Say Nothing

How to Wage a Wordless Culture War

Peter France, (BBC Interviewer): "We are a modern tribe of people who reject Christianity, not because we know too little but because we know too much.

We know the human mind and the conscious and unconscious and we know religious emotionalism, that it is all void of reality, we find your philosophical arguments for the existence of a God unconvincing, linguistics and archeology show your Bible is flawed, science shows no need for a Creator... so we reject your "Truth" because of our truths.

What would you say to us if you were a missionary to our tribe?"

Elder Amphilichios of Patmos: "I would not say anything to you. I would simply live with you. And I would love you."

I’ve seen the Bible proof texted (and its commentators) quoted to people and “cultures” for 50 years. I’ve “spoken the truth in love”, with the emphasis on truth and an illusion of my true capacity for and ability to love the people I was speaking to. I've come to the conclusion that pursuing another person’s intellectual conversion to my viewpoint is at worst an egotistical delusion and and best spiritual sloth because it is easy to wage an ideological war compared to the long, sacrificial, often silent, and sometimes sorrowful path of love for a single human being.

Love does not permit objectification of people. People cannot be defined solely by their ideologies, present thoughts, and yes, even sins. Love seeks the person to embrace, not just the concepts to contradict. Love accepts the other “as is” without a pretense of intellectual nor spiritual and moral superiority.

Love is our personal human expression of being created in a Trinitarian image. We are a relational creation. Because love is relational and “personal” it also places a higher, existential relational demand on the one who is loved. If I am no longer objectified, it demands introspection. We do not take down defenses with someone we are at war with. We can only be weak and wrong before someone who we know truly loves us.

If we wish to “missionize” our culture, we must love the people of the culture. There is no church service for the “baptism of a culture”, only the baptism of persons. The baptism of a culture requires saints to live within it, and thus transform it by love one person at a time.

How can this happen? Dimitru Staniloae wrote this description of what a saint, the person who has experienced God, looks like:

“In the saint there exists nothing that is trivial, nothing coarse, nothing base, nothing affected (fake), nothing insincere. In him is the culmination of delicacy, sensibility, transparency, purity, reverence, attention before the mystery of his fellow men…comes into actual being, for he brings this forth from his communication with the supreme Person (God). The saint grasps the various conditions of the soul in others and avoids all that would upset them, although he does not avoid helping them overcome their weaknesses. He reads the least articulate needs of others and fulfills it promptly, just as he reads their impurities also, however skillfully hidden and through the delicate power of his own purity, exercising upon them a purifying action.

From the saint there continually radiates a spirit of self-giving and of sacrifice for the sake of all, with no concern for himself, a spirit that gives warmth to others and assures them that they are not alone. … And yet there is no one more humble, more simple, no one more less artificial, less theatrical or hypocritical, no one more “natural” in his behavior, accepting all that is truly human and creating an atmosphere that is pure and familiar.

The saint has overcome any duality within himself as St. Maximos the Confessor puts it. He has overcome the struggle between soul and body, the divergence between good intentions and deeds that do not correspond to them, between deceptive appearance and hidden thoughts, between what claims to be the case and what is the case. He has become simple, therefore, because he has surrendered himself entirely to God. That is why he can surrender himself entirely in communication with others.

The saint always lends courage; at times, through a humor marked by this same delicacy, he shrinks the delusions created by fears or pride or the passions. He smiles, but does not laugh sarcastically; he is serious but not frightened. He finds value in the most humble persons, considering them to be great mysteries created by God and destined to eternal communion with Him. Through humility the saint makes himself almost unobserved, but he appears when there is need for consolation, for encouragement or help. For him no difficulty is insurmountable, because he believes firmly in the help of God sought through prayer.

He is the most human and humble of beings, yet at the same time of an appearance that is unusual and amazing and gives rise in others to the sense of discovering in him, and in themselves too, what is truly human. He is a presence simultaneously most dear, and unintentionally, most impressing, the one who draws the most attention. For you he becomes the most intimate one of all and the most understanding; you never feel more at ease than near him, yet at the same time he forces you into a corner and makes you see your moral inadequacies and failings. He overwhelms you with the simple greatness of his purity and with the warmth of his goodness and makes you ashamed of how far you have fallen away from what is truly human, of how far you have sunk in your impurity, artificiality, superficiality, and duplicity, for these appear in sharp relief in the comparison you make unwillingly between yourself and him.

He exercises no worldly power, he gives no harsh commands, but you feel in him an unyielding firmness in his convictions, his life, in the advice he gives, and so his opinion about what you should do, expressed with delicacy or by a discreet look, becomes for you a command and to fulfill that command you find yourself capable of any effort or sacrifice… Who ever approaches a saint discovers in him the peak of goodness, purity, and spiritual power covered over by the veil of humility. He is the illustration of the greatness and power of kenosis.

From the saint there radiates an imperturbable quiet or peace and simultaneously a participation in the pain of others that reaches the point of tears. He is rooted in the loving and suffering stability of God Incarnate and rest in the eternity of the power and goodness of God….

(Dumitru Staniloae. The Experience of God, Holy Cross Press, pp. 232-234)

St. Isaac the Syrian said, "God is reality. The person whose mind has become aware of God does not even possess a tongue with which to speak, but God resides in the heart in great serenity. He experiences no stirring of zeal or argumentativeness, nor is he stirred by anger. He cannot even be aroused concerning (matters of) the faith." 

Perhaps it because of the lack of true love that much of what passes for evangelism is described as a “culture war”. It is a “war” because we have intellectual combatants and so few true missionaries.

Spiritual warfare is not with our culture, nor even with other people. Spiritual warfare takes place within ourselves, overcomes evil within ourselves and equips us to overcome the evil in the world with good when we have tasted the goodness of God in our own souls and have become saints.

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Shameless self-promotion: I did a three hour podcast interview with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick on my life as an “Apostle to the Apostate”. It’s kind of about “evangelism” but not the kind you learn in seminary. It’s really about what it looks like trying to be (and stay) a Christian in the messiness of a fallen world. We talk about my failure as a minister because of bikers and hookers, my failed aspirations to the priesthood, my unlikely career as a multi-degreed construction worker, my 55 “recovering” employees who bankrupted me, my best friend’s death by a drug overdose, and lots of other real world encounters. It’s not “pious”, I might cuss just a little, but if nothing else you might be entertained by the stories. Click the links.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three