The Catalog of Good Deeds

It’s easy to find testimonies about “deconversion”, aka loss of faith, in the English-language part of the World Wide Web. People who grew up in a Christian (most often Fundamentalist) environment and then became atheists encourage each other, sharing their stories about how “reason and science” opened their eyes and demonstrated that the Bible (or in fact, the interpretation thereof, preached by the congregations which they attended as children) is evidently false.

Lately, similar stories have started to surface out in the Russian-speaking part of the Internet, too. An anonymous story of a priest who ostensibly lost his faith appeared on an anti-Christian website not long ago. I don’t know if that story is authentic; in any case, it resembles other stories so it’s worth looking into.

The author lists three main reasons for loss of faith. First, science has proven that the Earth is more than six thousand years old. Second, there are demonstrably false stories in the saints’ lives. Third, he never witnessed any miracles while praying. Well, let’s deal with these reasons, starting with science.

Science

What’s always striking in all those stories of deconversion is that the new knowledge and discoveries that the author puts forward as the reason for abandoning Christ are well known for many educated Christians but never lead them to renounce Jesus.

Take, for instance, Francis Collins, an American geneticist and the former head of the institute that decoded the human genome. Currently, he is in charge of the National Institute of Health and belongs to the upper layer of the world scientific elite. You are hardly more informed in the field of biology than he is. And yet, he’s a Christian, and he even wrote a book called The Language of God, which was translated into Russian. If biology makes you renounce Christ, what do you know which Dr. Collins doesn’t know?

Here is another Christian, Sir John Eccles, who won the Nobel Prize for his research in neurophysiology. His knowledge of how brain works did not interfere with his belief in the immortality of the soul and God’s Providence.

I am not going to turn this article into a detailed list of famous scholars who remain faithful Christians. There are dozens of such lists on the Internet. Sure, these scholars don’t think that the Earth is six thousand years old — frankly speaking, neither do I — but it doesn’t lead them to become atheists.

Given that these famous scholars aren’t led away from the faith by their profound knowledge but other people are led away from the faith by their haphazard and superfluous knowledge of some pop-sci books, I have to conclude that the real root of their spiritual crisis is elsewhere. Science doesn’t destroy faith.

Miracles

The same is true of miracles, too. The majority of believers have never witnessed the transformation of water into wine and crossed rivers using only bridges, yet it doesn’t prevent them from remaining Christians and being able to see God act in their lives.

Indeed, whether we see God act in our lives or not is to a great extent our choice, it’s what we want to see or not. There were many people in the Gospel who witnessed the Lord’s miracles but not every one of them started to believe in him. Furthermore, the more evident those miracles were (especially the resurrection of Lazarus), the more stubborn their denial was. We read in the Gospel that after Lazarus was raised from the dead, “many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him. But some of them went their ways to the Pharisees, and told them what things Jesus had done. Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation” (John 11:45-48).

If you stand face to face with an obvious miracle, it feels like you face a trial: you will never be able to go on living as if nothing happened. An individual either responds to the miracle with repentance and faith or refuses the opportunity; either of these decisions changes that individual’s life and determines his further destiny, including the eternal destiny.

That is why miracles of Biblical scope are extremely rare. On the contrary, the examples of God’s engagement with our lives happen quite often but they are subtle and uncoercive. You can agree to notice them or not. Someone has cancer, he goes through relentless treatment; other people pray for him with fervor, and in the end, he recovers. Is it a miracle? Skeptics will say: it was thanks to the chemo, so the effect of prayer is negligible. Someone is in trouble and doesn’t know what to do, then prays to God, and—the situation changes in an unexpected way. Is it a miracle? Skeptics can say that it was sheer luck. Someone prays to God to rescue him from a disaster, and the disaster goes away. It’s an accident, a skeptic may say.

Can we prove the skeptic wrong? How? We don’t have an alternative reality, where we didn’t pray, to check against. A person who chooses not to believe in God, won’t believe. God won’t force him into seeing His presence in the circumstances of life—at least until the Judgment Day.

