Epilogue: Going Somewhere Good

So you may have just noticed that I titled this episode “The Epilogue.” That’s because this is the final installment of Wandering the Desert. I’ve really enjoyed our journey over the past 35 episodes. By no means am I out of the desert, but we at Y2AM decided to shift and narrow our focus just a little bit. We’ve been sprinting for quite some time and need to pull back and shift to some other stuff which, unfortunately, means that some things needed to be put aside, and this podcast was one of those things.

I’m grateful for any of you who took this journey with me, a journey that is, in a sense, the destination. I know that’s silly and cliché, but really it’s true. I mean, when will any of us fully arrive at our destination? If theosis is becoming like God, then it’s not a destination that we can ever really reach, but rather is a horizon toward which we eternally move, never having fully arrived, but one towards which we are always, by God’s grace, progressing.

Our journey is one that is always, to quote C.S. Lewis, “Further up and further in,” even unto the ages of ages. And though we may not necessarily feel ourselves as having fully arrived in the sense of this journey being complete, we can trust that all of this is going somewhere good. No matter what may come our way, no matter what may happen, we know that the kingdom of God is at hand, and indeed, is coming. That’s the good news; there’s no escaping it, I promise.

My belief and ultimate trust in this reality has been one of the things that has guided much of my reflection here. It has meant that there is nothing that can’t be wondered, no question that can’t be asked, because nothing that I can say or do or ask or question can shake the foundation upon which the kingdom of God stands. We are held firmly and safely within the economy of God’s salvation, because this is all going somewhere good. There’s nothing that we can do to keep the kingdom from coming, which means that we can wonder about everything. We can ask questions everywhere and all the time without threat. Our questions aren’t obstacles or impediments; instead, they can be the way further up and further in.

Questions are only scary if things are fragile or uncertain, but things that are unshakable can’t be knocked over, and things that are too shaky to stand probably shouldn’t be believed anyway. Questions may be a threat to the belief that the earth is flat or that space aliens built the pyramids, but they’re not a threat to the kingdom of God, because the Lord’s house is built upon stone, not sand.

So here on Wandering the Desert, I hoped to encourage you all as fellow wanderers and fellow wonderers that perhaps our questions can actually help us show up more faithfully, more authentically, and more open to the work of God in our lives and in the world. My hope through this project was that, as we all move through life together and toward the inevitable coming of God’s kingdom, we would begin to recognize that God’s kingdom is not simply a far-off thing, not just a blissful afterlife, not just a promised future that we need to “hang in there” to receive. Even here, in the midst of the desert through which we are wandering, it’s a present reality. It’s at hand. It’s within and can be accessed at any moment.

Jesus himself begins his earthly ministry with a clear call: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.” Perhaps the way that we should read this is more consonant with the original Greek for that “repent”: metanoia, change your mind. Or perhaps even: think differently, because the kingdom of God is here. You just need to see it. The kingdom of heaven isn’t simply a future destination or where we go when we die. It really is at hand; it’s within us as Christ sits enthroned on our hearts as king. It’s in the divine word within us, the eternal God who himself if love, that makes our life quite literally heaven on earth.

But we can get in the way of our own openness to this kingdom, as we seek to make ourselves gods in our own likeness. After all, wasn’t this the sin of Adam and Eve? Instead of being prepared to receive life from the hand of God himself, we try to create our own heaven on earth—but we don’t need to. We don’t need to build a false kingdom for ourselves because this is all going somewhere good, no matter what.

The kingdom of God, this good place where everything is headed, is constantly nearer to us than we recognize, and yet we often fight the flow. We actively resist letting the river of God’s love carry us downstream to warm our waters, or maybe we try to push the river, to try to make it move and to feel like something is happening. Or, perhaps even more than this, we’re not pushing or fighting the water; we’re simply not aware of it, just like the fish in that old story you’ve probably heard a thousand times. Two young fish are swimming through a pond one day, and they happen upon an older, wiser fish. The old fish says, “Morning, boys! Water sure is nice today.” And then he swims off. Once the older fish is out of earshot, one of the younger fish turns to the other one and says, “What’s water?”

We are often unaware of the realities that are closest to us at any given moment, the realities that literally surround us and envelop us. It’s easy to live for the future and point to heaven as a place that we hope we arrive after we die, but Christ’s words and this parable point out to us a deeper reality: that the kingdom is all around us. And in order to see it, we need to repent: to think and to see differently. We need to open our hearts to it, and to live as though it [was] real.

