A philanthropist was walking on the sidewalk and met a sorely crippled man going along in a weelchair.

“How did you become crippled?” he asked.

“I loved a girl, and wanted to win her heart. Therefore I bought a weelchair like the one her crippled father uses, and I always went about in it, so that I would seem more familiar to her.”

“And did you win the girl?”

“No,” the fool answered, ”for I have now lost the use of my legs by pretending to be crippled, and my sweetheart was not willing to be bound to a lame man as her mother was.”

Thought I’d take another stab at this by way of rewriting an old post, and further decided to paste it here as well. This essay is not at all authoritative or even technical; my desire is to be able to explain to people how I, as someone raised anti-Catholic, was able to embrace a faith (the Eastern Orthodox Church) that includes a very strong belief in sacraments as a normal, effective part of Christian life.

By way of introduction I want to say that  the endeavor of my personal religious search (going on 10 years now) has been to discover what is truly Christian. In so doing I have learned that though there are many teachings that are called Christian, they are not all equally authoritative. In our time there are tens of thousands of sects, and all of them claim to be understanding the Bible in the proper way. But there was a time, in fact a very long time, when the Christian Church was so committed to unity that it could travail and struggle through the most serious doctrinal questions and come out not only with a concensus but with a formulation - a way of speaking about the mysteries of the faith - that was specific and that became regulative for all Christians ever after.

We all, including Protestants, benefit from these ocurrences to this day. Without the struggles, the councils, the authority of the holy theologians and the faith and obedience of the first Christian millenium, there would be no sense that it’s orthodox to consider Jesus as God, to believe in the Trinity, and to list a specific group of New Testament books as scripture.

In other words, what’s become clear is that if I want to escape the hermeneutic nightmare and resulting fragmentation of modern-day Christianity, I must owe interpretive allegiance first of all to the established Christian teachings of the first millenium.

That means a lot of things, but for now we’re just talking about sacraments. Or, to use the Orthodox word, Mysteries. Modern queasines about seeing grace attached to a physical object was never thought a Christian idea until very recent times.

There is always something about a Mystery that defies pinpoint definition. That’s why the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was so odious in the nostrils of the reformers. It’s not that we can’t talk about the mysteries of the church within the church; it’s not that we can’t say what we are meeting there and what it is doing for us. But there will always be more there than we can say. Religion is made to be enacted, lived, and walked in - not primarily to be talked about. A true theologian is a person who communes with God, not one who mistakenly thinks he can define the Almighty. (My reluctance to define God should not be confused with the “Emergent” reluctance to say anything precise and confident on religious subjects at all. They are part of two very different ways of approaching religion.)

A Mystery - what is sometimes called a sacrament in Western terms - is a sort of bridge from the world of our senses to the world of our hearts, where God meets us.

A sacrament, or mystery, is an enactment of a religious truth that, through the power of grace, becomes an experience of the religious truth itself. In the Lord’s Supper, for instance, it is not simply the bread and wine that are symbols. Our eating them is likewise a symbol - a symbol for the fact that we must imbibe Christ for the nourishment of our souls, that our life comes from him. What Christians believe is that in participating in this enactment a person is participating not only in the symbol but in the thing being symbolized. Your actions represent “recieving Christ” and at the same time you are actually receiving Christ. You recieve him in eating the bread and wine; and if you want to be as bold as the mystical theologians of times past you can even say that you are eating his flesh and blood and that mystically the bread and wine are his flesh and blood. It is not that far off from a few things that Jesus himself said if you are not afraid to take them in their plain sense. It only requires some faith and a religious imagination that struggles to free itself from the materialistic viewpoint of our modern day.

(”Imagination” is not the faculty of making up things that aren’t true; it’s the faculty of ‘imaging’ or forming concepts of realities that are not immediately present to the senses. It is an essential faculty when you are talking about religion and must be guarded and educated properly.)

Of course my readers must not think that I am trying to equate bread and wine with Christ’s body and blood in any scientific sense. That was the mistake of both transubstantiation and consubstantiation. What I mean is that as I understand it, the reality by which the body and blood of Christ is identified bread and wine is of a different nature than that by which grain and grapes are made bread and wine. Christ’s flesh itself belongs to a different nature - or rather the old nature resurrected and transfigured and changed. It is a “spiritual body” as saint Paul says, with what must surely have been conscious paradox. How can scientific terms be employed to describe the relationship between these two natures? I am not even sure that it is properly a ‘relationship’ at all, for it is not described as two things relating, but rather - “this is my body” as two objects identified (spoken of as one.)

However, if you want to know what this looks like in an actual service I will say this much. During the service (”Liturgy”) the bread and wine are brought out to pass between the people of the congregation, establishing a connection between the Body of Christ in the Church and the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. After much prayer and praising, the elder who stands in the altar for the congregation prays for mercy because of his owns sins, facing the altar along with the congregation, and with a certain amount of fear prays that God will “make” or “show” the bread and wine to be the body and blood of Christ. The people, kneeling, pray “Amen” all through this because it is the offering of all of the congregation. Then, remembering Christ’s sacrifice, everyone comes to eat and drink, believing that they themselves have in a mystery become present at that very sacrifice through their remembrance.

So in the Eucharist a Christian is really recieving Christ. This grace is attached to this form. If he approaches it with faith he will recieve Him to his benefit. If he approach sinfully he recieves Him to his damnation because although the grace is always there, the person has made himself unfit for this grace and it will not agree with him in that state.

Since we are talking about how a Protestant comes to accept such a thing, I think it would be well at this point to talk about The Protestant Sacrament. Yes, they retain one, though they don’t call it that.

Perhaps the most important moment in my spiritual life as a Baptist took place at camp. A rather politic, learned, gentle man in his own sphere was talking to us about how to read the Bible.

“The scriptures” he earnestly intoned “can literally become your spiritual food. You can be reading the page and seeing the Lord beyond the page, and it will literally be for the nourishment of your soul.”

This preacher was unusually articulate and was not in the habit of using the word ‘literally’ for mere emphasis, so I knew he meant it. If wanted to, I could stop reading the Bible as a mere text, and begin to feed upon it. I began to pracitce this and over time I learned to recognize that sense of hunger in myself when I had not fed. To this day I can open my Bible and because of practice I can derive a certain flow of life, if I may so describe it, as I read the words. It is coming through my physical and mental action of reading, but I’m aware that there is a certain presence of God resting upon the whole meeting that gives it such effectiveness. This presence of God, unlike other types of prescence, is no dependant upon the right timing. It is something that is always there. It is a grace that has been given to the scriptures and which I can expect them to retain to my benefit, whenever I choose to expose myself to it. In college I learned that this is an aspect of the word’s identification with the Word - Christ and the scriptures are in a sense one and when you take in the words by faith you recieve the Word.

In other words, I’ve been experiencing mystery for a long time.

Then there was marriage. In studying the scriptures I began to discover that the act of physical union between man and woman was a symbol for the union of God and Mankind. Not only was it a symbol of it, but it partook of the reality in a sense. It was meant to be the same kind of bridge or meeting place.

And finally, there was The Sinner’s Prayer. This was a moment, for those of evangelical stripe, at which your physical action of praying a certain prayer could and indeed must be expected to met with a very real infusion of grace. It was equated with being born again.

