All is Calm, All is Bright

Photo by Philip Jahn on Unsplash

A Season of Quiet

For the last several months, I have been fretting about the fact that I haven’t been writing, but it stems from this: since returning from my very intentional pilgrimage to the Balkans, I seem to have entered a new phase of my accidental pilgrimage, and it is one of great calm and even a place of spiritual rest. In conversation with our pastor the other day, he asked me, “are you taking a break from your blog?” I had to admit that I had something akin to writer’s block. I’ve begun several topics, only to find that I cannot figure out what direction to go, but this one theme has remained with me, and I believe it’s important to address—the peace and calm that I currently feel in my life and in my spiritual journey. It is unlike any I have ever experienced.

The vision of “The Accidental Pilgrim” has always been to share with people the experience of journeying out of a western Protestant Christian tradition into the Orthodox Church. At the beginning there was so much to process—high church, “smells and bells,” a richer liturgy that involved unfamiliar music and chanting, the presence of icons, fasting and feasting, a different way of encountering the eucharist, a completely new soteriological paradigm, acceptance of saints and prayers for their intercessions—the list goes on and on. Looking back, it took me a good two years to wrap my head around it all and I am still just scratching the surface. As I began this blog, the experience of processing it all was rather intense. Writing helped me think through what adjustments were happening in my heart and mind. But now, what comes next is learning to live out all that I have encountered, and making it my own. The question I find myself asking is how long does it take to become a naturalized “citizen” of this new worldview?

Shifting Paradigms

At the beginning of this journey, in the summer of ‘21, I was introduced to the Church which had previously been completely hidden from my view. Until this point I had always believed in a magnanimous God who loved mankind, but this love was hard to understand. He had grace and mercy for us, but this grace was always defined in such juridical terms that I lived in constant tension concerning the outcome of my life. Grace was defined as “getting what you did not deserve” and mercy was defined as “not getting what you do deserve,” and I was a sinner who deserved hell, but by God’s grace and mercy I would be okay. I was well instructed by the holy scriptures and I read plenty of verses that spoke about “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” but then I read other verses that said “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.” But according to Protestant doctrine, faith alone was what saved, not works. I have heard prominent evangelical teachers teach that if I didn’t take all of scripture (the 66 books of the Protestant canon) literally and at face value, (including a seven day, 24-hour creation) then I couldn’t really call myself a Christian, and this was something that I wrestled with. At the same time such teachers would assert that Christ spoke symbolically when he said, “eat my flesh and drink my blood” or that baptism was just an “outward sign of an inward change” and did not have any sacramental value but we did it to demonstrate our faith. What I saw in scripture on my own seemed different and felt different than what modern theologians taught and I was pretty sure that we were all just off somehow. I believed that God was a logical God and if something did not make sense logically then it must be false. This of course left no space for mystery, yet I was fascinated by what seemed to be “manifestations of the Spirit,” “miracles” and “revelations” — I was hungry to see the living God in my every day existence, but what I experienced seemed often to be contradictory.

What I had was smatterings of experiences that would let me feel that perhaps God was real and involved in the affairs of us humans. What I had not experienced was a certain, ongoing experience of sacramental life in which everything I did and said and experienced both in and apart from “religion” had meaning and value. The culture of Protestant Christianity has enabled—even encouraged—the materialist separation of spiritual life from our physical life, the Church from the polis, the moral from the political. We are left on spiritual islands where we can practice our faith only as long as it touches no one else or offends another belief system, much like a child who can’t stand to have his peas touch his mashed potatoes and his chicken must never touch the gravy. But Orthodoxy has changed all of this for me to such an extent that at times I feel I cannot even understand why or how I used to believe what I believed.

I am thankful beyond measure that in my Protestant upbringing I learned to love scripture with my whole heart and to believe in its authority and its ability to instruct the soul of mankind. I am thankful to God that He honors the cry of our hearts to know him. I am thankful that I have been taught that Christ is King and all of our worship is to be directed to Him. I am thankful that all of this has led me to a place where in the Orthodox Church I can experience the fullness of all the faith I have ever held, and begin to understand the Scripture and proper worship in the context of that Church by whom and for whom it was written.

A Change in Focus

A friend and I were recently discussing this dry spell in my writing—he agreed that there comes a time in our spiritual state where we don’t want to read theology, engage in debates with Protestant friends, or try to figure out the answers to every question. Rather, we are able to simply rest in the fact that we are deeply and truly loved by God and enjoy the communion He desires with us. There is a sense that we have truly reached the end of the line, and we need only to work on our repentance and live that out.

So consider this post a transition piece. I don’t wish to write about the angst of shedding one religious tradition and entering another. I don’t wish to be “anti- Protestantism.” Rather I want to focus on the beauty of the Orthodox faith as I grow into my “citizenship”. The sense of calmness and illumination that has come after my immersion into the culture and environment of the ancient Orthodox world has been a respite from years of spiritual striving to find answers to questions that Protestantism simply cannot answer. I will be writing what I am learning, taking snapshots along the way. I am not a theologian, but I am an enthusiastic student. I would like to share from conversations and readings the insights that I gain as I grow toward the light of Christ.

Most recently I have been thoroughly immersed in the work of Dr. Timothy Patitsas entitled The Ethics of Beauty. Look for a series of posts about my response to this work, which is capable of shifting the most stubborn of paradigms if for no other reason than its length! In all seriousness though, I have never encountered a work quite like his and I have found my worldview challenged on multiple occasions. Look for responses to this work in upcoming blog posts. I also plan to do some interviews with folks about their personal journeys into Orthodoxy, because I never cease to be fascinated with what has brought people into the Church.

I will close with Philippians 3:7-16 (ESV) which is especially appropriate for this season of pilgrimage:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained.