You’ve probably read the books or heard the talks. The picture of the Orthodox life looks beautifully straightforward: you (or your family) come to the Church—ideally young or at least early enough—marry once in the sacrament, raise well-catechized children who stay in the faith, belong to a healthy parish with a wise priest, and finish your days surrounded by icons, prayer, and loved ones.

Sometimes that happens. Often, it doesn’t.

Real life for many of us looks more like this: you discovered Orthodoxy after a divorce (or two). Your kids are grown and nowhere near a church. Your spouse isn’t Orthodox—or isn’t Christian at all. Your parish has real problems, and your priest is… well, human, with all that implies. You carry choices you’re not proud of, and a quiet voice wonders whether you’re now “second-class” material in the Church.

If that’s you—and for a lot of us it is—this piece is for you. The Church holds up a clear ideal, and it’s good and true. But the Church is also built for the messy middle, where most of us actually live. And the Gospel has always had more room there than we sometimes imagine.

“I’m Already Off the Map”

Many of us arrive at Orthodoxy already carrying complicated histories: previous marriages and custody schedules, relationships that ended badly, old wounds like abortion or addiction, financial messes, estranged family, or long stretches of life lived far from any Christian practice.

It’s easy, then, to hear a beautiful account of Orthodox family life or steady spiritual discipline and think, “That’s wonderful—for people who started earlier or made better choices. I’ve already blown it. I’m off the map.”

But if you actually read the New Testament and the lives of the saints, you discover something surprising: the Church has always been full of people who came late, came wounded, or came from tangled situations. Think of Saint Paul, breathing threats and murder against the Church before his dramatic turn. Or Saint Augustine, who lived with a mistress and fathered a child out of wedlock before his conversion. Or St. Mary of Egypt, whose life prior to repentance was the stuff of outright scandal. The “ideal” isn’t there to shame us for being latecomers or broken. It’s there to show the shape of the life God intends for every human being—body and soul, in community, oriented toward Him.

The real question isn’t “Do I match the ideal on paper?” The real question is “From where I actually am right now, what does faithfulness look like?”

Ideals, Wounds, and Oikonomia

This is where Orthodoxy does something that can feel both rigorous and merciful at the same time. It holds the ideal clearly through its oikonomia—lifelong, sacramental marriage; fidelity; children raised in the faith; regular confession and communion; that sort of thing. Akravia is the strict approach to oikonomia, the exactness of the Tradition.

Oikonomia (literally “household management”) is the Church’s governing and wise, pastoral application of the canons. It’s not rewriting the ideal. It’s not a loophole system where you shop for the most lenient priest. It’s more like a good physician who knows the medicine is strong but adjusts the dosage so it heals rather than crushes the patient.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware put it well: the Church condemns the breakdown of marriage as a sin and an evil, yet out of philanthropia—loving-kindness—it sometimes concedes a second (or, occasionally, third) chance so that the weak sinner is not utterly cut off from grace. The second marriage rite is prescribed to carry a more penitential tone; it’s not celebrated with the same level of joy as the first. The ideal remains, but mercy makes a way forward.

The same principle applies across the board, whether dealing with sexual immorality, cohabitation before marriage, or any other disordered aspect of life we bring through the parish doors. Becoming Orthodox is far more than developing an appreciation for ancient liturgy and the scent of incense. The Church cannot lower the high calling of the Gospel to accommodate where culture currently drifts.

For those of us in the messy middle, this means two important things.

• First, don’t expect the Church to lower the standard just because the standard is hard.

• Second, you can trust that if you are honest and patient, the Church will work with the life you actually have—not the one you “should have had.”

Christ has real expectations for His disciples, and healing requires facing reality honestly. Coming into the life of the Church means allowing the Great Physician to address, untangle, and reorder what is broken, conforming our daily lives to His holy commandments.

(Side bar: Oikonomia is commonly used to denote a “relaxing” of the rules, but that’s a minor confusion: economy is the running of the household—period—and therefore both relaxation and exactness properly fall under economy.)

Working Honestly with a Spiritual Father

In the messy middle, DIY spirituality usually doesn’t work. You need a real relationship with a priest or spiritual father—ideally your parish priest, or someone he blesses you to consult.

(Side bar: This is also commonly misunderstood—spiritual fathers are properly and typically in monastic settings. We often hear people refer to their priest or some other priest out there as their “spiritual father”—but ordinary Orthodox Christians typically confess to their parish priest and leave it at that, no title or specific obedience pledged other than ordinary stuff in confession.)

A few practical notes, offered over coffee:

• Be candid. Your confessor can only pastor you to the degree he actually knows the terrain. Hiding chapters of your story or minimizing things just keeps the wound infected.

• Be patient. Some situations—multiple marriages, tangled finances, estranged children, long-standing addictions—take years to untangle. The Church often plays the long game of healing, not quick fixes.

• Don’t confuse a priest’s personal style with the Church’s mind. Some confessors lean stricter, others gentler. What matters is whether they are honest, prayerful, and in obedience to their bishop.

What if your parish itself feels part of the mess—difficult personalities, conflicts, or a priest you struggle to connect with? In serious cases, you may need to speak with the bishop or seek a blessing to transfer. But often the quieter call is to endurance, humility, and staying put while you can. Sometimes faithfulness looks like: “I will remain, I will tell the truth in confession, I will do what is in my power, and I will entrust the rest to God.”

Moving from Shame to Hope

Many of us carry a low-grade sense of being “less than” in the Church: “We’re a second-marriage family.” “My kids aren’t anywhere near the faith.” “If people knew my full past, they’d realize I don’t really belong here.”

This is exactly where the Gospel has to move from head knowledge to heart reality. Christ did not come primarily for the people who had already nailed the ideal from age twelve. He came for sinners, the sick, the latecomers, the ones who wasted years and are only now turning around. Repentance isn’t Plan B. It is the normal path of holiness for most of us.

What matters now is not whether your life story matches the beautiful outline in the books. What matters is: Am I repenting today? Am I staying inside the Church? Am I letting Christ and His Body work on the actual, untidy life I have?

Your path may not photograph well for an Instagram feed of Orthodox family life. It may be a slow, quiet repentance rather than a dramatic conversion arc. That is not second-class Orthodoxy. That is the normal Christian life for more of us than you may realize.

The Church’s ideal is there to show the shape of the Kingdom, not to convince you that you’re too far gone to try. Wherever you stand—however tangled it feels—the invitation remains the same: Stay. Tell the truth. Receive the medicine you’re given. And let God work with the life you actually have.

He’s been doing that with messy people for two thousand years. There’s room for you in the middle.

Remember the words of our Lord in Matthew 11:28-30:

28 “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

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These days, what passes for religious discussion online is a cage match with a comment section. Somebody gets “destroyed.” Somebody gets “owned.” Nobody gets converted, and nobody gets any closer to Christ.

So when a friend of mine sat down with a Protestant for a long talk about the deepest disagreements between us, and both men walked away grateful, I wanted you to see it.

The video is “Orthodox vs Protestant: Who Follows the Early Church?” on Lucas Curcio’s channel, Method Ministries. Lucas is a Protestant. My friend Jeff Moss is formerly a Protestant minister, who is now Orthodox.

Don’t let the “vs” fool you. What follows is a model of how Christians who disagree ought to talk.

My Friend Jeff

I go back a long way with the Moss family. Over twenty years ago, before I was Orthodox, Jeff’s brother designed a really cool “mere Christianity” theology-for-everyday-Joe’s type website for me. It was called Wittenberg Hall, and had several subbrands—Enjoying Beer (pints!), Holy Trinity Classical (education site), JameyB (personal blog), and Postmillennialism.com (an alternative approach to eschatology). We modeled it, on purpose, on the then-iteration of Doug Wilson’s Blog & Mablog: similar structure and formatting, but could house multiple brands under one banner. And Doug Wilson linked a couple of those brands back then, so I guess the effort worked. Doug turns up in both our stories—Jeff spent years in Wilson’s church in Moscow, Idaho, and trained in its ministerial school.

Later, while Jeff was exploring Orthodoxy, he and I grabbed beers together in that part of the country. Over the years we’ve had many good conversations, comparing notes and talking through his honest struggles. I’ve pushed back on him more than once. He has always stayed gracious and respectful. More than that, he has convinced me that some of his concerns, specifically about Doug Wilson’s theology, were legitimate—in places where I first worried he was coming across too harshly.

That’s rare. Most of us can be gracious or honest, and Jeff manages both.

His road is a long one: a Catholic mother, a father raised in a secular Jewish home, an evangelical upbringing, two years as a missionary in Russia with Operation Mobilization.

He saw the Orthodox Church there and loved it, at a distance:

I thought it was beautiful. I thought it was absolutely gorgeous... This is a beautiful form of Christianity. This is wonderful for the Russian people because it’s their church... I’m an American. This isn’t for me.

A lot of us have said some version of that. God has a sense of humor about it.

The Question Under the Question

Jeff became a Reformed pastor. What moved him wasn’t a book or a debate. It was pastoral work. He sat across from a man who had walked out on his wife and called him to repentance, and then he had to face his own theology:

If God ordained his sin, if that was part of God’s eternal plan, if it was God’s intention, then what am I doing?... I couldn’t make that add up as a pastor.

Notice what he didn’t do. He didn’t throw out the faith. In his words, “I knew Jesus. I believed in him.” He asked a better question: what is the faithful path?

He found his answer in an eighth-century monk. St. John of Damascus draws the line Jeff needed:

We ought to understand that while God knows all things beforehand, yet He does not predetermine all things. For He knows beforehand those things that are in our power, but He does not predetermine them. For it is not His will that there should be wickedness nor does He choose to compel virtue. (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith II.30)

God sees your sin coming, but He doesn’t write it. That’s why a pastor’s call to repentance means something. Jeff read the same Holy Father on providence and on icons and came to the end of the line:

I’m just convinced in my soul that everything that he says is true. And so what does that make me?

Orthodox, as it turns out.

The Portrait Under the Mud

Lucas holds to total depravity, and he explains it carefully: fallen people can still do civil good, but they can’t turn to God apart from His grace. Jeff answers with an old picture of the image of God (Genesis 1:27):

It’s been obscured. It’s been smeared... But if the mud could only be cleaned off, you would see that the image of the king has always been there. It’s just been hidden. And that’s our condition as fallen human beings.

That image goes back at least to St. Athanasius, using a metaphor of a painting on a wooden panel:

For as, when the likeness painted on a panel has been effaced by stains from without, he whose likeness it is must needs come once more to enable the portrait to be renewed on the same wood... in the same way also the most holy Son of the Father, being the Image of the Father, came to our region to renew man once made in His likeness. (On the Incarnation 14)

The wood isn’t thrown out. The one whose likeness it is comes back, and the portrait is renewed on the same wood. That’s the Incarnation, and it’s why Jeff puts it at the center of the gospel. Christ died and rose to break death. David saw it coming: “Nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption” (Psalm 16:10).

Lucas pushed hard on the atonement, with Isaiah 53 and 2 Corinthians 5:21. Jeff didn’t dodge. They didn’t settle it. They didn’t need to.

Neither “You’re Going to Hell” Nor “You’re Good”

The sharpest question Lucas asked was personal: If the Church is the Body of Christ, and you weren’t in it, were you a Christian back then? Jeff said yes, he was. He also said he wasn’t yet a member of the Church. Lucas found that hard to square, and said so.

Jeff’s answer comes from Acts 19. Paul arrives in Ephesus and finds disciples of St. John the Baptist:

He doesn’t say to them, “You’re not believers in Jesus. You’re going to hell.” That’s not his response to them. But he also doesn’t say to them, “Okay, you’re followers of John the Baptist, you’re good.”

He asks, “Into what then were you baptized?” They answer, “Into John’s baptism.” Paul preaches Christ, and “when they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 19:3, 5).

That’s the Orthodox posture. We don’t sort souls. We know where the Church is. We don’t know the limits of God’s mercy. Paul told the Athenians, “the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23). His message everywhere was the same: “repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ” (Acts 20:21). As Jeff puts it, “that’s the core, that’s the heart of it all.”

Real truth outside the Church is a signpost, not a destination. The Church is the home it points to.

Iron on Iron

Here’s what I want you to notice most: the tone. Lucas opens by saying that “even though we disagree, I respect and appreciate that Jeff can do so in a mature manner.” He stops himself more than once to make sure he isn’t straw-manning Jeff. He brings Scripture, not slogans.

Jeff listens, answers the question actually asked, and corrects Lucas gently when it seems he’s been misheard. At the end he’s “delighted with your questions.” So am I.

That’s not a sign of weakness. Rather, it’s a sign of mature obedience:

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear. (1 Peter 3:15)

Another translation renders it “gentleness and respect.” Swift to hear, slow to speak (James 1:19). “As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend” (Proverbs 27:17). Even the Lord says to His people, “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18).

So go have the conversation. With the Baptist at work, with your Reformed cousin, with the friend who thinks icons are idols. Ask real questions. Answer the one they asked. Assume they love Jesus until they tell you otherwise. And when you hit the end of what you know, say so, and bring them to your parish if they will come.

Jeff says it himself at the end of the video: he’s “not a teacher of the faith,” but he teaches catechism at his parish. That’s exactly where this kind of conversation should lead.

Watch the whole thing. It’s worth your hour. And if you know Jeff, thank him for me.

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Have you ever seen the Maxell cassette ad from the ‘80s? A guy in sunglasses sits in a leather armchair facing a speaker, and the sound blasts him backward—hair streaming, tie flapping, lampshade rattling. That image lives in my head rent-free, and lately it keeps showing up next to Vladimir Lossky.

Because Lossky says something about the Trinity that sounds a lot like that armchair: “It is rather the Trinity that seizes man and provokes praise in him.”

In the last two posts, we saw that God is beyond everything we can think, and that the Fathers refused the philosophers’ god. That leaves a question hanging. If God is that far beyond us, how can we say anything at all? How can we sing, right after Communion, “We have seen the true light”?

The answer comes in three pieces: Trinity, Incarnation, purification. Let’s take them one at a time.

The God Who Hides

Start with the God of Israel. Lossky notes that he “hides the profundities of His nature; He manifests Himself only through His authority; His name itself is unpronounceable.” Nobody sees Him and lives. Taken on those terms alone, Lossky writes, “neither true reciprocity nor face to face encounter are possible between this terrifying divine monad and the humility of the created.”

Then God reveals Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And everything opens.

Don’t Ask How

St. John of Damascus describes the Father as the fountainhead of the Godhead: “All then that the Son and the Spirit have is from the Father, even their very being.” The Son is begotten of the Father. The Spirit proceeds from the Father—”the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father,” as Jesus says (John 15:26).

And how exactly does that work? St. John answers with what might be the most Orthodox sentences ever written: “You hear that there is generation [of the Son]? Do not waste your time in seeking after the how. You hear that the Spirit proceeds from the Father? Do not busy yourself with the how.”

I love that. It’s the theological version of a dad saying “Because I said so,” only this time it comes from reverence. (Parents of preschoolers know the other version well.)

Lossky calls the Trinity “primordial fact, ultimate reality, first datum which cannot be deduced, explained or discovered by way of any other truth; for there is nothing which is prior to it.”

We don’t reason our way to the Trinity. We receive it. And once we rest there, something happens: “Here thought gains a stability which cannot be shaken; theology finds its foundation; ignorance passes into knowledge.”

He also warns that it costs something. “The dogma of the Trinity is a cross for human ways of thought. The apophatic ascent is a mounting of calvary.” The Trinity won’t fit our boxes, and our minds get crucified a little in receiving it.

The Word Became Flesh

So how do we actually know any of this? Through Jesus Christ.

Lossky is clear: “The source of true Christian theology is thus the confession of the Incarnation of the Son of God.” In Christ, one person unites the unknowable divine nature with our human nature, and carries that union “as far as the tomb, as far, indeed, as Hell.” Elsewhere he says it in one line: “In Christ, transcendence becomes immanence and gives us the possibility of speaking about God, that is, of being theologians.”

“For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Colossians 2:9). The God nobody can see took a face. Because he took our nature, the unknowable God can be known personally, the way we know a friend.

Lossky captures the paradox. We strip away everything—stars, angels, goodness, even being itself—until we conclude that God “is not.” “But here is the Christian paradox: He is the God to Whom I say ‘Thou,’ Who calls me, Who reveals Himself as personal, as living.”

Clean the Lens

Here’s the catch. Knowing God takes more than information—it takes a clean heart.

St. Gregory the Theologian: “It is a great thing to speak of God, but still better to purify oneself for God.” Jesus said it first: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). And: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light” (Matthew 6:22).

Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos observes that “most people live in the prison of the senses.” He’s talking about us. Our phones buzz, our feeds scroll, our minds hop from screen to screen. The Fathers’ word for the eye of the soul is the nous, and ours is usually a mess. “The benighted and blind nous must be illumined and enlivened,” he writes.

The Church’s path to that healing is old and practical. “Vision of God (theoria) begins with repentance,” writes Metropolitan Hierotheos, “continues with noetic prayer, reaches illumination, is led to the vision of God and then to continual theoria.”

Repentance. The Jesus Prayer. The services, fasting, confession, the Eucharist. None of it glamorous. All of it is cleaning the lens.

And the goal is nothing short of staggering: “What God is, by nature and by essence,” Metropolitan Hierotheos writes, “the deified man becomes, by grace and by participation.”

St. Peter calls it becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4).

From Sinai to Tabor

In Part 1, we left Moses walking into the thick darkness of Sinai. Here’s where his story ends up. Lossky: “The darkness of Mount Sinai will be changed into the light of Mount Tabor, in which Moses at last was able to see the glorious face of God incarnate.”

That’s the trajectory for all of us. “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).

St. Dionysius pictures the end as endless light: “we shall be forever with the Lord, as Scripture says, enjoying His visible theophany in most pure contemplations, illumined by His bright rays just as the disciples were at the time of His divine Transfiguration.”

St. Symeon the New Theologian adds, “Blessed are they who have drawn near the divine light and entered within it and become wholly light.”

Blown Back

Lossky leaves us with a warning that doubles as an invitation: “Outside of praise and adoration, outside of the personal relationship of faith, our language, when speaking of the Trinity, is always false.”

So back to the Maxell guy in his armchair. That’s us at the end of Liturgy, if we’re paying attention. We’ve just received the Body and Blood of Christ. The choir takes up the hymn: “We have seen the true light; we have received the heavenly Spirit; we have found the true faith, worshiping the undivided Trinity, who has saved us.”

We still can’t explain him. He’s seized us anyway—hair back, tie flapping, singing.

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Sources

• Lossky, Vladimir. Dogmatic Theology: Creation, God’s Image in Man, and the Redeeming Work of the Trinity. Translated by Anthony P. Gythiel. Edited by Olivier Clément and Michel Stavrou. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017.

• Lossky, Vladimir. In the Image and Likeness of God. Edited by John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. Source for the quotation from St. Dionysius.

• Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Source for St. John of Damascus and St. Gregory the Theologian.

• Lossky, Vladimir. Orthodox Theology: An Introduction. Translated by Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989.

• Symeon the New Theologian. On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses. Vol. 1, The Church and the Last Things. Translated by Alexander Golitzin. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995.

• Vlachos, Hierotheos. The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition. Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1993.

• Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.

• “We have seen the true light” is from the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.
  

See part 1 here.

When somebody asks Jordan Peterson whether he believes in God, he usually answers with a question: “What do you mean by ‘god’?” It drives interviewers crazy. It’s also a fair question.

We moderns tend to assume everybody means the same thing when they say “God.” Two thousand years of Christian culture will do that. But put a Christian, a Platonist, and a Stoic at the same table over a round of beers, and it becomes clear pretty fast that they’re describing three very different realities.

This matters because Orthodox Christians hear a certain charge a lot: our theology is just Plato with incense. The Fathers were Greeks, the argument goes, so the Trinity and all that talk about God’s “unknowable essence” must be baptized Neoplatonism.

Let’s test that. We’ll look at what the philosophers actually believed, where the Fathers borrowed their words, and where they drew a hard line.

Plato’s Other World

For Plato, the things we see are shadows of eternal Forms—perfect, abstract ideas that exist beyond this world. J. N. D. Kelly describes Plato’s theory of knowledge as centered on “a transcendent, non-sensible world of Forms or Ideas which are apprehended by the intellect alone.” Those Forms are necessary, eternal, and uncreated. They were always there.

The Fathers said no. Fr. John Meyendorff notes that early Christians rejected Plato’s eternal world of Ideas because there could be nothing “which would limit the absolute freedom of the creative act.” God made everything, freely, out of nothing, and the world he made has a weight of its own. It’s far more than a “shadow of eternal realities.”

