Christians and smoking

[Rafael Resende Daher]

Dear all,

Are smoking a sin? Im don't have doubts about the vice in cigarrettes or others, but in smoking sometimes a cigar and others, without be a vitiated in smoking.

[Boulos]

I always used to consider that money spent on pleasures and luxuries for self satisfaction, very far form necessities, like smoking, is somehow selfishness. Finance spent on such could be redirected to people in need of bread. Thus, Is selfishness a sin?

[Fr Seraphim (Black)]

In Romania smoking of any type is a sin (to be confessed); however, some married clergy do smoke (both in Romania and elsewhere).

Believe it or not, those in kellis (NOT monasteries) on the Holy Mountain (Agion Oros) do have the occasional smoke.

Generally, all celibate clergy do not smoke. Married priests, in my experience at times, do indulge.

Married priests in 'the world' vary...however, no monks smoke, only (as I said above) do from time to time indulge.

Is smoking absolutely a SIN, certainly, it harms the body (the Temple of the Holy Spirit).

[Herman Blaydoe]

Has anyone done a medical study on what incense does to a body?

Just curious...

[Hieromonk Ambrose]

Has anyone done a medical study on what incense does to a body?

It seems that if we consider smoking a sin because it harms the body, then the use of incense is just as sinful if not more so. Probably more so since it is non-addictive and there is no compulsion to use it. Two years back I read an indepth study of it but cannot find this at the moment. Here is something I have just snatched from the web

Incense burning releases cancer-causing chemicals
(New Scientist)

http://tinyurl.com/kna7x

"Burning incense exposes people to dangerous levels of smoke laden with cancer-causing chemicals.

"The practice is a popular meditative and medicinal aid often used by Buddhists, Hindus and Christians in their homes and places of worship.

"Levels of one chemical believed to cause lung cancer were 40 times higher in a badly ventilated temple in Taiwan than in houses where people smoke tobacco...."
See also:
http://tinyurl.com/klnza

When incense is burned, it gives off a variety of by-products common to combustion. But because it is a smoldering burn, it is likely to give off much higher concentrations. One would expect incense to give off relatively high concentrations of carbon monoxide, aldehydes, and respirable particles...

Respirable particles that make up smoke are both upper respiratory and pulmonary system irritants. They can inflame mucous membranes and initiate asthmatic attacks in sensitive individuals. Burning incense has been reported to produce carcinogens such as benzo-a-pyrene, several other polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and the nasal carcinogen, sinaldehyde....

"...once per week during pregnancy increases the risk of childhood leukemia..."

[Olga]

With respect, Fr Ambrose, it seems odd to me that the use of incense in church could cause harm, given that it has been used for so many centuries, both in Christian and Jewish worship. While I have no objection to proper, rigorous scientific investigation as to whether burning incense causes harm, the article in the link provided is not a scientific study, but conjecture. There are also various types of incense, of different formulations. Asian incenses look and behave quite differently to the sort used in Orthodox churches, so perhaps there could be differences in the effects on health of the various types.

Another way of looking at this question could be in the same way we look at the sharing of Holy Communion from a common cup and spoon. Has the common chalice been responsible for the transmission of communicable diseases? In short, no. Even apart from the scientific evidence, to me, there are two compelling reasons which back this up: Firstly, if disease could be transmitted, then it would be the priest or deacon who consumes the remaining contents of the chalice after the people have communed, who would be most at risk. Secondly (some might think this quaint), how could the Body and Blood of Christ serve as a vehicle for transmission of illness? While incense is not quite the same as Holy Communion, it is no less an integral part of worship, used to glorify God. I suppose we'll be hearing soon that the fumes and smoke given off by burning candles in church are also a health hazard ... http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/wink.gif

[Fr Seraphim (Black)]

Dear Hieromonk Ambrose,

Please forgive that which I am about to say...having lived over 30 years in a monastic setting, and believing that the prayers of the righteous rise as incense, I do agree that in heavily concentrated Tibetan temples, or Hindu temples, I recognize the issue raised in the articles.

The only Buddhist monastery I visited was that of the Dalai Lama in India (hardly in a congested area); those monasteries of Hindu nature (which I visited) were similarily very remote. Tibetan incense is very strong. Hindu incense is less so - but the monasteries are (generally) so vast, that I can not, myself see a danger in the inhalation itself.

