Happy (W)Easter

Today millions upon millions of Christian faithful celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior and Messiah.  Now of course, I and my elect do not celebrate Easter quite yet, or as we in the East call it, Pascha.  There are many historical arguments as to the date and time Easter is figured and it's calculations. Most Christians and the general public as a whole know that the 'actual' date of both Christmas and Easter did not really occur the date on which we celebrate them, they are merely a landing spot for the celebration itself.  (This is how the East figures the date of Easter: http://www.antiochian.org/node/17394 and here are two other good articles: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/03/economist-explains-why-easter-moves-around#comments,  http://www.factmonster.com/spot/easter1.html).

Now to my point.  I don't know if it's just me or if this happens to any of you as well, I tend to have the best and most wonderful and profound things to say and write whilst I'm in one of two rather inconvenient places: 1) in bed as I'm falling asleep and 2) in the shower.  Obviously my computer does not follow me to either location, thus I must write down only what I recall.  I do often wish I had a voice recorder to capture those brief moments of brilliance before they scatter to the four winds in the oblivion of my mind from whence they came... Alas this same scenario happened for me this evening...in the shower.  So I am capturing what I can retrieve from my quickly failing memory bank. 

As I was sitting on the couch this evening watching, for the first time, "The Bible" on The History Channel, the scene was the following: the whipping, the scourging, the deliverance of Jesus to the Jews, Pilate washing his hands, and the fearful walk to Golgotha and all the events that followed.  The show was tasteful, not too overly dramatic for shock value, but showed the facts as they happened. Simon of Cyrene came to the aid of Jesus to help carry His burden to the Place of the Skull.  Mary, John, and the other Mary were also depicted, screaming and crying and pleading for His release.  Proclaiming His righteousness and innocence.  Jesus was nailed to the cross.  A plaque was placed above His head, mockingly reading, "This is Jesus, King of the Jews."  At the hour of His death, He lifted His head one last time and spoke some of the most iconic words ever uttered, "It is finished. Into Your Hands, Father, I commend My Spirit," And He bowed His head and was gone.  Most/many of us could quote these lines.  Many of us know this most beloved story by heart.  

Now mind you, once again, these are MY opinions and feelings on the topic.  Something that has always been a big deal to me, today I came to the realization, is not a big deal at all.  This was my epiphany today.  This was the huge deal I realized in the shower after watching these scenes on the History Channel.  It may be quite foreign for many, but being Orthodox, and very proudly so, the date of Easter to me has always been a big deal to me.  I've always gotten somewhat defensive of fasting, our Lenten season, and our figuring of Easter as the Right way.  But what I realized today is the 'date' of Easter doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter who celebrates it when.  It doesn't matter if the East or the West is 'right'.  (Now many of you may be totally bewildered that there is such a thing as more than one date for Christmas and Easter, but there are...Julian vs. Gregorian calendars, you may look that up, if you like.)  But today, I realized all that is beside the point.  What matters is that it happened, not WHEN it happend.  IT happened.  

Easter isn't only about the mocking, the whipping, the Crucifixion; it's about the Resurrection.  All those things had to take place in order for the prophecies to be fulfilled.  But criminals and evil doers were crucified all the time.  They were beaten and hung on a cross to die a most agonizing death.  But here's the difference, they all died, but He rose, defeating death for all mankind.  That's not to say that it is not important that those events happened to Jesus, but it IS to say that all that would have been for not without the Resurrection.  That is why this Man was special.  HE rose.  He was the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Savior of the World.  We are saved by His Life, Death, and Resurrection.  It is this that is what is important to us.  It is this and what it means to us that matters.  Not a date. 

I was thinking on all this in the shower and a movie quote came into my head.  Bill Pullman as President Whitmore said in 1996's Independence Day a most famous line, "We will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without a fight.  We're going to live on, we're going to survive. Today we celebrate our Independence Day."  Well whoda thunk that by Christ's Resurrection, this line would strike me.  But if you think about it, Easter, Pascha IS OUR INDEPENDENCE DAY!  It is our freedom from the bonds of death.  Christ rose again, He conquered the conqueror of life, death.  We are now free and will join Him again one day in Paradise.  This, brothers and sisters, is the great miracle and the overall point of Pascha.  He died for our sins and the sins of all mankind, so that we could partake in the life eternal that is with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  This is the help of the helpless, the hope of the hopeless.  This is the answer to deaths dominion over us.  Life.  The reality of the Resurrected Life that we are all invited to.  All that is asked of us it that we too, take up our cross, acknowledge our shortcomings, our burdens, our difficult times, and follow Him.  As the Father sent Him, He now sends us to be fishers of men.  

I wish you all, by brothers and sisters in the East and the West, a most blessed and glorious Easter/Pascha, no matter when your prescribed calendar says it will fall.  For truly Christ is Risen from the dead once and for all time. He has trampled down death by death and given life to those who had fallen asleep.  Blessings to you all.  

