An excerpt from Facing East: A Pilgrimâs Journey Into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy
Prologue: In the Passenger Seat
Saturday, December 21, 1991
Vespers
He was an Episcopal priest, but he was standing in an Orthodox church on this Saturday night and thinking about Truth. At the altar a gold-robed priest strode back and forth swinging incense, moving in and out the doors of the iconostasis according to rubrics that were as yet unfamiliar. Golden bells chimed against the censer, and the light was smoky and dim. Over to the left a small choir was singing in haunting harmony, voices twining in a capella simplicity. The Truth part was this: the ancient words of this Vesperal service had been chanted for more than a millennium. Lex orandi, lex credendi; what people pray shapes what they believe. This was a church that had never, could never, apostatize.
She was his wife, and she was standing next to him thinking about her feet. They hurt. She wondered why they had pews if you had to stand up all the time. The struggling choir was weak and singing in an unintelligible language that may have been English. The few other worshipers werenât participating in the service in any visible way. Why did they hide the altar behind a wall? It was annoying how the priest kept popping in and out of the doors like a figure on a Swiss clock. The service dragged on following no discernible pattern, and it was interminable. Once the priest said, âLet us conclude our evening prayer to the Lord.â She checked her watch again; that was ten minutes ago, and still no end in sight.
It was a long journey from that evening to my present life as an Orthodox priestâs wife. For many, converting to Christianity, or changing denominational allegiance, is the result of a solitary conviction. As I ponder my pilgrimâs progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didnât make the trip alone, but in a two-seater. And I wasnât the one driving.
This is more relevant than may initially appear. Something about Orthodoxy has immense appeal to men, and itâs something that their wivesâespecially those used to worshiping in the softer evangelical styleâare generally slower to get. The appeal of joining this vast, ancient, rock-solid communion must be something like the appeal of joining the marines. Itâs going to demand a hell of a lot out of you, and itâs not going to cater to your individual whims, but when itâs through with you youâre going to be more than you ever knew you could be. Itâs going to demand, not death on the battlefield, but death to self in a million painful ways, and God is going to be sovereign. Itâs a guy thing. You wouldnât understand.
When I asked members of our little mission, âWhy did you become a member?,â two women (both enthusiastic converts now) used the same words: âMy husband dragged me here kicking and screaming.â Several others echoed that it had been their husbandâs ideaâheâd been swept off his feet and had brought them along willy-nilly. Another woman told how she left Inquirerâs Class each week vowing never to go again, only to have her husband wheedle her into giving it one more try; this lasted right up to the day of her chrismation. I can imagine how her husband looked, because thatâs how my Gary looked: blissful, cautious, eager, and with a certain cat-who-ate-the-canary, youâll-find-out smile.
That night at Vespers a few years ago I was one of those balky wives. Gary and I stood side by side feeling radically different things, but the pattern could have been predicted from the beginning. When we first met over twenty years ago, he was a political animal who just didnât think much about God; I was a passionate agnostic, angry at God for not existing, eagerly attacking the faith of Christian friends.
Garyâs shell began to crack when a professor required his philosophy class to read a Gospel. As he read the words of Jesus, he became convinced that here was one who âspeaks with authority.â Since Jesus said there were a God, Gary began to doubt his doubting.
This reasoning left me unconvinced. By the time of our wedding I was going through my Hindu phase, but didnât object to visiting cathedrals on our honeymoon hitch-hiking through Europe. One day in Dublin I looked at a statue of Jesus and was struck to my knees, hearing an interior voice say, âI am your life.â I knew it was the One I had rejected and ridiculed, come at last to seize me forever. It was a shattering experience from which I emerged blinking like a newborn, and decades later I still feel overwhelming awe and gratitude for that rescue, that vast and undeserved gift. Itâs like the story of the farmer who had to whap his donkey with a two-by-four to get its attention. I imagine that, when God needs a two-by-four that big, He must be dealing with a pretty big donkey.
True to form, Gary needed Truth, while I needed a personal, mystical experience. In the years that followed we went to Episcopal seminary together, were baptized in the Holy Spirit together, and spent several years in the early charismatic movement. He was ordained a priest, and we moved to a new church every few years, having babies along the way. When the charismatic experience grew stale, he rediscovered the high liturgical tradition of his childhood, while I went into spiritual direction and centering prayer. Though there are pitfalls along each of these pathsâhigh-churchiness can devolve into form-but-not-substance, mysticism can float into goo-goo-eyed self-centerednessâneither of us lost our central commitment to Jesus as Lord. Wherever we went, God kept us near himself and each other.