Certainly, in a small temple, in a congested city, there may indeed be harm. But these researches are not devotees, or monks, thus, personally, I believe the damage is minimal. As for Asian cities, the petrol is the poorest available, regarding automobile traffic.

I do not believe this applies to Orthodox monasteries.

[Hieromonk Ambrose]

I suppose we'll be hearing soon that the fumes and smoke given off by burning candles in church are also a health hazard ...

They most certainly are if the candles are made from petroleum byproducts.

The matter of the reception of Communion being able to spread communicable diseases? The Church believes so and has instructions (should be printed in the back of the priest's Sluzhebnik)as to what precautions he must take in a time of plague,etc. The danger comes from the metal of the chalice, the spoon and the priest's hand. Nobody is suggesting that it is from the Body and Blood of the Lord.

Fr Seraphim, I have spent 25 years surrounded by clouds of incense, with daily Vespers and 1-2 Liturgies a week. I've even had the Sunday choir threaten to go on strike because I smoke them out with incense, especially during the Dostoyno yest after the Consecration of the Gifts. When I can't see the altar boy any more I reckon that we have had enough censing! However I expect the heart problem to kill me before the incense gets the chance! :-) Father, I hope your health is improving. Remember us in your holy prayers.

[Fr Seraphim (Black)]

Dear Hieromonk Ambrose,

First, I am deeply grateful for your prayers regarding my health.

Yet, did not St. John of Shanghai and San Fransciso, take the Holy Gifts which had been sadly vomited?

Dear Father, you can always reduce the amount of incense. As for your heart condition, serious as it is, and I do not speak lightly or without respect to your person.

I am but a poor excuse for a monk, I am not a Priest. I sincerely meant no harm in what I said.

I pray that you measure my words in this way.

I ask your forgiveness.

[Fr Seraphim (Black)]

Further with regards to Romania (perhaps other Balkan countries also): any Family (Divorce) Lawyer is barred from Holy Communion, due to the fact that he/she derives their income from the 'suffering of others'. In fact, in Romania, there is a far-reaching list of those whose professional status, bars them from Communion.

I, for one, stand with Nun Mina, (in another thread).

All these self-proclaimed Traditionalist are outside Orthodox Christianity. One Traditionalist Orthodox Christian Priestmonk, had the audacity to say to me that Sufism is "Christianity within Islam". He was a Muslim for eleven years before the Ayatollah Kohmeni closed the Islamic (Sufi) School in 1979. This school was personally funded by the wife of the Shah, and he (the now Orthodox Priestmonk) had to flee Iran.

Sadly, this 'apostate to Islam' is an active Priestmonk, though still a disciple of Schuon et al.

[Olga]

I agree, Fr Seraphim, re St John of SF; in fact, the Gifts had been spat out by a boy acutely sick with rabies. The staff at the Shanghai hospital were horrified, and told him that what he was doing was highly dangerous, as rabies is very easily transmitted through saliva. Yet the saint calmly told them: "Nothing will happen, these are the Holy Gifts."

Also I would think there is an obvious difference between smoking and censing: Smoking pollutes the body, and is addictive, making the smoker subject to the addiction, not its master. The use of incense, while "voluntary", is for the glorification of God.

[Klod]

The issue with smoking is not simply whether to classify it as sin, but also to see what sort of spiritual growth it brings, if it is something necessary or superfluous.

In most of the cases, I think smoking is superfluous, money spent unnecessarily and also addiction which contains in itself self-satisfaction and all that comes with it as selfishness, pleasure, self-reliance and why not some sort of arrogance and weakness, apart of damaging ones self and other surrounding peoples health.


Nevertheless, the issue, again, is depended on each persons situation and cannot be generalized.


For a serious orthodox christian is impossible to be e regular smoker, since the half of the year is made up of fasting time.


From my own experience, I used for two years (age 25-27), I think smoking is part of and connected with sin.

[Hieromonk Ambrose]

For a serious orthodox christian is impossible to be e regular smoker, since the half of the year is made up of fasting time.

The traditon on fasting has nothing to say either for or against smoking. The foods which are disallowed during fasting times have been known for centuries. Better to stay with what is traditional than to make up new individualistic rules. Of course if your own Church (the Albaninan Church?) has developed a teaching that smoking is outright sinful I suppose that you should abide by that but I am not aware of any Church which has such an attitude.

[Hieromonk Ambrose]

Yet, did not St. John of Shanghai and San Fransciso, take the Holy Gifts which had been sadly vomited?