Vladimir Lossky puts it bluntly: “Creation ex nihilo [out of nothing] is a dogma of the faith…. There is nothing remotely similar in other religions or metaphysics.” The New Testament agrees: “By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible” (Heb. 11:3).

That changes everything for us. Meyendorff says the “difference and distinction between Him and His creation” becomes the ground for “the very ideas of providence, love, and communion.”

A God who made the world out of nothing can love it on purpose.

Plotinus and the Leaking Fountain

Plotinus, the third-century founder of Neoplatonism, took Plato further. At the top of his system sits the One—absolutely simple, with no division or plurality, beyond all categories. Everything else flows downhill from the One, like water spilling over the lip of a fountain, getting dimmer and thinner the farther it goes.

Lossky’s verdict: “The God of the Christians is more transcendent than that of the philosophers.” In Plotinus, the One “is in a certain manner in continuity with the Intellect, and finally with the world. The universe appears as a manifestation, as degradation of the Absolute.”

Degradation. In that system, the world is what we get when divinity runs low. The Christian God creates, and he stays God while he does it. The Fathers insisted that “the visible world and its history” could be, as Meyendorff writes, “worthy of salvation and redemption.”

Christian writers did pick up some of Plotinus’s vocabulary, but critically. Lossky warns that “despite all the outward resemblances (due primarily to a common vocabulary),” the two visions part ways.

The Stoics Go to the Gym

The Stoics went the other direction. Kelly explains that they “reacted vigorously against the Platonic differentiation of a transcendent, intelligible world” from the world of the senses. “Whatever exists, they argued, must be body.” The universe was material through and through, and God was a kind of fiery reason running through it.

The Stoics are having a moment, by the way. Podcasters love them. So do CrossFit coaches. (I say this with affection, as a guy who spends a lot of time in a CrossFit-style gym.) There’s real wisdom in Marcus Aurelius about self-control. But the Fathers couldn’t follow the Stoics into a universe where God and matter are made of the same stuff.

Here’s the beauty of it. Plato pulls God away from matter. The Stoics collapse God into matter. The Incarnation settles the argument neither side could settle: the transcendent God takes flesh and remains God.

Wisdom at Work

So what did the Fathers put in place of Plato’s world of Ideas? Wisdom.

Proverbs pictures Wisdom beside God at creation, “like a master workman” (Prov. 8:30). Lossky explains that Wisdom “is an instrument of creation, not a world beyond it.” He writes that “God in order to create, thinks creation, and this thought gives its reality to the being of things.” Lossky calls it “Wisdom at work”—God’s will and word, where the inner principles, or logoi, of all things are rooted.

St. Paul gives that Wisdom a name: “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Cor. 1:24). “For by him all things were created” (Col. 1:16).

Borrowing Without Buying

Were the Fathers influenced by Greek philosophy? Of course. Many of them had the best classical education money could buy. St. Basil the Great even wrote an essay for young Christians on how to profit from pagan literature.

They used philosophy the way Saint Paul used it on the Areopagus. He quoted a Greek poet to an Athenian crowd—“In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28)—and then preached the Resurrection, which got him mocked by half the audience (Acts 17:32). Borrow the vocabulary; keep the gospel.

Lossky says St. Dionysius took “the apophasis of the Platonists” and transformed it “into an expression of the absolute transcendence of the divine essence.” Same tool, new job. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos puts it more strongly than I would: “All of the Holy Fathers criticize the philosophy of their time and reject it.” Rejected or repurposed, the point stands.

For the Fathers, theology was never a seminar topic.

• Metropolitan Hierotheos again: “In patristic tradition, the theologians are those who see God.”

• Evagrius said it in a line every catechumen should tape to the fridge: “If you are a theologian you truly pray. And if you truly pray you are a theologian.”

Which brings us back to Jordan Peterson’s question. What do we mean by “God”? We mean the One who made everything out of nothing, loved it on purpose, and then did the one thing no philosopher saw coming. He became part of it.

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Next in this series: how the Trinity and the Incarnation turn unknowing into knowing.

Sources

• Evagrius Ponticus. On Prayer 61. In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1, translated and edited by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.

• Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. Rev. ed. Peabody, MA: Prince Press, 2003.

• Lossky, Vladimir. In the Image and Likeness of God. Edited by John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.

• Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976.

• Lossky, Vladimir. Orthodox Theology: An Introduction. Translated by Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989.

• Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979.

• Vlachos, Hierotheos. The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition. Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1993.

• Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.

Fr. Thomas Hopko, of blessed memory, liked to say something that sounds like it came out of a fortune cookie: “You cannot know God—but you have to know Him to know that.”

I’ve puzzled over that line for years. It lands somewhere between a Zen koan and the boy in the Matrix telling Neo there is no spoon. The longer I spend with the Church’s mystical theology, the more sense it makes—and the more it rearranges how I talk about God.

Most of us, if we’re honest, picture God as the biggest thing in the universe. Bigger than the sun, older than the stars, smarter than Einstein, but still a thing, parked at the top of reality’s org chart. The Fathers would call that picture an idol, and a pretty small one.

So let’s look at the two ways the Church talks about God, why the Fathers leaned so hard on the one that says “no,” and where the two finally meet.

Two Roads

Vladimir Lossky, following St. Dionysius the Areopagite, lays it out plainly: “Dionysius distinguishes two possible theological ways. One—that of cataphatic or positive theology—proceeds by affirmations; the other—apophatic or negative theology—by negations.”

Cataphatic theology says what God is: good, wise, loving, holy. It depends completely on revelation, above all on God revealing himself in Jesus Christ, and it’s the language of our hymns and prayers. Apophatic theology says what God is not. He’s infinite—not finite. He’s unchangeable, invisible, incomprehensible, beyond every category we’ve got.

Here’s where it gets a little strange. Lossky argues the negative way is the more fitting one:

All knowledge has as its object that which is. Now God is beyond all that exists. In order to approach Him it is necessary to deny all that is inferior to Him, that is to say, all that which is.

The Line on the Whiteboard

Picture a whiteboard. Draw a line down the middle. Put God on one side. Put everything else on the other: time, space, galaxies, molecules, amoebas, mosquitoes, people, angels. Put knowledge over there too. Then add existence and being to that side as well.

That’s the picture. Everything created has more in common with a mosquito than with God.

St. Gregory Palamas puts it this way: “If that which is not God be nature, God is not nature, and likewise He is not being if that which is not God is being.” St. John of Damascus pushes it further: “God does not belong to the class of existing things: not that He has no existence, but that He is above all existing things, nay even above existence itself.”

St. Gregory the Theologian says plainly that “it is impossible to express God and even more impossible to conceive Him.” Evagrius warns us about this in prayer: “The beginning of error is the vanity of mind…which tries to circumscribe the divine in forms and shapes.” Lossky calls the whole experience “the consciousness of intellectual failure.”

It sounds bleak. It turns out to be a relief. The God we can’t box up is also the God nobody else can box up—no philosopher, no skeptic, no guy on YouTube with a whiteboard of his own.

Drinking from the River

Then how does anybody say anything true about God?

St. Cyril of Jerusalem offers a helpful picture. None of us can swallow a whole river, but that doesn’t stop us from drinking. “For in what concerns God,” he writes, “to confess our ignorance is the best knowledge.” St. John of Damascus says the same thing in tidier terms: “God, then, is infinite and incomprehensible, and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility.”

And we do drink. God has spoken. “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). St. Paul describes God as the one “who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim 6:16)—and he writes it in a letter about knowing and serving that very God.

Fr. Michael Pomazansky adds that, for Christians, “to believe in God signifies not only to acknowledge God with the mind, but also to strive towards him with the heart.”

Knowing God was never a spectator sport.

Into the Dark on Purpose

One of the favorite imagess among the Holy Fathers of the apophatic way is Moses on Sinai. “The people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was” (Exod 20:21).

Read that again. Moses walks into the dark. St. Gregory of Nyssa built an entire book, The Life of Moses, around that climb. Lossky, drawing on Dionysius, says Moses “passes into the truly mystical darkness of ignorance, where he shuts his eyes to all scientific apprehensions.” And he explains why the darkness is there: “For God makes His dwelling there where our understanding and our concepts can gain no admittance.”

That darkness is reverence. It’s what happens when a creature gets close enough to the Creator to realize his categories have stopped working.

Where the Two Roads Meet

So do we have to pick a road? Lossky shows that they run into each other. On the positive road, God comes down to us through “a ladder of ‘theophanies’ or manifestations of God in creation.” On the negative road, we climb toward him. “God condescends towards us in the ‘energies’ in which He is manifested; we mount towards Him in the ‘unions’ in which He remains incomprehensible by nature.”

The place they meet is Jesus Christ. Lossky again: “The ‘supreme theophany,’ the perfect manifestation of God in the world by the incarnation of the Word, retains for us its apophatic character.” God shows us his face in Christ, and that face turns out to be deeper than we’ll ever see to the bottom of.

The Church knows how to hold both threads at once, because she sings. The Canon of the Sunday Midnight Office puts it this way: “At a loss for words to express the meaning of Thine incomprehensible Thrice-radiant Godhead, we praise Thee, O Lord.”

At a loss for words—so we sing.

Which brings us back to Fr. Tom’s riddle. We can’t know God. But we have to know him to know that, because the only people who understand how far beyond us God is are the ones who’ve walked into the cloud and met him there.

Next in this series: why the Fathers borrowed the philosophers’ vocabulary and then refused their god.

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Sources

• Freeman, Stephen. “Knowing What We Don’t Know.” Glory to God for All Things (blog), Ancient Faith Ministries, September 18, 2010. Source for the Fr. Thomas Hopko quotation.

• Lossky, Vladimir. In the Image and Likeness of God. Edited by John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.

• Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Translated by members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976. Source for the quotations from St. Dionysius, St. Gregory Palamas, St. John of Damascus, and Evagrius.

• Pomazansky, Michael. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: A Concise Exposition. 3rd ed. Translated by Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2005. Source for St. Cyril of Jerusalem and the Canon of the Sunday Midnight Office.

• Vlachos, Hierotheos. The Illness and Cure of the Soul in the Orthodox Tradition. Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1993. Source for St. Gregory the Theologian.

• Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version unless another one snuck in there somewhere.

Highlander was gloriously absurd, and some of you may remember the iconic movie where the main character spends an entire film swinging a katana while growling the line “There can be only one.” Many of us imagine that is what ancient Jewish faith looked like.

One God. One throne. One solitary, radically simple monad sitting alone in heaven, and anyone suggesting there is more to the universe than that has his head cut off.

Then the Christians arrive, speaking of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and it seems almost inevitable that the story begins writing itself. A good story. However, that is a very inaccurate account.

The Jews of Jesus’s time were monotheists—fiercely so. Each day, they recited the Shema: Hear O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). Their image of the single God however was much more complex and intriguing than the Highlander version. As soon as we understand what they really believed, the Apostles’ worship of Jesus begins to appear as if they are returning home.

Let us take a few minutes to explore three areas of inquiry regarding the understanding of God in the world by Jews during the centuries leading up to Christ.

• First, how Jews in the years preceding Christ understood God working in the world.

• Second, what Jews meant by God’s “word.”

• Third, what transpired when that Word appeared with a face.

A Crowded Heaven

During the Second Temple era—which began after the Babylonian exile and ended with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70—and continues until Christ’s death and resurrection—the world was extremely difficult for God’s people. The Romans controlled much of their land, and they spoke languages and lived in ways that seemed alien. Abraham, David, Solomon and the Eternal Temple felt as though they were distant memories. When such pressure exists on individuals, they begin thinking long and hard about whether God remains with them when all aspects of familiarity disappear.

By the time of Christ, faithful Jews agreed that God acted within time and space. Though the Jews of this time were strict monotheists—as Daniel Boyarin noted—“they nevertheless recognized other supernatural beings who communicated the divine will.” Angels existed. Demons existed (”evil angels and wicked spirits”, according to Shaye Cohen). “God’s Heavenly Council” existed—a type of divine cabinet, as described by Michael Bird.

Scripture continued to muddy the waters. Abraham served lunch to three men at Mamre; one of them spoke as YHWH (Genesis 18). Jacob wrestled a man all night and went away limping, stating he saw God face-to-face (Genesis 32). “Thus the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” (Exodus 33:11).

Wisdom appears as a person in Proverbs 8, Job 28, Wisdom of Solomon chapters 7-10, and Baruch chapters 3-4. All of us studying Sirach this year at Saint Mark encountered her in Sirach 24 where Wisdom emerged from the mouth of the Most High and was instructed to pitch her tent in Jacob. Hold onto that tent. We’ll use it next.

The Word Before The Gospels

Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish philosopher living during the time of Christ. He continually referred to God’s Word (Logos)—or God’s Reason—and he discussed it with an apparent audience that required no explanation of this concept. Boyarin concludes: “there was nothing unusual about a doctrine of a manifestation of God.”

This is how Philo describes the Word:

To His Word, His chief messenger, greatest in age and honor, has granted Him to stand at the threshold and distinguish creature from Creator.

To many Jews, the Logos “served even more than angels to mediate between God and the world,” according to Cohen. It was “the manifestation of God who interacts with the physical world and is discernible to humans.” Philo, a committed monotheist, would even describe the Logos as a “second God,” who “created, revealed and redeemed.”

Review that list again. Created. Revealed. Redeemed. If you’re reading this, chances are you are familiar with the idea of “praying” the Creed. If so, I’m sure you know where this is headed.

Not everyone has studied Philo in Alexandria simply because he was a Greek-speaking intellectual. Boyarin believes Wisdom and Logos theology “existed among Aramaic-, Hebrew-, and Syriac-speaking Jews” alike.

Fr. Stephen De Young goes further: “For ancient Israelites and Second Temple Judeans, there was only one Yahweh—but He existed as multiple persons.” Not all scholars agree with De Young. Some scholars believe, like Boyarin (a Jewish scholar without any apologetic bias whatsoever), this leaves room for possibility that ideas related to the Trinity arose in pre-Christian Jewish accounts of the second and visible God found in numerous early Jewish texts.

The Line That Philo Would Not Cross

Philo came close to crossing that line. “Sooner could God transform himself into a man than a man into God,” he wrote. While God’s Word could stand at the boundary separating creator and creation—it could not cross it.

That is exactly where the Apostles crossed that line.

St. John opened his Gospel on familiar ground: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). Boyarin interprets John’s opening prologue as a midrash on Genesis 1; calling nearly all of it “completely unobjectionable non-Christian Jewish thought.” Any Jew familiar with Philo would probably nod in agreement—right up to verse fourteen: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

It’s often repeated that the Greek word for dwelt implies that the Word “pitched his tent.” Recall Wisdom’s tent in Sirach 24? John does. The Word standing on the border stepped across it—took on flesh—and set up shop near us. Oskar Skarsaune says that in Jesus the apostles found in him an embodiment of Wisdom; “the Torah personified”.

St. Paul does something similar using Israel’s greatest confession of Monotheistic Faith; The Shema itself: Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist (I Corinthians 8:6). He takes Israel’s great confession of one God—and places Jesus inside it. Bird states concerning Jesus’ earliest followers: “there was an immediate shift toward reconfiguring Jewish monotheism; where the one God of Israel would now be known/experienced as both Lord Jesus Christ AND God the Father.”

During Second Temple Judaism there were elevated angels such as Metatron—and elevated humans like Enoch. No one worshiped those two categories of individuals. Jesus received worship. The New Testament depicts Jesus as having an active role in creation—“for by Him all things were created in heaven and on earth” (Colossians 1:16); also demonstrates a prayer life consistent with at least a binitarian devotion pattern—and moving rapidly toward full Trinitarian worship.

When The Door Closes

Jesus “spoke in a manner which positioned him above the highest category permitted for humans in Judaism—namely that of prophets; not to mention rabbis,” Skarsaune states. The rabbis noticed.

As Christianity spread; rabbinical theology became increasingly hostile towards discussion about Logos or towards “two powers in heaven”. De Young states starting in the second century A.D., this view was rejected as a Jewish heresy—which De Young boldly asserts had previously been universally accepted by all Jews. Cohen is more tentative; he doubts that Logos believing Jews worshiped the Logos or assumed God became incarnate; he labels those views “central to formative Christianity but central to no other form of Judaism.”

The truth likely falls somewhere in between those positions—Bird puts it well: “the early church did not establish a strict monotheism; instead they established a christological monotheism; where one God is now known through/in/as Lord Jesus Christ.”

Why This Is Relevant To Inquirers

Eventually someone will tell an inquirer that the Trinity was invented by Greek philosophers at Nicaea in AD 325. Skarsaune responds directly to this objection: “the fathers at Nicea did not Hellenize Christology via [their] creed.” Larry Hurtado documents that early Christianity borrowed its theology from “the Jewish Matrix”; building their worship centered upon Jesus and Spirit later added philosophical vocabulary to protect what their apostles were already practicing on their knees.

The Creed is Nicene; however—the faith is Apostolic; and those apostles were reading their own Scripture.

Therefore—when this objection arises—none need panic; we can serve our friend another drink—then open Genesis 18 together.

There can be only one; that is something both Jews prior to Christ’s time would agree with Chris Lambert; we do too. They just realized that One never felt lonely.

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Sources

• Bird, Michael F., ed. How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus’ Divine Nature. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014. Source for Philo’s “Sooner could God change into a man than man into God.”

• Boyarin, Daniel. “Logos, A Jewish Word: John’s Prologue as Midrash.” In The Jewish Annotated New Testament, edited by Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler, 546–49. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Source for Philo’s description of the Word.

• Cohen, Shaye J. D. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. 3rd ed. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014.

• De Young, Stephen. The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century. Chesterton, IN: Ancient Faith Publishing, 2021.

• Hurtado, Larry W. God in New Testament Theology. Nashville: Abingdon, 2010.

• Richter, Sandra L. The Epic of Eden: A Christian Entry into the Old Testament. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008.

• Skarsaune, Oskar. In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2002.

• Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version.

There’s a poem making the rounds—you may have seen it—where a woman named Eira Quinn lists everything Sunday school supposedly hid from her. Noah’s drowned children. Job’s ruined life used to win a celestial bet. Isaac’s trauma. The concubines and the war crimes. Laws about disobedient sons, gay lovers, and virginity tests. She ends with the line doing all the work: “faith without truth is just fear in nicer clothing.” The implication is clear—once you actually read the text, the God who inspired it can’t survive contact with the reading.

I want to take this seriously. Most of her citations are accurate—the flood does drown people, Job’s suffering is permitted, not accidental, and Judges 19 is as horrifying as advertised. What I want to push back on is the theology she’s rejecting, because it isn’t ours. She’s throwing out a God assembled from bad catechesis and Western courtroom atonement theory, and calling the wreckage “the truth.”

Let’s actually read.

Here’s the poem, from Threads:

They told me about Noah,
but not the bodies.
Not the screaming
beneath rising water,
or the mothers
who begged God for mercy
as he watched from the clouds
and said nothing.

I heard about Job,
but they skipped the bet.
The part where God let the Devil
ruin a man’s life
just to prove a point.
Killed his children.
Stripped his skin.
And called it
righteous testing.

They told me about Abraham’s faith,
but not Isaac’s trauma.
Not what it does to a boy
to see his father raise a knife
with heaven’s approval.
Not the silence that follows
when you survive a god
who wanted you dead.

No one mentioned the concubines,
the raped,
the forgotten wives,
the daughters sold
for the price of land
or peace
or power.

They didn’t talk about
stoning disobedient sons,
or killing gay lovers,
or what to do
if a woman is not a virgin
on her wedding night.

They said Jesus died for us,
but not that God
could’ve chosen forgiveness
without blood.
That maybe the crucifixion
wasn’t salvation,
but spectacle.

They said “trust the Word,”
but they handed me
a censored book
and a list of acceptable questions.
And when I asked
about the rest,
they said
“have faith.”

But faith without truth
is just fear
in nicer clothing.

And now that I’ve read
what they skipped—
now that I’ve seen
what they hid—
I can’t go back
to coloring pages
and quiet amens.

The god they taught me
was edited.
Redacted.
Rebranded.

But the truth?
The truth was always there.
In the margins.
In the footnotes.
In the blood.

—EIRA QUINN

Noah: Not Silence, Grief

“He watched from the clouds and said nothing”—except the text says the opposite. Before a drop of rain falls, we’re told “it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart” (Genesis 6:6). That's not indifference—that’s a God who mourns his own judgment before he executes it.

