Sitting at home in bed with a nasty respiratory infection is not my ideal way of spending a Sunday morning. My groggy head makes it hard to focus, and I find my thoughts turning to the heavens above…

 A milestone was recently passed: the 555^th extrasolar planet was confirmed. An extra solar planet is a planet orbiting a star other than our own sun. When I was growing up, there was a debate going on as to whether such planets even existed. Then in 1992 a few thousand years of wondering came to an end when the first extrasolar planet was discovered, whizzing around a pulsar. Since then, the discoveries have come thick and fast, with new methods for detecting the slippery little creatures being developed all the time. A few of the planets have even posed for a photo, like this one orbiting Fomalhaut (see picture), a star just 25 light years away in the constellation of the Southern Fish (Fomalhaut is Arabic for ‘mouth of the whale’). The Kepler space observatory is expected to take the figure into the thousands.

 How exciting! Imagine what it might be like to travel to one of these planets orbiting around an alien sun. What exotic landscapes would we see? What new science might we learn there? For all human existence, we have been limited to one little, tiny corner of the universe. Until a few decades ago, we had no direct physical access to anything except what we could find here on earth. And then, as we began to send robots to the moon, the planets, the asteroids and comets of our own solar system, we were constantly surprised by what we discovered. Our furthest explorers, the Viking probes launched in the 1980s, are only now approaching the edge of our solar system, and again, making unexpected discoveries. What might we discover in an alien solar system? 

Could there be life?

 The scientific answer to that question is an interesting one. Most scientists who think about it believe the chances are pretty good that life exists somewhere else in the universe, but that our chances of ever coming across it are pretty dismal. Much of this thinking can be traced back to the famous Drake equation that calculates the probability of life and compares it to the number of planets that might be capable of harbouring life. There is ample speculation out there on the scientific and social questions that are raised by the possibility of alien life, so I won’t go into them here. But there is another set of questions that is a little harder to find being discussed.

 The theological questions are no less interesting. I recall hearing HG Bishop Moussa commenting on this topic at a conference once: “If we find life on other planets, we’ll just tuck our Bibles under our arms and go and preach to the aliens” he said. A nice repost for an impromptu response, but perhaps there is more to the matter?

 I see no problem in God creating life on other planets in the universe: it is abundantly clear that He has created a wildly huge universe, most of which is completely inaccessible to us anyway, so whether some of it has life or not hardly makes any difference. But what about intelligent life? Would such life be conscious in the same way we are? Might there be creatures who are like us but have no eternal spirit? Or if there are creatures with eternal spirits, would we meet them in Heaven? Perhaps that joyful meeting will not only be with angels and saints, but also with Alpha Centaurans! And would the aliens also be created in the image of God? Perhaps there are aliens throughout the universe, each of which is some variation on the image of God, much like a painter who paints the same scene in a number of different styles?

 Would conscious aliens also have free will? If they fell from grace, would God need to incarnate in their form to save them? Or was that a one off solution for the particular problem of humans, and there are other solutions He might use for the particular problems of alien races? Would their sins be the same as our sins, and their virtues the same as ours? If “God is love”, surely Love would have to be a universal virtue, whatever you or your alien society looked like? Perhaps by making contact with the aliens, and studying their morality and beliefs, we could better work out which truths are universal truths, truths that hold everywhere and at all times, and which ones are just local rules suitable for earth alone.

 Might some aliens be more in tune with the world of the spirit than we are? Are there worlds where the very question of the existence of God is not even raised because given their senses and brains, the answer is as blindingly obvious as a sunrise? Would they laugh at our debates over this topic (if they had laughing organs, that is)? Could they teach us new ways of experiencing God? Could they tell us new things about Him? What effect would this have on our relationship with Him? Could this kind of knowledge actually be harmful to us – something more than we can cope with?

Could there already be aliens out there on one of those very planets our telescopes are now imaging, peering back at us, watching and waiting for us to reach a level of maturity where we can sensibly communicate with them? If we found a planet ruled by cockroaches, we wouldn’t bother communicating with them, after all. Perhaps there aliens who think the same of us? What would such a discovery mean for how we see ourselves? Medieval theology considered humans to be God’s greatest creation ever (although I don’t think the Bible ever actually says that). What if we weren’t? What if we’re just one of many different creatures created by God in this wide universe, some greater, some lesser than we?

