One of the benefits of studying apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature is that such study alerts us to the intensely strange character of the religious matrix out of which our own tradition has arisen. This tradition usually appears to us as something familiar, well-known and well-worn; we think we understand everything, and particularly, we think we understand the structuring ethos, the whole frame. In reality, we have a set of blinders and presuppositions. We read our foundational texts and traditions through a lens provided us by centuries of mediators who have tamed and corralled the high strangeness, who have taken the sharp-edged stones and smoothed them and fitted them together to mortar up and close off the doorways leading off in the dark to places we can no longer imagine. Our texts and traditions do however contain these doorways. Sometimes we pass them by and see their outlines, now neatly filled with stones.

Fortunately we live in an era in which a vast panoply of ancient texts and a mass of scholarship on ancient religious belief and praxis allow us to knock some stones out of the ghost doors and shine a light into the passageways beyond, feel and scent the cool and ancient air moving as it arises out of the unknown depths.

In the New Testament we have a single document, the Apocalypse, which looms large in sectarian imagination, but we hardly grasp the extent to which it indicates the informing shape of the world from which our faith ultimately arose. There are traces of apocalyptic elsewhere in the Scriptures as well, of course; but underlying the canon we have is a host of other apocalyptic texts which were excluded from that canon and preserved only in untravelled and romantic corners of the ancient world. Oh, to live in the days when an advenurous scholar — an 18th century Indiana Jones — could find Ge’ez manuscripts of the Ascension of Isaiah in ancient Ethiopian monasteries! Only after this recovery was well underway did we begin to suspect that our own tradition’s account of itself was a mere sketch of reality, and a tendentious one at that. This realization was confirmed and solidified by the great textual discoveries of the 20th century — especially Qumran.

Ancient Hebrew religion as it actually existed was intensely rich and strange. The sketch we inherited as “history” from the polemicists of the ancient church presented this religion as a clean “monotheism,” in a projection of Rabbinic Judaism back onto Judaism’s origins. But this was a history written by the victors. In fact, the preponderance of evidence shows quite clearly now that “monotheism” is an anachronistic term. Even before Qumran and the translation of ancient pseudepigraphal literature preserved in odd corners and lost languages, there were already indications within the canonical New Testament of the presence of various streams of Hebrew religious tradition and praxis — “ghost doors,” as mentioned above, which one could comfortably pass by in the text only by failing to see them. These streams were in competition with one another and had been for centuries. Behind them all was the earliest epoch, during which “monotheism” was really rather a monolatry, a henotheism, or a so-called “kingship monotheism” as the operative cosmology. There was no absolute ontological distinction between the High God and the court of gods who surrounded him, merely a distinction of power and authority. “El” was the supreme god among a society of gods; and very likely, Yahweh was El’s firstborn son (Asherah was likely El’s consort, or one of his consorts).

A great deal that is perplexing in the Hebrew scriptures resolves itself when we take this view, and see the text we possess as bearing the traces of a long struggle between this more ancient view of the divine, and later views which moved towards a greater emphasis on the uniqueness of the Most High god amidst his court — of course, not merely a struggle between views, but a cultural and political struggle among the people who held those views, and who redacted and collated the extant canon according to their ideological intention. Rabbinic Judaism was the ultimate victor, but not until after the Roman destruction of the Temple. The Essenes, who maintained the ancient perspective (perhaps it could be said, the real “traditionalists” among the Jews in this regard), and out of whose milieu arose, most likely, both John the Baptist and Jesus himself, were forgotten, and it is only thanks to the curiosity of a lost goat wandering into a cave that we now have the ancient texts (the Dead Sea Scrolls) from which we can again hear their own beliefs in their own voices.

All of this is introductory to the point I want to make, and I will take it all as uncontested. The point that interests me is this: what we see when we press down into the roots of Hebrew religion is a vivid example of what Nikolai Berdyaev would call sociomorphism — that is, a religious belief that is a projection of human social structures onto the fabric of supernatural reality. (I am setting aside, for the moment, a real and deep theological question — namely, in which direction this projection is operative, that is, whether it is earth being projected onto the heavens, so to speak, or the heavens being projected onto the earth; this is a question of faith that reason cannot adjudicate. I will return to this question below.

