Five influences

I've been tagged by The Skylding to list five people, living or dead, who influenced my spiritual path in a positive way. For The Skylding (as a Lutheran), this had to exclude Jesus Christ and Martin Luther, and so assume that for me, as an Orthodox Christian it excludes Jesus Christ and the canonised saints of the church, or it could just become an exercise in listing one's favourite saints.

So here goes.

1. Steyn Krige -- high school teacher

He taught me for most of my time in high school at St Stithians College from the age of 12 to the age of 17. For the first couple of years he taught Geography, Chemistry and Scripture. Chemistry wasn't his field, and some of his experiments went horribly wrong, and I think he cookbooked his lessons. But he was a good teacher, and even when his experiments went wrong and the expected didn't happen, we knew what was supposed to have happened.

The year before he came to the school I had begun to break away from my atheist/agnostic upbringing and become interested in reading the Bible, and Steyn Krige hosted voluntary Bible study groups in the housemaster's flat where he lived with his family. He also arranged camps during the school holidays -- in the Western Cape, in the mountains of Lesotho and in other places. And he it was who guided me and showed what it meant to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

2. Brother Roger, CR - Anglican monk

When I left school, I encountered the Community of the Resurrection (CR), an Anglican religious order whose members often came to preach in our parish church, St Augustine's, Orange Grove, Johannesburg. Most of them were priests, but Brother Roger was one of the few lay brothers, and he spoke at the first conference of the Anglican Students Federation, held at at Modderpoort in the Free State in mid-winter, which is the coldest place I've ever been to.

He spoke on Pilgrims of the Absolute, and introduced us to people like Leon Bloy, and Beat Generation authors like Jack Kerouac, and presented the Christian faith as quite countercultural. Over the next few years I was a regular visitor to the CR priory in Rosettenville, and Brother Roger kept me supplied with books from their library. I was taking English literature courses at university, but he opened my eyes to a far wider variety of English literature than the English departments of South African universities -- Samuel Beckett, the Beat Generation authors, Charles Williams and many more.

Brother Roger took great joy in the world and life and living. He once opened an art exhibition for a Jewish artist friend of his, Harold Rubin, whose works were seized by the police a couple of days later, and he was charged with blasphemy. Brother Roger was hauled off a train to Durban to give evidence at his trial, and eventually he was acquitted. There is more about Brother Roger, and the paper he read at the student conference, at my Pilgrims of the Absolute web page.

3. Revd John Davies - Anglican priest

John Davies was invited to speak at another Anglican students conference, on Religion versus God. I wasn't there to hear it, but listened to it on tape afterwards, and published and distributed the hard copy as a kind of tract. When I was a student at the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg he led a parish mission at St Alphege's Church, which was near the university, and shared a vision of the parish as a Christian community and didn't just talk about it, but demonstrated it. Some of the things he introduced then, like house churches, have since become quite commonplace in Western Christianity, but then they were new and quite radical.

I got to know John Davies and his family quite well in the 1960s, and he and his wife Shirley, and children Mary, Mark and Elizabeth, became very close friends, and helped me more than they will ever know. In 1970 they returned to the UK for a visit, and were told on leaving South Africa that they would not be allowed to return, and have never been back since. I was glad to be able to travel to the UK in 2005 and see them again.

4. C.S. Lewis - Anglican author

The first three are people I met in person, but the last two are ones I only knew from their writings. But their writings have influenced me a great deal.

In the case of Lewis, it was his fiction that influenced me most; first his science fiction stories, and later his Narnia stories. I also read those of his fellow-Inkling Charles Williams, though I did not realise that they knew and influenced each other until much later, when a friend introduced me to Tolkien's works.

I read a few of his non-fiction works, but was never very impressed with them. There is quite a bit of talk nowadays about narrative theology, and I think Lewis excelled at that, rather than at propositional theology. He was also aware of the difference in outlook between premodern and modern people, and wrote in such a way as to make it possible for the modern mind to appreciate premodern ideas.

5. Fr. Alexander Schmemann - Orthodox priest

One of the things that troubled me about Western theology was that it seemed to be divided into two camps. I called them Pietists and Social Activists, though others may have different labels for them. The activists were always wanting to do something, to change the world and make it a better place. The pietists, on the other hand, kept saying that this was too "political" and that Christianity should be more "spiritual". I felt uncomfortable among both camps. It seemed to me that each was proclaiming a one-eyed vision of the Christian faith, and that we needed to see with two eyes to see it in all its depth.

And then I read Fr Alexander Schmemann's The world as sacrament (an expanded edition was called For the life of the world), and he said, much more clearly and succinctly, what I had been trying to say on the subject. And eventually it became clear to me that things were not going to get better in the Western Church -- that the two tendencies were getting into more pronounced conflict, and so, about fifteen years after first reading Schmemann's book, I joined the Orthodox Church.

Tagged

And now I'm supposed to tag some people.

The Elizaphanian
Fr John d'Alton
RevMommy
Roger Saner
Reggie Nel

What is this thing called Love?

The Tarot card originally called "Love", later "The Lovers" originally showed a man and a woman with Cupid aiming an arrow at them. Later a third figure was added, so that there were two women, one beautiful, the other ugly. Some saw them as allegorised into vice and virtue.

In a recent post on this blog (Fr Alexander Schmemann in Russia), I mentioned Father Alexander Schmemann's theological writings. One of the things he wrote about was marriage as the sacrament of love. Human love is the reflection of God's love, and it is through the experience of human love that we can relate to God's love. Schemann notes that many people sentimentalise marriage, and make the mistake of thinking that the "content" of the sacrament is "family", and so miss the main point; that it is love. One of the problems in the world today is that some people have idolised the family.

