Just Another Average Loser
I
joined the Orthodox Church, receiving the sacraments of Baptism and Chrismation
along with my family and a host of other lovely people on Holy Saturday,
2016.
It
has become somewhat typical of folk like me, who once regarded such a
conversion as unthinkable, to describe how we got here. Such accounts are
termed “journey stories” and they are numerous in the blogosphere (for instance
these),
but they are seldom, I think, written simply to explain oneself to wary or
incredulous family members, and still less for some kind of evangelistic
endeavor, but primarily (at least in my case) to clarify for oneself what just happened. I might have a
general idea or a motley collection of personal motivations, but the shift is
hard to articulate, even to oneself. To
the question, “Why did you become Orthodox?” I often resort to the sort of
response I imagine people must give to the question, “Why did you sign up for
the Extreme Weight Loss program?”—namely, “I
was just that fat.” Indeed, if I were as fat as I am sinful, you would have
to airlift my enormous carcass through the roof, sandblast the deep-fried
cheese curds from my voluminous folds, and bury me in a crater to rival the
Grand Canyon. Implied by such a realization is the fact that I was and am, by
myself, powerless to make significant change. I need a crane, an army, a coach,
a dietician, etc., to extricate me from the sagging couch of spiritual inertia.
The Danger: Prayer Bling and Patristic
Name-dropping
I’ll
return to my health and fitness hyperbole in time, but I’m eager to hedge
against any latent ecclesial snobbery in my heart lest I tempt to judgment those
who disagree with my experience or my conclusions. It is my sincere hope that
all of you will become Orthodox as soon as you find that choice even minimally plausible.
But that is not to say that I am better than you (I’m not); that Orthodoxy is
perfectly unified and free of strife (It’s not); that your current local
community is inferior to mine (though I suppose that’s possible); or that you
should feel insecure about your own theological and ecclesiological
convictions. C.S. Lewis was Anglican. Mother Theresa and G. K. Chesterton were Roman
Catholic. Dallas Willard (another of my personal heroes) was an Evangelical. I
would not presume to lecture or advise men and women of such incredible insight
and attainment about the “true Church.” Rather, I would gladly listen to them
lecture me. Of course, it would be disingenuous for me to say that I do not
believe that the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church is in fact the
Orthodox Church. That claim, by itself, may be sufficient to alienate some of
you, but I hope not. I cannot accept the modern notion of an “invisible”
universal Church, like some kind of Roster
of the Saved in the mind of God, but I must add quickly here that salvation,
in my understanding, is not entirely synonymous with being in the Church, nor
is it synonymous with “avoiding Hell.” Perhaps more on that later.
It is easy to observe in new
converts of every stripe a kind of offensive zeal for his or her new
disposition toward faith and practice. It is a natural zeal, I think, and
should be endured with grace, but I hope to avoid the offensive part anyway. I
am myself still in the usual “honeymoon” phase of my transition—the period in
which you might observe a sudden alacrity for donning prayer ropes, buying
icons, reading the early Church Fathers, and casually dropping words like theosis, hesychasm, or phronema
into the most unrelated conversations. In this respect I, and those like me,
are trying more fully both to enter and to understand the new mode of life that
we now inhabit. Still, it can come off as rather snooty, contrived, and
pretentious. So have mercy on me! I also want to add the qualification that
nothing I say in these installments is intended to invalidate all the wonderful
things that I’ve always valued and believed as part of my Protestant
upbringing. So often affirmative claims imply related negations, and vice versa,
but not always. I would only ask that you be cautious and charitable in
ascribing to me some attitude or doctrine that I haven’t clearly or directly endorsed.
The Existential Crisis: Trying to Suck Less
I am
not starting with a theological, intellectual, or strictly biblical
justification of my new direction. Those elements are also essential parts of
my journey, and many of them were already in place before I finally smacked the
surface of inadequacy with my existential belly-flop. I have said mysteriously at
times that I needed to learn how to be a
sinner before I could start on salvation—that is, I needed to learn how to
face my wickedness without falling into the traps of either obsessing over it
or simply dismissing it. Thus, the reasons my heart finally softened to what I
had long viewed with skepticism were profoundly obvious and practical: I am a
sinner, and I need help. The part of my
story that I’ve shared most frequently, and is by now doubtless a little
tiresome to my friends, involves my summer breaks. Put briefly, summer vacation
more than anything else reveals to me (and others) the deep problems in my
heart that I’ve never really dealt with.