As I shifted my aching feet on the floor of that dim church I wondered whether Garyâs new direction would ever make sense to me. What had pushed him in the door of this church in the first place was growing unease with changes in the Episcopal Church, changes both moral and theological.
For example, in July of 1991 I was present for a vote of the Episcopal House of Bishops, a resolution requiring ordained clergy to abstain from sex outside of marriage. When the ballots were counted, the resolution had failed. I remember thinking, âThis isnât a church anymore; it has no intention of following its Lord.â
Meanwhile, it became fashionable to doubt Jesusâ miracles, the Virgin Birth, even the bodily Resurrection. Before his consecration as Englandâs fourth-highest ranking cleric, David Jenkins claimed that miracles were in the eye of the beholder. Of Jesusâ physical resurrection he sniffed, âIâm bothered about what I call âGod and conjuring tricks.ââ He was consecrated Bishop of Durham in York Minster Cathedral on July 6, 1984; two nights later, lightening struck from a cloudless sky and burned down a wing of the building. Beholders thought they might have seen a miracle.
Home in Baltimore such shenanigans were wearing on my husband. He banded together with five other âtroublesome priestsâ and wrote a document asserting seven points of theological orthodoxy; they called it the Baltimore Declaration. It prompted a minor dust storm, but the national church lumbered on its way as undisturbed as a water buffalo by a mosquito.
Gary at last decided that he could no longer be under the authority of apostate bishops; he had to be in the line of Truth. But where to go? He briefly considered the âcontinuingâ Anglican churches, but felt he couldnât climb further out from the branch to a twig; if anything, he had to return to the trunk. Also, he began to believe that the compromising flaw lay at the very heart of Anglicanism. The beloved doctrine of âcomprehensivenessâ suggested, âLetâs share the same prayers, the same words about the faith, but they can mean different things to you than to me.â Not a common faith, but common words about the faithâmere flimsy words. A church at peace can survive this way; a church attacked by wheedling heresies must tumble into accommodation reducing orthodoxy to shreds.
Roman Catholicism was the next obvious choice, and we looked into the Pastoral Provision whereby married Episcopal priests can become married Catholic priests. But, ironically, pro-Provision literature gave us serious doubts. One book by a priestâs wife painted an unintentionally grim picture; would we have to sell our furniture and live in a furnished apartment, never be allowed to retire, be ordered to teach high school instead of pastor, and be fourth on a huge staff, under supervision of people whose views were uncomfortably similar to those of the Episcopal bishops he was fleeing? Despite that authorâs cheery âit was worth it all,â it sounded to me like jumping from the frying pan to the fire.
Then there was the matter of theology. We remained worried by traces of salvation-by-works in Catholic practice, and a habitual tendency to frame human relations with God more as business transaction than love affair. Catholic theology seemed in general too overdone, compelled to parse every sentience and split every infinitude. I call it âdriving nails with your forehead.â
Gary was invited to join a small group of Protestant clergy for an evening with Orthodox evangelist Father Peter Gillquist, and he went carrying some hard questions; Father Peter later said he thought Gary was the one present that night who would never convert. But the questions were evidence of urgent wrestling. Gary particularly needed assurance that the Orthodox cling to salvation given by Godâs loving grace, not earned by human effort. Father Peter directed Gary to the fourth-century commentaries of St. John Chrysostom. In a sermon on 1 Timothy, for example, Chrysostom says that the best purpose of the law is to reveal that it cannot save us; it then âremits us to Him who can do so.â
Then I re-encountered a history lesson that had eluded me in seminary, but now took on vital importance. For the first thousand years, the thread of Christian unity was preserved world-wide through battering waves of heresies. The method was collegial, not authoritarian; disputes were settled in church councils, whose decisions were not valid unless âreceivedâ by the whole community. The Faith was indeed common: what was believed by all people, in all times, in all places. The degree of unity won this way was amazing. Though there was some local liturgical variation, the Church was strikingly uniform in faith and practice across vast distances, and at a time when communication was far from easy. This unity was so consistent that I could attribute it to nothing but the Holy Spirit.
