Everywhere Present by Fr. Stephen Freeman
Chapter 1: The Shape of The Universe
When the dead were buried, they were generally dead and gone. There was little conversation about heaven, even less about hell.
What was clear in all this was the finality of death. There was an unspoken distance between the living and the dead, and nothing was to disturb it. No one seemed to notice that God Himself was separated from us by the same distance.
I have come to think of this modern cultural construct as the “two-storey universe.” It is as though the universe were a two-storey house: We live here on earth, the first floor, where things are simply things and everything operates according to normal, natural laws, while God lives in heaven, upstairs, and is largely removed from the storey in which we live. To effect anything here, God must interrupt the laws of nature and perform a miracle. Exactly how often He does this is a matter of debate among Christians and many others within our culture—often measured by just how conservative or liberal their religion may be. The effects of this distance are all-encompassing in the area of religious experience and belief, and frequently in other areas as well.
The two-storey universe is another way of describing a secular culture. The word secular should never be confused with atheist. Instead it refers to a separation between our daily life and God. This separation had its foundation in the religious and political wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The easiest way to achieve peace between warring religious factions was to remove religious debate from the sphere of daily living. At first this segregation was achieved by declaring separate religions for separate countries.
Chapter 2: Sitting In A Cave In Mar Saba
What I found in the monastery was much more than a cramped cave: I found an outpost of the one-storey universe.
St. Athanasius describes this in his On the Incarnation of the Word:
For God had made man thus (that is, as an embodied spirit), and had willed that he should remain in incorruption. But men, having turned from the contemplation of God to evil of their own devising, had come inevitably under the law of death. Instead of remaining in the state in which God had created them, they were in process of becoming corrupted entirely, and death had them completely under its dominion. For the transgression of the commandment was making them turn back again according to their nature; and as they had at the beginning come into being out of non-existence, so were they now on the way to returning, through corruption, to non-existence again. The presence and love of the Word had called them into being; inevitably, therefore, when they lost the knowledge of God, they lost existence with it; for it is God alone Who exists, evil is non-being, the negation and antithesis of good. By nature, of course, man is mortal, since he was made from nothing; but he bears also the Likeness of Him Who is, and if he preserves that Likeness through constant contemplation, then his nature is deprived of its power and he remains incorrupt. So is it affirmed in Wisdom: “The keeping of His laws is the assurance of incorruption.” (Wisdom 6:18)
Chapter 3: We Live In An Altar
this same child came to me and pointed into the altar: “That is where you live,” she said. My first reaction was to want to say, “No. I live in a house down the street.” But a very deep part of me could not bring myself to say that I do not live in the altar. It is certainly wrong to say I merely work in the altar. My relationship with this child and her childlike perceptions forced me to rethink where I live.
Chapter 4: The God Who Is Not There
most believers would say that they want to know the presence of God. His absence—particularly as a by-product of a secularized world—is a problem.
Interestingly, God’s absence is not always a problem for everyone. A friend of mine some years back, a woman of the Old South, attended a renewal weekend sponsored by her church. She came home, and like others who had attended, evidenced a clear religious experience. Something had happened in her weekend renewal. However, to my surprise, after about a week of this new experience, she commented to me, “I just can’t take it anymore! Jesus just seems to be everywhere! I can’t get any work done!”
She continued, “So, I finally told Him, ‘Jesus, please leave my kitchen and get back on Your throne! I can’t get my cooking done!’ ” Apparently cooking takes place on the first floor—while Jesus reigns on the second.
