Working and serving last summer in a Russian village, I was struck by the way 90% of the people in church on Sunday were female This can’t be a good situation.

Look also at situations where suddenly male involvement in church life grows. I know two: the first is if there is building work to be done (I think especially of Orthodox diaspora parishes with large economic migrant populations concentrated in the building trades), the second is male voice choirs (Welsh Methodists are the classic example). I would add the observation that the male/female ratio seems less skewed in Protestant parishes that Catholic or Orthodox ones.

My hypothesis is that there are two factors involved here, which are easily overlooked here: the first is the desire of most normal males, especially perhaps of the ‘bloke’ classes, to be working alongside other men that they consider as ‘real’ males. The second, which applies perhaps more to the better educated classes, is that a man expects to have a ‘voice’ in any venture he commits to seriously. He includes his family, this work and his other social commitments, where he considers himself entitled to analyse and critique the behaviour of those around him and the effectiveness of the structures concerned.

Both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches fall short here on ‘maleness’, the Catholics with their general celibacy, the Orthodox with the celibacy requirements for bishops. Celibacy does not per se destroy ‘manhood’ – no one would question that of either Pope Francis or Patriarch Kirill. But it can create distance, from that sort of silent understanding that exists between adult men working together, conscious of each other’s sexuality and sexual lives, and who mutually support each other’s male identity. A married priest, too, who is not felt as a fully male, is at a disadvantage here.

The Orthodox Church in particular falls badly short in its division of the right to speak. Basically, the only person who the right to speak on spiritual matters in a parish is the senior priest. Everyone else is supposed to listen. Discussion groups, chaired by junior clergy of lay people, in which people honestly discuss their reactions to the Gospel, including their doubts, do not exist. This is in crass opposition to the male need for ‘ voice’. There is a party line, and that’s that. The result is that the better educated class, male and female, has headed for the door.

It is one of my favourite feasts.

For me it is Christ saying: ‘I’m getting out of the picture, it’s over to you. You can no longer hide behind my tunic, like a timorous child behind his mother’s skirts. You have to take onto yourselves the risks of confronting both God’s fullness and the fullness of what God made man to be. The Father is giving you the kingdom (Luke 12.32) Don’t be cowards (2 Tim. 1.17). Be strong and courageous(1 Cor. 16.13)."

Luke 12.32: Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the Kingdom / Μὴ φοβοῦ, τὸ μικρὸν ποίμνιον, ὅτι εὐδόκησεν ὁ πατὴρ ὑμῶν δοῦναι ὑμῖν τὴν βασιλείαν.

2. Tim. 1.7: but For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind / οὐ γὰρ ἔδωκεν ἡμῖν ὁ θεὸς πνεῦμα δειλίας, ἀλλὰ δυνάμεως καὶ ἀγάπης καὶ σωφρονισμοῦ  

1 Cor. 16:13: stand fast in the faith; acquit yourselves like men; be strong / στηκετε εν τη πιστει ανδριζεσθε κραταιουσθε (The motto of my Cambridge college!)

For the past couple of week I have been reading for the past couple of weeks with considerable pleasure J-K Huysman’s novel ‘En route’ (its title in both English and French). It is thinly veiled description of this French author’s own conversion to practising Catholicism at the end of the 19^th century

Most of the religious experience recounted is convincing, though equally fascinating are the descriptions of late 19^th century Parisian Catholicism, and the insights it gives into the religious mind of the time. In the process of his conversion, Huysman’s hero Durtal, a middle-aged man of means of aesthetic bent, spends long hours in various well-known Paris churches, and produces sharp descriptions of their choirs, congregations and clergy. To all three he can be merciless. Perhaps not surprisingly, Fr Gévresin, the aged priest who gives Durtal the decisive push back into practising faith, sidesteps the mainline structures, sending him out of Paris to a run-down Trappist monastery, where he makes his confession and takes communion.

