Entries in Life

danlyke recently paid me a high compliment by posting a very thoughtful response on Flutterby to the Fr Alexander quote in my bit on spiritual thirst.

Belief is indisputibly subjective. But danlyke seems to claim that only objective truth has any merit because that is the only way to understand the world.

Not surprisingly, Fr Alex has a response to this:

Science studies nature. But isn't it true that the study of nature can also be approached quite differently, through poetry, music and art? And isn't it true that they reveal something other about nature, something just as true and perhaps even much more necessary for us?

  About what are you wailing, wind of night?
    What do you so frantically lament? …

  In a language the heart can comprehend you speak…
                                  (Fedor Tiutchev)

Are these just mindless and absurd words absolutely unrelated to life, or does this poetry unmask the lies of the ideologues who deny something self-evident to all: that everything in the world and life both conceals and reveals some deeper meaning, witnesses to a kind of mysterious presence; everything holds out the promise and pledge of an “other” knowlege, an “other” understanding.

… Christianity understands revelation [not as] simply a strange and inexplicable manifestation of some sort, but is something which man's own experience confirms.

To this I would only add that I don't view my relationships through an objecive lens (it would be impossible for me, in any case, to be objective about my own relationships), but I find value in those relationships anyway … because of their subjective importance. Consider, then, that the core of both Fundamentalist and Orthodox Christianity is not objective truth, but a relationship with Christ.