As I read the scriptures it became clear to me that it was the protestants who balked at a literal interpretation when it came to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It is obvious if you read between the lines that the early Christians used Baptism as we use the Sinner’s Prayer, and that they expected exactly the same results from it. The simplest way to prove this is to get out your concordance; make a list of all scriptures mentioning baptism; and read each of them assuming the interpretation I’ve given above. Suddenly they make sense.

When evangelicals balk at referring to baptism as regeneration, they are forced to substitute another ritual in its place - the sinner’s prayer, or walking the aisle. Only very strict Calvinists sometimes conjecture that God may infuse the grace of regeneration unsuspected when faith is born in the heart, completely independant of any form of action or choice on the part of the sinner. I still don’t think that is impossible in certain circumstance. Orthodox Christians do not believe that God has limited himself to bestow new life in Christ only through Baptism. All the same it is dreadful to knowingly slight the office of Baptism, since Christ has appointed it. It is the normal way to become a Christian and as such God has been so good as to attach a certain grace to it.

I have yet to experience the grace of the Eucharist. But I no longer have any qualms about doing it when the time comes.

I do not fear that it is superstitious to imagine that grace can be attached to a physical object or action. It is in the nature of Christianity that grace is more often incarnated in this manner than not. God is saving physical nature, not discarding it and that is why Christ, first of all, was enfleshed. What’s more I don’t believe in this grace in any “magical” sense, and nor do any Orthodox Christians. That is, even though we believe that the grace for healing and salvation is always present in the sacrament, we do not believe that it automatically saves a person who merely goes through the motions. Where there is no faith and no love that grace will be destructive, not saving. In this light I Corinthians 11 begins to make a lot more sense. 

Nor do I feel that I am indulging in “works salvation.” Since the Orthodox Church does not believe that heaven is attained through merit, there is no sense of merit accruing to our account with God when we enact the Christian Mysteries. They are acts of faith and obedience and I expect God, in his kindness, to make it to my salvation simply because he has promised to do so. (I have only to add that when an Orthodox Christian speaks of “salvation” he is not referring to a one-time event that marks the beginning of the Christian life. In Orthodox vocaublary, following  the Greek in which the New Testament was written, salvation is any rescuing, healing, santification, or preservation which God gives us through any means - either directly or mediated through other Christians on earth or in heaven, through sacraments, through dreams or thoughts, through icons, through authorities, through our own faith and love, through the ministry of his Spirit that penetrates all these things - in short through everything within his kingdom.)

Because I will be doing so within the Eastern Orthodox Church, I do not feel that I am doing something “Catholic.” Note, I do not consider the RCC to be my particular enemy. I hope I can count as particular friends all who worship the Lord Jesus as the Only-Begotten of the Father and through Him, the Holy Trinity. However, the doctrine of transubstantiation (so intellectually unacceptable to all but those who invented it,) certain confusions about the nature of grace that have sometimes existed within Western Christianity, and the power that authoritarian clergy have sometimes wielded over people through the Catholic sacraments, have created such suspicion that I know it will be to some people’s relief, as indeed it was to my own as well, to realize that the original Christian Mysteries exist outside of the RCC. My Catholic readers will not be able to agree with me in this belief but we will agree in trusting to the mercy of God to save what can be saved and sort all out in the end.

Finally, I am very happy in the thought that I will be doing something that can truly be considered established Christian doctrine and practice. This is not just my interpretation - I have the whole Church behind me. It is what all Christians everywhere did and to a great extent believed, until materialism and modernism enacted the present-day strict division between the spiritual and the material world.

I suppose that all natural human loves can be images of and partakers in Divine Love. It’s only just come to me how a parents’ love really does so.

In a happy marriage there is no need of a child to bring any completion or fulfil any lack within the relationship. The the man and the woman - diverse in sex, one in nature - have found unity and completion in one another, and they make a little world of themselves. Yet that same relationship will ordinarily flow out into living offspring. In fact, when parents bring a child into the world voluntarily and out of no obligation or sense of need, but just out of the desire to share their love with their own image, to allow their love to expand, as it were, and flow out, not only to an existing object, but to an object that exists because of the love that flows out to it - that is the when the phrase “Our Father, You Who are in Heaven” has the most meaning to us.

In case someone does not understand the comparison, I am talking about the truth that God is Himself a Realm and World that needs no other world to contain or give context. In diversity of Persons, Unity of Nature, His existance is named Love. Yet he pours out love even beyond himself, as impossible as this seems, which results in the existance of creatures and the bestowing of all good upon them. This is done freely and that is the beauty of it and the Honor of the Creator.

I believe that parental love is an image of this Divine Creative Love, and I think that the more freely parents bestow this ‘creating love’ upon the child whose existence they desire, the clearer the image becomes.

On the other hand, when the bearing of children becomes an obligation, as in so many corners of Christianity, the image is forbidden this, its most essential aspect.

Obligation is what ruins so many spiritual joys and godly virtues. I’m sure that is why, no matter how much the Jewish Christians of the Apostle Paul’s day were in need, no matter how good it was for the Gentiles to contribute largely to that need, he forbore to give them any command concerning the amount (or percentage) that each was to give. For “God loves a cheerful giver” and no one was to give “under compulsion.”

In fact, although the Kingdom of God is a place of order, of God’s rule, of Law of a sort, that Law is Love, and Love is free and is freedom. The whole tenor of true Christianity is one of goodness that is not under compulsion. Whenever I percieve the urge to codify and legislate what ought to be free and the springing up of grace, I feel that I am looking at something unhealthy and not fully Christian.

I used to think that to forgive someone was to release them from an obligation they had incurred against themselves by wronging me. Such a definition is easy to formulate and fits neatly into certain rather elegant theories about right and wrong. I suppose that idea still has some meaning or usefulness in some spheres of this life. However, I think that the more bewildering is more true: what is most important about forviveness is that we are all, already, under infinite obligation to one another because of that law which says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

I’m not saying that our obligation came into being when this law was first spoken as a commandement. The speaking of the command was, I think, more like a witness to a law that already existed because it has to do with what we are. As created beings, we are what we are only relative to other things that are and ultimately to the Uncreated, if we can be said to be anything relative to the Uncreated.

What I am trying to say is that when I forgive my neighbor I am the one under obligation, to suffer wrong rather than to wrong. This is to fulfill the law of Christ, which is love. If my baby, for whom I have cultivated limitless love, becomes angry with me for some baby reason, I would rather he changed his mind and came running into my arms, even if he pulls my hair and screams at me for a few moments, than that he flee from me in order to punish myself and nurture his greivance. I rejoice in the suffering of his rage if he vents it on me instead of on himself. It is better, if messier, than him giving me a dark look and retreating silently into loneliness.

When we ask God to forgive us, there is no obligation on his part. It is improper, I believe, to think of obligation when we are speaking of the Uncreated. Likewise, I don’t think we are asking for something to take place within God. I think we are asking that something be enabled to enter us. The forgiveness actually cures the sin. It absolves it, cleanses us from it, burns it, shames it into nothing. The forgiveness is more real than the sin.

My husband spent some minutes lately looking into an icon. When he returned he told me that sin doesn’t matter. That is a terrifying thing to hear from one’s husband. You think it means he’s going to sin more. Actually, acting as if sin doesn’t matter relative to one’s own pleasure is what is so dangerous. But when you say that sin is ultimately meaningless and nothing after gazing on God, that is a wholly different meaning. I’m not sure how to say what my husband told me, I’m not sure how he even told me. But it’s true. In the Light of God, there is no darkness. Sin is not the defining thing about me there. It vanishes.

