On Finding the East, Here in the West

Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas

One of England’s most respected actors, Sir David Suchet, has embraced Eastern Orthodoxy. He makes the case that the Western mind has been closed to the mode of thinking that Orthodoxy embodies because Westerners approach religion primarily as a rational exercise. When we encounter Orthodoxy we quickly recognize that the rational mind does not, indeed cannot discover all of the answers to the mysteries of God, but there is some other piece that we have been missing all along.

From my observation, several responses to this encounter can occur. The first is an outright rejection of the encounter as a trick of the power of human psyche—the willingness to see what one wants to see because of an cognitive or an emotional need for answers and perceived security. The idea that anything spiritual can exist in a building of wood and brick, paint and fabric is preposterous, and the ceremony is merely a game of collective mania. This is the atheistic response.

A second reaction is that of the emotional creature who sees the beauty and mystery as an answer to negative feelings and experiences in the world—a means of escape which will gratify and fulfill all the desires that have been heretofore unsatisfied. This person is in part, correct, but the encounter is shallow and can easily crumble when the notion of discipline, obedience, abstinence and suffering arise and call someone to “walk the walk,” or “deny themselves and take up their cross.”

The third response is an awakening to the reality that exists beyond the material, rational world. This is the world of Mystery and is not easily embraced by the rational mind, but if the person encountering this Mystery recognizes the need for it, a hunger is awakened, and this strange new world is explored with voracity and embraced utterly. This is the response of a hungry soul—an activated soul that desires union with God (theosis).

What is largely lacking in Western thought is awareness of the “nous.” This word, completely unknown to me before encountering eastern Christian thought, is the missing piece of all of the theology taught by western traditions. To know that there even is a missing piece provides an element of attraction for the Western rational mind, and then to experience the impact of this knowledge satisfies the hunger that is experienced by the soul who desires to know God in spirit and in truth. The English language defies explaining it. It is what Sir David Suchet describes as feeling and it also is what he describes as experience. It is “both / and,” yet it is so much more. The reply he gives to the question of “how do you know this is real” — “I don’t” —is the mysterious certainty of “unknowing.” How can you be certain of something that is “unknown”? The Orthodox journey is the process of answering this very question, and by defying all ability of human rationale and language to provide an adequate response, the only possible explanation is that it originates from faith. In Western thinking, faith is experienced as a rational ascent to the existence and reality of God, or “belief,” whereas in Eastern thought faith is experienced as an ineffable unknowing and originates in God.

What has been provided for Westerners who embrace Christ as God are two paths—the rational path by which all points of theology are explained through systems and logic, and the charismatic, by which theology is explained by emotional stirrings and “movements” or experiences of the Holy Spirit, which, as recorded in scripture, is unpredictable and blows where it will. Neither of these approaches fully satisfies. The rational mind can never be fully satiated because of the very nature of God—he cannot be explained or fully known, and the intellect will always be left wanting. Likewise, the emotions cannot be the arbiter of spiritual satisfaction because they are fleeting. A person who attempts to encounter God on the level of emotions (often mistaken for the “heart”) may soon feel abandoned by Him and wonder why they cannot reach the heights they have felt at other times.

With the understanding of the “nous” however, a Western Christian suddenly has the piece of the puzzle that explains why he or she can never feel fully satisfied with the knowledge they possess or the emptiness that is felt when emotions flee. The nous, previously unrecognized and properly named, is the aspect of the soul that can perceive God. It is correctly referred to as the heart in Orthodox spiritual literature.¹

In Orthodoxy, the nous is satisfied, and the mouth of reason is silenced. The rational lacks expression in the face of unknowing, and the emotions are stirred, but remain calm--they are no longer central to the worship experience. Only an ineffable unknowing is there and the soul is filled. A Godly Eros is awakened and a new journey begins.

Dr. Timothy Patitsas, in The Ethics of Beauty states,

“Religion can just seem like God coming down at us, scolding us, telling us to stay where we are, but just do better, but real religion must awaken the movement in the other direction, must make us come out of ourselves and move towards him, fall in love with him. It’s about beginning an adventure, becoming a pilgrim, an exile, a lover.”²

Upon encountering Orthodoxy, theology seems to fade into the background, somehow. Desire is awakened. All that a good Protestant thought they knew seems to come unraveled like a sweater with the wrong thread pulled, or the checklist of qualities that a woman is looking for in a husband when Mr. Right (but oh-so-wrong on the checklist) pulls up.

