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A Mathematician's Journey into Orthodoxy: Ramblings on Becoming Human
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But I'm not sure that describing things this way is the best way to look at things. I could talk about counting blessings, and that is worthwhile enough. But there is another way of looking it besides trying to find a way to claim more than a moral victory.
As best I remember the story of one saint, the Theotokos appeared in a dream to a Serbian prince the night before a battle and presented him with a choice: he could win earthly victory, or he could win a Heavenly victory. He chose a Heavenly victory, and in the end the earthly battle was very close, but he lost it.
Perhaps it is not the best thing to think that real success is explicit earthly success and you say there is a moral victory as a consolation prize when someone's heart was in the right place but he was defeated. The Serbian prince was exceptional in that he chose a moral victory!
The Apostle Paul, at the end of his life, wrote an epistle to St. Timothy. He knew that he was soon to be executed, and he had accomplished quite a lot: no one had planted more churches; he had written a good chunk of the Bible; he had raised the dead. And yet what he wrote to St. Timothy was simply, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." (II Tim. 4:7): in other words, when St. Paul was writing his last epistles, he did not say, "I achieved." He said, "I was faithful." And that says a lot to me.
In the Book of Job, we are told that St. Job was blameless and upright before God. He offers sacrifices for his children against the possibility that they might curse God in their hearts. We are also told something St. Job is never told: Satan, the Accuser, the Slanderer, who stands before God slandering his saints day and night, said that he had been wandering around, searching, and apparently not finding whatever he was searching for. Then God asks Satan to consider his servant St. Job, a man who is upright. And the Slanderer says that St. Job is only serving God because God has made him extraordinarily prosperous. Take that away--the Slanderer says--and St. Job will curse God to his face. So God allows this, and St. Job loses his children and all his wealth. His wife tells him to curse God and die. The second round of this, after a saint who has lost all his prosperity refuses to "curse God and die," the Slanderer only deepens his slander: a man will give everything for his health, and if God were only to let Satan strike Job's physical health, he would curse God to his face. When God allows this, St. Job is in anguished misery. And he does curse the day of his birth. But he never, ever curses God, however much he is told, "Curse God and die!"
Then three "comforters" come, and after sitting in him for a week in silence because his misery is so great, they begin to correct him. They assure Job that God is just, and furthermore, since God is just, only the guilty are punished, and if St. Job is being punished, he needs to repent of the sins God is punishing. And St. Job cries out to God and cries out that someone would bring God before him and let him press his case against God. And after long and touching rounds of speeches, one more dissatisfied person speaks, and then the Lord answers St. Job out of the whirlwind, tells St. Job he has things backwards: God will question him, and he will answer God: Who is this who speaks such confusion? Brace yourself! Where were you when I created the stars and the sons of God shouted for joy? Do you know the end of the natural world? Can you pull up the crocodile with a fishhook?
God questions St. Job at length, and St. Job says: I had heard of you, but now I have seen you with my own eye. I am nothing before you.
Once that is taken care of, God rebukes St. Job's "comforters," and doubles what Job had in the beginning.
And St. Job finally gets it. He has wanted someone to bring God before him and help him press a case against God, and God gave him something infinitely greater than what he wanted: what St. Job needs. He thought he needed help sorting things out. What he needs is God, and however nice it might be that the saint receives even greater worldly blessings after this whole ordeal, the real happy ending is that Job encounters God. Even if--or especially if--his response showed that he got it: I despise myself, and I repent in sackcloth and ashes.
At this point I would like to affirm something I implied earlier but must have seemed stranger and stranger through my narrative: that in telling my story I am describing a journey, from a vision of Hell, to the life of Heaven lived here on earth. The first piece I talked about, Yonder, was described as a journey from Hell to Heaven, but one in which the vision of Heaven included intense suffering. But I maintain quite strongly that it is a glimpse of Heaven. Even if it ends only with a moral victory--espcially if it ends only with a moral victory.
Which is not my case. My options for a Ph.D. are rather limited, and I've tried listing some quite impressive accomplishments and saying, "I don't have a Ph.D., but I've learned a lot; will you hire me?" It hasn't worked yet, and I don't know that if only I learn to communicate better I'll be able to do this.
But I'm really not in the weighty position of "only" claiming victory on a moral plane. Besides a number of awards, I have my website, with the literature section, which has some popularity and whose purpose is to share and showcase my creations--which mean a lot to me and seem to mean something to some other people as well. The creation of those works is an outflow of the process described earlier for my most cherished works, and the process is a synergy of waiting on the Lord, striving, and getting myself out of the way. My website is a tangible success. And I have two master's degrees--one in math from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one in theology from the University of Cambridge, plus a few things not detailed here because they didn't fit the story (i.e. the Certificat Semestriel, Niveau Supéreiur I from the Université de Sorbonne and a single advanced math class from the University of Chicago taken just before I entered high school at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy). The picture does not include a Ph.D., but neither is it the usual picture of being undereducated.
And again, I'm not sure I have been setting things in a bright ebough light. The reason I wanted to earn a Ph.D. was because I wanted to be a professor at an Orthodox seminary. Perhaps God doesn't want that, or perhaps he does want that and has picked out a better way to get me equipped. (Perhaps he has already been equipping me, and is equipping me now.) I'm not sure it is really my place to figure that out right now: each day has enough responsibilities of its own.
Let me return to St. Job. In the Book of Job, St. Job's victory is profound. We are told something in the beginning which St. Job is never allowed to see, even in the happy ending. We are told of the celestial arena, where all the world is a stage and none of us are extras, where the angels and demons watch as St. Job struggles, wrestles, and fights as God's champion. His innocent suffering, "The Lord gives and the Lord has taken away: blessed be the name of the Lord," "Though he slay me, yet shall I praise him," is ultimately St. Job's eternal victory. The story is, in the end, not only the story of God vindicates his suffering servant; it is the story of how God lays his honor on the line with the behavior of his children; it is ultimately the story of how St. Job, the suffering servant, vindicates God.
(The Book of Job doesn't just tell how the Slanderer sets out to prove that St. Job's faith is like an onion, with Satan tearing off layer after layer to show that there is nothing inside. The story also tells how God peels off the "nothing," to show that there is everything inside.)
I would like to pause for a moment to mention something that keeps cropping up. In loose terms, what happens in the situation is this. I enter a social situation where, socially speaking, a particular person is fairly clearly the "king of the hill." And things go well for a while, but after a while things start to change, and the person appears offended at me, probably quite offended, and starts to criticize me--abrasively and voluminously--perhaps, or perhaps pressure me to make disruptive changes to how I live, or perhaps provide me with unsolicited spiritual direction.
The standard advice is, more or less, "Let the other person be the 'king of the hill,' and let things run their course so that the other person is satisfied as an alpha dog with you accepting a lower place on the totem pole. Kowtow, don't fight back, and be as diplomatic, gracious, humble, and respectful as you can." And I've not found that advice to produce the desired effect--I've found that once someone starts trying to "help me" in this fashion, there is nothing that will create satisfaction in the original "king of the hill" that the original person is still "king of the hill" and I am not a threat. Trying to humbly let things run their course and simply trying not to directly add fuel to the fire to not work much better than using a "gently let things run their course" to work as a strategy when a forest fire has started.
(It was out of these "I have no mouth and I must scream" experiences that I wrote The Wagon, the Blackbird, and the Saab.)
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A Mathematician's Journey into Orthodoxy: Ramblings on Becoming Human
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