The Beginning to a Beginning

Prologue

I am about to provide an account of my conversion to the Orthodox Church from my earlier mainstream Protestant faith.  I want to begin, however, by offering some reflections on why faith is a part of my life at all.  Those of you who may adhere to one or another variety of agnostic or atheistic convictions may be somewhat amused or bemused about this facet of a man who may seem otherwise modestly intelligent. Certainly, there is no shortage of arguments that might be produced for or against the many expressions of theism, but the merits or demerits of these arguments might be debated for ages (as they have been) with varying effect—though sometimes such debates may be very important indeed. Instead, I’ll just speak directly about one or two specific aspects of my personal experience.

I have always found it impossible to be an atheist. Notice, I did not say “irrational”; there are perfectly rational ways to think oneself into a godless universe, and there are perfectly rational people who do just that. I am also sympathetic to those who reject conventional expressions of faith—particularly trite, American expressions—because of their shallow or insular subcultures, inexplicable political affiliations, or general flippancy toward those who disagree. Yes, I am acutely aware of just how stupid much of what passes for “Christianity” can be. But I’m a firm believer that one should never let someone else’s stupidity hinder his or her own contemplations of truth. One, of course, should not let his own stupidity be a hindrance either. In my case, the latter has been more difficult to manage.

All that said, the impossibility of atheism for me has not been a matter of logical inference or empirical evidence, but of deeper experience. God is a person, and persons are mysteries—mysteries that can be known. Known—not like one knows information in a book or observations through a microscope, but rather how you know your mother, or your friend, or even yourself.  Real knowledge. In this respect, human rationality is limited. It is limited to the inferences we can make according to the axioms we accept as trustworthy. Which axioms we take to be the most convincing largely depends on non-rational (or perhaps, supra-rational) factors. We have a kind of experiential resonance with our most basic convictions, and we work outward from them toward new convictions through the currents of logical, emotional, psychological, and aesthetic impulses—none of which, in my opinion should be regarded as invalid or inappropriate.

There is something admirable and quite attractive about the devotion to reason and its tidy, ingenious justifications. I would never abandon it. After all, my appreciation for the life of the mind drove me into years of philosophical study. Formal logic has long been one of my favorite subjects to learn and to teach. Still, in some ways, Reason is like a young woman, so talented and beautiful that a man wishes he could make her his true wife—but alas! he sees that she could never really understand the full vision of life and love for which his deeper heart longs. There would surely be an agreeable confidence in parading her around to receive the approval or envy of those who would also make her a trophy for themselves, but something would be missing—that tacit understanding, the intimacy of the bedroom, the aches and bruises, the poetry and warmth of shared experience. In other words, unlike Reason, Knowledge must be more of a matron than a mistress. She does not simply prove or justify. Knowledge stitches up your wounds, rubs her thumbs pensively over the scars, holds back your hair as you curl and vomit in the darkness. And this, by the way, is why Faith is the greatest form of knowledge.

If I haven’t already lost you with my strange analogies and conceptual vagaries, allow me to get to the point. Love and beauty constitute, for me, inarguable realities. Bishop Kallistos Ware writes in his book The Orthodox Way,

For each of us—perhaps once or twice only in the whole course of our lives—there have been sudden moments of discovery when we have seen disclosed the deepest being and truth of another, and we have experienced his or her inner life as if it were our own. And this encounter with the true personhood of another is, once more, a contact with the transcendent and timeless, with something stronger than death. To say to another, with all our heart, “I love you,” is to say, “You will never die.” At such moments of personal sharing we know, not through arguments but by immediate conviction, that there is life beyond death. So it is that in our relations with others, as in our experience of ourselves, we have moments of transcendence, pointing to something that lies beyond. (Emphasis added.)

This experience of real, particular love with another is perhaps the best “argument” for immortality. To love someone deeply is not simply to hope he or she will live on, but to know it and to will it. Bishop Kallistos suggests that we must be “loyal to these moments” of revelation not dismiss them as mere psychological phenomena.  If I am to be loyal to my own similar experiences, I have to acknowledge some ground of eternality, some Source and Sustainer of the love, the person, the human being whose inner life is now part and parcel of mine. Beauty too is the radiance of this love; and nothing truly beautiful must ever cease to exist. To some this may seem rather sappy or naïve, but if you have experienced such moments, no further explanation is necessary. If you have not experienced such moments, no explanation is possible.

So that is a beginning, at least, to sharing a glimpse of this world of poetry and miracle, a world impossible to separate from divine intimacy and immanence. There is of course more to it. The philosophical and empirical challenges to theism should not be ignored. But ultimately, for me, either Love is real, or nothing is real. And if nothing is real, there’s no advantage to being right. Regardless, I hope anyone who reads what follows can do so with charity and patience in spite of the fact that I may be a fool. After all, perhaps it is you whom I love, and you, then, who is the best evidence for a caring, eternal Reality.

[Next up—Part One: Just Another Average Loser]