I should say this more simply than I have before, just to be clear: I’m an ecumenist, and a radical ecumenist at that. Like a lot of converts I was once an exclusivist and a rigorist, but the truth is, this is not a position that I think can be honestly maintained with an open heart — that is, a perceiving heart, a sensitive heart, a heart that values people more than ideas.
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: “There are many united to the Church by bonds the Lord has not willed to reveal to us.”
St Philaret of Moscow: “The walls of our division do not rise all the way to Heaven.”
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 philosphers 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 Laeth’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.