How spiritual can a spiritual guide be if a spiritual guide doesn’t guide you to God? I realize it sounds very much like I am spiritualizing that insightful question which has confounded intellectuals for millennia, “How much wood can a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”, but I am not. My question has nowhere near the profundity of said woodchuck conundrum. To me the answer is pretty obvious. How spiritual can a spiritual guide be if the spiritual guide doesn’t guild you to God? The answer is: “not very”.
Still, that didn’t stop the Russian Orthodox Church from publishing a new spiritual guide, in association with Russia’s ruling party, that doesn’t mention God.
According to a recent Reuters article (say “recent Reuters” ten times and then continue), instead of God making it into the church’s new guide, justice, patriotism, and solidarity top the list of ‘Eternal Values.’ Gee, it sounds more like a ‘conduct guide’ published by a labour union than a ‘spiritual guide’ published by a church!
According to the daily newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the spiritual guide lists, in order of importance, in the eyes of the church and ruling party: 1. justice, 2. freedom, 3. solidarity, 4. unity, 5. self-restraint and sacrifice, 6. patriotism, 7. welfare and 8. Love. Can you believe that? It looks like they stopped at eight! If they extended the list to the ever popular ‘Top Ten’ format, God may have squeaked into the list, or, er, ah, maybe not.
Now, I am not blaming Russia’s ruling party for the content of this spiritual guide. After all, one would expect a list like this from the ruling party of many countries, including Russia. But, what about the Russian Orthodox Church?— No offense but I wonder if they should drop the “Orthodox” from their title, after all there isn’t anything orthodox about a church that doesn’t mention God, let alone “faith in Jesus Christ” at least somewhere near the top of their spiritual guide.
Call me old fashion, but I still think that faith in the divinity and saving work of Jesus Christ should be at the top of any church’s spiritual guide. Unfortunately more and more churches seem to be leaving Christ off their lists. Interestingly enough, I first found this news under the ‘weird news‘ section of the Toronto Sun. Even a secular newspaper sees the idea of a church’s spiritual guide that doesn’t mention God as being weird. Too bad the Russian Orthodox Church doesn’t!
I don’t know about you, but if I can’t list ‘faith in Christ’ at the top of my own personal spiritual list, I won’t have anything else in the spiritual category to list!
“For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith–and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God– not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:8-10, NIV)
