Becoming Like Flame And Father Ioan

Monastic desert cave

AFTER A LONG PERIOD OF PERSECUTION, ancient Christianity received the emperor's stamp of approval and Christianity became not only OK but preferred. Some say that's the worst thing that could have ever happened, as when a religion becomes preferred to others,  the endowing support of the state and the friendship with power results in deadly spiritual compromises. The history of Catholicism in France and Orthodoxy in Russia bears this out.

In the 4th century, holy men and women (abbas and ammas) went into the desert intending to recover the authentic intensity of the gospel life, living in small, loosely knit communities of prayer and inner discipline. There are many dozens of desert fathers and mothers whose stories and sayings are remembered, among them::

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, "Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do? Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands towards the heavens. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, "If you will, you can become all flame."

The key word in this little story is become. Young Abba Lot doesn't seem to be asking for anything more than another religious practice to undertake. It's like people who search for the perfect novena to the saint who is most likely to suit their particular need at any given time.

But Abba Joseph sees past that suggesting if Abba Lot desires it, he can become something new. Do we remember God appearing to Moses in the burning bush? God became flame! Abba Joseph is telling the inquiring monk: You can share in the very properties and energies of God himself. 

Abba Joseph wasn't giving Abba Lot a new devotion to add to his already rather full schedule of monastic practice: praying, fasting, meditating, working. He simply suggested: if you desire to go deeper - become a living flame! But how?

Maybe Lot could learn from the cave he lived in. Caves resemble ears. Deep listening might be a clue. Indeed, Saint Benedict's rule for monks and nuns in the western world begins with the single word, "Listen!" In truth, listening and its attendant silence is disappearing rapidly. Tuned in to a radio station recently, a war-expert was being interviewed about  Syria and the possible outcome of air strikes. The expert started to talk without taking any pauses, seemingly even for breaths. He went on and on in his professional new-speak, when I realized he was wasn't even trying to conceal the fact that he was now repeating himself. I felt he was living either in fear or vanity. But this kind of thing is common place now, I would even say it's become normative. When asked another question, he didn't even pause to consider, he simply began to talk again endlessly.

Listening is intimately connected to humility. The Latin root of humility is humus, which means good earth. It doesn't mean we're dirt, but a humble person is down to earth about herself/himself. The humble person has a light sense of humor about himself. The humble person can admit her mistakes and take correction. Humble people know they have a great deal to learn and growing to do.

Humility suggests  transformation, change, a coming into light, stretching, a desire to venture into or become something new. Indeed, becoming like flame  is indicated in our doing things we never dreamed before that we would do.

Father Ioan

Father Ioan is a sixty something year old Bulgarian priest who, having lived most of his life in the atheist world of the Soviet Union, converted to Christianity in his forties. While Bulgaria is purportedly an Orthodox Christian country, only a very few people practice the life of faith. So Father Ioan didn't envision his priesthood as simply maintaining a church, waiting for people to come. Instead, he found an old un-used church with a large side yard where he built a residence for unwed mothers and their children. 

Now that's pro-life! There is a precedent in the Gospel of Saint Luke where Jesus has a particular outreach to women and a valuing of children that was never taught by any other ancient guru, philosopher or religious teacher. 

But no good deed goes unpunished: Father Ioan depends almost exclusively upon donations to keep the little village open, as the state gives almost nothing to help and the locals often deride, slander and ridicule him. In Bulgaria an unwed mother is disdainfully considered a prostitute. 

So Father Ioan has become the face of Bulgarian Charity. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, apparently lost in hierarchical power struggles, has forgotten its charitable dimension. 

Flame is energy. Becoming like flame means sharing divine energies that spark something new: compassionate love that doesn't simply raise us to a new consciousness, leaving the status quo (business as usual) intact, but believes that through action, the world can be made new, "inch by inch, row by row" we sang as children. This is Christianity.

Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity invite first-world men and women, who have finished raising their own children, to visit the order's orphanages around the world for a couple of weeks, simply to hold, rock, play with, sing to, feed, touch, change, bathe and dress infants. The sisters are aware that unless babies are warmly handled, their physical and emotional lives atrophy.

Become like flame: in humility and that deep (cave-like) inner listening, it's thinking about the things that really matter in a new way and then finding myself doing new things I never dreamed I'd do.

