EMBRACING ALL OF HUMANITYTHE VISION OF PAULOS MAR GREGORIOS IN THE 21ST CENTURYBy Rev. Fr. John-Brian Paprock
Delivered on November 23, 2002 – Paulos Mar Gregorios Memorial Seminar St. Gregorios Malankara Orthodox Church, Chicago (Oak Park), Illinois Thank you, Abraham-Achen. Thank you, Dr. Joseph Thomas, Mary Mathews and St. Gregorios Malankara Orthodox Church, our hosts today for this special memorial seminar. Welcome to our distinguished speakers, guests, and friends. Paulos Mar Gregorios wrote, “It is our faith in the Divine that permits us to freely embrace the whole of humanity in a warm embrace of love and respect for their dignity and freedom.” This sentence embodies the whole of Thirumeni’s vision for the 21st Century. In addition, this quote has become a standard of ministry for me: in Holy Orthodoxy, in interfaith work, in hospitals and in the community. Since this is both a memorial for Mar Gregorios Thirumeni and a meeting between people of different faiths, let me begin by citing two principles from his work in dialogue with people of other faiths (articulated in autobiography Love’s Freedom The Grand Mystery 1997 p184-185): 1. Principle of maximum transparency – As he wrote, “Christians should have no hidden motives for dialogue with people of other faiths. They are all people whom Christ loves and for whom He gave His life. I decided that the love of Christ for all humanity must be the propelling motive for dialogue, though other motives such as the affirmation of, and concern for, the unity of humanity, and the need for pluralistic but harmonious local, national and global communities could be a subsidiary motive. But no hidden motive to convert the other.” 2. Principle of equality in dialogue – “In dialogue, all in are on the same plane, respectfully listening to and learning from each other. You may be convinced that your religion is the only true one. But do not make any claims of superiority over others on that ground. We are all equally contingent and dependent on God’s grace and mercy, whether we be Hindus, Christians or Muslims, whether some of us acknowledge that grace and mercy or not.” Before exploring the keys ideas in Paulos Mar Gregorios warm embrace of humanity, I would like to take this opportunity to tell you how I have come to speak before you today. First and foremost, you should know that I am a servant. By this, I mean that my primary motivation in this life is to serve God. I have had to come to terms with being a less than perfect servant. My understanding of how to best serve is limited. I have come to the realization (and reassurance) that I cannot know God in His fullness with the limited confines of human consciousness. In addition, I have had to come to terms with abilities and talents that God gave me for His glory – I have been given special challenges as well. Perhaps, it would be over simplifying to say that this has been difficult. Since I was a child, I have been prepared to serve God – not just around the altar of Holy Orthodoxy, where I was an altar boy at age seven, a tonsured reader of Holy Scripture in my early teens, and ordained a deacon as a young man, but everywhere and in everything – for everywhere I look, there is the God I serve. He is present with us always. Although a distinction is made between the Creator and His creation, I was taught that service to God is service to His creation, which includes all people, all animals, all plants and even rocks and stones. At the same time, I had to come to terms with the effects of childhood poverty, parental alcoholism with its accompanying physical and emotional violence and spiritual depravity. In the healing of childhood trauma, I have come to understand how all my personal hardships have given insight into the human condition, giving me empathy for those less fortunate as well as for those who suffer from the mundane day to day trials and tribulations of life. While studying for the priesthood in NYC, I came to a greater understanding of service when I worked with drug addicts. I saw tarnished creations become glowing and productive members of society. Then I moved back to Madison, after four years of study in NYC as an ordained deacon, I asked where I could be of service. Of course, I was put to work. Although I studied comparative religion at Columbia when I was in NYC, my first real experience with interfaith dialogue was in 1987. In 1987, after I was ordained to the priesthood, I was asked to join an interfaith dialogue group and the board of an ecumenical urban ministry. It was the positive reception of Orthodox spirituality that increased my sense of hope for humanity. It was during this time that I first encountered the writing and spirit of Bishop Paulos Mar Gregorios. I was encouraged by his sensitivity and boldness in relation to non-Orthodox Christians as well as his loving challenge to the Orthodox faithful. All through my life, I have been given visions, images that have encouraged or warned. The meaning has not always been immediately clear. Discernment has been needed. One of these visions was in the early 1990s; I was kneeling in prayer as a priest. Encircled around me were a variety of people from many cultures praying also. Streams of light came from them to me as spokes of a wheel. These joined my prayer, which as a stream of light ascended upwards and out of sight. From this, I was moved to work towards establishing an interfaith center that would be a place for cooperative leadership, education and service. To that end, I organized interfaith opportunities in Madison, Wisconsin – conferences, concerts, speakers, website, newsletter and an annual Interfaith Awareness Week, for which I wrote the text for a proclamation that has been signed by the Governor of Wisconsin, our County Executive and the Madison Mayor for the 5th consecutive year this year. (Copies are available.) Then a few years ago, after praying for