On Turning Aside
Life is not hurrying on to a receding future, nor hankering after an imagined past. It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush.
—R. S. Thomas, “The Bright Field”
My grounding in faith was unstable.
Which for walking in faith is all good.
My parents did their best, I believe; I wasn’t wise enough to ask my father before he died. I may yet wonder aloud with my mom on this subject. But the facts of the case are the usual suspects of an American birth and childhood: baptism, church attendance, minimal direct comment.
We talked in our family more of books and baseball than of religion. We watched a lot of television. I had an awesome dog, and we had many cats, usually at once. I played street football, rode a banana-seat bike, kissed the girls, went to college, got and lost jobs, found work.
Borne by United Methodist–meets–Roman Catholic waters and fire, I’ve done church with tea-with-oat-milk Protestants and preachers of the prosperity gospel, evangelicals and charismatics, conservative Episcopalians and the Anglicans. I’ve prayed the prayer, prayed it with others, been sprinkled, been dunked, been disgraced. Married and divorced, I have loved and lost, and the poet’s mostly right on that.
Guy can’t hold a religion job, you might think, and you wouldn’t be wrong.
But I’ll see your smarty-snarky, Seinfeldian take and raise you a Defoe, Chesterton, and Eliot—Daniel Defoe, whose shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe faces death more than twice before seeing his plan isn’t working; G. K. Chesterton, who describes how we “walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place”; and T. S. Eliot, who finds that our explorations end when we “arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”[1]
Sometimes the shortest possible distance between two points isn’t a straight line.
The first time I walked into Saint Spyridon Greek Orthodox Church in Loveland, Colorado, there was no scent of intensity. It took me longer to write that sentence than it would have to say hello to the people there.
Oh, I thought, It’s that kind of church.
About half were elderly. The rest were women. All were standing—we’re in that part of the service, I said to myself. The only youngish man in the place intoned from an altar I couldn’t see, hidden by painted panels of biblical personages, two of whom were principals and the only ones I could name for sure.
I knew about the paintings. Generally.
An acquaintance of mine back in California had converted from evangelicalism to Orthodoxy some years prior. He was odd already, to be honest: a photographer given to irascibility when he wasn’t being cryptic. He’d taken formal training in mosaic-making, abandoned the photography, and was now—well, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t understand it.
Longer ago, there’d been a group of young men who left an Episcopal denomination where I attended church, also for Orthodoxy. Our parish was small, an outpost of something in Scranton, Pennsylvania, like The Office but with less apparent relevance in the business model.
The rector, a kind gent overmatched by the overhead required even for two-digit Sunday attendance, said we needed “A good Protestant response” to the departure. Why do we need a response and to whom? I had wondered.
And so, nearly twenty years onward, I turned aside. Moved with vague purpose, with intensity, of a sort.
An hour or so passed at the Greek Orthodox church, and I made plans to exit.
I’d stopped in because I’d had an idea still inchoate of spending some Sunday mornings at several churches, including a very-free-church evangelical one with a popular linebacker-looking pastor and a Roman Catholic parish that sat on land that had been purchased in the neighboring town for four hundred dollars during the Rutherford B. Hayes presidency. That had seemed like a good mix. I had no intention of ever joining a church again.
But now, I couldn’t even leave.
What I’d thought was the main service, with fewer worshippers than employees at Dunder Mifflin, turned out to be only the opening act, what Orthodoxy calls Orthros. Some two hundred folding chairs, which had hardly been used for the whole hour filled up. At least the spaces in front of them did.
Whoa, I thought. It’s that kind of church.
It didn’t make sense to me—the standing, the artwork, the chanting, the complete disappearance of the pastor for minutes at a time. It all came together—which is not to say that I understand—when I eventually realized I’d simply been wrong.
I’ve been wrong enough times—“All this has happened before, and all this will happen again,” as Disney’s Peter Panputs it—to know that being wrong doesn’t always end with full knowledge, just enough to turn back, or at least turn aside.[2]
But it’s OK to be wrong. As Rise Against notes, mosaics start with broken glass, and end as “God-[blessed] works of art.”[3]
Saint Spyridon obviously isn’t a seeker-sensitive church. No, the priest here, Father Evan Armatas, is more fly fisher than footballer. He looks nothing like someone who could or would open-field tackle you, though he might ask you a question midhomily and wait for an answer, usually more than one.
It turned out my odd Orthodox friend knew the priest, and he was a bit of a rock star in contemporary Orthodoxy.
Oh, you might now be thinking, it’s that kind of church.
Well, still nope.
