Fr Ben Garren

Dear Siblings in Christ,

But didn’t we already have that meeting? Why are we going over this again this year? That feeling of having to rehash the exact same conversation over and over again without ever moving forward. Some of you may have encountered this at work, amidst family life, and possibly even going about life in the church. This was life for the church in the 300s. The story we tell ourselves is that Constantine became Emperor, held the council of Nicaea, and standardized Christianity for centuries to come.

The reality is that after Constantine there were several civil wars and a sequence of Emperors. Not all these Emperors were Christian and not all the Christian Emperors valued the Council of Nicaea. Constantine himself eventually chose to follow Arian Christianity not Nicene Christianity. It was fifty years after Nicaea before an emperor, Theodosius I, valued the council sufficiently to begin promoting it. At which point he asked Gregory of Nazianzus to come to Constantinople to promote Nicene Theology and debate leaders of Arian Christianity, Apollonian Christianity, and Platonic Monism… the philosophies promoted by previous emperors since Nicaea.

Gregory of Nazianzus is remembered by most as a Doctor of the Faith, one of the Three Holy Hiearchs, a pivotal theologian for Christianity as we know it. His life story is that of a person who consistently wants to just go to a monastery library and be left alone but is instead constantly being begged to go to another meeting and explain the exact same thing over and over again. So the next time you find yourself stuck in the exact same meeting you had last week, going over the exact same information for the hundredth time and being pretty certain you will have to do it again, pray to God for yourself and Gregory of Nazianzus, individuals afflicted by the near endless cycle of meetings that seem to make up our existence regardless of the century or the technology in play.

Pax,

—Ben