What we see is a heaven that mirrors a reality on earth, and that reality on earth is the ancient despotism of the first Near Eastern kingdoms and empires. The various apocalyptic and visionary narratives that were the air breathed by the ancients who shaped our contemporary traditions at their roots depict a heavenly court whose structures and inhabitants mirror the palaces and courtiers of the political powers of their time and place. The glory, majesty, and mystery of these heavenly courts are redolent of the despotism, grandeur, and mystification that attended the earthly courts the authors knew. The protagonists of the old apocalyptic and visionary narratives advance through the palace-temple of the heavens, encountering a progressively awe-inspiring community of divine beings, entering progressively more rarefied holy spaces, being washed and anointed and clothed in a way appropriate to this advancement, facilitating their “ascension,” until they finally arrive at the throne room, the Holy of Holies, where El Elyon is seated in majesty in the presence of his sons (including, of course, his Son) and chief viziers, and fall prostrate in obeisance before him.

I do not love this literature, and you may already see why.

The vision of this divine court finally produces intense revulsion in me: God sitting on this throne like a king among his nobles, receiving obeisance and praise and worship: there is nothing instrinsically beautiful here. God’s glory is here depicted as that of an ancient oriental despot with his foot on the heads of his enemies and with his courtiers gathered around him; this whole psychedelic panoply of visionary despotism is repugnant. I say “psychedelic” because the aesthetic of these visions is clearly so to me; I have spent plenty of time in fairly intense psychedelic states (not part of my current spiritual diet, only a part of my past), and when I read these ancient visions of crystalline figures with hair white as snow, with blazing eyes and golden limbs, fearsome hallucinatory beasts, and so forth, I immediately think, “Whoever wrote this was on mushrooms” — or at least, was drawing on a psychedelic experience and interpreting it as somehow a revelation of a deeper and higher reality. Alongside these psychedelia there is also the taste of a deep, atavistic, animal fear: there is a cringing before an overpowering force the sheer strength of which is existentially crushing and annihilating. It is dangerous.

(I know, I know… “Aslan is not a tame lion.” Yet he never seems to eat his well-meaning children alive, either — so in fact, although he is in some sense the mysterium tremendum, he’s not as tremendum as all that in the end, is he?)

To some extent, those familiar with the ethos of this literature are accustomed to say that Christianity radically revised it — that the experience of “holiness” as a profoundly dangerous force was transformed in Christianity into a vision of gentleness, mercy, and moral beauty. Very well — but what of the Apocalypse, where all the old themes, where the entire ancient apocalyptic atmosphere, is an operative, if not decisive, influence? In this, we may sympathize with D.H. Lawrence’s assessment of this text as profoundly anti-Christian. We may also suspect that Christianity did not cleanly reject the sense of “holiness as force” as much as it adopted, in parallel and in profound tension, another vision of holiness more deeply aligned with its experience of Jesus.

I suspect that this vision of the terrifying psychedelic splendor of antique despotism is repugnant not only to me, but to most other moderns as well, who have however inchoately been reared in a culture steeped in the idea of the human person’s dignity and inducted into reflection on its mystery; if anything characterizes modernity tout court it is this “turn to the person,” reflected in modernity’s finest theology and philosophy. I suspect that the jarring contrast with the despotic ethos of the ancient apocalyptic that formed the generative matrix of Christianity is fundamentally and intuitively obvious, and has been a central driver of the decline of Christianity; the peoples of Christendom have been like children coming to adolescence who suddenly realize that beneath their parents’ explicitly stated values and counsels, their family’s life is shaped in addition by unspoken, dark dysfunctions that utterly contradict those values — and like any sane adolescent, their response is “get me out of this house.”

