by Fr Gabriel-Allan Boyd
A few years ago, I read a news story about a construction contractor in Poland, named Daniel Czapiewski. He did something crazy in 2007. Having grown up suffering the horrifying consequences of communism, he wanted to create a powerful symbol that gave people a tangible and lasting reminder of that distorted ideology’s sickening effects, hoping this would inspire people to never let it happen again. So, he had his construction team build an upside down house, unstably fixed upon the peak of its roof and having its stone foundation dismayingly up in the air…and just to make it even more discombobulating, he built it on a slant, tilting it to eliminate the comfort of walking on a reliable flat surface inside. Normally, his skillful crew builds an entire house in only 3 weeks, but this house took them 4 months to complete. Why? Because, throughout the build, his workers were so unsettled by the bizarre angles of every surface and of having to walk on the slanted ceiling…that they constantly had to take breaks to recover from their disorientation, anxiety and queasiness.
Visitors enter through an attic window in the roof at the ground level, and then they discover that the whole interior is thoroughly furnished in the style of Communist Realism…but inverted. In other words, throughout the house there’s a dresser with crystal objects on it, a toilet from the 1970’s, and vintage propaganda from the communist era constantly blaring from an old television in the living room…but all of these are mounted upside down, on the floor, which happens to be slanted overhead. Today, many of the visitors to this house continue to describe an overwhelming feeling of dysphoric illness merely from taking tours through it. What people begin to understand when they walk through this house is that life in formerly communist Poland turned everyone’s world upside down and off kilter… disorienting them to the point that it made their beloved country a sick one.
This Sunday’s Gospel Reading is an excerpt from Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount”, where He also said some crazy sounding things to make a similar kind of point about the upside-down world we live in, like “Love your enemies.” This is the sermon that launched Jesus’ ministry—His stump speech, if you will. Large crowds were amazed and even shocked by what this new teacher was doing and saying. They’d begun to gather around Him in such great numbers…that Jesus saw the need to stop and offer them the foundation message of His mission in the world. This is His manifesto…His platform message of what He truly stands for. This is where He explains why He has come. Why has He come? He wants us to understand that the self-absorbed ways of the world around us aren’t normal. They don’t allow us to be truly human, because humanity was created to take on the loving, self-sacrificial, self-offering likeness of God. The world’s self-absorption wretchedly takes on the likeness of the evil one…and it merely turns our lives upside down and off kilter, disorienting us…and making us sick. Jesus came to turn that house (actually, the world) back aright…to lead us back to God’s likeness and restore us to our original beauty…in Him.
The Orthros hymns and verses this Sunday will remind us of Adam & Eve’s expulsion from Paradise, inviting us to meditate upon the things that distort, and disorient and bring illness and ultimately death upon us. From the beginning, humans were created to share in God’s glory…to be, as the holy Fathers say, “gods themselves through God’s grace,” if we would just put our trust in God’s crazy-sounding instructions to us, devoting ourselves to Him through efforts to be constantly present with Him, loving Him by trusting in and keeping His commandments, tangibly offering His love to those around us—reconciling them to Him. The hymns and prayers will invite us to reject the example of Adam & Eve, so that we will now refuse to enter into conversation with the evil one, choosing to rebuff the wisdom of this world. That serpent who deceived them continues attempting to deceive us. Disguised as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), the evil one seeks to confuse us, to make it our own choice, convincing us to give our own will precedence above God’s will. The evil one wants us listening to all those voices which are not the voice of God, obeying all those words that are not the Word of God, and therefore disfiguring our lives and eventually destroying us. It’s the ultimate insanity of an upside-down world, designed to keep us sick.
So here we are now, preparing for Lent to begin this Sunday night…and the Church, reminding us of Adam & Eve’s expulsion from Paradise, wants to remind us of the same thing, pointing us back to Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” and the theme of forgiveness. Essentially, our Church wants us to realize that in many ways, we all live upside-down lives…and through Lent we have a marvelous opportunity to let Christ turn our lives back upright…back toward wellness…back toward becoming truly human…intimately joined with our Lord’s will.
At the end of the Gospel Reading for this coming Saturday of Souls, Jesus teaches us to pray…“forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespasses against us.” And then, in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading, Jesus reiterates that advice for us, “If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” In both sets of teachings from our Lord, the amount of forgiveness, restoration, and life we receive from God is in direct proportion to the degree in which we willingly forgive and offer life to those who have offended us. The forgiveness we receive steadfastly corresponds to our willingness to participate in Christ’s spirit of forgiveness and love. So, before we enter into the Lenten fast, the Church reminds us that there can be no true fast, no genuine repentance, no reconciliation with God, no life…unless we are at the same time reconciled with one another. The Church wants us to know that a fast without mutual love is the fast of demons. We can’t travel down the road of Lent as isolated individuals…but rather, we must instead travel it together, as members of a family. This is the only way that Christ can turn us back upright again, releasing us from slavery, restoring us to sanity and wholeness. To forgive someone is to put God’s radiant forgiveness between me and my “enemy.” To forgive is to reject the hopeless, dead-ends of worldly human relationships and to unite ourselves with Christ.
So, we begin Lent this Sunday evening with Forgiveness Vespers. I hope you will make the time and effort to perform your first act of Lenten asceticism. Come to this Vespers at 6:30 PM, because it’s to your benefit to do so.
And as we use the tools of this Lent to further unite ourselves to Christ…allowing Him to turn us back upright, we’ll begin to blessedly resonate with Saint Paul’s words to the Church in Rome, from this coming Sunday morning’s Epistle Reading, “Brothers & sisters, salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand. Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.”