Sure, sometimes prayers don’t work: people die and or dreams don’t come true. However, prayer isn’t the way of manipulating the universe. It’s our personal plea to the One Who knows best. You can believe or refuse to believe if your request is met; likewise, if your prayers don’t yield fruit, you can either trust God or decide that if God doesn’t always do what I ask him to do, He doesn’t deserve my allegiance. A believer and an unbeliever may encounter the same events but react to them differently.

Lives of the Saints

Unreliable information in the saints’ biographies (lives of the saints) is an even weaker reason for loss of faith. Let’s assume—as many Orthodox Christians do—that there are certain unreliable facts there. What does it change for us? If the story of a saint destroying pagan temples with the power of his prayer is just a later legend, does it mean that there is no God and that Christ isn’t risen?

It seems to me that the deconverts are simply looking for ways to excuse their loss of faith but the real reasons aren’t the ones that they claim as such. What are the real reasons? I don’t know. They must vary among various people; with that said, there are certain well-trodden paths.

The first reason, which destroys our relationship with God, is our doubting his forgiveness. We all sin, sometimes chronically, year after year. Sometimes we fail suddenly and awfully. When an individual doubts that God has enough mercy for him, he tries to hide from the pangs of his conscience using the customary method, i.e., putting on the prosecutor’s mantle, justifying his own behavior and blaming others as a counter-attack measure. Furious condemnation of other Christians doesn’t mean that you’re zealous in the Lord. Zealots like Savonarola or Protopope Avvakum are an endangered species, if not extinct, nowadays. Much more often this behavior points at one’s own guilty conscience: “Those other sinners are even worse than I. They wear miters nevertheless!” The more a Christian attacks the Church, the stronger his anxiety is, the stronger he feels that he’s going in the wrong direction. The stronger his anxiety, the more thundering his invectives. Like other sins, this sin follows a downward spiral pattern.

You can jump out of that spiral if you simply believe that Christ knew who He was about to deal with from the start, and that all our sins are redeemed on Mount Golgotha. What we need is to get around to it and accept His forgiveness.

The second reason is our reluctance to forgive others. We all commit sins, and other people sin against us, too. If you are hurt, offended, or rebuked unjustly by other members of the Church, you are called to forgive them, and if you are reluctant to do so, it will erode your faith very fast.

The third reason is gradual evaporation of the feeling of awe. We live in a world that opposes the feeling of awe and hierarchy. Faith looks up at God, angels, saints, and the Church. The contemporary world can hardly stand it: it demands total vulgarization and defilement. “Creative artists” with their wry smiles of troubled teenagers are looking for ways to mock all sacred and revered objects and ideas and invite everyone to join them. Do you want to appear laid-back, blinkered, and ignorant of the modern art? They are always making fun of the Church and have the snide attitude that requires joking and derisive remarks every time they talk about sacred objects and ideas. When an Orthodox Christian gives in to this spirit of the time, he’s in trouble.

As far as scientific evidence is concerned, we’ve heard it already, haven’t we?

By Sergey Khudiev
Translated by The Catalog of Good Deeds

Source: https://pravoslavie.fm/articles/o-prichinah-otpadeniya-ot-veryi/

In his list of virtues which comprise the fruit of Spirit working in one’s life, St. Paul lists that of “goodness” (Greek agathosune, αγαθοσυνη) about midway in the list (Galatians 5:22f). One scarcely speaks of goodness as one of the virtues anymore. In our culture describing something as “good” is rather tepid praise; it is like saying something is “okay”, and “good” comes first in our ascending ladder of praise—“good, better, best”. Love, joy, and kindness are praised and admired, but goodness is hardly remembered at all. Indeed, though it stood toward the summit of virtues in the ancient world, our culture replaces “goodness” as the summit of virtues with “tolerance”—a tolerance always subject to the whims of fashion and standing within a world which knows no unchanging moral compass. Those whims might dictate almost anything. One season eating meat is declared unethical, and the next the wearing of fur. But apart from these arbitrary declarations of fashion, pretty much everything is tolerated—except, paradoxically, true goodness.

