Transfiguration of Modern Living

[W]e are called to love one another and the whole of our Lord’s Creation. If that love is not present in our lives... life itself becomes empty, hollow, a “tinkling cymbal”— and in that emptiness, the sacramental living to which we are called becomes a pointless series of magical manipulations.... Love in its Christian sense is a demanding reality, not a comfortable and cozy refuge. It requires strength, valor, sacrificial self-abnegation. Only the best of diets, the most invigorating of environments, and the most rigorous training can provide the strength essential to genuine Christian loving. It is precisely this need which sacramental living and that alone can meet.
The Sacramental Life
Bishop Alexander (Mileant) of Buenos Aires

Anyone living in the here and now is most likely living individualistically by way of modernity, and not in communion with others, all Creation, and the Creator by way of Ancient Faith, conscious of the world as sacrament, of all Creation as sacred and the means by which Creator of all manifests its immanence, exists separate from yet reveals itself to humanity. If Christians of Ancient Faith had lived as most those who think and call themselves “christian” live today, going along with contemporary way of life in order to get along, burning even only a pinch of incense before Caesar because it was easier for them to do so than to suffer the socio-politico-economic consequences, then there would be no martyrs, no Church, no Christian theology, no iconography, or liturgy as we know it today.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, and as the saying goes, so it is very much the same today as it was for early Christians. The West, and especially the USA, is after all the namesake of Rome, AKA “Holy Roman Empire”, passed down through Western European “Renaissance” (Greekish paganization of New Hellenic Ancient Faith), “Reformation” (revolution & regicide), “Enlightenment” (hubris, delusion), and western “philosophy” (vanity, esp. positivism, materialism, industrialism), and carried across the great waters and over time to us here today in Turtle Island.

The Church is definitely culture producing not culture conforming, to which history testifies, and not just prayer, liturgy, icon, chant or architecture producing. John Romanides has explained how Western Christianity became distorted from Ancient Faith after being overrun by invading Germanic barbarian Arians and infiltrated by their Frankish descendents, and Archbishop Lazar Puhalo states that it is their Western false types in theology that have produced the “humanistic and utilitarian civilization of the Enlightenment, that is still present to this day and defines the goals of modern society”.

These false Western types are rooted in historic proliferation of the Germanic Frankish overlords’ infatuation with scholasticism and Augustinianism, deviations of Augustine of Hippo from conciliarity of Church teaching. One of Augustine’s errors (the notion that only humans have souls and that material Creation will not be part of the Kingdom of God/Heaven), has had particularly great negative impact on Creation environmental ethics. Spread of such notion has paved the way for human self satisfaction and pleasure seeking by diminishing the importance of the natural realm to “resource” for “ownership”, and zealously encouraging natural law property “rights” and “creation of wealth” as greatest “good” no matter the Real Cost or abusive treatment of Creation. Elimination of all non-human Creation from the Kingdom of Heaven has also distorted Christian anthropocentic understanding of humanity as “crown of Creation” from one of responsiblity rooted in Divine Image of self-emptying humility to one of ungodly arrogance that tyrannizes and terrorizes all Creation.

Despite this, most contemporary "christians" persist in devoting themselves to modern secular living to detriment of their presumed spiritual interest. It is foolish to think that any modern “christian” possesses attainment of grace sufficient to embed themselves virtually isolated in a consuming godless consumerist, suburban, urban culture for nearly 85% or more of the time (except mostly Sunday mornings), and still maintain some sense of Christian community capable of fostering growth in Ancient Faith with essential outflow of fruits of the Spirit. To be viable today, it is necessary that faith of modern Christians resist the dominant, oligarchic, plutocratic, imperialistic, empire of Western modernism as Old Believers resisted its advances into Eastern Europe in their day, and similarly as The Amish resist in their way even today. Such resistence requires much more than superficial experience of Christian community.

Whereas the Church's main concern has historically been relationship between humanity and God, and between individual and humanity, modern life is disconnected not just from these but from all Creation as well. By choice (desire), westerners and those “westernized” by the globalized West, live contrary to interrelated connectivity of deification, disconnected, above and outside of Creation (the Cosmos) in the artificially (fake, counterfeit) manmade world of technology as visually described by Geoffrey Reggio in his Qatsi trilogy.

To think that repentance only applies to Divine-human and inter-human relations is to ignore reality and the vast body of Church teaching on human responsibility for the Cosmos, which Western modernism seems hell-bent on destroying. To think that participation in transfiguration (theosis) by which the entire Cosmos is "saved" (united in communion with its Creator, the Most Holy Trinity, through deification of humanity), is affected exclusively by prayer, liturgical celebration, and icon-raising, without any human struggle for change of way of life that resists modernity, is to miss the point of the very basis of Ancient Faith which is repentance (change of way of life) and theosis (communion with God which makes one “godlike”, godly, like God, self-emptying instead of self-fulfilling, self-serving).

Babylon, Modernity, and Change

No amount of prayer, icon raising, liturgy “celebrating” or ritual alone will effect Divine union and cure modern sinful disconnection on any level unless there is also human desire for an interrelated, interconnected, Christian way of life at all costs, that joins with human will to act toward resistance of modernism and attainment of Ancient Faith in Real Life instead of faith in the godless “system” of Babylon, namesake of the historical place where writing of numbers was invented for accounting of trade, and currency developed for trading purposes. If in doubt of what modern Babylon could be, see who it is who cries the most over her destruction in Rev 18: “merchants”, those who conform to her likeness (covetousness) in whoring after mammon, signifying that Babylon may very likely indicate a type of reigning socio-economic system of the day. If ever there was a worldwide Babylon as prophesied to appear at the advent of the end of time, surely there is one today in the modern travesty of human civilization’s reigning socio-economic system, casually touted as “globalism”.

As far as time goes, it is short and of the essence for any human, whether or not modern globalism constitutes apocalyptic Bablyon. What better time then, than right here and now for sacramental living by way of Ancient Faith, repentant way of life in acknowledgement for need of sacred union (holy communion, deification) and resistence to utopian promise of counterfeit “heaven” as held forth in utilitarian Western modern culture? Even at best, the counterfeit can only be temporal and fleeting, still subject to death and decay no matter the height of technological “progress” that masks the symptomatic lack of human interrelationship with the Real Source of all Life and with all Creation.

WORLDVIEW - Chicago Public Radio
Perspective on the “End Times”
Jerome McDonnell interviews Archbishop Lazar Puhalo
The early Church Fathers...always told us that the plagues mentioned in the Book of Revelation do not come to pass because of God’s judgement, but because of the greed and avarice of mankind

Disappearing Slopes in the Andes

Why Are Glaciers Melting

Revelation

Utilitarian Goals of Modern Society

On Types and Icons
Archbishop Lazar Puhalo

False types in theology often lead to false models of living and this results in collective false traditions being inserted into our communities. The final result is an anti-Christian image of the meaning of our life and of the world. Thus, the process of moulding one’s life according to the image of the life of the Holy Trinity is obscured and even obliterated. Then, secular types of living prevail and Christians are little by little identified with the rest of the world. The light is extinguished, the witness of our hope is weakened and our expectation, the expectation of the redemption of the whole universe, according to the apostle, is deformed and neglected. Then, people call themselves Christians but in truth they are no more. The whole orientation of their communities, even of their own personal lives is set according to anti-Christian standards. This is what happened in the historical West, where the wrongful theology adopted in the years before the schism evolved into a clearly anti-Christian culture during the Middle Ages and eventually in the pagan-oriented, humanistic and utilitarian civilization of the Enlightenment, that is still present to this day and defines the goals of our modern society.

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