The Christ Who Is Already There
This post was not written using AI.
Asking someone to convert, to change his religion, is akin to asking someone to leave his marriage, or to emigrate from his home and never return. In rootless modernity perhaps this statement doesn’t mean much; marriage is fungible, relationships are disposable, and most people are perpetual nomads living far from kith, kin, and any “ancestral” homeland and with no more loyalty to the earth they walk on than to a t-shirt. (Happy Fourth of July: the United States, the first “propositional nation,” was built on this attitude, at least superficially.) But to anyone who is blessed to have received, or re-created, an attitude to life that accords more weight to the virtue of fidelity on all its levels, the likening of religious conversion to other forms of infidelity to family or motherland might strike home, even if it evokes disagreement.
I’ve heard enough emigration ballads, and I’ve soaked my heart enough in premodern religion and its ambient ethos, to feel this likeness sharply once it occurred to me.
To ask for religious conversion is a huge ask. For someone rooted in a real tradition, and yes, “real tradition” to me includes most historic varieties of Protestant Christianity, religious conversion means leaving their soul’s motherland. Get thee behind me, Enlightenment rationalism: religion is not a matter of a set of doctrines, held more or less abstractly as intellectual propositions. It is an undefinable, ungraspable participation in a universe of feeling, a history of longing; it is membership in a family, in a living community whose presence in and journey through the world has led to the accumulation of a treasury of graces received and sufferings and joys undergone and gathered.
In our age of digitized, hyper-rational, hyper-linear madness, we can set aside that whole environing richness and chase some idea of spiritual life proposed to us by some literally disembodied voice heard through a computer (this by the way is what you’re doing every time you go down a YouTube or TikTok rabbit hole). If we were sane we wouldn’t do it. We’d laugh at the prospect. I knew old Baptists, back in my days of ur-Orthobro convertitis, who just laughed when I told them about Orthodoxy. Not that they were dismissive: they were just saying, that’s lovely, and I have a home, thank you so much. Really the same way a virtuous man laughs at being propositioned: that’s lovely, I’m so flattered, and do you see this ring? I have a wife, thank you so much.
I have arrived at something like the same position. I will listen to everyone. Certain people, I am more interested in, because of my own spiritual concerns (not to say obsessions). I’ll mention Roman Catholics, particularly personalists and existentialists; liberal process theologians; Mormons (if you are a Christian and have not engaged with Mormon theology, you’re missing out); MacDonald and Lewis and Tolkien; some Sufis, particularly Chishtis; and some Sikhs, especially some in the Sant Mat traditions. I recall one in particular, Baba Sawan Singh Ji, whose photograph was enough to arrest me — there was magic in it, something radiantly beautiful in his eyes, and I just saw and felt that he “had something” for me.
And yet — my home is the Orthodox Church, specifically the Russian Orthodox Church. I have no interest in converting to anything. “I have a home, thank you so much.” This does not mean that I believe we Orthodox “have the truth.” Lord, have mercy: that goes the other way around, one should hope: that the Truth would have us (of course perhaps He doesn’t, which is much the more serious possibility to consider). I hang my hat mostly on a few 19th century Russians. Khomiakov, in The Church Is One, says that there are many united to the Church by bonds that the Lord has not willed to reveal to us. St Philaret of Moscow said to a Catholic interlocutor that “the walls of our division do not rise all the way to Heaven.” But of course St Paul also says, “In every nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him.”
In the communal madhouse that is the modern world, there are many with no tradition at all in any real sense. To them, I extend a heartfelt invitation to come and visit the Orthodox Church, to find if it is a doorway for them back to the Lord. But go out and argue with other Christians? Zero interest. And I fail to see that it is going to do more than draw in cadres of angry fundamentalists focused on doctrines and ideas. Be Orthodox and let the proof of its truth be the fact that your face is radiant, and you are full of love — let the proof be that it works as it should. “Give a reason” for your hope when asked, and otherwise, stay busy working the earth of your own heart in the sweat of your brow. The Lord had words not just for the Pharisees of his time, but for us modern Pharisees: “Ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God.”
