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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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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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My religious readers will likely appreciate the first part and excoriate me for the second. My non-religious readers will be frien…

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I recently returned to the Desert Fathers after a long absence. It was a trajectory that drew me back into a very simple-hearted faith. I had an insight into the reality of God’s providence in my life, over and against all theological speculation; I felt where God had been with me even in my failures, bringing great good out of them. I stepped back from my usual reading into the simpler things that some part of me knows are close to the “one thing needful” — the Psalms, St John of Kronstadt’s My Life In Christ, the Discourses of Abba Dorotheos of Gaza, and then back to the Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

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If you don’t know these, they’re the record, treasured by Orthodox and Catholic monastics and layfolk for nearly 2,000 years, of the brief teachings, in word and deed, of the first ascetics who fled Christianity’s “success” in the third and fourth centuries and went to live in the wilderness. The age of martyrdom was over, and the Spirit inspired men and women to find a new way of living out the Gospel’s impossibly radical demands in solitude and spiritual warfare in the remote deserts of Egypt and Syria. You must read them to get a taste of them; it might revise your whole opinion of what Christianity is.

Some call these sayings Christian koans, but they are not that; they are too saturated in Christian caritas. By turns, they shock with revulsion and with the recognition of undeniable truth manifested in a superhuman love that reveals precisely what it ought to mean to be human — what we have sunk beneath. They convict, they offend, they set the heart on fire. Perhaps they are the most direct existential evidence of the perfect continuity between the Gospel and the ancient church. And since they remain the foundation of Orthodox monasticism and piety, a concentrated expression of the fragrance that permeates the whole of Orthodox spiritual life, they are evidence (to the one whose heart is open to it) that the Orthodox Church lives in direct spiritual continuity with the Gospel and the desert. This evidence precedes and exceeds all doctrinal disputation and in a way renders it irrelevant. There is a golden thread connecting the Gospel, the Desert Fathers, the saints of Russia’s “northern Thebaid,” the triumph of the New Martyrs, and the teaching of contemporary saints.

OK, that was my encomium to the Desert Fathers and to all the ascetic saints of Orthodoxy. (See, I am not just a hater: I love my Church.) Now comes the difficult part.

I want to be as honest and straightforward as I can be.

As I started to assemble a reading list for myself, I remembered St John Cassian, the man who more than any other transmitted desert spirituality and monastic life to the west (he was born more than a century before St Benedict). In browsing his Institutes, I came upon the (in)famous sixth chapter, which the bashful Victorian editors of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series declined to translate. A sample:

When the thought of the feminine sex first creeps up on our mind through the subtle suggestions of the crafty demon, beginning with the recollection of our mother, sisters, relatives or of certain pious women, we should hasten to drive it out of our inner being. If we were to linger over it, the tempter might take the occasion to make us gradually think of other women and so introduce evil thoughts. That is why we must carefully remember this precept: “Guard your heart with all vigilance.” We should observe according to God’s chief commandment the deadly head of the serpent. It is the principle of evil thoughts, by which the devil tries to creep into our soul. Nor should we negligently allow the rest of his body to penetrate into our heart, that is, by assenting to temptation. If allowed in, it will doubtless destroy the captive mind with its virulent bite.

(What follows is a transparent expression of my visceral reaction to this world of ascetic “piety.” I suspect that many ascetics would have expressed themselves in similar terms if they were honest about their reactions to sex, but few — Tertullian was one, perhaps — would be so straightforward.)

I despair of specifying all the ways in which I find this teaching so profoundly, monstrously perverted (later, St John spends some time discussing how often a monk might have a nocturnal emission without its indicating something amiss in his spiritual life — apparently two months is a good heuristic). I find it so in itself, though really, it’s none of my business and not my concern (except inasmuch as this culture of renunciation still seems to bear such evil fruit in the life of the Church, particularly since the Church is literally ruled by monastics — bishops in the Orthodox Church are monks). It’s a conversation monastics are having with each other about the difficulties of the strange way they’ve chosen to live. It feels like a technical discussion about spaceflight being carried on by professional astronauts, except much less heroic and interesting.

Sex is problematic. Everyone can agree.

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Finding the Scriptures

I know the difference between the holy scriptures and all the books written merely by human beings, and I suspect you do as well. There is an infinite depth shining in the scrip…

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I had often heard it said that you can take the man from the bog but you can’t take the bog from the man. I was myself within three weeks of being ordained a pri…

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I’ve had this inspiration for some time, and have finally come to a way of implementing it.

I feel at my best when I am able to speak with people with mutual sincerity and earnestness about the things…

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I am imagining it — but there really was such a girl. She is gone; her life — her growth, her sicknesses, her joys, her loves, her children, her labor, her wonder, her death, but more, infinitely more, the felt, experienced reality of all these and of her entire life-world bound into an unfathomable whole called her “soul” — is forgotten, lost in an absolute abyss of time. My spiritual and imaginative labor to grasp it consciously, when I consider it, has spanned my whole life, from my childhood awakening of feeling for and curiosity about ancient things (enflamed first of all by the traditional music of Brittany, Scotland, and Ireland), to my own travels in the lands of my ancestors, to all the accumulated knowledge and experience that has provided the canvas on which my imagination can invoke her. A life’s labor — true, such a joyful and deeply desired labor that it hardly seems appropriate to call it “labor.”

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As I awaken this vision in my heart and mind, it feels so tenuous, like the barest glimpse caught of a ghost — fleeting but heavy with feeling — out of the corner of my eye. Even reading some of the great imaginative masterworks of historical fiction that can evoke lost worlds with such poignancy and power can still feel pale compared to my own present embodied reality.

And yet I have a deeper connection to this girl. She is a grandmother. Between her and me, there is a literal, physical continuity. But there is more than a merely physical continuity, and a soul-link deeper than my own imaginative power.

What Is Real?

To divert for a moment into a piece of pragmatic metaphysics, I believe that the final realities of the world are qualities, and that the original and final mode of knowledge is feeling, not thought (though in the roots, it is probably impossible to disentangle thought and feeling — or perhaps, “thinking” in its integrity is merely a specific kind of feeling). When moderns judge qualia in the philosophical sense to be “epiphenomena” of an underlying “reality,” this is precisely an inversion. The logical, cognitive, rational, and in the case of modern science, mathematical “realities” are derivative; they are abstractions from reality. Reality is what is experienced, what appears, what is felt, what manifests itself to us.

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“By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” (Joseph Smith)
πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι. (Heraclitus)

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I dream a lover, one I’ve never met in the flesh. I wake up, boil water, shower, have breakfa…

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Transcribed from the audio collection One Evening in Eden, published by Lilliput Press.

So I’m telling Death (Death, you have to imagine, here’s the old skeleton coming at you with his scythe, you kno…

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Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like to a roe or to a young hart upon the mountains of spices. (Song of Solomon 8:14)

The nakedn…

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This post was not written using AI.

Unfortunately, I am not a scholar. My existential hunger was always deep enough to keep me from sticking to any academic program; I would always eventually say, Why…

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The current moment for “re-enchantment” strikes a deep chord for me. A few of my readers may know that in a past that now seems both distant and poignantly unrecove…

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