There is nothing intrinsically beautiful about the vision of God seated on a throne like a king among his nobles, receiving obeisance and worship and praise — an ancient oriental despot with his foot on the heads of his enemies as his courtiers gathered around him. Rather than the worship of beauty, the presentation of this vision as some decisive manifestation of glory insists on the worship and mystification of power and authority, of majesty, and ultimately, of fear. But I cannot recognize grandeur except in moral grandeur, and I cannot finally recognize beauty except in moral beauty. The authors of ancient apocalyptic expect me to be dazzled by the spectacle they portray, but spectacles are neither morally nor spiritually convincing. The image of deity as above all a supremely powerful force means absolutely nothing to me; indeed, it disgusts me. (This, by the way, of course, is the evil and falsehood inherent in the gnosticism of the theology underlying the Star Wars franchise, in which the worshipful source of human power is precisely a mere “force”— rather than a person — that has both light and dark “sides”; in other words, the root of cosmic life is morally ambivalent. This is Jung’s Answer to Job that caused his break with Victor White.)

Sometimes, this whole inheritance of Christianity just weighs on my heart. Why must I include this whole questionable patrimony in my religion? The figure of Jesus is at best nested within and garbed with, and at worst, thoroughly saturated with and transformed by, this repugnant atmosphere.

This dazzling, apotheosized royal court that graciously welcomes a few cringing mortals whose purity must be achieved by ritual washings and anointings and prostrations — what does this have to do with the beauty of the earth that I actually inhabit?

Where’s the mud? Where are the fallen leaves? Where are the ordinary stones that don’t flash like fire? Where’s the gentle breath of wind, the scent of pine and sage, where are the trembling leaves? Where are the coyotes, where are the crows, where are the squirrels, where are the frogs, where are the cicadas? Where’s the dappled mountain I study from across the canyon, come to life again after the fires, which has never known the obsessive regularity praised by geometers? Where is the wu-wei? And most importantly — where is Jesus?

Above, I mentioned “a real and deep theological question — namely, in which direction this projection is operative, that is, whether it is earth being projected onto the heavens, so to speak, or the heavens being projected onto the earth… a question of faith that reason cannot adjudicate.”

To me it is clear that the ancient apocalyptic from which our faith was formed is the former: it is the earth being projected onto the heavens; it is Berdyaev’s sociomorphism; it is an existential attempt to grapple with the terror and powerlessness of human existence by rooting our abasement in the nature of God and his cosmos, by somehow making it ontologically just. But it is equally clear to me that when this movement is reversed — when it is not a cringing mortal seeking admittance to the overwhelming glory of the divine precincts, but a divine figure descending to Earth, Christianity presents something starkly and radically different. Everything is turned upside down. All our expectations and imaginations about the character of God that are reflected in apocalyptic literature are shown to be profoundly mistaken.

Where apocalyptic discloses the heavens through narratives of human ascent and descriptions of what the glorified seers experience, Christianity’s originating myth presents instead a narrative of descent: it shows us not a man elevated to the presence of God, but a god descending to the intimate presence of human beings. And in this descent, as Christianity presents it, what do we see? Do we see God as a king? Do we see him as mighty? Does he offer the instruction in ritual washings and oblations and gestures of obeisance? What happens to his glory?

Tradition says, “It is veiled, and it will be revealed again.” But what if the coming of God among men is not a veiling, but precisely a revelation, an unveiling, a true apocalypse? Study the Sermon on the Mount and its promises; study Jesus’ heart for the poor, for the little ones, for children, for the widow and her mite, for prostitutes and tax collectors and sinners, for heretics, for the dregs and wrack of human society, for the lilies and the birds. Study his hidden life as a carpenter’s son, a manual laborer among peasants. Study his life as a man condemned to an unjust death, as a leader whose followers abandoned him.

What if the whole apocalyptic literature and its valorization of power and glory is a mistake, and the entire life of Jesus is a correction and a rebuke which the ekklesia received, but has struggled for 2,000 years to metabolize?

Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father?