And the flood isn't the last word—it's a preservation story. Saint Peter reaches back to it centuries later and calls the ark “a figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us” (1 Peter 3:20-21). We don't read Noah as a horror anecdote we're too embarrassed to mention. We read it as the first of many times God carries a remnant through water into new life—a pattern that runs straight through the Exodus and lands in the Jordan.

I like to remind people how often we watch a film and rejoice when the bad guy gets what is coming to him—and we seem to see just fine how that can be a mercy for the innocent. Why don’t we do the same when a just and righteous God executes righteous action?

Job: Not a Bet, a Boundary

Calling the prologue “the bet” flattens what's actually a very careful text. The satan—“the accuser,” not yet the fully personified Devil of later theology—cannot touch Job without explicit permission, and that permission has a hard fence around it, restated twice: “only upon himself put not forth thine hand” (Job 1:12), then “save his life” (Job 2:6).

The book isn’t entertainment at Job's expense. It’s a demolition of the transactional theology his three friends keep peddling—suffering proves sin, prosperity proves righteousness. When God finally answers from the whirlwind (Job 38-41), he never explains the suffering. He relocates Job’s question inside a creation too vast for Job to audit.

Why do we assume that this text is about history or specifically about the personal suffering of some fella named Job? Why do we not read this as a tale meant to teach us something? What some imagine is God dodging accountability is really a book refusing to hand you the cheap answer, and doing so on purpose.

Isaac: A Type the Poem Doesn't Engage

Genesis 22 gets cited constantly and read patristically almost, well, never. The Fathers noticed something specific: Isaac carries the wood of his own sacrifice up the mountain, exactly as Christ carries the wood of the cross to Golgotha. Many holy fathers, such as Saints Irenaeus and John Chrysostom, draw this line deliberately.

The text itself frames the whole episode as a test—“God did tempt Abraham” (Genesis 22:1)—and the angel of the Lord stops the knife before it falls (Genesis 22:11-12). None of that erases what fear and trust demanded of that family. But the passage's own theology is anti-child-sacrifice, standing directly against the Canaanite practices surrounding Israel, where the knife did not stop.

And again, are we even approaching this text properly? Was this text ever about the “trauma” of a historic person named Isaac? Or was it really about Jesus Christ and the unfolding revelation of God to mankind?

The Concubines, the Law, and the Texts We’d Rather Skip

Here Quinn scores real points, and we shouldn’t flinch from them. The text narrates the rape of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19 without a divine voice interrupting to condemn it in real time. It’s genuinely awful, and pretending otherwise isn't Orthodox exegesis—it’s also bad reading.

She also names the laws about stoning disobedient sons, the prohibition against male same-sex relations, and the virginity tests. These are real texts. They’re in the canon of Scripture. Hand-waving them is what got us the version of catechesis Quinn is rightly angry about.

But we don't need to pretend, because Christ already gave us the interpretive key: “Moses because of the hardness of your hearts suffered you to put away your wives: but from the beginning it was not so” (Matt. 19:8). St. Paul calls the law our “schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ’” (Gal. 3:24). Saint Irenaeus calls this divine pedagogy—God meeting a Bronze Age people where their moral formation actually stood, not where he’d have preferred them to be.

This is a script written to enter into what is already a cruel and broken world—it’s a text narrating a fallen world honestly while the whole canon of Scripture points forward toward something the Law itself never delivers. The hard laws aren’t the destination, they’re the diagnosis—and Christ is the cure, not just a newer, kinder rulebook stacked on top of the old one.

The Cross: Not a Ledger, a Cure

This is where the poem misfires hardest—because it’s not really arguing with us. “God could’ve chosen forgiveness without blood... maybe the crucifixion wasn’t salvation, but spectacle” assumes a God who needs to be talked into forgiving, who requires a payment before his wrath can be set aside. That’s penal substitution, a Western legal framework largely developed centuries after the Fathers, and it has never been the center of Orthodox theology.

Saint Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, is blunt: God can and does forgive freely. That was never the obstacle. The obstacle is ontological—humanity is dying, corrupted, sliding back toward nonbeing, and a pardon doesn't reverse decay any more than acquittal cures a disease. So the Word takes on our corruptible flesh and carries it through death from the inside, “that He might turn again to incorruption” what sin had ruined. Saint Irenaeus calls this recapitulation—Christ retracing Adam’s whole trajectory, including the disobedience, and healing it at every point Adam failed.

As I remind our catechumens at Saint Mark incessantly—the cross isn't a courtroom, it’s surgery. “Spectacle” would be a fair critique of a theology we don’t hold as Orthodox Christians.

The Canon: Bigger, Not Censored

One more correction, smaller but telling. If anyone censored the Bible, it happened in the opposite direction from what the poem assumes. The Orthodox Old Testament is larger than the Protestant one—we kept Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, texts the Reformation later cut. Canon formation wasn’t one editor with a red pen or even a secret cabal of editors colluding to suppress the truth. It was centuries of the whole Church testing books against apostolic use and liturgical life, ratified at councils like Carthage in 397.

You can disagree about which books belong—but “someone hid the hard parts from you” gets the history backwards.

The Line Worth Keeping

I'll grant Quinn her closing line—on our terms rather than hers. Faith without truth is fear in nicer clothing. Saint Gregory of Nyssa spent his whole theological career on the idea that real faith is not the suppression of hard questions but an endless pursuit deeper into a God too vast to exhaust—epektasis, reaching forward, always.

We don’t ask you to stop asking why Job suffered or why Judges 19 happened the way it did. We ask you to keep reading until you get to the empty tomb, and then go back and reread everything before it in that light.

That’s not “just have faith” as a door slamming shut. That's the actual method the Church has used since Pascha morning—nothing in the text gets its final word until it’s read through the resurrection of the God who didn’t stay dead.

Christ is risen from the dead, by death trampling death, and to those in the tombs granting life!

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P.S. Much more could be said. If this piece raises more questions for you, I welcome them so that I can expand on this topic in future posts.

1. The Mindset and the Margarine: Tools vs. Rules of Our Faith

2. We Are Ascending: A Practical Guide to Preparing for the Liturgy

3. Saints Among Us: An Introduction to Our Holy Friends

Two sincere Christians read the same verse and walk away with different religions.

Not different opinions, but different worldviews. Different gods, sometimes, though both would swear they’re reading the same Bible and loving the same Lord.

I was one of them for years. Open Bible, closed commentary. I was convinced the text spoke to me directly, personally, without mediation. “Just me and my Bible” felt like faithfulness. It felt like the Reformation’s best instinct carried to its honest conclusion. What it actually was—and I’m being charitable to myself here—was a method whose assumptions I had never examined.

Nobody told me this. The moment you decide what a verse means, you’re already interpreting it. Whether a command is universal or local, symbolic or fulfilled, spoken to you or to ancient Israel—interpretation has begun. You can’t opt out.

The real contrast was never interpretation versus no interpretation. It’s disciplined versus undisciplined. Ecclesial versus private. Christ-centered versus reader-centered. The question isn’t whether interpretation happens. It’s whether it happens well.

Saint Peter said it first: “Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:20-21). You can read the Bible alone. You just shouldn’t read it as though nobody before you has.

Saint Irenaeus saw the same danger in the second century. He pictured a heretic who pulls the tiles from a mosaic of a king and rearranges them into a fox. Same tiles. Same materials. Wrong hypothesis. The heretic rarely invents new stones. He rearranges the real ones and insists this was the original design.

Heresy usually knows how to quote. Same Bible, different religion. What follows is how the Church has always read—a center, four guardrails, and a way to start tonight.

What We’re Even Holding

Before arguing about how to read it, we should agree on what it is. The Bible is a library, not a singular book. Roughly forty-some authors across many centuries, and every shelf points to one Person. Two Testaments, one arc: promise, then fulfillment. The Orthodox Old Testament follows the Septuagint, and the Anagignoskomena—what some traditions call the deuterocanon—belong in the room.

Genre is more like instructions than decorations. Law, History, Wisdom, Prophets. Gospels, Epistles, Apocalyptic. Read a psalm like a lab report and the Bible will not cooperate. The Bible tells you what happened and what it means, and “accurate” and “literal” are not the same word.

A library, one Author, aimed at one Person. The Church’s book, read in her community and her worship. An icon of Christ, showing His face on every page. Forget the fridge magnets.

“Live, Laugh, Leviticus” is not a hermeneutic. Keep the icon.

Christ Is the Key

Luke 24. Two disciples on the road to Emmaus, confused and grieving, carrying their Scriptures like a safe deposit box they’ve lost the combination to. Jesus walks up—unrecognized—and “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27).

This is not a nice resurrection-side Bible study that behaves well. It’s a hermeneutical earthquake that shook them no less than the resurrection shook the earth and moved a stone.

Christ doesn’t point to a few predictions that happened to line up, and He didn’t just do a nice Bible study. He turned their world upside down. He teaches that Moses and the Prophets speak of Him. Then He opens their understanding—”that they might understand the scriptures” (Luke 24:45). The disciples already had the texts. What they lacked wasn’t information. It was the center, and the opened mind to receive the whole.

Christ is the key to the Bible.

Saint Athanasius gave this a name: the skopos of Scripture. The scope, the aim, the governing center. The Fathers asked not only “what does this verse say?” but “what is Scripture doing here, and how does it fit the whole?” Athanasius used this against the Arians. Their problem wasn’t a shortage of verses. They had plenty. Their problem was loss of scope. A passage can be grammatically correct in your mouth and theologically wrong in your system.

If you miss Christ, you can quote the text and still miss the point.

Guardrails, Not Vibes

Christ-centered reading sounds loose to a Protestant ear. Sounds like the door opening to whatever the reader feels the Spirit saying today. I carried that fear for years. Anything “allegorical” or “spiritual” meant the text had slipped its moorings. Give people permission to find Christ in the Old Testament and pretty soon someone’s saying Jonah’s fish is baptism and the whale is Rome and the gourd is—you get the idea.

When I finally looked at it honestly, I found something I didn’t expect. Christ-centered reading isn’t looser than modern reading. It’s stricter. The Church doesn’t give us a vague Christ-centered mood. She gives us guardrails. Four of them, and each one bites.

The first is context. A verse belongs to a sentence, a paragraph, a literary unit, a book, a covenant setting, and finally the canon as a whole. Ordinary but decisive questions: who is speaking, to whom, in what kind of text, and for what purpose? Orthodoxy isn’t against the literal or historical sense. It refuses to stop there. A surprising amount of theological nonsense begins when someone falls in love with half a verse.

The second is the rule of faith. Christianity isn’t reinvented every Tuesday by whoever happened to be unusually caffeinated during morning devotions. The faith has a shape: Trinity, the true divinity and true humanity of Christ, Incarnation, Cross, Resurrection, the Church, the sacraments, the judgment to come. St. Vincent of Lérins warned against interpretive vanity: “We hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.” Sometimes the “fresh new reading” is just the old mistake with better branding.

The third is the Fathers. They’re not there to make the slide look Orthodox. They’re witnesses to how the Church learned to hear Scripture—in doctrine, worship, and pastoral life. And they’re not a monolith. Alexandria (Origen, Cyril, Gregory of Nyssa) pressed spiritual and allegorical depth. Antioch (Diodore, Theodore, Chrysostom) leaned harder on the literal-historical sense, and on theoria. The Orthodox synthesis flattens neither and canonizes chaos in neither direction. The choice was never between dead literalism and baptized imagination run amok.

The Fathers had more tools than we do, and used them with less worry about it all. The fourfold sense—literal (what it says), allegorical (what it says about Christ), moral (what it asks of you), anagogical (where it’s all going)—they used all four without apology. Home base is the Liturgy. You meet Scripture on your feet, in worship, long before you meet it at a desk.

Chrysostom gave us a word for what Scripture does when it says God “walks” in the garden or “repents”: synkatabasis. Divine condescension. God speaking according to our weakness. He’s not trapped by our language. He mercifully enters it. This protects against two opposite errors—crude literalism on one side, embarrassed dismissal on the other. Scripture stoops. God is not confined by our words. He enters them.

The fourth is repentance. It is possible to know enough Bible to become unbearable. History has demonstrated this repeatedly. Chrysostom insisted Scripture belongs in the household—in the actual wounds and temptations of ordinary believers, not in the hands of specialists only. The point is to become less blind about yourself. Before your spouse, your enemies, the bishop, or the internet.

Using Scripture as ammunition is not the way it should be used. Scripture is medicine.

The Old Testament Is Already Lit

Two ways to read the Old Testament. One says it’s a Jewish preface. Then Jesus arrives and the real book finally begins. The other says the same Christ who is incarnate in the New Testament is promised, prefigured, active, and often manifest already in the Old.

Same Scriptures. Different center. Different result.

The Fathers read theophanies christologically. The burning bush. Jacob at Peniel. The Angel of the Lord. Isaiah’s vision in the temple. If the Father is unseen—who is it that appears? The Son, the eternal Logos, the image of the invisible God. My professor Father Bogdan Bucur has shown this was no decorative patristic poetry but a real and widespread early Christian habit of reading.

The Old Testament is already lit from within by the Son.

Typology—Adam and Christ, Passover and the Cross, Exodus and baptism, Manna and Eucharist, Jonah and resurrection—preserves both history and fulfillment. It keeps the Bible one drama instead of a stack of disconnected religious episodes. Saint Paul says it plainly, and the word is right there: “Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples [τύποι]: and they are written for our admonition” (1 Corinthians 10:11).

Typology is not baptized imagination with a cape.

How to Read Tonight

You don’t need to be a specialist. You need humility and the Church.

Pray briefly. Humility, light, repentance. We aren’t looking for mystical fireworks here. Read a passage, not a floating verse—something with edges. A paragraph. A psalm. Ask what kind of text it is, because read every genre the same way and the Bible takes its revenge. Ask what it says in context: who is speaking, to whom, in what situation, and why. Ask how it leads to Christ, within the scope, the rule of faith, the witness of the saints. Apply it to yourself first.

Eight words to take home: pray, read in context, identify genre, read with the Church, look for Christ, check the Fathers, apply to repentance, distrust pride.

Saint John of Damascus said the soul watered by sacred Scripture grows fat and bears fruit in due season.

Two disciples on a road. A stranger. Moses and the Prophets. Bread broken. Eyes opened.

Read the Bible. Just don’t read it as an orphan; read it as a son or daughter of the Church.

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Saint Paul ends his letter to the Romans with a chapter most people skip. Chapter 16 is just names—Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, Rufus, Asyncritus, Phlegon. Thirty-some people, most of whom we know nothing about except that Paul loved them and wanted to say so. It reads like a man scrolling through his contacts and pausing on each one: “she worked hard for you... they were in Christ before me... greet my beloved Epaenetus.”

I’ve been thinking about that chapter a bit lately, because I owe you an explanation for my periodic silence, and the explanation isn’t just a list of things I’ve been up to—the reality is more like a list of names.

Localized Ministry at Saint Mark

The catechism ministry at Saint Mark Greek Orthodox Church in Boca Raton has grown again, currently to about 60 inquirers and catechumens. New people walk through the door every week, and the team that receives them is real: Father Mark, Father Anastasios, Frank, John, Romy, the deacons, several other volunteers, and me. We have a Discover Orthodoxy table every week at coffee hour—a place to greet newcomers and give them somewhere to land—and a dual team during our annual cultural festival. I meet people pretty regularly for coffee and catechetical conversation—I sit with them and walk through the Bible. I teach. In the last month alone, I taught two evening evening class and a Sunday catechism session.

Probably the biggest thing I’ve done over the summer is put together a 26-week written lesson plans for our Discover Orthodoxy ministry. What we are moving into now is having a teaching rotation so the team can carry it together—handouts, schedules, the whole infrastructure for two “semesters” of catechesis.

This Substack is an extension of that ministry. When I’m not posting, it’s usually because I’m doing the work the posts are about—and doing it with people who make such a difference in the 3D world here in South Florida.

The Baptism

We baptized Alexandra (“Sasha”) Sophia. I need to tell you about that day, because it was the kind of day that makes everything else make sense.

Sasha, our daughter who was born earlier this year—went under the water and came up belonging to Christ, and the church was full of people who brought her there. My mother flew in from California. My mother-in-law and father-in-law came from Arizona. Sasha’s godmother was there. They sat in the nave alongside people I never could have predicted would be in my life five years ago.

There were my godsons—young men who came into the Church and who I’ve walked with, and who showed up for my daughter the way you show up for family. There were long-time and cradle Orthodox friends who’ve become essential to us, the kind of people who are just always there, quietly, reliably. There were partners in ministry—people I teach alongside, plan alongside, build things alongside, run things by. And there were whole families who came to Saint Mark in the last couple of years as curious outsiders and converted and are now our good friends. Our lives have become intertwined.

After the baptism, 25 of us went out to brunch. Twenty-five people. Our kids played together at breakfast as we broke bread together at a very, very long table and enjoyed each other’s company. I looked around that restaurant and saw a web of relationships that didn’t exist a few years ago—nearly all of them connected to a specific community in Boca Raton and the strange, beautiful fact that we keep showing up there.

Gregory, our son who turns 5 this month, was the best helper a dad could ask for. He took it seriously. He knew something important was happening to his sister, and he wanted to be closely involved to the point that he would mimic Fr. Mark’s blessing of the water with the sign of the cross.

That day is in large part the reason I’ve been quiet lately. Not so much because it took time away from writing (and it did), but because it reminded me what the writing is for. And sometimes it’s more important to focus on what is presented in front of you, rather than what is posted online.

Podcasts & Articles

My podcast Brews, Beards, and Shipwrecks is still putting out content.

Bad Books of the Bible isn’t publishing right now, but we’re recording—going through the Wisdom of Sirach chapter by chapter with rotating clergy guests. I’ve also been teaching a catechism-Sirach integration class that pulls those threads together. All of that material will eventually show up here in written and recorded form, complete with downloadable slide decks.

On top of that, I have dozens of practical catechetical articles in queue, but they need to be further developed, refined, edited, and incorporated into a planned release schedule. The pipeline is full. The spigot is just slow.

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Music

I’m finishing the third Royal Ruckus album inspired by Fred Rogers (here is #2). I have another album coming soon, a collaboration with Eligh of Living Legends, who is one of the most respected artists in the indie rap game. But it’s not just me and Eligh. It’s DJ Sean P on the decks and Cookbook in the mix—the people behind the production and beats. These are friendships that happen to also be creative partnerships, which is the best kind.

School

I’m in two graduate programs. A Master of Theological Studies at Antiochian House of Studies—coursework finished several years ago, with my thesis proposal in progress now. And I have also started working on a Doctor of Ministry in Christian Education—several classes done, aiming to be dissertation-ready by this time next year. Two programs, one brain, not enough coffee in South Florida to bridge the gap.

Day Job

I became Director of Education at the company I work for—which means I spend a good bit of time booking and developing continuing education classes for insurance adjusters and attorneys. I earned my WIND-P designation, I just passed the Associate of Insurance 101 exam, and I travel for work building relationships across Florida and the southeastern United States. Here I am, developing education for other people while falling behind on my own educational blog.

Family

Gregory is in preschool, loves art, and he’s doing jiu-jitsu, which means I’m now a dad who sits on the mat and watches his preschooler grapple. Polina and I will soon have a one-year-old and a five-year-old. That’s not a side note, it’s the main thing, and everything else fits around the edges.

The Names

Paul didn’t write Romans 16 as a status update. He wrote it because the connections matter—the coffee with the inquirer, the class you taught on a Wednesday night, the album you’re finishing with friends, the daughter you baptized, the kid grappling on the mat. These aren’t distractions from the work. They are the work. The names are central to the point.

I’ve been quiet here because I’ve been loud everywhere else—but loud in the way Saint Paul was loud at the end of a letter, just naming the people he loved and trusting that the names were enough.

The silence is ending. The Sirach material is coming. The Thinking Theologically recordings are coming. The writing is coming.

In the meantime—greet one another with a holy kiss. Or, you know, a comment below. Either way.

All the best,

Jamey

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Scripture quotations for this blog post are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Before my wife and I were engaged—before we had met—we were two ordinary people who loved God and wanted to be married. Not a crisis. Just the ordinary wish to be married.

So I asked my father confessor at the time in South Florida for help. He didn’t hand me a marriage book or a strategy. He gave me a saint. His instructions were, more or less: Pray to Saint Xenia of Saint Petersburg. Ask her to prepare your heart and bring you a wife.

Several time zones away in Arizona, Polina was having a similar conversation with her own confessor. He gave her a saint too: Saint John of Shanghai and San Francisco—a bishop who spent his last years serving in California, which is where I’m from. Neither of us knew about the other’s assignment. We hadn’t met.

