΄΄CHRIST IS THE GREAT LOVER΄΄ THE NEED FOR A CHRISTIANITY THAT CAN RECONNECT WITH ITS FORGOTTEN AFFIRMATION OF LIFE

 

Christian Light February 2022 — Vol. 34
Assumption of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church 97 Walcott Street, Pawtucket, RI 02860 “Christ is the Great Lover”
The Need for a Christianity that can Reconnect with its Forgotten Affirmation of Life In this issue of “Christian Light,” we host part of an important interview with Chrysostom Stamoulis, Dean of the University of Thessaloniki School of Theology and Professor of Systematic Theology. The full interview is available on the April 24, 2019 issue of Schedia .

 You have said that the Incarnation of the Word of God is the par excellence example of “immigration.” What do you mean by this? 

The Incarnate Divine Word of God takes on the foreign, the other, that which is entirely different. This is a voluntary migration, through which He became a foreigner and an outcast, in order to express a love that ultimately ends up on the cross. Christ is the great lover. His sojourn on earth was tragic. He was considered a foreigner by his own people, to the extent that they hated him and ultimately killed him as a rejected outcast. He was not totally understood by his disciples, his mother, or even by creation as a whole. He even was a stranger to life and death itself, which he conquered forever. We are called to imitate the way of the Divine Word and to be open to relationships outside of the boundaries set by national, ethnic, racial or religious criteria. The embracing, the full acceptance of - and not merely the “tolerance” of - the foreigner and the stranger is the true realization of ascetical love. Of course, many wrongly think that the Church is made up only of ritual practices and the adherence to “religious” rules and regulations. Thus we are confronted frequently with attitudes and mentalities centered around a sort of idealistic, legalistic “purity” tha morphs into an “Orthodox idolatry” and “spirituality,” where God and spirituality are so distant that they are unable to relate to human beings and the world. This ultimately is the ailment of an ideological Christianity that ignores the true human being. This leads to a sterile activism that randomly identifies with anything that satisfies a sort of psychological autism where the other is actually entirely absent and not seen as the meeting point of the individual self with the many.

 
Rather, it becomes an opportunity for an inward-looking savior syndrome. You have said that when she forgets her nature the Church has a problem with love. What do you mean by this?

The quality of a civilization can only be measured by its stance on love and death. These are ultimate realities, and when they are damaged the sum total of life is mortally traumatized and true life is alienated. The stance of Orthodox theology and the Church on the foundational subjects of love, sexuality, desire and pleasure has sometimes in the past, and even to this day, become the Achilles heel of Orthodoxy. Sexuality often was incriminated and demonized. These positions come straight from ancient Greek thought (Plato and Stoicism), Hellenistic Judaism, gnosticism and Syrian monasticism; the great tragedy is that modern Orthodoxy often baptizes such positions as “tradition.” The result of all this is a violation of the very essence of the Gospel and this distorts the ecclesial event into a closed system, a desert place inhabited by loveless, confused beings who can only project guilt regarding their created identity.
Why has the theologically problematic notion that Christianity sees the body and matter as corrupt gotten so much traction?

The greatest sin is that in the history of the Church we have often been tempted to “spiritualize” and “soul-ize” the human being to the detriment of his physical reality, and this is something that is contrary to the Gospel. Actually, it would be accurate to say that there is no greater materialism than true Christianity precisely because it bestows eternity upon the flesh through the resurrection. Any other kind of materialism that ends up in the grave is lacking and faulty. Unfortunately, under the influence of a later bizarre form of gnosticism, Christianity sometimes tended not to accept the human being as is. There has been a proclivity to assume that the human being is really the human being minus his nature; an estranged body and soul imprisoned within the ideology of “original sin”. That’s why we see this attitude toil to create another kind of human being, which certainly has nothing to do with the mystery of the Incarnation and the real human being created by the love and philanthropy of God. One of the best examples of this is the case of women, which during the time after they give birth and during their menstrual cycle are wrongly barred from communion, isolated and considered unclean in body and soul.

The Mystery of Life You have stressed that the “exile of death” is a prevalent ailment of our society. What do you mean by this?
 

We have a tendency to shove death under the rug and to build a life without death, so much so that we unable even to articulate the denial of death that we strive for. Today it is well known that the illegitimate child, the “elephant in the room,” of our technological civilization is death. It has become the object of social denial, a subject matter prohibited by good manners. A tangible example of this exile of death evident in the horizon of people’s lives today is the distancing of the dead from domestic space such as the home immediately after their death, their storage in specially fabricated places up to the moment of their burial, as well as the geographical exile of the cemetery from the center of cities and villages (i.e., the centrally located church graveyard of the olden days has all but disappeared). The excuse that this is for health or hygienic reasons is often cited, but today we know that the real issue is the denial of the sacramental
character of death. The result of this inability of contemporary man to accept death is, without doubt, connected directly to his inability to accept life! The alienation of death together with all ailments and illnesses is really the alienation of life. Indeed, this denial of life, which presupposes and is not only the result of the denial of death, is always done in the name of life! It’s done in the name o a sick earthly “immortality,” which boils down to the
absolutization of the moment and the studious ismissal of all vistas that point to the eschaton. 

 Don’t we often hear the opposite in Christianity, i.e., an overemphasis of death? 

If the first way we commit a disservice to death is by denying it, the second way is by “naturalizing” it and accepting it as normal in the context of an extremist morbid “asceticism” and a “denial of the flesh.” Death in this case prevails depressingly over life, which it, in the end, snuffs out. What is claimed in this distortion is that the only things that are of value are connected with the “other life” and that our historical life in the here and now is an illusionary sinful dream that has to be overcome so the idolized “life beyond” can prevail. According to this view the only meaning of life is to prepare for death. This attitude can’t grasp that the healthy “memory of death” and death itself are crucial for participation in the mystery of life. The permanent concern of this distorted view is if there is life after death, but it never considers if there is life before death! It’s as if there are two totally unrelated lives: one here now and one somewhere else over there later. For Christianity, however, life is one and a continuum. Therefore, the extent to which one lives his life here as dynamically as possible, so much so will he live in the age to come. The human being is made for incorruptibility and life. Death cannot be accepted by anyone, and especially by a Christian, because it is a defeated entity. The great poet Kiki Demoula once told me: “I don’t think I’m a Christian because I can’t accept death.” “But that’s exactly why you are a Christian!” I responded. Death certainly is ferocious because it splatters to smithereens the unity of life. Who can accept within himself that the relations he had with people during his life have an expiration date? As my father was ailing with cancer I asked him: “Do you fear death?” He thought about it a little and answered: “No, the only thing I am concerned with is if we will be together.