And what of the tantalising possibility that God only created one conscious species in each galaxy? If interplanetary travel is impossible for us in the near future, intergalactic travel is impossible for as far as we can imagine into the future! The distances are just mindboggling, even to the nearest galaxies. Even messages travelling at the speed of light would need to travel for millions of years before they got to us. By the time we messaged back, the whole alien civilisation would more than likely be long gone! What if the quota is exactly one conscious species per galaxy? That would mean that there are something of the order of 200,000,000,000 other conscious species living their lives, seeking their destinies, and we would never, ever know. Neither would they know about us.

Wow. If God’s intention in making this big universe was to help us realise how utterly small and insignificant we are, He did a really good job.

 The questions seem as endless as the rain that gently, irresistably falls on the lawn. Like the raindrops, they seem to disappear unsatisfyingly without a trace as soon as they land. Shall we ever find answers? Regrettably, I can’t see interplanetary travel happening in my lifetime, nor even in my grandchildren’s. If it were, I think I would work really hard to be the first Coptic priest in space. But sometimes, on a cold, wet Sunday morning, with no one but God and few noisy birds outside my window for company, it is interesting to ponder….

 Fr Ant

Or: “Did the Devil Really Make You Do It?”

 One of the (many) things I find very confusing in life is the question of Free Will. I have yet to find a satisfying explanation for how free will works. On what basis does a person make his or her choices? And if one’s choices are determined by those factors, where is the freedom? And yet, we experience this strange freedom that we cannot explain every day. When Samuel Johnson was challenged to defend the existence of free will, his answer was typically pithy yet profound: “I know I have free will, and there’s an end to the matter!”

 On a more practical level, we grapple with free will. In confessions, “I couldn’t help it Abouna,” is a phrase I have grown accustomed to hearing, usually followed by something like; “He forced me to swear at him!”

 “Hmmm” I will answer if I am in a sarcastic frame of mind, “so he reached into your mouth, grabbed your tongue, and forced it to produce a swear word?”

 The most common response I get is a stare that is usually reserved for inmates of mental hospitals. The question of my sanity notwithstanding, personal responsibility is a deeper issue than I once thought. How much of what we do is conscious choice and how much is ‘mechanical’? And if mechanical, then how are we to be held responsible for it?

 Perhaps you will understand my confusion a little better if you consider an example. We have an inbuilt reflex that causes us to pull away sharply if ever we feel a burning pain on our skin; you know, the reflex that makes you pull your hand away immediately you accidentally lean on a glowing hotplate. It would appear that the actual path taken by the signals in your nervous system does not go through the brain at all. Instead, the sensory nerves trigger an automatic response from the nerves that move the muscles by meeting them somewhere in the spinal cord. Your conscious brain only participates afterwards, after the action of pulling away has already been completed.

More confusing still is some research that has shown that our brains may sometimes make decisions some seconds before we are conscious of them. That’s right, your brain might be making decisions on its own. But what does that mean? If I am not my brain, then what am I? Are my mind and my brain two different things? And where does my spirit fit into all this?

The interpretation of these experiments is of course open to question. What the fMRI machine might be picking up is nothing more than the necessary machinary you use to make a conscious decision – a bit like watching the pieces of a car come together on a conveyor belt. It’s not fully a car until it pops out the end (eg it may not have wheels) yet it is recognisable as a ‘pre-car’. In the same way, the fMRI might be picking up ‘pre-decisions’.

 And yet, there are other things we do without really being in control of ourselves. Car drivers know the weird experience of driving on ‘autopilot’ – when you fall into a daydream while driving to the shops after work and come back to reality only to realise that the car seems to have taken you home instead all on its own! What has happened of course is that your brain and mind, in the absence of any conscious instructions to the contrary, just repeated the actions you normally perform every afternoon and drove you straight home. Are you responsible for this action? Should your wife get you in trouble for forgetting to pick up some bread?

 And how far does this unconscious action extend?

 Then again, does ‘unconscious’ really equal ‘not responsible’? The daydreaming autopilot driver did choose to daydream after all. Had he chosen to remain focused he would not have forgotten to pick up the bread.

I am reminded of the story of the monk who couldn’t resist having an egg during Lent fasting. Having smuggled the egg into his bare cell, he was faced with problem of how to cook it without arousing suspicion. So he struck upon the idea of roasting it over his prayer candle. When the abbot happened to pass by his cell and noticed something fishy going on, the startled monk exclaimed, “It wasn’t me, Father; the devil made me do it!” Suddenly, a demon appeared out of nowhere and exclaimed, “Oh no. I’m not to blame for this one. I would never have thought of that candle idea. He came up with it all by himself!”