And then we met, and we hit it off. My first visit to Arizona to meet her, I had dinner with her family and visited their parish. And I was standing in her home parish, in the approximate area where her family had stood many times, and I looked up.

Two icons. Opposite walls. Facing each other. Saint Xenia, and Saint John.

I stood there next to Polina and thought: They’re winking at each other. They’ve been at this a while. We showed up late.

The Bible Spends a Whole Chapter Naming “Dead” People

That story only works if the saints are doing something. Participating—in an actual marriage, an actual family, an actual Tuesday afternoon. Which sounds immediately to some like a late medieval accretion, but it isn’t.

Hebrews 11 runs the roll: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Rahab—Rahab, which should encourage all of us—Gideon, Samson, David, Samuel, the prophets. Then verse 38, about the ones sawn in two and living in caves: of whom the world was not worthy.

Notice what that is. A list of names. An inspired author of Holy Scripture spent an entire chapter naming specific dead people and telling you what they did. The list is the theological work, not an aside.

Then chapter 12 turns the list into a room of saints: we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses. Compassed about. Surrounded. Present tense.

And the instinct is older than the Church. Wisdom of Sirach 44 opens, Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us, and then runs its own roll call for six chapters. A little later: their name lives to all generations.

That’s a feast day. The definition of one, written two centuries before there was an “institutional Church” to keep them. Hebrews 11 stands in an old tradition—Sirach 44 with the Resurrection added, which changes everything, because now the names on the list are alive.

Check out the 50 minute class here:

A Throne with a Court around It

There’s a harder question underneath all this, and it deserves a straight answer: What kind of universe has to be true for any of it to work?

Psalm 82:1 — God has taken His place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods He holds judgment. That’s not late embellishment, that’s the Psalter.

In 1 Kings 22, Micaiah — the prophet nobody wants to invite — says he saw the LORD enthroned with the host of heaven standing on His right hand and on His left, and God turned and asked them a question. In Job 1 and 2, the sons of God present themselves before the LORD. In Revelation 4 and 5, John sees the throne, twenty-four elders, four living creatures, ten thousand times ten thousand.

Scripture’s standing picture of heaven is a throne with a court around it. If you want to go deeper into this and other issues surrounding early Judaism and Christianity, and you should, Fr. Stephen De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles and Fr. Andrew Damick’s Lord of Spirits are where I’d send you.

Somebody is thinking it, so let’s put it on the table: Isn’t that repackaged paganism?

Watch how casually Paul uses it. Do you not know that we shall judge angels? (1 Cor 6:3). He drops that into an argument about lawsuits—as a premise, the thing everybody already accepts, which he then builds on. Nobody builds a case on a premise his readers find absurd. The Apostles weren’t borrowing furniture from the pagans. They were writing from inside the house.

Here’s the thing. That council was never a closed circle of angels. Revelation seats elders there—human beings, on thrones. And Hebrews 12, a few verses past our cloud of witnesses, gives the guest list of the heavenly Jerusalem and names, in one breath, at one address: an innumerable company of angels, and the spirits of just men made perfect.

Same sentence. Same room. The council holds more than one kind of creature, and always has.

Which is why the Church writes their lives in a distinct genre. Biography informs you about a subject, and you judge it by accuracy of detail. Hagiography introduces you to someone still alive, and you judge it by whether you’d recognize them when you meet. Read a saint’s life the way you’d read a letter about a relative you’re about to pick up at the airport. You’re not fact-checking as much as you are getting ready to recognize somebody.

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Nicaea, AD 325

Now the part that took twenty years to assemble, one decision at a time.

Athanasius was in the room at Nicaea—as a deacon. Around twenty-seven, not a bishop, no vote, attending as secretary to Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. He walked in as support staff and walked out having supplied the word that ended the argument: homoousios, of one essence with the Father. Arius, for his part, was reasonable and popular and a marketer — he set his theology to music so dockworkers would hum it at work. Athanasius spent forty-five years arguing with a catchy song. Exiled five times, roughly seventeen of those forty-five years spent away from his own city. Athanasius contra mundum described the arithmetic rather than the man’s temperament. He is my patron from baptism, and the saint for anyone who has been the only one in the room who thinks the thing is wrong.

Gregory the Illuminator was not in the room. Too old, in seclusion — so he sent his son Aristakes, who carried the decrees home. Gregory’s father had assassinated the king of Armenia; the family was destroyed in reprisal and the infant Gregory was carried to Caesarea and raised Christian. He went back into the service of King Trdat, son of the man his father murdered, refused to sacrifice to the goddess Anahit, and spent thirteen years in the pit at Khor Virap, fed bread by a widow over the edge. Then the king went mad, his sister dreamt that only the man in the pit could heal him, and they hauled Gregory up alive. He baptized the king and his court in the Euphrates, and Armenia became the first nation on earth to adopt Christianity as its state religion — traditional date 301, twelve years before the Edict of Milan. Armenia was Christian before Christianity was legal in Rome. He is my son Gregory’s patron.

James of Nisibis was in the room too, as a bishop and a signatory, one of the 318. He had lived as a mountain hermit in a goat-hair cloak until the city drew him out to make him bishop, and he kept wearing the cloak. He founded the church and school at Nisibis and taught a student named Ephrem the Syrian. In 338 he stood on the walls during Shapur II’s siege—the traditional account has gnats and mosquitoes routing the Persian elephants; what isn’t in dispute is that the city held and the people credited their bishop’s prayers.

And here is the part I want to be precise about, because it would be easy to tell as a coincidence.

James of Nisibis and Gregory the Illuminator were first cousins. The traditional Armenian account has James’s mother, Khosrovidukht, as Gregory’s paternal aunt, the two boys raised and educated together at Caesarea. Years later Gregory wrote to his cousin and asked him to compose homilies on faith and love.

I found that out first. My son already had Gregory. I had Athanasius from my own baptism. And when it came time to take a name at my tonsure as a reader, I went looking for one that would tie the household to the council and to my son’s patron at once—and I took James of Nisibis on purpose. (Read more about that decision here.)

Two cousins and a deacon with no vote. One creed. Three names picked deliberately, over decades.

The Rest of the Household

Xenia of St. Petersburg, the one my confessor sent me to. Widowed young, she gave away everything she owned, then refused her own name—answering only to her dead husband’s, saying that Andrey was alive and Xenia had died—and spent forty-five years wandering Petersburg in his military coat. God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise. Her feast is January 24. Our daughter was born on it.

John of Shanghai and San Francisco, the one Polina was sent to. He followed the Russian diaspora across the twentieth century—Shanghai, the Philippines, Western Europe, San Francisco—barely slept, served daily, and was found praying in bell towers at night over whichever city held his people. In anticipation of his death he wrote to his flock: “Tell everyone, even though I have reposed, I am still alive.” His relics lie incorrupt in a cathedral in San Francisco. That sentence he wrote is this entire essay, written by a man who died in 1966.

Apollinaria, Polina’s patron from her own baptism. Daughter of Anthemius, regent to the young Theodosius II—born at the top of the Roman world and chose to become a monk….not a nun, a monk. She talked her parents into a pilgrimage, gave her jewels and money to the poor in Jerusalem, slipped away from her servants near Alexandria, and entered Sketis as a monk under the name Dorotheus. St. Macarius received her as one of the brethren, not knowing the ruse. When her own sister was made to accuse her falsely, she took the blame, walked home to Rome under guard, healed her sister, and went back to her cell. Her identity came out only at her death.

Alexandra Feodorovna and Sophia of Shamordino, chosen this year for our daughter. Alexandra was born Princess Alix of Hesse and received into Orthodoxy before she married Tsar Nicholas II—and she took St. Alexandra the Martyr Empress as her own patron, keeping April 23 as her name day, never knowing that one day she too would follow her patron saint into martyrdom. Our daughter’s patron had a patron. Her chaplain’s diary records her name day in 1917, when she was under house arrest: the family in bright festive clothes, a prosphora, and he described her as smiling, despite her suffering. She was murdered with her family the following July. Sophia Bolotova was a spiritual daughter of St. Ambrose of Optina—married in obedience to the elder, later widowed, tonsured by him, and made first abbess of Shamordino, a convent that received widows, orphans, and the blind whom other houses couldn’t afford. She led it three years and died at forty-two. After her death St. Ambrose told one of the sisters, :Remember, Mother Sophia was a saint!”

An empress and a village abbess, both chosen for the same infant. She has some shoes to fill!

Benedict of Nursia, ours twice over. Benedictus means blessed, and my surname—Bennett—descends from it, so he was on my mail before I had a vote. Serbian Orthodox families keep a Slava: an annual feast for the household’s own patron saint, not a person’s but the whole house’s. Polina and I loosely adopted the practice, and Benedict with it. His Rule opens, Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and it was written for beginners, with room made for the weak. A house with a four-year-old and an infant qualifies.

You Are Already in the Room

Nine names. Every one chosen, and I just gave you the reason behind each. My point in sharing each of these is not so I can talk about my family—though I certainly enjoy that—but rather in order to give a glimpse into how the saints “work” in the Orthodox faith.

Venerating the saints amounts to noticing where you’re standing—and then choosing who you stand with. Every Liturgy the curtain goes thin and you are in the room with them. Not thinking about them. With them. And every baptism, a name gets chosen, and a household gains a member it didn’t have the week before.

Compassed about. Surrounded. Not observed from a distance—surrounded, which is a different thing entirely, and the difference is most of the faith.

Two icons, on opposite walls of a church in Phoenix, over the spot where one family stood every Sunday. A California bishop and a Petersburg fool-for-Christ, looking at each other across a nave, while a woman prayed to one of them and a man three continents away prayed to the other — each sent there by a confessor who knew exactly what he was doing.

Nine names, chosen. A council you can join on purpose.

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Blessed is the Kingdom…

The priest does not greet everyone with “Good Morning.” Nor does he begin the Divine Liturgy immediately by saying “Let Us Pray,” nor simply “Welcome.”

When the Divine Liturgy begins on Sunday morning at Saint Mark Greek Orthodox Church in Boca Raton, Florida, Father Mark stands before the holy altar, lifts the Gospel book, makes the sign of the cross, and says something far more radical.

Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

What he is doing is proclaiming the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth. This means if what he said is true; if we really are going into the kingdom of God; that leaves us with a huge question. How can you possibly prepare yourself for such a thing?

We all prepare ourselves for those things we believe are important. Many people spend years preparing for their wedding day. They plan for weeks, months and even longer to be able to execute a few hours perfectly. A man might spend months studying for a big job interview. In fact, most people take their preparation for almost every event very seriously.

But when it comes to the Divine Liturgy, the temptation is to wing it. We wake up. We check our phones. We scroll the news. We yell at our kids in the car. We pull into the parking lot, rush through the doors, and suddenly hear, “Blessed is the kingdom.” (Well, that’s assuming we arrive early enough for that.)

Our bodies have arrived. Our minds and hearts are sometimes still in the parking lot or back at the house.

In our four week August adult education series after Vespers, this past week Father Mark tackled this exact problem. How does an Orthodox Christian actually prepare to encounter Christ in the Divine Liturgy?

To begin to answer, we must start with this: Sunday morning does not begin on Sunday morning.

The Compass Needle

There is a temptation to divide our lives into two distinct worlds. There is the church world, which happens on Sunday morning. And then there is the real world, which happens Monday through Saturday.

Orthodox Christianity doesn’t allow for that division. “The Divine Liturgy is connected to everything that happens during the week,” Father Mark taught. “How I speak to my spouse prepares me for the Liturgy. How I treat the person who irritates me prepares me for the Liturgy. Whether I pray... whether I repent... how I use my money, what I watch... prepares me for the Liturgy.”

You cannot spend six days forming your heart in one direction and expect to instantly turn it toward God on Sunday morning.

Father Mark used a helpful image. Think of the heart like a compass needle. Throughout the week, that needle is constantly being pulled by competing magnetic fields: work, anxiety, money, social media, family drama. The needle spins wildly sometimes.

Prayer helps to bring the needle back. Repentance brings it back. Reading Scripture brings it back. Fasting brings it back.

Saint Paul told the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17). This doesn’t mean standing in front of an icon corner for twenty-four hours a day. It means acquiring a direction. When we finally arrive on Sunday morning, we aren’t starting cold. We have been walking toward the altar all week.

Ascension Theology?

Father Mark shared a story about a local, evangelical Protestant pastor from down the street who brought his “worship team” to Saint Mark for a private tour. Father Mark was happy to show them around. The pastor told him he wanted his team to understand something that the Orthodox Church grasps intuitively: “Ascension theology.”

“We’re ascending,” he explained. “We’re always going toward Christ. We’re going toward that holy altar. Our worship is not us-focused. Our worship is Christ-focused... We’re always walking toward that holy altar.”

The Protestant team was stunned by their tour of the Orthodox Church. For them, it was said, church was a speech, a sermon, and a band. For the Orthodox, it is an ascent into the kingdom.

But it’s tough to ascend if you don’t know where you are going. This is why we have to prepare the mind. We have to learn the language of the Liturgy. We need to know why incense is offered, what the Trisagion means, and why the priest says, “Let us lift up our hearts.” That last line is not filler. It is an instruction. Lift your heart. Bring everything you carried into the building upward toward God.

Father Mark suggested doing something simple yet helpful: read the Sunday Epistle and Gospel before you come to church. “Imagine how differently you will hear the Gospel when you already know the story.” (And if you come to Matins, and follow along, you’ll get even more!)

Preparing the Mind vs. the Heart

Preparing the mind is the easy part. Preparing the heart is where the real work happens. You can understand every theological nuance of the Liturgy and still have a heart that is completely unprepared to receive Christ.

Jesus was quite clear. In Matthew’s gospel, he states “If you bring your offering to the altar and there recall that your brother holds anything against you, leave your gift at the altar, first go and be reconciled to your brother.” He connects quite clearly that how we relate to others has an impact on how we relate to God. “You cannot say ‘I love God,’ but will not forgive my brother.’ You cannot say ‘I am going to take communion’ and simultaneously choose to hold onto hate; it just doesn’t work that way,” Father Mark stated.

The Eucharist is communion. It is communion with Christ, communion with His Church, and communion with one another. This requires examining the heart.

• Are you feeding anger?

• Are you marinating in resentment?

This is where repentance and confession come in. Confession is not a courtroom where bad Orthodox Christians are punished. It is medicine. It is the tool Christ gave us to clean the house of the heart before the Guest arrives.

The Threshold to Sunday

Saturday night in America is often seen as the climax of the weekend. Many people treat Saturday night as their chance to go out with friends, to stay up late and to exhaust themselves. On the other hand, the church sees things differently. Father Mark also thought that we might view Saturday night as a doorway into Sunday.

Does this mean Orthodox Christians cannot hang out with friends or live a life on Saturday night? No! This is not a new set of strict rules; rather it is a matter of space. As Father Mark stated, are you preparing space for what is going to occur tomorrow? Maybe this involves reading the Gospels before bedtime. Perhaps it involves laying out your clothes so the morning is less chaotic. Maybe it simply means getting to bed 30 minutes sooner.

Anticipation changes experience. When you anticipate meeting Jesus Christ, your heart arrives before your body does.

The Purpose of the Fast

Then comes Sunday morning, and the final preparation: the body. Christianity is not a religion simply of the mind. We worship God with our whole person. We stand, we bow, we cross ourselves, we smell incense, we taste the Eucharist.

And we fast. The Eucharistic fast—abstaining from food and drink before communion—is not an arbitrary endurance test. It is not designed to see if you can survive until noon without coffee.

“Fasting teaches the body to participate in our longing for Christ,” Father Mark explained. You wake up hungry. But instead of immediately satisfying that hunger with a bowl of cereal, the hunger itself becomes a prayer. The body begins to say what the soul should be saying: I am waiting to be filled.

“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).

When you approach the chalice physically hungry, anticipation peaks. The first thing you receive that day is Jesus Christ.

(Note: Fr. Mark was clear that the young, the elderly, pregnant women, and those on medication should consult their priest and doctor. The Church is a hospital, not a courtroom, and uses wisdom as she cares for the souls of those who have bodies with particular weaknesses.)

Listen to the class yourself:

Protecting the Stillness

When Sunday morning finally arrives, then comes the biggest test: keeping the stillness. In the first ten minutes after waking, what do most of us do? Most likely we pick-up our phones and begin checking our social media, our e-mail, perhaps the news. Three or four Instagram scrolls deep before our feet have ever touched the floor, and now there are fifty different voices in our mind.

No wonder many cannot concentrate during the Divine Liturgy. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the very first thing you hear isn’t the world’s voice but rather God’s?

Father Mark described his own Sunday morning routine with his father-in-law. They drive to church in near total silence.

“I am going to meet Jesus Christ today,” Fr. Mark said, summarizing the one thought we should carry with us. “Not, I have to go to church. Not, I hope Father doesn’t preach too long... I am going to meet Christ.”

If you truly believe that, you don’t just arrive at church. You enter it intentionally. You light a candle. You venerate the icons. You don’t bring the noise of the world into the sanctuary.

You arrive ready to ascend.

When the priest finally raises the holy gifts and says, “The holy things for the holy people of God,” everything snaps into focus. The prayers, the fasting, the Saturday night quiet, the silence in the car—it was all leading to this moment.

When the priest declares, “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” the people respond, “Amen.” This “Amen” represents the culmination of all your work throughout the week. It says: Yes. This is why I forgave. This is why I fasted. I have come to enter the Kingdom.

Then, and only then does something marvelous happen. Instead of giving you a symbol or a memory, Christ gives you Himself.

Your preparation didn’t make you worthy of receiving such an amazing gift. There is absolutely nothing anyone could do to earn this kind of gift. Your preparation only made you ready to accept His Gift.

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A Practical Guide to Preparing for the Liturgy

Based on Father Mark’s class, here are the concrete steps we can take to prepare our minds, hearts, and bodies to encounter Christ on Sunday morning:

1. Read the Scripture ahead of time: Look up and read the Epistle and Gospel readings for the upcoming Sunday before you arrive.

2. Learn the commemorations: Take a few minutes to read about the specific saint or feast day being commemorated that weekend.

3. Reconcile and forgive: Examine your heart for anger or resentment. Reconcile with anyone you have a conflict with before approaching the chalice, utilizing the sacrament of confession as medicine.

4. Guard your Saturday night: Treat Saturday evening as the doorway to Sunday. Consider ways we can shift away from exhausting, worldly activities and intentionally create space for spiritual anticipation and rest.

5. Keep the Eucharistic fast: Abstain from food and drink on Sunday morning before Liturgy (consulting your priest and doctor regarding medical or age-related exceptions) to let your physical hunger become a prayer of longing for Christ.

6. Protect the morning stillness: Avoid the temptation to immediately reach for your phone, check email, or scroll social media and the news when you wake up.

7. Enter with intention: Don’t just casually walk into the building, and remember even the Narthex is a prayerful place and not really for chit chat. Best practice: arrive early, light a candle, venerate the icons, and pray to transition your mind fully toward the altar.

Recommended Resources:

• Daily Readings

• AGES Digital Chant Stand

What follows is my own reflection on that session, written for Simply Orthodox readers—catechumens, inquirers, and anyone still sorting out what any of this is actually for. You can read part 2 here and part 3 here.

Training Day

A catechumen one texted me asking if margarine counts as dairy.

Fair question. I answered it (it doesn’t, mostly—somewhere out there, a nineteenth-century Frenchman patented margarine specifically to torment future Orthodox catechumens, and I have chosen to believe this on faith). But the question underneath that question is the one most of us ask before we even notice we’re asking it: what am I allowed to do, and what happens if I don’t?

That’s rules-thinking. It’s the default setting for anyone who grew up measuring faith in checkboxes, and it’s the exact thing Fr. Mark Leondis spent an hour dismantling in the first session of St. Mark’s new catechesis and adult education series. He introduced a term most inquirers have never heard: phronema. I want to walk through why it matters, because the distinction he’s drawing isn’t a technicality. It’s the whole ballgame.

The Word Nobody Translates Well

Phronema doesn’t land cleanly in English, which is probably why so many converts never get properly introduced to it. The closest we can do is mindset—but that undersells it the way “cardio” undersells a marathon. Phronema isn’t an opinion we hold. It’s the lens we see through before we ever form an opinion, the operating system underneath whatever app happens to be open.

Saint Paul names it directly: “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5, ESV). A few letters later, writing to the church at Corinth, he says it flatter still: “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16, ESV). Not his ideas. Not a summary of his teaching we could fit on a bumper sticker. His mind—the way he saw a leper, a tax collector, his own execution.