In his own short
description of his conversion, Fr. Stephen Freeman notes that the heart is
really the only place to find God, and yet we are, in a variety of ways,
alienated from our own hearts. He references our need to become not just godly,
but fully human, adding these words that reflect my own situation:
I had not been a man
with a heart; I had been a man with a head who read
books about the heart.
Well
as a high school teacher, I spend the summer months at home with my three
children—or as I used to think of it, enduring an insufferable level of noise
and nuisance (it’s supposed to be my
vacation, right?). My primary objective each summer was more or less to
break from reality; television, internet, beer, sports—all these were very
useful for achieving an anesthetic level of distraction and relational absence,
a state made desirable by the sustained trauma of the school year and its heavy
grading load. When my attempts at oblivion were interrupted by blasphemous
requests for my attention, my primary response was anger—sometimes the quiet
smoldering sort, sometimes the louder animalistic variety. Apathy was another
option. And alcohol made both easier. “So what?” you may be thinking, “That’s
pretty normal. Every parent gets angry sometimes; it’s not like you murdered
anyone.” Well, yes actually, I did. I am in fact a murderer—at least if Matthew
5 is to be taken seriously. I might as well add that I’m an adulterer, a thief,
and a drunk while I’m at it. I’m not being hard on myself, and I’m not stewing in
guilt (guilt is truly of the devil); I am only facing the reality of my weakness.
Our problems run deeper than general discontent. Fear, insecurity, shame,
despair—all engendering the dull life of a beast mired in its own filth,
snarling at anything that interferes with its morsels of preoccupation. And noise.
Endless noise. Not simply the “lives of quiet desperation,” that Thoreau
diagnoses, but a ceaseless “babel of distractions” that “prevent the will from
ever achieving silence” (Aldous Huxley). At the center of this maelstrom was my
heart, or rather, at the center of my heart was the maelstrom.
We
Orthodox often, in prayer and liturgy, call ourselves the worst (or first) of
sinners, but it comes from an impulse very different from certain western
fetishes with human depravity. It is not fatalistic, not obsessive, not
despairing, but more like a cancer patient’s sober acceptance of the dire
situation. And the situation is dire.[1] I
am genuinely sinful. I am almost convinced that if anyone else had been given
my life to live, he or she would have done much better with it. Now, leaving this somewhat abstract concept of
my own sinfulness aside, I can also attest to the more practical fact that being
angry, idle, and selfish is really exhausting. Over the past several years enforcing
my will upon the circus of juvenility in my house brought no joy, no love, no
comfort. I often wished I could strap my kids into a harness and suspend them
individually in soundproof tanks, perhaps occasionally tossing them a juice box
and a handful of Cheerios. Can’t I just watch
soccer highlights in peace!? Can’t I just read my articles on theology in
peace!? Can’t I just squander all of God’s gifts in peace!?
At
some point, however, I managed to stumble upon the obvious: I’m the problem, or
at least a big part of it. My kids may be the loudest children ever to torture
the air with their plaintive shrieks, but their own puerile impatience,
irritation, laziness, and wrath were but the unrefined types of my own.
So
what’s a guy to do? Isn’t Christianity supposed to help with this sort of
thing? Should I go to more Bible studies? Read more Christian books?
I’ve
long clung to the verse: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.” Well I wasn’t satisfied, so if Jesus wasn’t
blowing smoke, it follows that either I didn’t actually want righteousness or
the progress toward righteousness must be really slow and painful (or both).
Without yet expounding on my personal, spiritual history, I will say that the
primary avenue through which I sought spiritual growth was reading books. In
fact, I vaguely recall evaluating the daily success of my soul by how much I
had read. Sounds ridiculous, perhaps, but I’m not the only one with this
disease. Well, having read a good deal about spiritual transformation,
especially the works of J. P. Moreland,
Richard Foster, and Dallas Willard, I
knew that one important answer to the question “How do I suck less?” was to practice the spiritual disciplines. You
know: fasting, prayer, solitude, silence, almsgiving, etc.
Far
from being ways to show off how “righteous” you are, these traditional
disciplines are meant for the unrighteous. If you don’t suck, you don’t need
them. I’ve often reflected on how absurd it is that people feel insecure about
going to the gym and looking scrawny or flabby or weak. Those are precisely the
reasons we go to the gym. If I were already a glistening paragon of masculine
beauty, I wouldn’t bother with the gym. I’d just change my name to Hugh Jackman
and move to Hollywood.
So
there. I had a definite direction. Practice the spiritual disciplines. Problem solved.
The end.
Or
not.