 So perhaps there really is no excuse for not practicing self control? My suspicion is the matter is still far more complex than we have yet guessed. Thank God that He is the judge of men’s hearts and deeds and not us!

 Fr Ant

We have seen that cloning raises some incredibly difficult ethical and moral questions. But before we attempt to address them, it may be helpful to look at things from the perspective of the infertile parent, and also to survey various religious positions on the matter.

 It is important to appreciate that these are not just hypothetical questions that people in ivory towers can enjoy discussing over a nice cup of tea. They are questions that influence the lives of many people, real living people. I have encountered couples dealing with infertility, and I can assure you, it is no small matter. Until you have gone through the experience yourself, I don’t think you can really understand what it means to be denied the chance of having your own children. In the Bible, it was considered a terrible curse, a cause of shame and social ridicule, and perhaps even a sign of God’s disfavour. Just think of Hannah the mother of Samuel crying soundless prayers of desperation in the temple, or Sarah the wife of Abraham and Elizabeth the wife of Zechariah. We no longer see infertility as a sign of God’s anger, just as we no longer see disease of any kind in this light. But the personal, emotional and psychological damage it does is still tremendous.

So anything that can help to bring about a child for a childless couple is worth taking very, very seriously. Here, if anywhere, is the place to apply the Pauline principle of “All things are lawful for me, but not all things edify” (1 Corinthians 10:22). We should begin with the assumption that this new technology is a good thing, and see if there is anything to disqualify it, rather than beginning by assuming it is a bad thing and seeing if there is anything to redeem it. Let’s take a quick tour of the stated opinions of a selection of religious bodies.

 The “all things are lawful – first” approach is indeed to be found among some of the bishops of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Back in 1987, the forward thinking scholar, the late HG Bishop Gregorius delivered a lecture and subsequently published a book on IVF. In it he presents a beautifully balanced critique of this powerful technology, highlighting the benefits it offers to infertile couples as well as the likely problems with progress in this kind of medical technology. His words, summarised by Dr Botros Rizk (see link below) are strangely prescient, and the ethical and moral principles he outlines remain the foundation for our attitude towards the subject today, including the condemnation of commercial trade in eggs or sperm and surrogacy.

HG Bishop Moussa in a 2006 article (see link below) takes a “wait and see” approach: “We are now waiting to see what man will do with knowledge. Will he make it the means of human growth and development or will he make it a means of destruction and distortion?” On the other hand, HG Bishop Serapion of LA (see link below) takes a much harder line: “Cloning is against God’s plan for human reproduction. It is very hard to draw a line between therapeutic cloning for research and human cloning … Christians should oppose any proposition that advances embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning.”

Given the differences in the opinions of Coptic Orthodox authorities on some of these issues, such as therapeutic cloning, for example, perhaps it is time for our Church to formally study these issues in depth and produce a definitive statement. On the other hand, a wide reading of the literature from all sources leaves one with the strong impression that no one has yet formulated waterproof arguments on many of these issues, so perhaps there is a wisdom in allowing the discussion to progress further before an official position is published by the Church?

 The Catholic Church has officially banned all forms of human cloning (see link below). This is consistent with its hardline pro-life positions on abortion, IVF, stem cell research and even contraception. In contrast, the Coptic Church’s pro-life position encompasses only the injunction to not kill; there is no injunction about preventing conception. Thus, while we are opposed to abortion (with the exception of situations where the life of the mother or the infant are in danger) and opposed to IVF or stem cell procedures that involve the destruction of embryos, we have no problem with any form of contraception that does not involve destroying an embryo. For those who are interested, that only rules out IUDs and the morning after pill, both of which have been shown to have a significant risk of acting by destroying an already fertilised embryo.

You may recall that Dr Savos gained the blessing of the senior Imam of Hammas in Lebanon for his cloning work. Interestingly, this is in direct contradiction to the publicly stated “official” Islamic position on the matter. At least one respected Islamic authority has declared human cloning ‘haraam’ (see link below).

 Next time, we’ll go back and bravely have a go at taming some of those really tricky ethical questions.