This leads me to ask if whether, when we forgive our neighbor, there is not something of this grace that enters them even through us. If we merely release them from an obligation, probably not. In that case the consciousness of the unpaid debt remains forever. But perhaps if forgiveness even between creatures is of another kind - perhaps if it is the opening of my heart to their good, releasing the wrong they have done me and allowing it to vanish as my own sins do when God forgives me - perhaps then they feel some of the same health. I think what I am saying is that true forgiveness is when I see someone else in the light of God’s face. My sins, and their sins alike, are nothing there, and we are only what God has made us to be, the mysterious me and the unique him. And when I do that, maybe the person I have forgiven can know themselves a little as I have know them in that place.

All this sheds some light on a question I have long had - why we must ask God to forgive us as we forgive others. Doesn’t our forgiveness of others proceed from God’s forgiveness of us?

I still think that is true. Nevertheless, refusing to forgive others can lead to God not forgiving us. Stop. Think. Remember that in asking God to forgive us we are not asking for something to happen within God. How could we even think about such a thing? Likewise, when Christ says that God does not forgive us - either for blaspheming the Holy Spirit, or less permanantly, for refusing to forgive others, he is not talking about something that moves or changes withing God.

When I go into God’s light to have my sins washed away, when I seek to know the cleansing power of His Blood; I will see myself without my sins and I will see others in the same way. His light is infinite. It will not settle on me and close others out, no matter how much I may want it to. Either I will know forgiveness - the forgiveness that encompasses me and my bitterest enemy alike - or I will refuse forgiveness. Whether I refuse it for myself or others, I will shut myself out from it just the same.

Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

“But do they teach you who God really is?” she asked wistfully. “That’s what I wish my church would do.”

My heart leapt and I wanted to simply say yes. That is indeed the pursuit that led me to the Orthodox Church.

Just as we began looking into Orthodoxy I read an article by a prominent fundamentalist. He had a new scheme for determining which doctrines are fundamental to the Christian faith.

It could have been illustrated by a series of concentric circles, with “the gospel” at the heart. The more necessary a doctrine was in explaining the gospel, the more fundamental that doctrine was to be considered. That put the doctrine of God and Christ’s incarnation somewhere off to the side. I felt I was looking at something completely disordered, from the desk of one of the most spiritually mature men I knew.

In contrast, I had begun reading Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church as well as The Cloud of Unknowing, and was immediately struck by how Orthodox theology has God at the center. Not just the doctrine of God - God himself.  All the other doctrines  flowed naturally and even forcefully from the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

Yet as I trundled over dark roads in my little Ford Focus, with her at my side asking her wistful question, I could not say a simple “yes, they do tell me who God really is.”

As a matter of fact, nowhere in Orthodoxy have I been told “who God really is.” Everywhere I turn I’ve been told that’s something I can’t know. But that denial, odd as it sounds, is the most deeply satisfying assurance I’ve ever been given.

“Eye has not seen” I have long known, “nor ear heard, neither has it entered into a human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him.”

But that statement rings hollow when you believe that God has been correctly defined and you happen to know the definition. If the human heart has already exhausted the concept of God, the best thing that exists, what is there left for him to give me that’s so hard to imagine? What place could he prepare for me that I can’t conceive of, if I can so readily conceive of its builder?  

But my Bible had long been telling me that it is he, God, who has been our dwelling place in all generations. Now my church tells me that it is in God that place has been prepared for those who love him, beyond our hearts’ conceiving. Moses, who saw his glory, called God a home and a realm. In him we all have our being and when we yearn for him we long to rest within him and not beside him.

In other words, it would be harder to define God than to draw a line around the space-time fabric. Yet it is also impossible to stand outside of him and for this reason he can descend to us, enflame us with himself, and bestow the knowledge of God upon us.

So to answer her question: while they don’t exactly tell me who God really is, they do lead me to this endless River of Fire. I step in and my heart begins to thaw. The God that I cannot comprehend, by contrast comprehends me perfectly. And I begin to know him from within - a completely different position than the one which her words imply, and the exact position toward which she yearns. 

Not only that, but they hand me a broom of sorts, and every day I sweep away false idols from my mind. As I write this, I’m remembering once again that the oldest book of the Bible is a story about a man, an innocent sufferer, who has to atone for three men who said the wrong things about God. So here I am, an Orthodox Chatecumen, learning how not to say the wrong things about God.

I wish she were here with me.

As soon as I was reasonably sure I wanted to become Orthodox in my Christianity, one of the first feelings or sentiments I experienced was a new distate for religious debate. It felt distinctly impious for me to throw my new-found allegiance toward historic Christian faith into the roiling ring of present-day theological dialogue. I don’t know if that’s because I was aware of my infantile grasp on this faith or if that is the way I would have felt had I gotten a PhD in Orthodox Studies before converting.

Since then, however, everything I’ve seen has confirmed that sentiment. I’ve seen two kinds of internet debate in which Orthodox thinking has been involved.

1) The Orthodox discussion boards; Inter-Orthodox debates.

2) The blog world of protestant seminarians and theologues; Orthodoxy debating with other forms of Christianity.

Each of these types distress me in different ways.

In the first you have Orthodox Christians forgetting themselves and their duties to one another all over the place. I’ve seen sentence after sentence beginning in “Forgive me, but…” and ending in some form of condemnation, criticism, or tongue-lashing in the name of True Orthodoxy. Frequently the bullies win because they won’t back down, while people trying to be good Orthodox Christians choose to put themselves in the wrong rather than keep squabbling. In the process they unfortunately put their beliefs in the wrong, as well. Friendships, at least of the internet sort, break up in public. And the cause of it all is that people were setting their religious beliefs at one another like attack dogs.

I’ve only set my heart on Orthodoxy since last summer, but already I’ve come to associate Orthodox discussion forums with a sort of American Orthodox Fundamentalism. You know, the type that judges the genuineness of your Orthodoxy against a calendar, a head covering, an ethnic custom, a favorite author, lipstick, spanking, a certain political cause, or some other non-essential. (This is a classic hallmark of all kinds of fundamentalism, by the way, as I have very good reason to know, having been raised in a fundamentalist church.) I don’t believe that Orthodoxy is normally a very fundamentalist type of religion. So I don’t care to see the most fundamental thinking among us being the most prominent. 

 The second forum is that of debating with protestants. When I was a protestant I enjoyed getting into a religious brawl as much as anyone out there. Oh, to find someone on my level and have it out in a good clean fight - my intution, learning, grammar, ettiquete, scriptural knowledge, and theological bent against someone else’s. In the process I came to understand the world of protestant theologues rather well. I’m going to share a few hints about their arena:

a) In any given debate, the fight is won by the person with the best debate skills and the steadiest stomach, not the person with the superior theological position.

b) the discussion is almost always purely rational, which means that theology like that of the Orthodox, which cannot survive once divided from its Living context of the Church, has little chance to come out on top compared to theology that was born and bred in a seminary classroom or study.

c) ridicule is the most commonly employed means of making one’s point - in other words, any doctrine you take into the arena you expose to ridicule.

d) over the internet, at least, the beliefs under debate inevitably become an extension of the believer - you attack one, you attack the other - which must inevitably degrade the honor of a belief that in reality is attached to Christ’s whole body, rather than to a single individual.

e) No one ever changes his or her mind.

