If you are a longtime Christian and wonder about our journey from Franciscan religious life in Haiti to our final home in Holy Orthodoxy, then please read, "Following Francis to the Church". If you are new to Christianity, then please read on.
On this remote island in Polynesia, people say we live in "the Garden of Eden," but in saying this, their hearts are fixed upon the world, not really on Paradise. Eden is the original scene of life in harmony among living creatures and with God. Eden is the first family, the first society, the proto-Church, and a mysterious past-present-future that pierces the heart, lays open the soul, and probes the nerves and sinews of our faith.
The elements of our faith, our belief, begin at the beginning: the Breath of Divine Being, the Logos, creates all things "and without Him nothing was made that was made" (Jn 1:3). All things partake in His Divinity, and the whole Creation stirs in goodness animated by Divine Fire. He then sets a Signature upon the Masterwork: His Own Image expressed in the form of human creatures. Here is perfection: an ineffable balance of the noetic and the material, of the spiritual and the physical, of soul and body .... and one more necessary element: freedom. For without freedom the magic of living beings suddenly collapses into the dead and the robotic — mere puppetry. The essence of our Creator's living art, then, is Eden .... lost through human choice.
Think of the range of human choice. Humans might choose for the all-noetic becoming purely spiritual beings or the all-body becoming more a gross clod of earth than an angel. Perfection lies in balance: the lightness of Being Personified in the Creator, Whom we call the Christ, Who insists on the royal dignity of the Body by resurrecting His own (Jn 20:27), yet is He Divine, the highest expression of Spirit (Jn 4:24).
Our faith, then, must always center on the return to Eden, the perfection of this balance. When Jesus is sent to gather the Lost Sheep of Israel, He continues a process that began with the formation of the Land of Promise and the setting apart of a people to recover Eden — God's ideal for human life.
As Eden is the primal scene for God's fully noetic human creatures, we understand that all people were made to be permanent. Perhaps humans were the only creatures made to to be holy and made to be permanent. In our own time people have discovered that they are permanent. With the advent of CPR, millions upon millions have verified that life continues after death. Eden's depiction of eternal human life is reliable and true. The great question of our brief lives on earth is where we will live forever — in harmony with God or eternally separated from God?
We see in the Person of Jesus the God-man a perfect harmony between man and God. In this sense the Lord Jesus is Eden. And He invites us into that eternal fellowship and harmony. In fact, God is relationship.
We believe that harmony among all people is God's will. He commands that we love Him and love each other for His sake. For each human life begins in Him and ends in Him. In this sense each human journey is holy .... though places along this path may not be.
That is, while each of is born in perfect innocence and blamelessness, we have the power to choose to leave Eden. We may bargain away purity, happiness, and communion with God for things not-of-God. In that sense, at birth each of us begins in Eden. We may choose as our first parents did for the forbidden. For once there were two people who had everything in the world. But they wanted more than everything. Today, our most serious problems are rooted in this more: the sick state of our planet, the sick state of our oceans, the sick state of our nation, the sick state of our lives and our souls. God calls us to simplicity even intentional poverty, to strip ourselves back to our first innocence. This is a return to Eden, marking a great turning point for our ailing souls, for our ailing society, for our ailing planet.
Who does not yearn to recover the wonder and purity of childhood or to feel at-one with the world God created shimmering in its primal beauty? These vestiges of paradise still radiate stirring wonder and purity within ourselves. In this, we retain a link with Eden — a paradise within that has been lost yet still can be regained. But we cannot go on, loving both the world and God.
Eden is the type of solitude with God. Creation packed into an ark on a vast ocean is Eden. The Sinai Wilderness where a liberated people lived alone with God is Eden. The Land of Promise where God's people are welcomed is Eden. A rocking boat or a desert waste may not seem like paradise to us. Yet it is enough to be alone with God. For Eden is an affair of the heart and a state of soul. The Kingdom of Heaven is within. Alternatively, the place where God is absent, however pleasant-seeming, is the anti-Eden, which is Pandemonium, all demons. For wherever God is not present, demons flood into the void. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the spiritual realm even more.
The Lord Jesus is Eden. Even as He hung upon the Cross the great compass of the world, He pointed us back to Eden. For upon each the compass are written four cardinal points, which in Greek spell "A," "D," "A," "M," the "old man" whom He redeemed and the new Adam Who He is.
Being followers of Jesus Christ, Who is our King, our Lord, our Brother, and our God, we are deeply committed to worship Him the same way the Apostles did, as the Undivided Church did for a thousand years, celebrating what was universally called the Fractio panis, the Breaking of Bread. We hear His command: "Do this!" No other scene is better attested than Jesus' exhortation to eat His Body and to drink His Blood found in the Synoptic Gospels as well as the Pauline Correspondence. In the Gospel According to St. John, Jesus says,
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"Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son
of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you" (John 6:53). |
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Now it came to pass, as He sat at the table with them,
that He took Bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him. (Lu 24:30-31) |
This is not the scene of ritual ministrations of a dead man's Body and Blood but quite the opposite. This gathering proclaims Life, Who is the Victor over death. In His first miracle He turned water to wine. In His last, He turned wine into His most precious Blood, unlocking the doors to Paradise. After many of his disciples abandoned Him over this "hard saying," He asked the Twelve, "Will you also leave me?"
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But Simon Peter answered Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life." |
We at the Hermitage practice the Evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity (abstinence), obedience, and stability. We are obedient to the Gospel life, to our Patriarch and to our Primate who embody the Church through the Succession of Apostles. We invite people from all over the world to join us in spiritual fellowship looking to the saints in light to lead us, to pray for us, and to guide us as we seek to fulfill and complete our royal likeness to God.
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