 Fr Ant

 ______________________

 Links to various religious views on Cloning:

 http://www.bioline.org.br/pdf?mf05031 The views of the Coptic Orthodox Church on the treatment of infertility, assisted reproduction and cloning. Botros Rizk, M.R.C.O.G., M.D, 2005.

http://www.stmina.hamilton.on.coptorthodox.ca/index.php?action=view&id=29&module=newsmodule&src=%40random44d36c519a457 The Christian View Of Cloning. HG Bishop Moussa, 2006.

http://www.lacopts.org/articles/the-churchs-perspective-stem-cell-research The Church’s Perspective on Stem Cell Research. HG Bishop Serapion,

http://www.americancatholic.org/news/cloning/default.asp Roman Catholic position on Human Cloning, 2003.

http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N04/493/06/PDF/N0449306.pdf?OpenElement  United Nations Declaration

http://www.islam-qa.com/en/ref/21582/clone Islamic Fatwa denounces Human Cloning as ‘haraam’.

"When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove (peristeran) and alighting upon Him." Matthew 3:16

I recently came across an interesting little fact. Before I share it with you, I have to tell you that although I love anything mathematical, I am not generally a great fan of Biblical numerology; the study of mathematical patterns in the text of the Bible. However, this one is interesting…

In the Gospel accounts of the Epiphany, the baptism of Jesus by St John the Baptist, the original Greek word used for the dove that appeared above Him is “PERISTERAN”. Now the evangelists tell us that this apparition of a dove was actually a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.

You may be aware that in written Greek (the original language of the New Testament), numbers do not have their own unique symbols, but are represented by the letters of the alphabet. The same is true of Coptic. Thus alpha, the first letter, represents the number one, beta, the second letter, is ‘two’, and so on. Once you get to ten, the next letter is twenty, then thirty, and so on to a hundred, then two hundred  etc.

Now it turns out that if you take the numerical values for all the letters that make up the Greek word “PERISTERAN” and add them up, you come to a total of 801.  What’s so special about that?

Well, 801 = 800 + 1.

The number 1 written in Greek is the letter alpha, the first letter of the alphabet. Care to guess what letter represents the number 800?

Omega, of course, the last letter of the Greek alphabet. I quote for you two verses from the Book of Revelation and leave you to put the rest together for yourself:

The Father Said:

Rev 1:8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End,” says the Lord, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”

And the Son said:

Rev 1:11 “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last,”

And the Holy Spirit didn’t need to say anything…

Fr Ant

 Then there are those whose minds just won’t stop thinking. These are the ones who must examine and delve and pull apart and understand things. For better or worse, God made me one of the latter. So for those readers who share my affliction, here are some thoughts on the incredible miracle of the Incarnation of the Word of God in Jesus Christ…

 Did Jesus have to be conceived within a virgin? Why couldn’t He have just been born normally and then filled or ‘soaked’ with divinity afterwards?

 In many ways this would have made the story of His life easier for people to accept. Today, there are theologians and clergy in the Churches of the West who cannot accept the concept of the Virgin birth of Christ, because it isn’t natural. They will point to examples of pre-Christian faiths that include virgin births, such as the Egyptian gods Isis and Horus, to show that the Christian one is just one example of a common phenomenon in religions.

 I see this as being a faulty argument. The existence of fakes in no way means that there cannot be a genuine article somewhere. Imagine if someone told you that all the so called Rolex watches sold at the markets are fake, and that therefore there IS no such thing as a genuine Rolex watch. You show him your watch, bought from a reputable jeweller complete with documentation, but he refuses to accept it. Nope, he’s seen too many fakes, so this one can’t be real – why, it looks just the same as all the other fakes!

 The Virgin birth wasn’t just a trick to show off God’s power. There are reasons for the Incarnation to have occurred from a Virgin birth rather than a normal one. Had Jesus been born to a normal couple, we would be missing one of the most important pieces of evidence that He really was God Incarnate rather than just a very holy prophet.

 And that’s not just because He was born miraculously. There are numerous miraculous births recorded in the Bible. Isaac was born miraculously to Abraham and Sarah, many decades beyond childbearing age. Similarly, St John the Baptist was born to an elderly couple after a miraculous announcement by the Archangel Gabriel. It is no surprise that the birth of God Incarnate should also be in miraculous circumstances, but the added extra here is the nature of the miracle itself.

 A virgin mother can only contribute half the DNA necessary for the conception of a new human being. Normally, the other half must be contributed by the father. Where there is no human father, God must have created that DNA miraculously in order for St Mary to conceive.