 So what is the point, my friends? For what good do we hang the historic faith of the apostles, fathers, saints, and martyrs upon the hook of our own debating skills? For what do we engage our tradition in an arena in which it cannot win? Is it right to hand over our holy faith to those who will hold it up to the ridicule of outsiders? Is it right to put it in the position of being our personal defender, and our unworthy selves its personal defender? Is it good that we seek to make it a tool of destruction, humiliation and victory over our fellow believers in Christ Jesus? And when we have done all this, even if we’ve managed to prove our point to some seminarian, making him look like a fool in the process, have we saved a single sinner? Have we even established respectful connections with separated brethren? I fear not.

What’s more, another evil has then been accomplished.

The Protestant mindset is not a coherent tradition anymore. Underneath a broad body of allegiance to the Bible swing a billion tentacles of divided belief. Some tentacles are engorged by the adherence of millions; some maintain a connection to traditional Christian belief that gives them a certain soundness; others are the slender hair of a purely individual interpretation. But the grounds by which they defend their beliefs with such apparent confidence are not entirely the same grounds by which we defend ours. Our confidence flows largely from being part of a Living Body, with an age-long self-memory. Theirs depends largely upon their individual ability to interpret scriptures and church history: the arena of these very debates. Therefore when we enter into debate with such defenders we are making our faith as if it had no more grounds than theirs (I mean, in points at which they differ from us - for we must not forget to thank God for all points of unity which remain to Christian people in our time) thus undermining our own efforts. We are putting the faith beneath us instead of above us and in us and around us, and subjecting it to the criteria of those who do not know anything about it. And the more confidently we defend it, the more arrogant we seem and the less they understand it.

I do understand that there have been great defenders and debaters among the Christians. If there is ever a time again when a blow needs to be struck for Orthodox Christianity, I hope and believe that the saints among us will know how to do it. But when it comes to witnessing for our true Christian faith, I believe it is to such as us that Christ and the apostles speak when they tell us that it is our love, our Christian obedience, our steadfast faith, and our readiness to answer inquirers who have witnessed our hope, that is required of us.

A little Mother called Ruth prayed to the Lord one night.

“Is it really my wrongdoing that estranges me from my fellow humans?” she cried.

She woke in the gray hours of the morning and found an angel standing by her bed.

“Who are you, lord?” she said, crossing herself as she spoke.

The angel said, “Come.”

So she followed him into the garden. She saw there among the melon vines a plant that she’d never looked on before.

The angel showed her at the end of the vine a broad, spotty leaf that trembled violently though the breeze was so slight it could hardly have been measured.

“What is this?” she said.

“Agony” he answered.

Then he moved his finger further into the vine and showed her a thick, sickly-white stem.

“And this?” she asked.

“Terror.”

Then he showed her a sound green shoot.

“This is the true desire for what is good” he said. The shoot was small but it was firm and clung tenaciously to the ground. A little stream of water flowed to it and the shoot seemed to be drinking up the water as if it wanted to form its own roots and become the whole plant.

“Is this the true plant, after all?” she asked hopefully.

But the angel directed her gaze further along the vine and showed her a large purple stem; or perhaps it was a tumor swollen on the stem. The little Mother began to trace its form among the leaves with her fingers. She never reached the end, for as she felt it she asked once more, with disgust, “And what is this?” But he never answered.

So she woke in her bed wondering.

This post has a strange history: it got a lot of attention when I first put it up, but after continuing to learn about the Christian faith I felt that my explanation was inadequate and perhaps even slightly inaccurate, and I wanted to erase it. However, instead of deleting the post as I often do with those with which I am dissatisfied, I left it up so that people could still read the comments, which I thought had merit.

Since then this page has been in my top post list. Most of the hits come from searches and I’m aware that people are likely not following the link to this article just so they can read the comments section. So, unwilling to disappoint my readers, I’ve decided to take another stab at it. This will not be a technical doctrinal thesis. My desire is to be able to tell people how I, as someone raised anti-Catholic, was able to embrace a faith (the Eastern Orthodox Church) that includes a very strong belief in sacraments as a normal, effective part of Christian life.

First of all, the endeavor of my personal religious search (going on 10 years now) has been to discover what is truly Christian. In so doing I have learned that though there are many teachings that are called Christian, they are not all equally authoritative. In our time there are tens of thousands of sects, and all of them claim to be understanding the Bible in the proper way. But there was a time, in fact a very long time, when the Christian Church was so committed to unity that it could travail and struggle through the most serious doctrinal questions and come out not only with a concensus but with a formulation - a way of speaking about the mysteries of the faith - that was specific and that became regulative for all Christians ever after.

We all, including Protestants, benefit from these things to this day. Without the struggles, the councils, the authority of the holy theologians and the faith and obedience of the first Christian millenium, there would be no sense that it’s orthodox to consider Jesus as God, to believe in the Trinity, and to list a specific group of New Testament books as scripture.

In other words, what’s become clear is that if I want to escape the hermeneutic nightmare and resulting fragmentation of modern-day Christianity, I must owe interpretive allegiance first of all to the established Christian teachings of the first millenium.

That means a lot of things, but for now we’re just talking about sacraments. Or, to use the Orthodox word, Mysteries. Today’s queasines about seeing grace attached to a physical object was never thought a Christian idea until very modern times.

There is always something about a Mystery that defies pinpoint definition. That’s why the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was so odious in the nostrils of the reformers. It’s not that we can’t talk about the mysteries of the church within the church; it’s not that we can’t say what we are meeting there and what it is doing for us. But there will always be more there than we can say. Religion is made to be enacted, lived, and walked in - not primarily to be talked about. A true theologian is a person who communes with God, not one who mistakenly thinks he can define the Almighty. (My reluctance to define God should not be confused with the “Emergent” reluctance to say anything precise and confident on religious subjects at all. They are part of two very different ways of approaching religion.)

A Mystery - what is sometimes called a sacrament in Western terms - is a sort of bridge from the world of our senses to the world of our hearts, where God meets us.

It is an enactment of a religious truth that, through the power of grace, becomes an experience of the religious truth itself. In the Lord’s Supper, for instance, it is not simply the bread and wine that are symbols. Our eating them is likewise a symbol - a symbol for the fact that we must imbibe Christ for the nourishment of our souls, that our life comes from him. What Christians believe is that in participating in this enactment a person is participating not only in the symbol but in the thing being symbolized. Your actons represent “recieving Christ” and at the same time you are actually receiving Christ. You recieve him in eating the bread and wine; and if you want to be as bold as the mystical theologians of times past you can even say that you are eating his flesh and blood and that mystically the bread and wine are his flesh and blood. It is not that far off from a few things that Jesus himself said if you are not afraid to take them in their plain sense. It only requires some faith and a religious imagination that struggles to free itself from the materialistic viewpoint of our modern day.

However, if you want to know what this looks like in an actual service I will say this much. During the service, the bread and wine are brought out to pass between the people of the congregation, established a connection between the Body of Christ in the Church and the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. After much prayer and praising, the elder who stands in the altar for the congregation prays for mercy because of his owns sins, and with a certain amount of fear prays that God will “make” or “show” the bread and wine to be the body and blood of Christ. The people, kneeling, pray “Amen” all through this because it is the offering of all of the congregation. Then, remembering Christ’s sacrifice, everyone comes to eat and drink, believing that they themselves have in a mystery become present at that very sacrifice through their remembrance.

