Читать книгу Heresy - Frank P. Spinella - Страница 7

Chapter 1

She always arrives just before dusk, perching on the same branch, watching, waiting. Compared to other Pharaoh eagle-owls I have seen, she is on the smallish side, but with those piercing yellow-orange eyes that take everything in, missing nothing—including me. We have an understanding, she and I. It is simply this: we are to keep our respectful distance.

Several times have I seen her take flight, soaring with a grace that belies her deadly purpose. When she hunts for rodents in the failing light, she is awesome to watch: a silent, devastating dive toward her prey, seizing it with talons far too strong to permit any consideration of escape (as if her victim could consider anything at all in the shock of the moment), snatching it from the ground and up ever higher into the terrifying sky with the fearsome beating of her powerful wings.

But I do not come here to watch a hunter.

I come to pray. Here on the outskirts of Alexandria, on the western shore of Lake Mareotis, its cool waters fed by canals from the Nile, I pray aloud. I pray that God hears me. But what does he hear? Is it my words only, or the thoughts of my heart that words can but poorly express? Does he see in my heart a genuine desire to be submissive to his will, or only a conditional one, tempered by human frailty and restricted to that which is not too difficult, not too inconvenient? I know which. God sees all. More than this owl sees.

How hard it is to pray sincerely sometimes! All too often I find my words encumbered by other thoughts. Even when those words are divinely scripted, even as I pray as the Lord taught us to pray, I find that I cannot slow my mind from distractions. I pray aloud, “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven,” but I think to myself, is God’s will not always done? Scripture reports that Job said to God, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.” Doesn’t that make it pointless to pray that God’s will be done? Who can resist it? Yet I know that the Lord would never institute an irrelevancy. He wants us to desire the same things as God. He asks us to conform our wills to God’s. And stilling the mind is always the first step toward discerning God’s will.

I am young, and unskilled in the art of meditation. The cares of my world intrude, and weigh heavily on my shoulders—my studies at the Catechetical School, my secretarial service to the Bishop, my writing, my duties as a new deacon. Somehow I must find a way to cast them all aside for a moment. Here, now, sitting under this tree, I must put them out of mind and trust that God will call out to me. I know that he sees me sitting here. The way Jesus saw Nathanael sitting under the fig tree before Philip called out to him to “come and see” the son of Joseph from Nazareth. Nathanael got up, came and saw, saw that Jesus knew him already, knew there was no deceit in his heart; and Nathanael asked in bewilderment how, how did Jesus know him. “I saw you under the fig tree,” was Jesus’ simple answer. Nothing more. At once Nathanael replied with a declaration that defied all logic, a conclusion that could not rationally be drawn from Jesus’ mere vision of him under the tree: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God!”

Jesus waits for my like reply. Will it form on my lips as readily as it did on Nathanael’s? Will it rise up from my heart? “The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart,” Paul wrote to the Romans. Let it be so!

And so I pray. I pray to confess in my heart that Jesus Christ is truly God, to feel its truth in the depths of my being. No mere intellectual assent to the conclusion, as though it were a geometrical proof distilled from undoubted axioms, will suffice here. No amount of study, whether of the Scriptures or of the writings of church fathers—all of which I have scrutinized extensively for many years—can yield the certainty I seek. That can come only from the Spirit. Inspiration, not logic, sparked Nathanael’s conclusion, and must spark mine as well. If, as Paul declared to the Corinthians, “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit,” how much more is the Spirit’s guidance needed for one to say “Jesus is God.” How much more blessed are those who, not having seen, yet believe, and declare with Thomas that Jesus is “My Lord and my God.”