 Now amongst the bewildering variety of life on earth, you will find examples of “parthenogenesis”, the making of a new individual without this mingling of DNA from two separate parents. But the conception of Christ could not have been a natural event, since His mother did not possess a Y chromosome. All humans possess two sex chromosomes, named, imaginatively, X and Y. Females have two X chromosomes, whereas males have an X and a Y. Each parent contributes one of their sex chromosomes to the child. If both parents contribute an X chromosome to their child, they have a girl. If the father contributes his Y instead of his X, then they have a boy. St Mary had no Y to contribute, so where did the Y that made Jesus male come from?

 It must have been a miraculous creation, and the source must have been the Holy Spirit that overshadowed her and caused the conception to occur in her womb. In this way the Virgin birth points, by its very nature, to an inescapable conclusion: the male child born of St Mary was, in a very real way, truly, the Son of God. He owed His very genes to two parents, one human, the other divine. The mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos, God becoming a true man, is embodied in the event we call the Virgin birth.

 Beautiful, isn’t it? But of course, all that analysis is not what Christmas is really about (and no, it’s not chocolates and presents either). Having exercised an overactive mind sufficiently, one is freed to approach Christmas the way it should be approached: with the love and simplicity of a child…

 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” John 3:16

 Wishing all readers a happy and holy Christmas and a blessed 2010.

Fr Ant

My understanding is that the vast majority of the Eastern Orthodox community has accepted that we Oriental Orthodox are in Orthodox in faith and not Monophysite heretics. However, a small section based mainly on the influential Mt Athos monastic community refuses to accept that we are Orthodox. They insist that the proof of our Orthodoxy must include condemning Pope Dioscorus as a heretic and renouncing him, dropping him from our doxologies, synaxarium, commemoration of the saints etc. They also insist that we must accept the Council of Chalcedon (where the split happened in 451AD) as legal or canonical, plus the other three Coucnils that came after it. We currently only accept the first three COuncils as canonical, they accept seven (The Roman Catholics are up to 22 I think, including Vatican II as the most recent).

As far as I know, no one is suggesting that the Oriental Orthodox change their rites or submit to new authorities (except the Catholics who insist the Pope of Rome has absolute authority over all Christians). Even within the Eastern Orthodox community, the Ecumenical Patriarch, based in Constantinople, has no authority over the other Eastern Orthodox Churches, for each one has its own independent Patriarch and Synod. Further, there is a wide variety of rites, languages, cultures, liturgies etc within the existing Eastern Orthodox community, as there is in the Oriental Orthodox. None of that needs to change.

So in summary, the only thing keeping us out of communion with our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters is this insistence by a stubborn but powerful minority that we rewrite our view of history to agree with theirs.

Nor is this merely a theoretical matter. I can think of at least two reasons why re-establishing communion between us is important and worth pursuing. Firstly, the very practical matter of inter-marriage. In the diaspora, we must accept that more and more of our youth will wish to marry Christians of other denominations. The lack of communion causes incredible heartache and tribulation, sometimes even destroying what might otherwise have been a very successful relationship. The second is the command of Christ that we be one in Him. We believe in the same basic Truths – why should we be separated from each other in this way? I do not think it was ever Christ’s intention that His flock be so divided one against the other. Surely we have a responsibility to do all we can to come together?

Fr Ant

This brief quote from one of the most eloquent Christians in history is a profound description of the liberty of the spirit that has truly known God. Our Lord Jesus Himself described this person’s freedom of spirit poetically when He said:

“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

A true Christian lives by the law of liberty. I do not believe that genuine Christianity is about living your life inside a cage of rules and regulations.

“Thou shalt not…” was the baby sitter of our infancy, charged with protecting and teaching us in our vulnerable spiritual childhood. But now we have grown up, we live thus; “All things are lawful to me, but not all things are helpful” (1 Corinthians 6:12). There is no real disagreement between these two. They both direct us to the same goal, humble obedience to God, albeit by different paths. The main difference is that the first is forced upon us, while the second is our own choice.

This liberty means the whole world is mine – there is nothing I need to fear. All doors are open to me, all knowledge is available to me. This marvellous universe God has lovingly created for me is mine to experience and to enjoy. But with liberty comes responsibility, and liberty must be used responsibly if it is to be of benefit and not harm. “All things are lawful to me, BUT not all things are helpful … not all things build up … I will not be made a slave to any” continues St Paul (see 1 Corinthians 6:12 & 10:23).