So in the Eucharist a Christian is really recieving Christ. This grace is attached to this form. If he approaches it with faith he will recieve Him to his benefit. If he approach sinfully he recieves Him to his damnation because although the grace is always there, the person has made himself unfit for this grace and it will not agree with him in that state.

Since we are talking about how a Protestant comes to accept such a thing, I think it would be well at this point to talk about The Protestant Sacrament. Yes, they retain one, though they don’t call it that.

Perhaps the most important moment in my spiritual life as a Baptist took place at camp. A rather politic, learned, gentle man in his own sphere was talking to us about how to read the Bible.

“The scriptures” he earnestly intoned “can literally become your spiritual food. You can be reading the page and seeing the Lord beyond the page, and it will literally be for the nourishment of your soul.”

This preacher was unusually articulate and was not in the habit of using the word ‘literally’ for mere emphasis, so I knew he meant it. If wanted to, I could stop reading the Bible as a mere text, and begin to feed upon it. I began to pracitce this and over time I learned to recognize that sense of hunger in myself when I had not fed. To this day I can open my Bible and because of practice I can derive a certain flow of life, if I may so describe it, as I read the words. It is coming through my physical and mental action of reading, but I’m aware that there is a certain presence of God resting upon the whole meeting that gives it such effectiveness. This presence of God, unlike other types of prescence, is no dependant upon the right timing. It is something that is always there. It is a grace that has been given to the scriptures and which I can expect them to retain to my benefit, whenever I choose to expose myself to it. In college I learned that this is an aspect of the word’s identification with the Word - Christ and the scriptures are in a sense one and when you take in the words by faith you recieve the Word.

In other words, I’ve been experiencing mystery for a long time.

Then there was marriage. In studying the scriptures I began to discover that the act of physical union between man and woman was a symbol for the union of God and Mankind. Not only was it a symbol of it, but it partook of the reality in a sense. It was meant to be the same kind of bridge or meeting place.

And finally, there was The Sinner’s Prayer. This was a moment, for those of evangelical stripe, at which your physical action of praying a certain prayer could and indeed must be expected to met with a very real infusion of grace. It was equated with being born again.

As I read the scriptures it became clear to me that it was the protestants who balked at a literal interpretation when it came to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It is obvious if you read between the lines that the early Christians used Baptism as we use the Sinner’s Prayer, and that they expected exactly the same results from it. The simplest way to prove this is to get out your concordance; make a list of all scriptures mentioning baptism; and read each of them assuming the interpretation I’ve given above. Suddenly they make sense.

When evangelicals balk at referring to baptism as regeneration, they are forced to substitute another ritual in its place - the sinner’s prayer, or walking the aisle. Only very strict Calvinists sometimes conjecture that God may infuse the grace of regeneration unsuspected when faith is born in the heart, completely independant of any form of action or choice on the part of the sinner. I still don’t think that is impossible in certain circumstance. Orthodox Christians do not believe that God has limited himself to bestow new life in Christ only through Baptism. All the same it is dreadful to knowingly slight the office of Baptism, since Christ has appointed it. It is the normal way to become a Christian and as such God has been so good as to attach a certain grace to it.

I have yet to experience the grace of the Eucharist. But I no longer have any qualms about doing it when the time comes.

I do not fear that it is superstitious to imagine that grace can be attached to a physical object or action. It is in the nature of Christianity that grace is more often incarnated in this manner than not. God is saving physical nature, not discarding it and that is why Christ, first of all, was enfleshed. What’s more I don’t believe in this grace in any “magical” sense, and nor do any Orthodox Christians. That is, even though we believe that the grace for healing and salvation is always present in the sacrament, we do not believe that it automatically saves a person who merely goes through the motions. Where there is no faith and no love that grace will be destructive, not saving. In this light I Corinthians 11 begins to make a lot more sense. 

Nor do I feel that I am indulging in “works salvation.” Since the Orthodox Church does not believe that heaven is attained through merit, there is no sense of merit accruing to our account with God when we enact the Christian Mysteries. They are acts of faith and obedience and I expect God, in his kindness, to make it to my salvation simply because he has promised to do so. (I have only to add that when an Orthodox Christian speaks of “salvation” he is not referring to a one-time event that marks the beginning of the Christian life. In Orthodox vocaublary, following  the Greek in which the New Testament was written, salvation is any rescuing, healing, santification, or preservation which God gives us through any means - either directly or mediated through other Christians on earth or in heaven, through sacraments, through dreams or thoughts, through icons, through authorities, through our own faith and love, through the ministry of his Spirit that penetrates all these things - in short through everything within his kingdom.)

Because I will be doing so within the Eastern Orthodox Church, I do not feel that I am doing something “Catholic.” Note, I do not consider the RCC to be my particular enemy. I hope I can count as particular friends all who worship the Lord Jesus as the Only-Begotten of the Father and through Him, the Holy Trinity. However, the doctrine of transubstantiation (so intellectually unacceptable to all but those who invented it,) certain confusions about the nature of grace that have sometimes existed within Western Christianity, and the power that authoritarian clergy have sometimes wielded over people through the Catholic sacraments, have created such suspicion that I know it will be to some people’s relief, as indeed it was to my own as well, to realize that the original Christian Mysteries exist outside of the RCC. My Catholic readers will not be able to agree with me in this belief but we will agree in trusting to the mercy of God to save what can be saved and sort all out in the end.

Finally, I am very happy in the thought that I will be doing something that can truly be considered established Christian doctrine and practice. This is not just my interpretation - I have the whole Church behind me. It is what all Christians everywhere did and to a great extent believed, until materialism and modernism enacted the present-day strict division between the spiritual and the material world.

Something funny.

 Here all this time I’ve been telling people we’re Orthodox Chatecumens…and then this Sunday I find out that it’s a formal ceremony you go through. The formal announcement of our “engagement” to become part of the Orthodox Church is set for two weeks from yesterday…i.e. the next time we’re at Liturgy. In our hearts we were there long ago…and so was our church, I think. What a loving vibrant place our congregation is.

 Which reminds me…there’s a lot of humor in Orthodoxy. During our meeting with dear Fr. B— last Sunday I mentioned that I loved his sense of humor.

“The first time we walked into this Church, I picked up the bulletin and read it and thought, whoever wrote this has a wonderful sense of humor. And then I met you and I knew who had written it!”

He looked down at the table silently for a moment and I wasn’t sure if I had said something too personal. But then he looked up with a glint in his eye and began telling a story about the time he was almost made an Episcopal bishop.

His nomination had been turned down because of his sense of humor. “I was having too much fun” he said “for their idea of a Bishop.”

After that he told the story about a Bretheren pastor who had lost a room full of college students by telling them that life was too serious to crack jokes about it. We shook our heads, feeling that this pastor, while seeing the seriousness of true life, was missing the ridiculousness and assymetrical protportions of this form of life that is passing away.

We laughed and then Fr. B— went on to say that he wants to write a pamphlet about our Lord’s sense of humor - a dry wit he told us. We started telling stories back and forth about the humorous images and stories we found in the gospel. We laughed a lot. And we agreed that a good joke is miles and miles removed from damnable frivolity.