If Father Evan is a celebrity, he’s an accidental one. It’s not that kind of faith, though we have that kind of culture. I would ding the people and not the pastor—sheep are dopes. The shepherd dances with those who brung him and keeps them safe from or strong for the wolves.
Evan is, like the faith and its founder whom he serves, sharp and funny. Sample: he said in a recent Bible study he wants a bumper sticker that says, “Honk 40 times if you’re Orthodox.”
Another: Q: How many Orthodox does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Change?
That’s likely an old one, but it was new to me, a common experience these last few years. Here’s another: “Every Orthodox service is twenty minutes too long.”
Another: A joke among Manhattan’s bankers—see, it’s already funny—can be applied to the Orthodox. It’s said that when Alexander Hamilton went to fight his fateful and fatal duel with Aaron Burr, he stopped in at the Bank of New York, which he’d founded, to finish some paperwork. He told his BONY colleagues, whose financier descendants are still active to this day, “I’ll be right back; don’t change a thing!” And they never did.
Think of Orthodoxy as the Bank of New York of the world’s religious Wall Street. Jesus didn’t quite come back but peeked under the tent flap one last time: “Love it! Don’t change a thing.”
And they never did.
Saint Spyridon parish is popular, peripatetic in the area, and prolific with progeny. The place goes like rabbits, if rabbits served communion, facilitated community, and modeled compassion.
That is to say, it’s adding nearly daily to the numbers that shall be saved, mentoring young priests into roles at nearby parishes, and growing the ranks of deacons.
But it’s not seeker-sensitive, nor seeker-insensitive, as an Anglican priest I knew liked to half-josh.
Call it seeker-serious.
You already know about the standing, which makes the folding chairs 90 percent expendable, except for the homily, which is most definitely not the focus of the main service, the one after Orthros, the Divine Liturgy (that’s liturgy, from leitourgia, lēitos + ergos, “people working,” so divine liturgy is God’s public works project).
I timed it the other day—yes, really—and, with the exception of some children and elders and a first-time visitor in the back, no one sat down for the first twenty-seven minutes.
That part of the service was the service.
More?
I can oblige.
There’s an adage, sometimes attributed to Lionel Blue or Mark Twain that “Jews are just like everyone else, only more so.” I can confirm that the Orthodox are not like anyone else, only more so.
Orthodoxy more than matches other faiths stroke for stroke on cross-uptaking and radical sacrifice. Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Native Peoples have their martyred missionaries, Desert Fathers, and sun dances or vision quests. The Orthodox faithful pilgrimage to Mount Athos and revere hermits and monks in a way that makes that Benedict Option look like, well, a church picnic. Take Paul Kingsnorth, a retired eco-warrior who converted in the last few years, as an example; he moved his family from urban England to craggy-cliffed, loamy Western Ireland after receiving a vision of “cave Christianity.” He doesn’t have a smart phone and would love it if you didn’t either.[4]
The Divine Liturgy is a comprehensive sensory experience without the benefit of or need for psilocybin. Art isn’t on the walls; it is the walls. There’s no hoary kerfuffle butter battle between pep rally worship choruses and biblically expositional hymns, but legit chanting, intoning. We’re as far from pop rock or French monks as Calvin is from Hobbes. Smell the incense and plenty of it. Touch the robes and kiss the icons and rings and crosses, and for taste, we have Communion bread soaked in, infused by, wine, as befits what a broken body mingled and marinated in its own blood by its own will would be.
The Orthodox are also known for icons, which takes care of Saint Francis of Assisi’s rule that using words are optional when preaching the gospel. Yes, yes, he probably never said it, anyway. Which rather proves the point, don’t it?
Speaking of icons, you could spend a lifetime looking at one—there are many people living today who are spending a lifetime looking at and writing them. The current go-to—I won’t say it—icon dude of American Orthodoxy is Jonathan Pageau.
The first book recommended to me by a fellow bibliophile who sat down and said hello during snack time at Saint Spyridon was Timothy Patitsas’s The Ethics of Beauty, a 749-pager that describes the “beauty first” rule of Orthodoxy. Yes, seven hundred and forty-nine pages. The first third or so is on trauma. And no, there is not a Kindle version.[5]
The first Orthodox-oriented book on beauty I recall owning, though, was The Beauty of the Infinite by David Bentley Hart. It was half a life ago, and I didn’t understand a bit of it. Who knows—maybe I’d have got sooner to Orthodoxy if . . . no, no, no—that’s not true. Defoe and Chesterton and Eliot can say why.
And anyway, maybe I would have been put off by DBH, who is Orthodoxy’s slightly rabid bulldog, as Huxley never was Darwin’s. Or perhaps he is more their Christopher Hitchens. In any event, his book argues, I’m told, that beauty is the reason for belief.