The second part of St Augustine’s words will not work without the first part being in place. Our liberty comes about and may be practiced safely and with benefit because we love God. To those who do not love God, but love the world or themselves above all else, liberty becomes the means of their destruction.

Sadly, there has always been a temptation to misuse this beautiful liberty throughout the history of Christianity. From the time of the Apostles, groups developed who squandered this precious gift and fell far from God (e.g. The Nicolaitans in Revelation chapters 2 & 3). Even today, cults develop that pervert the message and joy of Christian freedom.

And we as individuals commit the same sin when we justify our sins and say, “There’s nothing wrong with that! Who am I hurting?” or “He deserved it!” We also abuse it by allowing ourselves to get into tempting situations that are too hard for us. “I can listen to that violent music all day without being affected by it!” is a clear example of abuse of God’s liberty. I am using it to drag myself away from Him – how sad…

May God grant us the wisdom to use this great gift of liberty effectively and safely.

Fr Ant

Why did God create us to be able to feel pain?

Pain is one of the most unpleasant experiences a person can go through. We do everything we can to avoid pain. Just think of your fear of the dentist’s chair, or of stepping on a rusty nail, or getting your fingers caught in the car door as it closes … OUCH!

Of course, pain has a very important role to play in our lives. Without pain, we would all be a lot sicker, or perhaps even dead. Pain is the body’s alarm system – it goes off when there is danger. Pain is the first half of our pain reflex. When you touch something hot, the message shoots up to your brain, and without you consciously thinking about it, the brain shoots a message back to your muscles saying “Get out of there right now!” You pull your hand away and save yourself from a nasty burn. The pain in your tummy warns you that your appendix is infected and may be about to rupture, spreading germs throughout your abdomen and possibly killing you. So you take your sore tummy to the doctor who kindly removes the offending appendix.

You get an idea of how important pain is in our lives when you see what happens who lose their sense of pain. For example, long term diabetics may have their nerves so damaged by their diabetes that they no longer feel pain; or anything, at their toes and fingertips. This kind of diabetic must never walk around barefoot, for if she does, she won’t know that she stepped on an old drawing pin. She will continue to walk around with the pin stuck in her foot, banging around and ripping up her sole, opening up wounds that fill with germs and dirt. Some diabetics end up getting gangrene and losing their whole foot just from a simple thing like an old drawing pin; all because they cannot feel pain.

Yes, there are worse things in life than pain.

Pain plays a similarly important role in our spiritual and emotional lives. It is often the sign that something is wrong, and it invites us to investigate and find out what it is. When a disagreement occurs between two friends, the situation may be described as ‘painful’ in the emotional sense. To ease this pain, they will need to forgive each other and reconcile with one another.

The sting of sin is another example of this non-physical pain. That guilt you feel when you’ve done something wrong is like the dull, constant ache of a rotting tooth. You have to see your spiritual dentist (confession father) to have it cleaned out – perhaps, even to have the whole thing extracted! Yes, some pain is actually good for you. No one enjoys going through pain, but we understand that there are times when going through some pain today will save us from much worse pain tomorrow.

Every athlete knows the old adage, “No Pain; No Gain”. Without the constant pushing of the body to its limits, the athlete will never build up the muscles and skills they need to perform at the very highest level. So there are sane people who actually seek out pain, and that for very good reasons. As spiritual athletes, there may be times when we too may seek out certain types of emotional or spiritual pain for the higher goal we wish to attain. I would put fasting into this category, for it involves a ‘painful’ level of self denial, preventing one’s body from having the foods it desires and craves. Yet this pain is building spiritual muscles. It is conditioning the body to understand that the spirit is in charge, and the teaching the spirit to take charge of the body and control it. No pain, no gain.

Life might possibly be more pleasant without pain, but it would also be an awful lot less interesting. People would become lazy and complacent and lose many of the motivations that drive them to achieve and extend themselves. No longer could we speak of things like character, nobility or self-sacrifice. And, like spiritual diabetics, we might end up harming ourselves badly. Should we ask that pain disappear from our lives?

No.

Thank You God, for the gift of pain.

Fr Ant
www.stbishoy.org.au

Thus wrote John Greenleaf Whittier, to which Bret Harte replied:

If, of all words of tongue and pen,
The saddest are, ‘It might have been’,
More sad are these we daily see;
‘It is but hadn’t ought to be!’

It is interesting to contemplate on what might have been. Often a person will day-dream of opportunities lost and paradise averted. Much useful time can frittered away in this manner, and there are cases of whole lives destroyed because of an obsession with ‘what might have been’.