If this is true, then the way to the vision of the Father is the vision of Jesus on earth, and all the references to glory — even O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was — are to a glory that human beings disfigure and obscure when they read it as a glory like that of the despots who rule them through majesty and terror and demand their obeisance. The Sermon on the Mount is then an existential and cosmological coda to all the old visions of the divine court; when the Son of God comes, he does not say, “Blessed are the kings,” he says, “Blessed are the poor.”

Humanity spent millennia dreaming about holiness as the power of God, and God came to reveal holiness present in the very life from which their dreams had turned. God really is “king” — but until the advent of the Son of God we didn’t understand what kingship meant, we didn’t understand what glory meant. He opens the humility of created things to reveal the glory that dwells within humility — in place of the thunders of many waters, God is quiet; God’s glory is quiet. Glory as gentleness, dwelling with the anawim.

It is like the dew of Aermon, which cometh down upon the mountains of Sion. For there the Lord commanded the blessing, life for evermore.

(to be continued)

0:00–3:46 — When Ye Go Away — The Waterboys — Fisherman’s Blues
3:47–8:32 — Reres Hill — Old Blind Dogs — Fit?
8:33–12:08 — Go Down Easy — John Martyn — Solid Air
12:09–17:11 — By Weary Well — Robin Williamson — A Glint At the Kindling / Five Bardic Mysteries
17:12–21:04 — As I Roved Out — Planxty — The Well Below the Valley
21:05–26:30 — Reynardine — Bert Jansch — Rosemary Lane
26:31–31:03 — The Goodman — Kate Rusby — Underneath the Stars
31:04–34:54 — Queen Amang the Heather — Archie Fisher — The Man with a Rhyme
34:55–46:20 — Little Musgrave — Planxty — The Woman I Loved So Well
46:21–50:20 — Two Last Weeks In Summer — Fotheringay — Fotheringay
50:21–56:11 — Jardin d'amour — Pierre Bensusan — Pierre Bensusan 2
56:12–58:58 — Sometimes — Jonathan Edwards — Jonathan Edwards
58:59–1:04:21 — The Creel — Paul Brady — Welcome Here Kind Stranger
1:04:22–1:07:11 — Love And Freedom — Cathie Ryan — Music of What Happens
1:07:12–1:11:37 — Beeswing — Christy Moore — Burning Times
1:11:38–1:15:15 — The Wanton Seed — Nic Jones — The Noah’s Ark Trap
1:15:16–1:19:40 — Sweet Thing — Van Morrison — Astral Weeks

Recently, I made the observation that part of the invitation of aging — and I really feel this existentially — is that what we once had as a vitality that is natural to us, that we had whether we wil…

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The earth and sky never shine with such radiant splendor as after a thunderstorm, a tempest, or a pouring rain. And so it is in the songs of Homer: “we sense, both in the whole and the parts, the fre…

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She was not dressed for the part — a denim jacket flapping in the wind, a red backpack like a schoolchild’s, a white helmet. But she was going fast. I also enjoy going fast. Sometimes when I am alone on this stretch of road I take it at unreasonable speed. I felt her pace as an invitation, so I followed, keeping a safe distance, but staying with her, just at the limit of my comfort. I saw her taking the turns aggressively, leaning into them.

All of a sudden, I felt: I should let her go, I should just let her go. I felt her joy in the road, in speed, in the day; I was feeling it too (listening to Mari Boine helped), but I felt it magnified in her, on her bike, in the wind, closer to the road and the sun and the hills and the sky and the wheeling birds.

And I felt — I could catch her, but I want to let her go. She is so alive and so beautiful, I want to let her go. She is feeling the fierce bliss of skill and speed, she deserves the road alone, the road deserves her alone, the hills deserve her alone, God deserves her alone, it is better if that flame is alone, burning. I eased off, let her race ahead out of my sight.