But as “mercy burns,” beauty wrecks. Try The Idiot if you don’t believe me, or innumerable takes from film and television.[6] The Crucifixion anyone? Or an icon of the same? Beauty might also save but “only as through fire” (1 Cor. 3:15 ESV).
To mash up Dostoevsky and David Foster Wallace, beauty will save the world but not before it is done with us.[7]
If you’ve ever been in a Presbyterian gathering, you may have noticed they preach even when they pray. Scotch believers are big on exposition, and they take every chance. Sure, with the sermon—it’s the MacDonalds and such who’re known for hours-long instruction and other stem-winders—but also while praying, while not dancing, while ordering Starbucks . . . .
To the presbyteroi, everything is an untapped opportunity for preaching.
The Orthodox got that beat. To them, everything is a chance for all of it.
The chanters might be intoning away during Orthros while the priest is hearing confessions while the altar staff are replacing candles or tidying up while the greeters are setting baked goods in the hands and laps of visitors, setting chairs aright in an imperceptibly off-kilter row, or setting candles in front of the iconostasis, the row of icon panels between the altar and the sanctuary. The choir is upstairs rehearsing, an elderly parishioner wheels in or a child in a chair is wheeled in, and a half-dozen candle-bearers trickle down for the half-hour or so before Divine Liturgy begins. There’s whispering in confession, lines read at the altar, chanting to the right, chattering among those in the nave, and greetings among the worshippers who are standing about. Somewhere, someone has lighted that incense. A father brings his young children to kiss the icons and tell them their stories. Nobody seems to be on their phone, but that can’t be true.
Are we preaching, praying, chanting, talking, or silent?
Yes.
For the Orthodox, it’s all seamless. After two years, there’s a pause I now recognize between the Orthros and Divine Liturgy, but it’s a pause that’s part of a flow. There’s no separation between the parts of worship, no separation between worship and life.
It’s all one.
The Orthodox outdo everyone.
Their chanting leaves the cheese-eating brothers of the Taizé Community in the dust. The sentences run on and on, like an office memo, like a dispatch dictated by one of Her Majesty’s legates in the Negev, like the recitation of an ancient biographical sketch—“You were a champion of the / First Council, O Spyridon!” And the memo never changes. And getting memos is how we get memories: tradition and how things are done.
The Orthodox out–Roman Catholic the Roman Catholics on Mary. They give her more fasts throughout the year, more mentions in the services, and more daily prayers. And they do all this while slicing away or never adding the more exotic add-ons, like the Immaculate Conception.
They out-Evangelical the Evangelicals on, say, finding references to Jesus in the Old Testament. The Orthodox Study Bible notes how each and every Psalm—including the extra one; look it up—is a prayer about Jesus. And there’s the Jesus Prayer, of course—“Lord Jesus Christ, thou Son of God, have mercy on us, sinners” or, more succinctly, “Jesus, mercy”—which is a staple of daily prayer, the key to the guidance to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thes. 5:16–18 ESV).
They out-everyone everyone on reverencing leaders and clergy. Protestants might look for Mount Ararat, or—paging John Nelson Darby—idolize Jerusalem, or move to Colorado Springs, and Roman Catholics have their city-nation-state of the Vatican and millennia of checking in with the parish priest on buying sneakers, but the Orthodox exceed expectations here, too. They actually have a sort of Noah’s Ark, many in fact, on Mount Athos, which, actually, also is a city-nation-state, and which, speaking of rock stars, is also a literal and gigantic rock. I mean, while I like Father Evan quite a bit, everyone else really likes him—Orthodox priests get manhandled by ardor all the time, and bishops are mobbed like long-lost Beatles.
Orthodox are odder than pre–Vatican II Catholics. Sometimes they are even weirder than alien-awaiting cults. I see your chuckling goof Richard Rohr, and raise you a Martin Shaw, who probably smokes moss in his Tolkien pipe.
Look, just walk into an Orthodox service. You’ll see.
If not, this journal will give you your money back.
Results of these exceedings are more real while sometimes seeming less so, a sure sign one is onto something.
The differences between Orthodox and others—the distance of “aren’t like anyone else, only more so”—can look like something the O-folk took away, but it’s more likely the later accretions of others never took hold.
Do. Not. Change. A. Thing.
There’s a joke from my past—Protestants can be hilarious—about converting to Catholicism, called poping, as in the pope, as in, “Did you hear? Joseph and Mary poped!” “Well, it was bound to happen.” The joke is that Roman Catholicism is finishing school for Protestants.
If so, Orthodoxy is a postdoc.
Sometimes Orthodoxy’s not so much intense as curious. Or since curiosity was deemed an “inordinate desire” or sin back in the day, let us say confusing, or better yet, peculiar, both in the sense of being odd and separate.[8]
We call confusing that which we don’t understand—for if it weren’t so scatterbrained we, who are pretty smart cookies, would get it. And we call intense that which we don’t understand and know intuitively is beyond us.
We call fire intense, like that burning bush.
Moses knew in a hot minute that things are not what they seem. He realized he was facing the wrong way. Sometimes what’s right there in front of us, what we’re told to pay attention to—our job or that pet meme or the upcoming election or the next global crisis or our banishment by pharaoh—is not, in fact, the most important thing. Out wandering the desert wasteland, Moses may have thought his plan was working.
Just out for a walk? Yeah, like Abraham who journeyed, or John who Jordaned, or Jesus himself.
When we’re facing the wrong way, we need to turn around; when running the wrong way, we need to turn back.
The Orthodox traffic in the obscure, in the way, way back: Do something and stand there, they say. Iconostasis as a way in and a barrier. Theosis, askesis, podvig, phronema. Icon painting as writing. Akathist singing as reading.
They traffic in the obscure because they didn’t change a thing. The rest of us kept moving, and now we no longer get it. And to get it, we need to mimic the turning of the prodigal son or the Samaritan. Turning aside when one is more or less moving in a forward-facing direction takes work. It takes paying attention and acting with intent.
I once heard Dallas Willard describe turning to God in this way: “We like to say one gives one’s life to God.” Big pause. “But it actually does mean that we do exactly that.”
One hundred percent and 10/10, as the kids say.
When we turn, it is both completion and radical reversal, a mystery not to make sense of but one to enter.
Orthodoxy is single-minded and yet multi-layered with many moving parts. Orthodoxy has not changed and yet treasures a few reversals here and there—what they call mystery, an amped-up version of what others call paradox.
I once thought paradox was both the bomb and the bee’s knees—itself a paradox, of destruction and creation. I thought it was swell, and I thought I believed it—was willing to act as if it were so, to again borrow from Dr. Willard.[9]
I loved that Frederick Buechner called Christian faith a comedy, tragedy, and fairy tale, that Dante Alighieri and Willy Wonka played with the same ideas in different ways: gotta go down to go up, forward to go back.[10]
A friend recently got me to use an oil lamp. Father Evan had mentioned using one, and I thought, yeah, I’m not doing this. I’d set fire to my room! Welp, got an empty Bonne Maman jelly jar, added olive oil, and a wick, and I’m on fire, baby.
It burns and is consumed, except you keep adding oil so it’s not.
Like Moses’s bush but God doesn’t have to keep adding oil.
In that first service, I’d made a note to tell my Cali friend Tony about my visit. That’s how I then learned he knew of Father Evan and that Tony remembered the exact date he had, several years ago, called him during the latter’s Sunday night podcast, to ask a question.
It’s also how I learned Tony was going in for tests to check for malignancy in some tumorous growths.
The next week, I lit a candle for him.
In the epigraph that I shared at the beginning of these notes, R. S. Thomas writes as a walker and wanderer who turns aside and is now returning, completing that circle, that full way round, that finished-just-beginning journey. In times past, he has “seen the sun break through . . . for a while” on the spot but neglected it. “But that was the pearl,” he says, alluding to Matthew 13. That was Jesus, the priceless one he now knows he must possess, the peerless one he must be possessed by and that he will give all he has to do and be so.
Turning aside is an intentional act and so an intense one.
And so again, and again and again, the turning aside.
[1] Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton, 1925), 3; and Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets (New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1943), lines 28–29; also see Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (New York NY: Penguin Classics, 2003).
[2] Peter Pan, directed by Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi, and Wilfred Jackson (1953, Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Productions).
[3] “Far From Perfect,” track 5 on Rise Against, Wolves, Virgin, 2017, paraphrased.
[4] “Paul Kingsnorth: How to resist the machine,” interview by Freddie Sayers, UnHerd, video, 78:30, June 11, 2023, https://youtu.be/faaTLrTKwOE?si=WDM-k9xlB3Zn–3A.
[5] Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty (Maysville, MO: St. Nicholas Press, 2019).
[6] O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007).
[7] Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Everyman’s Library, 2002).
[8] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2.2.167,https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3167.htm.
[9] Bill Gaultiere, “Dallas Willard’s Definitions and Quotes,” Soul Shepherding, https://www.soulshepherding.org/dallas-willards-definitions/
[10] See Alighieri. The Divine Comedy, trans. Dorothy Sayers (New York, NY: Penguin Classics. 1950–62).