Several months ago, I read a wonderful column in Christianity Today by Frederica Matthewes-Green (FMG) that led me to purchase her book, At the Corner of East and Now. I’ve been reading this book off and on for some weeks, and I finally completed it on Sunday.
The subtitle of Facing East is “A Modern Life in Ancient Christian Orthodoxy.” FMG’s husband is an Orthodox priest, and the book is a collection of essays organized around the author’s recounting of an Orthodox worship service.
I enjoyed the book for several reasons. First of all, I love spiritual memoirs. If you like Kathleen Norris, Lauren Winner, and Anne Lamott, you will like FMG. Second, the only thing I knew about the Eastern Orthodox Church before reading this book was a vague memory from tenth grade world history about there being a schism with the Roman Catholic Church. I had never given the Orthodox Church much additional thought, but I suppose I assumed that it just another version of the Catholic Church. The book corrected my misconceptions. Finally, FMG has a way with words that enable her to articulate spiritual truth in an interesting way. I will share some examples in a moment.
The substantive differences I was able to ascertain between Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestant Evangelicalism are as follows.
- Worship is high-church liturgical with incense, icons, and chanting.
- The icons are paintings of saints and Biblical characters, and they are a significant part of worship.
- Orthodox venerate the virgin Mary, the Theotokos or “God-bearer” in a way similar to the Roman Catholic Church.
- Orthodox believe in transubstantiation.
Otherwise, the doctrine and theology seem quite sound. There is no Orthodox equivalent of an infallible Pope, no confessing to priests, no works-based righteousness. I was recently told that Orthodox do not believe in the Trinity, but that is clearly not the case here. In FMG’s cburch, they recite the Nicene Creed, and Facing East includes several Biblical references to the Trinity.
The basic position of Orthodoxy is that it is the direct descendant of the first century church. FMG writes:
While the initial schism between East and West led to further divisions in the West, as new Protestant denominations continue to emerge, the Orthodox Church remained intact. The Church is kept from significant change by its characteristic governing principle: conciliarity. Unlike religious bodies where a single powerful leader dispenses the faith, in Orthodoxy it is believed that the Holy Spirit guides the whole community of believers into the truth (as Jesus promised in John 16:13). Faith is a treasure jointly possessed by all believers, not one guarded by a powerful few; it accumulates over the centuries, never contradicting what has been previously held…What diverges from this shared faith would automatically disprove itself, even if it was urged by high ecclesiastical authority. No authority is greater than the common faith.
Since there is no locus of power where the faith may be tailored to fit current fashion, it doesn’t change in any significant way—not over long centuries or across great geographical distances. The faith of the first century is the faith of Orthodox today. When we meet in this little stone church outside Baltimore, we celebrate a Liturgy that is for the most part over fifteen hundred years old. We join in prayers that are being said in dozens of languages by Orthodox all over the world, prayers unchanged for dozens of generations.
Before he became an Orthodox priest, FMG’s husband was a mainline Protestant pastor. The following passage provides some insight into her conversion to Orthodoxy:
Orthodoxy initially struck me as strange and off-putting: beautiful but rigorous, and focused much more on God than on me. Western Christianity of many stripes has tended in recent decades to become somewhat soft and emotional—in a sense, consumer-focused. Orthodoxy has missed that bandwagon and still stubbornly addresses its energy toward worshipping God; every believer’s primary need, Orthodox would say, is to come further into this union with God, and the whole work of the faith is to enable this. It didn’t take long for me to be won over, as I found this God-focus was what I’d hungered for all along.
In this passage, she explains icons:
…the icon is a manifestation of the Word of God. In an illiterate culture, these scenes from Scripture and the lives of saints were the only Bible many could read….In painting icons, we affirm the Incarnation and God’s will to be visibly revealed to human eyes. Destroying icons indicates a desire to overspiritualize the faith and reject the body.
Here are a few other especially good passages:
Anyone who has attempted to live the spiritual life, in fact, knows this; we don’t dwell in a theoretical world where it is either all grace or all laborious will, but in a middle-in-between where vigilant effort repeatedly discovers that enabling grace has already gone before…The child works hard to learn to walk so he can learn to walk. He wants to move toward his mother’s arms; that is reward enough…When I follow the practices the community has found, through trial and error over long centuries, are helpful in drawing closer to God, I get the only reward I want” I get closer to God.
People newly coming to church should have an unfamiliar experience. It should be apparent to them that they are encountering something very different from the mundane. It should be discontinuous with their everyday experience, because God is discontinuous. God is holy, other, incomprehensible, strange, and if we go expecting an affable market-tested nice guy, we won’t be getting the whole picture. We’ll be getting the short God in a straw hat, not the big one beyond all thought….The well-intentioned idea of presenting the appealing, useful side of faith fails, I think, because it doesn’t question deeply enough the basic consumer ethos. The transaction that takes place between a shopper-seeker and the goods acquired (groceries, furniture, the key to the meaning of life) is one that leaves the seeker in control, in a position of judging, evaluating, and rejecting the parts he doesn’t like. But entering the faith is more like making a promise or beginning a marriage. It involves being grafted into a community and requires a willingness to grow and change. If it didn’t, if it merely confirmed us in our comfortable places, how could it free us to be more than we are?
It’s only when those emotions fade and you get down to the business of doing the work, following the way, saying the prayers even when you don’t feel like it, that your stony heart begins to budge. It’s only the offerings done from deliberate will that end the will and shape it to fit the will of God, Giddy emotions feel good, and all of might need a bowl of ice cream from time to time, but they don’t produce spiritual growth.
Somehow our willingness to receive was preceded by the grace to be willing, and the faith which results is brought to fruition by means beyond our own powers—sometimes, as in my case, mostly against our will. One inside the faith, many have a dawning realization that they were being sought all along, an experience poet Francis Thompson describes as being pursued by the “Hound of Heaven.” It’s been said that on the outside of the house of faith the sign over the door reads “Choose this day whom you will serve” (Joshua 24:15) and on the inside the sign reads “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). All I know is, I came home, and I don’t ever want to be anywhere else.
It’s good for well-grounded, thinking Christians to read books like this because it broadens our understanding of who God is and how He works. Because of my particular history, it’s been especially helpful to me to expose myself to Christian thinking from other traditions.
This is actually FMG’s second memoir. Her first, Facing East, recounts her conversion to Christianity and her family’s switch to Orthodoxy. It’s in the ever-growing stack on my bedside table.
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