This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Whole Cloth Faith, or Don't Pull on That Thread

I still feel the need to clarify, at least for myself, a response to the query as to why, if we're all Christians anyway, anyone would need to become Orthodox, even if Orthodoxy is the "fullest expression of Christianity." The easy answer is to fall back into the so-called "ortho-fundamentalist" response and simply state that no one outside the Orthodox Church is, strictly speaking, Christian. But I have yet to see that that answer itself is actually an Orthodox answer. On the other hand, the "God will save us by our own individual lights" response is somehow less than satisfying as well because it so easily plays into the pluralistic relativism of our modern Christian culture (which itself just mirrors the secular culture).

It would be much more satisfying to go toe-to-toe in respectful debate with the former conservative church of Christ preacher I once knew each of us defending the thesis that ours was the only true Church. At least there we would have clear markers agreed upon in advance. But in the end it would be wholly artificial and academic. And though in this dialogue we both would clearly communicate with one another--thus making it a successful dialogue--neither of us would likely move from our own positions.

I still don't know if I've lit on a way of expressing why becoming Orthodox is such a fundamental necessity, nor whether my way of expressing that reality will be either persuasive or clarifying. But I'll give it a shot.

The best way I can think of to express it is this: Orthodoxy is all of one cloth. You cannot become convinced of Orthodox beliefs and not also take on all of the life that Orthodoxy gives and obligates one to in those beliefs. This was exemplified for me in a response by one of my professors to my biography of Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim Rose that I happened to have on my desk in my office when the professor stopped by. He expressed bewilderment as to why someone who wanted to become Orthodox (and he claimed to know a little about Orthodoxy) would take on a new name, grow a beard and become a monk. Wouldn't it be much more simple, and authentic, if one simply took on the beliefs and that was that? Why the "dressing up" and "playacting"?

It seems to me that Father Seraphim crystallizes quite well what I'm trying to express here. Father Seraphim knew that on becoming Orthodox he not only had to take on new beliefs, but had to take on a new life. So he began to follow the Church's fasting rules. He ceased to have sexual relations with his gay partner, who himself was also Orthodox and had brought Father Seraphim to Orthodoxy, despite that partner's assurances that homosexual practices and Orthodoxy were compatible. Father Seraphim knew that on becoming Orthodox he wasn't just falling in line on correct beliefs, he was falling in line on correct living as well.

And I should clarify something important here. Father Seraphim was received into Orthodoxy by chrismation, and not only that but was received into the Orthodox Church in the very traditionalist Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. His baptism, then, was accepted as valid, and was "filled up" by the sacrament of chrismation. Thus he himself, and his bishop, accepted that he was a Christian when he became Orthodox.

But also of importance, when Father Seraphim took on the Orthodox way of life, he did so as a Russian Orthodox believer. That is to say, the Orthodoxy Father Seraphim lived was richly embued with the many centuries of Russian experience as Orthodox. His Orthodoxy was Orthodoxy, but it was incarnated as a Russian Orthodoxy. So he learned Russian and Slavonic--and became so fluent in Russian that he was mistaken for a native speaker. His saint exemplars were Russian saints. He knew that Tradition was a living thing, a thing one received from a living person and a living community and which life one emulated and took on as one's own. Did Father Seraphim appreciate other traditions? Definitely. Indeed, one of his important tasks was the search for reliable information on saints of the pre-Schism West, and he translated St. Gregory of Tours' Vita Patrum toward that end. But you could no more take away the Russian traditions from Father Seraphim's Orthodoxy anymore than you could the very substance of the Orthodox Faith. It didn't make specific Russian traditions on par with, say, the Nicene Creed or the Holy Eucharist. But it did mean there was no other way to take on Orthodoxy than by way of the living tradition wherein one was received into the Orthodox Church.

In other words, Orthodoxy is a whole cloth. One cannot pick and choose and cobble together an idiosyncratic Orthodoxy that suits one's own personal tastes. "Oh, I'll make the sign of the cross, but I won't venerate icons." Or: "I really like the hours of prayer, but I want to keep my traditional Buddhist meditative practices, too." Orthodoxy is not a religion a la carte. It is whole cloth. One does not pick and choose, because the moment one starts to pick at a thread and pull, the whole starts to unravel. One cannot be Orthodox from the bleachers. One has to strap on the pads and get down in the mud, to sweat and strive with fellow Orthodox as Orthodox.

Please don't misunderstand: it's not as though one is stuck in the narrow ethnic expression of Orthodoxy wherever one happens to be, or that one can never take on any traditions and cultural practices from other Orthodox. Especially here in America at this time in the growth of Orthodoxy in our country, we are in an artificial situation of uncanonical jurisdictions. If the Russian revolution would not have happened, we would already have been well on the way to establishing an American Orthodox Church, which, though our initial customs would have been much more Russian, would eventually take on unique aspects of the various regional cultures in America. (Koliva with Lousiana Hot Sauce, maybe? Heaven forfend!)

But I do want to stress that when one likes the way a coat looks and feels, one doesn't just go around wearing the left sleeve only. That's not really wearing the coat. You may like all of the coat, you may be convinced that the coat is the best thing going and that anyone who truly wanted to be warm would wear the coat, but until you put the whole thing on, you're just walking around uncommitted and not really actually clothing yourself in the coat. And if you start picking at that thread you think is loose and ought to go, you'll end up unravelling the whole thing and have nothing with which to shield oneself from the cold.

Posted by Clifton at February 4, 2005 06:40 AM | TrackBack