That is because true goodness is divine. When a rich young ruler addressed Christ with an idle and unthinking bit of flattery as “good teacher” (Mark 10:17), Christ rebuked the man with the reminder that “no one is good but God alone”. Christ of course did not mean that He was not divine or that goodness was not to be found in the world, but that true goodness was transcendent, luminous, unworldly, and the word was not to be tossed around so casually.

Goodness, as we see from the words and works of God in the Scriptures, is binary and discriminating. That is, it discriminates virtue from vice, and righteousness from evil. It looks upon evil with loathing, hatred, and disgust, and is filled with anger and wrath against it—or (if one prefers) with moral indignation. The more one is good the greater one’s sense of moral indignation when one encounters instances of sexual slavery, of child abuse, of violence against women and racial oppression, of the greed of the 1% which grinds the faces of the poor and wages exploitive war for the sake of material gain. Anyone who encountered such vice and evil and who remained calm, murmuring, “Oh well, nobody’s perfect” should not be praised for their tolerance, but censured for their lack of moral compass. True goodness rises up in wrath against such evil.

And in evil’s binary opposite, such goodness rejoices in virtue. When it encounters kindness to the poor, gentleness in the face of brutality, a forgiving spirit which refuses to retaliate against wrong, when it meets with honesty, industry, faithfulness, sexual purity, it exults and pours forth praise. We in the Church reaffirm and celebrate such a binary approach to life every time we sing one of psalms as a church antiphon: “The Lord loves the righteous, but the way of the wicked He brings to ruin” (Psalm 146). As the ancient document known as the Didache long ago declared, there are two ways only—the way of life and the way of death, the path of wisdom and that of folly. Goodness discriminates, exulting in the former and abominating the latter. Modern secular society does not have a good grasp on the binary nature of goodness; it gets queasy and nervous whenever evil is denounced. Authentic goodness has been replaced by non-judgmental niceness. (Rather inconsistently, it has no trouble itself denouncing traditional Christianity and anything it considers “non-progressive”.)

Our challenge as parents and teachers is to help our children to discriminate as well, training them to know instinctively what is worthy of praise and what is worthy of blame. The paths of wisdom and folly are not usually clearly marked in our day, and the path of folly which leads to death often looks superficially like the path of wisdom. A solid education therefore will therefore not simply teach children readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, but also the even more valuable skills of discerning between virtue and vice, and of recognizing the excellence of the former. But we must do so with open eyes and courageous hearts, for children thus trained will not be welcomed by the world. Moral compromise, not integrity, is valued by the world, and leads to worldly success. (If you doubt this, look at the inner lives of those at the summits of political power, and ask yourself if they achieved those heights without making moral compromises.) True goodness always gives offence, and the notion that if a person is truly good they will be liked and rewarded by the world is nonsense. A good person will always offend those whose lack of goodness and purity are revealed by the goodness of the good person. But children trained to love goodness will choose virtue all the same, preferring the praise of God to the applause of the crowd.

This goodness, if it is true goodness, is not merely ethical, and has nothing to do with cold moralism with all its self-righteous judgmentalism. It is not the result of keeping abstract rules, but of sowing to the Spirit (Galatians 6:8). It is the fruit of grace, not of self-exertion. Like the good Lord Himself, it is transcendent, divine, luminous. And acquiring such goodness is the only way to find our way home.

By Fr. Lawrence Farley

Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/nootherfoundation/on-the-virtue-of-goodness/

Question: Dear Father Andrew, please help me to figure out which position to take with regard to yoga as a physical practice. I did yoga for a long time, and I even trained a group. I regarded the clean-up of the body by physical exercise similar to the daily household chores that we all do. When I came to the church, I did an extensive research on the Church opinion about yoga as a system of physical exercises and finally realised that it is alien to the Orthodox spirit. Four years have passed since I stopped teaching yoga but those whom I taught sometimes meet me and ask if I’m thinking of gathering a group again. They want to do some kind of exercise to improve their health and boost their energy. I’m in doubt: is it a temptation? Should I try to coach them, if what I teach is going to be closer to the Orthodox spirit? Anna.