Now I will make the leap that will get me tarred and feathered not just by the Orthobros but perhaps by almost everyone. I extend the same philosophy across the board. I am doing no disservice to non-Orthodox Christians when I set aside aggressive proselytism, because the Lord Jesus Christ is present to them in their tradition (or in spite of their tradition — makes no difference to me which of those it is). What I want is for the presence of the Lord to be revealed to them; what I want for myself is for it to be revealed to me. Inasmuch as Orthodoxy has anything to contribute, I want it to be a voice that helps non-Orthodox understand and grasp with deeper clarity and deeper joy what is already true for them, the presence of the Lord who is already with them, who has never left them. And then, do you know what? Over time, and organically, the faith and praxis of their community will be transformed. And someday, God willing, we will be in communion again.
This is what I mean by “ecumenism” and this is why I am an “ecumenist.” And it includes not merely sharing “my” riches with others, but receiving others’ riches when they share them with me.
When I say that I extend this philosophy across the board, I mean that I apply it not merely to non-Orthodox, but to non-Christians. I don’t want Hindus to to “convert” to Christianity in the sense of replacing their current set of ideas with a “Christian” set of ideas. I want to help reveal to them what Raimundo Panikkar beautifully called “the unknown Christ of Hinduism.”1 I want the reality of Christ, the vision of Christ, to awaken in the hearts of all — as was the Lord’s desire: “Lo, I have come to cast fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!”
And when I speak of Christian Druidry, I mean this exercise of the imagination: what if this had been the attitude of those who preached Christianity to my ancestors? What if St Boniface could have revealed the Lord in the oak, rather than cutting it down? What if the intent and the praxis had been to reveal the Christ already present in Druidry, rather than to obliterate that tradition? As it was, it had to wait until the 19th century for Iolo Morganwg’s laudanum-fueled Romantic ravings to gesture towards this path.
And with all that said, tomorrow I will have the joy of attending the Divine Liturgy (and let me tell you, if you do not wake up on Sunday thinking “I get to go to church today!” you’re not doing it right). I have no intention of leaving my home. It is my home after all. But slowly I am putting aside the crazy, dare I say “autistic,” hive mind of digital modernity with all its logical, linear exclusions and its dogmatic insistence that its own categories must never, can never be violated, and inhabiting a different, calmer, more generous “open space.”
Lest anyone suggest this approach is foolish, naive, or even heretical, I observe that this was precisely what the Fathers of the undivided Church did: they revealed “the unknown Christ of Plato” and created small-o orthodox Christianity in the process. Likewise perhaps one could say that the Scholastics revealed “the unknown Christ of Aristotle.”
"tarred and feathered not just by the Orthobros but perhaps by almost everyone"
Not by me—I'm on the same page. The way I put it is that the Logos who is Jesus speaks via His holy Sophia across all places and cultures and traditions and times. It also follows that it is entirely possible for some people from non-Christian traditions to be more in harmony with the Logos than some Christian believers. After all, Jesus warned that not all who merely say His name would be saved, and I think it works the other way around as well.
But finally, I do think that all Wisdom converges on Christ, and that it would be better for people to pursue that convergence in the light of full consciousness, even as it isn't strictly necessary for them to do so. I don't care whether anyone "converts to Christianity," but it seems meaningful for them to know the Person, and to integrate the Gospel into their own existing traditions and understandings as they will.
(This type of approach was magnificently successful when the Orthodox missionaries went to the Inuits in Alaska: https://sacredalaskafilm.com)
“This is what I mean by “ecumenism” and this is why I am an “ecumenist.” And it includes not merely sharing “my” riches with others, but receiving others’ riches when they share them with me.”
Beautiful work, brother. This reflects the best of our conversations over the years. Your comparison to marriage is perfect. That is exactly how it sounds when someone tries to convert us, or when we do the same.
If we don’t begin and end with love and genuine interest in the person than we’ve already lost.