I wondered: does it ever happen that an animal predator suddenly sees the pure, vital beauty of its prey shining out, a bright star of being, bright against the sky — does an animal predator ever see this, and let its prey go? I know immediately, no, it doesn’t. No, an animal would never step back from itself in that way, never be enraptured by the sheer beauty of another creature for which it has an appetite. The sheer beauty!

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It may not be obvious to many of my readers that I’m an Orthodox Christian, and those who know may wonder why I’m still an Orthodox Christian. In these cris de coeur I have said bluntly that I am not sure I believe the Nicene Creed as a set of metaphysical propositions; that the traditional asceticism counseled by the Church as the bedrock of spiritual life is repugnant to me; that I am seeking some way to re-inhabit the animist cosmos of my pagan ancestors; that I am a radical ecumenist skeptical of evangelism as a call to abandon non-Orthodox or non-Christian spiritual patrimonies; and that I have an acid disdain for Orthodox rigorists and polemicists. I have waxed lyrical about visions of Aphrodite and questioned the absolute normativity of the Church’s teachings on human sexuality. I write regularly and appreciatively about theologians and philosophers not just beyond my own tradition but far beyond it; I listen to them earnestly. So what am I doing still in the communion of the Orthodox Church?

The first simple answer is “Jesus.” Jesus has so far survived all of my honesty and all of my questioning. Jesus has persisted in reminding me that there is a holy of holies within the faith, interior to all the superstructure of dogma and praxis built up over the centuries. I have never visited Jerusalem, but I have the impression of the holy sites of Christian history and imagination there as archetypes of organic growth: shrines built on shrines built on ruined shrines; contentious hierophants on the same holy ground in an uneasy peace that occasionally breaks out into a brawl (a description that could serve as a summary of exoteric Christian history); labyrinthine streets and passages and walls and tunnels leading, by paths traveled only in trust of the pilgrims who have gone before, to the earth heart tomb-cave of the Resurrection. All are accidents of history pointing somehow, impossibly, to the essential that is not an accident. What is true of human history, with all its sin and error, is true of the Church, with all its sin and error.

And so it is all bound together: the beautiful agony of the wrack and ruin of human and cosmic history; the witch-light of the moth-like stars that I follow through hollow lands and hilly lands; and this Jesus, merciful and ruthless teacher, faithful companion and lone-wolf cosmic troubadour; water-walker, water-giver, wine-maker, storm-calmer, Spirit-breather; judge, redeemer, crucified, risen; who transfixes my heart and my imagination, before whom I kneel and say de profundis, as in that moment my mind bows down with me, “My Lord and my God.”

Wisdom is youth that has met the tragedy of life. Fortunate as I am, I know little enough of tragedy, and thus unfortunately, I have little enough of wisdom; but my own drop of tragedy is enough for me to taste the ocean of it. My youthful innocence and joy are an Eden from which I am blocked by an angel with a flaming sword.

But what does the wisdom gained say? She tells me what is most precious: living souls, the bodied persons who surround me; beauty, aesthetic and moral and sensual, the desire of it and the pursuit of it and the veneration of it and the service of it; and freedom — all terrible brightnesses but in that very blinding excess, undeniable, even as all lie under the sign of death. And so the other precious gift or curse — heartbreaking, unbearable — is the cry of desolation from the cross of crucified humanity. Where else but in the story of Jesus is all of this presented to me as the model and matrix, where else is it all laid before me with the exhortation to choose life? The story is incomparable; everything is here.

And what, then, does wisdom counsel me to do? To give my heart to serve what is most precious, to shed blood in the hope of receiving the Spirit, to wait without idols, as Auden says. This is not a rational enterprise. This is not a rule of life. This is neither a goal nor an objective. If there is obedience in it, the obedience — the “listening,” the “hearkening,” etymologically — is finally to the Lord, but to the Lord whose voice I find to be, when I listen deeply enough, the very voice of my own heart. Deep calleth unto deep at the voice of Thy cataracts.

Yes, then, Jesus: but why Orthodox Christianity?

