When the Homily is about Immunology

Listening from a distance

Everyone in the lab here knows that myself and another coworker are religious...the extent to which they know this and how they interpret such an understanding is largely unknown to me though. However, they must have thought it odd yesterday at lunch that we two (admittedly the most religious - perhaps ONLY religious persons present) remained silent as the others around the table began discussing issues that were decidedly religious: marriage vs. living together and whether the latter was "sinful." Sadly, I missed some of the context but did manage to hear enough to gain some insight - which suprisingly does seem to happen when one keeps their big mouths shut.

One thing I noticed was word useage. In "secular" settings, when any moral or religious topic arises it seems that people preface everything they say with the language of individuality: "I think...I believe...for me..." etc etc. Of course we recognize that this is nothing new, we live in a society that is increasingly weary of consenting to anything other than subjective truths in the realm of morality and religion. But for me, the expression of this subjectivism was palpable yesterday...I could smell and taste it, so thick it was in the room. Marriage lost the day of course...it was once again downgraded to nothing more than a legal contract useful for little more than changing names. As a protestant society - lacking a sacramental understanding - could we expect anything more? Is this not the logical conclusion to the experiment we began some 500 years ago or so? Truly, I see a clear and direct connection between Sola Scriptura (understood in my context as Scripture being the sole authority and each "informed" [or perhaps even otherwise] individual has the right - indeed obligation - to personal interpretation) and moral ambiguity.

Seriously, I should like to see ANY protestant argument for the importance of marriage that will not collapse like a house of cards by the simple statement made by a coworker yesterday: "If we are committed to one another and we promise to remain so, how are we not married in God's eyes?"

What could I have said to these people as they ran marriage through the modern western legal dungheep? Thankfully, no one stopped to ask what I thought...and so I just listened and lamented - truly I did. It was a sad sort of pulse-taking of our society and where we are headed. Had I been asked (as I told my other religious coworker later), I know what I would have said:

What good is it for me to try and tell you whether I think you are "living in sin"? In discussing such things, we must understand that we are leaping intellectually from two very different platforms. We would in essence be trying to install different windows in a home for which the foundation has not yet even been poured.

I should have asked them all: "What is sin?" For I should have VERY much liked to get their opinions on THAT topic. Of course we are a culture of inbred legal understandings....knowing next to nothing about the Eastern Patristic medicinal understanding of sin.

The individuality factor is striking to me still though. What makes us, as individual so damn confident that we can discern religious and moral truth all by our little selves? Is it the fact that we come to believe that said truths are only valid for ourselves to begin with? Perhaps. Who cannot easily pontificate on matters believed to be solely intended for themselves? Much like a child surrounded by a large collection of toys, all for his or her self - just waiting for the child to invent his own little play world.

I wonder if this is not why Orthodoxy sometimes seem so strange to us - it seemingly invites us out of our own little "play worlds" in order to teach us to play with all the others milling about the big playground. As such, there is a tradition to follow which has been discerned by others who have played on the plaground before and have left them for us, to assist us in our playing and to keep us from having to find such things out on our own: with bruises and scrapes (or worse!). There are "playground" truths that are applicable to everyone, but they are not like the truths I work with here in this lab.

I work with truths that are laws...so called laws of nature. Morality and sin are not like this. There is not necceasarily a direct and empirically evidential consequence to my cheating on my wife - certainly there could be, but the fact that sometimes you can get away with it without obvious consequences tends to alienate the truth of it being a "sin" from the truth of say DNA replication neccesarily having to take place with the assistance of a protein called Polymerase. No, the things of God run deeper than what we see, hear, feel, smell or touch...there is indeed a 6th sense: the eye of the soul as it is sometimes called. Here it is that we find the neccesary consequence to sin, for we blind ourselves and yet we do not even know it.

This "truth" is where we meet the Person who is the Real Truth.

Have I babbled enough?