We would be better served contemplating not on the good things we might have had, but on the bad things that might have come upon us. As the famous 19th century poet said upon seeing someone in a terrible state, “But for the grace of God, there goes Robert Barrett Browning.”

This principle applies on a larger scale as well. Consider for example, what the Christian Church today mught have been like had Arius and his heresy won the day back in the 4th century AD. Imagine us belonging today to the Coptic Arian Church, instead of the Coptic Orthodox Church. What might have happened?

To begin with, I don’t believe we would have had a Church by the 21st century. Arius, you will recall, denied the divinity of Christ, claiming Him to have been a mere man who was simply imbued with a larger dose than usual of the power of God. Thus, the One who died on the Cross was not God, but a man like us. What difference does it make?

Quite a lot! This mystery of God made man is one of the main engines that drives the faith of the Christian. That the Creator of all the cosmos should so humble Himself as to take vulnerable flesh is astonishing; astounding; mind-blowing! It sets Christianity apart from all mere ‘philosophies’ which tend to be theoretical and academic in nature, for this is a reality, Truth embodied and enacted. It sets Christianity apart from other religions, for none has the granduer and vision of this mystery.

What increases the distance between Christianity and other beliefs is the central role of love. For the Incarnation of Christ was not a party trick, it was no sign intended merely to astound and entertain, it was an act of unimaginable love. If love gives, then the Incarnation was the giving to end all givings. One cannot imagine any expression of love greater than this one. Yet, all of that falls by the wayside if Christ is not God.

It’s like the engine falling out of the car. Sure, sheer momentum will keep it rolling for some time, but sooner or later it must come to a stop, with no hope of moving again, until an engine is restored. The Christian faith, I think, would have dwindled gradually until it petered out altogether.

Can you imagine the glee of the Muslim who finds an ally in the Arian, for both belief systems deny the divinity of Christ and proclaim Him only to be a particularly good man. Can you imagine how easy it would have been for Arians to slip smoothly into Islam, with its denial of a Holy Trinity? An Arian Christianity would have been one without its main motivation to resist the innovations of Islam, and who knows what the history of the world might have been?

And if the Church had survived till now, can you imagine an Arian Church trying desperately to face the challenges of 21st century Western society, standing upon this weakened and empty base? Instead of a living, risen Saviour, a Saviour who united us with God and who dwells in us daily, we would have only a ‘very good man’ for our inspiriation. We would not have seen the face of God made flesh. We could not say that God had dwelt among us, so that by His sacrifice on the Cross, and His daily sacrifice on the altar, He dwells not only among us, but inside us, in our very bones and muscles.

The Christian Church had a very close shave back then, in the 4th century. There was a time when Pope Athanasius was warned that he stood alone against this whole world, to which he offered his own famous reply:

“One with God is the majority.”

We owe him a deep, deep debt of gratitude.

Fr Ant
www.stbishoy.org.au

Our lives as Christians are meant to be built upon a personal relationship with God. Our Lord Jesus came down to earth to reveal to us the nature and personality of God in a way we could accept, and to dwell among us without destroying us with His unbearable glory. Daily we pray to Him. We strive to run our lives according to His commands and we seek to do that which pleases Him. Ask anyone in church, even the naughtiest of kids, “Do you love God?” and with even hesitating, a confident “yes!” will be the response.

Yet, who is the God we love? St Augustine repeatedly asks this question in his Confessions, giving some beautiful answers, but I am trapped in the 21st century, in the age of logic and reason and the scientific method. Can these tell me anything about God?

I think so. Let’s see how far it can take us…

I mentioned in a comment following a recent post that the theory of a Big Bang forces the 21st century seeker for truth to admit there must have been a beginning to the universe. Some have begun to look for ways around this, but to my mind (and that of many others, including atheists) none of the attempts are worth taking seriously. If you must have a beginning, then you must have a beginner, a First Cause that is itself without a cause. Thus, cosmology plus a little basic logic leads to the conclusion that the uncaused First Cause, whom we call ‘God’, is actually essential, is necessary, if anything is to exist at all. And we think we exist, since we are here, asking the question (cogito ergo sum*).

But beyond that, it is surprisingly difficult to really know anything specific and with certainty about God. Without ’special revelation’, that is the Bible and the Church traditions we have recieved via the Apostles, ‘general revelation’, that is, what we can see in our universe, reveals only faint hints, glimpses, as it were, “in a mirror, dimly” (I Cor. 13).