My Problem with the Answer: The Unqualified
Trainer—Myself
The
problem with this answer was the lack of real instruction. We all tend to need guidance,
not just advice. I was left, as most Christians are, to my own resources. I had
tried all of these ascetic practices at some point. As a young man, I once ate nothing
and drank nothing but water for three days (I was aiming for a week). But it
was an act of sheer will, not an act of grace. In the end, it made me feel
special, but I wasn’t any closer to God. I once committed to an hour of
uninterrupted prayer everyday in my room. For months, I spent this hour trying
to fabricate from scratch what I later realized the ancient Church had long
preserved and cultivated—the daily prayer rule (the Trisagion, The Troparia,
the General Intercessions, etc.). Mostly I spent the hour talking to myself,
trying to form clever phrasings in my mind and often unconsciously projecting
my own desires onto the world. In short, I was floundering, and when I
technically accomplished my “goal,” it just infused me with new pride for my
efforts—the opposite of what I needed.
Return
to my analogy of the morbidly obese version of myself. Imagine how unhelpful
and potentially counterproductive it would be to say to Fat Tullius, “I know
what you need to do—eat right and exercise!” That may be technically correct,
but there are too many other conditions that need to be in place for that advice
to have any practical meaning, let alone real benefit: Which practices? What do they entail? When and how long should I do
them? Who will help me? Is this normal? What if I fail?
Here’s
where Orthodoxy seemed to separate itself from other forms of Christianity. It
has answers to all these questions—long, beautiful, and variegated answers
written from the real experiences of the great saints, ranging from the first
century to the present. By contrast, many major expressions of Protestantism,
especially those I had been used to, teach (implicitly or explicitly) that
there really is nothing you can do to cooperate more fully with the grace of
God, to participate in your own salvation, to grow in Christlikeness. Even to
think so may be regarded by some as a kind of Pharisaical attempt to “earn”
one’s salvation. I won’t stop here to expand upon how fallacious and
destructive this attitude is. It stems from a mistaken understanding of both sin
and salvation, I think, which I’ll perhaps address later. For now I’ll just mention
in passing that Scripture is filled from cover to cover with calls to choose obedience, to act on the Lord’s
statutes, to “put to death the deeds of the body” and to “work out your own
salvation with fear and trembling.” It requires serious hermeneutical blinders
to ignore the Bible’s prescription of free and active participation in our own
transformation.[2]
Consider also the words of Metropolitan Anthony:
It is absolutely pointless to ask God for something which we
ourselves are not prepared to do. If we say ‘O God, make me free from this or
that temptation’ while at the same time seeking every possible way of falling
to just such a temptation, hoping now that God is in control, that He will get
us out of it, then we do not stand much chance. God gives us strength but we
must use it.
Obviously
such passivity is only one, albeit pervasive, strain of Protestant culture, and
does not apply to all of it. Many churches are not only comfortable with the
traditional ascetic practices, but actively attempt to integrate them into the
lives of their communities. Organizations like Richard Foster’s Renovaré institute exist to try to
supply what is no longer intrinsic to parish life in the West. But such unique
entities only underscore the more general departure from those earlier rhythms
and expectations of Christian discipleship.
In the
more ancient of the western expressions of the Church, particularly classical
Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism, there has long been a traditional
observation of the same spiritual practices. However, it is not an
exaggeration, I think, to say that the vast majority of practicing Catholics
and Anglicans and respective clergy view the disciplines as highly optional for
the “layperson” who themselves no longer understand them to be essential for
sanctification or transformation. Thus it is sadly notable today (and
historically) that fasting and daily prayer have been neglected in western
Christendom—diluted or distorted by sin. The same criticism may be justly
levied at the Orthodox Church, but not in the sense that the amount of fasting,
almsgiving, and prayer regarded as ordinary,
essential, and expected has decreased to the same degree. Even Orthodox who
completely neglect these spiritual practices know that they are supposed to be doing them—and for their own benefit, not
some pharisaical notion of propriety.