"Blessed Joseph Her Spouse"

RECENTLY POPE FRANCIS ASKED  the priests of the Latin Rite around the world to place Saint Joseph's name in the Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass, after the name of Jesus' Mother, Mary. This news isn't as monumental as the pope's  initiating a probe into the Vatican Bank, but it has significance for the Church, especially if we can see the addition as more than just the pope sharing his devotion.

Mary and Joseph were married. But in the ancient biblical world, once the couple was married and before they lived together as husband and wife, they went apart separately to live with other married people to learn how to be good spouses to each other.

We shouldn't just assume that people know how to be good husbands and wives; mothers and fathers. Indeed, that so many marriages fail so often and so quickly, perhaps suggests that some practical teaching time might be a very good idea. Marriage failure isn't someone else's fault.  It takes a lot of hard work and self-forgetting to make marriages strong and enduring.

In the old ritual book used at weddings, the priest used to  read a long instruction to the young couple before the exchange of vows. The word sacrifice or sacrificial appears six times in those pages. Are most people ready for that?

Anyway, when Mary told Joseph she was pregnant and that he wasn't the father, Joseph was understandably confused and upset. But in a dream the angel told him to take Mary into his home as his wife. Then when the baby was born and Herod was angry at hearing there was a child around who was being called a king, Joseph was again summoned into action by a dream-angel and the little family fled to Egypt. Finally, when the coast was clear, Joseph took his wife and the child to Galilee, yet again directed by an angelic navigator, circumventing murderous trouble in Judea. This action packed story is found in Matthew 1:1 - 2:23.

It is a hard story, full of threats and fears, disrupted sleep, long and miserable travel, tiring obedience, disappointment in plans that didn't work out, twists and turns, enemies lurking, poverty and future unknowns. And in all of this, Joseph is the original action man of the New Testament. He doesn't get into a major fight with Mary,  leaving her and the child abandoned. In fact, he is so plugged in and receptive to God's purposes, only gradually unfolding, that we don't hear him speak at all throughout the story - he just listens and acts.

Isn't this refreshing in a world of incessant talking: commercials and infomercials, sitcoms with canned laughter after each spoken line, politicians who seem to be standing in front of microphones at every turn, radio talk show hosts who bloviate (talk much and say nothing). Even in the life of the Church it's a frequent complaint that the clerics who stand in the pulpit are taking a long time to say very little or that Church life is a series of endless meetings which bear little fruit.

Maybe we have Joseph, newly featured, to help quiet us down - if we will dare it. Saint Benedict begins his rule for monks with the word: Listen! I recently showed a forest waterfall to young Nicholas, who asked to climb to the top, to see where the water went over the cliff. As he took video of the falls from different and interesting angles, we didn't speak, but simply listened.. Then tracing the stream back away from the roar of the falls, he made a video of a mossy grove of ferns and trees where the only sound was that of the rain patting the leaves and the  quiet pools of water along the edges of the stream. At one point I simply put my finger to  my lips, and listening, he filmed the quiet.

But this fresh sense of listening has to invade our home and work lives too. In an article on the troubled state of marriage, a woman asks, "Why can't I find a man who can listen as long as I can talk?" Some men will roll their eyes or make fun of this woman, without even knowing who she is or what she's really asking. They will just assume she talks too much and that to listen to her would be burdensome. Maybe the woman is simply expressing what many women don't ever express: that they feel unheard by the men who say they love them. All throughout the story, it's Joseph the Listener.  Indeed, he listened to angels! What does that mean?

Brother Roger of Taize said that we should never engage in any kind of proposed dialogue until we are able to speak and understand the language of the other. He's not talking about German, Italian, African dialect, French. Roger means we shouldn't engage in dialogue until we understand the other person's sense of history, their conceptual life - where they're coming from. Instead, today so many people appraoch conversation with their minds already made up. Come hell or high water, they are going to get their agenda across.

Pope Benedict XVI suggested that the first project the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches might undertake towards unity would be to write a common history. What a marvelous idea! But were that ever to happen, I'd suggest, that the greatest gift given to the world, would not have been the volumes written, but the modeling of the great, mutual and humble listening that would have been required to produce those volumes in the first place.

Blessed Joseph, Husband of Mary...that we would be changed, and that our world would be changed through listening.