Cycles of Newness

This week I have been reflecting on what brought me into the Orthodox Church. The Church lacked anything characteristic of a western church that I was used to – no list of doctrines to compare to a denomination or non-denominational church and no worship band to play with. At the time back in 2016 I was struggling with some existential questions of faith after I had returned from studying in Germany: Can God change? What is love? What if Moses didn’t write the first five books of the Bible? These questions and others started gnawing on me until I found the root of the questions “Who am I and how deep do I go?” Something deep down hurt and it didn’t make any sense with my current faith of “I’m saved.” If I was saved, why did things feel like they weren’t saved, like they were dying? My friends would give me bible verses and people at church would pray for me and neither of those things answered the question, though it did show they loved me.

Then one day I was driving through California with my cousin Jessica’s husband Aaron who mentioned he was reading a blog by an Orthodox priest, Father Stephen Freeman. Father Freeman had written a couple articles on suffering mentioning the word of Saint Silouan. The way Father Freeman talked about him wasn’t the normal way my friends would relate stories from the Bible. Father Freeman talked like he knew him in an intimate way. Saint Silouan said, “Keep your mind in Hell and don’t despair.” And for Father Freeman this wasn’t a pithy saying from an old dead guy but a conversation he had with the saint himself. Something was offered here I had never encountered before and it was reaching where my question of “Who am I?” lay.

I had never encountered someone who shared their relationship with a saint in the Kingdom like Father Freeman did. And that communion came to me as well, I got to know Saint Silouan. So far in my walk in faith I had met Christ, and I had met the Holy Spirit, but I had never met a specific saint, one who had been transformed into Christ’s likeness and lived fully in His presence in the Kingdom. As far as I knew all of those men and women were still waiting in their graves, yet “God is the God of the living, not the dead.”

What did Saint Siloam reach in me, what needed to be restored by a saint, why not the Son or the Holy Spirit? Isn’t Christ our only mediator? Yesterday I was finally able to put this into words, why it took a saint. My question deep down was a question of essence, “who am I and how deep do I go?” When Christ emptied himself and became man, he showed us what a human being is. And this should have been enough for me, at least intellectually to answer my quest. But I’m stubborn and responded with, “That’s great for Christ, He’s God.” I am not God, not by nature at least. Why then didn’t the Holy Spirit answer my question, He lives inside of us doesn’t He? Again, He’s God and did not put on flesh. Saint Silouan showed me what a person united to God by grace looked like; I had always heard about saints like the “saints in Ephesus” but hearing about a general concept isn’t the same as meeting the fullness of a saint in person.

Meeting Saint Silouan showed me what a human being is, as Saint Ignatius says, “Leave me to imitate the death of my Lord and I will become a human being.” I need specific examples, what can I say. Saint Silouan met Christ standing before him and that should have sealed his life’s trajectory, but instead he was overtaken by one thought of pride and didn’t feel God in his prayers for 15 years. I could relate with that in my existential turmoil. Finally he asked God, “Lord how do I become humble?” And after 15 years God responded, “Keep your mind in hell and don’t despair.” Rather than offering me a Bible verse or even a prayer, Saint Silouan sat with me where I was. I would sit in front of his icon for hours in silence in my apartment across from the old Presbyterian church on 7th street in Pocatello. The Kingdom of Heaven had time for me.

Saint Silouan offered me a greater gift than an intellectual word of scripture or even an example of healing; he offered me communion, his life in Christ. His communion with me healed the loneliness at my core, another creation like me yet living in the Kingdom of Heaven. This answered the question of “who am I?” – one who is called to have communion with Heaven. The saints, like Saint Siloan live the communal life of the Trinity, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” The Trinity extends grace to the saints to partake of this life of communion and the saints respond with all of their person, the seat of their being. This is what the Fathers call Theosis or deification: living by grace what the God is by nature as Divine Persons in free communion. God extends Himself to His children; we are all called to become saints, to be fully persons united to God by grace and sharing in His life.

God is love and longs to share His way of being with all of creation through His Image, you and me. The saints as specific free persons invite us into this life of communion, each in their own way. Get to know a saint, Saint Siouan, Saint Ignatius, Saint Matthew or the Mother of God and meet the Kingdom through their eyes.