The “blinding excesses” of God’s wisdom, in God’s wisdom (as faith might testify), “all lie under the sign of death.” St John’s Gospel says it in the prologue: τὸ φῶς ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ φαίνει, καὶ ἡ σκοτία αὐτὸ οὐ κατέλαβεν. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never mastered it.” The verse is ambivalent. Are we to rejoice that the light remains shining — or are we to lament that though it endures and shines, it has not dispelled the darkness?

What, indeed, is the tenor of our whole life as our hearts bow before the Lord? Is it joy, or is it lamentation? Is it ecstasy, or is it repentance? Is Christian life a feast or a fast, askesis or eucharistia? Should we, may we, can we “be of good cheer” in the face of a world that gathers in a mob around Jesus and shouts, “Crucify him, crucify him”? Because after all, he is crucified every day, to this day.

This drama is not located comfortably outside of me, situated for leisurely, detached contemplation — it is a drama that unfolds within me, where I know within myself both the light that cannot be extinguished and the darkness it cannot dispel. I know it both in my failure and in my doubt, and it haunts me in the midst of my joy. I know it in my inability to reconcile belief and unbelief: a belief, or perhaps a hunger for belief, that will not die, and an unbelief that will not let belief live. O Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief!

This is small-c catholic Christianity, κατά ὅλου, “according to the whole.” Fundamentally it is the Christianity that lives within the tension of light and darkness, knowledge and ignorance, sin and virtue, failure and victory, earth and heaven — as we also live in this tension, we in whom prayer and the life that is prayer become, as a consequence, drops of blood, as they did for the Lord in Gethsemane. The Didache, the oldest record of Christian discipline outside the New Testament, instructs us to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times daily, in which we educate and concentrate our hearts to feel and to say, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It is a petition, the summit of all petitions — not a proclamation, not a metaphysical proposition.

This is therefore the life of the Church. The impulse for that life to be “pure,” to be “according to our thought,” κατά διανοίας, rather than “according to the whole,” κατά ὅλου, is an impulse to escape Gethsemane and Golgotha, it is an impulse to refuse the cup that the Lord — showing us, opening to us, our way — accepted. The Church is not pure, not infallible, not merely divine. The Church is the heart of each of us writ large across the ambivalence of history, sketched in chiaroscuro. Here, without seeking to impose my mind on it, I find that surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.

Above all, I have found the Orthodox Church to be the ecclesial body where this truth is accepted and lived with the fewest institutional and doctrinal scars of rebellion. If the Orthodox Church is a garden, we are the gardeners who have learned best from Masanobu Fukuoka, the Japanese apostle of “do-nothing farming,” agricultural wu wei. We have let it be messy, as it wishes to be. We have both ferociously defined it, and defined that it cannot be defined. We have insisted on hierarchical strictness, and undercut the hierarchy with the illimitably hospitable expanse of oikonomia, “household management.” We have established rigorous structures to administer the Mysteries, and accorded quiet finality to the witness and judgment of charismatic elders and fools.

This is why it is so superficially fruitless and infuriating when we participate in ecumenical dialogue. The self-selected cadre of polemicists can only ever represent one shade of the chiaroscuro, and it’s one we permit to exist, as we permit all the shades to exist.

This is also why visitors and enquirers and transient converts can leave, exasperated by some strand of aesthetics, or theology, or praxis that they find unsatisfying and problematic. Yes, those strands are there, they are like weeds, but we welcome the weeds. Our garden is supremely unkempt. But you should really stay long enough to taste the wine. If you fall asleep beside the fire in our temple that is open to the sky, it may be an uncomfortable night. But when you wake with an aching back, and turn over to look up, you might see a shooting star reflected in the dark waters of your heart, and your life will never be the same.

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But such as I have, I give unto thee — a mishmash of summer songs. inspired me.

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Who can really look with charity at Christians outside his own confession and conclude that they’re not in the church? What does “the church” even mean? Almost all of us come to some way of including “the others,” sometimes while managing to maintain the centrality of our own ecclesial home, sometimes as a straightforward pluralist who just rejoices in the riotous diversity without needing to impose any structure on it. In any event, the pious old Evangelical grandma is obviously a Christian, and that means that in some sense she’s in the Church. Period.