We don’t acquire that by reading about it, any more than my four-year-old is getting a black belt by reading about jiu-jitsu (he’d fight me on this, mid-armbar, but it’s true). We get it the way Paul describes it: “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2, ESV)—renewal, present tense, ongoing. Not a bar we clear once and frame on the wall. A mind we keep letting Him remake, the way a river keeps letting the bank shape it, whether the river notices or not.

This is also, incidentally, where East and West tend to part company. A rules framework treats sin as a broken statute—something owed, something to be settled. Orthodoxy treats sin the way a doctor treats a fever: a symptom worth diagnosing, not a debt worth collecting. Which is a nicer way of saying nobody’s getting sentenced to community service for skipping vespers.

Askesis: The Church as Gym

Here’s where it gets concrete. The Greek word askesis just means training—it’s where we get “ascetic,” and it originally described an athlete’s regimen, not a monk’s. Saint Paul uses it on purpose: “I discipline my body and keep it under control” (1 Corinthians 9:27, ESV). Timothy gets the plainer version: “train yourself for godliness” (1 Timothy 4:7, ESV).

I know a little about training regimens. I spent over a year tracking macros and dropped 75 pounds chasing a protein number I still miss most days (mostly because chicken breast is a personality-free food and I will resent it if I eat it too often). A good coach doesn’t hand you one fixed program and disappear. He’s running the whole operation—when to push, when to back off, when a sore knee means rest instead of another set. That whole job, not just the backing-off part, is closer to what the Church actually means by oikonomia. The word literally means managing a household.

A spiritual father practicing it isn’t handing out exceptions to a rule; he’s governing the whole thing, deciding case by case where strictness serves someone and where it would break them. That strict baseline has its own name too: akriveia, the standard everyone’s aiming at. Oikonomia is the governance holding both together, not a synonym for going easy. A pregnant woman gets something other than the full monastic fast because a shepherd is actually managing the household case by case. The program still serves the person. Miss a day, meanwhile, and nobody revokes your membership. You just don’t build the muscle you’d have built.

That’s the whole logic behind fasting, prayer, and every other tool in the Church’s kit. They’re reps. When Christ tells the Pharisees “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27, ESV), He’s making Fr. Mark’s exact point about tools two thousand years early: the tool serves us, not the other way around.

And when He says “those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick,” then adds that He came “not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12–13, ESV), that’s the hospital model preached before hospitals had waiting rooms. It’s such a fixture of Orthodox pastoral language by now that half the people who repeat it couldn’t tell you who said it first, which might be its own kind of proof: the Church runs like a hospital, not a courtroom.

Nobody gets discharged from physical therapy for a bad week. If you’ve ever been to PT, you know your program simply gets modified and your therapist has undoubtedly seen worse.

Seven Tools, One Aim

Father Mark walked through the toolbox itself—prayer, fasting, Scripture, the Divine Liturgy, confession, almsgiving, the saints—and made the same case seven different ways: none of these earn us anything. They form us. We can own a Bible and stay unchanged. Light a candle and stay unchanged. Buy the Allen wrench and leave it in the drawer, and the bookshelf still doesn’t build itself. Pick up the tool and use it, though, and something starts happening to the shape of our mind.

Confession is worth pausing on, because it’s the tool people dread walking into and leave describing as relief—which should tell us something’s being mismarketed. It isn’t a deposition; the Church isn’t building a case against us. Almsgiving carries its own quiet correction: it keeps asking whose money it actually was in the first place, which is an uncomfortable question for a culture that names its retirement accounts after itself.

Every one of those seven tools points at the same word the Fathers kept reaching for: theosis. Saint Peter puts it right in Scripture—we’re meant to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4, ESV). Saint Athanasius said the same thing in five words that have outlived every empire since: “He was made man that we might be made god.”

That’s the target—becoming something capable of holding the life of God, from the inside out.

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The Actual Point

So, margarine. My catechumen got her answer, and nobody had to call a lawyer to figure it out. But the question I’d want every inquirer walking into a series like this one to actually carry isn’t “what’s allowed.” It’s the one Fr. Mark spent an hour training us toward instead: what is this doing to my heart, mind, and soul?

Father Georges Florovsky, writing decades before any of us showed up to a catechism class, put it better than I can:

“To follow the Fathers does not mean simply to quote their sentences. It means to acquire their mind, their phronema.”

That’s the whole thing in one sentence. Not citations. Not compliance. A mind, slowly and stubbornly acquired—one Wednesday fast, one confession, one Liturgy at a time.

Three sessions to go this August. We’ll be back next to discuss preparation for the Divine Liturgy.

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Sources

Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation, §54.3.

Georges Florovsky, “Following the Holy Fathers,” in Collected Works, vol. 4, Patristic Theology and the Ethos of the Orthodox Church (Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing, 1987), 15–22.

A note on one line above: “the Church runs like a hospital, not a courtroom” is a common saying in an Orthodox pastoral context, often loosely attributed to St. John Chrysostom. I couldn’t trace it to a specific homily with confidence, so it appears in the piece without his name on it.

There’s a strange thing that can happen not long after a baptism or chrismation.

Holy Week and Pascha were electric. The candles, the processions, “Christ is risen!”—maybe you even got a new name spoken over you as you received Communion as an Orthodox Christian for the first time. And then…Monday came. Or June came. Or October. The choir didn’t sound like angels every Sunday and your prayer rule got heavy. Gossip in the church touched your life.

Whatever it may be, the spiritual high faded, and you started to wonder, “Is this it? Am I already failing at being Orthodox?”

On the other end of the spectrum is the convert on fire. Three months after chrismation, he’s got strong feelings about icons, liturgical rubrics, and which Fathers everyone else is misreading (and sometimes he looks ready to punch someone when he talks about it). His social media feed is a running commentary on “the West” and perhaps he’s already got a chip on his shoulder about some priest or other out there with a podcast. It’s also entirely possible his family tiptoes around him, especially about religion, which he incessantly brings up. And his priest, if he’s wise, is quietly trying to help him safely land the plane without crashing.

And then there’s the quieter story: the slow drift. Someone is chrismated, shows up steadily for a while, and then life happens. Work gets busy. The prayer rule starts slipping. Liturgy gets swapped out for sleep now and then, or “Well, I watched it on YouTube, ya know.” Nothing dramatic happens; things just…thin out.

This is meant to be a field guide to that first year or so after chrismation or baptism—things to look for, things to do, and offer some help in making that season honest, sane, healthy, and grounded in the life of the Church. I don’t know if you saw yourself in any of those descriptions, but wherever you are on this spectrum, there’s hope for us all.

After the Feast: Why the First Year Is So Strange

One of the poorly advertised facts of the Christian life is that emotional “honeymoons” are frequently followed by much less glamorous terrain. The Church knows this; the Fathers talk about it. But it’s easy to assume that once you are finally Orthodox, things will only go up and to the right.

Instead, a lot of people experience:

• A post‑Pascha crash: after all the intensity and joy, everything feels a bit flat.

• A wave of old temptations returning with surprising force.

• A new awareness of the Church’s very human side: parish quirks, imperfect leadership, un‑saintly behavior at coffee hour, perhaps you still don’t feel like “part of the crew.”

None of that means you “did it wrong.” In many ways, it means you’ve simply moved from engagement to marriage. The romance isn’t gone, but it’s no longer the whole story. The main task of this first year is learning what faithfulness looks like when you’re not being carried by what is exciting and new.

I don’t share this much, but when I was an Orthodox catechumen, I was on a very high high, followed by a brief crash and burn shortly before baptism. In an email with my friend Steve Robinson, he set me back on track when he wrote something to this effect: “I’ve had many spiritual highs, and I hope to never have one again, because the fall usually hurts.”

What Has Actually Changed? (And What Hasn’t)

It’s worth pausing to name what really did change at your reception into Holy Orthodoxy—and what did not.

What changed:

• You are now in full Eucharistic communion with the Orthodox Church. You’re not just visiting something holy; you belong to it.

  • And more importantly, this Eucharistic communion means that you are united to Christ, and being united to Christ indicates membership in the Body of Christ. It is going to change you if you let it.

• You are under a bishop and a priest in a concrete place. The Church is no longer an inspiring idea or a podcast; you now are tied in with this parish, this altar, these people.

  • This bishop and priest answer to God for your soul—and you have become their spiritual child. This matters a good deal, you’re no freelancer anymore.

• You have undergone a real sacramental change. However you feel on some random Tuesday, your baptism/chrismation weren’t mere symbolic ceremonies with fancy gestures—they are objective gifts and real turning points.

  • Nothing can undo your baptism, either. I always remind our catechumens that becoming Orthodox can never be undone—one can walk away and apostatize, but you can’t unring this bell. Once you’ve been “inside,” you’re accountable to God for it.

What has not automatically changed:

• Your habits: Whatever patterns of prayer, distraction, anger, lust, Internet overuse, you had before—those don’t magically dissolve because oil touched your forehead.

  • You may have more weapons to fight with, but most likely you’re still going to be prone to the same temptations you had before—this is why the Church gives us additional, ongoing tools such as confession, so we can actually make some progress. But be aware—it takes years sometimes.

• Your relationships: Family dynamics, losing old church connections, new workplace challenges: all of that takes time to adjust.

• Your emotional life: You may not feel as “on fire” as you thought you would.

  • At some point you may find yourself more tired than triumphant, and that’s perfectly normal.

Baptism and chrismation are a new beginning. You’ve come out of the baptismal waters newly born, a spiritual rebirth; now, over years (and decades), you must learn to walk.

The Anchors: What a Normal Orthodox Rhythm Looks Like

Everybody wants to know, “Okay, now that I’m officially Orthodox, what’s expected of me?” You may be hoping for a clean checklist. Instead, I want to point to a few anchors—patterns that give shape to a normal Orthodox life—without pretending there’s a one‑size‑fits‑all rule.

Always, always: the concrete details of your life belong in conversation with your priest who you will know in person, and who will guide you for this stretch of the road. Think of these suggestions I’m making as the categories you’ll talk about together.

Sunday Liturgy and the Sacraments

For the ordinary Orthodox Christian life, Sunday Divine Liturgy is not an optional add-on, it’s the beating heart of the life in Christ. Barring illness, travel, or serious obstacles, the basic expectation is: this is where you are on Sunday morning. And if you miss one, come right back; miss three, still come right back; been gone a year, still, come back (and maybe consider scheduling a confession!).

Confession, too, becomes part of the normal rhythm. It’s not an emergency‑only sacrament reserved for spectacular moral failures; it’s one of the ordinary ways you keep your heart honest and your life tethered to Christ. New Orthodox Christians should speak to their priest about the frequency of confession, and find the pace that makes sense within that spiritual relationship. And unless you’re confessing before every communion (as is frequently done in Slavic churches), you can always ask for more.

Fasting and Feasts

It’s no secret that we fast in the Orthodox Church. Now that you’re in, you’re not just watching the fasts and feasts from the outside—you’re keeping them. But that does not necessarily mean instant maximalism.

Instead of assuming, “I must now keep every letter of the fasting calendar,” a better move is to go to your priest and say, “I want to take the fasts seriously. Given my health, work, family, and where I am spiritually, what makes sense for me?” Let the guidance be concrete and realistic.

Being overly scrupulous or completely dismissive of the fast are two opposite ditches we don’t want to fall into.

Feasts matter too. Letting yourself actually celebrate on feasts, and making it a point to observe the seasons and holy days in your life—liturgically and at home—is part of a healthy rhythm. Christianity is not meant to be an unbroken gray.

Prayer at Home

Those converts who attempt the Herculean leap from “occasional improvised prayers” to “full monastic cycle by Tuesday” usually last less than a week at prayer. Don’t set yourself up for failure.

A sane aim is a small, stable rule: morning and/or evening prayers, maybe you will incorporate a Psalm or two, perhaps you’re using the Jesus Prayer throughout the day, and maybe a few prostrations as your body allows. Simple, repeatable, and ideally with feedback from your confessor/priest.

For myself, I’ve always felt that it’s better to get in five minutes of prayer (or even 50 seconds) that I actually do than fifty-five minutes I feel guilty about not doing.

Becoming a Parish Person

Finally, life after reception into Orthodoxy means beginning to belong: not as a permanent visitor, but as a member of a particular community.

That might look like:

• Staying for coffee hour and gradually learning names.

• Finding one small way to serve: helping in the kitchen, reading, singing, cleaning, teaching (after we get to know ya!). One of my godsons basically became an essential part of coffee hour service overnight—and suddenly he knows everyone at the parish. For me, my big “break” in my current parish was becoming an usher. Serve others and you’ll see.

• Becoming a faithful steward of your parish by giving financially according to your means, as a concrete way of saying, “This is my Church, too.” Everyone in the Church should have “skin in the game,” and committing to a financial gift to the Church is an important way of doing that.

You don’t have to become Parish Super‑Volunteer of the Year. But you are no longer just passing through. This is home, and everyone in the family should chip in.

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Classic First‑Year Temptations

Let’s put a few of the usual suspects on the table.

Convert Triumphalism

The temptation is this: You’ve found the pearl of great price, and you can see exactly what’s wrong with everyone else’s pearls. Perhaps you’ve met some cradle Orthodox that you think seem lukewarm. And those other converts seem to have brought in so much baggage!

You discover the delightful pastime of mentally grading everyone’s Orthodoxy. Maybe you like to argue with the priest, because you’re more Orthodox than he is (or so you think). And you’d never mingle with that other filthy Orthodox jurisdiction.

• Antidote: remember that you were received into something you did not build. The people who don’t match your idealized vision of “serious Orthodoxy” are often the ones who quietly kept the parish alive so that you could be received at all, and it’s always good to let the bishops doing the bishopin’. Humility here is an absolute must.

Over‑Asceticism and Burnout

You want to make God proud, so you pile on: strict fasting, long rules, every possible service. For a few weeks, it feels amazing. Then you’re exhausted, irritable, and tempted to chuck the whole thing. Stop trying to make God proud, because He doesn’t need your fasting, you do, and you don’t do yourself a favor by crashing out.

• Antidote: think in decades, not weeks. Ask your priest for a rule you could imagine keeping in five years, not just five days. (You can always adjust later.) Think of the Church’s call to asceticism as an offer of medicine—it’s not a reality show Survivor or Challenge-style competition.

Online Radicalization

Now that you’re “inside,” the algorithm will happily show you every hot take, controversy, and micro‑schism inside Orthodoxy. You could spend your entire spiritual life angry at bishops you’ve never met in places you’ll never go. If you’re prone to following dunces, you might even find yourself organizing a boycott of some institution, ministry, or book that some dork on YouTube told you to hate. Knock it off, it’s a waste of time and spiritually draining.

• Antidote: you soul will benefit from avoiding “jurisdictional politics” and instead making the peace and well-being of your parish and your diocese the center of gravity. And if something online disturbs you, take it to your priest, not to a comment thread.

Discouragement and Shame

You might have had a mental image of the kind of Orthodox Christian you’d be immediately following your baptism/chrismation. That imaginary person prays like an elder, fasts like a monk, and never yells at their kids. The real you…well…does not. Cue: shame, self‑loathing, and the suspicion that the sacraments “didn’t work.”

• Antidote: trade the imaginary Orthodoxy in your head for the actual Orthodoxy in front of you. God is not surprised by your pace of growth. The measure is not “Have I arrived?” but “Am I repenting? Am I getting back up?” The Proverbs say “the righteous falls seven times and rises again” (24:16). That’s the only way.

When the Feelings Don’t Match the Faith

It’s very common for doubts or dryness to surface after reception, if not before. Before baptism/chrismation you were riding the wave of discovery; afterwards, some questions you shelved in the excitement may come back with new force.

You might find yourself second-guessing:

• “What if I just talked myself into this?”

• “Why does prayer feel harder now than before I was Orthodox?”

• “Other people seem to ‘feel God’ more than I do.”

• “I’m not even sure if God is real anymore.”

• “So many jerks in Orthodoxy, I must have made a mistake.”

When that happens:

• Keep the anchors. Show up to Liturgy; keep a reduced, honest prayer rule; don’t abandon confession.

• Tell your priest the truth. It’s best not to fake zeal or use pious platitudes to avoid telling the truth. Say, “Here’s where I’m actually at.” You might be surprised; a good priest is patient with the struggles of the flock.

• Be patient with yourself. It is better to limp toward the Kingdom than to pointlessly sprint around the yard in circles.

I experienced my own reception in a season of deep peace and healing—and the tumults came later down the road. I was baptized at Saint Juvenaly Orthodox Mission in Kailua-Kona, Hawaiʻi—a small, loving community where there were lots of Vespers, lots of Liturgies, and a steady environment for formation. Even in that beautiful setting, the habits took time, and the inner life did not instantly match the outer reality.

And then 5 or 6 years in, and at a decade in, I had various struggles that were much different than what I dealt with when I was newly illumined. That sort of thing is normal. If you don’t let your existential struggles dictate your Liturgy attendance, your faith might stand a chance.

Planning and Planting for Decades

The first year after baptism/chrismation is a time for planting, for growth, for making the life of the Church part of the rhythm of your life. You might think of it as planting a garden you hope to be still be harvesting from in twenty years.

You’re choosing, bit by bit:

• Do I want Sunday Liturgy to be the axis of my week, or just one more thing to fit in?

• Will I treat confession as occasional spiritual urgent care, or as normal medicine?

• Am I going to let the fasting and feasting of the Church year shape my time, or will I mostly live by the civil calendar and squeeze Orthodoxy into the gaps?

• Will I be the kind of parishioner who drifts on the edges or hangs in the back, or someone who lets themselves actually belong?

None of these questions are meant to induce panic, but rather to give you agency. You are no longer a passive object being pulled along by forces you don’t understand—you have been set free in Christ, you have real choices to make, and you have been offered real spiritual help from the Church.

If you stumble—and you will—remember: the measure of a Christian is not about the absence of falls, but is ultimately about the persistence of a life of repentance. You didn’t become Orthodox because you were strong enough. You became Orthodox because Christ is alive enough to carry you, in this very ordinary, often unspectacular life, all the way through.

Father Thomas Hopko of blessed memory said that, when he went to seminary, his mother told him: “Remember God. Say your prayers. Go to Church.” This is the rhythm of the Christian life. This is what we should all be doing at all times, but especially when the chrism has been rubbed in.

If you’re in this first‑year zone right now, you might want to bookmark this page to return to. The oil has dried; the journey has only just begun.

Postscript

If you’ve already slipped away, and you feel like you’ve slipped away completely—the habits cracked, the zeal cooled, and you’re quietly carrying around the knowledge that you “used to be Orthodox”—I want you to hear this as clearly as possible: you are loved, and you are missed.

Whatever combination of burnout, hurt, boredom, sin, or simple drift led you out the side door, none of that has canceled Christ’s claim on you. He has already called you His own in baptism and chrismation; He is not pacing the narthex with crossed arms, waiting to scold you about missed services. He is the Shepherd who goes after lost sheep, the Father who runs to meet prodigals.

If you’re reading this with a knot in your stomach thinking, “Maybe I should go back,” consider that a mercy. Talk to your priest if you can, or another priest if you must, and just say the truth: “I’ve been gone. I want to come home.” There are conversations to have and steps to take, of course—but the basic movement is simple: turn around and come back. The doors are still open.

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Additional Resources

• “Preparing for Confession,” Our Life in Christ, Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3

• “When Confession Feels Unsafe,” Healing the Unresolved Podcast

• “Holy Conversation: Issues of Marriage and Sexuality,” Orthodox Marriage Podcast

Someone in our catechism class recently asked about the Immaculate Conception. What happened next was exactly what happens every time: half of the room believed we were discussing how Jesus was conceived. (We were not.) And the fact that we’re confused enough to not know what this 19th-century Roman Catholic dogma actually claims is telling us something.

So let’s resolve this. Afterward, we’ll discuss why the Orthodox Church rejects the concept—because it disrupts the mechanism of how God saves us.

What the Immaculate Conception Actually Is

The Immaculate Conception is unrelated to Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. It pertains to Mary’s conception in the womb of her mother, Saint Anna. Pope Pius IX defined it as dogma in 1854: Mary, from the very first instant of her conception, was preserved from all stain of original sin by a singular grace of God, applied in advance on account of the future merits of Jesus Christ.

In simpler terms, God reached back through time and protected Mary from the guilt of Adam’s fall before she ever drew breath. God made Mary an untouched, sealed vessel—one untainted by the universal infection that affects every human being.

That is what is claimed. Let us now discuss why it exists.

At Issue Behind the Dogma

We cannot understand the Immaculate Conception without comprehending how the Latin West understands the Fall of Adam. This is where things begin to diverge significantly, because the Orthodox East and the Catholic West are addressing two fundamentally different questions.

