Frederica Mathewes-Green - Facing East: A Pilgrims Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy

With love

to my brothers and sisters

at Holy Cross Orthodox Mission.

Many years!

CONTENTS

In offering this little book I realize that I am in danger of being mistaken for someone who knows what Im talking about. Already I find acquaintances presuming Im an expert on Orthodoxy. No, Im only an expert on my own experience: what its like to be a recent convert figuring my way along in a small mission church. Its a journey Im enjoying very much, but that doesnt make me a church historian, theologian, or liturgical whiz. I have just enough education in theology to know that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I urge those interested in loftier theory to consult others wiser than I.

My other, greater fear is that in my eagerness to celebrate this Church I love so much I have failed to convey its most constant feature, its majesty and dignity. The very act of writing an affectionate and somewhat humorous account like this is in itself a distinctively Western thing to do, and something of the essential Orthodox experience is likely to have been lost in the translation. If this is the case, I need the forgiveness of many, not least the reader. The best antidote is to come and see for yourself what I so clumsily try to portray. Come and learn firsthand what Orthodoxy is.

Vespers

He was an Episcopal priest, but he was standing in an Orthodox church on this Saturday night and thinking about Truth. At the altar a gold-robed priest strode back and forth swinging incense, moving in and out the doors of the iconostasis according to rubrics that were as yet unfamiliar. Golden bells chimed against the censer, and the light was smoky and dim. Over to the left a small choir was singing in haunting harmony, voices twining in a capella simplicity. The truth part was this: the ancient words of this vesperal service had been chanted for more than a millennium. Lex orandi, lex credendi; what people pray shapes what they believe. This was a church that had never, could never, apostatize.

She was his wife, and she was standing next to him thinking about her feet. They hurt. She wondered why they had pews if you had to stand up all the time. The struggling choir was weak and singing in an unintelligible language that may have been English. The few other worshipers werent participating in the service in any visible way. Why did they hide the altar behind a wall? It was annoying how the priest kept popping in and out of the doors like a figure on a Swiss clock. The service dragged on following no discernible pattern, and it was interminable. Once the priest said, Let us conclude our evening prayer to the Lord. She checked her watch again; that was ten minutes ago, and still no end in sight.

It was a long journey from that evening to my present life as an Orthodox priests wife. For many, converting to Christianity or changing denominational allegiance is the result of a solitary conviction. As I ponder my pilgrims progress to Orthodoxy, however, I realize that I didnt make the trip alone but in a two-seater. And I wasnt the one driving.

This is more relevant than may initially appear. Something about Orthodoxy has immense appeal to men, and its something that their wivesespecially those used to worshiping in the softer evangelical styleare generally slower to get. The appeal of joining this vast, ancient, rock-solid communion must be something like the appeal of joining the marines. Its going to demand a hell of a lot out of you, and its not going to cater to your individual whims, but when its through with you youre going to be more than you ever knew you could be. Its going to demand, not death on the battlefield, but death to self in a million painful ways, and God is going to be sovereign. Its a guy thing. You wouldnt understand.

When I asked members of our little mission, Why did you become a member?, two women (both enthusiastic converts now) used the same words: My husband dragged me here kicking and screaming. Several others echoed that it had been their husbands ideahed been swept off his feet and had brought them along willy-nilly. Another woman told how she left Inquirers Class each week vowing never to go again, only to have her husband wheedle her into giving it one more try; this lasted right up to the day of her chrismation. I can imagine how her husband looked, because thats how my Gary looked: blissful, cautious, eager, and with a certain cat-who-ate-the-canary, youll-find-out smile.

That night at Vespers a few years ago I was one of those balky wives. Gary and I stood side by side feeling radically different things, but the pattern could have been predicted from the beginning. When we first met over twenty years ago, he was a political animal who just didnt think much about God; I was a passionate agnostic, angry at God for not existing, eagerly attacking the faith of Christian friends.

Garys shell began to crack when a professor required his philosophy class to read a Gospel. As he read the words of Jesus, he became convinced that here was one who speaks with authority. Since Jesus said there was a God, Gary began to doubt his doubting.

This reasoning left me unconvinced. By the time of our wedding I was going through my Hindu phase, but I didnt object to visiting cathedrals on our honeymoon hitchhiking through Europe. One day in Dublin I looked at a statue of Jesus and was struck to my knees, hearing an interior voice say, I am your life. I knew it was the One I had rejected and ridiculed, come at last to seize me forever. It was a shattering experience from which I emerged blinking like a newborn, and decades later I still feel overwhelming awe and gratitude for that rescue, that vast and undeserved gift. Its like the story of the farmer who had to whap his donkey with a two-by-four to get its attention. I imagine that when God needs a two-by-four this big, he must be dealing with a pretty big donkey.

True to form, Gary needed Truth, while I needed a personal, mystical experience. In the years that followed we went to Episcopal seminary together, were baptized in the Holy Spirit together, and spent several years in the early charismatic movement. He was ordained a priest, and we moved to a new church every few years, having babies along the way. When the charismatic experience grew stale, he rediscovered the high liturgical tradition of his childhood, while I went into spiritual direction and centering prayer. Though there are pitfalls along each of these pathshigh-churchiness can devolve into form-but-not-substance, mysticism can float into goo-goo-eyed self-centerednessneither of us lost our central commitment to Jesus as Lord. Wherever we went, God kept us near himself and each other.

As I shifted my aching feet on the floor of that dim church I wondered whether Garys new direction would ever make sense to me. What had pushed him in the door of this church in the first place was growing unease with changes in the Episcopal Church, changes both moral and theological.

For example, in July of 1991 I was present for a vote of the Episcopal House of Bishops, a resolution requiring ordained clergy to abstain from sex outside of marriage. When the ballots were counted, the resolution had failed. I remember thinking, This isnt a church anymore; it has no intention of following its Lord.

Meanwhile, it became fashionable to doubt Jesus miracles, the Virgin Birth, even the bodily Resurrection. Before his consecration as Englands fourth-highest ranking cleric, David Jenkins claimed that miracles were in the eye of the beholder. Of Jesus physical resurrection he sniffed, Im bothered about what I call God and conjuring tricks. He was consecrated Bishop of Durham in Yorkminster Cathedral on July 6, 1984; two nights later, lightning struck from a cloudless sky and burned down a wing of the building. Beholders thought they might have seen a miracle.