Alexei Khomiakov, from The Church Is One: Так как Цеpковь земная и видимая не есть еще полнота и совеpшение всей Цеpкви, которым Господь назначил явиться пpи конечном сyде всего твоpения, то она твоpит и ведает только в своих пpеделах, «не сyдя остальномy человечествy» (по словам апостола Павла к Коpинф.) и только пpизнавая отлyченными, т.е. не пpинадлежащими ей, тех, котоpые от нее сами отлyчаются. Остальное же человечество, или чyждое Цеpкви, или связанное с нею yзами, котоpые Бог не изволил ей откpыть, пpедоставляет она сyдy великого дня. “Since the earthly and visible Church is not yet the fullness and completion of the whole Church — which the Lord has appointed to appear at the final judgment of all creation — she works and knows only within her own bounds, ‘not judging the rest of mankind’ (in the words of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians), and recognizing as excommunicated, that is, as not belonging to her, only those who excommunicate themselves from her. The rest of mankind — whether foreign to the Church, or bound to her by bonds which God has not deigned to reveal to her — she leaves to the judgment of the great day.”

And again, Наши перегородки до неба не доходят, that is, “our partitions do not reach up to heaven” — a Russian saying attributed to several 19th century hierarchs and quoted approvingly in the 20th century. As near as I can tell, it likely was spoken by Metropolitan Platon (Gorodetsky) of Kiev (1803–1891), who served as Archbishop of Riga and Jelgava from 1848 to 1867 — a see where he certainly encountered a richly diverse community of Orthodox, Old Believers, Catholics, and Lutherans. He had a reputation for an irenic, conciliatory pastoral manner. In any event, this is a legitimate and deep thread in the Russian Church, apparent in the great St Philaret of Moscow.

I had a moment many years ago when watching the Iranian film Color of Paradise. You may know the story: a blind boy is rejected by his father, who just wants to be rid of him so he can find a new wife. One of the few characters who loves the boy is his grandmother. There was a scene where she was praying her prayer beads. I don’t know if this is the case in Shi’i Islam, my experience has all been with Sunni Sufism, but the prayer beads are often used to invoke God under His many names, the Majestic, the Subtle, the All-Merciful, the Beautiful… I saw her praying these beads and I could not escape the knowledge that God hears her and loves her. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” — whoever said that “opening” requires a particular set of ideas to be held consciously by the mind? Who could maintain this? Which of us can say that the ideas we hold — which ought to “remind us of straw,” as the greatest theologian of the west said — are so luminously perspicacious that we can think they are anything other than a child babbling? “My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways” Prov 23:26.

To the convinced exclusivists, I just say, yes, and. I can’t not see the primacy of the heart and the conscience. I can’t not see that God is the lover and judge of hearts, that the disposition of the heart is the fundamental reality that governs our relationship with Him, not accidents of birth or of culture or of ideology. “The devils also believe, and tremble.”

Of course, we have to stand where we stand; we have to confess the truth we see; but it is a fundamental gesture of the heart to acknowledge that our dogmatic “enemy” is doing the same thing, unless he is truly overwhelmed by ill-will, i.e., not by his incorrect ideas but by the corruption of his heart. And then in the midst of the disagreement, a light shines — a light in which we acknowledge our own fallibility and weakness, in which we stand in awe of the grandeur of God’s truth that so outstrips us, in which our vision of mercy floods our contraction and fear.

I feel it like music. I have many genres of music that, when I’m in the proper mood, I’ll hear and think “this is what I love best.” The Father’s “many mansions” are like this for me. It’s like some dispositive astrological planet moving in my internal heavens.

Today, my heart is captivated by the traditional Gaelic music I grew up with.

