The services I grew up on had a moment built into them. Near the end the music would drop to something low and unhurried, and the man leading it would say that if anything had been working on you that night there was no sense putting it off, and people would come up out of the rows and walk down to the front. I went down more than once. I meant it every time, and I have no wish to be clever now at the expense of the young man who did it.

Years later my wife and I started going to an Orthodox parish in the States, and I kept waiting for that part of the service. It never came. Not the first Sunday, and not on any Sunday after it. Nobody at the front put a question to the room. Nowhere in the hour was anybody asked to settle anything. And across that whole first stretch of months, not one person asked me what I had concluded.

I had been trained to run everything in one direction. Look into a thing, make up your mind, then act on what you decided. It is a sound order, and I would still use it on anything a man can stand outside of and examine. What had never occurred to me is that some things issue their evidence only to people already inside them, and that with those, the sequence I trusted is exactly wrong. Understanding was not the price of getting in. It was what getting in produced.

The first year was not enjoyable. The Divine Liturgy, which is the long Sunday morning service where the whole of this Church’s worship is done, ran well past anything I had been through, and much of it was not in English. Everything I had been formed to listen for was missing: the turn in the music, the lift in the room, the moment I have just described. Their absence is not subtle. It is more like walking into a house where all the furniture has been put somewhere else. I was on my feet for stretches my legs had no history of. I caught very little of what was said, and I never once knew where in the service we had got to.

I cannot give you a reason for going back. There was not one available. No argument had landed, my reading had not reached a conclusion and would not for years, and nobody at that parish was working on me. That last part is worth saying out loud, because I came in braced for it and it never arrived. I kept turning up the way a person keeps turning up somewhere before he could explain it to a friend who asked.

Written down as advice, this comes close to something I would object to myself. Remain in it until it takes. Go through the motions and let the motions do the believing for you. If that had been what happened, I would say so, and I would not be recommending it to anybody.

What was asked of me in those months was nothing. No word I did not mean, no profession of anything, no account of where I stood. The Church draws a hard line of her own and keeps it without apologizing, and nobody expects that part: I was not going to be given communion, and would not be for years, and nobody softened it to keep me comfortable. What I was allowed to do was come in and be there among them. Being somewhere is not agreeing with it. And I could have stopped on any given week and nothing would have followed, no call, no visit, no explanation owed, which is exactly what a method for producing belief cannot afford. Anything built to work on a man has to keep hold of him. That one let go of me every Sunday at noon.

The Church calls herself a hospital rather than a courtroom, which had a letter to itself here back in August, and the useful part of a hospital is that nobody has to believe in medicine before he is admitted. What a sick man is asked for is that he come in and stay long enough for the treatment to reach him. Whether he can account for how it works is somebody else’s department.

None of this is peculiar to religion. Nobody ever learned a language by finishing the grammar and then opening his mouth. You speak it badly for years in front of patient people, and the understanding arrives behind the speaking rather than ahead of it. What is odd about the world that formed me is not that it forgot this. It kept the rule everywhere else and suspended it here, where assent was meant to come first and the practice afterward, and where doing it in the other order gets called dishonest.

I cannot give you a date either, which before it happened to me is what I would have believed least. There was no morning I can point at. What I noticed, and noticed late, was that I had stopped rehearsing my exit. For months I had gone in with reasons prepared, ready in case anybody asked what I thought I was doing there, and somewhere in there I stopped keeping the reasons up, the way you stop renewing something you have not read in a year.

We are getting ready to go back to the States next week. Everything in this letter happened over there, and in all the time since I have not been handed a better way in, or met anyone who was.

What the Church says to a man in that spot is two words long, and it predates every argument she has ever made for herself. In the first chapter of John a man hears where the Messiah is said to have come from and asks, not unreasonably, whether a place of that sort has ever produced anything worth the walk. St. Philip does not take the question up. He offers no proof, he corrects no geography, and he asks nothing about what his friend has decided. Come and see.

There is no more method than that, and it is the only instruction in the Gospels I have ever been able to follow. I did not go because I believed. I went because there was a service on Sunday morning and nothing in it was going to be required of me, and then a year had gone by, and I had moved, and I had not felt myself move. The first Sunday after we land I will be doing exactly what I did when I understood none of it. Turning up.

If that is anywhere near where you are, find an Orthodox church near you and go on a Sunday morning, and then go again. Let it be as foreign as it is. Nobody there is going to ask you what you have decided.

David

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For most of a decade my income arrived because a stranger I will never meet stopped scrolling.

There is no image in that sentence. It is the job description. I had a business of my own that needed no address, and what other companies paid me for was to reach people who had no idea they existed and get those people to look. I was good at it. It paid for the house we lived in and the flights.

The year I got everything I had aimed at is a letter I have already written. What that letter does not say is where the money was coming from.

What I worked inside of has a better name than the industry ever gave itself, and I got the name from the English writer . He calls the whole apparatus the Machine: technology and money and power treated as one, because in practice they operate as one. Take the word seriously for an afternoon and it stops being about phones. The Machine was up and running two centuries before anyone had one. It got to its feet in the mills, at the point where a family that had farmed the same few fields for generations began sending its sons off to be labor, and labor can be shifted to wherever it is wanted. The phone is the finest organ it has ever grown. It is not the animal.

What the animal needs from you now is your attention, and attention is the one thing nobody has ever managed to produce in larger quantities. We are very good at making more of everything else. This is the exception. A day holds the same number of hours it held for a man in a field eight hundred years ago, and there is only so much of him awake inside it. So the only growth left is to take a larger share of what is already there. That is arithmetic rather than villainy, and every company I ever worked for knew it in the bone, and none of them ever wrote it down.

That much is widely known and widely resented. What sits underneath it came to me slowly, and I doubt I would have got to it from anywhere but the inside.

The uprooting is not the damage. It is the requirement.

Think about who makes a poor customer. A man with a house full of people who know his name. A man who is expected somewhere on Sunday morning and would be missed if he failed to come. Work he can point at, neighbors, a table where somebody would notice the empty chair. He is not holding out against anything. He is spent already. His hours are already promised to people with faces, and there is very little of him left over to sell.

The other man can live anywhere, which is a way of saying nowhere in particular. His friends are wherever he was last. His week has no fixed points in it that another person could name. Everything he needs is delivered, nothing at all is expected of him, and he is carrying around great unbroken quantities of time that no one has any claim on.

The second man is what the system is for. Nearly everything sold to me as freedom turns out, looked at squarely, to have been the manufacture of that second man. I bought it, gladly, for years. Then I turned around and helped produce more of him.

This next part has to be handled carefully, because there is a version of it that does more damage than silence.

Nobody sat down and arranged it. There is no room where it was agreed, no meeting, no one to hold responsible. Each step was reasonable at the time it was taken, and most of them I would take again tomorrow. There is no head on it. It has a logic, and the logic runs on our consent, given a hundred times a day for reasons that are good every single time.

I insist on it for a reason of my own. Put a face on it and you have an enemy, and my record with enemies is not good. For years I hunted whoever was responsible for what had gone wrong, and I was in earnest, and that hunt is the most expensive misdirection of my own attention I have ever managed. A man who goes looking for the villain behind all this has just handed over another year.

Which is the trouble with treating any of it as a matter of ideas. You cannot argue your way out of something that already has your attention, because the argument goes in through the same door it does. That was roughly where I had got to, and no further, when Sunday came.

The house had been sick most of the week. My son and I were both down with it, and by the weekend we were ourselves again, and Sunday was the first day any of us had been out. We went up to the reservoir out on the edge of the city, the one everybody calls the Tbilisi Sea, and we stood under the Chronicles of Georgia.

It is sixteen pillars, the tallest of them something over a hundred feet, and I will take the shine off it immediately by saying that it was begun in the nineteen-eighties and has never been finished. Around the base of every pillar, on each of its faces, the story runs from the making of the world to the empty tomb. Above that the country’s own story begins: St. Nino first, then the kings, then the saints of the centuries after her, one course of stone resting on the course beneath it. The argument is in the arrangement rather than in any words. Whatever was done here goes up there. What all of it stands on is down at the bottom, where a person’s eye is when he arrives.

You cannot have it on a phone. I tried it, and everybody else up there was trying it too. It does not photograph, because there is no distance from which the whole of it resolves and no crop that does not lie about the size. The only way to take it in is to stand underneath with your head back, walking, for longer than is comfortable, until you have gone round enough of the bases that the sequence assembles in you instead of on a screen.

So it is asking for exactly the commodity I used to turn into money for a living. It will not haggle over it, and there is nothing it can offer in exchange.

The Machine has never asked me for twenty unbroken minutes. It cannot afford to. Twenty minutes of a man’s undivided looking is the single thing it has no way to resell, so it will never propose it, and nothing inside it will ever stop you.

The Church keeps an instrument for anything that has got hold of a man. It is a fast. You put the thing down for a set stretch of days, with a day marked for the end of it, so that what you are keeping is a season and not a vow, and then you find out who is standing there once the noise stops. I have tried my best to keep the Church’s fasts from food since the day I came in. I have never thought to keep one from the thing I sold.

I have no progress to report there, and I would sooner leave that sentence standing bare than dress it up. The pillars asked for something on Sunday and I did not have much of it on me, and I know perfectly well where all of it has been going. The asking was not a rebuke. That is how anything worth looking at has always reached a person, and nothing about that has been withdrawn, and the price has not changed. You stand there until you can see it.

David

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An woman is dying in a bed, and the men who had followed her son stand around her. That is the event. A death in a room, and the Church keeps it today as one of the great feasts of its year, under a word, Dormition, that means her falling asleep.

In Georgia the day is Mariamoba, after her own name, and the country has it off. My own parish kept this feast a fortnight ago; Georgia still counts the fixed days on the older calendar, which runs thirteen behind the civil one, so it arrives here today. I will leave the gap alone. I raise it only because it means the feast has come round twice for me this month, and the second time is the one an entire nation is keeping alongside me. We went to Kashueti St. George church, down on Rustaveli.

I described a feast morning here back in July as a street drifting one direction without anybody having organized it. Today is one of those.

A day like this one keeps putting the same fact in front of me, and it is not something I could have said out loud five years ago. Everything old in this faith that I have, I went and got. I read for it. A patient priest handed me pieces of it. I argued most of it back into place against a formation that never knew anything was missing. I have not stopped. None of that was required here. The faith was never put down in this country, so there was nothing to pick back up. A thing that has only ever been passed along sits differently in a people’s hands than a thing that had to be recovered.

How far back does the passing go? The early three hundreds. A woman crossed the mountains into Iberia, the kingdom that then held the east of this country. The Church knows her as St. Nino and gives her the title Equal-to-the-Apostles. By its own reckoning that places her in the company of the Twelve. She held no office, carried no letter from anybody, and had nothing at all behind her. Before she died the king and queen, Mirian and Nana, had been baptized, and the kingdom followed them in.

You meet her cross all over this country, and it is the least impressive object in any church that has one. Two lengths of grapevine, and by tradition she tied them together at the crossing with her own hair. Its arms hang down at the ends, the way any cut vine does.

Hold one thing that long and you do not generally call it continuity. Georgia has an older name for it. The belief here is that this ground is the lot of the Mother of God: when the apostles drew lots for the countries they would preach in, the tradition runs, this one fell to her, and it has been in her keeping ever since. As history I hold that loosely. What I have not managed to do, after ten years of coming here, is treat it as ornament. Whatever else a claim like that is, it puts a people under an obligation rather than in possession of an idea. You are not free to set down something you were given to look after.

A short drive north of Tbilisi is Mtskheta, the old capital, and in it the cathedral called Svetitskhoveli, under whose floor the seamless robe of Christ is held by long tradition to lie. People have prayed on that ground for seventeen centuries without a break. I have given up trying to make the figure land by repeating it, because a number that size is not a quantity anybody can feel. What can be felt is smaller than that. Nothing in there is being revived. The doors were not shut and later reopened. The people inside on an ordinary weekday are not marking an anniversary; they came in to pray.

Last weekend we were out east in Kakheti, where the vineyards are. We had dinner at one that sits across the road from a monastery, and the business is set up so that part of what it earns keeps the monastery going and its grounds in order. Nobody presented this to us as a cause. There was no appeal and nothing to sign. The monastery is there and the vines are there, and one pays for the other, and the arrangement is about as remarkable to the people inside it as a Friday.

That phrase I used a moment ago, the lot of the Mother of God, needs a fence around it, because it goes bad quickly.

It is not a deed. Nothing in it gives anyone title to a piece of ground, and nothing in it licenses a man to rule on which people a country was meant for. An inheritance heard that way stops being an inheritance and turns into a flag, and a faith carried as a flag has already had the thing taken out of it that made it worth carrying. I am not warning Georgia about a Georgian temptation. My own country runs the same play, and I have run it myself, and I know what it took out of me.

Take the phrase at its word and it says something a good deal smaller and a good deal harder. Somebody was given something to look after, and has been looking after it for seventeen centuries, and is not finished. That is not a nation being told it was chosen. That is a nation holding a bill it has to go on paying. Georgia does not come out of that impressive. It comes out of it answerable, and that is what an inheritance is.

If this reads like a country you will never set foot in, I would say one thing. I was not born into this. I came in the other door, the long one, through years of reading and a fair number of wrong turns, and I am walking through it still. Both doors open on the same room.

The arms of that cross still hang down. In seventeen hundred years, with gold available and every better material to hand, nobody in this country has ever seen a reason to straighten them. It is the shape the thing took when a woman with nothing tied two lengths of vine together, and the people who were given it have left it exactly as it came to them.

- David

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On Saturday evening we were at Vespers at Alaverdi, out in Kakheti. It is an eleventh-century church, a good part of it is under heavy repair, and the work has taken nothing off it. Vespers is the evening service, and in this tradition Sunday has already begun by the time it is sung. About seventy-five people had come out for it.

Nothing was being decided in that room. Nobody wanted my opinion about anything, and there would have been nowhere to put one if I had carried it in with me.

I noticed that, which tells you something about the month I had just had. I spent most of the last month writing an argument, and I put it out yesterday. It runs long. It is about a claim that has been going around American Orthodox circles for a while now, that this country is a white Christian nation and the job now is to get it back. I think the claim is wrong, and I said so at length.

There is one paragraph in it about me. I wrote that paragraph quickly, because it was standing in the way of the argument, and I have been thinking since Saturday evening that I got it out of the way too cheaply. So this letter is that paragraph, slowed down.

