Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

The Visible and Invisible Church - Lazar Puhao

Archishop Lazar Puhalo on the Visible and Invisible Church

QUESTION: In Western church tradition, there is a concept of the visible and invisible church, however we define that. Is there such a concept in Eastern Christianity?

RESPONSE: There is, but there is not such a sharp dichotomy in the East since the visible and invisible church are intimately connected. What the West would call the invisible church, the East “the noetic altar in the heavens” with a noetic projection on earth. So, the invisible permeates the visible.

QUESTION: And what constitutes the visible church?

RESPONSE: Sometimes we make the mistaken of trying to look for a physical definition rather than a spiritual definition. And sometimes we carry ‘spiritual’ a little too far and make it meaningless.

But the church on earth—“the catholic church”—is where catholic means “gathered together,” where everyone gathers or is gathered. I would call the church “the harvester of the earth,” because you make the church present and call everyone into it.

The minute you are baptized and chrismated, you become part of the royal priesthood, and you become part of THE Church—not the visible church but THE Church, visible and invisible, all united together.

It’s very important to remember that if one listens to the divine liturgy carefully, you can see this osmosis, this penetration of the heavenly into the earthly. The moment we enter the temple—we gather as a kind of visible kingdom of God. When we have what we call “the entrance,” most people miss it, but we say, “Blessed is the entrance of thy holy ones—the angels—because in the priest’s prayers, the angels are entering with us. And in the great anthem of the people of God, as I call it, “the Cherubic Hymn,” we sing,

“Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim and sing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-giving Trinity, lay aside all worldly cares, that we may receive the King of all, invisibly upborne [escorted] by angelic hosts. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

In other words, the angelic hosts are celebrating together with us—so the unseen is totally penetrating the seen and what is unseen is now seen.

And to make it more definitive, we see it in types and symbols. The types and symbols are very powerful. In the liturgy itself, inside “the gates of paradise,” when the priests start to cense the gifts, they pray,

“Having received them upon Thy holy, most heavenly, and noetic altar as an odor of spiritual fragrance, send down upon us in return the divine grace and the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

We must always see the penetration of the Holy Spirit as the union of the visible and invisible church, because they are not two distinct entities. The visible is for the sake of our weakness, but the invisible is always present—as long as we understand there is no dichotomy, we can say that the church here on earth is the visible aspect of the heavenly church.

But again, as a farmer, I often think of the church as the harvester of the crop, as long as there’s a harvest to be had,… so “lift up your eyes, the fields are ripe for the harvest.”    

Beyond Chicken Little Narratives - Luke Schulz

I remember growing up with the narrative of Chicken Little, and it seems to me to be the mainstream narrative adopted by both left and right. The sky is falling because of climate change! The sky is falling because authoritarians are in power! The sky is falling because other people are rich! The sky is falling because those people think differently! The sky is falling because these are the end times! If you truly believe that "the sky is falling", you will be fed plenty of fodder to confirm your biases. And if those spinning narratives can catch you in their web, they will continue to feed on your anxious attention.

 

How you see politics, and everything else, depends on narratives. What is the story you see playing out in the world? Where did that narrative come from? Many of us are intellectually lazy, or ignorant, and so we allow narratives to be fed to us through established channels and corporate media ON BOTH SIDES. But we need to realize that these stories are curated to produce the most angst and thus demand the most attention. It is a business model and a political ploy, designed to capture you and arrest your faculties of investigation. The left is not a mass of evil Communists and the right is not a mob of psychotic Nazis. Have some nuance!

Here's a narrative for you: DEMOCRACY IS WORKING.

 

Across the West, after decades of influence, the left has done a piss poor job representing its proclaimed values and constituents, and a lot of people don't buy the narrative anymore. They didn't become enamoured with the far-right or dictators, they just want something different, because the status quo, the prevailing narrative, seems to have failed them. The only alternative to "same-old" at the moment is the populist right, and until the left re-examines itself and figures out how to better represent and legislate on the values and concerns of its constituents, the populist right will be popular.

 

In democracies, parties must calculate the desires of the population, and deliver on them. If you stray too far from that, the people vote you out. This is how democracy works, and until the left gets new accountants, they leave the populist path to victory open for the right to capitalize on. And they will, until inevitably, the roles reverse. Come back to the public with a better platform and everything will be a-ok.