discernment, Paulos Mar Gregorios beckoned me in a dream to come to the Malankara church; that everything would be all right. As I have studied his legacy, his writings and the anecdotes of his life – I have found myself in awe of his profound insight and resonated deeply to his words. It is in reflection and meditation on his words that I find myself responding, “Yes, this is Holy Orthodoxy. This is the articulation of the spiritual gift of our church to the modern secular world.” So, I am here before you, an unworthy servant, presenting profound thoughts and ideas of a truly blessed channel of light, Paulos Mar Gregorios – I pray that I as I summarize and quote from his work that God will gently guide me to adequately represent Thirumeni’s wisdom and his vision. With such a quotable body of writing, the duty of preparing this presentation has been reassuring that, in our gathering today, we remember a great man, a prophet for the Church and the world. Since my dream of Thirumeni’s beckoning, the past few years have been full of hills that seemed as daunting as Sisyphus’s mountain and valleys that seemed as dark as caverns under the earth. Walking the way of a servant is not always easy. There are always reasons to give up. There is always somewhere else to be. There is something else that appears more rewarding (or at least more glamorous). Service to God is a continual decision, because it is not the relationship of master and slave, but the free-will decision of love. The servant’s struggle is that of spiritual development, both intensely personal yet potentially global in its impact. A Russian saint, Seraphim of Sarov is often quoted – “Find inner peace and ten thousand around you will be saved.” This brings us back to that profound sentence of our blessed Thirumeni, Paulos Mar Gregorios – “It is our faith in the Divine that permits us to freely embrace the whole of humanity in a warm embrace of love and respect for their dignity and freedom.” In this, there are several key ideas that embody Paulos Mar Gregorios’ vision of ministry for us:
1. “Our faith in the Divine”Notice it all begins with our faith – not just faith in anything, but faith in the Divine, in that sacred other that defines us by His own creative action. That transcendent that is beyond secular superficiality. That reality that has been interpreted through the filters of religion and culture. In all his interfaith work, Paulos Mar Gregorios ever lost track of his Christian foundation and faith. In fact, it is from his faith and his ability to grasp the essence of Holy Orthodoxy, that he said, “Without Divine aid, our efforts can bear no significant fruit.”While introducing our faith to others, he wrote “The Orthodox place greater emphasis on the quality of spiritual life, on worshipping God in a fitting way, and in showing love and compassion to all.” (Introducing the Orthodox Churches 1999 p4 from 1976 article) There is an essential unity of all creation under the Divine. Each from our own perspective, we are in the process of coming to understand this unity. Although we can learn much from each other, as Mar Gregorios affirmed, we need to be careful that we are not just blending all the colors on the palette, by being syncretic or relativistic. It certainly takes restraint, but every painter learns early on that too much mixing makes a brown mush where no color is distinct enough to represent anything on canvass whether real or imaged. From one of Mar Gregorios’ first books, Joy of Freedom, written 35 years ago (in 1967) “There is in our own time an anti-rational animus which might too easily assume that mysticism, as a universal religious phenomenon, could be made the nucleus of a new ‘religion for one world,’ a synthetic product created by man’s ingenuity.” (Joy of Freedom p14 1967) However, he did not go to the extreme of exclusivism. In the same book, he wrote: It is an error to assume that God is unable to deal with men in Christ through the Holy Spirit EXCEPT through the Church and the preaching of the Word. Believing the Gospel and being baptized are the normal way to salvation; but it is not for us in the Church to limit the work of God to the normal. In so far as He has revealed them to us, we ought to walk in them. But our failures cannot bind God. He continues to work for the salvation of all mankind.” (The Joy of Freedom 1967 p. 20-1) 2. “The free embrace of the whole of humanity” This “embrace” is not legislated, not forced, but a free will choice. One of Mar Gregorios’ themes is that goodness and the experience of the divine both flow from freedom. “The good acts of man are the proper response to the Grace of God, who has created man to be a free agent of the good…the good has to be a free act of man and not something compelled by a sovereign grace.” (Cosmic Man 1980 p213) “True freedom is the possibility of facing God with unveiled face.” (Joy of Freedom 1967 p12) “It is through the practice of genuinely creative freedom that the transcendent is best experienced, by humans as well as others.” (A Light Too Bright 1992 p235) This free embrace is for all humanity, regardless of race, caste, creed or nationality. Mar Gregorios challenges us to recognize unity-in-diversity and diversity-in-unity, to an engaged understanding of pluralism without the secular post-modern relativism. This recognition and understanding, according to Paulos Mar Gregorios, needs to flow from our faith. “Christ’s love is for all humankind, not just for Christians. It is for the whole of humanity that he has died, not just for Christians alone….How can I then draw any limits to my love and compassion, or deny it to any group of human beings? Even those who regard themselves as my enemies I am not to hate or exclude from Christ’s love and compassion. That has been the basis for my approach to all sorts of groups, people of other religions, Communists, Moonies, and especially the White races against