I do not in any way pretend to be that older, wiser fish that explains the nature of water to anyone that listens, but rather I see myself as one of those younger fish who’s consistently trying to wake up to the reality that we are surrounded by water all the time. That has been my hope for this podcast, that it can be one more voice in the conversation, one more voice striving to give hope and to resist the insanity of the world around us, one more voice that is standing in the midst of what often seems like a crazy world, while pointing to hints of the presence of God’s kingdom and saying, “This is water. This is water.”

For us to live in the kingdom of God, I do not think we need to turn far. It’s more of an adjacent reality than an alternate one, but if we step sideways into the kingdom, we won’t be able to help but live alternatively. My hope for Wandering the Desert has been that you, too, would seek ways to step sideways into this kingdom that is always present and within, and to internalize the realities of what Christ has called us to. Moreover, I do not think that we need to search very far for the shape of this kingdom. It’s not to philosophy or culture or politics, whether American or otherwise, that we must turn, but rather to the Divine Liturgy and to the sacramental life of the Church. That is where we must draw our understanding.

I think we too often have viewed the Church as an escape from the world, as a way of strengthening ourselves against cultural downward spirals. But if we truly have, in the truest sense of the word, an apocalyptic understanding of the Church, then we will see the revealing, the unveiling of the kingdom of God that is in our midst. We will see a redemptive pathway for the rest of the world. We will see that the Church and the liturgical gathering is a symbol in the truest sense, a joining of two distinct realities and one moment.

In this way, the Church is not an embassy to protect us from sin, but rather as the hands-on university in which we began to understand the true shape of reality, despite what our senses show us. The sacramental life of the Church is both a real participation in that kingdom that is coming and a revelation of that same kingdom which is already at hand. The Church does not possess magic that changes material stuff into divine presence, but rather it shows us that the divine is already everywhere present and filling all things, and that the material world, no matter what we do or leave undone, is headed for unity with the divine, no matter what.

St. Dionysios the Areopagite speaks of God’s irresistible embrace. If that hug is coming, we need to be ready. Yes, we need to participate in that action, but we don’t cause it. God alone causes it; we participate. We are called to synergy, to work with God, but we have to remember our place. This is why the deacon begins the Liturgy with the words, “It is time for the Lord to act.” If we can see the liturgical life of the Church as participation in an ongoing reality and the unique revelation of that same reality, then we will no longer feel that we are the possessors and the proprietors of the divine truth. This divine truth is not a consumer good that we carry in our pockets. It exists in us but also outside of and independent from us, and we are changed with being its humble proclaimers, its martyrs, its witnesses, although our success or failure has little to do with whether or not that message continues to be preached, and certainly has nothing to do with whether that message is being fulfilled.

God wants us, but he doesn’t need us. As Jesus says, even if we as his disciples are silent, then even the very rocks would declare the presence of God. Divine presence and the kingdom reality are not dependent on us as Orthodox Christians, and I believe that we would do well to recognize this with humility.

One of my favorite moments in episode VIII of Star Wars: The Last Jedi is when Luke is training the young Rey. He encourages her to reach out with her feelings, and then when he asks what she senses in all things, she replies, “Balance and energy: a force.” And when she says that that same force lives within her, Luke says this killer line: “And this is the lesson: that force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die the light dies is vanity. Can you feel that?” Little did Ryan Johnson know that he would be penning prophetic words with this. I think we too often have assumed to believe that the revelation of the kingdom belongs to the Orthodox, as if what we’re revealed on Sunday mornings is our exclusive property. I think this is wrong.

If tomorrow the institution that we call the Orthodox Church were to go away forever, the kingdom of God would still be present, and it would still come, regardless of whether anyone served a Divine Liturgy ever again. Please don’t misunderstand or misquote me. The Liturgy is important, valuable, and truly divine, but do I believe that the Liturgy is the only place that we can come to experience the kingdom of God? Of course not, and frankly I think we need to have a little more humility about this fact. We are not the possessors of the kingdom, but, rather, witnesses of it.

