Gifts Of The Christian East

And: The Trump Rally, Gad Saad, Smartphones & Fertility, AI & Preaching

Detail of ancient icon of St. Peter and St. Paul

A reader passed on to me yesterday this wonderful reflection by Constance T. Hull on Catholic Exchange about what she has learned from Eastern Christian spirituality, and from Living In Wonder. Excerpts:

Seeing the world through the eyes of faith in the supernatural is what Christians have done through the ages, but too many—especially in the Western Church—jettisoned the supernatural and preternatural in favor of seeming more reasonable to a culture devoted to science. We are uncomfortable with anything that cannot be controlled or rationalized away. We have placed God in a box of our own making.

Thankfully, this is not authentic Christianity. Being Christian is extremely weird, which is wonderful because it means that we are immersed in a cosmic story that is taking place around us within the material universe and the immaterial realm. Even more amazing, this spiritual reality spills over into our own lives in astonishing ways.

I reached a point about 7 years ago when I could no longer hold onto my super rational version of the Catholic Faith. I was a Thomist without a heart. There are many Thomists whose faith is heart and mind, but I wasn’t one of them. Strange things started happening to me that I could not explain. I experienced many dreams—some so extraordinarily vivid that it was as if I was there—that came true. I was given warnings and missions.

At the time, I didn’t know how to talk about these dreams. I felt crazy and I knew most people around me—including clergy—wouldn’t believe me. After all, we have been told our entire lives that extraordinary spiritual gifts are only reserved for the saints. It turns out this is a falsehood perpetuated by those who overly rationalize our faith. I am not a saint. I am not even close to extraordinarily holy, and yet, the Lord has done incredible things in my life that I don’t deserve and in the lives of those around me.

She goes on:

After my reasoned and controlled—and rather lifeless—faith collapsed, I started to see that this is not what we are called to in the Church. We live in a time of utter cultural disintegration. The Church has failed in her evangelical mission in the West because we want to go along to get along rather than live the fullness we are called to in Christ. I started to look for others who see the world from a supernatural perspective and who are reading the signs of the times because they seem hard to find in the Western Church outside of the charismatic movement.

I was unexpectedly led to multiple Orthodox Christian writers, including Jonathan Pageau, who is reclaiming a symbolic understanding of the world, Rod Dreher, whose writings on re-enchantment and experiences are somewhat similar to my own, Martin Shaw, with his mythological and literary understanding, and Paul Kingsnorth, who writes on wild saints and the Machine. While I would not leave Catholicism for Orthodoxy for theological reasons, I firmly believe that both Eastern Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have preserved a way of seeing the world that the Western Church desperately needs today.

Rod Dreher wrote in his most recent book, Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, “…we have entered an era in which the Western church desperately needs to taste the medicine preserved in the Eastern church.” St. John Paul II wrote in Ut Unim Sint, “the Church must breathe with both her lungs,” referring to the Western and Eastern halves of the Church. The West is suffering from a collapsed lung and needs the Eastern lung to help breathe new oxygen into it.

The Western Church has jettisoned too much of her heritage in order to belong to the world. The Eastern Church has maintained its ancient liturgies, mystical prayer, supernatural vision, and asceticism. In fact, the Eastern Church can help the Western Church reclaim asceticism from our half-hearted forms of fasting and penance on top of helping us see with supernatural vision once more. We are meant to see God in our every day lives in a supernatural way, rather than reducing everything to science. We are called to full union with God through theosis in the Eastern tradition or divine intimacy and mystical union in the Western tradition. He gives us gifts that help us to see more clearly, but they are uncomfortable and weird.

Read it all — it’s great! The thing I love about it is that Hull did not abandon her Catholicism; rather, she has found it enriched by the insights of the Christian East. This is what I hope most of all that Living In Wonder will do for readers. Oh sure, if people finish this book and say, “I want to go visit an Orthodox liturgy,” then I will be thrilled! Not gonna lie about that. But above all, I want all my readers, whatever their faith tradition, to develop a deeper, more transformative relationship to Christ, and to God’s enchanted world. To that end, we Christians who are part of Eastern traditions have a lot to offer our Western brothers and sisters in their crisis (a crisis which we can’t escape, because Orthodox countries are also in the thick of liquid modernity.)

I noted that in the comments section of Solène Tadié’s interview with me at National Catholic Register, there were a few knotheads who can’t engage with my message without trashing me personally as someone who left the Catholic Church. Too bad. It doesn’t bother me, but it makes me sad for them. Such miserabilists. Me, I’ll take truth wherever it appears. If a Protestant or a Catholic can teach me something about how to love God more completely, and to follow Christ more faithfully, then I won’t convert to Catholicism or Protestantism, but I’ll still thank the Lord for the gift. I’m Orthodox, but I’m not mad about it.

Newsletter continues below for subscribers…