Answer by Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok: People who are initially leading an external, emotionally-driven life want to remain lively and energetic, and they use physical exercise to be in shape, which helps them in their lives. Little by little, they discover that there is the soul living in that body, and in the same way that the body requires motion, the soul requires God, prayer, and repentance, too.

The doctrine that lies at the roots of yoga is unacceptable for the Orthodox, in spite of the fine-tuned and time-honoured exercises that stimulate agility and make an individual more robust. This doctrine teaches that a human being can do everything; that he is able to climb the heaven using his own power. Its chief principle is “I can do it,” that is, an individual gets puffed up in his own eyes; he tries to exercise his huge potential, which is present in each one of us. It leads to pride. That is why you should avoid yoga at all costs. As far as physical exercises in general are concerned…

There are people who suffer because they don’t get enough exercise: they have a sedentary lifestyle, while they are still young and their bodies need to be fit. If possible, everyone should keep fit. I think it would be great if you organise a group, find certain exercises, and combine them with Orthodoxy, with the spiritual vigilance. It can be your ministry. If you are a good coach (apparently, people remember and respect you), you will be very helpful for those who join your group. You can do some exercises and then read the Gospel, for example, and then pray for each other or go and confess in the church. I would recommend you to gather a group of people. Perhaps, it may even become a fitness centre in the end. People need it because they need to keep fit. If it’s combined with Orthodoxy, it will be great!

September 20, 2018

St. Elisabeth Convent

“Why?” Why didn’t God stop all of these hurricanes? Why did my friends lose their jobs? Why can’t I stop this bad habit? Why am I struggling financially?

Each of us has our own set of “whys” that we ask ourselves and that maybe we ask God in prayer each day. We want there to be a rhyme and reason to life. We want there to be order and justice. We want our prayers heard and answered.

There’s some dissonance when we know we’re prayerful people (or at least people who consistently try to pray) but things don’t go as planned. We lose our jobs, bills pile up, family members pass away, and natural disasters seem only to be more frequent. We need God more than ever, but these problems have a habit of pushing us away from our faith.

Here are three things to keep in mind in the midst of hard times.

1. God IS with us

When things are going well, it isn’t so hard to remember God. It’s when nothing seems to be working out that we wonder where God is in our lives. In the Old Testament, the Prophet Elijah (St. Elias) went in search for God to speak to Him. He found that God wasn’t found in these big shows of the earth’s power (the wind, the earthquake, or fire)...but He was found in a quiet whisper (1 Kings 19:9-13). Later, when God chose to become man, He wasn’t born a king, he was born to a young girl in a cave. Jesus was born and called Immanuel (literally “God with us”) in a way the people weren’t expecting (Matthew 1:23). So maybe God is with us when we least expect it, too.

For many of us, it can be really hard to sense God’s presence with us when we’re going through tough times. Sadness and grief can lead us to despair and despondency. Worry can lead to anxiety and fear. And fear just leads us to isolate and get lost in the what-ifs in our thoughts.

So how do we see that God is with us? There’s a beautiful Orthodox prayer service called the “Glory to God for all Things Akathist” that helps us to meditate on our many blessings and gratitudes when we might be inclined to see none. God is with us in the love of friends and family. Even after a disaster, God is made known to us in the acts of kindness shown by strangers and in the service given by emergency personnel. God is with us, and we recognize His presence when we learn to see the many signs of His mercy.

2. We can’t always explain suffering

Since so many of us ask “Why?” when we face suffering, there is no shortage of people giving explanations. Many Protestant pastors have suggested that natural disasters serve as signs of the Second Coming of Christ or serve as punishment for societal sin. Other people, like Kirk Cameron (actor from the 1985-1992 sitcom Growing Pains and the popular Left Behind series about the supposed “Rapture”) suggest that storms like Hurricane Irma are meant for individuals to personally repent.

One blogger, commenting on Kirk Cameron’s remarks, wrote:

People who are wounded and grieving and heartbroken need to be cared for and comforted and embraced—they don’t need any armchair theology about why this is a good thing, or how it’s a Divine personal message, or what God might be personally saying to them. It’s one thing for a victim to seek and speculate on such things for themselves, but something else for us to do it for them…

Maybe we should admit the mystery, discomfort, and the tension that spirituality yields in painful, terrifying times.

