Passion

If kitsch, sentimentality, emotionalism, nostalgia, neo-platonic idealism, attraction and I'd dare to say biological ties, and indebtedness are not the highest basis (not necessarily illigitimate basis) for relating and relationship, then what is? The above are all too circumstantial and based on an immature, if not fallen mode of relating. Not that there isn't a deeper and more real and eternal relationship underneath the sentimentality or temporal things that tie us to people, things and ideals. Love is what we are looking for, and connection.

Perhaps there is a balance that when tipped the wrong way, the above become insufficient to tie us to the things we thought we loved. To oversimplify, sin and selfishness are probably what swings connecion in the wrong direction to cold detachment. Because people and things are not just ideals and figments of our sentimentality. They are created by God and maintain His sustaining presence, and are meant to be in communion with God who unites all of creation in Christ. That's the ideal or the eschatological state anyway.

But sin separates. I'm not blaming the leaver or the left, because there is perhaps a time for both - to leave or be left. God may call us out of a relationship to go higher up with Him, but is this because the one attached to has sin and doesn't want to leave it to go up? Or maybe they didn't receive the call. I don't know. If it was a matter of calling, and the left one was pure in heart, then they would willingly let the other go in love and peace and with a continued sense of connection that transcends time and space. Sense. That which makes us "feel" connected.

The connection based in the first sentence can have a grasping, insular, horizontal quality that is ultimately materialistic. As with everything, there is balance. We don't deny material, or we would become gnostic. We aren't to be detached in a cold, things don't matter to me, sort of way. Probably Father Schmemann's For the Life of the World, which I haven't completed, would be helpful here. How to bring things into communion with God. We talk about being environmentally conscious and examining how the things we are attached to were produced, but I think that we can become too purist in our thinking and reject fallen things as if we weren't. Still, we need to be aware and to seek to redeem and consecrate the place in which we find ourselves. Prayer is the way to do that. Prayer helps us transcend (not in a gnostic way) temporal, immature attachment to things and to seek a higher good. It helps us loosen our grip on lesser modes of attachment, not that things shouldn't be touched. But they should be touched with reverence and with the remembrance of Christ.

Remembrance of Christ. Hopefully our Lenten preparations have brought about, through detachment from worldly things, a cleansed and opened awareness so that we will be able to discern the experience of His loving Passion for us and His unstoppable desire to be united with us in spirit, body, soul, mind, and heart.

(edited to add a link to Sophocles' blog where he posts a wonderful article on Communion and Great and Holy Thursday by Father Alexander.)