Critical Comments
Submitted by Dirk Gently on May 11 2000 23:25:06
In reply to A long Statement -- Critical Comments Welcome! submitted by Chislon on May 10 2000 20:17:47
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Hello, Chislon. I must admit I'm rather puzzled by one of your statements. You said, Regardless of who these leaders are, they are older than the young one and most often have reached a spiritual level of maturity unparalleled by even the most devout Christian. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but that seems to imply that these leaders are not Christians. Although I have a very deep and loving relationship with my own father, one of the things which drew me to the Orthodox Church was precisely the understanding of the need for a spiritual father. This is embedded in the New Testament, and has always been an integral part of the Church. A humble parish priest is no less a father in Christ than one of the 19th century Russian startsi, or one of the Athonite monks alive today. "You might have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet you do not have many fathers" according to St. Paul, who went on to say that in Christ Jesus he had begotten the Corinthians through the gospel. (See 1 Corinthians 4 for the context.) I have had the great privilege of meeting my spiritual father's spiritual father. He is a Romanian monk who endured torture for the sake of Christ, and spent two of his eleven years in prison in solitary confinement. His "crime" was teaching children about Christ. By the end of his confinement, and even to this day, he feels only love towards his captors. If you know anything at all about the persecution endured by Christians under Communist regimes, you will understand what an astounding statement that is. Perhaps you are not speaking in ignorance when you said that "these leaders" are most often more spiritually mature than "even the most devout Christian," but I suspect you just don't know what you're talking about. The blood of the martyrs testifies against you, my friend, and there have been more Christian martyrs in the 20th century than in the preceding two thousand years combined. I've been to Russia. I've seen the holes in the side of a monastery church left there when the monks were lined up and gunned down by the Communists. I've read about Mother Maria, a Russian nun living in Paris who took the place of a Jewish woman in a Nazi oven. I'm close friends with an Iranian who was imprisoned and tortured when he converted to Christianity from Islam. He is only alive today because an evangelical missionary helped him escape the country. You and I have CNN to teach us about suffering. Christians in the rest of the world have been baptized in blood. Don't be so quick to discount their spiritual maturity based on your own limited experience. Since you seem to think so poorly of Christians, the question presents itself to me: Do you consider yourself to be a Christian? I guess all of the above sounds rather antagonistic, but I really can't think of anything that I should leave out. At least we're agreed upon the dire need for spiritual mentors! Dirk |
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