In my twenties I believed that what was wrong with America was political, and that doing something about it fell, in some measure, to me. That much I can write in one line. Underneath it sat something I did not get at for years. It was never that I had picked the wrong side. It was that I had handed politics the two jobs a man hands a religion: it was where I kept my hope, and it was how I knew I was one of the good ones. Politics does not carry either of those. It does not carry them for anybody, in any colors.

Nobody taught me to be conservative. I was conservative the way I was from Ohio. Then the government lost me, in stages, until there was almost nothing left of my trust in it, and I found a politics that took the loss seriously, and I moved into it. There is no need to dress that stretch up and no honest way to play it down. I went further out than I would have admitted at the time, the way a man does when he finds something that explains everything he was already angry about.

I was not unusual in this. Everybody around me had done some version of it, and the Christians had done it hardest. In some churches the preaching slid toward whatever the moment was asking for, until you could not have said which one was leading. In others it slid the opposite way, and men I respected began speaking about a candidate in a register I had only ever heard used about Christ. I doubt either group would put it that way, and I would not have put myself that way either, which is most of the trouble with it. There is no moment when it gets declared. No one stands up and says he has moved his hope.

There was a run of years when I could work out where a man stood inside about two minutes of meeting him. I did not decide to do this; it ran on its own. And once I had him placed I knew roughly how much of my attention he was going to get, and how much benefit of the doubt, and whether the next thing he said would be weighed or filed. I have no idea how many conversations I closed early in those years without either of us noticing that I had closed them. None of that struck me at the time as a religious act. It is the most religious thing I was doing.

And the hope in it had a shape you could feel. A piece of news could set the temperature of a whole day, and a run of them could set a season, and I called that caring about the country. Caring does not do that. Something you are counting on does that.

Something else was going on in me during those same years, and I would not have said the two had anything to do with each other. At the end of July there was a letter here about a faith I had kept almost entirely in my head, filed with everything else I had ever learned and nowhere nearer than that. Both were running at once, in one man, on the same weeks.

The politics did not end in a debate, and it did not end in a defeat. Two things arrived at about the same time. The first was watching the country swing, and swing back, and swing harder, each side taking its turn and each turn calling out a bigger one from the other, until the swinging began to look less like an interruption of the country and more like the shape of it. The second is harder to say without sounding like a man reaching for the conclusion he already wanted. It is that a great deal of what is wrong is not what a policy is built to reach. There is a spiritual dimension to it. No election is won or lost at that depth, and no law has ever been written that goes down that far.

I want to fence that, because there are two ways to hear it and both of them are wrong.

The first is to hear a shrug in it. It is not one. I spent a month on an argument I believe is worth making and put it out yesterday, which is not the act of a man who thinks none of it matters. Making an argument is not the error. Making the argument the place you keep your hope is the error, and a man can do the first without the second. I could not do it for years, and that was a fact about me rather than a fact about arguments.

The second is to hear an even-handed peace being offered, one hand laid on each side, which costs nothing and is worth about what it costs. The version of this I ran was the right-hand one. It is the one I can speak about from inside it, and the one I still watch for in myself, and I will not buy credibility here by issuing a matching charge to people whose version of it I only ever watched from across a room.

I carried an argument for years the way a man carries a weapon he has never had to use. At some point I set it down. I would like to report that something happened when I did. Nothing happened. The country went on exactly as it had been going, and the thing I had been holding up all that time turned out not to have been holding anything up.

A weight came off me that I had not known was on. I had been carrying the outcome of a country I do not run, every week of the year, as though the carrying were itself the work. It is not. Whatever my own share of the work is, it is a great deal smaller than that and a great deal nearer to hand, and I am still finding out what it looks like.

That church in the vineyards had the repairs going on inside it, and about seventy-five people had come out on a Saturday evening for a service that would be sung whether they came or not, and that had no use whatever for my position on anything. Nobody in there was waiting for the repairs to be finished before they started.

I do not think I understood, until fairly recently, how many years I spent waiting for a country to be finished before I would agree to live in it.

If you have taken your own hope back off politics, I would like to know where you put it. I am asking because my answer is not finished, and I suspect some of what I have is still borrowed.

- David

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I. What the law thought of my Church

In 1915 a federal appeals court in Richmond had to rule on whether Syrians were white.

The man in the case was George Dow, a Christian from what was then Greater Syria, who wanted to become an American citizen. A judge in South Carolina had already refused him twice. The reasoning was not personal and it was not even especially hostile; it was statutory. The naturalization act of 1790 reserved citizenship to free white persons, the judge held that the framers of that act had meant persons of European habitancy and European descent, and he held that a man born on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean was not one of those. The Fourth Circuit reversed him and let Dow in, on the ground that by the time Congress last touched the statute, in 1875, Syrians were commonly reckoned as white. So the question was settled, for the moment, by a court’s guess about what a word had meant to a legislature forty years earlier.

That was 1915. St. Raphael of Brooklyn had died in the February of that same year.

He was born in Beirut in 1860, to parents who had fled the massacres in Damascus that year, which makes him a saint of this Church born in flight. He was sent to New York in 1895 because Arabic-speaking Orthodox in America had asked for a priest and there was nobody to send them. He spent twenty years finding those people. He went by train where there was a train, and by horse and on foot where there was not, and he ran down scattered Antiochian families in mill towns and mining towns across a continent, and he left behind him something like thirty parishes. In 1904 he was consecrated a bishop in New York, the first Orthodox bishop consecrated on this continent. He died in Brooklyn in February of 1915, and later that same year a court got round to deciding whether the people he had spent his life gathering were legally white.

Nine years after that, Congress wrote the quotas.

The Immigration Act of 1924 capped each country’s annual admissions at two percent of that nationality’s population in the United States as recorded in the census of 1890. The choice of 1890 was the whole mechanism, and everyone involved understood it as such: it selected a baseline from before the great migration out of southern and eastern Europe had happened, which meant those countries were pegged to a version of America in which they had barely arrived. There was a statutory floor of one hundred, the number a country received when the formula gave it essentially nothing.

Greece got a hundred a year. Syria, a hundred. Albania, a hundred. Bulgaria, a hundred. Turkey, a hundred. Romania got six hundred and three. Yugoslavia, six hundred and seventy-one. Russia, whose quota under the emergency act three years earlier had run past twenty-four thousand, came out at two thousand two hundred and forty-eight. Northwestern Europe and Scandinavia took better than eighty-six of every hundred slots in the whole system.

Set those numbers beside a map of American Orthodoxy and the overlap is close to exact. Greek, Arab, Russian, Serbian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Carpatho-Rusyn: those are the peoples who built every Orthodox parish in this country that was not built by Alaska Natives. The 1924 law did not mention them by faith. It did not have to. It named their countries and gave them the floor.

I am not the first person to notice this and I am not pretending it is a secret. What I want to do with it is narrower. There is an argument moving through American Orthodox circles right now, mostly online, mostly among young converts, that America is or was a white Christian nation, that this is what is worth defending, and that a serious Christian politics would begin by moving the foreign-born back out of it. I have read a fair amount of it. Some of it is careful and some of it is not, and I do not think the people making it are wicked. But I think it is wrong in a specific way that an Orthodox Christian, of all people, is unusually well placed to see, and I want to set out why at length, because a subject this hot deserves more than a paragraph and a slogan.

The short version is that the policy being proposed, applied to this country a century ago, would have emptied the Church that the people proposing it have just joined.

II. My own people were on the safe side of that law

I should say where I am standing before I say anything else, because a man throwing this kind of fact around had better account for himself first.

A hundred and seventy-five people lived in the town that raised me. It sat in the part of Ohio where the last of the Appalachian hills give out into the Midwest, and it had nothing in it that gathered anybody. What stood in for a shared story was a thin patriotism and a thin evangelical Protestantism, and neither of them went down far enough to reach whatever it is a person is really asking about at four in the morning. On my father’s side, the men served. The Second World War, Vietnam, and on down. I say that with respect and without a shred of irony; there was sacrifice in it and a sturdy older kind of American decency I have no standing to look down on and no wish to. What I could not see then is that this decency had come unmoored from the faith that first grew it. It was spending down an account nobody was still paying into.

Nobody in that town needed a quota number. Most of them had ancestors hailing from Germany or Switzerland that arrived in the early-to-mid 19th century. Whatever my family was doing in 1924, it was not standing in a consular queue in Salonica hoping to be one of a hundred. The people the law was written to keep out were not my people. The people the law was written to protect were.

And then I became Orthodox, which means that the Church I now belong to in America is very largely the Church of the people that law was aimed at.

That is an uncomfortable position and I would rather not pretend it is a comfortable one. It is also, I think, the position most American converts are in, and it is worth sitting in rather than hurrying past. We came into this Church late. We did not build it. We were, by ancestry and by culture, on the receiving end of an arrangement that treated the people who did build it as a problem to be managed. The correct posture for a man in that position is to keep quiet a while and find out what he has walked into, before he starts explaining to the Church what its politics ought to be.

And I have made a version of this same mistake myself, wearing a different set of colors. Through most of my twenties I took the trouble with the country to be a political trouble and went hunting for the answer where the trouble appeared to be. I held a run of positions, each with more heat in it than the one before, and somewhere in there my faith quietly rearranged itself around whose side I was on. Nothing argued me out of it. I ran the position to the end of its rope and found nothing tied there. So when I say I think this is a mistake, I am not saying it down from anywhere. I am saying it as a man who came out the far end of the identical error with a different set of enthusiasms attached to it.

III. The argument, at its strongest

Let me put the position I am going to argue against as well as I can put it, because a version I could knock down easily would waste everyone’s time, and because the men holding it are not fools and are mostly not cynics.

It runs something like this. A nation is a particular people, in a particular place, with a particular inheritance, and the Christian tradition has never pretended otherwise. The saints loved their homelands and said so. They blessed the defense of their peoples. Orthodoxy itself is organized nationally, into self-governing churches that grew up inside the life of specific nations, which is the very thing that made it possible for the faith to become the body of a people rather than a hobby of individuals. A civilization is a fragile thing, built slowly, held by particular families in particular places, and it can be dissolved by rapid demographic change as surely as by war. America was founded by Christians, its laws and habits assumed a Christian population, and its collapse into whatever it is now tracks closely with the deliberate unmaking of that population. To notice this is the same noticing any Georgian or Serb or Greek makes about his own country without anybody calling it a sin, and the fact that an American is not permitted to make it is itself evidence of the double standard the whole project is built on.

I have not tried to make that sound stupid, because it is not stupid. Three of its premises are true. Nations are not abstractions and they are not interchangeable. Orthodoxy does live nationally and has never wanted the faith floating free of a people’s ordinary life. And there is a double standard running through Western conversation about which peoples are permitted an attachment to their own places, and it is corrosive, and pretending it is not there makes honest discussion impossible.

Where it goes wrong is not in any of that. It goes wrong where those true things get welded to a set of historical claims that will not hold, and then welded again to a proposal that the tradition has actually addressed, and condemned, by name.

So let me take the historical claim first, because it is the load-bearing one, and because if it fails the rest of the structure has nothing to sit on.

IV. It was never a Christian nation, and it was never for one day an Orthodox one

Start with the documents, since they are short and everyone can read them.

The Constitution of the United States contains no reference to God. Not one. The only theological word anywhere in the original text is in the dating clause at the end, where the year is given as the year of our Lord, which was simply how one wrote a date in 1787. That absence was noticed at the time and complained about at the time, loudly, by clergy who wanted the document to acknowledge the Almighty and did not get their way.

What the Constitution does contain is Article Six: “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” That sentence deliberately settles a question the framers knew perfectly well was live, and it settles it in the negative. A Muslim, a Jew, an atheist, a Catholic, a Quaker, or, had there been any to speak of, an Orthodox Christian, was as eligible for federal office as a Congregationalist. Then the First Amendment came along and forbade Congress to establish a religion at all.

Then there is the Treaty of Tripoli. In 1797, in a treaty with the Bey of Tripoli negotiated to deal with the Barbary corsairs, the United States put its name to an article that reads, in the English text, that the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion. That sentence was read aloud in the Senate, printed in the newspapers, ratified without a single dissenting vote, and signed by President John Adams. There is a scholarly wrinkle about the Arabic version of the treaty, which does not contain the article, and I will not wave the wrinkle away. But the wrinkle does not touch the point. Whatever the Arabic said, what the United States Senate unanimously ratified and the President signed and published as the law of the land was a sentence saying that this government is not founded on the Christian religion, and not one senator thought that sentence worth objecting to.

Now the honest qualifications, because I do not want this to be a lawyer’s argument.

Yes, the culture was thickly and pervasively Christian. Of course it was. Sabbath laws, public fasts and thanksgivings, Bible-soaked oratory, a moral vocabulary that was Protestant to the bone. Yes, several individual states kept religious establishments after the federal settlement; Massachusetts did not disestablish until 1833. Yes, there is a real sense in which nineteenth-century America was a Protestant country in everything but its federal law, and a man who says so is not lying.

But look closely at what that sentence actually contains, because it is the whole answer to the argument I am examining.

It was a Protestant country. Specifically, self-consciously, and often ferociously so. The civil religion of nineteenth-century America defined itself against Rome, and it was not subtle about it. Convents were burned. Nativist parties ran on it and won. One of the largest mass movements of the 1920s was a revived Klan with a membership somewhere in the millions whose enemies list was Catholics, Jews, and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, in that order. Which is to say: the Christian America now being invoked as the inheritance was, at the height of its confidence, actively hostile to every branch of Christianity that was not itself, and had never so much as heard of mine.

It had heard of Greeks, though. In February of 1909 a mob of somewhere between five hundred and a thousand men spent an afternoon and an evening destroying the Greek quarter of South Omaha, Nebraska, after a Greek immigrant shot a policeman. About fifty buildings were wrecked. Roughly twelve hundred of the two thousand Greeks in the town fled, and the following year’s census found fifty-nine Greeks still living there. A petition circulating beforehand demanded that the city rid itself of the filthy Greeks. A Klan lecturer in the next decade is on record saying that Mexicans and Greeks should be sent back where they came from, in order to preserve white supremacy. If you want an American precedent for the policy currently being proposed, that is it, and it was applied to Orthodox Christians, and it worked.

The race science of the period is worth a paragraph too, because it is where the word “white” was actually being defined at the time the quotas were written. Madison Grant, who sat on the board of the Immigration Restriction League and whose figures were used in support of the 1924 act, divided Europeans into Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans, ranked in that order, with Slavs and Greeks in the lower two. Lothrop Stoddard warned against hordes of immigrant Alpines and Mediterraneans, and then added, in case anyone had missed his meaning, that this was not to mention Asiatic elements like Levantines and Jews. Levantines. That is St. Raphael’s flock. In the taxonomy that produced the law, the Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians of Greater Syria were not inferior Europeans; they were not Europeans at all, which is why the courts needed the better part of two years to work out whether George Dow could be naturalized.

So: whose Christian America, exactly, and whose whiteness?

I am belaboring this because the argument depends on a picture, and the picture is of a lost homogeneous Christian country that has been taken away and could in principle be given back. But there was no such country. There was a Protestant cultural majority that was strong, and real, and worth taking seriously as a historical fact, and that regarded Orthodox Christianity, when it noticed it at all, as a foreign superstition carried by people of doubtful racial standing. A convert who wants that majority restored is asking for the restoration of a settlement in which his own Church had no position at all, held by people who would have kept it out.

Underneath the historical point there is a deeper one, and this is the place to say it, because it is the basis of everything else I write.

The American founding declined to be a Christian confessional order on principle, and the principle has a pedigree.

Almost everything I put down in these letters comes back to a single long unravelling in the Christian West: a set of bonds between the world and God that got cut, one at a time, over several centuries, by devout men who would have been appalled at where the cutting ended. I am not going to run the whole ledger here. It is a set-piece and it belongs elsewhere. But three of those cuts are standing right underneath the American founding, holding it up, and they need naming.

The first is the loss of the logoi, the Fathers’ word for the divine meaning seated inside a created thing, the reason a loaf or a hillside or a human face is more than its weight and its chemistry. In the fourteenth century a line of Western thinking arrived at the position that universals, the meanings held in common between one thing and another, are not real at all, and are only names we hand out for our own convenience, and that what actually exists is a heap of bare particulars with nothing inside them saying what they are. Ockham is the usual name attached to it. Once that is granted, nothing has a nature it is. It has a label somebody has agreed to put on it, and labels are administered by whoever is holding the pen.

The second is the loss of communion as the shape of a person. In the older account a man comes into being through his relations. This mother, this village, this church, knit into other people before he is capable of choosing anything at all. The modern account reverses that exactly. The individual comes first, sovereign and self-owning, and every bond he has is a contract he entered and may exit. That is the American founding document’s own premise, stated in its first sentences and built into every institution downstream of them.

The third is the loss of an authority above the state. A polity used to understand itself as answerable to an order it had not written. When that goes, legitimacy has to come from somewhere else, and what it comes from is procedure: a thing is lawful because the correct steps were followed by the correctly selected people.

Set those three side by side and you are no longer looking at a country that drifted away from Christendom. You are looking at the first polity in history purpose-built downstream of the cutting, by men who thought, not unreasonably, that they were building something better than the wars of religion they had just escaped. The privatized conscience and the neutral public square are that settlement working as designed. A man who wants to restore Christian America is asking to restore an Enlightenment compromise with a Protestant flavor. He can want it. It is a real position and there are decent arguments for it, and I will come back at the end to the parts of it I would not trade. But he should not tell himself he is restoring the faith of the Fathers, because he is not, and they would not have recognized a line of it.

Now the part that ought to stop the argument I am examining in its tracks.

The category “white” is an artifact of that first cut. It has no nature. It never had one. It is a name, assigned by administrators for a purpose, and the whole documentary record of it in this country is the record of the name being reassigned when the purpose changed. That is why the men who built the quota system could sort Europeans into Nordics and Alpines and Mediterraneans and rank them, and why Greeks and Slavs came out in the bottom two tiers, and why Arabic-speaking Christians came out as not European at all. It is why the whole business could be settled by measurement, by men with calipers producing indices, which is the same severed bond in its other form: only what can be counted is really there. And it is why the question of whether George Dow was white took a federal appellate court the better part of two years, and was answered at last not by looking at the man but by working out what a word had meant to a legislature in 1875. A thing with a real nature cannot be settled that way. Only a name can.

So the position on offer is this. A movement that says it is defending Christendom against the modern world has picked up, as its cause, a category that the modern world manufactured, out of the exact severance that produced everything else it hates. It is using nominalism to guard the ruins of the world nominalism emptied.

The tradition has no slot for it. There is no Father anywhere who thinks a human being is an instance of a type. The nature is one and it is single: one blood, as Paul told the Athenians, every nation of men made out of it. And a person is not an example of a category at all in Orthodox anthropology; he is a hypostasis, this one, unrepeatable, with a name given at his baptism that God uses. You cannot get a race out of that. There is nothing there to make one out of.

Orthodoxy’s actual American timeline is short and it runs entirely through the immigrant and the missionary. Eight monks from Valaam landed at Kodiak in 1794, which is before the United States had any presence in Alaska at all, and the Orthodox Christianity that has been longest in North America is Alutiiq and Yup’ik and Tlingit and Athabascan, prayed in those languages, because St. Innocent built an alphabet for one of those languages and wrote his catechism in it before he wrote it in Russian. Everything else came by ship. St. Alexis Toth arrived in Minneapolis in 1889, presented himself to the Latin archbishop, was refused faculties, and watched the local Catholic parishes instructed to have nothing to do with his people; he took three hundred and sixty-one Carpatho-Russians into Orthodoxy in 1891, with tens of thousands following over the next two decades. St. Tikhon, later the patriarch and the new martyr, ran the American diocese from 1898 and in 1905 proposed to the Russian Synod that it be reorganized as a self-supporting American church made of ethnic auxiliary dioceses: Russian in New York, Arab in Brooklyn under St. Raphael, Serbian in Chicago, and a Greek one to be established, with a governing council of clergy and laity. That is the founding vision of Orthodoxy in this country as its own saints framed it. What he drew was a mosaic, held together by a common faith and a common cup, in a country that had never been Orthodox and was not about to become so.

You cannot take back what you never had. And what some men are trying to take back is a demographic memory, which is not even a memory of us.

V. The three exhibits

Three pieces of evidence come up whenever this is pressed, and there are only three, which is itself the finding. The third is the strongest, and I expect to be hit with it, so I have put it last and given it the most room. Let me take all three seriously, and then say why none of them is a case.

The one man

The first is a name.

Colonel Philip Ludwell III of Green Spring, Virginia, is the first documented Orthodox convert out of the English-speaking population of British North America. He sat in the House of Burgesses, and from 1752 on the Governor’s Council of Virginia, and he held that seat until he died. The argument built on him runs: here is an Orthodox Christian in high public office in America, so Orthodoxy and the American order were never at odds, and anyone saying otherwise has invented a grievance.

Every joint of that fails, and the document it rests on is the thing that breaks it.

Start with the polity. Ludwell died on the twenty-fifth of March, 1767. That is nine years and three months before the Declaration of Independence, and about twenty-two years before the Constitution took effect. He never held an office of the United States or of any American state, because there were none to hold. The Governor’s Council was a body of the Crown, its members appointed by the King on the governor’s recommendation, sitting for life as the colony’s upper house and its highest court, and it was abolished outright by the Virginia constitution of 1776. Whatever his seat demonstrates, it demonstrates nothing about the American political order, because he did not live under one. He lived and died a subject of George III.

Then where he had to go to become Orthodox. He was received in London, in the chapel of the Russian embassy, an upper room up a back alley off the Strand, on the thirty-first of December, 1738, by chrismation. He crossed an ocean for it. There was no Orthodox priest, chapel, or congregation anywhere in the American colonies on that date, and there would not be a parish in what is now the lower forty-eight for another century and a quarter.

Then how he had to live once he came back. In 1761 the priest of that London parish, Fr. Stefan Ivanovsky, petitioned the Russian Holy Synod on Ludwell’s behalf, and the petition survives. It asks what an Orthodox family returning to Virginia should do about worship: keep to prayer at home, or go to the English church now and then. And it explains why the question is urgent. Here is the sentence, in the published translation of the Synod archive:

“there, and in the whole Province of Virginia, and in the whole of America, except nearby Pennsylvania, any other Religion except Protestant, is forbidden. Besides in his home country still nobody knows about his change of Religion, since he is a councilor in a high position in the King’s service.”

Read it twice, because it is the load-bearing document of the argument it is supposed to support, and what it describes is a legal prohibition and a concealment. The reason for going to the English church three times a year was to draw off, in the petition’s own words, the anger of the local people. The reason nobody had found him out was that he was a councillor in the King’s service. His office and his silence were one fact.

The same petition contains a line that ought to end the discussion on its own. Ludwell’s heaviest trouble in Virginia, it says, was that in twenty years he had no access to the Eucharist, which he had longed for; hence the request that consecrated Gifts be shipped to him once a year in a proper tabernacle. The exemplary Orthodox statesman of colonial America went two decades without communion.

Then the ending. He never went back to Virginia. He sailed for London in September of 1760 and stayed. He died there and was buried in the family vault at an Anglican parish church at Bow, in the East End. Whatever permission the Synod may have given was never used by him, and no Orthodox community anywhere descends from him. He owned two hundred and thirty-five people at his death, which is a separate reckoning and not my subject here, though anyone constructing a Southern Orthodox lineage out of him is going to have to say it out loud sooner or later. And the researcher who has spent fifteen years assembling his archive concedes, in print, that almost nothing written by the man survives: a one-page preface, a handful of letters, some inscriptions in books.

So here is the case, whole. One man. Converted abroad because he could not be converted at home. Keeping it secret in order to keep a Crown office. Twenty years without the sacrament. Gone from the country for good seven years before he died, and dead nine years before the country existed. A page of his own words in the record.

That is the exception that reports the rule, and the rule is written in the petition’s own sentence: any other religion except Protestant is forbidden.

And a word about method, because the Ludwell argument is a specimen of something. When the case for a broad historical claim narrows to one individual, the claim has already lost. When the documents about that individual say the reverse of what is wanted, the honest move is to drop the claim, not to inflate the man. One convert is not a settlement. One seat on a colonial council is not a constitutional principle. A tradition that produced St. Ambrose and St. Basil and a thousand years of canon law does not have to be argued from a lone Virginian’s discreet chrismation, and the reaching itself tells you how bare the shelf is.

I will grant Ludwell everything that is actually his. He found the faith on his own, in a foreign city, with nobody to help him. He translated a catechism out of Latin so his daughters would have it. He kept it for twenty-three years with no priest, no parish, and no communion, which is longer than most of us would last. He is worth remembering, and I am glad somebody is doing the archival work. He is simply not evidence for the claim he is being made to carry, and I suspect he would have been baffled to be asked.

The fourteen hundred

The second exhibit is a number, and I expect to meet it more often than the first, because a crowd sounds better than a convert. It is usually put as fourteen hundred Greek Orthodox settlers in St. Augustine in 1768, and offered as proof that Orthodoxy was on the ground in America before the Republic was.

Almost every word of that is wrong, and the corrections are not quibbles.

They were not fourteen hundred Greeks. One thousand four hundred and three people sailed from Mahón in Minorca on the seventeenth of April, 1768, in eight ships, and the Greeks were a minority of them. Around eleven hundred were Minorcans, which is to say Catholic subjects of the Spanish crown. The Greeks numbered somewhere near two hundred, most of them Maniots out of the Peloponnese. The peer-reviewed figure counts about three hundred non-Minorcans in total, Greeks and Italians and Corsicans and Turks together. You will see five hundred Greeks quoted, including on the memorial’s own website; that number comes from Turnbull’s recruiting letters, in which he says he means to bring nigh five hundred working people out of Greece. It is what he hoped to get. It is not what he shipped.

They were not settlers. What Turnbull shipped was indentured labour for an indigo plantation, recruited on five-to-ten-year contracts at five pounds a year with food and clothing, to work a bounty-farming venture capitalized in London by Dr. Andrew Turnbull, Sir William Duncan and George Grenville, on a land grant that eventually ran past a hundred thousand acres. Around a hundred enslaved Africans were purchased to work it alongside them. This was a labour force procured for a commodity crop, and nothing in the record suggests anyone involved thought of it otherwise.

And it destroyed them. A hundred and forty-eight died on the crossing. Of the one thousand two hundred and fifty-five who came ashore, nine hundred and sixty-four were dead within ten years, and the figure is Governor Tonyn’s own return. In May of 1777 seventeen of them swore depositions before that governor describing whippings of a hundred and ten lashes, men chained by the leg for six months, wages never paid, indentures extended by years without consent, and starvation that had people eating cowhide and vermin. Ten of the seventeen signed their names; seven made a mark. Only seven were Minorcan. The rest were Greeks and Italians. Tonyn’s own summary was that not less than six murders had been committed.

There was no Orthodox priest. None sailed, none came later, and no Orthodox chapel, liturgy, or parish was ever established at New Smyrna or at St. Augustine in the whole colonial period. What they had was two Roman Catholic priests: Fr. Pedro Camps, a secular priest of Mercadal, and Fr. Bartolomé Casanovas, an Augustinian, who was deported in 1774 and left Fr. Camps alone.

And here is the fact that closes it. The single most complete surviving record of that community’s sacramental life, every baptism from 1768 to 1784 and every marriage from 1776, is Fr. Camps’s register, which survives and is catalogued and is known as the Golden Book of the Minorcans. It is a Roman Catholic parish book. There is no Orthodox counterpart because there was no Orthodox parish. If any of those Greeks was baptized, married, or buried with the rites of the Orthodox Church on American soil, no one has produced the record of it.

The memorial itself concedes this, and it deserves credit for the concession, which I did not have to dig out of anywhere. The St. Photios Greek Orthodox National Shrine in St. Augustine, dedicated in 1982 in the old Avero House, says on its own page about the colonists that the Greeks worshipped in the Roman Catholic faith, because of the lack of priests in their own faith. The Shrine’s language throughout is more careful than the language of the people who repeat it. It says first Greek colony, not first Orthodox parish. It acknowledges the Minorcan majority. Whatever inflation has happened has mostly happened downstream of the Shrine, on social media, and it would be unfair to aim at the Shrine for it.

Then Spain took the whatever was left. When the colony collapsed in 1777, something like six hundred survivors walked the seventy miles up the King’s Road to St. Augustine; Tonyn’s census a few months later counted four hundred and nineteen alive. When Spain resumed possession in 1784, the survivors were required by law to swear loyalty to the Spanish crown and to be received into the Roman Catholic Church. Their descendants are still there, some ten thousand of them in St. Johns County by the Park Service’s count, and they are Catholics, and they call themselves Minorcans, and their historic church is the Catholic cathedral. Whatever Orthodoxy any individual carried off those ships in 1768 was extinguished by statute inside sixteen years.