 

Democracy is simply working as it does. Our problems are not caused by liberal or conservative voters. Our solutions lie ever in new offerings going forward. We will pull through this era. No war has been lost, the sky is not falling, and giving in to panic or anxiety only makes you vulnerable to the false narratives of predators wearing all stripes, who will use their influence to get you to point the finger at your neighbour instead of them.

 

Peace and Love!

Addison Hart's "Confessions of the Antichrist" - Review by Bradley Jersak

After thoroughly enjoying "Patapsco Spirits: Eleven Ghost Stories", Addison Hart's marvellous collection of short ghost stories (it was my top fiction choice for 2024), I immediately raced to see what other books he had to offer. It turns out, quite a few (click here for his Goodreads list). Since I'm neck-deep in a stack of non-fiction works right now, I wanted another taste of his story-telling, so I used my remaining Christmas cash to pick up his novel, Confessions of the Antichrist.

Full disclosure, if I didn't already follow Hart's treasury of thought on Substack ("The Pragmatic Mystic") and hadn't known he's an elder brother to DBH (perhaps Mycroft to David's Sherlock?), I may have wrongly assumed from the title that Confessions was another fan fiction instalment of the Left Behind literary debacle. I'm glad I knew better! For while this short novel is very readable and moves quickly, it also boasts some wonderfully creative premises that left me pondering (as his ghost stories had in my essay here).

I'm wary of spoilers, and would even recommend avoiding the Amazon summary. So rather than offering an overview of the plot, I can hint at it by suggesting some pre-reading thought experiments to tempt you into Hart's treatment.

• Given the apostle Paul's claims in the Christ hymns of Philippians 2 and Colossians 1--that all things visible and invisible are "reconciled by his blood" and that every tongue in heaven and on earth and under the earth will confess (joyfully) the Lordship of Jesus--is it possible that even the devil (whatever that is) could yet repent and be saved? (an ancient debate, actually).
• If we were to image the devil seeing the error of its ways and trying to make amends, what would that look like? Would those amends look like a realignment with the fallen spirit's original design, or would the corruption of character continue to be manifest in his course corrections?
• If the devil were to prepare an Antichrist for the role, what type of man would he be? When or how would he discover his role? How would he be revealed to the world? Would the classical Antichrist of Christian imagination be his inevitable destiny or would God offers exit ramps? Could he or would he take them?
• Would the church recognize the Antichrist when he appeared? If they were to discover his identity, how would they respond and relate to him? Who would resist him? Who would bargain with him? And how do we keep doing so again and again in the realpolitik of our world. 
• And where does Jesus come into any of these questions? Is God the divine architect of a predestined outcome, or a passive observer in a cosmic dualism, or how would he participate in this plot as the Shepherd of humankind?       

The way Addison plays with these questions is well worth enjoying. The book has previously compared the book to a meeting of Through the Looking-Glass and The Divine Comedy. Yes, or I might suggest that it's the lovechild of The Grand Inquisitor and The Screwtape Letters because its relevance is a serious exploration in the nature of temptation and how we in 'the real world' regularly succumb to it in the name of our best ideas, which are precisely what got us into the current mess.

P.S. A few minor asides: I appreciated the very short chapters. It allowed me to snack on the book between tasks or at the end of the day and kept the book moving.

And I would also recommend pausing to look up Hart's incidental references to books, authors, history (historical figures, the Etruscans, etc.), and artworks (Goya)--worthy of pausing for sure.

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Shadia Drury's "Chauvinism of the West" - Review by Ron Dart

Shadia Drury, Chauvinism of the West: The Case of American Exceptionalism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2024)                              

Each year a few fine and must-read books are published (others not worth more than a passing glance), but there can be little doubt that Shadia Drury’s Chauvinism of the West is a ten-bell book. There is much packed into this historic read of the West and its impact on the notion and ideology of American exceptionalism—the origins, history and contemporary reality of American politics, foreign policy and global politics are parsed and exposed well and wisely.

Chauvinism of the West is divided into 6 compact, probing and arrow hitting bull’s eye well chapters: 1) The Roots of American Exceptionalism, 2) Manifest Destiny Goes Global, 3) What’s Wrong with Spreading Democracy, 4) Neoconservative Realism, 5) Fascist Elements in Neoconservative Realism and 6) The Political Theology of the West. Each of the paced well and tightly argued chapters are divided into smaller sections that hold the reader as Shadia’s argument unfolds and develops. The almost 50 pages of the “Annotated Bibliography” convert the at odds book with the orthodox way of viewing America into a spacious library that highlights further reading for those interested in following the pathway and trail that Shadia organized and constructed.