Saint Augustine of Hippo was both an outstanding and necessary holy Father—but not an infallible one. Through the Latin translation he used of Romans 5:12, the West produced a unique interpretation of Paul: that all humanity sinned in Adam. From this interpretation, Western theology developed the idea that original sin is primarily guilt passed on through inheritance. Every child brought into the world comes with a judicial determination: guilty. Not due to any actions they performed themselves, but because Adam’s wrongdoing was transmitted down through each successive generation like an unpaid debt.

Based on this premise, we face a conundrum regarding the Mother of God. If Mary carried Adam’s guilt, then Christ received flesh from a guilty woman. The Immaculate Conception resolves this issue: a preemptive pardon granted to Mary — essentially a type of exemption placed on her soul before the guilt could affect her.

However, the Orthodox read the Fall differently. This is key.

How the East Understands Original Sin

The Eastern Fathers—Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Maximus the Confessor—never viewed original sin as inherited guilt. Examine Romans 5:12 in Greek and the phrase that formed Augustine’s structure disappears. Saint Paul states that death spread to all people, because (Greek: ἐφ’ ᾧ, eph’ hō) all sinned. Death spread first. Then we all sinned within that mortal condition. Note the order.

What we inherit from Adam is a condition. Mortality. Decay. A nature that deteriorates over time and draws us toward sin like a weakened foundation draws a house toward collapse. We enter a world that is already sick, and we contract the illness. Some may interpret our existence as carrying a terminal prognosis—yet none of us have been charged with another individual’s crime.

This presents an enormous distinction, because if original sin is a disease, we need a physician. And that physician is Christ. As Saint Paul writes to the Romans, chapter 5, verse 12 and 15:

Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned... much more have the grace of God and the free gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many.

The remedy is the Incarnation itself—for all humanity.

Why the Immaculate Conception Disrupts Salvation?

This is where the Orthodox objection cannot be overlooked.

Saint Gregory the Theologian laid down a principle in the fourth century that became the spine of all Orthodox Christology: “What is not assumed is not healed.”

Consider this. If Christ intends to repair fallen human nature—our mortality, decay, and tendency toward sin—He must accept that nature entirely and without restriction. And He accepted it from Mary. Her body became His body. Her human nature became the basic substance from which our salvation arose. She gave God His DNA.

Now. If Mary was exempted from fallen human nature—if she possessed some other type of humanity, a pre-Fall variety—then Christ did not assume our humanity. He assumed something else. Something that required no healing.

And if He did not assume our nature, He did not heal it. You may even state that salvation collapses entirely. Ouch!

Saint Ignatius Brianchaninov, the 19th-century Russian bishop, stated this clearly: the Mother of God was conceived and born under the general law of humanity’s fallen condition. She required a Redeemer. She required resurrection. She required everything we require.

To clarify: Orthodoxy maintains that Mary never personally sinned—she is the Panagia, the All-Holy. Her personal sinlessness resulted from her fierce cooperation with God’s grace while possessing a mortal, fallen body. She navigated the same fallen world we do. She resisted. She chose. She prevailed. Brianchaninov employed a strongly worded 19th-century Russian corrective to Rome, and while some of his wording exceeds the ferocity on this point of the broader Patristic tradition, his fundamental assertion remains valid: Mary is one of us. That is precisely the point.

What Orthodoxy Truly Believes About Mary

We refer to her as Panagia—the All-Holy. We refer to her as Theotokos—the God-Bearer. Our hymns celebrate her as “more honorable than the Cherubim and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim.” No one in Orthodoxy attempts to denigrate Mary.

Her holiness results from a response.

Upon hearing Gabriel speak to her, she replied: “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). That “yes” was Mary’s free, fully human response as a woman living within the same fallen world we inhabit—and she chose God regardless.

Vladimir Lossky argued that by excluding Mary from the common condition of humanity—thereby making her fiat a foregone conclusion rather than the culmination of countless generations of faithfulness ripening in one young woman from Nazareth—the Catholic dogma devalues the most important free choice in human history.

And that word—generations—deserves greater emphasis than we typically give it. Orthodoxy views all of the Old Testament as an ongoing refinement process across numerous generations of human flesh and blood. For millennia God worked through the line of Abraham and David, refining that genealogy until it could finally bring forth an individual capable of giving voice to that “yes.” Mary represented the greatest degree of human synergy with God’s grace—the fruit of thousands of years of human striving toward God, culminating in a teenage girl from Nazareth who willingly offered herself as a living Ark.

She represents the summit of humanity. She embodied our nature totally—and still said yes.

The Moment of Purification

A discerning Catholic reader may ask: if Mary was not purified at her conception, how could a fallen human vessel contain the uncontainable God in her womb without being consumed?

St. John of Damascus and the broader patristic tradition teach that Mary was purified by the Holy Spirit at the moment of the Annunciation—immediately after she gave her free consent. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35). That overshadowing was not merely the act of conception. It was her purification, her preparation to become a living temple of God.

Notice the timing:

• In the Catholic framework, Mary is purified at her conception—before she existed as a sentient individual, before she had chosen anything.

• Orthodoxy teaches that Mary was purified at the Annunciation—after she voluntarily agreed.

There is a great deal of significance in that distinction. One makes Mary’s sanctity a passive state caused by an external factor. The other is a collaborative action between divine grace and human will. God does not supersede Mary’s will. He honors it.

The Icon That Tells Us Everything

Let’s talk about the bed. The icon of the Conception of the Theotokos—celebrated on December 9th—is one of the most earthy, beautifully human images in our tradition. You have Saints Joachim and Anna, an elderly couple who endured decades of barrenness and the social shame that came with it, locked in a tender embrace.

And right there in the background, unapologetically, is their marriage bed.

While including a bed in an image depicting saints may appear incongruous or even sacrilegious today, icons rarely feature random items in their backgrounds. Each stroke of paint has intentionality in iconography. Their marriage bed serves to emphasize an essential truth: Mary was conceived naturally.

The Church celebrates the miracle of Anna’s barren womb becoming fertile — but Mary was conceived through a normal, physical, marital act. Our services are explicit on this subject: only Christ’s conception by the Holy Spirit was seedless. Mary herself came into existence the way every human being does.

Moreover, it is worth noting: the Orthodox Church observes this feast, commemorating Mary’s natural conception as holy and worthy of gold leaf and liturgical hymns. The marital union of Joachim and Anna was a grace-filled act. By placing this event on our liturgical calendar and depicting it in icons, the Church declares that ordinary physical human reproduction is good, capable of existing in a holy union, and capable of producing the Mother of God.

The bed is really a declaration. The icon emphasizes that Mary shares our humanity completely. She was not genetically engineered in any way. She did not possess a “pre-fallen” nature. Like every other human being, she was born into the same grimy, mortal reality we experience daily. The icon is visual theology—an iconographic corrective to any notion that would remove Mary from unity with the rest of Adam’s descendants.

And that unity is crucial to our salvation—it is our salvation. Because if Mary doesn’t share our nature, she cannot pass that nature to Christ. And if Christ does not receive our nature, Gregory’s maxim applies with the greatest of force: what is not assumed is not healed. The bed in that icon safeguards Mary’s dignity as an authentic woman with an actual husband and an actual body—and it safeguards the Incarnation itself.

What About Christ’s Conception?

Now—since this began with confusion on this very point—let’s land this plane.

Scripture testifies to the Virgin Birth itself: Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit within Mary’s womb, without a human father (Matthew 1:18–23; Luke 1:35). The Orthodox Church acknowledges this without reserve. It appears in our Creed: “incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary.”

Christ took real human nature from a real human mother. He entered our condition—mortality and all—and healed it from the inside out by uniting it to His divinity. He needed a willing vessel. He found one in Mary.

That’s the difference between a legal religion and a hospital.

The Landing

The Immaculate Conception addresses an issue we do not have. It responds to a question the Greek (and other Eastern) Fathers never asked. And in answering it, it quietly severs the very connection between Christ and fallen humanity that makes salvation possible.

The icon of Joachim and Anna knows this. It places their marriage bed right in the gold-leafed background where everybody can see it—unembarrassed, ordinary, physical. The woman who gave God His human flesh had to be ordinary in her nature so that His taking of that nature could be extraordinary in its effect.

Mary didn’t need a “forcefield” to protect Her from God. Turns out she just needed a Son. And that’s particularly what is so special about Mary—she knows that He is what we need, too.

Comparative Summary of Points of Departure

Nature of Original Sin
Latin West (Post-1854): Inherited legal guilt (Debt).
Orthodox East: Inherited mortality/decay (Disease).

Mary’s Nature
Latin West (Post-1854): Exempted from fallen nature.
Orthodox East: Shared our fallen human nature.

Timing of Purification
Latin West (Post-1854): At her own conception.
Orthodox East: At the Annunciation (Luke 1:35).

Purpose of the Fiat
Latin West (Post-1854): Result of preemptive grace.
Orthodox East: Culmination of human synergy.

The “Problem” Solved
Latin West (Post-1854): Preventing Christ from inheriting guilt.
Orthodox East: Healing the nature He assumed.

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“There is such a thing as a true American: an honest, forthright, normal person for whom Holy Orthodoxy is quite natural; and the harvest of these true Americans is only beginning.” - Fr. Seraphim Rose

This post is available in audio, simply click below:

The other morning I did a very normal thing for our household: I taught my four-year-old pieces of the Creed on the way to preschool, coffee in the tumbler, work not yet cracked, the day not yet started. Gregory can say things far above his pay grade with total confidence, which is one of the better features of being four.

And somewhere in the middle of reviewing our catechism about the Creed, the Fourth of July landed on me differently than it used to.

Age has a way of sanding off the taste for fashionable contempt. I have less and less patience for the habit of speaking about America as though serious people are required to sneer. The country has sins—any grown man knows that. A nation large enough to do real good has power enough to do real damage. That is what power does in fallen hands.

Still, common sense exists and we can determine a few things about America from what we do know. People do not cross oceans, learn new languages and accents, and rebuild from nothing because they were promised fewer possibilities, fewer freedoms. My ancestors didn’t. My wife didn’t. Polina came here from Russia, and living with someone who knows the difference between America as a theory and America as a gift has a way of clearing the head. Gratitude does what arguments can’t. It makes you notice what has been sitting in front of you the whole time.

So, plainly: America is worth thanking God for.

Romans 12:18 says: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Elsewhere, Saint Paul tells the Church to pray for kings and all in authority, “that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence” (1 Timothy 2:1-2). We are not commanded to idolize the state. We are commanded to seek peace in our lives—and to pray for peace in the civil order, because peace gives households, parishes, and ordinary work enough room to breathe. A decent political order does not save souls. But can make it easier for souls to repent, worship, marry, raise children, and bury their dead without chaos swallowing the whole effort.

That room matters. But what is the room for?

Saint Gregory of Nyssa, in his Dialogue on the Soul and the Resurrection, he writes that “liberty is the coming up to a state which owns no master and is self-regulating,” and then the line worth turning over a few times: “everything that is free will be united with virtue; for virtue is a thing that has no master, that is, is free.”

Freedom is not the prize. Rather, Freedom is the room in which virtue becomes possible—the space to choose the good and do the slow, unglamorous work of becoming a person whose will is aligned with God’s.

Strip out that purpose and freedom stops being freedom. It becomes autonomy, which is just a dignified word for drift.

I don’t mind the modern talk of liberty, and I favor non-coercion—but liberty is frequently libertinism unmoored from virtue. Too often it means nothing sturdier than preference—appetite without discipline, choice without judgment. Paul never allows the move. “For freedom Christ has set us free,” he says, then immediately: “Do not use liberty as an opportunity for the flesh” (Galatians 5:1, 13).

Christian freedom has a shape. It bends toward holiness.

But holiness cannot be coerced; you cannot decree the people into virtue. Faith comes by hearing (Romans 10:17), and hearing requires the Word be preached, received, obeyed. Coercion can produce compliance. It cannot produce virtue, and it cannot produce worship. Christ stands at the door and knocks (Revelation 3:20). He does not kick it in.

I cannot talk about religious liberty as an abstraction; I feel the weight of this as a convert, and I value religious freedom because I am its beneficiary. I entered the Church in a country where I could do so openly—no harassment in the street, no visit from agents of the state who had suddenly developed a tender concern for my soul. By contrast, my wife and her mother were baptized by an Orthodox priest in secret in an apartment in the late Soviet Union out of fear of persecution.

So when I say America leaves room, this is what I mean. Room for work, worship, family, for building a home, for seeking opportunities for advancement, personal, professional, familial, cultural. Saint Paul tells the Thessalonians to “aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands” (1 Thessalonians 4:11). The quiet life is not a lesser Christian life. For most of us it is where ordinary, daily sanctifications either grows or shrinks.

But a quiet and peaceable life has minimal conditions. It needs enough order that a father can teach his son the Creed in the morning without bombs going off and the freedom to do so without a knock on the front door. Collectively, enough liberty that a parish can worship without asking permission of men who treat religion as a hobby with incense, and enough order that the churches are not targeted by authorities.

No amount of liberty or order will automatically grant virtue. Plenty of people waste peace. Plenty use freedom to become softer, greedier, more distracted. Which is exactly why gratitude and self-government belong together. “All things are lawful for me,” Saint Paul says, “but I will not be dominated by anything” (1 Corinthians 6:12).

It’s a principle I think is true: A free people who cannot govern their appetites will eventually beg to be governed by someone else.

I know the pattern in myself. A man can receive a gift and turn it into one more reason to clench his jaw by lunchtime. It is almost as if gratitude has to become a discipline. “In everything give thanks” (1 Thessalonians 5:18) is not a Hallmark greeting card throwaway line, it’s about keeping gifts in perspective and ambition from turning ugly.

The same lesson keeps arriving in my own family’s life through ordinary things—bed shopping, car repairs, baby gear, the unromantic objects that run a household. They force the larger questions. What kind of home are we making? What still belongs to a leaner chapter we never closed? The physical world will not let you stay abstract for long. The Word became flesh (John 1:14). Grace comes in water, bread, oil, spoken words. Children learn by repetition long before analysis, which is why hearing Gregory recite the Creed matters to me. It is funny. It is also inheritance.

And inheritance is where patriotism turns serious or embarrassing. I have no interest left in patriotism as costume. I want the harder thing—gratitude strong enough to tell the truth, to admit sin without collapsing into contempt. A mature patriotism can say America has been foolish and unjust, and also that she has handed many of us something rare: enough liberty to seek God openly, enough peace to build a household, enough freedom that a Russian immigrant turned American citizen wife can love this country with tears in her eyes and teach her husband to see it clearly.

So the Fourth means less to me now as a pageant and more as a question. What are we doing with the freedom we’ve been given? Are we spending it on reverence, work, family, mercy, self-command—or on drift? Faith without works is dead (James 2:17), and so is civic gratitude that never reaches practice.

Tonight I am thankful for plain things. A wife who helped me see this country with clearer eyes. Children who will receive whatever I manage to embody. Work to do, a home to tend, a parish to belong to. The freedom to worship without asking permission, to order a household under Christ, to repent and to build.

Freedom was never the finish line. What it is for—what it has always been for—is virtue.

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P.S. Happy 250th birthday, America!

This is part of an ongoing series on Mormonism and Orthodox Christianity. Some of these posts have come out of my family history—my mother spent thirty years in the LDS Church, and my ancestry goes back a century and a half beyond that. I’ve been writing about what I found when I went looking for the ancient Church.

This one starts, as many true things do, with a closet full of beans.

Our family left the Mormon religion in 1983 after my mom had spent three decades as a member (and of my ancestry, nearly a century and-a-half).

As a faithful Mormon family, we did all the things we were supposed to: Sacrament Meeting, Family Home Evening, and Family Home Storage. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints teaches that all Mormon families keep food stored in case of a long-term disaster or job loss, and has done so at least since the 1930s. They even sell food storage kits.

In a video on the official LDS website, this is a matter of obedience: “We wanted to follow the commandments and get our food storage … If you want to follow the Prophet, just do it.” For the average Mormon, this is understood as a wise way to prepare for a disaster or job loss, but it is impossible to extract this “follow[ing] the commandments” from Mormon eschatology.

Mormon theology teaches that in the “latter days” of world history, Joseph Smith would re-establish the true faith in the world that had fallen away after the time of the Apostles. That day apparently came in the 1820s, and the Mormon scriptures teach that the Second Coming would shortly follow: “[Christ] will reign till he descends on the earth to put all enemies under his feet, which time is nigh at hand.”

Being premillennial, the LDS teach that Jesus will return to earth to install his own earthly rule (in Missouri)—but not before the Great Tribulation of the Apocalypse and the scarier portions of the Olivet Discourse come tearing through the earth with a vengeance. Living “saints” would have to endure such things, should they be unfortunate enough to make it that far into history. It is not surprising, then, that disaster preparedness would be a preoccupation of people who expect to be the last generation on earth.

You store food because the end is near and it’s going to be rough.

So we stored food.

When we left Mormonism and became evangelicals—a huge shift in most ways, but when it comes to the end times, this was not a large shift, really. We were taught a dispensational premillennial understanding of the end-times as evangelicals. Yes, Mormonism is premillennial, but there was one key difference: we believed in a pre-tribulational rapture. Before anything truly catastrophic happened on the prophetic timetable, Jesus would return and escort Christian believers to heaven so they would not have to endure the pains of the Great Tribulation.

The disaster preparedness may have been pragmatic, but we fully expected to be whisked away before the Tribulation, and so our stored surplus food was rendered unnecessary.

So for several years, we worked on eating through the Family Home Storage. The storage closet contained many of my toys—I was in the single digits—so when we weren’t eating the cooked beans, I was pretending the beans were quicksand and sinking my GI Joes in them. Our end-times theology didn’t change much. But our attitude toward it had.

Years later, I came to understand eschatology differently than in my childhood. Beginning with a careful study of Scripture, and then a survey of Christian history, followed by a humbling bow to the Orthodox Church’s authority-as-teacher, I came to understand the following as the sine qua non of Orthodox eschatology.

1. Jesus Christ Is Coming Again

The most fundamental expectation of the Christian Church is that Jesus Christ will come again. No matter the martyrdoms, the heresies, or the numerical setbacks, the Church has always expected that Christ would return with finality. This is so important it is enshrined forever in the Nicene Creed, the most important and central statement of faith of the Orthodox Church: “And he shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead.”

But the Church also sees the coming of Christ as something we taste in the present. Every time the Church celebrates the Divine Liturgy, Jesus Christ himself comes into the midst of his people in the power of the Holy Spirit, and is received in the Holy Eucharist. This is an eschatological event—where the fullness of Christ is made present in the Eucharist and in his people.

The end is something we eat.

2. The Kingdom of God Is Now—But What Is to Come Is Beyond Belief

While Mormonism and much of popular evangelicalism anticipate an earthly reign of Christ in the future, the Orthodox Church teaches that the kingdom of God is now. The reign of Jesus Christ is a present reality (Philippians 2:9), inaugurated at the ascension of Christ into heaven, where he sits down at the right hand of God. The so-called millennial reign of Christ in Revelation is understood as a spiritual reign from heaven, with the kingdom breaking through into the here and now.

And just as our Savior taught us in the Lord’s Prayer, we are to pray that God’s kingdom come on earth—not later, but now.

This doesn’t evacuate the future of its glory. What is to come is beyond imagination. But the Church is not a bunker. It’s a beachhead.

3. The Particulars of Revelation Aren’t Particularly Important

Ambrose Bierce defined the book of Revelation thusly: “REVELATION, n. A famous book in which St. John the Divine concealed all that he knew. The revealing is done by the commentators, who know nothing.”

It’s no minor factoid that the book of Revelation never appears in the liturgical readings of the Orthodox Church. We read from everything—Genesis to Job to Jonah, all the way through the New Testament’s Epistles and Gospels. But we never read from Revelation liturgically. Not because we reject it, but because Revelation was one of the most disputed books in the early Church canon—and while it is in the canon today, it remains a puzzling book. A range of opinions about its details has existed since the beginning, and various monks and individuals have proposed specific understandings of it. It is not unreasonable to suppose the book served an important purpose for its original audience and has since moved into a role testifying to the faithfulness of God through persecution and tribulation, no matter the characters at the helm of that persecution.

The train-schedule eschatology of Dispensationalism—complete with extensive wall charts—is foreign to Orthodoxy. That Christ is King, that he will come again, that he will vindicate his persecuted Church—these are the things the Orthodox Church is concerned with.

Funny, though: even though we don’t read Revelation in the services of the Orthodox Church, the services of the Orthodox Church look a lot like the book of Revelation. Revelation is a book of worship. The major elements are present at every Divine Liturgy, as we enter into the heavenly worship service mystically.

