When the Homily is about Immunology

Escaping to Utopia

Also in the same aforementioned edition of Divine Ascent they published the transcripts from a talk that Fr. Alexander Schmemann gave way back in 1981 entitled “Between Utopia and Escape.” I encourage everyone to read it, for as I did so, I was privvy to discover that I am guilty of often wavering back and forth between utopia and escape and I wonder if such wavering is not the cause of some of my angst I have been sensing lately.

For those who won’t read it, I thought I might tempt you with a few choice quotes, one of which had my laughing outloud on the bus this morning (I’ll let you decide which one):

Maybe it is a caricature of the great belief of the 20th century that discussion always leads somewhere... I think that it always leads nowhere - I mean this is my very personal view. Not only that, but also all those discussions create realities, which otherwise would have never existed. As a result, half of Christendom confessed the "sin" of having produced Saint Francis or the Mass of Bach, or the Messiah of Handel, or a symbolic system, in which one minute of time can be pregnant with the whole of eternity, where not happiness, not equality, but — joy, spiritual joy, the joy of seeing the light of the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor is the real human vocation…

…And now we are obliged to mobilize ourselves and join every possible activism, whether it’s called "liberation theology" or "the theology of urbanism," or "the theology of the sexual fulfillment"… The word "theology" used to mean "words about God." Now it may also mean words about sex, or contraceptives…

…As an Orthodox priest I can see the forms it [escapism] takes in our Church: we have people who do not care what is going on in the world. They have discovered The Icon. Or, of course, one of the areas, into which one can endlessly escape, is a discussion of the high-church, low-church, and middle-church liturgical practices. Vestments... Modern or archaic... You can hear people saying, "But that isn’t right: in the third century in eastern Egypt..." — and you already feel that the Transfiguration has begun. The third century in Egypt, or in Mesopotamia, or wherever it is — as long as it is not in Chicago, New York, London or Paris. As long as this Epiphany or Theophany takes place somewhere in some impossible land! In Caesarea of Cappadocia... — that is music itself: Cappadocia, it already gives you the feeling that you are in the right religious school, you know. Introduce Chicago into that religion, and it spoils the whole dream, the whole sweetness, the whole thing…

…the church is not a little forum for social reforms. It introduces, it reiterates the single fact that the history of the world’s redemption, for which we are responsible, takes place in our hearts, and that Kingdom, that light, which comes to us, is the only power left with us — the realized, inaugurated eschatology of the Kingdom and, at the same time, the real knowledge of the Kingdom. The knowledge that nothing is solved by recipes and therapies, but, when a man decides to know the truth of all things…

…Sometimes, I feel like I joined a kind of metaphysical Peace Corps made out of Christianity. Very often in Geneva, when I used to go to ecumenical meetings, I heard the expression "churches, synagogues, and other agencies." I was not baptized into an agency. And I think that everyone is free not to be part of an agency. Keep me out of it…

…The fundamental Christian eschatology has been destroyed by either the optimism leading to the Utopia, or by the pessimism leading to the Escape. If there are two heretical words in the Christian vocabulary, they would be "optimism" and "pessimism." These two things are utterly anti-biblical and anti-Christian…

Now…having read all of this and really seeing the wisdom in it…I don’t have any idea how to make it practical? I mean, seriously, what does this understanding…this realization that I have a tendency to be a utopian and an escapist do to me with regard to my everyday actions? Is it simply an attitude change? Does it make me vote differently?

Consider these tough questions: What led you to Orthodoxy, escapism or utopianism? Does the life of your parish express one extreme or the other?