For quite some time now (ten years or so), I have been a fond admirer of and sometimes participant with Eastern Orthodoxy. At a time when I had grown somewhat weary of consumerist, westernist, modernist Evangelicalism, the Orthodox Church served as a welcome refuge and simultaneous adventure that helped me draw near to God through a path ancient and well-trodden- even if relatively unknown in North American circles. This week my interest in Orthodoxy was stirred yet again while reading Frederica Mathewes-Green's At the Corner of East and Now: A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy.
Rederica Mathewes-Green, who has become somewhat of a spokesperson for the Orthodox Church after her conversion in the late 1990’s, is a well-known commentator on the popular NPR program, All Things Considered. Over the last few years she’s been very busy writing about her faith. Besides At the Corner of East and Now, her books about Orthodoxy include: Lost Gospel of Mary: The Theotokos in Three Ancient Texts, First Fruits of Prayer: A Forty-Day Journey Through the Canon of St. Andrew, Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy, and The Illumined Heart: The Ancient Christian Path of Transformation.
For those of you not so familiar with Orthodoxy, here's a quick history lesson. As one expression of Chrisitan faith branched westward throughout Europe, another moved south into Ethiopia and Egypt, as well as east (hence the name) into Russia, India, Greece, Finland and Persia. While these expressions grew from the same root, eventually language and divergent cultural influence began to cause tension in Christian identity- and thus relationship. This tension culminated in the what is commonly referred to as the Great Schism, which took place in 1054 AD, when the Eastern and Western branches went their seperate ways. This was the first large-scale split in Christian communion. From these two now divided branches grew the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox Church. For the Eastern Orthodox of today not much has changed. They pride themselves on the fact that their method of contemporary worship is not very far removed from the experience of the earliest Orthodox believers.
The thing about Orthodoxy (which Mathewes-Green does well to point out) is that it’s something that has to be truly experienced to be understood. You really cannot simply read a book about Orthodoxy and “get it”. Reading a book will certainly help, but its participating with the Faithful in a context where mystery and reverence are wholeheartedly embraced where you gain a true comprehension of what Orthodoxy is all about. But even then, it’s just a hint. To learn more you need to experience more. Immersion is required I suppose you could say. Ask an Orthodox believer for a quick doctrine statement and you’ll likely receive a peculiar, puzzled expression in return. Why? Well because that very conception of truth- served up like a legal code, is in itself a western construct. And remember, unlike Roman Catholicism and its offspring, the Protestant Church, Eastern Orthodoxy grew and flourished in decidedly “un-westernized” regions. Mathewes-Green writes,
Though westerners tend to think of Protestant and Roman Catholic as the two opposite poles of Christian faith, in eastern eyes this quarrelling mother and daughter bear a strong family resemblance. The two circle around questions of common obsession, questions which often do not arise in the East: works versus faith, Scripture versus Tradition, papacy versus individualism. This very context of habitual argument creates a climate of nitpicking, and every theological topic can be defined, and some which are beyond definition, gets scrutinized in turn. As a result, the East sees in the West an unhelpful tendency to plow up the roots of mystery.
There’s that word again: mystery. It is so central to Eastern Orthodox understanding; born out of a strong and well-developed, well-celebrated sense that in approaching God- the creator and sustainer of the Cosmos, large doses of humility are necessarily required. But the embrace of mystery is not just a result of a resigned, logical understanding of our position before God, but rather via a sense of sacred romance. There is poetry in every pocket of our existence. The Orthodox Church dwells on and savors this fact through symboism and beauty, rather than begrudgingly admitting it to be so.
It should be said that At the Corner of East and Now is much more than an introduction to Eastern Orthodox Faith, it is a biography of sorts- compellingly recounting Mathewes-Green’s own sojourn towards Jesus, and subsequently the Eastern branch of the Church. Mathewes-Green’s account of her own Damascus Road-like experience with Jesus is one of the book’s true highlights- one amongst many. It happened during a season of life where Mathewes-Green and her new husband were both spiritual wanderers, open to almost every faith except Christianity. In a season where Hinduism was the latest spiritual guide to be tried, Mathewes-Green writes about an experience when she and her husband visited an old church in Dublin while on an extended European honeymoon. They were not there for religious reasons, but purely out of architectural appreciation. Mathewes-Green writes,
I strolled around the dimly lit building, admiring stained-glass architecture and stonework. Eventually I came upon a small side altar. Above it there was a white marble statue of Jesus with his arms held low and open, and his heart exposed on his chest, twined with thorns and springing with flames… I can’t really explain what happened next. I was standing there looking at the statue, and then I discovered I was on my knees. I could hear an interior voice speaking to me. Not with my ears- it was more like a radio inside suddenly clicked on. The voice was both intimate and authoritative, and it filled me.
It said, “I am your life. You think that your life is your name, your personality, your history. But that is not your life. I am your life… You think that your life is the fact that you are alive, that your breath goes in and out, that energy courses in your veins. But even this is not your life. I am your life. I am the foundation of everything else in your life.”
The journey from that old Dublin church to Eastern Orthodoxy was one that took years for Mathewes-Green and her husband, Gary. While attending a seminary years later, Mathewes-Green’s husband began researching Orthodoxy as a result of a real and growing appreciation for the historical roots of the faith. Mathewes-Green writes: “Gary wanted to be part of a church that was immersed in the unchanging faith of the ages, rather than one which had an active history of only a few hundred years, or which was eagerly jettisoning its history in favor of transitory relevance.”
While her husband clearly loved the Orthodox expression almost from the moment he discovered it, the path of appreciation for Frederica was more drawn out. She writes that at first it struck her as “strange and off-putting: beautiful but rigorous, and focused much more on God than on me.” But before long she too was won over by Orthodoxy. Eventually her husband, formally a mainline pastor, was ordained as an Orthodox priest and they planted a small parish near Baltimore. Interestingly, this Orthodox Church was and still is made up of mostly Orthodox converts from Evangelical and mainline Protestant backgrounds.
Honestly, it is difficult to find a member of the Orthodox Church, especially a convert, why doesn’t gush about their new spiritual home. But like any other Christian movement, Orthodoxy has plenty of historical blemishes to its name. And Mathewes-Green is quick to admit this fact, writing,
The history of this Church is not spotless. When people criticize Christianity, they usually point to two incidents in western history, the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. While Orthodoxy is not implicated in either of these- Green Orthodox were among the victims of the Crusades- Orthodox must confess their own sins. The pogroms that occurred against the Jew of Russia, for example, were executed by mobs which included Orthodox believers… There has (also) been a general tendency of the Orthodox Church to reflexively support the state rather than criticize it.
There is so much rich wisdom (delivered in eloquent, poetic prose) to be found in this book. At the Corner of East and Now is a colorful, expansive, personal account of one woman’s journey to Jesus and within the life of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Rather than reading like some dry theological treatise defending one particular branch of Christian expression, this book is a dynamic, interactive accounting of what we in Emerging Church circles might refer to as an experience of “ancient-future”.
Along these very same lines, we in the EC conversation would do well to remember that our journey forward is not just a collective shaking off of the shackles of modernistic, enlightenment inspired assumptions, but also a journey into depth, where we rediscover the rich, life-giving roots of our shared history as the followers of Christ. Simply put, sometimes moving forward involves returning home.