whom I can justly hold a thousand grudges.” (Love’s Freedom 1997 p 196) Of course, he had positive experiences in ecumenical and interfaith dialogue with other Orthodox Christians, Western Christians and people of all faiths. He was given the honor of opening the 1993 Parliament of the World’s Religions. It should be obvious that the whole of humanity includes everyone. Some of us have tried to love the whole of humanity while excluding important people in our neighborhoods, our families, perhaps even excluding ourselves. Sometimes, due to the trying circumstances of life, it is almost easier to be polite and kind to strangers rather than those closest to us. However, this embrace needs to include our church, our religion, our cultures, and our selves. We need embrace and understand ourselves with honest self-appraisal. Then, we need to move this honest appraisal to the groups we belong, to our churches and religious communities, our communities, our countries, and our world. It is truly an act of love to embrace all humanity after looking at the mistakes and evils of the world. Yet, we are called to love. At the same time, Mar Gregorios as an exemplar for us in this embrace of all humanity, was a social activist. He was avidly opposed to economic injustices on all levels. He was clearly opposed to war, especially nuclear arms, which is one of the only things he called satanic and evil, beyond all rational understanding. There was a slogan on a bumper sticker years ago that Mar Gregorios could have written - “A Child cannot be hugged by nuclear arms.” He accepted invitations to Moscow when it was part of the Soviet Union to speak squarely against the insanity of nuclear weapons. To this end, he was involved with advocating for a global agreement for Common Security. He felt the religions of the world needed to be included as they are part of the problem and part of the solution. In a 1987 report Common Security and Moral Values, he makes the following points: “An inclusive global compassion for all humanity should become an integral part of the teaching of all religions. Only by such an internal renewal can each religion make its best contribution to a Global Common Security.” (P 72) “True peace, from the religious perspective, must go beyond and deeper than peace with neighbors, and peace with nature. A human person has to be at peace with oneself as well as the whole of reality. This is the true foundation for Comprehensive Security.” (p. 71) “Religious people should seek peace of mind in accordance with their own best traditions. But no religious tradition can be true to itself if it seeks to inculcate inner peace and spiritual security for persons while preaching of hatred for others and contempt for those who do not belong to one’s own religious persuasion.” (p. 71) Over a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall and dissolution of the Soviet Union, and 15 years after Mar Gregorios wrote on Common Security as a means to nuclear disarmament; the World Council of Churches (just last week – 11/17/02) said, in a press release, that, “Complete nuclear disarmament is a moral and legal imperative.” It is good to see Mar Gregorios prophetic position on this issue. We can only hope that political leaders will listen. 3. “A warm embrace of love and respect” The warm embrace of the love of God flows through us. In fact, it can be said that we can only experience the love of God through His creation, His children – that is, through others. We love as we have been loved, so if we know the love of God then our love will be boundless. If others around us can feel this love, then they too will be able to give a warm embrace and love will grow. Mar Gregorios reminds us throughout his writings that God is love, the source of love, the transcendence of love. In his popular book, The Human Presence (1987) “God is love, and where love is absent in man, his image disappears.” “Our love creates spiritual energies which inwardly transform the cosmos itself, imprinting upon it the image of God as love.” p71 & p82 In the WCC book, The Meaning and Nature of Diakonia (1988) “God is love and the church has to reflect that nature. It is love that the Holy Spirit pours into our hearts; without love, there is neither church nor ministry. Failure to love lies at the root of the failure in the church’s ministry.” (p. 36) 4. “The dignity and freedom of others” Every person is uniquely a part of the whole of creation. Each has inherent worth and value. It is easy to give respect and honor to the wealthy, to the prestigious, the powerful, the beautiful – but we are being called to respect the dignity and freedom of those that may be less desirable as well. We need to be guided by compassion and goodness in all our relations. Mar Gregorios emphasizes over and over again that the essential depth of human goodness lie in our freedom. In the definitive work on his namesake St. Gregory of Nyssa, Mar Gregorios writes “The human initiative is essential, for without it there is no freedom; without freedom there is no moral good; and without moral good there is no image of God.” (Cosmic Man 1980 p 203) “All humanity, by virtue of their created nature, share in the capacity to do good. The fact that most people fail to do so does not prove the absence of freedom. On the contrary, the fact that a few do practice good, is evidence enough for the presence of freedom in all human beings.” (Cosmic Man 1980 p212) This freedom is a function of community, as Mar Gregorios emphasized, 13 years earlier, (Joy of Freedom 1967): “The free human society is a society not passively formed by causal forces engineered from outside or compulsively thrown up from inside, but a society which chooses its own destiny and has the wherewithal to pursue and to transform that destiny.” (P65) As much as we want to trust the fullness of the profound view of freedom that Thirumeni expresses, we know that