Then a developing split between East and West broke open. The Church had five centers: Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome. The bishop of Rome was accorded special honorary status, but no unilateral power to determine doctrine or to command the other bishops. However, by the eleventh century the concord between the four Eastern centers and Rome was disintegrating. The East believed the papacy was seeking expanded power over the worldwide church, and balked particularly at Romeâs insistence on adding the word filioque (âand the Sonâ) to the Nicene Creed, a statement of faith which had been in common use since 325 A.D. So serious a change as rewording a creed would have to be won by consensus in church council, not imposed by command.
While the filioque controversy sounds at first picayune, it had theological reverberations that are significant, as disputants at the time realized. In an effort to elevate the second person of the Trinity, it dilutes the singular authority of the Father, and changes the Trinity fromâvisually speakingâa triangle with God the Father at the top, to one tipped over, both Father and Son above the Spirit. Orthodoxy is indeed âpatri-archal,â that is, the Father (the pater) is the arche, the source and font of all.
In Orthodoxy the all-male priesthood is not based on the idea that women canât represent Jesus; if replication of the specifics of the Incarnation is the goal, only a first-century Jew could come near that. In Orthodoxy, itâs not Jesus, but the Father whom those serving at the altar represent, and whatever else a woman can be (and, in Orthodoxy, she can be anything else: choir director, lector, teacher, head of the parish council) she cannot be a Father. She can be a Mother, of course, and so there is a recognized and honored role for the priestâs wife, with a title: Khouria (Arabic), Matushka (Russian), or Presbytera (Greek).
The filioque controversy, then, had implications that reach further than initially appear. The bishops of Antioch, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem objected that the Holy Spirit would not have waited a thousand years to clarify the role of the bishop of Rome, and that a church council would be necessary to amend the Creed. The conflict grew worse, and the legate of the pope excommunicated the patriarch of Constantinople on Christmas Day of 1054 AD. The patriarch returned the favor, and the split was on.
When West severed from East in this four-to-one split, the Orthodox churches continued united, as they have to the present day (Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, and so forth being just national expressions of the same worldwide church). Unlike the Western church, the church of the East went through Christianityâs second millennium without being shattered into fragments by theological disputes. This is despite horrific persecution and martyrdom: twenty million Russian Orthodox are estimated to have been martyred in this century alone.
Once unchained from the need for consensus with other bishops the Western Church continued freely developing Christian doctrine, while the East had laid the task to rest with the end of the seventh Ecumenical (âworld-wideâ) Council in the eighth century. As Western Christian theology grew more elaborately defined, it offered more fodder for protest, and eventually for Protestantism. Five hundred years after the East-West split the Reformation emerged, spurred by a desire to whittle back to the simpler original. But though some Reformers read the Church Fathers and made an effort to learn from Orthodox leaders, barriers of geography, culture, and language made cross-fertilization difficult. For the most part the Reformers relied on the Bible as their only guide, and itâs a book that sincere people can interpret in wildly different ways, as shown by the existence of nearly twenty-five thousand different Protestant âBible-basedâ denominations. Subsequent generations continued the split from ancient practice. Like untrained gardeners going into an overgrown garden, successors to the Reformers hacked about with machetes, slashing unknowingly through material that had been affirmed for the first thousand years: the sacraments, the honoring of Mary, the eucharistic Real Presence. Protestants were trying to rediscover the ancient Church, but instead they created a dancing array of sorcererâs apprentice brooms, all trying to sweep one another clean.
The constant experience of doctrinal disagreements contributed to a Western tendency to make the Christian experience more about ideas than about heart-driven living faith, more what you think than what you do; more assensus than fiducia, more ideas about God than surrender to him. The Orthodox Church, escaping this sort of discord, could admire a butterfly without having to pin its head to a board. Orthodoxy has had many failings and controversies, but they are most often about use and abuse of earthly power; they are not about theology. Itâs not yet perfection on earth, but there is to a refugee Westerner a certain bliss in bypassing theological arm wrestling about things too big for our puny understanding. For example, rather than over-defining Jesusâ presence in the Eucharist, or tossing out the concept entirely, Orthodox are content to say that the bread and wine become his body and blood simply because they âchange.â In Orthodox theology there is a humility, a willingness to let mystery remain beyond comprehension.
The stance of an Orthodox believer is similarly humble and childlike: we are sinners, receiving the overwhelming love of God, and we stand before him in gratitude. This is, I think, one of the reasons we kiss so much: we kiss icons, the Gospel book, the cross, and each other. Most Sundays we use the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and we thank God for sending his Son âinto the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.â Grateful repentance is such a constant in Orthodox worship that mystic surfers, looking for smells, bells, and thrills, rather than submission to Jesus as Lord, find they canât take more than a couple of weeksânot without conversion.
