We are not our sins...

Part of the attraction of Orthodoxy, and why I remain Orthodox, lies in the very real and practical wisdom that flows through this faith like gold threads in a larger and beautiful tapestry. To the unaware all there is ritual and esoteric quotes and a strange attraction to beauty for its own sake that seems so out of sync in a culture which values function above all. But within is wisdom for the very real world of hard choices and human struggle.

These past days have focused my mind on that interweaving of faith, scripture, canon, council, liturgy and thought that is the Tradition and the anthropology of it all as it addresses the way we see ourselves, how we proclaim our identities to the world.

The spokesman for ex-congressman Foley stated what many feel when he identified his client as a gay man and an alcoholic. I'm sure some of it was to garner sympathy for a person disgraced by sending sexual messages to teenage boys, but within this lies a mania of our culture, the identifying of ourselves by our struggles, labeling ourselves by our sins.

To this the Orthodox Tradition points us in a radically different direction because it calls us to see ourselves as we were meant to be by God, not a wildly fluctuating mass of pathologies and misdirected passions but children of God designed for communion, even union, with our Creator. While we certainly acknowledge we sin, and sometimes often and with intent, we are never allowed in Orthodoxy to let those dark parts of us define us and doing that is in itself a kind of darkness. We identify our sins not because they define who we are but because we know what we should be and see our sins as things we must face and overcome to be what we truly are.

Orthodoxy is puzzled when someone would say "I am a gay man" as if that is the center or the focus of identity. There is no such thing as a fornicator among us, or a liar, or a violent man but rather a collection of people struggling to be as we are supposed to be who in our struggles have to face and put to flight enemies within us seeking to destroy the image of God even as we seek its restoration within us and the whole world. Our sins are that which is inauthentic within us, that which is contrary to God's design, that which diverts us and keeps us from fulfilling the destiny implanted in us when God breathed a unique kind of life into us at the dawn of time.

Our sins are never who we are or were meant to be unless we make that choice and its only when we finally and completely give in that we are lost. Until then there is hope.