Wednesday, July 20, 2005
A DIFFERENT KIND OF HOMILY
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be in prison? If you have read Lee Penn's book, you probably have. How would you cope, going from being self-directed to having your every action prescribed by others? It's a sobering meditation.
In my mailbox this morning is a portion of a chapter of Fr. Seraphim Rose's book that speaks to this very thing.
"Today in Russia, Tomorrow in America"
“Our abnormal life today can be characterized as spoiled, pampered. From infancy today’s child is treated, as a general rule, like al little god or goddess in the family; his whims are catered to, his desires fulfilled; he is surrounded by toys, amusements, comforts; he is not trained and brought up according to the strict principles of Christian behavior, but left to develop whichever way his desire incline. It is usually enough for him to say, ‘I want it!’ or ‘I won’t do it!’ for his obliging parents to bow down before him and let him have his way…. It happens often enough to be the rule of contemporary child-rearing and even the best-intentioned parents do not entirely escape its influence.”
“When such a child becomes an adult, he naturally surrounds himself with the same things he was used to in his childhood: comforts, amusements, and grown-up toys. Life becomes a constant search for ‘fun’—which, by the way, is a word totally unheard of in any other vocabulary; in nineteenth-century Russia or in any serious civilization, they wouldn’t have understood what this word meant. Life is a constant search for ‘fun’ which is so empty of any serious meaning that a visitor from any nineteenth-century country, looking at our popular television programs, amusement parks, advertisements, movies, music—at almost any aspect of our popular culture—would think he had stumbled across a land of imbeciles who have lost all contact with normal reality. We don’t often take that into consideration, because we are living in this society and we take it for granted.”
“It is important for us to realize, as we try ourselves to lead a Christian life today, that the world which has been formed by our pampered times makes demands on the soul, whether in religion or in secular life, which are what one has to call totalitarian. This is easy enough to see in the mind-bending cults that have received so much publicity in recent years, and which demand total allegiance to a self-made ‘holy man’; but it is just as evident in secular life, where one is confronted not just by an individual temptation here or there, but by a constant state of temptation that attacks one—whether in the background music heard everywhere in markets and businesses; in the home itself, where television often becomes the secret ruler of the household, dictating modern values, opinions, and tastes.”
“Do we have any image that explains our situation as well as [the Soviet] Gulag does that of Russia? I am afraid there is an image, most unflattering to us, which is almost our equivalent of Gulag. It is ‘Disneyland’—an image which exemplifies our carefree love of ‘fun’ (a most un-Christian word!), our lack of seriousness…unaware or barely aware of the real meaning and seriousness of life.”
“The message of this universal temptation that attacks men today—quite openly in its secular forms, but usually more hidden in its religious forms—is: Live for the present, enjoy yourself, relax, be comfortable. Behind this message is another, more sinister undertone which is openly expressed only in the officially atheist countries which are one step ahead of the free world in this respect … In the Communist countries which have an official doctrine of atheism, they tell you quite openly that you are to forget about God and any other life but the present one; remove from your life the fear of God and reverence for holy things; regard those who still believe in God in the ‘old-fashioned’ way as enemies who must be exterminated. One might take, as a symbol of our carefree, fun-loving, self-worshipping times, our American ‘Disneyland’; if so, we should not neglect to see behind it the more sinister symbol that shows where the ‘me generation’ is really heading: the Soviet Gulag.”
“Have you ever asked yourself, for example, the question how you will survive if you are placed in prison or concentration camp, and especially in the punishment cells of solitary confinement? How are you going to survive? You will go crazy in a very short time if your mind has nothing to occupy itself with. What will you have in your mind? If you are filled with worldly impressions and have nothing spiritual in your mind; if you are just living from day to day without thinking seriously about Christianity and the Church, without becoming aware of what Orthodoxy is, and you are placed in a situation like solitary confinement where there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, no movies to see, just staying in one spot facing four walls—you will scarcely survive.”
“The Rumanian Protestant pastor, Richard Wurmbrand, has a tape devoted to this subject which is very interesting. In a crisis situation like that, when all our books and outward props are taken away, we can depend on nothing except what we've acquired within ourselves. He says that all the Bible verses he knew didn't help him much; abstract knowledge of dogmas didn't help much—what is important is what you have in your soul. You must have Christ in your soul. If He is there, then we Orthodox Christians have a whole program which we could use in prison. We can remember the Orthodox Calendar—which saints and feasts are commemorated when. We don't have to know the whole Calendar, but from our daily life in the Church we will remember the milestones of the Church year; whatever we have stored up in our hearts and minds will come back to us. Whatever prayers and hymns we know by heart will help us, we will have to sing them every day. You will have to have people to pray for. The world-wide dispersion of our Russian Church Abroad is ideal for this. You can go over the whole globe in your mind, one country or continent at a time, and pray for those you know, even if you can't think of their names—bishops and abbesses, parishes and priests both Russian and missionary, the monasteries in the Holy Land, prisoners in Russia and Rumania and other lands under the atheist yoke, the missions in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa where it is very difficult, the monks of Mt. Athos…. The more of these you are aware of and praying for now, the better it will be for you when you have to suffer yourself, the more you will have to take with you into prison.”
--Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, Ch. 94
Here in the West we are not so tuned to the Christian feasts and fasts to be able to recall them in such a setting, but we have one weapon against madness, we have the crucifix, and another--we have the rosary. One more weapon could be available but most of us would not be able to use it. The lives of the saints are filled with privation and how they overcame it. If we knew the stories, they too would sustain us in a gulag. Russia attempted to wipe out the faith and failed. There is little reason to hope another attempt will not be made.
The words from Fatima remind us that it may come here--"Russia will spread her errors around the world." What good will our Disneyland life, our self-actualization, and our lavendar mafia do us then? In such an evantuality, only the words of a holy man would have meaning.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