Huysmans’ exaltation of the priesthood and of monasticism, with the attendant theology of reparation sound extreme to modern ears, and I have difficulty in working out how much this is specific Huysmans religious romanticism, how much this was mainline discourse them, or whether it was, as I suspect, already rather peripheral (it is certainly so today).  Take his view on priesthood (the context is a funeral mass):

‘Never, in any religion, has a more charitable part, a more august mission, been assigned to man. Lifted, by his consecration, wholly above humanity, almost deified by the sacerdotal office; the priest, while earth laments or is silent, can advance to the brink of the abyss, and intercede for the being whom the Church has baptized as an infant, who has no doubt forgotten her since that day…’

Or his line on the substitutionary/reparatory role of enclosed religious, especially women. This time it is Gévresin speaking:

“You are aware, sir, that in all ages, nuns have offered themselves to heaven as expiatory victims. The lives of saints, both men and women, who desired these sacrifices abound, of those who atoned for the sins of others by sufferings eagerly demanded and patiently borne. But there is a task still more arduous and more painful that was desired by these admirable souls. It is not now that of purging the faults of others, but of preventing them, hindering their commission, by taking the place of who are too weak to bear the shock.”

The ‘spiritual image’ Huysmans gives of Paris is that of a lots of religious hidden away in arduous conditions in out-of-sight cloisters, hoping by their prayers to make good the evil living of many of the city’s inhabitants, if you want a tug of war nuns vs. prostitutes.

Theologically, I believe that some people can ‘advance to the brink of the abyss’, but do not see this as specific to the priesthood. Nor do it want to throw out of the window the idea of redemptive prayer, or of ‘expiatory victimhood’, or the idea that people of deep prayer can indeed preserve the world from much worse. I pretty much believe in all three, in some form or another, but I am uneasy when they are systematized, or (intentionally or otherwise) romanticized.

We are exhorted as Christians to follow Christ’s example in saying to God: ‘not my will, but your will be done’.

I am beginning to suspect a hidden trap here. Let me explain:

Basically that the concept of ‘will’ in fact has two fairly separate components

a)      What I want or do not want to do

b)      Strength of purpose, will-power (nicely rendered in French by ‘force de l’âme’).

The correct Christian marriage of the two parts is, it seems to me: ‘willing what God wants to me do’ + the full strength my innate, God-given will-power (force de l’âme).

Almost certainly the correct marriage is only possible when ‘God’s will’ really is God’s will, perceived as such and consented to in the depths of the heart, and not imposed from outside. Yes, outside help may be required with the discernment, but the final yes/no must be a free movement of the individual soul. There is one possible exception; in the specific situation of religious obedience under a really professional elder, concerned to bring the disciple to real spiritual maturity. But for that’s the only exception, and then both the decision of obedience and the choice of elder must be free choices.

In any other combination of the two parts - which one sees too often, and I include myself in this for large chunks of my Christian life - and we chug along in a rather miserable third-gear.

It has been a rather incredible ten days, in France and Belgium, in terms of spiritual encounters.

During this time I spent 5 days at Notre Dame de Vie at Venasque, near Avignon, an Institut Séculier of the Roman Catholic Church of Carmelite inspiration. The prospect of translating a major book for them required me to clearly understand certain key Carmelite concepts. In the process I crossed tracks with people of a deep spiritual life bearing the print of years of steady spiritual discipline. There was an extraordinary simplicity in our encounters, out of a common concern to plumb the truth and then express it across a major linguistic/cultural divide.

On my return I immediately had two very deep and open exchanges, with two senior members of the Orthodox and Protestant communities here in Brussels.

Apart from a confirmation of my own being on track (useful as the community I am part of is far from on track right now), these conversations enabled me to put words on something I sense to be increasingly important (in Protestant-talk: something I am “burdened with”): the urgent need to teach a more advanced Christian spirituality. ‘Entry-car’ spirituality is everywhere: well-structured, more or less intellectually coherent, with masses of teaching material. But somewhere, ten, twenty or thirty years along the line, God kicks out a couple of lynch-pins or supporting columns, the nice structure collapses, leaving you searching for something else to rely on. In fact leaving you having to rely more and more directly on Him, rather than any organizational or mental structure.

It is vitally important to recognize this stage, often accompanied by a lot of unease. It is a juncture at which many people leave the church, sensing that what they have had so far is not enough, but unable to find it in the weekly church round. But it is a critical passage towards really mature Christianity.