Eric Simpson's Hell And God's Love: An Alternative, Orthodox View

Common depictions of the Christian doctrine of hell, perhaps borrowing images from classic literature and Dante, portray it as a place of literal fire, where tortured souls repose in anguish, a vision much used by itinerant evangelists and manipulative preachers.

A further degradation of this cartoon vision finds human souls not only suffering extreme torture, but prodded by red devils with tiny horns, cloven hoofs for feet, spiraling tails, and pitchforks at hand, a caricature used to both trivialize the concept as well as mock the very idea of hell.

In the Revelation of John, we discover a lake of fire, prepared for the devil and his angels, as an abode of punishment, as well as a bottomless abyss. Jesus himself, of course, named hell as the place where the worm doesn't die and the fire is never quenched, but he spoke of eternal darkness as well, eternal destruction and eternal death.

Such descriptions are at best figurative, much like other parts of the Bible where, for instance, God is described as a hen brooding over her chicks (God isn't literally a fowl.) Rather, it seems apparent that according to the teachings of the ancient Church, the non-literal descriptions of hell that appear in Scripture and elsewhere pertain to fundamental qualities of a disposition of being, not one defined primarily as punishment, but of death.

Strains of western Catholicism and Protestantism have fundamentally defined death as legal punishment, an expression of God's wrath. Death is entrenched within a judicial context; it is a sentence for sin. God is angry, according to the western view, and Christ's merit applied to us satisfies his anger, so He dies as a sacrifice to appease the Father.

A gross oversimplification and popular notion of the historical understanding of death in the West paints an ugly and frightening picture for those who take it seriously. Good people or redeemed people who have faith in Jesus, whom the Father punishes in our place through an expression of divine anger, overcome the punishment of death and go to heaven; unrepentant sinners suffer their just punishment and are cast howling into hell for their evil deeds. Death is the judicial sentence of all humanity; some overcome it totally through an abstract and forensic transaction, others do not.

The Greek fathers and the eastern churches historically do not share the western legal emphasis, nor the consequent view of atonement. The fathers of the church teach that humanity is the author of death, not God. St. Basil in the fourth century writes, "God did not create death, but we brought it upon ourselves." Death is the result of sin; it is the final product that we, apart from God, create for ourselves through the power of the human will, that also ensnares and condemns us.

For the Christian Orthodox, death is much more than what happens when the lungs quit, the heart fails or the brain stops functioning; it is also the source of corruption and spiritual myopia, producing deep-rooted fear and a whole legion of consequent disorders, maladies, pathologies and suffering. The separation of the spirit and the body at the end of physical life is the culmination of a long period of smaller separations; existence is filled with estrangement. Death is embodied by division and the truncation of significance. As the late Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann writes:

When we see the world as an end in itself, everything in itself becomes a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the "sacrament" of God's presence. Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life. The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with the dying world, it is communion with death. Food itself is dead, it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse.

It is possible to envision death, defined in this way, as at least tolerable, but if we posit the reality of redemption, that is, from a certain perspective, the added imposition of the presence of infinite and divine personality figuratively signified by fire, death then takes on a further dimension. Death doesn't dissolve away into nothingness, but energized by the presence of creative, personal and divine love, it becomes a separation fixed in an eternal position. Death is transmuted into bitter torment and despair.

As St. Symeon the New Theologian writes:

God is fire and when He came into the world, and became man, He sent fire on the earth, as He Himself says; this fire turns about searching to find material -- that is a disposition and an intention that is good -- to fall into and to kindle; and for those in whom this fire will ignite, it becomes a great flame, which reaches Heaven. ... [T]his flame at first purifies us from the pollution of passions and then it becomes in us food and drink and light and joy, and renders us light ourselves because we participate in His light. (Discourse 78)

The same fire, the love of God, that ignites in the hearts of the faithful transmutes in the experience of those who reject it into the fire of hell; it purifies the former, but burns the latter, per St. Isaac the Syrian:

It is totally false to think that the sinners in hell are deprived of God's love. Love is a child of the knowledge of truth, and is unquestionably given commonly to all. But love's power acts in two ways: it torments sinners, while at the same time it delights those who have lived in accord with it. (Homily 84)

Hell in this view is understood as the presence of God experienced by a person who, through the use of free will, rejects divine love. He is tortured by the love of God, tormented by being in the eternal presence of God without being in communion with God. God's love is the fire that is never quenched, and the disposition and suffering of the soul in the presence of God who rejects him is the worm that does not die. Whether one experiences the presence of love as heaven or hell is entirely dependent on how he has resolved his own soul to be disposed towards God, whether communion or separation, love or hatred, acceptance or rejection.

Hell, then, is not primarily a place where God sends people in his wrath, or where God displays anger, but rather, it is the love of God, experienced by one who is not in communion with him. The figurative, spiritual fire of God's love is transcendent joy to the person purified and transfigured by it through communion in the body of Christ, but bottomless despair and suffering to the person who rejects it, and chooses to remain in communion with death.

Bread Pudding Recipe | Simply Recipes

Bread Pudding Recipe | Simply Recipes

Oh drat, I just happened to have left over French bread and Brandy sauce.  Suppose I'll have to make this.