What happens in the Liturgy is real—it is a real revelation of God’s presence in our midst—but we need to recognize this revelation is not our property. As St. Irenaeus of Lyons famously said, “We know where the Holy Spirit is, but we can’t say where he is not.” The Church in an institutional sense can be persecuted to the point of disappearing entirely, or every parishioner in every parish around the world could decide to leave and never come back, yet the Church as the mystical body of Christ would endure to the end of the ages. The grace of God would still be unleashed in the material world. To say that if the Orthodox die, the light dies, is vanity. Can you feel that?

When I became Orthodox, we spent a great deal of time learning about how Christ is present in the Church, and how, when we come to church, we’re stepping outside of time and entering the kingdom. And this is true, yet I wonder if our preaching has been a little out of balance, if we’ve spend so much time focusing on how Christ is in the church, in the bread and the wine, that we’ve learned to over-localize God’s presence to the temple. I wonder if our fascination with temple-worship, while definitely good, true, and beautiful, has led us to spend a lot of our time, attention, and energy focusing on the temple itself, as if we as parish communities exist for nothing else other than going to church.

We see this in ministry challenges that parishes face, where people can’t conceive of ministry happening anywhere other than the physical property of the parish. Bible studies at home? Prayer groups at home? Ministry in our homes and neighborhoods? To many it’s inconceivable. Yes, we certainly need beautiful spaces where we can worship, pray, and learn, but I wonder… if an alien anthropologist were to survey one of our local communities, would they find a trace of us outside the walls of the parish? Would they find prayer books in our homes, worn with use? Would they find evidence of our mercy and love for neighbor in the wider community? Are we more concerned when a kid shows up for church in shorts and sandals than when a kid drops out of a high school across town because his neighborhood is ground down by violence and poverty?

Now, I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be some kind of protocol in place for worship, but I wonder whether we’ve attempted to put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. So what if we decided instead that we wanted to turn the tables on this? What if we stressed in our communities that the sacramental life of the Church was actually this ongoing revelation of the kingdom of God, not just within the walls of the temple, but throughout the temple of creation? What if we were to suggest that the waters in the baptismal font were not just church waters, but rather that these were the true shape of what water actually is? That bread truly is a place of communing with God, and that, in Church, water and bread were finally free to be themselves? How would our understanding of Liturgy change the way that we interact with the world? What if we were actually aware of God’s presence as we sat in the park or looked in the face of our neighbor? What if we didn’t confine God to the physical property of the church and a few hours on Sunday morning? And what if this were the second part of our catechesis?

If the sacramental life of the Church and of liturgical assembly revealed the true shape of God’s kingdom, then perhaps we need to ask ourselves how much we really align our experience with this kingdom we witness and proclaim as blessed unto ages of ages. Does anything in our lives actually realize God’s kingdom after we’ve eaten our doughnuts and left coffee hour, or are we virtually indistinguishable from our neighbors who don’t confess that Christ is king and that his kingdom really is at hand?

My kids have a book called When I Attend Liturgy, What Do I See? The book is good, but I think it falls short in that it only functions in a self-referential manner: I see candles, I see a priest, I see a gospel book. Yes, this is true, but what what if we had the eyes to see what we actually see? If we were able to experience that Christly command to repent, to think differently, and to reimagine the way that we engage the world, anything and everything—what would be the things we support? So when we attend the Liturgy, what do we see? What is revealed about the good place toward which all of this is headed?

When I attend Liturgy, I see icons floor to ceiling of the saints of God. What this means isn’t just that I see people who managed to “level up” enough to do some really cool things like walk on water; what I see, rather, is that these are the holy ones of God who shine with the uncreated light of Christ, and what’s more, they shine from within. This means that Christ dwells within; it is not something that comes to us from the outside in some distant or impersonal way, but rather is the divine seed, the logos spermatikos, implanted in us from our very creation, when God made us in God’s own image, after God’s own likeness.

The holy ones of God are the ones who live from their most authentic self, and they’re the ones we’re most likely to bury when they stand in the way of our own kingdoms that we insist on building. However, the light that pours forth from the saints shows us and teaches us and reveals to us that the light of Christ dwells within all human beings and that every single person we encounter is an image and an icon of Christ that ought to be venerated as such. Our problem is that we just can’t see it, but if we did see this, if we did live this, if we truly believed that the Spirit of God is everywhere present and filling all things, and most especially all people, then what would this mean for how we treat any and all human beings, even, and perhaps especially, those with whom we disagree? What would this mean for how we treat those who are the poorest of the poor, the most marginalized in our society, those with whom Christ explicitly identifies?