The cover of Chauvinism of the West speaks its own evocative and convincing message, metaphor of Statue of Liberty falling into the sea, foaming waves soon to bury and drown it, city in the distance soon to suffer the same fate.

The First Christmas and the Palestinians - Ron Dart

T.S. Eliot began the 6^th of his Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Ariel poems “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” in an apt and poignant manner.  

    There are several attitudes towards Christmas,

    Some of which we may disregard:

    The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,

    The rowdy (the pubs being open to midnight),

     And the childish—which is not that of the child

The birth of the child, of course, was none of the above, so accurately depicted by Eliot. The actual birth was about the uncertain Joseph-Mary having to leave their home in Nazareth, being ignored in their hour of birthing need in Bethlehem, larger political powers seemingly driving them to places of loneliness---they must have wondered as did the Magi in Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” that indeed it was a cold coming, a hard coming and was it all folly? And where was God in all this, God actually with them in the form of a vulnerable child (never easy to see when much seems to contradict and oppose such a read of a lived historic moment).

It would have been a matter of months (perhaps under 2 years) that Herod sent his death squads to slaughter many innocent children, Joseph-Mary and Jesus refugees, flight to Egypt and the Jewish community there a temporary home for a few years. Such is, in brief, the tale of the Jewish Jesus born from the Jewish context, the Biblical Jewish tale central to the Western Tradition and ethos, a chosen people, a people offered land, a people near and dear to a significant segment of the Christian Tradition. But, where in this tale are the Muslim and Christian Palestinians?

We have witnessed a barbaric and aggressive Jewish assault on the Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The extreme right-of-centre Israeli state has brutally, even though judged as engaging in genocide and violating international law, ignored basic human rights and savaged the Palestinians in Gaza (the West Bank has also felt the impact of this). The right-of-centre Jewish Orthodox Zealots and Christian Zionists have cheered on such a war against a people, and Western leaders have done little to halt the carnage. And, there was the 1^st Christmas--yes, the slaughter of the innocents (many more done by the Jewish state than ever done by the Roman military) and Mary-Joseph-Jesus refugees (rather minor when compared to the multitude of Palestinian refugees).

What will be the long-term ripple effect for politics in the Middle East and Palestinian children who have seen families killed, homes destroyed, hospitals, and educational structures obliterated? How will Muslim states (pro-contra West) view the virtual apathy of Israel in this war? And there was the 1^st Christmas, many faithfully and religiously remember these days, some as Eliot noted, missing the deeper meaning. But what is the relationship between what the Palestinians are living through (much more gruesome and sustained, Jewish death squads creating hovels, slaughtering many innocents) and the 1^st Christmas? To isolate the latter from the reality of the former is to misread the meaning of the contemporary reality in Israel today and its war, genocide, and refugee-making machine on the Muslim and Christian Palestinians on this Christmas season. It might be of some worth to read Eliot’s “The Triumphal March,” the 5^th in the Ariel poems, to get a sense of how such a drama plays itself out in the affluent and insulated West to get a sense of the tragedy the West and Israel are facilitating and inflicting on the Palestinians and the unwary implications of it

Fiat Lux

Ron Dart     

The Challenge of Mary - Katherine Murray

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’
Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
            raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
            consent illumined her.

-Excerpt from Poem: Denise Levertov’s “Annunciation”

It is the second week of Advent, and my attention is turned to Mary and, more specifically, Mary’s fiat, “Be it done onto me according to Your will.”  Mary's response to the angel Gabriel’s message that God has chosen her to birth God’s own son is to surrender with a clear ‘yes.'  She self-empties her own will - kenosis - so that God’s will can be done.  Kenosis is a Greek term meaning “self-emptying,” used by the apostle Paul in Philippians 2:6-11 to help us understand the life of Jesus, Mary’s son.  Mary’s “consent to open her sealed body to the presence of the infinite” is her kenotic act.^[1] And her choice has cosmic significance.^[2]

For half of my life, I was in a protestant, fundamentalist Christian tradition that acknowledged Mary only once a year, at Christmastime, as Jesus’s mother, when we would read the Luke nativity story.  That is all I really understood about Mary.  But in the last decade and a half, I became more intentional to explore the wider Christian tradition and I also became more deeply contemplative in my spirituality.  Curiously, both these movements brought me closer to Mary, who has come to inspire me and teach me, but mostly, challenge me.