Either that or reverently gather them up and bury them beside the church. This was sometimes necessary with children in Serbia whose parents had made them fast strictly in the first week of the Great Fast. Virtually the whole country receives Holy Communion on the first Saturday of the Fast.


I am but a poor excuse for a monk, I am not a Priest. I sincerely meant no harm in what I said.

Dearest Father, I never thought for one moment that there was any harm in what you said. Lord forbid! I was only expressing a viewpoint on the dangers of incense. In this country political correctness has run mad and the Government has banned smoking from almost everywhere and is even considering passing a bill which will forbid it in private homes. How long, I wonder, before some functionary turns his attention to incense in churches? What a ghastly thought!, but it probably awaits us!

Asking forgiveness for having disturbed you.

[Klod]

That fact the written tradition has nothing to say pro or against smoking, that, surely, doesnt mean that the church has no conscience on that point and that the matter cannot be judged upon!
If smoking is strongly connected to addiction, self-reliance, self-comfortness, indifference, weakness etc etc...it surely it is a sin that pushes peoples to other sins.

I do not remember, but there is a description of smoke in the life of a saint, as the incense of devil, incense one offers to devil.

Another one, father Paisios in Mount Athos directed a layman (orthodox believer) in giving up smoking.

[Hieromonk Ambrose]

Dear Klod, I know that you have a point, but all that you say can be applied to the use of other potentially addictive substances, such as alcohol. This can be destructive of all aspects of a person's life - family life, spiritual life, work, health - and of course it leads on to so many other sins. I would say that more than 50% of all the old Russian immigrants buried in the cemetery had serious alcoholic problems. It destroyed their families and in many cases was a direct cause of their death.

I find it rather odd that I am defending the use of alcohol and tobacco. Normally I *am* delivering homilies urging people to cut back, but I think that a measured use is in order and certainly not sinful.

[Byron Jack Gaist]

With all due respect to Fr Ambrose, I'm with Fr Seraphim and Klod on the issue of smoking. It harms the body, causes addiction (thereby probably also ultimately causing morbid self-indulgence), and passive smoking harms other people who have not asked for this abuse. In a book on Mt Athos, professor Constantine Cavarnos says Orthodox Christians should not smoke, it defiles the Image of God in which we are created (yet Fr Seraphim suggests that, sadly in my opinion, even Athonite monks do sometimes succumb to the occasional puff). When priests smoke, I have to say it is very undignified. Nevertheless, nobody should be judged or blamed for what is essentially a human weakness, I'm just saying call a spade, a spade - smoking is definitely harmful, and probably a sin. I am living in a country where everyone thinks it is their right by Divine decree to smoke in your face as much as they want, and to get angry if you so much as utter a single polite word of protest - it really does get too much. Quite the opposite of politically correct New Zealand it seems. Once again, nothing irritates me more than the hypocrisy of political correctness; but in this case this seems a right and healthy approach to the obnoxious cigarette.

Forgive my intensity, I'm just blowing off steam. But I really would rather be harmed by incense.

In Christ
Byron

[Klod]

How many people do you know, laymen or worldly men, who have a measured use of smoke more so for the sake of God?!
For that matter, alcohol dependency is also a sin or connected to a spiritual decadency if it is a motive for self-reliance, self-comfortness, weakness.


We cannot conclude that since russians drink alcohol and since they are orthodox, the use of alcohol is ok, and if that is so, so should be smoking.



When I used to go to the russian church in London, Enissmore Gdns, I happened to see a russian guy smoking while going to church from the bus stop on Sunday. He threw off the cigarette right in front of the church, few meter away. And then - sadly - I saw that person taking the Holy Communion.

Those 50% Russians, have either been superficially orthodox, as it usual in countries where being orthodox is some sort of genetic identity more than a matter of personal faith, or they havent been expressing their fullness of faith and have been living tied in passion.

[M.C. Steenberg]

It seems that one might be best advised to think of this particular issue in the scope of the way the Church approaches all activities: beyond the initial question of whether something is harmful in a straightforward way (health, etc.), one also must ask after the power one relinquishes to a given activity, with respect to the hold it is allowed to have over someone.