“Not only does the sun shine in the saints, but they also become little suns, partaking of the nature of the fountain of their light.”  - Jonathan Edwards 

Those who “know” me on the web know that before I came to Orthodoxy I was a staunch Edwardsian Calvinist. Other Orthodox often assume that this was a bigger leap than it actually was. They feel that because Arminian or “Biblicist” people make much of the free will, while Calvinism seems to deny it, it would have been a more natural progression from Weslyanism to Orthodoxy, for Orthodoxy believes strongly in human freedom of a sort. I haven’t studied much Weslyan theology but Charles’ hymns were among my favorite. What people possibly forget is that the Wesley brothers were friends with the Edwards. What they had in common, I have long felt, transcended their formulaic differences.

I did not read Edwards’ defense of Original Sin nor many of his other works. I dwelt constantly upon the teachings of the Religious Affections and to a lesser extent upon The End for Which God Created the World, which pictures God’s glory as rays emenating from his essence or waters flowing from a secret spring. Therefore it was Edwardsian doctrine even more than Weslyan hymns that prepared me to view Orthodox theology with understanding.

The primary reason: Edwardsian Calvinism has a well-developed doctrine of Regeneration that provides a bridge to Orthodox Theosis. Other Baptists and baptistic sects confess Regeneration as a fundamental doctrine of the faith, but usually they are largely unaware of what it means or what the greatest Regenerist theologian ever to write in the English language had to say about it.

My family, for instance, at first labored under the twin beliefs that

1) Salvation equals justification by faith alone and little else. (This means that salvation is a verdict God makes as judge that takes place in a moment in time…a moment that always corresponds exactly to a persons’ act of “placing their faith in Jesus” which in turn meant that you began to try to assume that Jesus’ merit had “covered your sins.” This led to a lot of circular reasoning: how do you know he did it? Because I believe he did it!)

2) Salvation, once accomplished in this (often elusive) moment in time could never be undone.

The problem in trying to live this way was that if, after your initial conversion, you started to want something more in your spiritual life, you were left either to the necessity of seeking a new, entirely different experience or to wonder whether your first one was the real thing. In other words, salvation under this system was not all that salvific unless all you wanted to be saved from was hell. The hell within was largely left untouched.

We were of course told that at “the moment of salvation” we were given all that pertains to life and godliness - the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. How to connect to this mysterious unknown person of the Godhead who had so intangibly and without sign taken our bodies as his temple was a perplexing, and to a serious seeker, agonizing question.

For my family and me, it really seemed that Jonathan Edwards solved all this. And to a large extent I still believe he  did. As we will see, there is one important distinction within Orthodox theology that my poor dear Teacher did not appear to understand, and it is for this reason that his condemnations of free will are so devestating.

 I will try to sum up the stages of thinking he took us through.

First and most importantly, his teaching came to us as if in response to a few verses of scriptures that had become very important relative to the needs we were sensing within us. Jim Johnson,  a dear family friend, my Aunt Elaine, my parents and sister and myself and a few others, among the others in our Baptist Church, began to be occupied with the question of “finding God.” We constantly quoted to one another the verses that urge us to seek God with all our hearts and the accompanying promise that we would find him. We passed in and out of Keswick theology (which demands a second, sanctifying experience of grace distinct from justification, but which pictures such second grace as being filled with the Holy Spirit much like a pitcher of water or worse like a demon-possessed person) without being much helped by it. Thus when Jonathan Edwards came and introduced the idea that this seeking was a necessary component even in salvation, we were ready to hear it.

Jonathan Edwards, although he believed in and preached justification by faith, experienced mystical visions in the spirit that seem similar to those eccstacies which Orthodox saints in their earlier stages of theosis speak of. The language he uses to describe it…or to veil it… is strikingly similar to certain Orthodox accounts I have read. The effect in his writings is that the search for a true inward experience of God as the root of salvation takes center stage. “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision, neither high profession nor low profession, neither a fair story (of initial conversion) nor a broken one, avails any thing; but a new creature.” And he was not content with an experience of God that would fade with time and leave a person no better than before. He believed in a kind of experience that would be the root of defining and permanant alteration in a person’s soul.

“All gracious affections (of which true Christianity largely consists, this work argues) arise from a spiritual understanding, in which the soul has the excellency and glory of divine things discovered to it, as was shown before. But all spiritual discoveries are also transforming. They not only make an alteration of the present exercise, sensation, and frame of the soul; but such is their power and efficacy, that they alter its very nature: “But we all with open face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.” Such power as this, is properly divine, and is peculiar to the Spirit of the Lord…

Thus it is with those affections of which the soul is the subject in its conversion.The scriptural representations of conversion, strongly imply and signify a change of nature: such as being born again; becoming new creatures; rising from the dead; being renewed in the spirit of the mind; dying to sin, and living to righteousness; putting off the old man, and putting on the new man; being ingrafted into a new stock; having a divine seed implanted in the heart; being made partakers of the divine nature, &c.“

But it was not only in conversion, Edwards disclosed to us, that such things happen. For,

As it is with spiritual discoveries and affections given at first conversion, so it is in all subsequent illuminations and affections of that kind, they are all transforming. There is a like divine power and energy in them, as in the first discoveries: and they still reach the bottom of the heart, and affect and alter the very nature of the soul, in proportion to the degree in which they are given. And a transformation of nature is continued and carried on by them, to the end of life, until it is brought to perfection in glory. Hence the progress of the work of grace in the hearts of the saints, is represented in Scripture as a continued conversion and renovation of nature. So the apostle exhorts those that were at Rome, beloved of God, called to be saints—the subjects of God’s redeeming mercies—to be transformed by the renewing of their mind…

When I learned that the work of Grace in conversion is of the same kind as the work of Grace in what I had formerly called “sanctification” the unity of a person’s salvation appeared to me. I began to see salvation as a whole rather than as a moment in time. I did a little work on my own at this point and discovered that in the scriptures, salvation is first of all God’s work in rescuing people from any evil whatever, and secondly their experience of this work, and finally their experience of this work more specifically in regard to being dead in sins.

What was the nature, though, of this last salvation? Edwards had an answer that inflamed me with the delight of truth from the first moment that I read and understood it.

It is very true, that all grace and goodness in the hearts of the saints is entirely from God; and they are universally and immediately dependent on him for it. But yet (certain) persons are mistaken, as to the manner of God’s communicating himself and his Holy Spirit, in imparting saving grace to the soul. He gives his Spirit to be united to the faculties of the soul, and to dwell there after the manner of a principle of nature: so that the soul, in being endued with grace, is endued with a new nature: but nature is an abiding thing. All the exercises of grace are entirely from Christ: but are not from him as a living agent moves and stirs what is without life, and which yet remains lifeless. The soul has life communicated to it, so as through Christ’s power to have inherent in itself a vital nature. In the soul where Christ savingly is, there he lives. He does not merely live without it, so as violently to actuate it, but he lives in it, so that the soul also is alive. Grace in the soul is as much from Christ, as the light in a glass, held out in the sunbeams, is from the sun. But this represents the manner of the communication of grace to the soul but in part; because the glass remaining as it was, the nature of it not being at all changed, it is as much without any lightsomeness in its nature as ever. But the soul of a saint receives light from the sun of righteousness in such a manner, that its nature is changed, and it becomes properly a luminous thing. Not only does the sun shine in the saints, but they also become little suns, partaking of the nature of the fountain of their light. In this respect; the manner of their derivation of light, is like that of the lamps in the tabernacle, rather than that of a reflecting glass; which though they were lit up by fire from heaven, yet thereby became themselves burning, shining things. The saints do not only drink of the water of life, that flows from the original fountain; but this water becomes a fountain of water in them, springing up there, and flowing out of them. Grace is compared to a seed implanted, that not only is in the ground, but has hold of it; has root there, grows there, and is an abiding principle of life and nature there.