Catholicism
endured an unfortunate period in which the spectrum of Christian practices
became merely legalistic—sources of guilt and manipulation (though not universally
so). In response to these abuses, theologians of the counter-reformation and
subsequent thinkers did well to swing the pendulum back toward sincere,
meaningful praxis, but cultural forces and repeated concessions over the
centuries have rendered faithful observation of the fasts and other habits almost
absent from the life of the average Catholic. While it is still common for many
to eat fish on Fridays in Lent and “give up something” like chocolate or coffee
for the 40-day period, it is much less common to meet a Catholic who knows that
eating only fish on Fridays is intended to be observed year-round, that both
Wednesdays and Fridays were the
traditional fast days, and that the general fasting guidelines did not ask
simply to avoid beef and chicken but to eliminate all meat, dairy, alcohol, and
oil from one’s diet. One of my wonderful Catholic friends told me a few years
ago that her priest advises against any fasting in Lent because it would only
make one prideful. Certainly, all spiritual practices pose that risk to the
sinful heart, but I’m not sure that the unchecked indulgence of our appetites is
a great alternative. Jesus expects us to fast and to do so humbly (Matthew 6:16,
9:15). [I must say, no less, that my Catholic friends tend to be some of the
most intelligent, radiant, and disciplined people I know. Indeed, they mostly
put me to shame when it comes to spiritual depth. I only comment here on the
missing sense of normativity in ascetic practice.]
The
English Reformation produced a unique brand of Christianity, a kind of mixture
of the ecclesiastical and liturgical elements of Catholicism, the conciliarity
of pre-Schism Christendom, and nascent Protestant doctrines like sola scriptura. Like other Protestant
traditions, Anglicanism rejected the legalism and clerical abuses of medieval
Catholicism, and did its best to streamline those things deemed “necessary for
salvation.” Since the concept of salvation
had been for the most part separated in Western theology from sanctification, the array of exercises
intended to bring about the latter became technically “unnecessary.” My
experience has been that if you tell people (or even imply) that something is
optional or unnecessary to their ultimate goal (in this case, “salvation”) then
they will usually take a pass on it. And if you are one of the exceptions, you
are left more or less alone, maybe even drawing resentment from others for
trying too hard to be “holy” or attempting to “earn your salvation.” Sadly, we’ve
reached a point in American Christianity in which it is much more acceptable to
resign oneself to a life of perpetual sin, lust, gluttony, and selfishness than
it is to make a concerted effort to reject those habits and adopt a life of
obedience to the statutes of Christ.
The
long and short of this very cursory historical digression is that Catholicism,
Anglicanism, and broader Protestantism had lost—both in their liturgical,
ecclesial lives and in their dogmatic and/or doctrinal teachings—the rigorous,
intentional, traditional integration of ascetic practices that had been a part
of the Church since the time of the Apostles. The Orthodox have faithfully
preserved this aspect of the faith, and even when people neglect it or
participate perfunctorily or legalistically, there is at least the clerical and
communal understanding of its centrality. Disciplines are not merely private
activities for my own edification, nor are they just a personal “diet program”
designed for me, the individual. After all, “you can't really practice [the
spiritual disciplines] without community. If you have a community where they
are understood as a normal part of our lives, there can be instruction or
teaching about them, which brings about a kind of accountability.” Once again
these are the thoughts of Dallas Willard (whose influence I hope to explain at
length in a separate installment), and they resonate with my experience. If
your broader spiritual community is not invested in the regular observations of
at least the major fasts (and feasts) and the idea of developing even a minimal
prayer rule, how long could you keep it up on your own, even with your pastor’s
support? How long could you commit to Yoga, or cycling, or soccer, without a
group of fellow practitioners prioritizing the same vision of health and
fitness. Wouldn’t even something as important as Bible study be more difficult
if it weren’t at least an implicitly “expected” activity within the life and
community you chose (and perhaps it’s difficult anyway)? [More on fasting here
and here.]
So
when I asked myself, Which version of
Christianity at least ostensibly offers this kind of program for renewal, transformation,
and sanctification—and not just as a Summer Camp or an Institute or a Para-Church
activity, but as a real, historical, and unequivocal part of its identity?
There was really only one answer.
This
was my entry point for regarding Orthodoxy as even an outside possibility. I
needed help. A lot of help. A lifetime of help (I still do). But there were
still many other important things to consider. After all, you wouldn’t want to
sign up for a really effective fitness program only to find out later that they
feed you steroids, encourage vanity, or make you wear a leopard-print leotard.
[1] The Lord of
The Rings so well captures that flash
of penetrating awareness that every honest character has of his/her own hidden
complicity with evil—in the films, it is depicted as a brief vision of the
“great eye wreathed in flame.” Gandalf, Bilbo, Galadriel, Boromir—all but a
few—understand deeply their own susceptibility, and yet they neither despair
nor acquiesce to its power, but instead hope. And they hope, often, in the
faith and choices of men.
[2]
Passages are too
numerous to list, but here are a few more Matt 16:24, Luke 6:40, 2 Peter 1:3-9,
Phil. 2, Col. 3, etc.
excellent...thanks. look forward to the rest.
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