Entering Orthodoxy, it can sometimes seem that most converts suddenly adopt an attitude of “EAST GOOD, WEST BAD,” or “The Enlightenment ruined us!” and “The West is all law and no heart!” All of that may feel true to some extent, but the fact is, I found Orthodox Christianity here, in the West. True, my logical Western mind is very different than that of a cradle Eastern Orthodox Christian or a native of any Eastern culture. Having lived in China for over two years and having married into a Japanese family, I am keenly aware that the there is more than one way to relate to the world around us, to other humans, and to God. It may be true that the Enlightenment did more damage than good when science and humanism began to overtake the mysticism of medievalism which still embraced the unseen and the mysterious, but certainly God is not limited by our “progress.” He always leaves us with a remnant and a path to Him, no matter how faint it first appears. In our modern day, we are not without guides to lead pilgrims back into what has been struck down by the Enlightenment and modernism.

Two of these guides are some of the greatest minds of the 20th century: J.R.R. Tolkien, a pious Catholic and the father of the modern fantasy literary genre, and C.S. Lewis, a faithful Anglican and Christian author and apologist. These two have led the modern West back into the magic and mysticism that prevailed during the medieval period. Both of these men were scholars of medieval thought who managed to synthesize that worldview, filled with its wonder and cosmic phenomena, with the modern hunger for Truth in its deepest form.

In an episode of the Close Reads podcast series on The Lord of the Rings, one of the hosts, Heidi White, made a comment that has stuck with me to this day. She said, “We live in a world that has lost the anchors that Middle Earth has. We are always searching for transcendent stories that lift us beyond the wasteland of this world and into a world that tells a Truer story.”³ At the time I heard this comment, I was not yet Orthodox, but I so resonated with this longing for that story that lifted me beyond the wasteland of this world. I wanted the Truer story. I was a devout Anglican Christian. I read my Bible every day. I prayed and went to church. I served in various ways in my church and raised my children in the faith, but that longing ached inside me. I was not finding it in what was being offered within my church, somehow. Perhaps the fault lay entirely with me, that I was unable or unwilling to see it, or I hadn’t been listening deeply enough or catechized properly. Though I had read the scriptures through entirely many times, held a graduate degree from a prominent Evangelical college, and had a discipline of reading scripture daily, and though I received communion weekly and prayed regularly, I was living in a dry and weary land that badly needed renewal.⁴

I have lost count of how many times I have entered Middle Earth and traveled with the Hobbits and their entourage to Mordor, but every time I do, I weep at the end of the journey. The story, though classified as fantasy, is profoundly TRUE. I recently read the Lord of the Rings again, this time with the perspective of of Orthodox Christianity, and it moved me even more than it has in the past. The reconnection of my soul with True Enchantment rendered Tolkien’s stories even more profound.

The second guide and teacher on my Western path to Orthodoxy was C. S. Lewis, and he more directly so than Tolkien. As a child, the Chronicles of Narnia called me to desire wonder and magic and mystery, as well as to view Christ in a way that was both victorious and merciful. Lewis’s novel entitled The Great Divorce planted in my heart a desire for heaven that I could grasp. Narnia’s The Last Battle explained the end of days and judgment in a way that was comprehensible, to the extent that it can be. I had been so poisoned by dispensationalism and false teaching about the end times, death, and judgement, that I actually feared heaven and did not want to go. I wanted to feel like Reepicheep when he reaches Aslan’s country at the end of his journey in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but instead I felt an overwhelming fear and dread of what heaven would be like. The Great Divorce became an Ebenezer stone for my heart—a concept of heaven that I would cling to and hope for—a place so vast and so real that everything else is mere vapor by comparison and beauty so profound and so bright that the human existence could not withstand it, except with help from those who had gone before. Protestants in my life would say that the story was useful as an instructive allegory to help people understand sin and its effect in their lives, but that heaven and hell were misrepresented for the purpose of making a point. I didn’t want to believe that. Lewis’s Heaven was a place I wanted to be. The Protestant heaven was a place I was reluctant to go. No one had ever been able to define exactly what heaven was except for an eternal worship service. When “worship service” meant the equivalent of a hand-raising church’s band playing songs while everyone sways and sings and claps and shouts…I didn’t want to spend eternity doing that. When I encountered Orthodoxy, I also encountered a close approximation to Lewis’s concept of the afterlife, the end of days, the judgement of the world, and heaven, and it was the thing that initially captivated my attention and ignited my need to know more.

