Our age chiefly dreams up and manufactures simulacra. Shopping malls are adorned with plants and trees that look real but aren’t. Television and movie studios present us with times, places, and environments that don’t exist. Advertisements refer us to worlds that have no connection with reality. Men and women are painted and dyed, fakes and shams, copies of which no original has ever existed, not a few of them surgically altered, to show the world faces which aren’t true, ages which deceive, and genders that do not correspond to hormones and anatomy. The extravagant (and extravagantly wasteful) hegemony of «appearances» has destroyed the essence and distinctive presence of that which «is».
Still worse, all of this has penetrated our thinking and disfigured our life, including our spiritual life. We often speak about the brilliance of modern science and how it seemingly agrees with religion; about the value of democracy, which permits the church to function freely; and of course about human rights as if they were the greatest value of which we could conceive. And yet, we all know that science has made us more arrogant than ever, because in the place of God we have set up the idol of self-worshipping man, while democracy has replaced the will of God with our selfish and irrational personal choices and preferences, and human rights permit everything except the right of God to intervene in our life, to function as God.
Thus we have become Christians who try to accomplish things unaided by God and who find it difficult to entrust ourselves to the grace of God. Christians who struggle to uncover on their own the secrets of God, and not men and women who patiently expect the revelation of God’s glory. Christians who are seeking rest and tranquility and who have no experience of inner peace. Christians who hear the word «love» and immediately think of some sort of ego-centered sympathy or pathological attachment.
And this mentality has made its way into our worship. Our altars are covered with fabrics which appear hand-sewn and woven, but which aren’t. The vestments of our clergy, and the holy chalice itself, sparkle with what appears to be gold and precious stones, but which are not. Our icons conjure up days of old, but they are cheap paper copies, with no color, cost, time, labor or life. We minutely photograph and record sacraments and other services, and yet have great difficulty in seeing God’s presence in them. We call our outings and vacations «pilgrimages», but our soul is incapable of egress from its prison, incapable of making its way into the wilderness for a real encounter with God. We «visit» various holy places, but the «visitation» of the Holy Spirit is nowhere evident in our life. We indulge and satisfy our physical senses, but inwardly we are starving. We are filled with useless and untimely theological knowledge, but are impoverished in terms of rich spiritual experiences. Our «spiritual study» takes place in cold, competitive, and fear-filled classrooms, or in the comfort of our living and bedrooms, devoid of any disposition or inclination for asceticism, self-mortification or sacrifice. As for the sacred texts themselves, we use them—not to humble ourselves—but to exalt ourselves over others, to concoct self-serving theories, or to confuse reality with our fantasies and dreams [. . .] Intellectual, academic knowledge, memorized and parroted, experienced as stress and expressed through tension and diffusive speech, takes the place of true personal experience which is confirmed in silence, inner peace, and tears. We chew up antiquity seeking to justify our own personal views and opinions, and find it difficult to generate new knowledge which at once humbles us and embraces others.
Thus contemporary spirituality often appears wearing a mask of delusion. In its essence it is nothing more than a self-chosen religiosity and imitative traditionalism, which is little more than the expression of a morbid, emotional attachment to certain forms, rules, external patterns, customs or persons. It is the triumph of false conservatism. And it leads only to false virtues, and states of deception, satisfying the devil and wounding God. It cultivates inner passions and weaknesses, hardens the heart, makes us hypocrites, and has no connection with the Spirit of God or the tradition of the Church. It is but a pseudo-authenticity, which has exchanged faith in God for quick fixes and cheap tricks, twisting religious experience into false-impressions, confusion, agitation, and turmoil.
~By Metropolitan Nicholas (Hatzinikolaou) of Mesogaias, Anthropos Methorios (Athens 2005), cited by Father Maximos of Simonopetra (Mount Athos), Professor of Theology, Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology
