I’m sitting in a restaurant just north of the Hagia Sophia, the air redolent of sea salt and the death cries of the Janisarries. Then, Pink Floyd’s "Wish You Were Here" emerges from the speakers. It surprises me. It’s a gut-punch of a song that usually leaves me a wreck, ever since my brother Jonathan died in ’87 while I was stationed in Pearl Harbor. He had this album in his CD player when I returned home from Hawaii and visited his empty room. After he died, the world felt wrong; and this tragedy a jagged piece of glass causing me and my Mom and Dad to experience an intense, confused, and enduring exsanguination of the soul. During that time so many years ago I wished my brother and God were here. Still do.
Istanbul is a place where the air is heavy with history. I wasn’t planning on coming here on this international flyabout, but Trump’s war in Iran forced cancellation of one of my flights to SE Asia, because it would have taken me into the Gulf States for a connection; so I had to reroute to avoid flying over Iranian airspace. Istanbul is also the seat of the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, a religion I have been touched by in an unexpected and powerful way, and which all began two years ago.
Fate conspired to have me arrive on a Saturday, the day before Holy Pascha. So, it seemed as kismet that I should walk up to the Fener-Balat area on Sunday morning and attend the Agape Vespers at the Hagios Georgios Church. So I did, fueled by a simit and double espresso. It was very powerful, very moving, and I was grateful to see the EP, Bartholomew I, in person. Interesting fact - Bartholomew, known as the “Green Patriarch,” for his work in environmental activism, was awarded the 2025 Templeton Prize.
I was a creature of the Analytic School—crisp, tight, and suspicious of anything that didn't smell like a coherent syllogism, nourished by brute verifiable facts. I wasn't an atheist, never was—those people always struck me as too (ironically) "holier than thou" in their ill-reasoned certainty—but I was a rational agnostic who thought the Abrahamic deity had a hell of a lot of explaining to do.
Standing here now, 64 years into a finite life and becoming more aware every day, with the miles of a thousand trail runs and hikes hammered into my body, and the ideas of so many thinkers whispered into a brain which needs to listen more, that I’ve spent my life dancing around looking for and struggling to prove and justify the Holy. As a rationalist I was looking for "God the Explanation." I should have been looking for "God of the Infinite Embrace"—the arc that contains the project of scientific inquiry itself which, to this point, has been an epistemological keystone; and yet it is very clearly limited in its domain of inquiry, in its methodology, and in its capacity to address teleological questions.
My pathway into Eastern Orthodoxy didn’t start with a bold revelation or a supernova of insight; it started with the cadence of thudding footfalls while training on the dirt of Nassahegan with the voice of David Bentley Hart and others in my ears. Listening to Hart and Tyler Cowen trade rapid-fire erudition rounds on everything from Orioles baseball to Heidegger, to New Testament, to Baroque music to Death, etc was like witnessing two friendly masters sparring, and delighting in the enterprise. Hart, with his fifteen languages and relentless deconstruction of the "blind watchmaker" version of God, gently directed me toward an idea that was only lingering, unformed at the periphery: that God isn't a "thing" among other things, but the Infinite Ocean of Being.
For an old student of the Medieval Scholastics and the Analytic School, the appeal was deeply cerebral because of the clear contrasts. I began to see that Orthodox theology is undergirded by a fierce Neoplatonism. It reflects a "Chain of Being" that doesn’t treat the world as a machine, but as a Thought that God is thinking. This is where Ian McGilchrist comes in, though I didn't know it yet. We’ve become a society dominated by the left-brain—the "Machine," as Paul Kingsnorth calls it—obsessed with efficiency, commodification, and objectification of human. We’ve lost the right-brain’s capacity for distilling Truth from the mythopoetic, the holistic, and even the silent.