And it was not in America. This is the part that should be checked before anyone cites the colony again. East Florida had been British only since 1763, when Spain handed it over at the Treaty of Paris. It was never one of the thirteen; the Park Service calls it the fourteenth. It was a loyalist stronghold through the Revolution, and the citizens of St. Augustine burned Samuel Adams and John Hancock in effigy in the plaza. Britain gave Florida back to Spain in 1783. The ground the colony stood on did not become United States soil until the tenth of July, 1821, when the Spanish governor handed the province over to an American colonel. That is forty-four years after the colony had already ceased to exist, and fifty-three years after those people landed. Not one of them lived a single day under an American flag.

I want to be scrupulous about the one place the record is genuinely soft, because I would rather raise it myself. The National Park Service, a federal source, describes the colonists as practicing the Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox religion, and it cites nothing for it. The director of the St. Photios Shrine has said the Greeks were almost all Orthodox and that an Orthodox priest was originally meant to come. And the Orthodox historian who has looked hardest at this reported, after reading the standard monograph, that it is not even entirely clear the Greeks were Orthodox, since the sources speak of Greek priests and a Greek church without ever naming the Orthodox Church. That is worth knowing in both directions: some of those “Greeks” were recruited out of Corsica, where the Greek colony had formally left Orthodoxy for Rome in the 1670s and had been Greek-rite Catholics for ninety years by the time they sailed. And that same historian and that same Shrine director agreed, in the end, on the description of the colony that I think is exactly right. It is a barren shoot.

So the defensible sentence is this. Some of the Maniots aboard were presumably Orthodox by background. There was no priest, no chapel, no liturgy, no parish, and no sacramental record that is not Catholic; the survivors were required by law to become Catholic; their descendants are Catholic; and the whole thing happened on ground that would not be American for another two generations.

And the last thing to say about it is the saddest. The first Orthodox parish on the soil of the contiguous United States dates from the 1860s, in New Orleans and San Francisco, and nothing about it descends from New Smyrna. That is a real history, and an honorable one, and it is a hundred years shorter than people would like. It does not need a failed indigo plantation in a loyalist British colony grafted onto the front of it, and the grafting insults the people it claims to honor. Those people were indentured laborers worked to death in a swamp, three-quarters of them dead inside a decade, and the honest thing to do with them is to pray for them and leave them out of an argument they never entered.

The son-in-law

The third exhibit is the serious one, and a reader who has been nodding along should slow down here, because this is the place where my argument has to be narrowed.

Philip Ludwell’s youngest daughter Lucy was received into Orthodoxy with her two sisters at the Russian embassy chapel in London in 1762, when she was about ten. In 1769 she married a man named John Paradise, and John Paradise is the best case anybody has.

He was born at Salonica in April of 1743, the son of Peter Paradise, an English consul in the Levant, and a half-Greek mother whose name I could not turn up anywhere. That makes him about a quarter Greek by descent, and no baptismal record from Salonica survives, so his infant Orthodoxy is an inference rather than a document. But his adult practice is not an inference, and I want to concede it in full rather than have it produced against me. The editors of the Princeton edition of Jefferson’s papers, working from three separate scholarly sources, record that the Paradises attended the Russian legation chapel in London regularly, that Lucy called its priest her priest, and that John Paradise left that priest, Fr. Yakov Smirnov, a legacy of a hundred pounds in his will. This was a practicing Orthodox Christian. Not a man with a Greek grandmother and a sentiment.

He was also, unlike Ludwell, alive in the American republic, and my own framing has to be corrected here. In 1780, at a dinner in Paris that Franklin attended, Paradise swore an oath of allegiance to the United States, and Franklin issued him a passport calling him a citizen. Jefferson later held that this conferred nothing, since the law required the oath to be sworn before a magistrate on American soil. But something changed during the Paradises’ visit to Virginia, because on the sixth of July, 1788, Jefferson certified over his own hand and seal that Paradise’s condition was “that of a gentleman, and citizen of the state of Virginia, invested with all the rights of that character, capable of all the offices and honors of that country,” and a month later drafted a legal instrument describing him as “John Paradise of James city county in the commonwealth of Virginia.” The instrument by which that happened I have not seen, and I will say so rather than guess at it.

So the sentence I would have liked to write, that no Orthodox Christian ever stood inside the American political order, is not available to me. One did.

Now look at what it amounted to.

He held no office, ever. What is documented is the reverse: Lucy wrote to President Washington in 1789 hoping to secure her husband a diplomatic post, and the editors of Washington’s papers describe the hope as vain, which it was. Jefferson’s certificate says he was capable of offices and honors, which is a statement about eligibility and expressly not about tenure. There is no record of his voting. He was resident in Virginia for a single stay of roughly eight or nine months, arriving in the autumn of 1787 and gone again by the summer of 1788, and in the middle of it he spent four days at Mount Vernon. He never came back. He died at Great Titchfield Street in London on the twelfth of December, 1795.

And in all of that there was no priest, no altar, no liturgy, and no sacrament available to him anywhere on this continent. Not one.

And by then it was not against the law any more. This is the part worth sitting with, because it is where the whole question of what political power can and cannot do gets answered without anybody arguing about it. Virginia had enacted Jefferson’s statute for religious freedom on the sixteenth of January, 1786, twenty-one months before Paradise landed. No man to be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, and no man to suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief. The Commonwealth he stepped into had just written the most complete guarantee of religious liberty then existing anywhere in the world, and the man who drafted it was handling his legal affairs and would certify his citizenship that July. Paradise could have opened a chapel on Duke of Gloucester Street and no magistrate in Virginia could have touched him.

He did not, because there was nobody to serve it, and there would be nobody for another lifetime.

Set the two men side by side and the point makes itself. His father-in-law could not receive communion in Virginia because the law forbade it. He could not receive communion in Virginia although the law now invited it. Between the two of them the statute book was turned completely around, and it changed nothing whatever for either, because the thing that was missing was never permission.

Two details finish it, and the first is almost too neat. When he married Lucy Ludwell in 1769, two Orthodox Christians were married to each other in England, and they were married by Anglican rite, because Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act had since 1753 made every other form legally void, exempting only Quakers and Jews. Their marriage produced a settlement that Virginia courts later honored and Jefferson himself abstracted, so it must have been the valid kind. That is an inference from the statute rather than a parish register I have read, and I flag it as one. But if it holds, then the best-documented Orthodox marriage in the American story was solemnized in the one rite the law would recognize, which was not theirs.

The second is Lucy. She came home to Virginia in 1805, a widow of about fifty-three, and wrote to Jefferson from Norfolk on the twenty-seventh of August to say she had “Come home to live the remaining Years of My Life in the Bosom of My Native Country,” and that she did it “with My Priests Blessing and Command who is the Revd Mr Smirnove Chapplen of Legation to the Russian Embasey.” That sentence is the high-water mark of Orthodox Christianity in the early United States, and I mean that seriously and without any sneer in it. A woman crossed an ocean under her confessor’s blessing and told the President of the United States she had done so.

Then nine years, and nothing. No priest, no chapel, no confession, no communion, no letters about any of it. The researcher who has done more than anyone to recover this family speculates that she may have carried reserved gifts with her, and then concedes in print that there is no surviving correspondence to show it. She was declared insane in 1812 and died in Williamsburg in 1814. Where she is buried is uncertain and there is no marker.

Three corrections while I am here, because the popular version of Paradise carries them. He is often called the first naturalized citizen of the United States; he was not, and Jefferson’s own view of the Paris oath is the reason. He is often placed in Dr. Johnson’s Literary Club; he was a member of the Essex Head Club, which is a different and later thing. And he is often called Jefferson’s Greek tutor, for which I could find no document at all.

What the three of them have in common

Notice what has to be done to the first two to make them work. Ludwell has to be moved forward across the founding of a country he did not live to see. The New Smyrna colonists have to be moved north into a nation that would not own their ground for another fifty-three years, and multiplied by seven, and converted posthumously. In each case the man building the case has stopped reading the evidence and started renovating it.

Paradise needs no renovation, which is why he is worth more than the other two together, and he still does not deliver what is wanted. He gives you an Orthodox Christian with a legal footing in Virginia, and I have said so. What he cannot give you is a Church. No priest crossed with him, none was here to meet him, and none came for the rest of his life or his widow’s. Whatever standing he had was his own, and it died with him, and nothing grew from it.

That is the distinction the whole argument turns on, and it is worth stating bluntly. The question is not whether an Orthodox Christian ever set foot in the early republic and held property and swore an oath. One did. The question is whether Orthodoxy was ever established in this country as a public thing with clergy and altars and canons and children baptized into it, and the answer to that is no, and it stayed no for another lifetime after Lucy Paradise was buried without a stone.

It also answers a question a reader is entitled to ask about all three of them, which is whether these were simply men keeping quiet. Ludwell was, and the petition says so and gives the reason, and I have made a good deal of it. But the concealment stops with him. What comes after him is not a secret, it is a vacancy, and no amount of courage uncovers a vacancy. Paradise had nothing to hide and nowhere to take it.

There is one more case that settles the register. In the 1820s two boys were brought out of the Greek revolution to New England by Protestant missionaries. One of them, Photius Kavasales, was the son of an Orthodox priest of Zante. He grew up in Connecticut, took the surname of his Protestant patron, and became a Congregationalist clergyman named Photius Fisk. That is what happened to an Orthodox priest’s son who arrived in America in the early republic. There was nothing here to receive him, so something else did.

If four centuries of American history contained a real Orthodox political inheritance, it would not come down to one concealed councillor, a failed plantation, and a linguist who visited for eight months. There would be parishes, and canons, and quarrels, and buildings. There are none, because there was nothing. The Orthodox history of this country starts with a boat from Valaam in 1794 and then a long line of steerage tickets, and every honest thing anybody can say about it starts there too.

VI. The Church has a name for this, and the name is not a compliment

Here is where an Orthodox Christian has an advantage over everyone else in this argument, and it is a strange thing to watch him decline to use it.

In September of 1872 a synod met in Constantinople, with the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch and the archbishop of Cyprus and some two dozen metropolitans and bishops present, and condemned a thing it called phyletism. The word is built on the Greek for tribe or race, and the sense of it is the making of race the organizing principle of the Church: the constitution, in one and the same place, of separate racial churches, each receiving all of its own kind and shutting out all the others. The synod called that arrangement contrary to the Gospel and the canons, and declared those who built on it to be schismatics, cut off from the Catholic Church. Its stated premise was that the Church is a spiritual communion appointed by her founder to gather all nations into one brotherhood in Christ, so that racial distinction inside her amounts to a contradiction in terms.

Some care is needed here, in both directions.

The care in one direction: what the synod condemned was narrower than the way it is usually quoted. The occasion was the Bulgarian question, and the specific offense was the erection of a parallel ethnic jurisdiction on ground that already had a bishop, sorting Christians in the same city into churches by blood. It did not condemn the Bulgarians, and it said so; it did not condemn national churches, or Slavonic liturgy, or the ordinary fact that a Serb loves being a Serb. The most common English translation renders the Greek word as “racism,” which is a translator’s gloss and imports a modern moral vocabulary into a technical ecclesiological ruling. And its authority is a real question: it was a local synod, not an ecumenical council, the patriarch of Jerusalem walked out and refused to sign, and Russia was not represented.

The care in the other direction: none of that gets anybody out from under it. The bishops of the Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States, which is to say every canonical Orthodox hierarch in this country, Greek and Antiochian and OCA and ROCOR and Serbian and Romanian and the rest, issued a statement in August of 2017, after Charlottesville, that cited this synod by name, described what it condemned as all forms of xenophobia and chauvinism, and said that it stands formally condemned as heresy, which they described as the strongest category of false teaching. Whatever one thinks of 1872’s canonical weight in the abstract, the American episcopate has told the American faithful, unanimously and in writing, how to read it. And the same document is careful in a way that ought to be noticed by everyone tempted to quote half of it: it also refuses to condone any form of revenge or retaliation by any group or individual. The refusal runs in both directions, which is how you can tell what kind of document it is.

I want to press on what that word means, because the statement gets read as a press release and it is not one.

Heresy is a term of art in Orthodox usage, and it carries a consequence: it names a teaching that puts a man outside the Church for as long as he holds it. It is a good deal more than a strong word for a bad opinion. The 1872 synod did not merely disapprove of phyletism. It declared those who organize on it foreign to the one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and schismatic. And in 2017 the whole American episcopate, every canonical Orthodox bishop in the country, including the bishop of whatever parish you will walk into this Sunday, signed its name to a document saying that is where the teaching stands.

That has consequences, and I would rather spell them out than leave them courteous.

If you hold that the Church in America ought to belong to one race, your own bishop has already ruled on it, in writing, with his name on it. You are not standing in an open question. You are on the wrong side of a closed one, and you did not lose that argument to me. You lost it to the man whose name is said aloud in your parish at every Liturgy and whose hand is on the head of every priest who has ever absolved you.

It is a matter for confession and not for a comment section. That is the ordinary mechanism the Church has for this, and I mean it at face value. When a teaching has been named heresy and a man finds that he holds it, the tradition does not send him off to win a debate. It sends him to his priest, and then it feeds him.

Let me be exact about what this does not mean, because overstating it would be its own dishonesty. Nobody has been excommunicated by a statement; the Church does not work that way, no canonical process has been opened against anyone over this, and a bishops’ declaration is not a trial. It means the teaching has been named, publicly and unanimously, by the men with the authority to name it, and that a Christian who goes on holding it is holding something his own hierarchs have called by the worst word the Church possesses. A man may decide that all of them are wrong. He should notice, first, that this is what he has decided.

And the reasoning underneath 1872 is very much older than 1872. The first constitutional crisis the Church ever had was about exactly this. The question at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts was whether a Gentile had to become ethnically Jewish in order to belong to the body of Christ, and the answer was no, and St. John Chrysostom’s comment on the passage is that to impose the ethnic marker on the incomer is to fight against God. St. Paul, writing to the Colossians, lists the categories that no longer determine anything and deliberately reaches for the two his readers would have thought beyond redemption: barbarian and Scythian, the unassimilable savage and the northern nomad. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on that verse, says there is no difference admitted with him either of nation, or of rank, or of ancestry. When St. John Chrysostom takes up the passage in Ephesians about the middle wall of partition being broken down, he reaches for an image I have never been able to shake: two statues, one of silver and one of lead, both melted, and both coming out gold. Not the lead becoming silver. Both becoming a third thing that neither was before. That is what the Church claims to be doing to the peoples that walk into her, and whatever it is, it is stranger than assimilation and stranger than preservation.