Each confessional group seems to have its own problems with this passage:

-          Protestantism often lacks language for it, and has nowhere theologically to put it. People hit against a sort of spiritual glass ceiling, accuse themselves of backsliding, redouble traditional prayer and bible-reading and group bible study routines, but still it does not work, and after iterating two or three times, and banging their heads every time, retire discouraged.

-          Orthodoxy has a sort of language for it, if you are looking for it, especially in the Philokalia. That being said, the references are all i) monastic and ii) male. The language tends to concentrate on the early stages, with great stress on all the ways the evil one will try and trip you up, and on the final stages (with a distinct danger of voyeurism – delighting second-hand in other people’s ecstatic experiences). There is little sense of gradual maturation: notably specific instructions for those two-thirds of the way down the road (in Teresian language, at the fifth and sixth mansions) are almost non-existent. Also a real problem in Orthodoxy is that people moving on to real spiritual maturity can be seen as a threat to those guarding ecclesiastical power bases. And for those in established ministries, it is very difficult to obtain the necessary free time and space (ideally several months’ sabbatical or lightening of duties) that such a passage requires.

-          Roman Catholicism has the most developed approach (St Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle with its seven mansions being the classical example). Perhaps too developed at times, with the spiritual temptation of measuring oneself (‘have I finally passed from the fourth to the fifth mansion’?) and forgetting God’s sovereign liberty to take people down any route He wants. I suspect also that accessing this more advanced spirituality requires people to quit parish structures for the churches of the teaching orders (Jesuits, Dominicans, Carmelites etc.), producing a sort of two-tier Catholicism.

Be that as it may: it is vital to have people who have made the jump into this ‘Book 2’ Christianity, living much more through faith than outer structure. Also who are able to guide other people as they struggle into this new stage of Christian life, including importantly being able to pick up God’s working in the soul when expressed in non-standard language (in fact a sure marker of deepening spirituality) or happening in non-standard life situations. And people who simply, being more Christ-like, ‘speak the Gospel with their lives’.

I am finishing André Vauchez’s ‘La spiritualité du Moyen Age occidental’, which gives an account of the development of western spirituality from the 8th to the 13th century (There is an English translation, which like the original French edition, covers only till the 12th century, the part on the 13th – perhaps the most interesting –being a later addition.)

For me, Vauchez documents well the move from a church essentially rooted in the liturgy, with heavily decorated churches, with rites attended by people who had very little idea of what was really happening and a spirituality which bordered on the magic, to the starts of a ‘modern’ spiritual consciousness, with the laity beginning to demand to understand what was going on, to have a genuine religious experience and express it their own language, often to the horror of the church authorities.

No prizes for guessing the parallel going through my mind….

I learned yesterday that I am being bad-mouthed in one of our diocesan parishes as a кляузник or a ‘denouncer’ or ‘tale-bearer’. I assume the reference is the article published in 2013 in Russia’s premier Orthodox journal where I criticized the triumphalistic tone and the praise-singing that accompanied our diocese’s 150^th anniversary in 2012. I am sure the bad-mouthers have not read the article. I do not rule out a clerical source.

I stand by that article, which, I remind my detractors, passed through the church censors in Moscow. Three years after writing it I remain deeply worried at the danger that one the main functions of our Russian-speaking church communities in Belgium, that of providing a meeting space for Russian-speakers living in a foreign country, is subverting the primary purpose of any Christian community, which is to be a place out of which the Christian gospel can be lived to the full.

I am not saying that the ROC should not provide a social function, nor that religion should not be a component of group identity. But when this social and identity function distort the Christian gospel, than I object.

Distort is perhaps the wrong word: better, prevent it from ever flowering to the full. My reading of the ROC in Belgium is that we are stuck in what, for lack of a better term, I would call improved Judaism – with our religion defined too much by rites and rules and insufficiently informed by direct experience of the living God, and unable to express to the outside world what experience we do have. It is this full Christianity, what I sometimes call ‘Book 2 Christianity’ which I am concerned about, because I believe it is the only Christianity that is of any real use outside the four walls of the church. For some it is probably scary: it demands much greater pastoral skills, real spiritual discernment, and inevitably questions established patterns of power and authority. It calls for a certain pruning (John 15), but without this pruning, the tree will wither and die.