Nevertheless, family is important. A book that illustrates this is John Bowlby's Child care and the growth of love, which demonstrates that children who do not experience loving relationships with parents, especially their mothers, in the first six months of life, find it far more difficult to form loving relations with other people in later life.

By our own behaviour, we often create this problem. Though wars, we make children orphans. Through systems like migrant labour coupled with influx control, which prevailed in South Africa for many years, children are effrectively deprived of parental love. They are more likely to become juvenile delinquents, child soldiers, adult criminals and abusive spouses and parents. In such a way the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, even to the third and fourth generation.

Schmemann points out that in Christian marriage, husband and wife become king and queen to each other. There is a small kingdom, a reflection of the heavenly kingdom. The possibility may be lost, perhaps in a single night, but it is nevertheless there. And he gives a moving description of a couple of old people sitting holding hands on a park bench, all battles past, all passion spent, but still an image of love.

St John summed this up when he said, "herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he first loved us." In order to be able to give love, we first have to receive it, and even if we have received no human love, we can still receive the love of God, though of course it is much more difficult. But having received the love of God, we need to give love, in order to enable others to love. "Freely ye have received, freely give." Too often human love dies when people say that they no longer "feel" anything for each other. But love is more than an emotion or a feeling. We do not show love or give love by having loving "feelings" about other people. We show love and give love by loving actions, even contrary to our feelings.

To return to the Tarot card: Cupid's arrow may strike, and we may have overpowering feelings of love towards another person. If we are lucky, they will be reciprocated. But that is not enough to lead to the couple Father Alexander Schemann saw sitting on the park bench in the evening of the day, in the evening of their lives. That takes more than just those first feelings.

In a beat generation novel by John Clellon Holmes, Go one of the characters, Stofsky, has a dream of meeting God, and God tells him "Go, and love without the help of anything on earth". And that is surely the only thing that can turn back the tide of hatred that threatens to engulf the world.

List of synchronised blogs on the topic of Love -- visit them!

• Christian Sexuality as Ritual Worship at Phil Wyman's Square No More
• Christians: choosing who to love at Mike's Musings
• Loving God, Loving others, loving self- responding to the Goddess- a feminist perspective at Eternal Echoes
• Trinity by Mike Crockett
• Prophet's Passion at Adam Gonnerman's Igneous Quill
• A Love Supreme from Fernando's Desk
• What is this thing called love? at Steve's Notes from Underground
• Love as it should pertain to us missionally? at Webb's Stumbling into the Kingdom
  
• Divine Eros by Handmaid
  Leah
• Loving the Other by John Smulo
• The Conjunction Between Sensuality and Spirituality by Matt Stone
• The Blogger Whom Jesus Loved at Jamie's More Than Stone
• Love Them Patriots at Calacirian
• I'm a better lover than I used to be... by Billy Calderwood
• Young people in on love by Tim Abbot

Fr Alexander Schmemann in Russia

Father Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) was probably the most influential Orthodox theologian in the English-speaking world, at least in the 20th century. His writings certainly changed my life, and probably many others.

What is less known, in the English-speaking world, is how influential his writings were in Russia, and Bishop Seraphim Sigrist has shared in his LiveJournal a review of Father Schmemann's journals by Gregory Yavlinsky.

Father Alexander Schmemann has never been to Russia but his presence was felt during the most important moments of our life. By the end of the Eighties many people, among whom were my friends, began to seek a way to faith. Temples were opened, thousands were baptized. There was enthusiastic talk about Russia’s religious revival. This quest was perhaps, truly strong and pure, in many respects an intuitive internal movement toward truth by people which felt it impossible after so many years to remain under a bushel of lies. This thirst for the truth spilled over into the country’s political life briefly perhaps, with a powerful moral momentum.

Today it is difficult to imagine how scarce such books were and how difficult they were to come by and with what passion they were read! For many, Christianity had its beginning with the words of Father Alexander. His books were passed from hand to hand, they were discussed, and when priests saw a serious interest towards faith they advised: “read Father Alexander Schmemann’s books.”

Today such a source as Father Alexander is simply indispensable. Father Alexander’s “Diaries”, published by “Russkiy Put’”, are his most timely words for today. These words are not addressed to servants but to friends (Jn 15:15). Today people who, ten or fifteen years ago, felt that they were coming to Christ find themselves inside a complicated structure of Church life. Many things there are not customary for them nor are they understandable. They may be confusing and lead them to a search for answers and they, more than anyone else, are in need of pastoral counsel to explain what is what, to clarify doubts, strengthen their faith, establish a line between the search for Christ and those manifestations of Church life which can not only disturb but even destroy the beginnings of faith.

I first read Father Alexander Schmemann's The world as sacament at a time when Western theology was split into warring factions of pietists and secularists (today often called "conservatives" and "liberals"), neither of which appealed to me very much. But if one did not fully support one side, one was immediately taken by its champions to be a supporter of the other, and therefore the Enemy. There was no middle ground. Reading Fr Alexander's book was like a breath of fresh air: this is what I've been trying to say!

I've continued to read that book, and to recommend it to friends. It is now published as For the life of the world, with two extra chapters. And his Journals, too, make very good reading.

But it was something of a surprise to find that he had been equally influential in Russia, where very different conditions prevailed. That makes his writing more universal, and more universally significant.