For the Life of the World, Alexander Schmemann

With Rinah spending so much time eating, playing, sleeping, and running around with my uncle, aunt, and cousins, I’ve had a lot of time to read. It’s been wonderful. Years ago, I started reading Schmemann but life got in the way and I never finished it. My cousin Christopher had a copy sitting on his shelf and I’m trying to finish it before I leave. I don’t know if I can because it’s slow going. One reason is because I keep rereading what I’ve read already. This book been an answer to prayer, showing me the way out of some of the struggles I’ve had in my life.

(The italics are Schmemann’s. The underlining is mine.)

Weltschmerz, hunger, desire, pain.
Created in the image of a perfect Triune God, three Persons in eternal fellowship and friendship and trust, I am filled with a yearning and longing for that same fellowship and friendship and trust. The imperfect human fellowship I have found does not satisfy my hunger, but merely whets my appetite to the point of starvation. Trusting and desiring Man leads to pain and betrayal. There is no true love, no joy, no faithfulness, no peace with Man. But Christ invites us to His table, gives us Himself, His blood and His flesh.

Man is a hungry being. But he is hungry for God. Behind all the hunger of our life is God. All desire is finally a desire for Him. (p. 14)

Why live? Live for what? Joy in daily communion with Christ, the life of the world.
Jonah, Job, Elijah, David, Solomon, Paul, they all longed for death and the life that death brings. Life is permeated with death. We cannot live unless we die first. We die when we sleep, we die when Christ died, we die when we give up the ghost … we live when we wake, when we commune and remember His resurrection, when we are born again in Heaven. And they all rejoiced in this life because they lived for Him, in Him, with Him.

One eats and drinks, one fights for freedom and justice in order to be alive, to have the fullness of life. But what is it? What is the life of life itself? What is the content of life eternal? At some ultimate point, within some ultimate analysis, we inescapably discover that in and by itself action has no meaning. When all committees have fulfilled their task, all papers have been distributed and all practical goals achieved, there must come a perfect joy. About what? Unless we know, the same dichotomy between religion and life … remains. Whether we “spiritualize” our life or “secularize” our religion, whether we invite men to a spiritual banquet or simply join them at the secular one, the real life of the world, for which we are told God gave his only-begotten Son, remains hopelessly beyond our religious grasp. (p. 13)

Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for death is better to me than life. I waste away; I will not live forever. Leave me alone, for my days are but a breath. The day of one’s death is better than the day of one’s birth. (Jonah 4:3; Job 7:16; Ecclesiastes 7:1)

Names, naming.
The last few weeks, I have been looking at names, and praying about names, names, names. Many cultures understand the significance names in a perverse way. Some tribal peoples believe names hold power over life and death and thus keep their “real” names secret, some people will not even spell the word God and write G-d, Jews read pronounce YHWH as Adonai (“lord”), witchesand wizards fear to pronounce the name of Voldemort. Japanese youths were given new names in a special ceremony when they reached adulthood and became samurai. God renamed Abraham and Jacob and there are puns on names everywhere in the Bible. So what name will Baby Two have?

… in the Bible a name is infinitely more than a means to distinguish one thing from another. It reveals the very essence of a thing, or rather its essence as God’s gift. To name a thing is to manifest the meaning and value God gave it, to know it as coming from God and to know its place and function within the cosmos created by God.

To name a thing, in other words, is to bless God for it and in it. And in the Bible to bless God is not a “religious” or a “cultic” act, but the very way of life. God blessed the world, blessed man, blessed the seventh day … and this means that he filled allt hat exists with His love and goodness, made all this “very good.” So the only natural (and not “supernatural”) reaction of man to whom God gave this blessed and sanctified world, is to bless God in return, to thank Him, to see the world as God sees it and — in this act of gratitde and adoration — to know, name and possess the world. Alll rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes his life. “Homo sapiens,” “homo faber” … yes, but first of all, “homo adorans.” The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God — and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the “matter,” the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.

Men understand all this instinctively if not rationally. Centuries of secularism have failed to transform eating and drinking into something strictly utilitarian. Food is still treated with reverence. A meal is still a rite — the last “natural sacrament” of family and friendship, of life that is more than “eating” and “drinking.” To eat is still something more than to maintain bodily functions. People may not understand what that “something more” is, but they nonetheless desire to celebrate it. They are still hungry and thirsty for sacramental life. (pp. 15-16)

Communion, union, beauty and love.
“Who cares if it’s beautiful?” I am often told that I care too much about beauty, that it is vain and fleeting, flowers die and women grow old. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining why I love bright colours, clouds lit by moonlight, the open sky, the rhythm of words, swirly calligraphy, Russian choral music, Greek sculpture, ballet and yoga, crisp new quilting fabric.

Despairing ingrate that I am, recently I have found little joy or beauty outside my daughter’s smiles and babbles. I do find comfort in the reliable rhythmical liturgy of the daily office of Morning Prayer and my heart dances when I hear her soft little voice trying to go through it with me. I know in my head and forget in my heart that everything I do is worship. I always forget that I yearn for beauty and joy with all my senses and every part of my being because I am created in the image of three Persons who love each other.

… the joyful character of the eucharistic gathering must be stressed…. The liturgy is, before everything else, the joyous gathering of those who are to meet the risen Lord and to enter with him into the bridal chamber. And it is this joy of expectation and this expectation of joy that are expressed in the singing and the ritual, in vestments and in censing, in that whole “beauty” of the liturgy which has so often been denounced as unnecessary and even sinful.

Unnecessary it is indeed, for we are beyond the categories of the “necessary.” Beauty is never “necessary,” “functional” or “useful.” And when, expecting someone whom we love, we put a beautiful tablecloth on the table and decorate it with candles and flower, we do all this not out of necessity, but out of love. And the Church is love, expectation, and joy. It is heaven on earth … it is the joy of recovered childhood, that free, unconditioned and disinterested joy which alone is capable of transforming the world. In our adult, serious piety we ask for definitions and justifications, and they are rooted in fear — fear or corruption, deviation, “pagan influences,” whatnot. But “he that feareth is not made perfect in love” (1 Jn. 4:18). As long as Christians will love the Kingdom of God, and not only discuss it, they will “represent” it and signify it, in art and beauty. And the celebrant of the sacrament of joy will appear in a beautiful chasuble, because he is vested in the glory of the Kingdom, because even in the form of man God appears in glory. In the Eucharist we are standing in the presence of Christ, and like Moses before God, we are to be covered with his glory. (pp. 29-30)