Alleluia! The Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole world.
Come, let us adore him, alleluia.
Apologetics played a big part in my conversion but they always left me wanting. In the end I wanted not an argument or a logical proof of the Church’s validity and authenticity, rather I wanted to become a different person. I wanted deification, theosis, divinization. I do find this concept within Catholicism but it is from the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholicism that one find deification emphasized. In short, I want nothing else than to experience God, to be united with God.
I’ve been reading The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality by Kyriacos C. Markides. In it I find this wonderful exchange:
“So, when during the liturgy we recite the prayer “I believe in one God…,” Father Maximos went on after I shifted to second gear, “we try in reality to move from an intellectual faith in God to the actual vision of God. Faith become Love itself. The Creed actually mean ‘I live in a union of love with God.’ This is the path of the saints. Only then can we say that we are true Christians. This is the kind of Faith that the saints possess as direct experience. Consequently they are unafraid of death, of war, of illness, or anything else of this world. They are beyond all worldly ambition, of money, fame, power, safety, and the like. Such person transcend the idea of God and enter into the experience of God.”
“But how many people can really know God that way?” I complained.
“Well, as long as we do not know God experientially then we should at least realize that we are simply ideological believers,” Father Maximos relied dryly. “The ideal and ultimate form of true faith means having direct experience of God as a living reality.”
This morning I recited the Creed with a group of local believers as we celebrated Pentecost Sunday and I thought about those Christians two thousand years ago experiencing God come upon them and transform them. The world has not ever been the same since.
[Pentecost Sunday]
pilgrimakimbo 