There is an irony in the 1872 condemnation being invoked so rarely by the people who most need it, and it is worth naming. Phyletism was condemned in order to stop a large church from making a small people’s Christianity into an ethnic instrument. It was, in its origins, a protection. It is now being violated in reverse, by men who want to take a Church that is in America overwhelmingly the Church of immigrants and make it the chaplaincy of an ethnic majority that has never belonged to it.

VII. What the Fathers actually did when foreigners were the question

I said the tradition has addressed this. I want to be specific about how, because vague appeals to “the Fathers” are exactly what got us here, and because the actual texts are better than any summary of them.

Start with the one case where a Father faced this precise policy. In about 388, in Milan, St. Ambrose wrote his treatise on the duties of the clergy, and one chapter of the third book carries a heading that has not needed updating in sixteen hundred years: that strangers must never be expelled from the city in a time of famine. He is describing an actual proposal, and an actual expulsion.

He gives three reasons against it, and they are not the reasons a modern churchman would give. The first is that it is a killing. To drive out the foreigners at the moment they most need help, he writes, and to cut them off from the trade of their common parent, is as cruel as casting off a man and refusing him food while he dies. The second is a matter of self-respect: “Nothing is more shameful,” he says, “than to expel a man as a foreigner, and yet to claim his services as though he belonged to us.” The third is that it does not even work. Against the expulsion at Rome he sets what a certain old official did somewhere else: rather than emptying the city, he raised a subscription from the wealthy, bought grain with it, and fed the foreigners, and the city’s own supply was not reduced by a bushel. St. Ambrose’s conclusion is that what is virtuous turns out to be what is expedient, and that the expulsion was neither.

I want to set that argument next to the one being made now, because they are the same argument.

The trouble at Rome was a famine, and there was nothing abstract or manufactured about it. There was not enough grain, the price of what there was had gone up, and a proposal went round that the shortage would ease if the foreigners went home. That is the identical shape of the case one hears constantly today, and hears from people who are not cranks: the housing, the wages, the jobs on the site, the class sizes, the strain on what there is to go round. I am not going to wave that off. The men making it are very often the ones actually feeling the squeeze, and telling a man his hardship is imaginary is both cruel and the fastest way to lose him.

Ambrose does not wave it off either, and that is why he is worth reading rather than quoting. He takes the shortage as real, and then he does two things with it.

First he attacks the arithmetic. “How much cheaper is it to feed than to buy a working-man” is a sentence about cost, and he means it as one. He is telling the men who want the expulsion that the people they are about to drive out produce more than they consume, that the city will be poorer without them, and that it will end up paying to bring the labour back. Then he points at the alternative, which had been tried and had worked: a certain official facing the same famine went to the wealthy, raised a subscription, bought grain with it, and fed the strangers, and the citizens’ own supply was not reduced by a bushel. The scarcity was answered by increasing the supply, which is the thing one does with a scarcity.

Then he names what the expulsion actually was. Nothing is more shameful, he says, than to expel a man as a foreigner and yet to claim his services as though he belonged to us. Rome had wanted the labour and not the man. It had been content to have him unloading its grain and carrying its stone, and it discovered him to be a foreigner in the month the accounts got tight. St. Ambrose calls that a disgrace, to the faces of the men who had just done it, and then tells them it did not even work.

The thing to notice about that passage is who is writing it. St. Ambrose is the bishop of the western imperial capital, from a senatorial family, writing in the very years when he is browbeating the emperor Theodosius in public and winning. Nobody could mistake him for a persecuted minority pleading for tolerance. This is a man at the top of the Christian political order telling his own governing class that a policy it has just carried out was cruel, hypocritical, and stupid. He cannot be waved off as an outsider arguing his own interest.

Then take St. John Chrysostom and the Goths, because it is the single hardest fact in this entire dispute for the assimilate-or-leave position, and it comes out of Blessed Theodoret’s church history, written within living memory, rather than out of a devotional life.

Chrysostom is archbishop of Constantinople from 397, in the years when a Gothic general nearly took the city and the mob wanted every Goth in it dead or gone. Blessed Theodoret’s account is four sentences long and I will give it almost whole. St. John Chrysostom saw that the Goths were tangled up in the Arian heresy. So he appointed presbyters and deacons and readers who spoke the Gothic tongue, and he assigned them a church of their own, and by their means won many of them back. And, Blessed Theodoret adds, he used frequently himself to go and preach there, using an interpreter, and he got other good speakers to do the same.

Read that slowly, because every clause is doing work. A church building, given. Clergy of their own people, ordained at every grade. The Scriptures read in their language, not in the language of the capital. And the archbishop of the imperial city walking down there himself, repeatedly, to preach through a translator to a foreign population that his own citizens were afraid of, in the exact years they were most afraid.

Chrysostom was no modern liberal here, and presenting him as one would be a lie. A homily survives that appears to come from that Gothic church, and its rhetoric is patronizing in a way that would embarrass anyone quoting it as a model of respect; he calls them the most barbarous of barbarians and compares the situation to wolves brought in among sheep. He is a fourth-century Roman and he sounds like one. But what he did is not ambiguous, and it is the opposite of what is being urged now. The barbarians at the gate were, in his hands, a mission field with a liturgy in their own language, inside the walls.

Then St. Basil, who built, outside the walls of Caesarea, the complex that St. Gregory the Theologian described in his funeral oration as a new city: a hospital, a leprosarium, and at the center of it a xenodocheion, a house for strangers, with physicians and transport and escorts laid on. St. Basil defends the project in his own hand, in a letter to the provincial governor who had been receiving complaints about it, and the description he gives is of a place of entertainment for strangers, both those on a journey and those who need treatment. It was infrastructure, built by a bishop, for foreigners, and set deliberately outside the city that had no room for them.

The objection to this one arrives on schedule, so let me meet it before it does. Somebody always points out that St. Basil put the place outside the walls, and reads that as proof the Fathers wanted the undesirables kept out of town.

Read St. Gregory’s oration and it collapses. What he describes of the situation before St. Basil is a population already expelled: men whose limbs were mortifying, “driven away from their cities and homes and public places and fountains, aye, and from their own dearest ones, recognizable by their names rather than by their features.” The lepers were already outside the walls when St. Basil got there, and had been for as long as anybody could remember, and the driving out was the entire relationship the city had with them. St. Basil did not move them further off. He went out to where they had been thrown and built a city around them.

And what he built was not a quarantine. In his own letter to the governor, answering the complaints, he describes the plan in the vocabulary of settlement: he means to restore ruins, to people deserted districts, and to turn wildernesses into towns. He staffs it with physicians and attendants and transport. He teaches trades, so that the people there will have an occupation and a career. And St. Gregory, rebutting a charge that St. Basil was a proud man, reaches for the fact everyone in Caesarea knew and considers it a knock-down: he kissed the lepers. He greeted them as brothers, with his own mouth, at a time when the accepted wisdom was that doing so would kill you.

I will concede the one point an honest critic can press, because it is sitting in the text. St. Gregory does say, with some evident relief, that these men are “no longer before our eyes” at the city’s gatherings, and a modern reader can hear in that a note of the problem having been tidied out of sight. That is fair, and I would rather grant it than pretend the passage is cleaner than it is. But look at the direction everything else runs. The exclusion is what St. Basil inherited. The going out, the kiss, the physicians and the town are his answer to it. And the effect St. Gregory reports is that the leading men of the province started competing with one another to do the same. What that describes is a man walking out to the place where the removed already were, and refusing to leave them in it.

Then St. Patrick, whose letter to the soldiers of Coroticus is, of everything set down here, the text I would most want the men making this argument to sit with. St. Patrick is a Briton. He was taken to Ireland as a slave, escaped, and went back as a bishop to the people who had enslaved him. Coroticus is a Christian British warlord whose men have killed and enslaved a group of St. Patrick’s newly baptized Irish converts, some of them still wearing the white robes of their baptism.

St. Patrick excommunicates him. And the way he does it is the point. “I live as an alien among non-Roman peoples,” he writes, “an exile on account of the love of God.” Of his own countrymen he says that he cannot call them his fellow-citizens, nor fellow-citizens of the saints of Rome, but fellow-citizens of demons, because of their evil deeds. He tells them that the Christians of Roman Gaul send holy men to the Franks and the other pagan peoples with money to buy back baptized captives, and that Coroticus and his men do the reverse: they kill them and sell them to foreign peoples who have no knowledge of God. And then, quietly, in the middle of it: if my own people do not recognize me, still no prophet is honored in his own country.

A saint of the Church, writing in his own hand, in the fifth century, chose a foreign people he had every reason to hate over his own countrymen and his own race, and told his countrymen to their faces that they had forfeited the name of citizen and of Christian by what they had done to foreigners. That is the entire occasion and content of the letter, which is why I have had no need to strain it.

And then St. Nicholas of Japan, who is as close as the tradition comes to a controlled experiment on the question of whether a Christian’s nation or his Church holds the final claim on him.

He was a Russian priest who landed at Hakodate in 1861 and never left. By the time he died in 1912 there were something like thirty-three thousand Japanese Orthodox Christians in two hundred and sixty-six communities, in a country where Christianity had been illegal until he had been there twelve years. Then, in 1904, Russia and Japan went to war, and a Russian bishop found himself the shepherd of a Japanese flock whose sons were being sent to fight and kill his own countrymen.

What he did is documented from his own diaries. He withdrew from public services for the duration of the war, because the rite as it stood required prayers for his sovereign’s victory and his sovereign’s enemies’ defeat, and his sovereign’s enemies were the people in front of him. He instructed his Japanese Christians to do their duty to their own emperor and their own country, and he blessed the prayers his Japanese clergy offered for Japanese victory, and he prayed for Russia by himself, in private, and said so. At a funeral for Japanese Orthodox soldiers killed fighting Russians, in October of 1904, he prayed aloud that God would credit their deaths, undertaken in fulfillment of their duty to their fatherland, as the holy deeds of martyrs. And at the same time he organized the pastoral care of the tens of thousands of Russian prisoners of war held in Japanese camps.

The line I cannot get out of my head is from his diary on Christmas Eve of that year. He writes that he is living now in a house of two stories. On the upper floor, he says, we are all children of the heavenly Father; on that floor there are no Japanese and no Russians. But sometimes an oppressive state of soul pulls him down to the lower floor, where he is alone, without the Japanese. And he tells himself: I must go up to the upper floor, where there is no anger. I must be an inhabitant of the upper floor.

Now the part that has to be said, because this saint has lately been picked up and swung as a club.

The line that travels is “love of country is natural and holy.” It is real. He said it, and he meant it, and anybody who wants to quote it may. What does not travel is the sentence it lives inside. In the pastoral letter he sent his Japanese flock when the war began, the passage runs: to love one’s country is holy, but besides our earthly homeland we have a fatherland in heaven, and that fatherland is the Church, in which we are her equal members. He stacks the two of them, says out loud which one sits on top, and says the members of the higher one are equal. In the same letter he tells any of them going to the front to fight without regard for his own life, and then adds the clause that wrecks the entire use now being made of him: not out of hatred for your enemy.

Then set the words beside the life, because with this man the life is the argument.

He spent fifty years making Japanese Christians. He translated the New Testament into Japanese with a Japanese scholar over a span of decades. He opened a seminary and staffed it to produce Japanese clergy, and the curriculum carried Japanese and Chinese and Russian precisely so the graduates could translate. At his death there were two hundred and sixty-six Japanese Orthodox communities and some thirty-three thousand faithful, served by thirty-five priests, six deacons and a hundred and sixteen catechists, nearly all of them Japanese, and a cathedral in Tokyo that the Japanese themselves named after him and still call by his name. He did not build a Russian chapel for Russians in Japan. He built a Japanese Church and handed it to the Japanese.

He also went back to Russia twice, in 1869 and again in 1879, so the staying was chosen, and chosen again, by a man who had somewhere else to go. And the reason he gave for refusing to come home when the war made it reasonable is the one that settles the matter: the Japanese Church must not be left without a bishop, and therefore I am staying here.

So. If a man wants St. Nicholas of Japan for the proposition that a Christian may love his own country, he is welcome to him, and he is right, and I will not quarrel. If he wants him for the proposition that a Christian’s first duty runs to his own countrymen and that the foreigner is therefore to be moved along, he has reached for the worst witness in the entire calendar. St. Nicholas’s first duty, by his own account and by every year of his life, was to the Church. And the concrete content of that duty was baptizing foreigners, the foreigners of a nation then at war with his own, and giving them priests and books and a cathedral in their own language.

Run that back through to America and it does not land where the argument wants it. The analogue of St. Nicholas’s Japanese is the immigrant. And what he owed them was the font.

He is not a man with no attachments; he is a man who knew which floor of the house he lived on, and who found out at the one moment when the answer costs something. He was glorified by the Russian Church in 1970 as equal to the apostles, which is the title the Church reserves for the ones who bring a whole people in.

VIII. Who is my neighbor

There is a question underneath all of this that the tradition answers directly, and it is worth going to it, because the whole dispute turns on a definition and the definition is not ours to write.

A lawyer asks Christ what he must do to inherit eternal life and is sent back to the law he already knows: love God, and love thy neighbor as thyself. And then, in Luke’s telling, comes the clause that gives the game away. “But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbor?”

Willing to justify himself. Luke tells us the motive before he tells us the question. It is a request for a boundary. The man wants to know where the obligation stops, because an obligation that stops somewhere is one he can satisfy, and an obligation that stops nowhere is one he will fail at for the rest of his life. Everyone who asks this question in 2026 is asking it for that reason, and I include myself. I have wanted the smaller circle plenty of times, and always for reasons that sounded excellent while I was giving them.

What Christ does with the question is the thing. He does not answer it. He tells a story about a man beaten and left in a ditch, and two men of the right religion and the right nation who cross the road, and one man of the wrong nation who stops. And then He hands the question back with the grammar reversed: “Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves?”