freedom involves risks, particularly when we respect the freedom of others. To feel secure, we restrict others and ourselves with locks on our doors. When someone, in the sovereignty of their free will, chooses to harm others or property, we restrict their freedom with jails and prisons. Respecting the freedom of others does mean embracing risk. In a report given in Moscow in 1987 (Global Peace and Common Security 1998), Mar Gregorios makes a profound comment on the issue of common security, “Security involves risk. That is the way of love. One cannot show love, compassion and trust without making ourselves vulnerable, and taking risks. The alternative is to take the incomparably greater risk of remaining blocked in pride, selfishness and debilitating mutual suspicion.” (p. 69) If I have served Mar Gregorios Thirumeni well in this presentation today, we should all have an appreciation of his vision for us in this brave new world of international terrorism, widening gaps between rich and poor, religious fanaticism that incites riots and other sorts of civil and personal discord. Mar Gregorios’ prophetic wisdom challenges the religious and devout to bring healing to the world. In “A Light Too Bright” (1992) “Conflicts that divide our humanity cannot be settled until religion is healed and restored to its proper place in society, not as a tool for secular politics, but as a transcendent power not subordinated to the political.” (p. 14) He felt that it is the acceptance of our inherent unity, while embracing individual uniqueness that is needed to repair the world and dispel all evils (although he rarely referred to our present difficulties as “evil”). At the same time, he was mindful of the problems inherent in living in a secular pluralistic society and in the reliance of those in positions of authority, even religious authority, to move toward the cooperation needed. “I do not think that a lazy tolerance of religious pluralism,” said PMG in the 1979 Dudleian Lecture at Harvard Divinity School, “or leaving it to the individual to choose from a cafeteria of varied religious options will do. Nor am I arguing for a common world religion. My concern is for a deeply grounded Christian practice and worship and thought which are less parochial and more actively receptive to the total religious heritage of humanity and also to the concerns and aspirations of what once flared up as secular Christianity.” In his incomplete autobiography written in the years preceding his death (Love’s Freedom The Grand Mystery 1997) “I am convinced that until humanity sees that the secular civilization, which denies the centrality of God, has been the greatest mistake in our history, it cannot find the way forward. I see that I cannot put my trust either in [current] Christian Church activities, or in the work of governments and intergovernmental agencies such as the UN, to begin to lead humanity in the way it has to go. That leadership has to come from groups of people of all religions and of no professed religion, in all countries and on all continents, working to enlighten the awareness of people and mobilize their power to act in the best interests of humanity.” (p. 190) Compare this to his vision in 1987 (The Human Presence) “We need now charismatic communities cutting across the borders of church and world, across the confines of each separate religion or secular ideology.” (P2) Although he dreamed of an intentional community of people of diverse religious beliefs where everyone was secure enough for that community to be an exemplar for the entire world, it seems to me that a city, any city or town – Chicago, Madison, Kerala – any city or town, could in effect become such a charismatic community. So how can we move closer to this effective remedy of the crises and difficulties confronting us in the 21st century? Paulos Mar Gregorios Thirumeni said, “Experience shows that the deeper we go into our respective religions, the more clearly we find that basic love of God and love for all humanity which should unite us all. The more rooted one is in one’s own tradition the freer and more secure one becomes in facing our fellow human beings and finding our unity in God and in our shared aspirations.” In another place, he said “The subtle art of image making for the future needs skilled craftsmen as well as the gift of the Spirit. The various crises of our time should be used neither as occasions for doom-saying pessimism nor as a chance to peddle empty-hope optimism. Every crises is a judgment, a call to see where things have gone wrong and to seek to set matters right, both within our consciousness and in society.” (Human Presence 1987 p3) And finally, summarizing his namesake, St. Gregory of Nyssa “True unity, abiding unity, is not possible except in the good.” (Cosmic Man 1980 p11) I would like to close this presentation with Thirumeni’s ultimate prophetic vision in his own words from his closing pages of his unfinished, though published, autobiography (Love’s Freedom 1997). May this vision be a guiding inspiration for us to continue to work in goodness and service for all humanity. “The vision that beckons defies human word and concept. The mind cannot envision what God has set in store for creation. The destiny is good without mitigation, pure joy in love, peace in community with all, ecstasy without triumph, sweeter than anything our mind and senses can now enjoy. The human mind can neither conceive of nor imagine what God has set in store for us and for all creation. Our fantasy and our imagination cannot soar so high. Even when we finally experience it, it will be beyond all language and concept. “It is the Spirit that assures me of this. And the Spirit leads me there. That Spirit, we have a foretaste. The reality will surpass all present hope and human expectation. “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, one true God, for ever and ever. Amen.” (p. 193) |