“Alive in Christ” took on a whole new meaning for me at this point. From that moment on all my searching for truth was informed by an insistence in my spirit that this was the heart of religion and that everything else I knew must be conformed to this truth. I think those Orthodox before me will understand now what I learned from Edwards and how it became a bridge to Orthodoxy.

I learned that the nature of saving Grace is nothing less than Christ through His Spirit being united to mine as a principle of life. This was the perfect bridge to grasping theosis a few years later. As I understand it after reading Lossky, grace itself is a sort of Presence of God and it is indeed in the uniting of the human nature to the divine that it becomes ours and transforms us. Where Edwards says that through the Sun (God) shining in us we would become “little suns,” Orthodoxy speaks less euphamistically and says that we become god by grace as God by Nature burns in our souls. (I wish I could compare direct quotes from Lossky but while I was writing Johnny pulled all my books off the shelf and I can’t find it.)

I spoke earlier of Edward’s misunderstanding. All these quotes have been taken from the same section in his book on the Religious Affections. The point of that section is to prove that: “Another thing, wherein gracious affections are distinguishedfrom others, is, that they are attended with a change of nature.”

Because of the centrality of this explanation, the whole weight of salvation was made to rest upon this change of nature. Edwards wrote a treatise on the will of which I read only a little. There he says that people are indeed free in a manner of speaking and bound in a manner of speaking - they are as free as it is possible to conceive of derived beings, that is, creatures, as being. (Orthodox theology, partly in agreement with the assumptions here and largely in disagreement with the conluscions, teaches that in the later stages of salvation or theosis we are supposed to take on characteristics of uncreated existance…though not by nature, only by grace.) Edwards’ explanation was comforting only in the sense that one didn’t have to feel there was any point at which the argument broke down. For the sake of the beloved truth about salvation which Edwards had taught me, I needed his formulation of soteriological questions to stand up to any challenge. However when it came to practically living these teachings, this is the point at which there was a short-circuit.

How was I to make the connection between my nature and me? Was there in fact no “me” in distinction to my nature? Or was I all and only nature? (Orthodox theology teaches that personhood, from which we have largely fallen, implies freedom in regard to nature…human nature is intended to be subjugated to the Image of God in which the human person is formed.) I did not, of course, formulate the questions so well at that time. I merely struggled with the difficulty of trying to seek salvation when I was at every moment dependant on God’s good will to provide me with an impulse of grace in my nature. Eventually this broke down to those horrible doubts about whether or not God actually has good will towards me and this is the tragedy of the Calvinist belief in election.

Upon coming to Orthodoxy I was confronted by this idea of theosis, that we must seek to become “god” or divine by grace. Father Stephen has recently put up a post in which he shows that all Christians believe the same thing when you examine the meaning of their teachings. This is certainly true of Jonathan Edwards as far as concerns the transformation of human nature in salvation. Unfortunately he was not able to make for me the distinction between nature and person and therefore was not able to speak to me on the salvation of the person. This affected his teaching on human freedom. Well he knew that “will is a function of nature” as Vladimir Lossky explains. And as nature, for Edwards, is what is directly affected by grace in salvation, any good will on our part is dependant upon our salvation. To an Edwardsian Calvinist there can be no idea of free choice leading out in the search for salvation. Free choice can only be a function of nature informed by grace and therefore it always follows after.

Now I’ve finally come full circle, I believe. I don’t understand Orthodox theology the way I thought I unerstood Edwardsian theology. However I do know that the answers are here. Freedom is something behind will, something that urges it on and sometimes even transcends it. For most of us there is a breakdown between freedom and will. I have not come to believe in the same “free will” I left behind long ago. Rather, I have come to understand that the perfection and marriage of freedom and will is something I have to look forward to when I am perfected in salvation. In the meantime whenever I become confused, there is absolutely no reason why I cannot simply sit down and do that which we were all impelled to begin over a decade ago: seek for God with all your heart and you will find him. And indeed this is another point at which Orthodoxy manifestly excells even the excellent Edwards: for it provides clearly defined steps in this seeking.

Edwards, and to an even greater extent A.W. Tozer, and I am sure other great Protestants have indeed climbed the mountain of theosis. Of Tozer it was said that when he went into his study he spent the greater part of the day lying silently on his face, “gazing on God” and would emerge with his face shining like Moses on the mountain. The difference is that in Orthodoxy those who go before us cut steps into the rock. Any Orthodox Christian, not merely the great ones, can follow in these steps: the sacraments, the icons and the whole ceremony of Church worship, the tradition of Orthodox “obedience,” but most of all the deeply explored tradition of Orthodox prayer, culminating in the Jesus Prayer.

So I thank God for Edwards and my other former teachers: For the truth they labored to rediscover that had been lost to them; for the lengths they went to in the effort to express that truth to such as me; and at last because I am sure their prayers in heaven guided me to such parts of their work as would eventually hand me over to the care of the Holy Orthodox Church.

I copied the Edwards quotations from this website.

Johnny has been eating eggs a lot lately but I’ve been worried he hasn’t been getting enough carbs. Apparently Cheerios are now too boring to eat. And I know well that trying to force a kid to eat something is the surest way to make him loathe that thing forever.

 This morning I tried a trick - whisking eggs, milk, and a little flavoring with some soft shredded bread. As I cooked it and noticed how mushy it was turning out I began to dread trying to get Johnny to eat it.

When the mixture was thoroughly cooked I sat down with it in front of Johnny’s high chair and made a great performance of eating a few bites. Then I offered it to him.

He took the bate, didn’t spit it out, and smiled. So far so good. He took another bite and another.

And then suddenly he started pushing it away.

“Would you like more eggs?” I asked politely as this has been known to do the trick…Johnny gets upset if I start shoving food in his mouth like a machine.

 He condescended to take one more bite but that was it.

Now normally at this point I would have thrown my hands up in bewildered misery, thrown the eggs-and-bread in the trash and started rummaging around for anything else I could get Johnny to eat. Today was different. We had some unexpected expenses this last week and payday is not till Sunday. What’s more I have no vehicle (this involves the aformentioned expenses) and no way to go to the store. What it comes down to is that none of the usual grapes, banannas and very little of the Smokies that are Johnny’s old standbys were available. I was saving the Smokies for lunch and for tomorrow. And I was tired. Too tired to fight with my kid and too strapped to waste a whole egg and a slice of bread.

So I just sat there. We stuck out our tongues at one another; we took turns making funny noises with our lips. A couple of times Johnny reached his hand out in that “give me some more” gesture but I just shrugged and said, “I don’t know what to do for you, Baby.”

And what a miracle, he eventually ate three more bites of egg mixture. Then he stopped eating again but I thought, hey I’m on to something. Low pressure, friendly interaction, and don’t let him know there’s any other food in the house.

I don’t know when it ocurred to me to give him some water. Maybe I was feeling thirsty myself. But I remembered he’d had nothing to drink yet this morning so I filled a small glass with water and began to help him drink it.

And miracle of miracles, after his third or fourth sip, I caught him looking at the bowl of eggs-and-bread on the table.

