Holiness through the Communion of Saints
by Bishop Maxim Vasiljevic
Synaxis of the Holy TheotokosAnno Domini 2019, December 26
Therefore, in view of the ethical and personal dimension of holiness, we can assert that the objective of every human being is not moral perfection through
holiness but uniqueness, that is, an otherness, manifested through communion with others. Here, one should point out that otherness and distinction – that is being different – are not the same. Distinctiveness can be expressed in terms of qualities that all share, but it does not apply to otherness because personal otherness and uniqueness exclude it. After all, in the Divine Liturgy the Church commemorates particular
saints and not saints as a general category. They are commemorated by their respective calendar dates: every individual ascetic and martyr. Only through their uniqueness and irreplaceability can they serve as inexhaustible sources of inspiration to Christians. Consider, for example: Abba Sisoe’s attitude toward death, Abba Anthony’s sober vigilance of the mystery of God’s judgments, holy Martyr Polycarp and other martyrs in their ekstatic passion during martyrdom for Christ, or the challenges of St. Simeon the Fool for Christ. They are all permanent and eternal examples of a sacrificial love “stronger than death.” At the same time, they pose an existential challenge to man. Perhaps a maximalistic anthropology stems from their hagiography, which at first glance seems unattainable for modern man and difficult for those who are used to a leisurely lifestyle. However, this kind of anthropology causes an awakening from a “dogmatic,” as well as from a likely ethical, “slumber.” After all, the higher one aims, the deeper one repents. The lives of the saints show that the search for holiness here
and now
turns man into a being who is unafraid of death and who leads all of creation into communion with the Holy God. The martyrs who offered themselves wholly to God serve as an example. Their being was united with God to such an extent that one can no longer speak of any separation
between them, although distinction
(i.e., otherness) certainly continues to exist and remains forever. The saints of the Church are those persons (the Theotokos, the Apostles, the marytrs and ascetics) who in one way or another, have overcome the anonymity of nature in their own and irreplaceable manner, and have united themselves with Christ, the “only Holy One” in a personal and unique way.
With a concept of holiness, we paradoxically arrive at the understanding of eschatology, and vice versa
as well. Namely, every saint is regarded as a future resident of Heaven, although in his lifetime he continues to bear both the marks of history, including the fall, and also man’s infirmities. Christ, however, retains the ultimate word. Were it not for the vision of the Eschaton, that is, were we not given a foretaste of the Kingdom in the Liturgy, of that ultimate communion with the saints, we would never know what is meant by either “holiness” or “holy man.” In other words, it is only the vision and the liturgical experience of the true, end state of the world that provides us with the possibility of knowing something about the true world, man and God. This dimension of theology and of the Church is of paramount importance and should be of greater significance in contemporary theological thought.
~Bishop Maxim Vasiljevic, excerpt from History, Truth, Holiness, available at Eighth Day Books
*Register for the Eighth Day Symposium("For I Am Holy: The Command to Be Like God") before regular registration rates begin on January 7.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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