by Fr Gabriel-Allan Boyd
Why is this happening? My heart breaks to see that there’s a religious awakening in America, because it’s not the kind of “religious awakening” that many of us would normally associate with that phrase. This new religion is as fundamentalist as Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was back in the 1980s, but it merely replaces one set of morals with a different set of morals. It’s more puritanical than the 16th century Puritans, where every sinner must be branded with a proverbial “scarlet letter,” severely punished by public shunning and renunciation...yet these particular sins pivot upon cartoonishly shifty notions of “wokeness.” In this latest religion, it doesn’t matter if a person later matured and repented of their sin...all that matters is that they once committed some sin and that means they must now be cancelled—erased from history. It’s as distorted and destructive and demon-filled and severe and cruel as the Spanish Inquisition, whose zealots always, eventually, end up turning on and consuming each other because brokenness will eventually be found in everyone. For those who practice this new religion, there’s the naïve belief that events can be controlled and manipulated so as to cause a coming utopia, but this version of paradise is only a delusion. Rather, because it’s from the demons, it can never bring about human flourishing, but only deterioration and devastation.
For people who reject time-honored expressions of worshipping of God, this new religious awakening temporarily gratifies the religious cravings of their starved human spirit. Since all humanity is created in the image of a God who is a communion in community of three Persons (Father Son & Holy Spirit) and since we are created for becoming like that God (in God’s image and toward His likeness – Genesis 1:26), then even for those who believe they are secular and who believe they are atheists, it resonates-with and momentarily gratifies their innate human desire to seek and participate in something larger than themselves and to find in that place the community they desperately need. But they’ve embraced something that’s merely a counterfeit of what we were created to be.
So, there’s a profound need for us Orthodox Christians to have conversations with each other, and with our neighbors regarding the harmful effects of this counterfeit. Yet, where outrage is the spirit of our age, communication on these topics is only important to people (even to some Orthodox Christians) only in so far it can be used for a weapon. Honest conversation is being silenced. When there are efforts at mere interaction, if there is disagreement, they are taken as an act of assault. Anyone presenting a differing opinion on any key topics, only encounters outrage, sanctimony, and intellectual dishonesty, often seated in the delusion of confirmation bias. Attempts at reason—at merely being rational in public—have now become loving acts of courage, because to the world (and now, even to some Orthodox Christians) the greatest offense is to disagree with them, thus making them feel uncomfortable. In our cancel culture, the consequence of such a sin must be ruthless retaliation.
By God’s grace, it’s recently been exposed that the peer review system of judging whether a scientific or an academic work is trustworthy has proven to be seriously flawed. Academic “peers” findings were influenced by foreign disrupters, while a great many others demonstrated that their own personal politics bias their judgment. Political leaders in each party (motivated more by aspirations toward ideological power and by their own greed, rather than by a desire to actually help people) have brought serious oppression and deterioration to poverty-stricken communities under their stewardship. Consequently, we have a breakdown in public trust for almost every American institution, with a confused and confusing response. So, at every level, there’s a kind of irrationality being embraced that’s incapable of encountering reality—unable to distinguish fact from fiction. Being totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination...we lash out at each other.
Regarding the topic of police violence and racism, our society has come to process and analyze information in such a way that it only supports preexisting ideas...and then we lash-out at each other on that basis, as though every question about our current state was answered a long time ago and has never changed. Instead of examining *all* the facts, our surrounding culture has become totally subverted by people’s imagination about what’s going on. Even though it doesn’t fit the facts, the prevailing view among many people today is that America hasn’t made much progress on racism...relishing its own ignorance to feed the rage.
And in the unwitting chaos that’s flowed from that rage, last Friday, a group of “Black Lives Matter” supporters in Rochester, NY, began combing the streets, intoxicated on the intent to topple *everything,* because, in their eyes *everything* has become merely a symbol of white, supremacist, patriarchal, institutional racism. So, when they came across a statue honoring the great Black leader, Frederick Douglass (not realizing that he was actually a runaway slave who moved to Rochester to lead the abolitionist movement) ...they had to destroy him. Ironically, this desecration of his statue fell on July 5, the anniversary of Douglass’ famous anti-slavery speech in 1852. Douglass was torn from his pedestal, dragged with a rope to a nearby fence, sprayed with paint, and his hands were broken off. What we’re witnessing around us, both online and on our streets is a breakdown in the people’s desire to care enough about truth to investigate and discern its origin, nature, methods, and limits. The future doesn’t look good for us, if we can’t agree on what’s real and where we find reality. What can we do? Is it totally hopeless? The answer lies in both prayer and action.
There is particular comfort and hope from the Orthodox Prayer to the Holy Spirit, found in the Trisagion Prayers. Why? Because, there we address the Holy Spirit as, “You, who are everywhere present and filling all things.” It’s often been helpful for me to meditate on the implications of that phrase when I’m surrounded by chaos and malevolence. What does it imply when we say that the Holy Spirit is “present everywhere and fills *all* things?” If “all” means what we think it does, then that means that there’s actually no place that’s truly secular. Thus, each of us should recognize that God *is* doing His marvelous work, even when the most loathsome acts are being perpetrated. The Holy Spirit is present and doing His work, convicting hearts, calling them to repentance. He’s there, doing His redemptive work, engaged in transforming His creation, even when people are engaged in something evil. And God intends for every Christian to be involved with Him in His redemptive work. That’s why He gave each of us the gift of the Holy Spirit at our baptism. Thus, wherever any Christian happens to be, because we are given the gift of the Spirit, we’re invited by God and also given the role to enter into people’s lives with Him, to pray for them and to engage them in dialogue (sometimes risky, uncomfortable dialogue), trying to be a peacemaker (Matthew 5:9) offering acts of love, revealing timeless, lifegiving, absolute truth to them (Matthew 5:13-16). It means courageously entering into every situation and conversation with the intent of cooperating with God in His loving ministry to His creation.
Lately, it feels like I need to remind myself all the more that the Holy Spirit is “everywhere present and filling all things,” because, the last few weeks feel like years have passed. People have come to me expressing feelings of fatigue, despair and fear over what we see and experience going on around us, and I have to admit that I’m feeling pretty grumpy about what I see going on around me. So, let’s remind each other that God is good, God is light, God is love, God is Spirit. And that Spirit, who is God, fills all of creation, including every human life, in order to lead it to perfection, to sanctify and render it holy. He offers to all of creation the possibility of sharing forever in that goodness, that light, and that love. And by God’s grace, as He fills all things (including us), we’re called to participate in that ministry (our own religious awakening), offering transcendent truth to each other and lovingly risking ourselves to offer it to the world around us.