Truly He is risen!
Okay, Mary. I can respect your position. I obviously don’t agree with it (and I would suspect that we would probably have very different understandings of who is “qualified” – in whatever sense that should be taken – to have such discussions; see below), but I can respect and agree with your desire not to descend into further argument. Christ is risen, and nothing else really matters.
Just for the sake of clarifying one thing, though, I’d like to write a little bit concerning this part of your reply:
It’s certainly not true that if people believe the same thing they will recognize it- That presumes that everyone has a clear understanding of the faith, Histories and traditions of all the Churches. If it were so, we would not have had Catholics and E. Orthodox from the highest ranks of the Church to the most common lay persons insist for one and a half millenia that you and your people were monophysites.
While I purposely stay out of Christological debates with Chalcedonians (they never go anywhere worth seeing), I think the wider issue of who can or does know their faith is another place that is worth exploring. In one of my favorite books of all time,
Journey Back to Eden by Benedictine monk Mark Gruber, the young Gruber visits an old Egyptian monk in his cave outside of Deir el-Baramous (the Monastery of the Romans), one of the Coptic monasteries of the Egyptian desert, and asks the old man for a word that he might ponder in order to gain spiritual insight. The monk tells him: “Our faith is easy, as simple as the alphabet.” Not understanding, Gruber returns the next day to ask for clarification. The monk continues: “In the ancient tongue,
alpha means ‘eagle’. It is the bird of heaven, that which represents God – transcendent, over all.
Beta is the Hebrew word, we hear it in the name ‘Bethel’; it means ‘house, home’ – the place in which we are familiar, comfortable, in control, the place where we live out our lives day to day. But these two words, so opposite, have been conjoined: ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’, because in Christ Jesus, heaven is wedded to earth. Christ is the Word made flesh to dwell among us, to pitch His tent in our midst. We are not estranged anymore. This is easy; this is simple. Every child knows the alphabet, and so can any heart accept our faith.”
This is what I believe, too, and I have argued for the simplicity of faith before using the same passage here on CAF. If memory serves me, my Catholic interlocutor at that time said I was comparing a simple, rustic monastic faith to the developed and brilliant intellects of Rome, and hence it was this natural difference that lead me to believe that there was more of a difference between the Orthodox and Rome than there really is. After all, Catholic monks live simply, as films like “Into Great Silence” (about the Carthusians) show. But that is missing the point, which is that in Orthodoxy there is no such separation or distinction. We do not live as monks because we are still in the world (there are no “secular orders” as in RCism), but there is no one better to explain the faith, in the simplest, most immediate and useful way. As it was in the days of the Desert Fathers, it still is today.
So I am afraid that I do not agree that there are better people than us. There are certainly theologians, and even people who you might call “professional theologians”, but by and large the people know their faith. There are new struggles to maintain that same level of knowledge in the lands of immigration (e.g., Coptic youth attending Protestant praise meetings; Lord have mercy!), but if you ever have a chance to search the web for translated videos or transcripts of HH Pope Shenouda’s III weekly address/Q&A, you will see how everyone, including the farmer and the teenager and everyone in between, hangs on the very plain and simple exposition of this deep man of faith. It is by this same method, analogous to the experiences in the monasteries, that I myself am being instructed at the feet of our priests Fr. Marcus and Fr. Philemon, but
also (significantly) by the grandmothers and aunts of the church, the young doctors and students, and even the children, who never miss a chance to discuss and learn, and prostrate and worship.
We can’t say we have learned when we know all the histories, controversies, and traditions, as though the faith is akin to swallowing massive amounts of information. Those things are definitely important and worth learning, but liturgy, fasting, and prayer do more for us than all of the libraries of the Vatican and all of the monasteries of the world put together. I believe I’ve heard Eastern Orthodox put this distinction in terms like “The one who does theology well is the one who prays well.” For Latins, I like their phrasing even better than that: “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi” (the law of prayer is the law of belief). This is Orthodoxy…in my humble opinion.
Pax tecum! Christus resurrexit!