Maybe that will go on for weeks or months. But then a turn will come for European early music…

or for medieval and renaissance sacred choral music…

And a turn might come for Tuareg desert rock…

or dub techno…

or tribal electronica…

or 70s cassette New Age (hello Iasos!)…

or classical Hindustani music…

or qawwali…

or the Armenian duduk…

or Fela Kuti’s groove symphonies.

Yes there are different layers of depth, but the truth is they all bring something to the table that at this or that time, my heart craves.

This is honestly the way I feel about theology. Yes, I’m a communicant of the Orthodox Church. I sing the creed every Sunday and I mean it. I receive the mysteries. I love my church very much, and after the decades, it’s home in a way nothing else is. But still, I am fundamentally, in my heart, a holder of multiple citizenships. Here are a few:

Orthodoxy — obviously. But truly, at this point, the vibe, not the rules. I know the rules, but as in language, the point of knowing the rules is to know the spirit of the rules and follow it rather than the letter. I love the gestalt, the messy whole. I struggle with parts of it, I reject parts of it. My Orthodox spirit animal is Nikolai Berdyaev, a courageous freethinker and yet also a spiritual child of St Alexei Mechev. I venerate the Fathers more than I take their theology as gospel. So shoot me.

John Moriarty’s “Silver Branch” Christianity. This is the mythopoetic answer to my child’s soul that loves Ireland, who was weaned on Tolkien, this is the bursting of the whole conceit of the philosophy of the west, a Christian Nietzsche perhaps to lead us down and out and under and through. This is my Druidic ace in the hole.

And a lot of you will flip out at this one: Mormon Christianity. There is something incomparable here, something obviously ancient and obviously new. This is an inspired Christianity that finally, heroically — in a way like Moriarty in spirit, if totally different in vibe! — breaks Christianity out of the crust of Greek philosophy. It’s a process theism before process theism, somehow cooked up by an uneducated farmboy from backwoods New England. That alone should give any honest questioner pause. It’s a Christianity that rejects “omnigoddism,” the timeless, spaceless, finally impersonal Absolute beloved of philosophers and philosophical theologians. It’s also so American, deeply optimistic, deeply future oriented, deeply pragmatic. Trying on Mormon doctrine to get a taste for how the world feels when you believe it is a really interesting exercise. Recommended for the genuinely open-minded: Terryl Givens’ The God Who Weeps and The Christ Who Heals, and James Faulconer’s Thinking Otherwise.

Personally, I think there is enormous scope for dialogue among all of these widely differing traditions. Martin Shaw, now Orthodox, is essentially a spiritual child of John Moriarty. And Catholic theologian James Webb modeled how “great tradition” Christianity can learn from and appreciate Mormon faith and praxis in Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation.

There’s more traditions that I love. We all have so much to learn from each other, we each have gifts that the whole Body needs! The ranks of the rigorists are full. I’ll be over here jamming with the ragtag ecumenists. Come on, among all these new converts coming into Orthodoxy there have got to be some freaks and weirdos. Looking forward to your joining me. Or yelling at me. Go for it.

Part of the benefit of a book is that when you’re done reading it, you know the author a little bit. Reading random flotsam online, you know the author not at all, so you’re easy prey for whatever psyop may be getting transmitted through a given piece of schlock.

Ask yourself: when in normal life, outside electronic media, would you ever just give credence to something said by a person you don’t know at all? Yet this is the character of virtually all electronic media — except perhaps for the traditional blog.

The wonderful thing about buying DIY books is that you know that because you bought the book, there is one more copy in the world than there would have been otherwise.

It’s really hard to really remember that the anons are really people. There is something so insulated, muffled about interaction here. Thinking this after hearing ’s voice for the first time. There is something embodying about the voice, some truth of the voice, that this medium works against. Maybe we need to try hearing the writer speak as we read.

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It should be enough for the rest of your workday, or for your festive gathering tonight.

Beannachtaí na Féile!

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We know him as St Ciarán of Saighir, one of Ireland’s earliest Christians. It is said that he met St Patrick in Rome. Sensing a kind of saintly outlandishness in him, P…

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