We arrived back from Mount Athos at midnight on Friday. We, that is Slava, his two sons Stas and Anton, and myself. Their first visit, my 12^th. Five monasteries, Dionysios, Xenofondas, Zoograf, Vatopedi and Hilandar. Three of them with services in Greek, two in Slavonic (old Russian). Friends at 4 of them, met 3. The younger men, more athletic, did all five days on foot, I used the privilege of age to use the boat on 2 of them. Key bits:

-         *  For me the ‘core’ is in the first morning service, in the near-dark, starting between 1 and 4 in the morning depending on monastery, with perhaps no more than 10 monks and a few guests. Having a cassock and overcassock with me, I sat with the monks in the choir, putting me close enough to be able to catch some words of the service.

-         *  The incredible decoration of the churches, especially the woodwork, even in the poorest of the monasteries. Elsewhere rich decoration shocks me, here somehow it works.

-        * Ditto for many of the refectories, with their wall paintings going back hundreds of years.

-        *   Permission obtained from one abbot to return and stay longer at his monastery. While I can still manage the rougher tracks with a backpack, there will be time soon when this will no longer be possible, and I want to be able to stay several days at one monastery.

-        *  Some incredible views, especially over the sea on the north-east side of the peninsula.

-         *  And as always, the Byzantine Museum in Thessaloniki, very well arranged, with descriptions in perfect English, and a valuable source of information for newcomers, who normally know zero about the Eastern Roman Empire.

True, I would have liked to have spent a bit more time in spiritual conversation with experienced monks, but that can be for a next time.

Slava and Anton were manipulating a pretty sophisticated camera between them, and we look forward to the results.

more

It’s like I’m trying to get two forms of Orthodoxy to meet:

- The first is that of a popular and ‘national’ Orthodoxy. The ‘faces’ it takes are of big ceremonies at major religious locations (Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, major monasteries like St Sergius at Serguei Posad or the Monastery of the Caves in Pskov) with senior hierarchs in gaudy vestments, surrounded by candle-bearers and acolytes, long religious marches (Krestni khodi), and pictures of ‘spiritual-looking’ priests, with flowing beards and gaunt faces in bright-coloured vestments, the sort of pictures that illustrate popular religious magazines. I would add, currently and less fortunately, that of priests performing burials in the Ukraine war-zone, surrounded by men in battledress, who clearly do not understand the ceremony, but sense the rite is important and to whom it gives some sort of meaning and closure to their comrades’ deaths. It is a simple, folk religion, into which you enter by being essentially part of a crowd, without asking too many questions. It’s what in bad moments I can ‘priest and peasant’ Orthodoxy.

- The second is the Orthodoxy of the spiritual writers that Orthodox read: the Church Fathers, the Philokalia, and that of Mount Athos.

Right now, it would seem, it is the first type of Orthodoxy that seems to have the wind in its sails, at least in the Russian Church. Orthodoxy as part of a popular culture that the hierarchy seems to be pushing, largely in step with the Russian political machine, which seems to be wanting to paint western culture as disunited and morally depraved.  

This causes a problem in the diaspora, especially its more intellectual, non-Russian part, whose natural proclivity is very much towards the second type. This diaspora also lives within a wider Christian environment (Roman Catholic and Protestant) which has largely lost the first type, even if hankerings remain at the more ‘integrist’ end of the scale, and where the emphasis, especially in Catholicism, is very far from nationalist.

My instincts tell me not to jettison the first type of Orthodoxy. I admit as much as a ‘sociologist’ than as a theologian. Societies need some sort of glue to hold them together, and religion has traditionally provided it, including, paradoxically, giving identity to the liberal anti-clerical group in countries like France, who defined themselves as being ‘not’-Church. My big worry with Europe, as it forgets Christianity, and with a Muslim population in cities of 25%+, is that the glue may not be strong enough. Therefore if, in countries like Russia, Christianity, or religion more generally, can indeed still provide part of the glue that holds societies together, so be it.

