Becoming Human

IC XC
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NI KA

DIGGING IN MY email, I found this report of a retreat offered by Fr John Behr at my former parish, Holy Trinity Cathedral (OCA). It was a great retreat and, from this report which I wrote for our parish newsletter, it seems evident that Fr John has been working on the same issues for a long time!

On Saturday 22 November over fifty members and guests of Holy Trinity Cathedral, including members of surrounding Orthodox parishes, came together to experience an Advent Teaching event with the Very Rev’d Dr John Behr, Archpriest and Dean of St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, Crestwood NY. Fr John was speaking on topics meditated on in his book, Becoming Human: Meditations on Christian Anthropology in Word and Image, (SVOTS Press, 2013).

After a delicious light breakfast including the traditional Advent raisin focaccia from SF’s famous Liguria Bakery, we convened for the morning session. Fr John covered the first few chapters of his book, discussing the Creation of Man, the Fall, the Incarnation, and our Salvation in Christ through sacramental participation in his life.

We are not able to know Christ but through revelation. We do not know Christ through the Scriptures save as their meaning is revealed to us in the Church’s liturgical life by the Holy Spirit. Each opening of scripture is as for the Disciples on the Road to Emmaus: a revelation of Christ to us in the breaking of the bread in community. All of Scripture is a referral to Christ: he is the only meaning contained in, the only source of meaning for the Scriptures the Church has in her possession.

The mystery of Christ is hidden in the Old Testament, and this hiddenness is still evident in the Synoptic Gospels where no one really “gets” it except the demons. Only in John’s Gospel is the Mystery fully revealed.

God’s project of “let us make a human being in our image” is completed in the death of Christ on the Cross. In our hymns we sing that Christ has “trampled down death by death”. Death is defeated, yet we see that human beings still die. But in Christ our death has been opened out into a gateway to fuller life. We participate and prepare for this in the sacramental life of the Church.

Father suggested that there was something about our two sexes – male and female – that is not shared by the other creatures God made. That there is something about us, about our sex, about the Mystery of Holy Matrimony that ties this together. But that would wait until after lunch.

Just before lunch a question was asked about the Fall of Man in the Old Testament and if God could not have “done it a different way”.

Fr John’s response: you need to explain what you mean by “Fall” and when did it happen (is it historical – did it happen two thousand years before the fall of Troy on a Thursday?). And how could God have done it differently? What god do you mean? The only God we know is the one revealed in Christ who has done it this way. To try to posit a referent outside of space and time, a point of Truth other than the God revealed to us in Christ is to ask questions about a different god than the one we have. Adam is a type of Christ – not the other way around. The Saviour was the lamb slain from the Foundation of the World. He was there before there was an Adam or a Fall: there before the “need for Salvation” came into the world.

Fr John asked us all to spend Lunch meditating on the follow-up questions we had so as to have a more well-formed conversation afterwards. Many thanks to Photina and the Stewards’ Fellowship who prepared a delicious lunch of tomato soup and salad followed by some wonderful cake and desserts.

After lunch a superfluity of questions arose until, at about 2:40, Father John brought things to a close with a few concluding remarks, acknowledging that he had been unable to cover all his material. This was unfortunate because Father’s other topics – the issue of sex and male and female, as well as the Church as Virgin Mother – would have been greatly interesting. Issues of sex and our human identity as two specific sexes united in one flesh in Holy Matrimony is something that is of great interest in San Francisco and in our community at Holy Trinity Cathedral.