For those few kind souls who read my blog posts and from time to time, make commentary, you may have noticed that I have been away from the keyboard for a long time. This absence has had a number of reasons, but the most prevalent is that I really have not had any thoughts of which I thought were important enough to discuss in public. I have also been quite busy with our new puppy, Dodger, with my wife Elizabeth continuing to suffer from illness and needing help, and a sudden influx of work for my business. There were days, honestly, that I thought I was losing my mind due to the sheer volume of responsibilities demanding my attention.

And now, it is Pascha, Resurrection Sunday, and all is quiet. After a beautiful Paschal Divine Liturgy at St. Mary’s last night, I find that there is nothing to do but relax today, to rest, take it easy, and wind down a bit. Oh, there are a couple of things that I could do, but I am simply refusing to give them any sense of importance in my life at this moment. I have a far more important project which comes to mind and which I would like to begin.

During Lent, our pastor, Fr. David, began a series of sermons ¹ in which he linked the Twelve Steps of AA to the Christian life. They are wonderful sermons, and I would encourage anyone reading this blog, even if you don’t suffer from alcoholism or any other physical addiction, to read them and take the messages to heart. You see, I am firmly convinced that all humanity is enslaved to sin, even those of us who profess the Christian faith. If you feel that you have it all together as a Christian, well, I’m sorry, but you are simply kidding yourself. Every one of us struggles with some lack of Christian charity in our lives. Love is the greatest and highest of the virtues and its practice is the apex of living the Christian life. When we fail to live out love, that is sin. If I bark at the cashier at the Dunkin’ Donut shop because my order was a bit slow, that is lacking love towards her, and that is sin! If I am grumbling and always mumbling under my breath about serving my sick wife, that is a lack of love, and this is sin! When I am playing softball and throw my bat and slam my helmet because things didn’t go my way, that is a lack of love and that is sin! When I struggle with doubts about God’s love towards me, when I fear death, when I am lazy in prayer, inattentive to what I am saying, and in general spiritually lazy, that is a lack of love towards our lovely Lord Jesus Christ, and that is sin!

And I would dare anyone reading this to deny that you don’t have your own addiction to such selfish actions from time to time, and indeed, that you, like me, often lament just how far you are from being the Christian you wish you could be. The is the power of sin in our lives. Every man, woman, and child is in some way affected in their lives to some degree by this power. We are all, to some degree or other, addicts!

STEP ONE: We admitted we were powerless over our addiction – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Here is an interesting thought that I had a while back as I pondered Fr. David’s messages: I am not only powerless over my sin, but I am also powerless to live the Christian life. This is the beauty of Orthodoxy – it presents the real Christian life and not some sugar-coated substitute which makes us feel good about ourselves but leaves us unchanged. My coming into the Orthodox Church has disavowed me of any vain thoughts that I am a “good Christian” or have some sort of exemplary Christian life!

Now, what I am going to say next will no doubt offend some people. I am sorry, but I refuse to sugar-coat what is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. Only in the Orthodox faith do we see examples of what the true Christian faith is – the monks of Mount Athos, ² the holy men who lived lives of complete surrender to Christ, lives totally given over to seeking Him through despising the flesh and its demands. The Protestantism I came out of is designed to make a person feel good about themselves because they have “made a decision for Jesus,” and having done so, everything is right with them. God doesn’t see them anymore, they are allowed to hide under the snow-white blanket of Christ’s righteousness so that this, and not their sins, is what the Father sees and deals with. This makes them think that walking about, thinking nice thoughts about Jesus means they are living the Christian life, and yet, they are far from it. I know this from my own personal experience, from years of doing just that while being a snotty, rude, nasty individual when I didn’t get my way or get people to give me what I considered an adequate amount of respect for my vast theological knowledge of the Bible. Dear God, what hubris!

When I look at the exemplary lives of those who have truly lived and are living the Christ life – monks, nuns, saints, and martyrs – I see that I am powerless to live the Christian life. They are humble – I am most certainly not. They are pure in thought – my mind is an open sewer due to my past hedonistic life. They fast and pray continually, seeking communion with God. I am lazy and grumbling about both of these things, and I expect God to do miracles in my life without my sacrificing anything to the creature comforts demanded by my flesh.

The Christian life, the REAL life, the TRUE life to which we are all called, is a foretaste of heaven, a warfare in which the victory is union with Christ. Unlike the easy Protestantism from which I came, Orthodoxy teaches us that we are to become like Christ. It is a lived life, not an intellectual assent to a bunch of facts. But our addiction to sin, our laziness, and our lack of commitment keeps us from this. The messages from Fr. David have been designed to give us weapons in this warfare, to overcome, with the help of God, those things holding us back from a rich life of communion with Him. It is my desire to begin to work through these sermons and work on myself, so that, with the help of the Holy Spirit, I might advance a little this year in living the Christian life.

Thank you, Father David!

And as we say in the Prayer before Communion, I believe, O Lord and I confess that Thou art truly the Christ, the Son of the living God, Who came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am first!

1. If you cannot access the Realm link, here is the link to the YouTube podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu0kM0gi954 ↩︎
2. Let me hasten to also mention the many holy nuns who have lived lives of close communion with Christ through their ascetic struggles. ↩︎