4. We Each Have Our Own Personal Eschaton to Face—and Preparedness Is Always Now

Hebrews 9:27 famously says: “It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgment.”

None of us is aware of when we will take our last breath. And we will answer for what we do in this life. How many millions of people have pondered an end-times scenario and instead found themselves laid in the ground without ever seeing a Great Tribulation? The average human dies an ordinary death, and we will all stand before God one day at the final judgment.

Paul writes: “Behold, now is the favorable time; behold, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2). John Chrysostom says Paul is “urging and compelling them to bestir themselves in order to lay hold of their own salvation.” Now.

We have only today. Tomorrow is not promised to any of us. We must repent now, and again, and again—until there is no “now” to repent in.

5. Yet We Paradoxically Live As If We Are Here in an Unending World

When an Orthodox Church is consecrated, it is consecrated unto the end of the world—“Keep this structure standing strong till the end of time, unshaken, and glorified in You.” We don’t set out to merely sojourn here — like we’re buying train tickets into eternity and have no interest in the present. We are pilgrims, but we still seek to establish an outpost of the kingdom of God in the present, and if possible, one that will last until the Second Coming of Christ.

Part and parcel of living now is the desire to see God’s kingdom manifest now. Chrysostom comments on thy kingdom come:

Seest thou how He hath taught us also to be modest, by making it clear that virtue is not of our endeavors only, but also of the grace from above? And again, He hath enjoined each one of us, who pray, to take upon himself the care of the whole world. For He did not at all say, ‘Thy will be done’ in me, or in us, but everywhere on the earth; so that error may be destroyed, and truth implanted, and all wickedness cast out, and virtue return, and no difference in this respect be henceforth between heaven and earth. ‘For if this come to pass,’ saith He, ‘there will be no difference between things below and above, separated as they are in nature; the earth exhibiting to us another set of angels.’

So we live, and pray, and hope that the kingdom is made visibly present now—that holiness and virtue are increased, and that the true worship of God is spread throughout the world as it is in the throne room of God.

The kingdom doesn’t descend from the outside while we store beans.

Conclusion

The canned beans are long gone. The G.I. Joes survived—until sold later in a yard sale. The closet is empty now, and the end of the world has not yet arrived.

Storing up provisions is not a bad idea, and all of us would be wise to take a cue from the Mormons in this regard. But the Orthodox Church does not obsess over end-times scenarios. As one of the most persecuted Christian groups in history, we know what it means to prepare for hard times.

But the grand testimony of the Church in her saints is that our greatest preparation for hard times is this: repentance, humility, and faith.

A young monk said to Abba Sisoes: “Abba, what should I do? I fell.”

The elder answered, “Get up.”

The monk said, “I got up and I fell again.”

The elder replied, “Get up again.”

But the young monk asked, “For how long should I get up when I fall?”

“Until your death,” answered Abba Sisoes. “For a man heads to his judgment either fallen or getting back up again.”

That’s Orthodox eschatology in one exchange. Not a wall chart. Not a food closet. Not a rapture.

The grand testimony of the Church in her saints is that our greatest preparation for hard times is simply this: just a man, getting up again.

Repentance, humility, and faith.

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Note: My apologies to Thelma “Granny” Geer, author of Mormonism, Mama, & Me. The title of this piece owes her a debt.

This article has been updated. It originally was published on the now-defunct On Behalf of All blog at Ancient Faith Blogs circa 2013.

June 1862—A Prophet Cornered

It’s June 1862, and a splinter community of Latter-day Saints is dug in behind dirt and desperation, waiting for the end of the world—or at least for the territorial militia to arrive first. Their prophet has been receiving visions. He has been writing letters to Brigham Young. He has been gathering followers. He has been gathering property.

And in at least one of his prophecies, he says something so big and audacious, it feels like it should belong in a dystopian film, not a family tree: If you are a son or daughter of Adam, I am now your leader.

Some of the followers try to leave. They want their things back—things that were “given” to the communal cause under the pressure of imminent apocalypse. But the camp doesn’t just say no, they detain people, making their own people into prisoners within their own settlement. Word gets out. The governor issues an ultimatum and a militia forms. The standoff collapses into violence, and Joseph Morris—the would-be prophet-king of the whole human race—ends up dead in the chaos.

This is usually told as a strange footnote in the history of American Mormonism: an obscure, short-lived confrontation in the Utah Territory in 1862. For my family, it’s not a footnote. It’s part of our inheritance—one of the earliest chapters in a long, complicated habit we’ve had for generations: We convert.

Not in the shallow sense—religion as a lifestyle tweak, a new community, a better playlist. I mean conversion as upheaval. As rupture. As “we can’t stay where we are, not honestly.” The kind of movement that costs you something, and sometimes costs you almost everything.

My great-great-great grandfather George Thompson and his family didn’t drift into “Zion” the way modern people drift into a new city. They traveled close to 5,000 miles from England to Utah because they believed the Mormon claim was not a private spirituality but a map of reality. They joined, they moved, they built, and somewhere along the line they ended up tangled in the Morrisite movement—one more schism in an already schism-prone frontier religion.

If you want a neat and tidy moral lesson here, I can give you the cheap version: people can be fanatics, and religion is a major driver of fanaticism.

Purported prophets can really be liars. Communities of faith can become coercive. It’s true. It’s also an easy judgment to make. It lets us stand above it all like a safe, modern narrator—shaking our heads at those weird 19th-century zealots while we sip on something cold.

But that’s actually missing the point.

The point is that the modern world—especially the American version—trains you to assume religion is basically a preference. A choice. A consumer menu. If we don’t like one thing, we can try another. If we outgrow a community, we can just “move on.” If a doctrine feels too sharp, we can sand it down and choose to believe whatever variation of that doctrine suits our fancy. If a practice feels too strange, we can just leave it behind.

My family story doesn’t let me pretend that’s what’s happening.

Because whatever else the Morrissites were, they weren’t casual. And whatever else my ancestors were doing, they weren’t browsing. They were staking their lives on something they believed was True—with a capital T—and that’s why their mistakes were dangerous, and why their devotion was costly, and why their conversions mattered.

And here’s the uncomfortable twist: I didn’t inherit this story as a warning about “those people.” I inherited it as a prelude to my own.

Today’s piece is a reflection based on an interview I did on The Areopagus Podcast with Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Pastor Mike Landsman on Ancient Faith Radio.

Conversion: An American Inheritance?

Growing up in an evangelical home, I sometimes felt like I was living in two religions at once. My extended family—cousins, grandparents, the larger web—largely remained Mormon. The culture and identity were there. And because my mother left Mormonism when I was a toddler, the differences were not theoretical in our home. They were daily. They were linguistic. They were about the very shape of reality.

• Mormonism says Jesus is our elder brother who lived righteously and showed us the way.

• Evangelicalism says Jesus is God incarnate.

To some, those sentences may look like they’re making similar points—but they’re not. They’re actually making very different points. And when you grow up hearing both in deliberate contrast, you learn early that theology isn’t academic—it’s the difference between two worlds.

I was two years old when my father died in a car accident. My mother was widowed with four children. And in the middle of the trauma of that loss, she became open—truly open—to something else. She converted to evangelical Christianity.

That conversion wasn’t merely “switching churches.” It was a change in the very grammar of God. She went, as I often put it, from seeing Jesus as our elder brother who did all the right things to help us do all the right things… to seeing Him as God incarnate. Not a creature elevated, not a moral hero with divine backing, but the eternal Word made flesh. This is no minor doctrinal adjustment, but an entirely different Christ.

And once we change Christ, everything changes downstream: salvation, the Church, Scripture, worship, what a human being even is.

So my childhood wasn’t merely “Bible time.” It was catechesis by contrast. My mother would read Scripture at breakfast, and when I’d ask a question, she’d sometimes stop herself mid-answer and say, Wait—that might be a Mormon teaching. And then she’d go study. Not to win an argument, not to prove something, but to tell her son the truth about God.

That’s where my long road “home” actually starts—not with an adult intellectual quest, not with my later zig-zags through Protestant traditions, not with Orthodox liturgy, not with some aesthetic romance about icons.

It starts with grief, with a widow. With the slow, costly work of unlearning and relearning who Jesus is.

My mother gave me a gift, though I didn’t understand it at the time: she taught me that conversion is real. Not therapy; not an upgrade. Real. The kind of thing that asks you to rebuild your house from the ground up.

The Protestant Pendulum: Or, How I Learned to Read the Reformers

I inherited her seriousness. As a teenager and young adult, I threw myself at evangelicalism with the intensity of someone who believed every word mattered—because I did believe that. I handed out Jack Chick tracts. I memorized apologetics. I was sure of just about everything. Later, I spent time in charismatic circles, waiting and listening for the gift of tongues. Later still, I became what we called a “cage stage” Calvinist—a young Reformed Christian so convinced of five-point Calvinism that it would have been a mercy to put me in a cage until I calmed down and got some sobriety.

I was probably pretty tiresome. Also, looking back, I was hungry.

The hunger showed itself especially through reading. I read the Reformers—particularly Martin Luther—and something shifted for me. Luther kept saying that baptism saves you. Not “baptism represents salvation” or “baptism is a symbol of your faith.” He kept saying what Saint Peter says it in the epistles: “Baptism . . . now saves you” (1 Peter 3:21). And suddenly the purely symbolic view of the sacraments—the “well, it’s just a memorial meal” approach—began to feel thin. Not wrong, exactly. Just thin.

I was sensing something the modern Protestant world had stopped sensing: that God might actually do something in the holy things. That He might really be present. That matter might, well, matter.

So I drifted into Anglo-Catholicism—that high-church Anglican tradition where you try to hold onto your Protestant identity while grasping for the liturgical weight and sacramental conviction of the ancient Church. You get the bells, the incense, the sense that something real is happening. You get to keep your Bible confidence. You get the both/and.

Except the both/and started to feel like neither/nor.

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The Wafer in the Trash: Or, When Symbols Aren’t Enough

Here’s where the theology got concrete for me. I was part of a small Anglican community. We took the sacraments seriously, but being Anglican put us in the position of having to reconcile our self-conscious efforts at “being catholic” with the historical reality of Protestantism inherent to the Anglican way of Christianity.

During this period, I was working a temp job as a janitor at an Assembly of God. One week I found a box of discarded communion wafers in the trash of one of the Sunday School classrooms—and week after week, I was there to clean up communion “leftovers” from this particular classroom. Apparently, this class was experimenting with more liturgical Christianity, because Sunday after Sunday there were leftover wafers, clearly intended as communion bread, designated to be tossed out by the janitor.

From the first discovery, the question appeared in my head with force: What do I do with this? I couldn’t throw it away, could I? Even though they weren’t a high church religious body with claims to Apostolic Succession, I couldn’t bring myself to toss it. It meant something deeply meaningful to them, and was intended to be connected with Christ’s institution of the Eucharist. Somewhere in my bones, I knew: you don’t toss away something holy like it’s a soggy napkin.

So I called my Anglican bishop, explained the situation, and got my orders. I was to consume it. Alone, reverently, in the Sunday School room, like someone who didn’t quite know what he believed about these particular elements, but knew he believed something special is in the Eucharist, and whatever this is, it is certainly intended to be a ritual Supper with our Lord.

I was on a low carb diet at the time, so this was no small sacrifice—I downed so many wafers and grape juice thimbles that summer!

As a Protestant, I had wandered into the territory of Catholicism—the conviction that the Eucharist is really Christ, not symbolically Christ—but I was trying to camp out in Protestantism, which kept insisting it was just bread, just memory, just a beautiful sign.

You really can’t live in both places. Growing up, the modern Protestant world had trained me to think that symbols are enough, that meaning doesn’t require presence, and that worship is primarily about what happens in your mind, not what happens in matter.

But the wafers in my hands said something different.

The Fear That Broke: Hawaii, Galatians 3, and the Mercy I Didn’t Expect

By this point in my life as an Anglican, I had read my way into believing something radical: the early Church still exists. Not as a memory, not as a beautiful ideal that we study and learn about from a distance. Still exists. With Apostolic Succession, with the sacraments, with the full liturgical inheritance.

That belief should have sent me running to the Orthodox Church. But it didn’t. Instead, it sent me running from the Orthodox Church for quite some time.

Because I was afraid.

And the fear had a name: works righteousness. I had been evangelical and Reformed long enough to absorb the Protestant anxiety about salvation by works. And from a distance, Orthodoxy—with its talk of theosis/deification, transformation, the healing of human nature through grace—sounded like an elaborate system of spiritual earning. Like you had to do enough, pray enough, fast enough, pull yourself up high enough to finally meet God halfway.

It sounded exhausting. It sounded like moralism dressed up in liturgy.

I was wrong. But I didn’t know it yet.

Then I visited an Orthodox parish a few months after I moved to Hawaii. A bishop was visiting, and he stood up to preach on Galatians 3—that classic Protestant proof-text about faith, not works, about the Spirit, about grace. And he preached the Gospel of God’s grace and mercy so clearly, so purely, so Christianly that it felt like something in me broke open.

He said—and I’m really relaying my memory’s impressions—that in Orthodoxy, we don’t view salvation as a legal contract we have to pay off. We don’t view it as a transaction where God demands a price and we have to scramble to meet it. We view it as the healing of our human nature by the grace of God. The deification of humanity. Theosis.

It’s not earning. It’s union.

When you’re sick, you don’t negotiate with the doctor about how much sickness you’re allowed to keep, you go to the doctor to be healed. And healing means the doctor’s medicine enters your body, does its work, and you’re restored to wholeness.

That’s what salvation is. Not a legal settlement. A healing.

And suddenly, the fear dissolved.

Not because I had figured out every theological detail. Not because I was ready to be Orthodox in the way a person is ready to be something after a committee vote. But because in that moment, I realized: this is what I’ve been looking for. Orthodoxy is the coherence I kept searching for in Protestantism. This is the sacramental realism I couldn’t quite articulate in Anglicanism. This is the Church that still exists, still carries the apostolic faith, still offers the fullness of Christ.

This is home.

A Decision Point: The Early Church Still Exists

People sometimes ask me: don’t you still feel like a convert? Aren’t you worried that you chose Orthodoxy, rather than being born into it? Like you’re somehow less of a “real” Orthodox Christian because you didn’t inherit it from your grandmother?

And Father Andrew Stephen Damick said something in our conversation that cut through all of that noise: Christianity started with converts.

Think about it. The Apostles didn’t grow up Christians. Peter didn’t attend an Orthodox liturgy as a child and then become an altar server and one day a priest. The early Church was entirely composed of people who had chosen to follow Christ, often at enormous cost. They converted from Judaism. They converted from paganism. They converted from false gospels. And their conversions weren’t timid intellectual movements—they were upheavals that cost them property, relationships, sometimes their lives.

Conversion isn’t less authentic than inheritance. It’s the pattern of Christianity itself.

But here’s what matters: true conversion isn’t brand-switching. It’s not “I tried that thing, it didn’t work, so now I’m trying this thing.” It’s the fundamental realignment of your life with Christ. It’s the moment where you encounter the fullness of the faith and it becomes—to use the language of Scripture—bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh. It becomes you. You can’t imagine being any other way, not honestly.

The Apostle Peter captured it perfectly: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

Not “Lord, I’ve compared the options and Orthodoxy seems optimal.” Not “Lord, I like the aesthetics of your Church.” But: to whom shall we go? There’s nowhere else to go. There’s no higher ground. There’s no other place where the fullness of Christ dwells.

That’s the place I’ve arrived at. Not because I’m a perfect Orthodox Christian—I’m not. Not because I have all the answers—I don’t. But because I’ve encountered something real. Something that can’t be upgraded from. Something that holds together the whole inheritance of the faith, from the Apostles to now.

My great-great-great grandfather George Thompson traveled 5,000 miles to find what he thought was Zion. His daughter ended up in a siege, and nearly was shot herself, before returning to the mainstream Mormon fold. My mother lost her husband and had to rebuild her faith from rubble. I zig-zagged through evangelical fervor and Reformed conviction and Anglo-Catholic longing to the calm, still waters of Orthodoxy.

All of it was looking for the same thing: a place where God is really present. Where the sacraments are really efficacious. Where the ancient faith hasn’t been watered down into a consumer preference or gutted of its sacramental meaning. Where you can finally stop auditioning religious identities and come home.

I found it. Not in a neat package. Not after a five-step program. But in the ancient Church, still alive, still singing the same psalms, still offering the same Christ.

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

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Often it takes twenty years. That is the timeline often cited by the monks of Mount Athos for a novice to acquire the mind of the Church.

Two decades of chopping vegetables, standing in the dark, submitting to a spiritual father, and having your ego systematically ground into dust before you can even begin to trust your own theological instincts. Twenty years of silence before you can reliably distinguish the voice of the Holy Spirit from the voice of your own pride.

We do not like that timeline. We live in America. We have Amazon Prime.

We read a copy of Metropolitan Kallistos (Timothy) Ware’s The Orthodox Church, watch three hours of aggressive YouTube apologetics, buy a prayer rope, and suddenly we feel entirely equipped to correct our priest on his liturgical rubrics. We want the phronema—the deep, intuitive Orthodox mindset—by next Tuesday, and think somehow we can download the ancient faith like a software update.

Metropolitan Saba, the primate of the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America, recently sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Ancient Faith Radio. If you haven’t tuned in, you should (see below). He is one of the greatest gifts to the Church in the Americas right now. He brings the gravity of the Middle East to the non-stop, anxious energy of our American religion.

Listening to His Eminence speak—or listening to him pray—is like witnessing a master physician diagnose a patient who didn’t even realize he is sick. The thing is, we are trying to build the ancient Church using American corporate tools and internet paranoia. Metropolitan Saba is gently pointing us toward a different way.

The Bunker and the Sons of God

There is a specific fear that grips many of us when we enter the Orthodox Church. It makes sense. We look out at the culture, and we see a secular acid bath. Everything is dissolving.

We look back at the Evangelical or mainline Protestant churches we left, and we watch them frantically adapting to the culture, compromising their theology into oblivion just to keep the seats full. We are afraid of doing it wrong. We are scared that if we loosen our grip for even a second, the Orthodox Church will slide into the exact same liberalism we just fled.

So we build a bunker. We take the ancient canons of the Church and we pour them over our heads like concrete. We scour the internet for the strictest, most severe monastic advice we can find.

Metropolitan Saba noted this exact phenomenon in the interview: priests are dealing with a rising tide of fundamentalism, largely driven by online lectures and social media algorithms that reward the more extreme voices online. He mentioned a common tale: a young man, deeply influenced by YouTube videos about Elder Ephraim, becomes visibly upset when his rigid, downloaded understanding of the faith is challenged by actual pastoral reality.

We bring our Protestant literalism with us, we just swap out a literalist reading of the King James Bible for a literalist reading of the Rudder.

This is the leaven of the Pharisees. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ unleashes his most devastating critique not on the pagans, but on the religious fundamentalists of his day. “They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them” (Matthew 23:4). When we turn Orthodoxy into a hyper-rigid legal code, we are tying up heavy loads. We take a faith designed to heal the soul and turn it into a checklist designed to crush it.

We forget the entire argument of the Apostle Paul to the Galatians. Paul writes that the law was put in charge to lead us to Christ. It was a guardian. It was a babysitter meant to keep us from running into traffic while we were still children. “But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a guardian” (Galatians 3:25).

God did not send his Son to make us perfect law-keepers. He sent his Son so that we might receive adoption. “Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’ So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child” (Galatians 4:6-7).

Metropolitan Saba understands this. His Eminence told his interviewer that we have to learn to respect the canons of the Church while simultaneously living in the liberty of the sons of God. The canons are not a penal code. They are medical guidelines.

A spiritual father does not read a manual and dispense uniform punishments; he looks at the specific spiritual sickness of the person sitting in front of him and prescribes custom medicine. You cannot get custom medicine from a YouTube channel—you need a relationship with an in-the-flesh priest.

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The Religious Vendor

The fundamentalism we battle is heavily fueled by the culture we live in.

Metropolitan Saba was born in Latakia, on the Mediterranean coast of Syria. He grew up in a world where the Orthodox faith was not a hobby, a fun thing to debate with friends, but a matter of survival. When he talks about the Middle East, he talks about a people who have endured economic collapse, war, and centuries of persecution. That kind of pressure produces a deeply collective culture. You survive because of solidarity. You survive because the Church is your family.

Then he came to America. The shock he describes is telling. In America, we do not have persecution. We have money. And because we have money, our default instinct is to turn the parish into a religious business.