Look at what has happened. The lawyer asked who is a neighbor to me, which is a question about categories: who qualifies, where the edge of my people runs, whom I owe. Christ asks who became a neighbor to the man in the ditch, which is a question about what somebody did on a particular afternoon. In the lawyer’s version, neighbor is a status a man either has or lacks, and once you have established that he lacks it you are free and you may go home. In Christ’s version it has stopped being a status at all and become something that happens when one man stops walking. The lawyer never gets his boundary, because the question that would have produced one has been taken out of his hands.

St. Cyril of Alexandria, commenting on the passage, puts it where it hurts. “You have seen, O lawyer,” he writes, “and it has been proved by the parable, that it is of no avail whatsoever to any man, to be set up by empty names, and to pride himself upon unmeaning and ridiculous titles, so long as the excellence of deeds does not accompany them.” And of the man who stopped, in seven words: “one of another race, a Samaritan, fulfilled the law of love.”

One of another race. Cyril does not labour it and neither will I. He notes what the man was, and what he did, and sets the two beside each other. The priest and the Levite had every credential the lawyer would have recognized as his own, and their entire function in the story is to be walked past.

Underneath that there is an older reading the tradition kept. Origen reports it from one of the elders and endorses it: the man going down is Adam, the robbers are the hostile powers, the priest is the Law and the Levite the prophets, the Samaritan is Christ, and the inn to which the wounded man is carried, the pandocheion, which means the all-receiver, the place that takes in everyone who comes, is the Church. That is the Church’s oldest picture of herself in this parable, and it is worth sitting with. A wayside inn on a dangerous road, kept by a foreigner, whose whole business is taking in whoever gets carried through the door and paying for him until he can stand again. Nobody at that door is working from a list.

And there is a floor under all of it that the Fathers laid early and never took up. St. Gregory of Nyssa, preaching on Ecclesiastes and getting angrier by the paragraph at a man who has bought slaves, demands to know what the buyer imagined he was purchasing. “What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God? How many staters did you get for selling that being shaped by God?” There is no figure, because what he bought has no price, and could not have one. Whatever else a human being is, and he may be foreign and illegal and inconvenient and competing for the job you wanted and speaking a language you cannot follow, he is that. And St. John Chrysostom, preaching on almsgiving, presses it one further and says the poor man in the road is an altar: “This altar is composed of the very members of Christ. . . This altar may thou everywhere see lying, both in lanes and in market places, and may sacrifice upon it every hour.”

I do not think a man can hold that account of what a person is and also hold that a category of persons is a problem to be relocated. Not because the second is impolite. Because the first has already told him what he is looking at when he looks at them, and what he is looking at is an altar lying in the road.

The lawyer wanted to know where the line ran. He was sent away to become the sort of man who does not need one.

IX. What the Church prays, which is harder to argue with than what any Father wrote

Everything above is a Father or a saint, which means everything above can be met with another Father or another saint, and usually is. So let me put down the part of the argument that does not work that way, because this is what the whole Church says out loud, every week, in every jurisdiction, whether anybody agrees with it or not.

Every year, at the door of Great Lent, the Church reads the judgment of the nations. The Sunday of the Last Judgment, which most people know as Meatfare, is the third Sunday of the pre-Lenten season, and its Gospel is Matthew twenty-five, the sheep and the goats, and there is no jurisdiction anywhere that reads anything else on that day. Which means that before the fast begins, every year, without exception, in every Orthodox church on earth, the faithful are told what the criterion of the last judgment is, and the criterion has six items in it, and the third one is I was a stranger, and ye took me in.

It is worth sitting with the placement. The Church could have put that reading anywhere. She puts it at the threshold of the season of repentance, immediately before Forgiveness Sunday, as the last thing said before the fast starts. And St. John Chrysostom’s homily on the passage anticipates the obvious dodge, which is to restrict the obligation to our own: though he be a secular person, he says, if he be hungry and famishing and naked and a stranger, Christ’s will is that he should have the benefit of all this care. The qualifying condition is need. It is not membership, and it is not blood.

Every Divine Liturgy contains a prayer for outsiders to be brought in, and none for anyone to be put out. After the Gospel, before the doors are shut on the faithful, the deacon turns and calls on the congregation to pray for the catechumens, and every petition in that litany points one direction: that the Lord will teach them the word of truth, that He will reveal to them the gospel of righteousness, that He will unite them to His holy, catholic and apostolic Church. The priest’s prayer asks that they be granted the baptism of rebirth and be numbered among the chosen flock. And the exclamation that closes it is the giveaway: that with us they also may glorify Thy most honorable and majestic name.

That is how the Church’s mind runs on the man who is not yet inside her. He is prayed for out loud, as a class, by everyone who is inside, every week, and the whole content of the prayer is bring him in. Nothing answers it. There is no place anywhere in the service, and there never has been in the history of the rite, where the assembly asks God to take anybody out of anywhere. I have looked. It is not in there. A man whose politics require him to want a category of persons removed from his country is holding a position for which his own liturgy has supplied no words at all, and that ought to strike him as worth a minute’s thought.

(I know the objection: in a great many parishes the litany for the catechumens is skipped. It is. That is a true fact about modern practice and I would rather not hide behind an ideal text. But the omission is a shortening for time, not a repudiation, and it stands in the service books of every jurisdiction, including the ones that skip it.)

The anaphora of St. Basil, the great eucharistic prayer said over the gifts ten times a year, asks God to sail with those who sail and to travel with those who travel by land and by air, to defend widows, protect orphans, free captives, heal the sick, and to remember those who are in the courts, in the mines, in exile, in harsh labor, and in every affliction. The Greek asks God to go with him. Those categories, then and now, are overwhelmingly categories of displaced and foreign people. The Church does not stop to ask about their papers before praying for them.

And on Holy Friday the Church calls Christ a stranger. The hymn is by George Akropolites, sung at Vespers while the people come up to venerate the burial shroud, and it is built on a Greek pun the English cannot carry. Xenos is stranger and guest and host, all in one word. Give me this stranger, the hymn says, who from infancy was made a stranger in the world. Give me this stranger, whom his own people, hating him, put to death as a stranger. Give me this stranger, who knew how to show hospitality to the poor and to strangers. Give me this stranger, that I may hide in a tomb the one who, being a stranger, has nowhere to lay his head.

At the lowest point of the Orthodox year, the Church’s name for the crucified Christ is the Stranger, and the reason she gives for wanting him is that he was the one who took strangers in. On Holy Friday the Passion is the reception of the stranger, and the man who takes the body down is doing the sixth work of mercy over God’s own corpse. Matthew twenty-five runs straight through the middle of Holy Week.

And at Pentecost the Church sings that the division of the nations was a judgment God undid. When the Most High came down and confounded the tongues, runs the kontakion, the short hymn that carries the sense of a feast, He divided the nations; but when He distributed the tongues of fire, He called all to unity, and with one voice we glorify the all-holy Spirit. There is a hymn in the vespers of the feast that makes the same point twice over: of old the tongues were confounded because of the audacity of the tower, and now the tongues are made wise because of the glory of divine knowledge.

I do not want to overload that. The Church is not making a policy claim about borders in a festal hymn. But she is saying something about the standing of ethnic and linguistic division in the order of things, and what she says is that it belongs to the wreckage rather than to the design, and that the Spirit’s characteristic work is to reverse it. A theology that treats the separation of peoples as the very thing to be defended is going to have trouble singing that kontakion with a straight face.

X. Their best texts, read honestly

I have been on the internet long enough to know that everything above will be met with quotations, so let me go through the main ones. I have tried to check each of them against the actual source rather than against whoever posted it, and where the other side is right I am going to say so, because a man who cannot say that has stopped arguing and started campaigning.

“Love your personal enemies, hate the enemies of Christ, destroy the enemies of the Fatherland,” attributed to St. Philaret of Moscow. This one circulates constantly and it is mangled. The sermon is real: it is his homily on the nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, preached when he was a young monk in his mid-twenties, around 1806 to 1808. But its text is Luke six, love your enemies, and do good, its whole argument is against Christian enmity, and it ends at Golgotha with Christ forgiving the men killing him. The final sentence, in the Slavonic, runs in the reverse of the order in which it is quoted: loathe the enemies of God, strike the enemies of the fatherland, love your enemies. Amen. Three corruptions have crept into the popular version. The order is flipped so that violence is the payoff instead of the commandment being overridden. The verb rendered “hate” is gnushaytes, which means to loathe or shun or recoil from; the Russian word for hatred does not occur. And “enemies of God” has become “enemies of Christ.” The Russian Orthodox press has itself published corrections of this. Give the middle clause its due: a homilist in Russia on the eve of Napoleon did mean armed resistance to an invading army, and I will not make him into a pacifist. But an invading army is not a resident population, and the sermon’s last word is love.

St. Sergius of Radonezh blessing Dmitry Donskoy before Kulikovo, and sending the monks Peresvet and Oslyabya to fight. The earliest account of the battle, written within two years of it, does not contain the blessing. The chronicle tale that first mentions a meeting between the prince and the saint is judged fictitious by the specialists. The elaborated version everyone quotes, with the two warrior-monks in it, comes from a narrative written at the end of the fifteenth century or the beginning of the sixteenth, a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty years after the fact. A man named Oslyabya is documented, in 1390, as a boyar in the metropolitan’s service, which is to say a layman. Take the tradition at its full devotional value and it is still about a defensive campaign against an invading field army, and it still has nothing whatever to say about the people already living in your city.

St. Alexander Nevsky. He is invoked constantly and he is the most awkward possible witness for the case. He received his patent to rule from a pagan khan in 1248. In 1259 he led an army against Novgorod, a Russian city, to force it to pay the Mongol tribute census it had refused. In 1261 an Orthodox diocese was established at Sarai, the capital of the Horde, under Mongol protection. He fought only westward, against Latin Christians, and turned down the papal overture with the line the hagiography preserves: these things we know very well, but we do not accept your teaching. Whatever else St. Alexander Nevsky was, he was a man who judged that confessional integrity mattered more than political sovereignty or ethnic self-rule and acted on that judgment, which is the exact inverse of the position he gets quoted for. He was canonized in 1547, nearly three centuries after his death, by a Muscovite council with its own reasons.

St. Basil’s canon on soldiers, and St. Athanasius’ letter to Amun. St. Athanasius’ line, that it is not right to kill and yet in war it is lawful and praiseworthy to destroy the enemy, is authentic. It is also a throwaway analogy inside a letter about nocturnal emissions and whether natural bodily processes defile a man; he is establishing that acts change their character by context, so that he can then say something about marriage. St. Basil’s thirteenth canon is the serious text, and it cuts the other way from how it is used. Our fathers, he writes, did not reckon killing in war as murder; and then, immediately, he counsels that men who have done it abstain from communion for three years, on the ground that their hands are not clean. His fifty-fifth canon deposes a cleric who kills a bandit. That is not a tradition of pacifism; the Orthodox Church has never been pacifist and I am not claiming she has. But this is a tradition that declines to call the soldier a murderer and then keeps him from the chalice for three years anyway, which sits a long way from treating killing for one’s nation as meritorious.

The katechon, the restrainer of the second letter to the Thessalonians, is a favorite. St. John Chrysostom’s homily on the passage is the classic reading and it is worth quoting exactly, because it is quoted so loosely: some indeed say the grace of the Spirit, but others the Roman empire, to whom I most of all accede. What St. John Chrysostom then says the restrainer restrains is anarchy: as long as the fear of this empire lasts, no one will exalt himself. And he places that empire in a sequence of kingdoms that rise and are destroyed, this one to be destroyed by Antichrist as the ones before it were destroyed in their turn. So the patristic katechon is a universal legal order suppressing usurpation, understood to be temporary and perishable, and no policy is derived from it by anyone in the first millennium. It is nearly the opposite of an ethnically defined nation-state with a permanent vocation.

Symphonia. The word comes to us mainly from the preface to the emperor Justinian’s sixth novel, which says that the priesthood and the empire are the two greatest gifts God has given to men, proceeding from the same source, the one governing divine things and the other human ones. It is a beautiful sentence. What the novel itself legislates is episcopal qualifications, clerical marriage, the age of deaconesses, and church finance, because it is a statute regulating the clergy and the preface is its rationale. The other symphonia text, the Epanagoge, was withdrawn from official use within about twenty years of publication and replaced. And the whole arrangement presupposes an Orthodox emperor of a universal, deliberately multi-ethnic Christian world order. Byzantium never conceived of itself as the political expression of an ethnos. It had Armenian emperors. It had a mosque in Constantinople, for merchants and prisoners, which by the twelfth century was significant enough to appear in diplomatic negotiations. It never expelled its Jews, in eleven hundred years, while western Christendom expelled them from England in 1290 and Spain in 1492. Whatever symphonia is, it is not ethno-nationalism with a chrism on it.

And now the three cards they genuinely hold, because they exist and I would rather put them on the table myself.

The first is St. Ambrose again, and it is the same man. In 388 a mob of Christians at Callinicum burned the local synagogue, and Theodosius ordered the local bishop to pay for its rebuilding. St. Ambrose intervened, and won. His letter to the emperor is not evasive: he declares that he himself set fire to the synagogue, or at any rate gave the orders, so that there should be no building in which Christ is denied, and he describes the burned synagogue as a home of unbelief and a house of impiety under the damnation of God. A canonized Father asserted that the state must not protect a religious minority’s house of worship from Christian violence, and he prevailed. There is no honest way around that. I will note only what it does not say: he does not question the Jews’ presence in the empire or propose that they be removed. His claim is about a building and about impunity. It is bad enough as it stands.

The second is the Council in Trullo, canon eleven, which is a canon of a council the Orthodox Church receives with ecumenical authority, and which forbids clergy and laity alike to eat the unleavened bread of the Jews, to keep familiar company with them, to summon them in illness, to take their medicines, or to bathe with them, on pain of deposition for a cleric and excommunication for a layman. That is comprehensive social separation from a resident minority, mandated by a canon still formally on the books. Three things limit it, all of them true and none of them dissolving it: it is a discipline imposed on Christians and imposes nothing on Jews; it presupposes Jews living in the same cities, using the same baths, practicing the same medicine, which is to say it regulates a coexistence rather than ending one; and Balsamon, the great Byzantine canonist, was already narrowing its scope in the twelfth century.

The third is St. Justinian, who is a canonized saint of this Church, and whose thirty-seventh novel, for the reconquered African provinces, ordered that synagogues there should not stand but be converted into churches, and whose code required pagans to accept instruction and baptism on pain of losing their property and civil standing. That is coercion, in law, by an Orthodox emperor the Church commemorates.