This first Orthodoxy reminds me more and more of the Old Testament, and particularly of later Judaism, very much the scene in which Christ himself operated: the popular rites which hold a people together and give identity, both in a physical country and in a wide diaspora. It is the religion of the big gatherings in Jerusalem to which people travelled long distances – remember Christ’s repeated going up from Galilee to the feasts, first with his family, later with his disciples. There the people stood around for long periods, while priests performed rites in a language (classical Hebrew) poorly understood by the people. Religion was deeply woven into the political power structure – and the Gospels, particularly Luke, portraying Christ’s death as his being removed for threatening the ‘symphony’ between the Jewish powers that be (‘the high priests and chief citizens’) and the Roman occupants.

I am very attempted to label this as ‘Pre-Christianity’ – basically one form of what Fritjof Schuon calls ‘religio perennis’, a ‘religiöses Gemeingut’. I have also heard the term, unkind but not far off the mark, of ‘updated Judaism’.

It is religion, it is socially necessary, but it is not full Christianity. My concern right now, both in Russia and the diaspora, is that ‘full Christianity’ is being drowned in it.

A hundred years ago the situation was simple: ‘full Christianity’, was largely the preserve of the more educated part of monasticism, the people (‘narod’) lived pre-Christianity, and the secular priesthood hovered somewhere in between. This situation no longer holds, in particular the more educated laity is no longer ready to accept this pre-Christianity and is demanding ‘full Christianity’. One senses the religious powers-that-be uneasy at this: one way round it (at least in the Orthodox diaspora) being to ‘clergify’ any more intelligent and pious male by putting him in a cassock and vestment and giving him a place in the liturgical dance. (This leaves open the question of intelligent women ….).

How do you hold the two together theologically and practically?

I am very tempted to borrow a solution from both Orthodoxy and Catholicism in talking of Christianity as a series of stages. I think of the ‘Stages of Contemplation’ of St Peter of Damaskos, one of authors with the most pages in the Philokalia, and obviously of St Teresa of Avila, with her Interior Castle. Both make a sharp distinction between a first level: basically ‘keeping of the commandments and try to be good’ and a second level, where one is much more individually grasped by Christ, and, normally in a long process of spiritual struggle, comes into a deep personal relationship with the Trinity. For Peter of Damaskos, the switch point lies between the fourth and fifth of his eight stages of contemplation, for Teresa, after the third of the seven mansions. The two  stages bear a striking resemblance to what I have called ‘pre-Christianity’

Basically, what we are saying is that we are going to have to learn to cater for people at both stages: pre-switch and post-switch. For (Russian) Orthodoxy the big, and very big problem here, is that we have little experience (and sometimes, I fear, little interest) in handling post-switch Christianity at parish level. The Roman Catholics have got better at it, willy-nilly, since the 1970s, basically because, with the five-fold increase in university education in the 1950s and 1960s, it found itself with an educated Fussvolk which could think for itself, and wanted much more say in their own religious practice.

Both sides need each other. I am very far from use that we can run a Church in basically ‘post-switch’ or ‘full Christianity’ mode, even if full Christianity must be both the locomotive and the goal. But we need to allow for a significant part of our more intelligent members, to go ‘post-switch’, on to full Christianity.

The distinction may also offer a theological way out of the present impasse on certain moral issues which are going to bedevil Christianity for the next generation. Pre-switch morality can only differ so far from the general consensus of society: put at its crudest, in a society (Russia, Uganda) where homosexual activity is taboo, pre-switch Christianity will condemn it. In societies like the UK and the USA, where social consensus seems more tolerant, pre-switch morality, those churches offering ‘pre-Christianity’, especially the ‘national’ churches, can be more tolerant. At the post-switch stage of full Christianity, one can allow oneself to stand much more strongly against general social trends.

This distinction, incidentally, offers an interesting alternative take on the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-gatherer, with which we started the long liturgical march to Easter today. In many ways, Pharisee is pre-switch Christianity, a religion which centres on behaving in the right or wrong way. The tax-gatherer is post-switch, having reached that realization of his non-worth and the beginning of tears that start the long ascent (mostly a descent in fact) towards the living God.