We deduce that God is great from the hugeness of this universe that surrounds. We further deduce that we are but a tiny, tiny part of that creation, making the fact that God loves us little specks of dust even more incredible. But how big is God? The answer is, He isn’t. He is neither big, nor small. He is neither short or tall, wide or thin. The usual description we use is that God is unlimited in space, yet this is, strictly speaking, not true either. As far as we can understand, God cannot be measured using the three dimensions of space we are used to, for He created that three dimensional space, and He Himself existed when it was not, and exists now “outside” of space, whatever that may mean. If you try to characterise God using the language and concepts of three dimensional, or even n-dimensional space, you cannot succeed.

Neither is it possible to define God in terms of time. How old is God? We usually say that God is eternal, and clarify that by saying that He has no beginning and no end. But that inevitably implies that God exists ‘inside’ time, He is actually on the timeline, so to speak, and differs from everything else in that they have a beginning (and sometimes an end) whereas He does not. But this is wrong. God made time. He exists without time. He existed ‘before’ time began, whatever that may mean. Any description of God that involves time will therefore be inadequate and inaccurate. And we have no language that does not depend on the concept of time. Try it now. Try to make a sentence that describes God (or anything else) without using a time-dependent word or concept.

“God is love”?

‘is’ denotes the present, as opposed to the past or the future, and is thus a time-dependent concept.

What kind of being is God? We usually call God, “He”. In recent times, the feminists have taken great umbridge to this sexism and Bibles have been published referring to God as “She” … “Our Mother who art in heaven”, and so on. Traditionalists are outraged by this modern editing of a text over 3,500 years old in some places. Who is right? Strictly speaking, neither. Gender is a characteristic of physical living beings – animals and birds and reptiles and fish. Humans have gender because they need to reproduce, but angels have no gender. Thus did our Lord answer those who asked who in heaven would be the husband of the woman who had married five men during her life by saying, “They neither marry nor are they given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven”.

Sure, we use masculine words to express God’s superior strength, or feminine language to communicate His gentle nurturing love, but all these are human words applied to One who is far, far beyond humanity, infinitely far, in fact. ‘He’ and ‘She’ are thus woefully inadequate. ‘It’ sounds downright rude, lowering God to the level of a senseless stone or a coffee table. We have no other pronouns in our language! Perhaps we should invent one, to be reserved especially for God and for Him alone? ‘Thee’ perhaps, echoing the Greek root word for God, theo?

I could go on.

The disappointing fact is that God is just so far beyond our imagination, experience or comprehension that we simply cannot know Him. Everything we think about Him is bound to be inadequate, and thus, strictly speaking, wrong. The Ancient Fathers, especially in the east, recognised this, and some of them insisted that we cannot truthfully describe God using positive terms; saying what He is, but we can only use negative terms; we can only rule out what He is not. You might have noticed that St Gregory’s Anaphora lists a whole lot of negatives: “the ineffable; the unseen; the uncontainable; without beginning; the eternal ; the timeless; the limitless; the unsearchable; the unchanging.”

It is just as well, then, that God Himself chose to tell us about Himself. Of course, He must use limited language that we can understand, but when He does so, He highlights for us the things that are important, the things that matter. It’s a bit like your teacher highlighting the bits that will be in the upcoming exam for you so you don’t have to waste time studying the whole textbook!

And just what is it that God chooses to highlight? Is it e=mc^2? Is it the structure of the electron shells around the nucleaus of an atom? Is it how to accurately predict weather conditions? No, it is none of these. What He points out to us is…

“God is love”.

Our curiosity leads us to try to understand God with our brains, and by and large, we fail miserably. But perhaps that is not the important thing. Perhaps the important thing is to feel God’s love for us in our hearts, and to love Him from our hearts in return. Knowing about God is nowhere near as important as knowing God. The mind can tell us a little about the character of God, but it is in living with God daily, and minute by minute; in feeling that He surrounds us and dwells within us; in ‘touching Him’ when we live by His commandments and ‘meeting Him’ in every tiny act of kindness towards another; in these things do we come to know God.

Even if I knew nothing about God, just knowing Him would be enough.

“To the Unknown God” – the inscription on an altar, seized upon by St Paul to start preaching to the philosophical Greeks. A God Unknown, but Loving … and that is more than enough.

Fr Ant