“Would you like more eggs?” I asked him, and tried giving him a bite. He took it. Then he looked at the water so I gave him more. Then eggs. Water. Eggs. Water. Eggs. Water. Till he’d finished the entire bowl of eggs and the entire cup of water. Now he’s happily runing around the house filling his diaper.

My nose tells me I should go.

But first I must reflect that sometimes when we have trouble getting our kids to eat, it’s because we are trying to forcre them into our own bad eating habits. My husband is always telling me I need to drink water at every meal but I usually forget. Now I was expecting my baby to do the same thing. Fortunately he has healthier desires than I do.

As I explore Orthodox Christian thinking, my ideas about children are changing. If God does not take personal offence at my every infraction or failure, as I once believed he did, then why should I take offence at my child’s infractions and failures? If he’s wrong it’s only to his own hurt and that should grieve me more than anger me. I’m trying to reserve righteous anger for those times when he is truly being stubborn even though he knows better. At this age (16 months) that doesn’t really happen when you watch closely. Ignorance, misunderstanding, blind desire, and fear drive most wrongdoing. That wrongdoing can and will become sinful and death-bringing if they become habits and last till he’s older. Well, that’s bound to happen…it’s the human condition. But the gentlest way to discourage as much of it as possible is the best kind of discipline. Sometimes when Johnny is truly frustrating me I put him in his crib with some toys until we are ready to start interacting again.

Then again, as in today’s example, sometimes it’s me who’s wrong, not him. And that should make me even slower to condemn my child’s frustrating behavior. I’m really glad I didn’t punish Johnny for not eating his eggs-and-bread this morning.

After some correspondance with our dear Father B— last night I’ve realized once again how lightly Christianity treads the tense wire between challenging and effortless.

Everyone has sins and failures. My own tend to be of that very obvious sort that everyone notices - which frustrates any subtle designs on my part to hide my faults and make pretense to sanctity I don’t actually possess. In fact I tend to go to the opposite extreme. As I mentioned elsewhere in blogdom, I am the type of person to whom temptation usually comes in religious garb. If it’s time to pray I’m going to choose the most demanding prayers and linger longest over those “for I have never done anything good in thy sight” phrases. 

 Those words of repentance are great phrases. And I naturally gravitate towards them, not only in a bid to feel that I have repented thoroughly enough, but also because they are wordy. And I am a person who loves words and who has an almost superstitious belief in their power.

 And therefore it’s quote appropriate (now that I think of it) that it is the Jesus Prayer - all dozen words of it - that my father in the Lord prescribed for me last night.

 Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Whisper the words without trying, born up on them as they come into the mind. Wait and then after a while whisper or think them again. This is a regimen that seems to require no effort. All burdens and desires and confusions given over to Christ in a single, simple, timeless posture: the verbal phrase (in which the only thing that is explicit is my relationship to Him and His to me) opening a door to a gesture of the heart that has probably been there for a long time, smothered in my ironic effort to “express myself” to One who knows me better than I will ever know myself.

 Just be with God and the saints; just pray Father B— told me.

I still believe that the kingdom of God is taken by force and that those who would enter must grasp swords and draw on running shoes. And I know very well that the training prayers I’m leaving aside for a time are good and beneficial and might be just the thing for someone else at any moment. But I’m less eager to try and tell anyone what any of that means right now as I find myself led by still waters.

Dear family, friends, and the curious,

Of the many reasons I could offer for our becoming Orthodox, I think the one that is most central for us, and that others  ought to respect most, is simply that we need it.

 Orthodoxy is teaching us how to pray, how to truly worship, and is giving us a plain path to follow to God. We feel that we never had knowledge before of the spiritual disciplines which purify the heart for God’s dwelling place. The Orthodox Church is teaching us to say the right thing about God; her Theology is Trinitarianism par excellence. 

 What’s more, no one need fear us now. We have not become Orthodox partisans and we are not on a crusade to convert everyone we know, although we long for those we love to share the consolation we have found. Following Orthodoxy is bringing us into fuller fellowship even with believers outside the Orthodox Church, because it is here that God is choosing to give us what we need to attain hearts of Love.

This move is not essentially a reaction against the religious teaching in our past. Because we are poor and wretched and sinful and dying: that’s why we are joinging the Orthodox Church.

If anyone is wondering about specific doctrines and practices, many of which seem alarming from a certain point of view, there is much to say - but now is not the time.

Please simply consider that it might be different than it looks from the outside, particularly if your perspective is from another tradition. It might be different: and if you know us well then you ought to have great reason to consider that it probably is.

If you have known us any length of time, please believe in us. You should know that we would not be in this Church if we were not being led to God here. We decided long ago that was what truly mattered. We would follow that anywhere: Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Catholicism, anything - whoever could tells us Who God Is and How To Know Him, that would be the true Church. Many of you, our dear friends and family members, supported us on that journey and even taught us those values. We have done our best before God to follow the ideals we shared with you and to the best of our knowledge this is Journey’s End. We are not infallible; God is our judge.

It’s as much a surprise to us as to anyone else that this is where we found what we were looking for. But now that we’ve seen what’s really here, we feel certaint that we are home.

I wish you peace.

Today my baby displayed his first evidence of shame. He bit my neck and I scolded him, rather mildly. But another woman was present, and little Johnny surprised me by bursting into tears, burying his nose in my neck, and covering his cheeks and eyes with his hands.

Am I proud? No. I think it’s so sad. Already innocence has taken a step toward the door.

I have to teach him right and wrong. But the effects are…well, the law incites sin.  It’s a horrible paradox. I’m so glad that the Orthodox Church offers salvation at an infant level to infants, as well as at an adult level to adults.

Of which saint, I wonder, should I ask prayers for the wellbeing of my precious son’s soul? And will I ever again have the courage to bring into this perilous, sinful, dying world a creature in whom is “the seed of corruption?”

Last night I stood in the porch of heaven. Angels were singing to the Mother who bore God about what a wonderful occasion it was when she first entered the Temple: the vessel prepared for the Lord’s entrance into our world had come at last to the holy place, a foreshadowing of his soon coming.

“The Lord whom ye seek shall suddenly come to his Temple.”

I stood respectfully in the back since I had entered late. The stiffness in my back disappeared as I took my place next to dear St. Nicholas, who has been a good friend to my family in recent days. He wears a kind, mild, or merry expression most of the time, but has been known to be stern on occasion and my dear Father says that once he looked positively smug.

 My attention, however, was drawn to what was happening further in. Through the dark glass windows I could see into the very heaven, where Christ stood blessing his people. I bowed to him - what a relief.

I did not know the song, but some others on the porch were singing along with the angels. I chimed in at “Lord, have mercy” and saw that he was acknowledging my best attempt to join the praise.

Then it was over, or nearly over. I approached slowly to a window through which I could look and see the Mother of God, that meek and courageous maiden whose obedience brought her to the heights of glory. I made a kiss at her hand through the window and looked down, ashamed. I who am less than her may still follow her example.

Then I looked up and through another window I saw a flash of brilliant clarity - Christ beckoning me to come nearer. I could not yet pass through the window to him but rejoicing I kissed his window also, and his holy cross, and recieved his final blessing. Around me others who are before me were putting out the lights.

We looked through a few more windows at various saints, and through one behind which the Holy Trinity itself is said to be visible, though it was too great for me to see. Then we left the presence of God to keep our porch till we should need it next.

Narnia, Middle Earth, every place of longing - it is all the Church. I love Orthodoxy.