I paint here in hindsight a rushing tide of conviction about the truth of Orthodoxy which swept my husband away. At the time, I was having none of it. Orthodoxy was too foreign, too old, too fancy. I didnât care what they said, I just couldnât believe that this was what the worship of the early church looked likeâall the cluttered doodads of gold, incense, and fancy vestments.
My vague assumption was that early Christians just sat around on the floor, probably in their blue jeans, talking about what a great guy Jesus was. It was embarrassing to review Scripture and realize that from Exodus to Revelation worship is clothed in gold, silver, precious stones, embroidery, robes of gorgeous fabric, bells and candles; I donât know of an instance of scriptural worship that doesnât include incense. God ordered beauty, even extravagant beauty, in worship even while his people were still wandering the desert in tents. Beauty must mean something that no-nonsense, head-driven Christians fail to grasp.
Gary was rarinâ to go, but I put on the brakes. Oddly, I wasnât concerned about finances, even though becoming Orthodox meant throwing away a fifteen-year career when our three kids were entering their teens. Nor did I feel loyal affection for the Episcopal Church, either nationally or in our little parish (where, as a cultural conservative, I often felt like the odd man out). But I was afraid we would be leaving for the wrong reason: because we werenât happy. Too many people break up marriages, shirk obligations, and betray commitments because they feel insufficiently fulfilled. Besides, even if the Episcopal Church was lost to apostasy, didnât God need chaplains on the Titanic? Hadnât we better stay where he planted us?
Gary finally won me over by saying, âYou know what God needed on the Titanic? Life-boats. We know where thereâs a ship that doesnât sink. Letâs try to get as many people to safety as possible.â So on January 30, 1993, I found myself standing before Bishop Antoun as he anointed me with holy oil, calling out âThe seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit!â âSeal!â the congregation shouted. Five other families came with us from our Episcopal parish that day, and two weeks later we celebrated our first liturgy, at a homemade altar, in a borrowed space, with borrowed appointments. Three years later, Holy Cross Mission numbers forty familiesânearly every one a convert.
A continent away someone Iâve met only by mail is writing me a letter. Sheâs a multi-generation evangelical, descended from missionaries and professors at Christian colleges. Now her husband has begun looking into Orthodoxy and shows the signs, so familiar to me, of beginning that plummeting dive. Her words, too, are familiar:
âThis is a church whose disciplines and life, I feel, appeal initially more to men. To me it all seems soâŠhard. In my spiritual walk up to this point my heart has led my head. I might go to church mad and unrepentant, but with a worship chorus in a lilting tune, or a heartfelt spontaneous prayer, my heart would begin to soften. Iâd come out ready to live the obedient life.
âOrthodoxy makes sense in my head, but I yearn for something to grab my gut and help me over the hump labeled âself.â All the âsoftâ music, etc., that used to draw me is missing and Iâm left in this massive struggle with my will. Does that make sense? Doesnât a spoonful of sugar help the medicine go down, and all that?
âAnd how do women eventually come to terms with this somewhat austere church?â
How did I? Now I canât imagine ever not being Orthodox. Here is my home, my joy, my fulfillment; I tasted and saw and nothing can compare. But how did I get past the bare truth part, the aching feet part, to discover the rich, mystical beauty of Orthodoxy?
A kaleidoscope of images flashes through my mind. The textures, the scents, the music of the liturgy, a continuous song of worship that lifts me every week. The Great Fast of Lent, a discipline far more demanding than Iâd ever faced in my Christian walk. Kneeling on Holy and Great Thursday and listening to the hammer blows resound as my husband nailed the icon of Jesusâ corpus to the cross; seeing my daughterâs shoulders shake with sobbing. Easter morning giddiness and champagne at sunrise. Hearing my son say that, after a year of the Divine Liturgy, he didnât like the sentimental hymns of the last 300 years any more: âThey make me feel further from God.â Seeing icons change from looking grim and forbidding to looking challenging, strong and true. True.
Truth turns into Beauty in unexpected ways. What was strange and perplexing has become my sweetest home. As I look over my shoulder, I can see this friend not far behind me on the road, on the cloverleaf of conversion, and itâs by now a familiar sight. Her husband is driving, and sheâs in the passenger seat.