At the Catechetical School many of my fellow deacons argue that Thomas’ twofold declaration was redundant, that “Lord” and “God” are functionally equivalent. They point to the Hebrew Scriptures’ use of the word “Lord” as a stand-in for the unutterable name of God, time and again—and they argue from this that Jesus’ divinity must be entailed by his lordship. They quote David’s Psalm, ‘The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool,’” and insist that David must have used “my lord” as a title of divinity. But the Hebrew word that the Greek renders as “my lord” is regularly employed to describe an earthly rather than a divine being. David is no exception; even after Saul anointed him king, David referred to Saul as “my lord.” How, then, can we know whether “my lord” in his Psalm was intended to refer to a divine being or a human one?

I think of Simon Peter’s quotation of the same Psalm when he proclaimed at Pentecost that “God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified,” and wonder how the Jews who were converted that day understood his words. God made him Lord? Perhaps so; lordship can be granted or inherited. But God made him God? The very concept would have been almost unintelligible to any Jew! Surely Simon Peter, no less than the Jews in his audience, understood that “God” and “Lord” were not equivalent concepts. One refers to the Supreme Being; the other is simply an acknowledgement of sovereignty and dominion, equivalent to “master.” The logical leap from “Jesus is Lord” to “Jesus is God” is as great as Nathanael’s.

If anything, Simon Peter’s words widen the logical gap for me. If God made him Lord, doesn’t that suggest he was not Lord to begin with, and received power and glory only later as a reward for his obedience to the Father’s will? Yet that is precisely what the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah implies: God allotted him “a portion with the great” for agreeing to die for our sins. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians likewise teaches that “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on the cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name.” The Letter to the Hebrews is even more explicit, suggesting that Christ endured the cross “for the sake of the joy that was set before him,” and now “has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.” And that is where Simon Peter’s speech at Pentecost places him, “exalted at the right hand of God.” But this notion of exalting Christ as a reward troubles me. After all, if he was truly God, he could not have been made Lord; that station would already have been his automatically, and not a reward for sacrifice. How could it be otherwise? Suppose the cup had passed him by; what would have happened then? An empty seat in the throne room of heaven?

Once again, I am being too analytical. I must find a way to halt this cascading river of rationalization running through my mind, before it deprives the day of its prayerful possibilities. Prayer is a contemplative journey, and like any other journey it requires preparation—but unlike physical journeys, this one requires us not to pack but to unpack. So much baggage! The gentle lapping of the lake at the shoreline soothes me as I strive to empty my mind of distractions and open myself to the Spirit, to the chance for inspiration, for insight. A soft breeze dances off the water, bending the tips of the reeds in the shallows; I inhale it deeply. Relaxing every part of my body, I close my eyes and breathe slowly, dispelling all thoughts until even my consciousness of waiting for insight is gone.

Suddenly what washes over me instead—or perhaps this is the insight—can only be described as a premonition, yet one so palpably real it is as though I am hearing Christ’s words speaking to me aloud. They are words of warning:

There is danger approaching, Athanasius!

My eyes tighten shut even more; I hold my breath. Yes, Lord, I can sense something. I can feel it in the pit of my stomach, almost sickening me!

Someone is coming to attack us!

Yes, Lord; but who is it? Is a new persecution about to be mounted by Rome? No, somehow I sense that this is different. More insidious. My pulse races and my skin grows clammy. I try to concentrate, but the effort is self-defeating; the contours of this peril to the Faith become more elusive the more I try to bring it into focus, like a shadowy imperfection on the cornea, just off center, floating away as the eye vainly attempts to follow it and pull it back from the periphery. I cannot make it out clearly.

The cryptic warning fades as quickly as it arrived, and the wave of nausea passes. Still shaking, I exhale deeply, my quivering palms pushing beads of sweat from my brow up over my scalp. If infidels are truly arriving to storm the gates of Christ’s kingdom, I will not be able to discern them today.

But perhaps it was nothing. Just as dreams can reveal either truth or fantasy, this might have been fantasy. One can all too easily mistake the surfacing of one’s own latent fears for divine insight.

Darkness overtakes the day. The owl soars somewhere above; I have lost sight of her. It is time to return to the city.