Luke writes that Mary pondered the words of the angel (1:29). I ponder Mary’s kenotic choice.  Mary has agency and so is free to decline to be impregnated by the Spirit with Jesus.  But, incredibly, she renounces her own will and power^[3] to be the mother of God-in-flesh. The emptying of her will results in her being filled with God.  Through Mary, it is shown that “barrenness is the condition of fruitfulness.”^[4]  The fruitfulness of Mary’s fiat is that she participates in God becoming flesh - “for in the union of God and humanity, it is Mary who imparts the humanity.”^[5]  Her consent opens up a way for the beginning of a new creation^[6] and “preserves the mystery of life, the power opposed to death.”^[7]  Mary participates in the redemptive mission of God.^[8]   She “becomes a sign of grace, the sign of what is truly salvific and healing: the ready openness that submits itself to God’s will.”^[9] I stand amazed.

Mary’s kenotic act offers me a window through which to see and understand part of the mystery of God.  It is imitative of her own son Jesus before he has even revealed it to the world.^[10]  Jesus, through both his teaching and how he lived his life, would reveal kenosis as God’s way of being.  He would teach in the Sermon on the Mount that, ‘Blessed are the poor in Spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:3). Rather than be full of ourselves, we are to be emptied of egotism, void of willfulness to experience God’s reign.^[11] Jesus taught that true power and greatness is not in dominating and oppressing others but by serving all (Matthew 20:25-26).  He revealed that “equality with God is not through getting but through giving until he was empty.”^[12]

Jesus lived his life doing only what he saw his Father God doing, saying only what he heard his Father God speak (John 5:19, 12:49). He gave himself so completely to this way of being that he consented to suffering and being killed when, in the garden of Gethsemane, he surrendered to God’s will being done and not his own (Luke 22:42).  Kenosis is the framework that unifies the entire life of Christ.^[13]

In that framework, Jesus revealed that God’s will is done on the earth through the surrender of human will.  Kenosis is a revelation of God’s nature.^[14]  It is in this way that Mary participates in revealing part of the divine mystery.

If we widen the lens on kenosis in scripture, we also see God self-emptying at creation. That is, in creating humanity with the freedom to choose, God made space for humans to choose God’s will or reject it.^[15]  It is the “lamb slain at the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8).^[16] Kenosis is present at creation. This is what gives Mary her agency.

We see in God at creation, in Mary’s consent to God, and in Jesus’s full life, that the divine way of reigning is through self-emptying and self-giving.^[17] God’s victory is through humility.^[18]

From what we read about Mary in the gospels, she does not renounce her fiat. Mary continues to surrender to God’s will being done even when Joseph is about to divorce her, when she has to flee to Egypt to protect Jesus from a genocidal king, and when she fears Jesus lost though he is teaching in the temple.  Mary continues in this way as she watches her son live out a unique destiny that sees him misunderstood, rejected, betrayed, tortured, and condemned as a blasphemer and put to death.^[19]  She continues to self-empty, to live a life of ongoing surrender to God, and in this way, too, is like her son.

In Mary and in Jesus, we see that God has chosen human partners who can bridge heaven and earth. That is, when we renounce our human will so that God’s will is done, it opens up a way for God’s love and presence to be manifested in the world.^[20] Sarah Jane Boss describes it this way, “It is because one woman (Mary) did this thing once, decisively, that…Christians have confidence that human beings can mediate the divine presence to the rest of creation.”^[21]

Mary opens up a unique window into the divine mystery, helps us see God more clearly, and to understand how God is at work in the world. Francesca Murphy, writing on the Mariology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, captures it this way, “What it means to be Christian in relation to God is articulated in Mary.”^[22]  In Mary I see that when we renounce our will to do God’s will we are imaging God, we are being like God - for this is God’s nature as revealed at creation and in Jesus.^[23] This is no doormat posture! We renounce our own self-will and the power we have to make room for the all-powerful.  It is for me a humbling truth.

When I consider the landscape of the world at present and observe horror in the Middle East, rising hate, racism, and violence, a movement to autocratic government and militarism, climate crises, economic hardship, and relationships in need of reconciliation - I ache for God’s loving will to be done upon the earth. When I consider Mary’s life, I see that my consent to God opens up a way for that to happen. Mary shows me what is possible when a human being consents to God’s will and renounces their own will and power. She points me to the way to experience the fullness of God in the here and now.  Mary challenges me to do the same.

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Endnotes