Smoking harms health, this is clear. But so do many other activities that the Church does not condemn outright as sinful on this ground: drinking, eating fatty foods, even inhaling incense, as has been discussed above. It is not clear to me that occasional smoking is drastically more damaging to the body as temple of God than are a number of other activities engaged in by Christian persons (this is not to suggest that smoking is healthy, mind you, only that other things are also harmful). One should not fail to consider this health aspect with respect to smoking, but one should be careful not to make it a category of its own. The concept that 'it harms the body, so it is sinful to do it'
bears truth; but it is too easy to become hypocritical here. Putting salt on eggs also harms health. Riding in a car when one could get some proper exercise by walking, also harms health.

But smoking has the potential to become a captivating activity to a degree greater than many other activities. Smoking can easily come to have a hold over a person, to be an addiction that is a 'passion', in the sense that it takes control over a person's life, or a notable part of a person's life, rather than remaining something over which the person retains control. This is not universally the case, but it is common - a real and present risk.

It strikes me one shouldn't be too black-and-white in considering this. One must look at the way the Church approaches the whole notion of activities and habits in life.

INXC, Matthew

[Byron Jack Gaist]

Dear Matthew,

You are quite right: physical and spiritual health are not always identical, and it's easy to slip into forgetting this. Sometimes good bodily health may even stand in the way of spiritual life I suppose. Nevertheless, there is something about smoking, that I find personally very distasteful. A person who occasionally has an alcoholic drink, or is too lazy to walk to the shops and gets into his car instead, may be harming their body or others or the environment; but smokers, especially once they are really addicted, defend their habit with a different kind of ferocity, I find, and cigarette smoke is much more personally intrusive than, say, car fumes. Besides, the existence of one sin does not excuse that of another (if we are talking about "sins"). It may just be my personal dislike, but I really feel smoking is different. Having said that, it's not exactly the major problem we are confronted with in our spiritual life (though it may be for a minority), and yes - we shouldn't be too black-and-white when considering this or any other activity or habit. It all takes place within a bigger context, I suppose...

In Christ
Byron

[Herman Blaydoe]

the priest's Sluzhebnik)as to what precautions he must take in a time of plague,etc. The danger comes from the metal of the chalice, the spoon and the priest's hand.

That may well be, however medically speaking, it is precisely the metal of the chalice and spoon that PREVENTS contamination, not to mention the alchoholic content of the wine. Tradition requires gold or silver for the chalice and spoon, which are naturally antibacterial.


Also I would think there is an obvious difference between smoking and censing: Smoking pollutes the body, and is addictive, making the smoker subject to the addiction, not its master. The use of incense, while "voluntary", is for the glorification of God.

Apples and oranges here, I think. Have you ever looked closely at the censor from the altar? As one who has had to clean it, it can be quite nasty looking, trust me. Smoke "pollutes", and incense is smoke, I do not think there is any getting around that. The fact that most people are only subjected to it once a week certainly mitigates the risk. But to simply say that "smoking" is a sin because it "pollutes" the body is to oversimplify and overstate the case, as several here have thoughtfully commented. There are certainly reasons that smoking CAN be sinful, but the case that it "pollutes the temple" is a weak one. Perhaps I am merely rationalizing my enjoyment of the occasional cigar or pipe, but I am in company with monastics and metropolitans in that respect so I am not overly concerned.

[Sergei M. Fadeyev]

I have been living in Russia since my birth. I can assume you that smoking tobacco in Russian Church is 100% condemned. "Tobacco is the frankincense of the devil," - is a very wide-spread expression. Some people even are likely to exaggerate this kind of sin. For a priest to be caught smoking -- is one of the fastest ways to lose any respect among all categories (occasional church visitors, zealots...) of people. Speaking about traditionalist part of the church-goers such an attitude is due to Old-Rite values, where anathema for smoking is not a nonsense (just as for drinking tea and coffee -- among the most sectarian-minded soglasiya). This attitude is mostly mythological and cannot be explained by any health reasons. Its mythology is based on xenophobia (as all these plants don't grow in Russia and they are brought from the outside fallen world). Also in people's minds smoke is connected with cult and worship (as a historical archetype). Tobacco smoke is definitely not a godly worship and according to dualistic perception of reality in the dark waters of folklore spirituality -- it belongs to demons. General church flock in Russia has been always deeply influenced by 'old-rite' zealot traditions, though some of them are very suspicious, because these people demonstrated religious golgothism that is close to the heart of nearly every Russian.

All in all, we should not look for reasons of health and reason on this matter -- all of them are secondary. The most important of them are in the field of mythology. But any mythology has very important protective functions and should not be underestimated.

Sorry for my poor Russian English http://www.monachos.net/mb/clipart/wink.gif.

Sergei