Orthodoxy offers a rejection of this clinical, algorithmic, dangerously accelerated, toxically literalist world. It leans into a more contemplative, even mystical, “Apophatic” theology—the idea that the Godhead is utterly inscrutable and beyond category. If you try to pin God down with human language, you’re tilting with knights of ether. Words like “Power,” “Knowledge,” “Good,” “Evil” are artifacts of a capacity to symbolize which is only 100K years old. A blink. And yet this ineffable God we worship is praised within the construct of ancient, deep, mysterious, and sacred rituals. Ritual that has been preserved in the same state for Ages and Ages, and ritual that brings order to sometimes chaotic lives.
Language is a tool for the discrete, but God is the meta-linguistic "Pure Act." This is the "Deep Magic" of ontological inevitability. You stop looking for a bearded anthropomorphized Voluntarist God who "flexes a muscle" or “points a finger” to stop a car crash and you start seeing a God of pure Idea, pure Experience, pure Love, whose “Power” is merely a tangent of His Omniscience. An inevitability. I’m reminded of Aristotle’s Metaphysics , “All men by nature desire to know.” We all want to participate in the big Thought.
Seen this way it casts the bog standard “Omnipotence” attribute in a far different light. One I like. And in understanding the limitations of language and ceding to humility in the face of a truly ineffable Ontological Primitive, you see your way to taking another angle at classical Theodicy. In fact, the problem of suffering and evil is probably the most frequently deployed justification for atheism, ever. And it is not necessarily irrational to think this way if you don't push beyond our constrained and imperfect human faculties. Isaiah 55:8 nails it with “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,...”
As Aquinas argued, God’s knowledge is the cause of things. To "know" a possibility is to give it being. In this light, evil isn't a choice God makes to "permit.” I found echoes of this in the Muslim Sufi poet and theologian ibn al-Arabi’s panentheism—the idea that the world is a mirror for the Divine, yet the Divine remains hidden behind the veil of its own light.
One of the most significant pivots for me was moving from seeing God as an "Infinite Doer" to an "Infinite Knower". If God is beyond time and space, then time doesn't matter "beyond it." God knows all of history as a single, eternal "Now." Because God is a single unchangeable now. Kind of like a photon. As Abbé Faria taught Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo, true power isn't brute force; it’s the perfect knowledge of how the the Logos unfolds.
But OK. That is all head. All brain. Those words are just kindling and cotton in wait for a firestone, a catalyst to inflame a boundless potential domain of Love and Awe and Humility and Gratitude. For me, that catalyst was the Orthodox Divine Liturgy. It’s not "three tunes and a Ted talk" as the standard Protestant service is sometimes teased. It’s an initiation. When I walked into Holy Trinity in New Britain that Sunday morning in February of ‘24, Fr. Philip Beiner—a former lawyer and intelligence professional, presiding—I felt a sensory bridge back 2,000 years. The smell of incense, the darkness, the heavy weight of the Byzantine icons, the monophonic chanting—it was sacred. Truly sacred. It was a denial of the austere, perfunctory, and antiseptic reality within which I, we all, currently reside.
I thought back to a winter night, Christmastime, at King’s College Cambridge many years ago now. I had stood in that candlelit stone darkness, flames fluttering, incense wafting, people in big hats and richly colored vestments walking somberly atop the ancient rock floors, and suggested to Carol, my wife and partner at the time, about how a 16th-century peasant who, by day, worked catching eels in the nearby fens, would walk in and just "know" there was majesty here. That God was here. There would be no question. Because the beauty and impact would have been so far beyond his conception. At the time, I felt nothing spiritual; I was too smart after all.
But in the Liturgy that day, the "proposition" gave way to "disposition." And in that moment as I walked into the nave and sat down, my eyes welling up for reasons that confused me, I muttered to myself, "Oh. Here He is." And I meant it. So very powerful. That was well over two years ago and I remember the experience like it was yesterday.