If we bow down before and kiss the icons that we as human beings have crafted and painted ourselves, why would we not do the same things with the living icons that were created with God’s own hand? And if we did this, what sort of witness would it be to the world, the wisdom of which encourages us, at best, to overlook them and even to look down upon those whose lives have been shipwrecked by poverty? Wouldn’t we speak up against those who’ve been the unjust recipients of the so-called realities of life in this world? Wouldn’t we advocate differently for the restoration of those caught in the life of crime instead of calling for their punishment? Or are we content to lock Christ away within the physical property of our parish?

But that won’t work, because, as St. John Chrysostom challenges us, if we can’t find Christ in the least of these at our door, then we will not find him in the chalice either. If we let the Church shape our understanding of reality, we would never be able to look at another person the same way. We would see differently. We would have a change of mind, a metanoia. We truly would be living out of repentance, working out our salvation in fear and trembling, because it is God working within us, both to act and will, according to his own purpose.

And it doesn’t stop there. What if we were to recognize that in the church we see candles, water, bread, and smoke, all in the service of God’s liturgy? That is to say, we see fire, water, earth, and air: the four fundamental elements of creation in the medieval mind. We would see that God’s world is not just the background of our salvation, but that it is indeed an integral part of it. God is not just saving people; God is saving the entire cosmos. This indeed is how we should read John 3:16, that for God so loved the cosmos that he sent his only Son to die, that whosoever should believe in him would be saved.

God’s love is cosmic. Full stop. That means that the created order is not an accident; it’s not going to be irrelevant once we go to heaven and shuffle off this mortal coil, but rather that care for creation is an essential part of the work of God’s people, and not just its care but its sanctification. Our job isn’t just to protect it, but to proclaim it as essentially good and beautiful and part of God’s redemptive plan. We’re not surrounded by trash that will pass away, but treasure. As St. John saw in his apocalyptic vision: “Then he who sat on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ ” How would this change the way that we see and engage with the created order? Would we feel okay throwing trash on the ground? Would we feel okay with corporations exploiting and destroying the earth to turn a profit? Would we believe that none of this matters because, well, matter doesn’t matter and it’s only the spirit that counts? Or would we see ourselves as an essential part of the ecology, understanding that this earth is our home, too, that we are earth creatures, dependent on the health of our planet for our own life, just as we are dependent on the bread and the wine for a unique and real experience of God’s grace?

Finally, what if we understood ourselves in the light of the eucharistic moment? We see that Christ comes to us in the chalice as humble elements of bread and wine, things that exist for us to eat in order that our lives can be sustained. What if, like St. Ignatius of Antioch, we saw ourselves as the bread and the wine, offered for the world? What if, once we receive the body and blood of Christ, we could see ourselves as newly ordained chalices, as those charged with being the very carriers of God’s own body into the world? What if we understood our own lives as being an offering, given to the world for its very sustenance, that we ourselves are meant to pour ourselves out as real food and real drink for others?

How would this affect our lives and our families? Would we see ourselves as needing to retreat to a quiet place in order just to get some space from demanding children? Or would we understand that Christ came to empower us to give ourselves away, to be eaten and to be drunk, not just when we feel like it, but in every moment of our lives? What could we possibly understand to be ours? What could we possibly justify holding onto when we ourselves have become the very body of Christ, broken for the world? Wouldn’t we instead simply expect to be tired all the time and to expect that our lives exist for the sake of building up and feeding others? We’d have no sense that what we have is ours for our own sake, but rather we would know that all of this is for others; that our call is to love everybody all of the time, even and perhaps especially when it hurts.

Indeed, it is that hurt, that suffering, that ties us all together. Christ’s full identification with humanity took him voluntarily to the cross, where he shares in the only common experience of all people: suffering and death. This is how Christ stands in full solidarity with humanity: by sharing in our suffering, so that we may share in his life.

As we join ourselves to this cup of Christ, to the broken body and spilled blood which stands next to every suffering human being, do we ourselves not proclaim our own identification with the suffering and the needy? And if we could see ourselves as drinking from the same cup, how would this change everything for us? How could it not?

I hope you receive everything that I’ve ever said here with the heart that I intend; that we learn to take our beliefs seriously, that the Holy Spirit is everywhere present and filling all things. All things. It has been a joy to offer these reflections and to stumble on this path toward the kingdom with you. This has been so good, and I know it’s all going somewhere even better. Forgive me and pray for me.