I would be remiss to suggest that only these two authors exist as guides in returning to the mystical expression of western spirituality, for there are many, but in my life there exists another unlikely guide who captivated my logical mind that desires facts, reason, and scientific answers—an American Jew by the name of Barrie Schwortz, who led the scientific team who performed hundreds of thousands of hours of research on the Shroud of Turin. I cannot speak to God’s ways, of course, but how the shroud came to reside in the west is a history worth reading. I, for one, am grateful beyond measure that it does reside in the West. There is no doubt that the Shroud is the most important relic known to the Church, and the idea that it exists, has somehow survived for these two millennia, has disappeared for hundreds of years at a time and reappeared in unlikely places, suggests a purpose greater than a museum curiosity. The decision to use scientific methods to study the shroud and explain the how the image of the crucified man came to be is a decision that could only have been made in the West. Were this incredible relic housed in the East, say on Mt. Athos where countless other invaluable relics are retained, there would likely never be a scientific look at the shroud. It would be venerated and honored, there would likely be miracles that happen in its proximity, and Orthodox Christianity would simply accept it as fact because of their conviction of the rightness of Tradition. Perhaps that is the correct attitude—to examine the shroud in the way that science demands seems sacrilegious, arrogant and even crude, if it is indeed the cloth that enveloped the most pure body of God incarnate. But just as Christ said to Thomas after he invited him to place his hand in the very wounds inflicted during His suffering, “stop doubting and believe,” (John 20:27) I sincerely hope that He forgives us our arrogance, and invites us to examine this cloth and say once again, “Stop doubting and believe.” Perhaps it is a receipt left by Christ for this very purpose.

Every possible test known to modern science has been conducted on this piece of cloth bearing the image of a scourged, thorn-crowned, and crucified man. The data correlates precisely to the historical period, the eyewitness accounts recorded in the gospels, and the traditional history of veneration of the relic, all but proving that this is in fact the burial cloth of Christ, God Incarnate, the Savior of the World—except that there is no final proof. It can be correlated and theorized, but there still remains this one reality that the Shroud of Turin cannot be fully proven to be the burial cloth of Christ, even though the Jewish scientist, Barrie Schwortz, was ultimately convinced that it was. The Western logical mind is brought up to the very precipice of Mystery by this singular piece of cloth. It is confronted with the closest material object that exists for proving Christ’s existence, death by crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead, but is not given the wings to fly. Rather, Western rational thought is left to fall on faith into that glorious Truth, the ultimate unknowing.

Today as I write, it is the second Sunday of Lent, the day that we commemorate St. Gregory Palamas. In all of the Orthodox world, this Saint is honored for his defense of hesychasm beginning in 1332 against certain Greek and Latin scholastic theologians and rationalistic humanists. The foremost of these opposed by St. Gregory was a Greek monk who resided in Italy named Barlaam of Calabria who, upon visiting monasteries in Constantinople and Mount Athos, insisted that the practice of hesychastic (or mystical) prayer was tantamount to “navel gazing” (because of the posture the monks assumed when they prayed) and could not produce the effect of experiencing the uncreated light of God for, according to Barlaam and the scholastics, it was impossible for God to be known in his essence. After a quarter-century of battling the scholastics and theological agnostics, St. Gregory’s position defending the mystical practice of hesychastic prayer prevailed, and he was declared by the Orthodox church to be a Saint and a “Father and Doctor of the Orthodox Church.”⁵ Thus, from the time of the nascent Renaissance and the rise of humanism and the subsequent Enlightenment, the East has stood in opposition to rationalistic theology.

Today, it may be that the West is weary of a theology that insists on logic and proof. We are hungry for the true enlightenment that is provided through the unknowing Eros that can be found in Eastern theology—the illumination of the essence of God. The West is ripe for re-enchantment through the Truest story that is—the one that is told by the picture engraved in the Shroud of Turin—that the God-incarnate Christ was crucified and rose from the dead.

We need this radical encounter, not by learning and not by rational assent to theological concepts, but by falling headlong into the divine Eros of God, and simply desiring oneness with Him.

St. Gregory Palamas, pray to God for us!

1. Paffhausen, Metropolitan Jonah, The Inner Work of the Spiritual Life, p. 5 (2024).

2. Patitsas, Timothy. The Ethics of Beauty. Maysville, MO: St. Nicholas Press, 2019.

3. Kern, David, White, Heidi with Andrews, Ian. The Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter One. Produced by Goldberry Studios, Close Reads Podcast, Bonus Edition, October 16, 2020, (1:24:49) Close Reads HQ.

4. The year after I recorded that comment in my commonplace book, I had the opportunity to meet Heidi White in person, and I asked her to tell me about how she came to be Orthodox. Over the course of several conversations with her and the woman who ultimately became my Godmother, Thomaida Houdanish of Beauty First Films, my desire to know more was awakened, and the rest as they say, is history.

5. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Gregory-Palamas#ref275511