So a man who wants to argue that the Christian tradition has sanctioned legal and social coercion of religious minorities has real material and does not need to invent any. I would rather he had it from me than discover it later and conclude I was hiding it.

But notice what is not on that list, after all of it. In everything I have been able to find, and I have looked with some determination, there is no Father, no council, no canon, and no Orthodox emperor who proposes the removal of a settled people from a Christian land because of their descent. Byzantium restricted, and it converted by force in episodes it usually regretted, and it moved populations internally for military reasons, which is ugly enough. It did not expel. The theory was always incorporation, and the instrument was always the font. Even at its worst the tradition’s imagination ran toward getting people in, by pressure when it had lost its nerve and by preaching when it had not.

XI. What our situation is, in numbers

Set the theology down for a moment and look at where we stand, because a strategy has to start from the ground.

Orthodox Christians are about one percent of the American population by self-identification, and about four tenths of one percent if you count the people who are in a parish, which is the honest number. There are somewhere near three thousand parishes in the country, all traditions counted, and the total who reliably turn up on a Sunday is around three hundred and fifty thousand. The Orthodox Studies Institute may offer slight correction here, but I think these numbers are fair. However, that is the whole of us. That is smaller than a mid-sized city.

And yes, it is growing, and growing fast. I am not going to understate that. It is the best news I have had about my own country in years. The pandemic years, which emptied most American congregations, filled these: something like four in ten Orthodox parishes stayed open through 2020 against about one in eight congregations nationally, and by the spring of 2023 roughly fifteen in every hundred members of a median Orthodox parish had arrived since 2020. Parishes that had not received a convert in a generation are running catechumen classes of twenty and fifty. Priests are describing a kind of exhaustion no one in American Christianity has had occasion to describe in a very long time, which is the exhaustion of too many people arriving at once. All of that is real, and every bit of it is why this argument matters. Nobody bothers to fight over the steering of a ship that is not moving.

Now hold that beside the other set of numbers, because the two are the same story.

Of American Orthodox Christians, according to Pew, about forty-two in every hundred were born outside the United States, and another twenty-seven in every hundred have at least one parent who was. Roughly seven in ten are immigrants or the children of immigrants, which makes this the most immigrant-heavy Christian body in the country by a wide margin.

So work out what the proposal does to a parish directory, and do it concretely rather than in the abstract, because in the abstract it sounds like policy and in the concrete it is people you have stood next to in a communion line.

Walk into a Greek cathedral in Chicago, an Antiochian parish in a mill town in Ohio, a Serbian church in western Pennsylvania, a Russian parish in New Jersey, a Romanian mission in Michigan. Now take out everyone foreign-born. Then take out everyone with a foreign-born parent. In most of those buildings you have just removed the choir, the council, the kitchen, the Sunday school, and a good share of the altar servers, and in a fair number of them the priest. Most of the Orthodox churches in this country would be empty. Not thinned. Empty. The buildings themselves were paid for in cash that people who had very little of it put in a basket, and their names are on the plaques in the narthex, and you can go and read them on your way in.

And there is one more thing here, which is the coldest morning available to anyone making this argument, and I would rather they heard it from a friendly source.

The category being defended is not a fixed one, and it has not always included the people whose Church you have joined. In 1924 the American state, advised by the best race science it had, sorted Europeans into Nordics, Alpines and Mediterraneans, ranked in that order, and put Slavs and Greeks in the bottom two. Arabic-speaking Christians it did not count as European at all; they were filed under Levantines, alongside the other elements a serious country was to keep out. A Greek in South Omaha in 1909 did not need to be lectured about whether whiteness had a door in it. He watched his store come apart in an afternoon and left town with twelve hundred others, and the census the following year found fifty-nine of them still there. A Greek in Utah in 1923 watched the Klan come through the shops in Helper. Whiteness is drawn by whoever is holding the pencil. It has been redrawn more than once inside a single human lifetime, and it has never once been redrawn to the benefit of the people who were most confident it did not concern them.

Which means the young convert arguing online for a white Christian America is arguing, without noticing, for a principle that was used against his own godfather’s grandparents, and could be used again on a definition he will not be consulted about.

I do not want to inflate the phenomenon either. There is no survey data measuring how many American Orthodox hold these views, and anyone who tells you there is is making it up. The scholars closest to it, including ones with no sympathy for it at all, describe a fringe inside a growing convert population, and that is the most defensible sentence anybody can write. An online thing is not a demographic thing. What I am arguing with is an argument, not a population, and I would rather overstate its seriousness than its size.

But the bishops have started saying it out loud, which is new. The head of one archdiocese has taken to warning publicly against what he calls internet fundamentalism and naming it a new heresy. The archbishop of another has said the growth has to stay catholic in the true sense of the word, open to every person. When hierarchs of a Church that has spent a century declining to comment on American anything begin saying that from the ambo, it is worth stopping over.

XII. Evangelism before government, and why that order is not a retreat

So what follows.

The first thing that follows is an order of operations, and it is the actual structure of the case rather than a compromise or a way of dodging politics.

We are not a majority in America and we are not going to be one soon. That is arithmetic rather than defeatism, and it is also the position the Church has occupied for most of her existence and in most of the places she has been. The Church of the East lived as a permanent minority under Zoroastrian and then Muslim rule for a thousand years and produced some of the greatest theology anyone has ever written. St. Nino converted a kingdom as a foreign woman with no standing. St. Nicholas of Japan built a church of thirty thousand in a country where the faith had been a capital crime. None of them had a state. Several of them had a state actively against them. The condition is the normal case, and the tradition knows how to work in it.

And what a minority does, in every one of those cases, is preach and take people in.

That is the sense in which evangelism comes before government, and it is not a preference about sequence. A government can guard something its people are already carrying. It has no method for putting that something into them, because statutes reach conduct and stop at the skin. Write every law on the list, over a population already formed all the way down by the very thing the laws are meant to undo, and you will have narrowed the range of permitted behavior and left the interior of every one of those people precisely as you found it. Then the protected thing turns out not to be there, and the failure sours, and the soured hand reaches for the statute again, harder.

And this is not a disease of one hand. The attempt to make people over by law has spent far more of its history in the other one, in every project that set out to legislate a new kind of human being into existence and to clear away whoever declined to become one. I am not applying a rule to one side that the other gets waived. There is one rule here, and neither has kept it.

None of this is my observation. It is why the tradition heals the person before it orders the city, and why it comes to the city last, if it comes there.

The only standing I have to say so is that I had the order backwards first, and paid for it. I was sure the injury was a political one. My side lost plenty over those years and losing never once taught me anything. What finally broke it was noticing, slowly and against my will, that nothing I had been reaching for could get anywhere near what was actually wrong. No statute has ever gone into a man and put back what has gone missing in him. I had been throwing everything I had at a target that was not in the room, and I have never entirely stopped being embarrassed about it, which is probably good for me.

The second thing that follows is that care for the stranger is the criterion of the last judgment, in Christ’s own words, read at the door of every Lent, which puts it some way above an addendum to be reached once the serious work is done. St. John Chrysostom’s practical version of this is worth having, because he refuses to let the institution absorb the obligation. Preaching on the Acts, he tells his congregation to build a room. Set up a bed in it, he says, set up a table there and a candlestick, and call it Christ’s cell, and bring in the maimed and the beggars and the homeless. He knows perfectly well that the church already runs a hostel, and he names it, and he says that is not a reason for a Christian household to be without a guest-room. Then he reaches for Abraham and the three strangers, and the detail he picks out is the seating: Abraham received the strangers in the place where he lived himself, his wife standing in the place of a servant and the guests in the place of masters. And commenting elsewhere on the verse in Hebrews about entertaining angels unawares, he lands on the detail that ought to end the whole vetting instinct: the reward was great precisely because Abraham did not know who they were.

The third thing is that none of this requires anyone to hold a naive politics, and I want to be exact here, because vagueness at this point would be cowardice.

Nothing in the tradition says a nation may not have borders, or that a state may not decide how many people it admits and on what terms, or that a Christian may not think the current arrangements imprudent and vote accordingly. The Fathers had no nation-states in the modern sense, no passports, no visa regimes, and no immigration policy, and anyone who tells you they did is selling something. Both sides of this fight are reading a modern question backward into men who never faced it. What the tradition does contain, on this precise matter, is narrower and harder: a formal conciliar condemnation of building the Church on race; no text anywhere proposing the removal of a settled people from a Christian land; and a very great deal of instruction, canon, hymn and example about how the stranger who is in front of you is to be treated. That is what it will bear. I would rather claim less and be able to defend it.

That is what the tradition will bear on the policy. Now the conduct, which is where it becomes talkative, and which is the half being skipped.

The Fathers have close to nothing to say about how many people a country should admit. They have an enormous amount to say about how a man treats the one standing in front of him. And the second of the two is the part he will be asked about. Nobody at the last judgment is being examined on his immigration policy. The examination Christ actually describes has six questions in it, and every one of them is about what you did with the person who was there.

So a Christian may hold whatever view of the border he can defend in front of God. What he may not do is hold it by itself. If a man is going to talk about strong borders and illegal entry, he is under orders to talk, in the same breath and not in a footnote and not in a different post next week, about loving the people he is talking about. That is the double command he says he believes. The second of the two is like unto the first, and the man in front of him is the only neighbor he has been issued.

Which means it matters how they are treated in the ordinary run of a week. It matters how they are spoken of at your own table, in front of children who are working out from you what a person is worth and how much of one. It matters whether the family down the street with the wrong accent has ever been fed by anybody in your parish, or visited, or driven anywhere. It matters what you do when one of them is in a hospital or a cell, which the Church names as the specific questions of the last day rather than as suggestions. And it matters, enormously and particularly, what you post.

I want to land hard here, because this is where most of the actual damage is being done, and it is not being done by anyone who holds office.

A few days ago I put a short note out about this, and I want to take it further here, because a note has room for the accusation and no room at all for the argument sitting underneath it.

There is now a large and growing business in making Christians afraid of foreigners, and the foreigners are only one of the bins. Other accounts sort women into their place, and other faiths, and whole countries, week after week, and the replies underneath do not object, they put in requests. The sorting is a habit rather than a position anybody reasoned his way to, and it has an audience, and the two feed each other.

I want to give the other bins the same weight as the one this essay is mostly about, because treating them as a lesser matter would be its own kind of sorting, and because they are all the same habit wearing different coats. A man who has learned to be contemptuous of foreigners in public has not learned a position about immigration. He has learned contempt, and contempt does not stay where you put it. It will find the next category on its own.

Take the mockery of women, which is the loudest of the adjacent ones and the one that has done the most damage to the Church’s reputation among people who were coming toward her. The anthropology is a different letter and a harder one, and there are real questions inside it that deserve better than a paragraph. I am talking about conduct. About accounts that exist to make women ridiculous, that treat a woman’s foolishness as evidence about women and a man’s foolishness as evidence about him, that address a category of persons in a register nobody would use in a room.

What that costs is worth naming. The man doing it is standing inside a Church whose most-repeated prayer after the name of Jesus is addressed to a woman, and who is asked at every Liturgy to call her more honorable than the cherubim. He is standing in a tradition whose Gospel says, without hedging, that the risen Christ “appeared first to Mary Magdalene.” Women were at the tomb before anybody else, they were sent to tell the men, and the Church gives them a Sunday of their own in the Paschal season for it. St. Nino converted a kingdom with no standing of any kind. And when St. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the finest minds the Church has produced, wanted to write a dialogue on the soul and the resurrection, he wrote himself as the student and his sister St. Macrina as the authority, and called her, all the way through, the Teacher.

You may hold whatever you hold about the order of the sexes, and the tradition does hold something. You cannot hold it and also be cruel to half the human race in public, and you certainly cannot do it in the name of a Church that took its Easter news from women.

Then the mockery of other the non-Orthodox Christians, which I have to be careful about, because I came out of one of those traditions and I have watched converts do this and have felt the pull of it myself in my first year or two. The instinct is understandable. A man who has just found something wants to explain what everyone else is missing, and the internet pays promptly for that explanation. But the Protestant being made a fool of on somebody’s account loves Christ, and kept the Scriptures when they were not being kept elsewhere, and very often reads them better than I do. The Catholic being made a fool of held the sacraments, and the Incarnation at the centre, and much of the ancient treasure through centuries when it would have been easier to let it go. Whatever I think went wrong, and I do think something went wrong, and I have written it down elsewhere, none of it licenses a tone. A man cannot invite people through a door he is standing in front of, laughing at the clothes they arrived in.

Then the treatment of people of other religions entirely, and here the tradition’s own practice is the rebuke. The Fathers who lived among Muslims and Zoroastrians and pagans argued, at length and without flinching, and some of what they wrote is sharp enough to take the skin off. But look at how they did it. Patriarch Timothy of the Church of the East spent two days in argument before the caliph, courteously, in his own house, as a subject with no power whatever, and both men walked out of it. St. John of Damascus wrote the hardest polemic against Islam anyone had written, from inside a family that served the Umayyad state, in a city where his neighbors could answer him. Theodore Abu Qurrah wrote in Arabic, using the vocabulary of the men he was disputing with, so they could follow the argument and reply to it. That is what disputation looks like when you have to live with the people you are disputing with, and it has almost nothing in common with contempt aimed at a category from behind a screen, at people who will never see it and could not respond if they did.

And then the general case, which is the one that catches all of us. There is a species of Orthodox account whose whole product is the belittling of somebody, and whose subject rotates depending on what is available that week. The register is the point rather than the target. A man who has built an audience that way is going to keep needing somebody to belittle, and the tradition has been extremely clear about what that does to the man doing it, long before we get to what it does to anybody else.

St. James is blunt in a way that does not need my help. The tongue, he says, no man can tame. “Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith curse we men, which are made after the similitude of God. Out of the same mouth proceedeth blessing and cursing. My brethren, these things ought not so to be.”

Read what the objection actually is. It is not that cursing men is unkind, though it is. It is that they are made after the likeness of God, so that the mouth which sang the Cherubic Hymn on Sunday morning and the mouth which spent Sunday afternoon making a woman or a Baptist or a Muslim into content are producing two incompatible reports about the same universe. One of them is lying. The Fathers would say the passions have got hold of the man and he cannot see it, and that the cure is confession and the eucharist and somebody older who is allowed to tell him the truth, and that none of it can begin while he still thinks the problem is everyone else’s thin skin.