I would be utterly remiss if I didn’t talk a little about the church I am attending. Where I live, in Burlington, CT, I have 4 x Orthodox churches within 20-25 minutes of me. Three in the Orthodox Church of America (OCA): Holy Trinity in New Britain, Saints Cyril & Methodius in Terryville, All Saints in Hartford; and one Russian Orthodox Church, St Panteleimon, in Hartford. My first exposure to the Divine Liturgy, that powerful experience I described above, was at Holy Trinity. But I wanted to experience others as well. So, my next stop was Ss Cyril and Methodius, presided over by Fr John Hopko. I knew the Hopko name because Fr John’s dad, Fr Thomas Hopko, Memory Eternal, was a powerhouse in the formation of the OCA, an important and gifted theologian, seminarian, and teacher. Fr Tom is a name known by everyone in these circles. He gifted us hours and hours of Orthodox material which has proved to be critical in my own nascent formation. The only criticism I have is that he could have probably said everything he needed to say in those podcasts using 33% fewer words. But I listened with nothing but respect and gratitude. And often a smile at his unstoppable loquacity.
I later learned that Fr John is very much his father’s son. He is so clearly full of the Love of God, the love of the faith, and the love of his parishioners. And he likes to actualize that Love through words. Lots of them, and in many directions because he has so many domains of expertise and interest: Orthodoxy, History, Fly-fishing, US Politics, International Relations, Family, others. He also has a point a view on religious practice. A sense of a right way and wrong way to be one of the faithful. His Five Part heuristic (and I paraphrase) is basically: “Say your prayers. Come to Church. Read the Bible. Love your neighbors. Participate in the Sacraments.” All that is spot on. No issues from me. Do all that and you’ll live a better life on many fronts. But bring in a “Yes, but what about…X?” or “If that’s true then…isn’t it the case that X” or “Why does the church believe…X?” You get a sigh, maybe a patient shrug, or sometimes (and I’ve told him this), you get what I really love, which is the surly and pugnacious Fr John.
This is funny and true. During my first visit to Ss Cyril and Methodius I had sent a note to Fr John telling him I would be attending the service. It was a wonderful service, even though I still had no idea what was going on. It was soon after Pascha, as I recall. Afterwards people venerated the icons, received the priest’s blessing and cleared out. I just sat in the back and waited until he came out. Well, after I introduced myself, I launched into some stream of pretentious polysyllabic incoherence ending with saying something about "the very clear influences of Proclus’ and Iamblicus' philosophy on Orthodox theology." He became somewhat huffy and grumbled, “It just gives us a language to use.” He was in a mood and I think I set him off. Well, I didn’t show it, but it delighted me. I thought, “Here’s a man that has an opinion, isn’t afraid to lay it down, and that there is a depth of mind and disposition in there that has considered a lot of hard edged theological questions. Many more than I have. I like this guy.”
So here I am, an "ecclesial outlaw," living a life that doesn't quite fit the "celestial HOA rules" of rigid Eastern Orthodoxy and I understand that. I’m a "C-grade" practitioner at best, currently sitting in the Divine Liturgy without taking part in the sacraments. I read scripture (not enough, probably), I pray twice daily. I fast (kind of). I do my best to Love and show compassion to all (poorly, probably). I still struggle with Pride, with Tolerance, with giving Grace. My language can be salty, my entendres double, and my disposition toward Humanity writ large less than kind. But, as Gregory of Nazianzus suggested, faith isn't a prize for the perfect; it's a hospital for the broken. At least my Mom thinks I have greatly changed since attending church. She told me. But then it makes me wonder if she's thought I've been a total asshat for the first 62 years.
I’ve spent decades running through woods, climbing up mountains, and trodding upon the corridors of power. I’ve seen enough of the "common sense" basic Scientistic and Materialistic interpretation of the world to know it is empty. Plenty of knowledge, not enough meaning. My pathway to Orthodoxy has been a slow-motion collision with a Truth that finally makes the white noise of the world coalesce into a song. Call it enchantment.
All of that as it is. I may be walking a bit crookedly, and I still have more questions than the Liturgy has candles, but I finally think I know which way the grain of the universe runs. I'm no longer just an observer of the created; I’m a participant in the Thought God is thinking. It’s a rough road, but it’s the only one that feels real.
Thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment