Brad Jersak: In a previous interview over breakfast, you late out a rich and layered definition of ecclesia. Prior to that, the chief critique of my own theology was its rather thin version of what I imagined (or overlooked) as "church." I'd like to review those.
David Goa: Adapting Maximos the Confessor's rich understanding of the church and the cosmos, as I understand him, we might think of the ecclesia in six registers:
David Goa: Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology is highly layered.
- The Ecclesia refers, first of all, to the great gathering, the cosmos. This is because the whole cosmos is saved by the Energies of God.
- The second layer includes all those men and women, from all times and places, who have experienced grace and expressed mercy. They are Ecclesia we Orthodox like to chat with.
- The third layer we call the Christian tradition, including the heretics. More specifically the Way of Christ that we’ve inherited.
- The fourth layer is more textured. We think of the Eastern Orthodox Church in its gifts, its wounds, its limits and its capacities.
- The fifth layer of the Ecclesia is my parish (where we gather to pray together, but also the locale where that gathering is situated).
- Finally, the Ecclesia is the world I walk in, the people I meet—whenever I experience a moment of grace, wherever I am an eyewitness to the heavenly kingdom in the lives of those I encounter.
Brad Jersak: I have found this incredibly beneficial. It resonates with Fr. Christopher Foley said: "The Church is our life in Christ and should shape and inform every area of our life."
That posits the church as more than an event, an institution, or even a people. There's a verb to this notion--a way of being. Can you help me understand what it means for the church to be "our life in Christ."
David Goa: Yes, one sense of ekklesia is "our Life in Christ." Our life in Christ, as such, is attentiveness to Reality and our capacity to bless it. Not that everyone who has a vibrant life in Christ identifies with Jesus of Nazareth yet and many who do identify with Jesus today do not have a life of any sort.
Brad Jersak: I can see that. Certainly, Cornelius in Acts 10 is an example of a righteous man, accepted by God, and alive to both God and the poor.
But in that case--if the church is our life in Christ--why gather for worship?
David Goa: Because the hyper-individualism of our culture generally leads those who fail to gather to become private and flaky mystics. So, why worship? And what is worship? I can tell you that many church gatherings I've attended would not constitute minimal 'worship' in any true sense.
Brad Jersak: Okay, then. What is worship as you understand it? And why do we worship?
David Goa: Worship has much to do with how our lives are being cultivated by the liturgy in a community of belonging.
The liturgy is first and foremost a spiritual discipline. It's something we 'work at,' like the discipline of developing skills we would need to participate in a symphony orchestra or in team sports. That takes time and growth. It includes the discipline of undergoing personal training, participating in team training, then playing together, and we spend time doing that on a regular basis. As with sports or music, the discipline of mind, heart, diet, and space bring worship together in excellence. And it is in playing together that we heighten creation's symphony.
Brad Jersak: I would struggle with how to communicate this to Evangelicals or charismatics who have a particular notion of 'worship' but are unfamiliar with 'liturgy' except as the repetitive rote prayers they regard as 'religious' in a negative sense. How would I communicate what liturgy is and does vis-a-vis their worship experiences and assumptions?
David Goa: In other words, how do we communicate the function of the liturgy to a Protestant?
First, the liturgy does not exist for itself. The liturgy exists for the life of the world so that when you walk out of the church doors and down the street, the world is made new to you. You see the world in a new way. The new heavens and the new earth are there … in the grace of walking the elderly person across the street or empty your wallet to a homeless person. The liturgy is meant to help us see the world as God sees it. And God sees it as delight.
Second, as a spiritual discipline, liturgical worship has two functions--both have to do with attentiveness. Liturgical attentiveness includes (1) an apophatic discipline of emptying and (2) a discipline of wonder and praise.
Not enough attention is given to its apophatic aspect, by which I mean, liturgy helps us empty ourselves of the things that aren’t real—e.g. our fears and desires.
All disciplines do this: they cultivate your capacity to become conscious of your dis-eases--your fears, your desires--which is why the liturgy is so repetitive: to fatigue the wall of denial between our conscious and unconscious mind… so the third or thirtieth time you pray, “Lord, have mercy,” some unrecognized uneasiness rises to the surface to be anointed and maybe even healed. So, liturgy is a spiritual discipline that helps us become attentive to something other than our fears and desires ... but they do need to be surfaced, offered up, and let go of.
In other words, the liturgy is an amazing way of offering the brokenness of our lives up so that we are resurrected to the fulness of our life again.
Brad Jersak: When we receive the Eucharist, we hear that it is offered up "for the life of the world." There's this outward focus through which we see our priesthood as a vicarious ministry rather than an exclusive, in-house activity. How do you see this?
David Goa: For many, ecclesiology and liturgical theology is focused on how the liturgy and especially communion expresses the truth that we are all one. It is a symbol of unity.
But as a discipline, it is about our relationships to each other, to our deepest selves, to the life of the world in all its messiness, and to the triune God. We gather up the whole world three times in the litanies of the divine liturgy: at the beginning, in the face of the gospel, and in receiving the gifts. These call litanies call to attention how we may have become dull to the life of the world and call us to be present again in fullness, praying for everything and everyone, from travelers to weather to governments to crops. Like any practice, it has a purpose, which isn’t the practice itself, but the fruit of the practice in your everyday life in the world.
Brad Jersak: That is, we empty ourselves of those unreal cravings and fears and resentments that distract us and we dismantle the partitions we've created to life beyond our egoism. That's the emptying function. Now the wonder?
David Goa: The other function of the liturgy is the deepening of our capacity, language, and sensorium to praise, express delight, to see the beauty and wonder of it all. The first is a language of therapy—outing you—raising the diseases to place them on the throne of grace where they disappear. And this side is the language of wonder.
Brad Jersak: Yes, in praise and gratitude of the Creator and the cosmos that 'spilled' out of Love's plenitude.
I can see what Jesus may have meant, then, by God looking for those who will worship in s/Spirit and in truth. From Eugene Peterson's Message translation:
"The time is coming—it has, in fact, come—when what you’re called will not matter and where you go to worship will not matter.
It’s who you are and the way you live that count before God. Your worship must engage your spirit in the pursuit of truth. That’s the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in their worship. God is sheer being itself—Spirit. Those who worship him must do it out of their very being, their spirits, their true selves, in adoration.” (John 4:22-24 MSG).
The liturgy of Spirit and truth is not merely a privatized ethereal spirituality. It is the practiced capacity to of attention to what needs flushing our and what incites wonder.
There is no injunction against repetition (think of the Cherubim) only against vain repetition. The only repetition I’m aware of—Lord, have mercy—is never in vain.
Posted by: Brad | February 14, 2021 at 07:15 PM
On the one hand, the costumes and sanctuaries are elaborate in order to emulate the majesty of the heavenly throne room. On the other, you’re right to see the temptations involved. That said, I’m not able to judge motives.
Posted by: Brad | February 14, 2021 at 07:13 PM
Hi, I have found this journal to be a place where fascinating discoveries of the Christian faith are to be had. I come from a Protestant background but ever since discovering Maximus the Confessor in my early walk of faith a part of me has wondered about the other faith traditions in Christianity.
What I have not reconciled is the ecclesia of the Orthodox and Catholic traditions as it appears. Without sounding rude, why the garb at times seeming so ostentatious? Certain there are reasons to the "outer" expression in the Orthodox tradition but how different from Protestant expression (Calvary Chapel for instance the ecclesia I belong to)!
And what about the phylacteries of the Pharisees or the injunction to not pray as the heathens do with vain repetition?
Sincerely,
Joshua
Posted by: Josue | February 14, 2021 at 06:55 PM