Maybe when people are being terrorized by nature or by the inhumanity around them, instead of shouting sermons at them—we should shut up and simply try to be a loving, compassionate presence.

This response meant so much to me, personally, because I still feel an instinctive cringe awaiting some religious leader giving their interpretation of the impending doom that natural disasters might represent. It’s part of my own path of healing having been raised in a Rapture-centric community before becoming Orthodox.

Sometimes we can look too hard for meaning in situations that simply are. We live in a broken world with pain and suffering and being a Christian doesn’t make us imune to the ways of the world. I can’t give meaning to another’s suffering. I can’t even guarantee I’ll make sense of my own; the only thing I can do with it is offer it up to God in prayer.

3. Prayer isn’t a transaction

When we encounter difficult times, prayer is either the last thing we think about or it’s the thing we grasp onto. As I watched Hurricane Irma approach Florida, I had to consciously reject the urge to freeze with anxiety about family and friends, and instead turn to prayer. In the moment, prayer was the only thing I could do. But what if my prayers aren’t answered? What if what I ask for (protection for people I love) isn’t what I get?

I can approach prayer as a transactional process with God or I can approach it as a transformational encounter with Him as part of our relationship. I’m abusing my relationship with God if I expect something from Him in return for my time and energy in prayer. If I think I’ll get what I want if only I fast properly or say the right words, or ask the right saint to intercede for me, I’m not committing myself and others to God.

Instead, I can chose to give my worries and concerns up to God. I can tell Him what is making me scared, and I can ask Him that His will “be done on earth as it is in heaven” as we pray in the Our Father. I pray so that I can make myself aware of being in the presence of God and so that God can soften the hardness of my heart. And then, naturally, God gives me the strength I need to endure the hard times.

Source: https://blogs.goarch.org/blog/-/blogs/holding-on-to-god-in-hard-times

Question: Father Andrew, please tell me how to save my child. My daughter is 11. She’s lost interest in God and doesn’t want to go to church. Instead, she spends her days glued to her smartphone, and she is furious if I attempt to take it away. When she was younger, I was teaching my daughter to love God. We went to church, confessed and took communion often. I have always sheltered her from evil. Now she watches films with foul and angry words and says that they’re “cool”. How can I save my daughter? Maria.

Answer by Fr. Andrew Lemeshonok: Small children bring small troubles. She’s 11 now. Imagine what will happen when she’s 16? You’ve got to help your daughter to become a Christian. All good encounters that you had in the past, all your prayers and communions, haven’t been lost, believe me. She’s in her transition to adulthood now. She isn’t a little girl anymore. Unfortunately, children are sometimes attracted to sins—various sins. They want to be adult. They want to imitate the grown-ups, and sadly, they often choose to imitate bad adults. Therefore, you’ve got to muster your patience and humility. Talk with her wisely, with love and attention. Watch that bad film together and then explain to her that it isn’t as great as it seems. Watch a good film with her. Both you and your daughter will need your prayers and the effort that you must make to ensure that your daughter defeats all temptations of this world. God will never let you down.

Most children are susceptible to the smartphone addiction that you mention. Unfortunately, the filth that is so widespread nowadays sometimes sticks to their souls. That’s why we should fight for our kids. Summon your patience and humility, and learn to be a mother with faith. You can take a little child to church by giving him or her a sweet or taking her in your lap. It is harder to get an eleven-year-old girl to be interested in the church, and it’s harder still with a sixteen-year-old girl. I believe that if you do your best to lead a Christian life, you’ll win.

September 17, 2018

St. Elisabeth Convent

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Discussing the Main Reasons for Loss of Faith

Parable of the Day: The Child Who Wished to Be a TV Set

Goodness: What Is Said in the Scripture about One of the Main Virtues

Q&A with a Priest: Is an Orthodox Christian Allowed to Do Yoga?

3 Points about Holding on to God in the Most Hard Times

Spiritual Father’s Advice: How to Save My Child in This Modern World?

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