Posted on: March 22nd, 2013 Beer, _Purgatio_, & the End of Lent

Almost every day, I have the joy of talking to a Christ Church parishioner who comes up to me excitedly and tells me about a new beer they’ve discovered. Wow! What a wonderful and interesting life I get to live!

For the fifth Lent in a row, however, I decided once again to do the barely thinkable: I decided to give up all alcohol for Lent. This, year, however, I did something even more unheard of: I went “Eastern Orthodox style,” meaning that I continued my fast even on the Sundays in Lent! (Did you know that a faithful Orthodox Christian lives about 40% of each year, about 40% of his or her entire life, fasting in one form or another?)

It has truly been an amazing experience. Not only have I lost ten pounds without changing a single additional variable. Not only am I sleeping better. Not only is my budget that much closer to being responsible. But, in addition to all of that, my prayer life has improved, and that is what I want to talk to write about in this blog post.

St. Augustine, in Book VII of the Confessions, has a life-changing epiphany when he “discovers” the “books of the Platonists,” or what today we would call the “neoPlatonists.” From those books he learns that God is “simple:” without body, without spatiality, not subject to time or to change. But also from those books he begins to incorporate an ancient insight of mysticism (shared, again, by the tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy): that God reveals himself to the human soul in an experience which many mystics (including St. Augustine) call “divine illumination” or the “divine light.”

Now, when Augustine or someone like Symeon the New Theologian or indeed the neoPlatonist Plotinus speaks of this divine light, they always stress the importance of purity. In fact, neoplatonism injected into the stream of Christian tradition, inherited by the ancient monastics, the three-fold way of purification – illumination – unification.

Think about this “purification” like this. The human soul / mind / heart is like a multi-layered onion. You might think of the outermost layer of the onion as the noise which floods into our ears daily in the car, at home, in the coffee shop, or wherever. Beneath that external noise we have the many distracting thoughts which occupy our mind. Beneath that layer are the concerns and worries of our life (finances, health, etc.). Deepest of all one might find a painful and disturbing layer of damage caused, for example, by hurtful words spoken or things experienced in our childhood.

All of these “layers” essentially serves as distractions or barriers to the experience of the “divine light” of God in our innermost being. The goal of purification, then, not unrelated to the fasting of Lent, is to rid ourselves of the noise, to rid ourselves of the distractions of life.

This Lent I’ve experienced something of this purificaton, more this year than ever before. My “theology of the fruit of the vine” has not changed! I believe in myrth, conviviality, and feasting! I still wear beer t-shirts (even during Lent!). Young people still gather on my front porch after church and enjoy new, riveting beverages.

But my heart and mind are also captivated by the benefits of living without strong drink. It is a very small price to pay for deeper intimacy with my Lord.

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Filed under: Book Notes (& articles, too), liturgical theology, Me / Us, news & culture, the Christian Life / Prayer, theology / ecclesiology

2 Responses to “Beer, _Purgatio_, & the End of Lent”

  1. Hannah Venable Says:
    March 23rd, 2013 at 10:07 am

    I enjoyed your connection between giving up some bodily pleasure with the purification of the soul. It is easy to try and argue against such connection to justify our actions (like the Manichees), but , as you pointed out, sometimes giving up a bodily pleasure, brings out issues that may be hidden underneath.

  2. matt Says:
    March 28th, 2013 at 8:34 am

    Yes, Hannah. I’d say that exposing and dealing with “the issues underneath” is what the neoplatonic tradition means by “purgation.”

    I was reading just yesterday that Thomas believes that, daily, we should grow in likeness of our Examplar (Christ). Convicting!

    Seems to me, at a very basic level that resonates with so much of St. Paul’s thought (Col 3:3, this Sunday’s Epistle Lesson), that this is at the very center of what it means to be a Christian. To “die” to ourselves and the world by giving up bodily pleasure for the sake of learning more deeply to en-joying Christ.

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