We view the priesthood as a religious profession rather than a spiritual martyrdom. We run our parishes like vendors. We pay our dues, we expect a certain quality of liturgical service, and if the youth group isn’t performing up to our standards, we take our business elsewhere. The financial dimension dominates our ecclesiastical life. We have line-item budgets and strategic planning committees, but we lack the fierce, bleeding solidarity of the Christians who kept the faith alive under the Ottoman Empire.

We have organized the people of the Church, but we have individualized the faith. This is the great danger for those of us living in the wealthy West. We think our money protects us. But the witness of the Middle Eastern Christians is a glaring reminder that the truest spiritual resilience is not found in an endowment fund. It is found in a community that knows how to suffer together.

We have so much to learn from their courage, if we would only stop trying to run our parishes like corporate franchises.

The Corporate Merger

Nowhere is this corporate mindset more obvious than in how we handle the scandal of Orthodox disunity in America.

It is a glaring canonical failure. The ancient rule of the Church was simple: one city, one bishop. With time, the practice expanded to one diocese, one bishop, but the principle was the same: The bishop is the icon of Christ, the center of unity for the local eucharistic community. But look at any major American city today. We may have a Greek bishop, an Antiochian bishop, a Russian bishop, and an OCA bishop, all claiming neighboring zip codes, all operating parallel administrative structures.

It is an ecclesiological mess that violates the very canons we claim to hold so dear.

But our proposed solution to this problem reveals our underlying disease. Because we view the Church through the lens of American corporate structures, we treat pan-Orthodox unity like an impending corporate merger. We think the problem will be solved when the CEOs—the bishops—get into a boardroom in New York or Istanbul, sign a treaty, consolidate their assets, and announce a new organizational flowchart.

We wait for a top-down administrative fix. Metropolitan Saba takes this apart brick by brick. The Church is not a company. It is the Body of Christ. You do not unite a living body by signing a piece of paper. You unite it by living together.

If we want unity, we have to build it from the base. We have to activate our pastoral activities across jurisdictional lines. The Antiochian parish should probably invite the Greek parish down the street over for Vespers. The OCA youth group might need to run a food pantry with the Russian youth group. We have to exchange visits. We have to pray together. We have to actually stand at the same chalice and discover, through the messy, inconvenient reality of shared human life, that we are already one.

Unity is not an administrative achievement. It is a spiritual reality that has to be lived before it can be codified. As long as we sit in our respective ethnic or convert silos, complaining about the bishops on the internet, we are the ones perpetuating the division.

We want the quick fix. We want the corporate merger. We do not want to do the slow, unglamorous work of loving the parish across town.

The Medicine

We are in a massive moment of transition. Converts are flooding into the Church. The internet is funneling thousands of spiritually starved Americans toward the ancient faith. By some estimates, as many as 16,000 new converts were received in the United States at Pascha in 2026.

This is a profound gift. As Metropolitan Saba notes, these converts bring a serious, intense dedication that often wakes up the cradle Orthodox who may have been taking the sacraments for granted. There is new life pouring into our parishes.

But with that new life comes the chaotic, aggressive energy of American religion. We bring our literalism. We bring our impatience. We bring our desperate need to be right, our fear of the secular world, and our tendency to treat the Kingdom of God like a corporate franchise.

We want to skip the cross and go straight to the resurrection.

Orthodoxy does not work that way. The Church is a hospital, and the medicine takes time. It requires an American-born spiritual leadership rooted deeply in the tradition, and as Metropolitan Saba gently reminds us, that kind of leadership takes generations to cultivate. It cannot be rushed.

It takes twenty years to acquire the mind of the Church.

It takes decades of standing in the nave, submitting to the fasts, and keeping your mouth shut before the frantic, argumentative energy of the American convert finally burns off, leaving behind the quiet, unshakeable peace of the sons of God.

Stop checking your watch. Just take the medicine faithfully.

Listen to the discussion yourself here:

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If you start a new job and your boss immediately hands you a failing, multimillion-dollar project, we would call it a “baptism by fire.” It is a corporate cliché, a piece of shorthand for a steep learning curve or a highly stressful initiation.

But when St. John the Forerunner used the phrase in the Gospels, he wasn’t talking about a stressful Tuesday at the office—he was talking about a smeltering furnace. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire,” John warned the crowds (Matthew 3:11).

In the modern era, we tend to read the word fire as a metaphor for enthusiasm. Modern Christians want to be “on fire” for the Lord, which usually means having a really good time during the “worship music.” But as Fr. Stephen de Young and Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick frequently point out on their excellent Lord of Spirits podcast, the biblical writers weren’t using fire as a metaphor for warm fuzzies, but were instead using it as a metaphor for metallurgy.

A baptism by fire is a process of painful purification. When you refine gold or silver, you subject it to intense heat so that the impurities—the dross—rise to the surface in order to be skimmed off. The fire doesn’t destroy the gold; it destroys everything that isn’t gold. So spiritually speaking, a baptism by fire is the agonizing but necessary process of confronting our own weaknesses, burning away our self-deception, and emerging resilient. It is the crucible of spiritual warfare.

But how exactly does a Christian enter into this refining fire? And once we are in it, what keeps us from simply burning up?

A few weeks ago, we began a series on the Holy Mysteries. First, we gave a “field guide” to the sacraments of the Orthodox Church. Then we looked at why we baptize and commune children. Today, we arrive at the mysterious, fragrant, and heavily misunderstood reality of Chrismation.

With a little help from the hosts of the Lord of Spirits podcast, we are going to walk through how the Orthodox Church understands the anointing of the Holy Spirit, how it connects to ancient Israelite kings, and why your local parish is actually a localized invasion force.

Counting Sacraments?

If you ask a Roman Catholic how many sacraments there are, they will promptly tell you there are seven. If you ask an Orthodox Christian, an honest answer is perhaps a shrug, followed by, “At least seven?”

As the Lord of Spirits hosts amuse themselves by pointing out—and they are frequently amused—the concept of “sacraments” (or mysteries, as we prefer) isn’t as rigidly categorized in the East. Historically, we see the most rigorous definitions along these lines in the Orthodox Church in response to Western questions and conversations.

We know Baptism and the Eucharist are mysteries. But we also consider the blessing of water at Theophany, the tonsuring of a monk, and perhaps even the painting of an icon to be sacramental acts. But right at the center of our initiatory rites is Chrismation: the anointing of a new believer with a specially prepared oil—called Holy Chrism—that has been consecrated by the bishops of the Church.

For our Catholic and many Protestant friends, the equivalent rite is Confirmation. But there is a major logistical and theological difference in how we apply it. In the West, Confirmation is often delayed until the child is older and can articulate the faith. So a baby is baptized, but they are not “confirmed” in the Holy Spirit until they reach an “age of reason,” making Confirmation function almost like a graduation ceremony or a public coming-of-age profession of faith.

And as neat as a coming-of-age rite can be, Orthodoxy, however, anoints babies immediately after they are pulled from the baptismal waters. Why? Because we do not view the gift of the Holy Spirit as a diploma for passing a theology quiz. We view it as the equipping of a soldier, and this is signified in anointing them for spiritual battle.

You don’t send a soldier into the meat grinder of human existence and tell them you’ll give them their armor in thirteen years if they memorize the catechism. You outfit them immediately.

To listen to this episode yourself, check it out at Ancient Faith or below on YouTube:

The Anointed Kings and the Restricted Spirit

To understand what this oil is actually doing, we have to look backward. In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit was not poured out on everyone. The presence of the Spirit was targeted, specific, and often restricted to those who needed to fulfill an impossible task.

When you read through the historical books (such as 1-4 Kingdoms, frequently labeled in English Bibles as 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings), you notice that the Spirit rests on or abides with specific figures: prophets, priests, and kings. When Samuel anoints David with oil, the text explicitly links the physical oil with the Spirit’s descent: “Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David from that day forward” (1 Samuel 16:13).

This is the biblical imagery of anointing. The oil is the visible, physical vehicle for the invisible, spiritual reality.

But this anointing was also deeply tied to the concept of restoration. By the time of the Second Temple period, Jewish tradition was thick with Messianic expectations. Messiah (or Christos in Greek) literally means “The Anointed One.” Because Israel had been anointed in three main offices, they began looking for a Kingly Messiah (like David) to defeat their enemies, a Priestly Messiah (like Aaron) to purify the temple, and a Prophetic Messiah (like Moses) to speak the very words of God.

Interestingly, as Fr. Stephen explains, there was also a tradition regarding the Messiah ben Ephraim—a messianic figure whose specific task was the reconstitution of the lost tribes of Israel. The expectation was that when the ultimate Anointed One arrived, He wouldn’t just sit on a throne; He would put the shattered family of God back together.

The Messianic Marker

And that brings us to the banks of the Jordan River.

When St. John the Baptist is standing in the water, he isn’t just waiting for a nice guy with good moral teachings. He is waiting for a very specific set of markers for the One for whom he would prepare the way. In the Gospel of John, the Forerunner says, “I myself did not know him, but he who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit’” (John 1:33).

The Holy Spirit is the ultimate marker of the Messiah. When the Spirit descends like a dove and rests on Jesus, it is the cosmic signal that the Kingly, Priestly, and Prophetic Anointed One has finally arrived.

But here is where the story turns a corner and directly implicates you and me. The Anointed One does not keep the anointing to Himself. As the prophet Joel had predicted centuries earlier, the era of the Messiah would be marked by the Spirit being poured out “on all flesh” (Joel 2:28)—this is why this text is explicitly quoted by Saint Peter in Acts (2:17-21) to explain the miraculous events of Pentecost, making the Spirit extend to all believers, regardless of age, gender, or status.

What was once restricted to the kings and prophets of the Old Testament is now democratized in the New Covenant. The idea of anointing is no longer limited to a guy holding a scepter or wearing an ephod. Through the mystery of Chrismation, every single Christian is anointed.

When the priest traces the sign of the cross on your forehead, eyes, and chest with the Holy Chrism, you are being integrated into a new, restored, and transformed humanity.

You are being drafted into the royal priesthood.

The Mobile Temple

This alters our fundamental geography of “where” God lives.

For the ancient Israelite, the presence of God was intensely localized. It was in the Tabernacle. Later, it was in the inner sanctum of the stone Temple in Jerusalem. Second Temple Jewish thought was incredibly focused on this reality: the Temple was the singular overlap between heaven and earth.

The early Christians, however, recognized that Jesus Christ Himself was the new Temple. A living, breathing, walking, sacramental, sacrficial, new Temple—He is the ultimate, indestructible meeting place of God and man.

But it doesn’t stop with Jesus. Because we are baptized into Christ, and because we are sealed with His Spirit in Chrismation, the New Testament writers begin using astonishing language to describe normal, everyday people. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?” St. Paul asks the Corinthians (1 Cor. 6:19).

We are so used to this verse being used as a proof-text for eating your vegetables, limiting booze, and putting a damper on your cigar night with the boys, that we miss the sheer theological import of what Paul is saying. He is essentially telling a group of blue-collar workers and former pagans in a chaotic port city that they are now a walking, talking, dwelling place of God. We are to become a breathing Holy of Holies.

The purpose of the sacraments is not just to impart a legal status or give you a ticket to heaven. Chrismation turns you into a mobile Temple. We are meant to carry the presence of God out of the nave of the church building and into the grocery store, the boardroom, and the neighborhood.

The Intensity that Bears Fruit

This brings us back to the fire, and to what we are actually supposed to do with this anointing.

In Jeremiah 31, God promises a new covenant where He will put His law within us and write it on our hearts. The Holy Spirit is the fulfillment of this promise. The Spirit empowers Christians to actually keep the commandments of God. It is not merely a matter of intense, white-knuckled individual effort; it is a synergistic work of the Spirit operating within a willing human heart.

In Lord of Spirits, the “podfathers” emphasize that Christians are called to bring the Holy Spirit with them into the world to actively drive out evil. We are involved in spiritual warfare, seeking to replace demonic chaos with the presence of God.

But how do we fight? We don’t do it by casting magical spells or shouting at the sky. We do it through what St. Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

We may be tempted to read that list as a polite checklist for being a nice person. But in the context of spiritual warfare, the fruits of the Spirit are weapons of territorial conquest. They are the means by which we conquer the nations—love not swords; self-control instead of suicide bombs; gentleness instead of blows.

Toward the end of the show, Fr. Stephen really emphasized a challenge for all of us. That when we introduce profound, immovable peace into a chaotic, anxiety-ridden world, we are driving out a spirit of fear, whether that world is a neighborhood, a workplace, or your family life. When we exercise supernatural patience with someone who usually provokes us to anger, we are extinguishing the fire of demons and replacing it with the presence of God. This transformation occurs through everyday, microscopic efforts to love and be at peace.

Fr. Stephen continues:

So through just one person who’s honestly striving every day to follow Christ, both in keeping commandments and in repenting when not… One of the most powerful ways to completely transform a social dynamic is to apologize, to actually accept the blame for our failures, to actually be honest about them and apologize. So repentance is a big part of this, too. But one person doing that can transform a whole system, can transform a whole workplace, can transform a whole dynamic. And it’s when we do that that people see Christ in us. It’s when we do that, not win arguments, that people are drawn to find Christ in his Church, and as they do that they start to become Christians as well, and they start to make an honest effort to follow Christ. And some of us who have been Christians our whole lives but maybe aren’t making an honest effort right now are inspired by seeing those who do to start making further efforts ourselves.

And slowly, slowly, piece by piece, big systems can be transformed. If you don’t believe that’s true, I will once again point you to history, where a bunch of peasants and fishermen, in a backwater of the Roman Empire—it took them 300 years, but—completely transformed society, culture, politics, everything, just by each one of them being willing to follow Christ, whether that meant life or death, whether that meant glory or dishonor, but they made that honest effort every day. And through them the Spirit—the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God—came to fill a whole empire and change it. And it can do that again, but we don’t start by trying to stage some kind of Christian revolution. We’ve seen how that goes. We do that by each of us, in our place, in the place where God has put us—in the family he’s put us in, in the occupation he’s put us in, in the church community he’s put us in—making these everyday, day-to-day efforts to love, to be at peace, to experience real joy, to be kind, to be good, to be gentle, to be faithful, to exercise self-control.

It is worth repeating what he just said: This is exactly how the early Christians transformed the Roman Empire. They didn’t win by out-arguing the pagan philosophers or assembling a massive military force. They won because they were baptized in fire, sealed with the oil of kings, and lived as walking temples in a world that was dying for the presence of God.

They bore the fruit of the Spirit in the face of lions and gladiators, and in doing so, they drove the demons out of Rome.

The call to action for us is identical. You have been anointed with the same Chrism. You contain the same Spirit.

• Make an honest effort to follow Christ today.

• Forgive the person who slighted you.

• Tell the truth when a lie would be easier.

• Pray for your enemies.

In doing so, you aren’t just being a good citizen; you are taking back ground for the Kingdom of God, one peaceful interaction at a time.

For something a little different, I’d like to share this song from my pals in the Christian rap outfit, P.I.D., “The Crucible.” If nothing else, it will give you a soundtrack for this message:

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Heresy is rarely original. It’s usually just a couple of ancient errors duct-taped together by someone who thinks they are the first person in 2,000 years to finally read the Bible correctly.

Recently, a commenter stopped by my blog to drop off a manifesto or two. It was a theological yard sale. The author had taken 3rd-century Sabellianism (Modalism), duct-taped it to 19th-century Hyper-Preterism (the idea that all prophecy, including the Second Coming, was fulfilled in AD 70), and littered the whole thing with enough emojis to make a teenager dizzy.

He confidently informed me that Trinitarians share a heresy with Islam and Jehovah’s Witnesses—two sides of the same heretical coin. He bolstered his Christology with a theologically rigorous use of the flexed bicep emoji, and he let me know that anyone waiting for the Second Coming is a fraud.

Normally I would not give much time to refuting such an argument, and even here my refutation is much shorter than it could be—but I have encountered both the Christological errors and the bizarre redefinition of the Gospel many times over the years in a variety of places.

Because while this might look like a digital clown show, the root of these errors is actually quite common.

Here is the problem: Heresy—which literally means “to choose” one’s own path apart from the historic Church (derived from the Ancient Greek haíresis, which literally means “choice” or “thing chosen”)—always shrinks God. It reduces the eternal, relational God of the Trinity into a lonely monad who just wears different “masks” (Father, Son, Spirit) depending on the era.

And it reduces the cosmic, death-trampling Gospel of Jesus Christ into a localized Roman military campaign.

Both of these errors stem from a failure to understand the scale of who our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ is and what He came to do.

The “Flesh Suit” Christology

Let’s look at the appeal of this for a moment. The Trinity is, by all accounts, an incomprehensible mystery. It defies our categories, and our simplistic metaphors we use to explain it. It is intellectually much easier to shrink God into a single guy wearing three different masks. It feels like solving a math problem.

The author doubles down on this simple math, claiming that Jesus is just the Father wearing a human body. He writes: ”Jesus is only a son by virtue of the fact that the human flesh that the SINGULAR GOD occupied belonged to God... not a second or different person!!”

We’ve touched on this before, but it bears repeating because this logic falls apart in light of the Gospel narratives. If Jesus is just the Father in a flesh suit, the New Testament becomes some kind of bizarre Divine Ventriloquist theater.

When Jesus cries out on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), is He just talking to Himself to put on a show? The author quotes John 14:9 (”He that has seen me has seen the Father”) but ignores John 14:11, where Jesus says, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.” There is a clear distinction of persons being made by our Lord.

Historic Christianity teaches that God is one in essence (ousia) but three in person (hypostasis). As St. Philaret’s Catechism puts it: “The Father is true God, the Son equally true God, and the Holy Ghost true God; but yet so that in the three Persons there is only one Tri-personal God.”

They share the exact same divine nature, will, and power, which is why seeing the Son is seeing the perfect image of the Father. But they are distinct persons. Different conditions do not equal different persons, but eternal relations (unbegotten, begotten, proceeding) do.

St. Athanasius didn’t endure five exiles from home to defend a “flesh suit” theology. He defended the Trinity because if Christ is not the eternal Son of God, our salvation is null and void.

The “Gospel Wasn’t the Resurrection” Absurdity

Once you have a lonely, single-person God playing dress-up, you have to rewrite the rest of the story to fit. And here is where the commenter goes entirely off the rails, claiming: “THE GOSPEL JESUS PREACHED WAS NOT DEATH BURIAL & RESURECTION ...HE HARDLY EVER MENTIONED IT!”

This is historically and scripturally illiterate.

Jesus explicitly predicted His death and resurrection repeatedly (Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34). Furthermore, Saint Paul defines the Gospel with absolute, undeniable clarity in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4: “Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you... that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day.”

The AD 70 Trap

This redefinition of the Gospel is necessary for his final trick: Hyper-Preterism. He claims that the “end of the world” and the “days of vengeance” were entirely fulfilled in the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The earth that was to burn up was just “a people -> Israel NOT a planet!!”

I get the psychological appeal of this. Waiting for Christ to return and fix this broken world is exhausting. Living in the tension of the “already, but not yet” is hard. Hyper-Preterism is a cheap way out—if it all ended in AD 70, you don’t have to wait or hope anymore.

Did Jesus prophesy the destruction of the Temple? Yes, absolutely (Matthew 24, Luke 21). There are aspects of preterist interpretation in some Orthodox holy fathers, but the Church has always understood that the events of AD 70 were a localized judgment and also a type (or a foreshadowing) of the final judgment.

But Hyper-Preterism—the claim that all prophecy was fulfilled in AD 70—is a heresy that guts the Christian hope.

If the Second Coming already happened in AD 70, then the resurrection of the dead already happened. If that’s true, then death has not been defeated, the cosmos has not been restored, and we are still in our sins. Some Gospel.

As St. Paul warns in 2 Thessalonians 2, we are not to be deceived into thinking the Day of the Lord has already fully come. The Creed we recite every Sunday is clear: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.”

The Second and Glorious Coming of our Lord did not happen in a fly by night operation in AD 70. He did not wrap things up yet.

The Rubble or the Empty Tomb?

Why does this matter?

• If the Gospel was just about God taking “vengeance” on Jerusalem in AD 70, then Christianity is just a historical footnote about Roman siege warfare.

• But we believe in a Gospel where the eternal Son of God took on our human nature, descended into Hades, shattered the gates of death, and rose on the third day so that we might be united to God.

The author’s theology shrinks God into a lonely actor and shrinks the Gospel into a localized history lesson.

We belong to a Church that offers a cosmic, eternal, death-defeating reality. We don’t need to invent a new theology in the comment section. The saints already bled for the true one.

Stick with the Holy Fathers.

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