A-ventin’ ‘fore A-Lentin’

“You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-16).

You’re sitting alone in a cathedral after evensong. The vested laity snuff out the remaining candles along the walls, leaving the flame of the setting sun beaming through the blue stained glass, swishing and flickering over the stone altar, an alpha and omega symbol emboldened on the front. The darkness rises from the east when you hear their silent gentility cut from the opposite side of the church, barefoot and barely on the ground.

They stop short at the edge of the pews, at the front, and bow before the embers below the ornate cross. Their reverence shines like a beacon at the top of the nave. 

They cross the threshold of pews, sits beside you, piercing you with their deep, crystalline eyes and covers your hand gently with theirs, “Don’t be afraid.” 

The altar burns brighter and your throat chokes up as friends and family rise from the flames before you. The heart melts like clay in a typhoon. Lightning fills the eyes and anchors pin the limbs. 

Please God make it stop. 

“Do you see?” 

Everyone who ever loved you. Everyone who ever thought about you. Everyone who ever thanked God you were alive. 

God, please make it stop. 

“Do you see?”

These people loved you despite yourself. They loved you despite themselves. 

God please. 

All the love you’ve ever rejected. All the love you’ve ever ignored. All the people you never reached out to. All the people you convinced yourself didn’t care. 

God…

“Do you see?”

All the people who just wanted to love you.

That’s all they wanted. 

And you wouldn’t let them. 

“Do you see?” 

The eastern twilight drowns the flames. The wax hardens. Ash falls around the altar. The glass is dark. 

And you’re alone. 

Do you see?

I’ve been fighting this a long time, but I’m taking a step back from Orthodox Christianity.

Call it a part of my recovery, call it reorientation, call it whatever but I cannot with good conscience continue down a path that seems to attract a narrow worldview and suspicion of society. If that’s what I wanted I’d still be watching the Zeitgeist series with my cousin, gacked out on shake-and-bake methamphetamines and backwoods bigotry.

The Church is a hospital and not a country club, but I have been making myself impossibly lonely within a church I cannot relate to in a meaningful way. The Orthodox tradition is not an umbrella for ethnic religions, but gosh does it feel like us against them in there. If it is a hospital it’s a private one.

Objectively, taking a step back helps me recognize that I was interested in Orthodoxy because I’m an old goth kid who likes mysticism, Minor Threat, and magic.

I’m interested in pastoral care and theurgy; mythic time and making space for the lonely; union with God and knowing the self. 

And Orthodoxy has that… but there’s something in the way. I’ve been going at this all wrong for a while. I’ve been trying to know myself by cutting off limbs to better fit a spiritual tradition that just doesn’t suit. 

I’m happy to see where I don’t fit to appreciate where I do; it’s become clear that, since I first walked through the doors, I’ve been accepted for who I am at the Episcopal church. 

That is a spooky goth kid who loves God, and quite frankly, I am much too sensitive for Orthodoxy.

There is a spartan edge that appealed to my sense of rigor initially but became an obstacle to an authentic spiritual life rather than a facilitator. Unfortunately, rigidness lay past the rigor and behind the edifice of striking beauty and demure was a community that’s exclusivity reminded me more of my nondenominational background than Eastern Christianity. For some reason Orthodoxy and the strip mall churches are almost indistinguishable save Protestant heresy.

The Orthodox φρόνημα (phronema) has been infiltrated by Western converts bringing along a disgust for other, an attachment to legalism, and a superiority complex for having found the pristine Christian theology—you see it all the time with Western minds co-opting any spiritual system that is not codified with an Occidental structure.

Orthodoxy, like any spiritual path, is not a mask to hide our ego. This is spiritual bypassing, and I’m tired of pretending that spiritual bypassing isn’t used to conceal one’s misogyny, racism (particularly rampant in pagan reconstructionism), or other forms of using other people to make yourself feel better (rampant in the Christianity I grew up with). At worst it’s a form of prelest, but either way it’s tourism and commodification of things that are, by their nature, bigger than you. Which is how they should remain.

If something is not shattering our worldview than what’s the point?

There should be discomfort when pursuing the spiritual path, there should be constriction. Step Five of the Twelve Steps wherein we have Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs calls us to go beyond the bold and begin breaking down the disillusionment of a compartmentalized worldview. This is the purpose of spiritual traditions, but if one is around people they cannot relate to or trust than progress is impossible.

The thing Orthodoxy does not state plainly is the fact that an Orthodox lens is essentially a magical one. Orthodoxy, and any true Christian model of perception, follows a nonlinear, mythic time wherein one is in communion with eternity by showing up to church and celebrating the Eucharist. Eternity is omnipresent, easily tapped into by stepping into the hallowed hallways of the church and extends out through the Body of Christ, individually in baptized persons who live the life of Christ, conforming to be like Him rather than the world. 

Ergo, eternity extends through each of us who partake in it; the world is not some fallen place beyond repair. The world, like us, has the potential of redemption which occurs by uniting the world with the church through action (this does not mean forced conversion). 

It is essentially an act of eternity to live the Way instructed by Christ, so much so that early Christians were known as Followers of the Way. And by living in accordance with Christ’s commandments one is brought to a lot of uncomfortable places, having to make a lot of uncomfortable choices and constantly trying to walk the narrow path that leads to life. 

I thought that I needed to kill myself to do that, which is not dying to the self. God did not allow Isaac to be sacrificed and He is not asking for us to throw away what makes us a person. God meets us where we are and it is up to us to offer up what makes us a person to be transformed. This is a difficult task and we will never be strong enough to change unless we have community around us that we trust and that we can lean on and that we can be honest with. 

I decided that the Orthodox community was not the place I was best suited to walk the narrow path on during my first visit ten months ago. I didn’t trust my intuition because I was walking with a lot of distrust of self at the time; I was in bad shape and trying to disappear. I think I tried forcing a relationship with the Orthodox Church because I was really lonely and in a position of self-exile. I thought that if I changed enough of myself I’d be acceptable to (loved by) others.

I didn’t deserve happiness and I was running away from a community, praxis, and people who were poised to change my life for the better because I was rejecting their love and the love of God. These people were the clergy and laity of the Episcopal church.

Ultimately, Orthodoxy became a stumbling block for me like an eye of a needle where all of the form, pomp, and circumstances were becoming bags on my camel. I was never going to fit through and it was almost like I didn’t want to. I couldn’t take any steps forward, because—in my Western mind—I still thought I needed to earn that love, which is a very finite understanding of love: a creature-based comprehension.

Love is not a moralism and to treat it as such makes it an obsession with accumulating shame.

Now I know accepting the love of God and of others is sincerely a lifetime of work, it’s its own form of rigor. There are ways to make it easier however it is a Sisyphean task to love others as God loves if you’re busy beating yourself up. Loosening our grip on feeling like we need to win the love of God is taking one step to remove the luggage from the camel. This initial step was helpful in taking the next step with νῆψις (nepsis) and care. 

Dion Fortune once said that, if we were to look at the spiritual path like a river, the closer to source one gets the purer the stream. I wanted to see for myself if that were the case. Orthodoxy, at least on the surface, appears like that pure stream and the way toward union with God, but the more upriver I got the more I realized I would rather be on the margins with those that the world and (some) churches deem as sinful or inferior. Those are my people, so that is the step I am taking—toward my home with the mutts, drawing from a variety of Christian sources as well as some thought from outside the church all used with the intent in building a true relationship with the θεάνθρωπος. 

The Episcopalians face the world; they just want to share the Gospel while appreciating where other people are in their spiritual journeys. Walking alongside with them rather than being defensive about Christianity which I feel is a much better model for proselytizing.