Sufficient Pressure – January 18, 2019
First I want to apologize for the slight rambling quality of this post. I am a very logic oriented individual, and while I exist quite well within the mystery and cloud of unknowing, sometimes something sparks and intellectual train of thought that causes me to connect the dots between the Cataphatic and Apophatic sides of the theological fence. Here is the latest instance of the ramblings of an Orthodox Deacon 🙂
I was introduced to Nowak’s evolvability equation this evening. It is the idea (at least in my understanding of it) that the means for the replication of life to emerge are molecules subject to forces of selection and mutation. When I heard this, my mind thought of sufficient pressures and conditions in order for life to emerge in inhospitable or changing environments. After this, my mind immediately moved to recent scientific announcements that echo what the Church has already known and practiced for nearly two thousand years.
Recently science has shown that fasting twice a week is of great benefit to our health, and this is something that Christians have practiced since the first century, and even the Jews for centuries before them. It has been revealed that frankincense and myrrh are a psychoactive anti depressant, and this is burned in every divine liturgy and prayer service, which serves towards the healing of soul and body. Beauty is a convincing power of truth, as Plato would say, and “exists to reach us and make us capable of recieving the message in a way that convinces us: to the extent each of us is capable of receiving, the message, so completely as we can contain in, but completely” (Bloom); and nearly all Orthodox Churches are adorned in great beauty via architecture, hymns, icons and the like, all directing us to “Godward” gaze to encounter His divine light. We set our services to chants and singing, not only presenting our services amidst a procession of aural beauty, but to put words to music helping us engrave them into our memories, writing the words onto our very hearts. The Christian creation story, Creation ex Nihilo, is the only one that makes sense within existing scientific ideologies. The Christian understanding of the human being, a divine-human Anthropology, is the only one that brings wholeness to humanity, and personhood. Sometimes it feels as though science is only now starting to catch up to faith, even though many seem to argue the opposite.
Going back to Nowak’s evolvability equation, though not a direct parallel to the initial understanding and meaning of the equation, I see all these things mentioned, the prescriptions of the Church, directing us to the willing submission to sufficient pressures and conditions to make us right for the conditions of life after death, the pressures of asceticism, sacrifice, and existence apart from this world. That it is only within these conditions, the prescriptions of the Church, and life within the Church, that will prepare us properly for what lies beyond our final breath. If we cannot abandon this world, the comforts of this world, our attachments of this world and all the things therein, then when we fall into our eternal rest, we will forever be looking back with eager longing for what is gone, missing the divine light shining eternally in our presence. We look away from God, and never experience the joy of divine love, for He is love.