I would rather be precise about the standard than clever about it. It is one standard. It applies to the man sorting immigrants and to the man sorting women and to the man sorting the Christians he left behind and to the man sorting people whose religion he has never studied and does not intend to. And it applies to me, on a publication with my name on it, which is why I have tried to write this whole essay in a way that would survive being read aloud to the people it is about. It runs on the same machinery as every other attention business, and the machinery is not a secret. A post that produces a strong feeling travels further than a post that produces a thought. The feelings that travel furthest are fear and contempt. And a man who learns to produce those two reliably can assemble an audience a great deal faster than a man who is merely correct. I have spent my working life in a trade that studies how attention gets bought, and I can tell you there is nothing mysterious in any of it. It is a mechanism, it is well understood, and it can be operated on purpose by anyone who decides to.

The Church has a vocabulary for what that mechanism produces, and it is older and more exact than anything in my trade. The Fathers call them the passions, the disordered drives that get inside a man and take over the running of him. And they call the first stirrings logismoi, the intruding thoughts a Christian is meant to catch at the door while they are still small, before they have moved in and started rearranging the furniture. The whole ascetic apparatus, the watchfulness, the stillness, the short prayer repeated until it prays itself, exists to train a man to catch anger at the first suggestion and decline to feed it.

Now set that next to the machine and look at what is being sold. An account that exists to provoke anger in strangers, daily, for money, is a device for manufacturing passions in other people’s souls. I mean that as a flat description of the product. Everything the Fathers spent fifteen centuries teaching men to catch at the door, this arrangement now delivers to them at breakfast, by design, in a format built to be hard to put down.

And then it is sold back to the buyer as zeal. That is the move that makes this a religious problem and not merely a commercial one. The passions the tradition tells us to starve are being fed to us with a label on them saying that the feeding is faithfulness, and a man can go years taking delivery of his own anger every morning under the impression that he is being formed.

And doing it to somebody is worse than suffering it. The tradition is stern with a man who cannot govern his own anger. It is savage with a man who cultivates it in someone else. “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me,” Christ says, “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.” And then, in case the point needed sharpening: woe unto the world because of offenses, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh. In all the time I have spent reading this quarrel I have never once seen that verse quoted in it, and it is the verse in it.

A second mechanism holds the whole arrangement upright, and that one is why this is a Church problem and not merely an internet problem.

Say out loud that a man’s treatment of other people has become cruel, and the answer comes back the same way every time. You are being judgmental. You are signalling your piety. Look at what that rule is protecting. It is not protecting humility, because the sorting of human beings into their places was not a humble act and nobody involved pretended it was. It protects the man doing the sorting, and it protects him by moving the offense. The cruelty is no longer what has gone wrong. The objection is. And the only person left in the room who can still be judged is the one who objected.

That is the whole method by which a man who has become cruel, and who will not be told so, keeps his standing inside an institution. He never has to defend the cruelty, which would not survive defending. He only has to get the correction reclassified as the sin.

It works better in a Church than it works anywhere else, and that is the part that ought to cost us some sleep. We keep real and ancient words for the sin of judging, and they are true, and every one of us needs them badly. The desert kept a story about a monk summoned to sit in judgment on a brother who turned up dragging a basket of sand with a hole in it, and said that his own sins were running out behind him where he could not see them, and that he had come here to look at somebody else’s. That story is one of the best things we own. It is also, at this moment, being worn as a coat by men who have never once put it on in private. They are borrowing a humility they do not practice, and the loan is underwritten by the people in every parish who do practice it, who are the quietest people there and the least likely to make a scene about anything.

So let me be exact about the line, because a man who is careless here does real damage in the other direction. I do not get to suspend “judge not” because I have located a case where it is being abused. Judging a man’s soul is God’s work and none of mine, and I have no idea what any of these men are before God, and neither do you. Naming a public act as what it is, in public, is a different operation, and the Church has been performing it in council for two thousand years. The first is forbidden to me. The second is the reason we have canons at all. Anyone who cannot hold those two apart is going to end up either silent in front of something plainly wrong, or contemptuous, and both of those are worse than the trouble he was trying to avoid.

Then the money, which people go shy about naming and should not.

The Church has had a word for this since about the year 100. The Didache, the oldest church order we possess and older than the settled canon of the New Testament, is laying down rules for traveling preachers, and it arrives at the man who shows up in the name of the Lord, declines to work, and expects to be kept. It calls him a christemporos. The word means a Christ-monger: a man running a stall in the market with Christ as his stock. The instruction attached to him is short. Keep away from such.

St. Paul had the same instinct and a sharper picture. “We are not as many,” he writes to Corinth, “which corrupt the word of God.” The verb underneath that English is the word for a tavern-keeper who waters the wine before he sells it. He is not charging them with heresy. He is charging them with retail.

Which is the word I have been circling and may as well put down. It is a grift. I have gone looking for a gentler one and I have got tired of looking. When contempt is the engine, and the engine is running on the passions the tradition exists to starve, and the exhaust is a following that pays, there is not a kinder name available that is also accurate.

I am not able to read anybody’s heart, I will name no one, and on a charge of this kind I would far rather be slow than quick. But the structure is visible without any mind-reading whatsoever, and here it is. If your audience was gathered by making Christians frightened of foreigners, then you require the foreigners to remain frightening. You cannot afford the man on the corner to turn into somebody’s neighbor, because on the day he does your material stops working. There is a requirement buried in the business model, and the requirement is that a category of human beings must never be permitted to become particular people with names and jobs and mothers. Which is precisely and exactly what the parable of the Samaritan was told in order to break.

I put myself inside that exposure, because running this argument from outside it would be a fraud. I write on the internet. I know the feel of a sentence that is going to travel, I know the small lift that comes with recognizing it, and I know that the lift arrives before any thought about whether the sentence is true. It is the most ordinary temptation available to anyone who publishes anything, and I know of no writer who is exempt from it. The one tell I have found is the direction of the check. A piece written to be true gets checked against what it describes. A piece written to be shared gets checked against the feed. A man usually knows which check he just ran, if he is willing to stop and ask.

So here is the test, and I would have it applied to me first. Take the last thing you posted about immigrants and put one of them at your shoulder while you read it back. Give him a face you have actually seen: the man who hung the drywall in your kitchen, the woman who checked your mother into the ward at two in the morning. If you would not say it with him standing there, you had no business saying it with him not standing there, because as far as the Church is concerned he was standing there the whole time. He is the traveller in the road. The Fathers say he is an altar. And you have been using him for material.

A man who can produce the border sentence and cannot produce the loving sentence in the same breath has told you which of the two he is in this for. And a man who has monetized the first and has never once attempted the second is not, whatever the icon in his profile picture is, doing anything the Church would recognize as her work.

Nor is love of one’s own people the error. It is not. St. Nicholas of Japan said love of country is natural and holy and he meant it. A Georgian’s love of Georgia is one of the more beautiful things I have ever been allowed to stand near, and I have written about it here often enough that nobody can accuse me of thinking a people’s particular attachment to its own place is a defect. The Church herself is organized nationally, into self-governing churches that grew up in the life of actual peoples, and that is a feature.

The error is two specific moves, and they are the two the 1872 synod put its finger on. The first is closure: a church that receives its own kind and shuts out the rest, which is what was condemned. The second is inversion: the faith becoming an instrument of the nation rather than the nation being received into the faith. The document the Ecumenical Patriarchate issued in 2020 on the Church’s social ethos puts the distinction about as well as it can be put. A love for one’s own culture, it says, is an honorable sentiment, so long as it is a generous sentiment as well; and patriotism can be a benign and wholesome feeling, so long as it is not mistaken for a virtue in itself; but it is absolutely forbidden for Christians to make an idol of cultural, ethnic, or national identity, and there can be no such thing as a Christian nationalism. That is a synodally endorsed document of one patriarchate rather than a council of the whole Church, and I would not want to overstate its weight. But it is the clearest statement anyone has made of a line that is not otherwise easy to draw.

I have watched a national church refuse the first of those two moves, and it is worth setting down, because it is happening now and not in the fourth century.

Georgia has an Orthodox Church about as national as a church can get. It is the confession of the overwhelming majority. Its patriarch has for decades outpolled every politician in the place for public trust, and not narrowly. Its history and the country’s history are more or less the same document, and the founding event of the nation is a foreign woman arriving with no standing whatever and bringing the king and queen to the faith. Nobody in Tbilisi requires persuading that a people may love its own place, and nobody there is in any doubt about whose church it is. Iranians have been coming for years now, some for work, some for air, a good number of them for the ordinary reason that home stopped being livable and going back is not simple.

What that Church does with them is set about bringing them in. Not as a gesture, and not as anything with a press release attached, but in the slow way these things actually go, with catechumens taken singly, across years rather than weeks, by clergy willing to sit with a man whose family may treat his baptism as a bereavement. It is unhurried, it is unspectacular, and it is working.

A few weeks ago I stood and watched one of them go into the water. An Iranian man, renouncing Islam out loud, in front of people who had spent a long time getting him ready to. What it cost him I could not see from where I stood, but the size of it is easy enough to work out. In the country he came from, saying that sentence aloud would have finished off whatever ordinary life he had there, and that is the mild version of the estimate.

Then set that beside the argument being made here, and notice what it does to it. This is a genuinely Orthodox nation with a genuinely national church, and foreigners of another faith arriving in real numbers, which is the precise scenario the remigration case keeps insisting is unlike ours and would have been handled differently. The Church that actually occupies the position everybody in this fight is fantasizing about occupying has looked at those men and gone to work on catechizing them. Nobody there arranged the order of operations as a theory. It is being carried out on adults, one at a time, and it will take a generation, and they have started anyway.

And the standard runs both ways or it is not a standard. A Christianity that dissolves into whatever the age wants of it, that keeps no border of its own, trades any doctrine, softens every fast, has committed the same error from the opposite end, making the faith the instrument of something outside itself. None of this is a plea for vagueness. What I am claiming is that a Church with very hard doctrinal edges and a very open door is the ordinary historical case. The catechumenate, the Church’s long on-ramp of learning and preparation before baptism, exists because both halves are true at the same time: you may not have this on your own terms, and you may absolutely have it.

And now the thing the men I am arguing with are half right about, which I would rather concede out loud than have extracted from me.

There should one day be an American Orthodoxy. Not a Greek church and a Russian church and an Antiochian church keeping separate houses on the same street, which is very nearly the arrangement the 1872 synod condemned and which we have been running here for a hundred years; but one Church of this place, praying in this language, in a form that has grown up out of this ground. St. Tikhon saw it in 1905 and wrote it down before anyone else did. It is the ordinary way the faith has settled everywhere it has ever settled. Georgia has a Georgian Orthodoxy. Japan has a Japanese one, because a Russian refused to build a Russian chapel. There is no reason this country should not have an American one, and every reason to want it, and a man who longs for that is not longing for anything he should apologize for.

But an American Orthodoxy is not a white Orthodoxy, and the whole question lives in the distance between those two sentences.

An Orthodoxy of this place has to mean an Orthodoxy of the people who are in this place. All of them, as they come, not as a demographic model would prefer them. It means the Ethiopian family three pews back is part of what the real American Church is going to be made out of, rather than a foreign presence to be put up with until it arrives. It means the black parishioner in an American parish is at home in his own building. It means the man from Guatemala who walks in off the street next Sunday, because the doors were open and something in there stopped him, is the next person to be catechized, and there is a rite for exactly that, and it is older than the country.

The work in front of us is incorporating the people who are already in the country, which is the most various population any local church in the history of the world has been handed, and which is, for the first time in the history of this continent, within reach. That is a harder project than the one being proposed, and a slower one, and there is no enemy anywhere in it, which is probably why it draws so much less attention. It is also the only one of the two with any prospect of producing a Church instead of a caucus.

Whatever an American Orthodoxy turns out to be, it is going to be built out of whoever comes through the door. I would like it very much if that turned out to be everybody.

XIII. The door that only opens inward

I will finish where I started, in the mill towns and the freight yards.

The Orthodox Christianity that exists in America exists because people got on boats. A Russian monk from Valaam, a Carpatho-Rusyn priest turned away at a Latin chancery in Minneapolis, an Arab from Beirut riding freight trains to find his scattered people, a Greek shopkeeper in South Omaha whose store was pulled apart around him by his neighbors. It exists because a bishop who would later die in a Soviet prison sat down in New York in 1905 and drew up a plan for an American church made of Russians and Arabs and Serbs and Greeks, all of them foreigners, all under one bishop, in a country that had never once been Orthodox and had recently been trying to work out whether some of them were white.

That is our inheritance in this country. It is not a Christendom that was taken away from us. We never had one on this continent and nobody ever invited us to build one. What we have is a small, strange, polyglot immigrant Church carrying something the nation around it does not know it has mislaid, and it has only ever grown here one way, which is that somebody walks in and is received.

Which brings me back to that litany after the Gospel, the one said over the people not yet permitted to stay for the rest of it. Every week the assembly stops and prays for the men and women standing outside its own membership, and asks God for exactly one thing on their behalf: that He bring them in and join them to the Church, so that with us they also may glorify His name. Then those people are sent out, not because they are unwanted but because they are unfinished, and the doors are shut, and the faithful go on.

There is no matching prayer. In sixteen hundred years of a rite that has petitions for travelers and prisoners and the sick and people in mines and people in exile and people on the sea and, since somebody thought to add it, people in the air, nobody ever wrote a line asking God to take anyone out of anywhere. The door in that building opens one direction. It was built that way.

I am a convert and a recent one, and I have no business lecturing anybody about a Church I have belonged to for a fraction of the time most of the people in my parish have. But I know what I was before I walked in. I know what the country I come from made of the countries my Church came from. I know what it did about it in 1909, and again in 1924. Given the choice of posts, I would rather spend my life at that door holding it open for whoever comes up the steps than stand somewhere behind it keeping a count of who belongs on the street.

The last judgment is going to be about the stranger. We read it at the door of every Lent so that nobody can say he was not told.

And then Lent begins, which is the part I would rather finish on. The Church does not hand a man that reading and leave him standing in it. She gives him forty days to start becoming somebody who could survive the question, and when he fails she comes back the next year and gives him forty more, and she will go on doing that for as long as he keeps turning up. Whatever turns out to be true about the country that made me, or the one I keep going back to, that offer is open on a Sunday morning within driving distance of nearly everyone who will read this. And more often than not the people who will hand it to you are the grandchildren of somebody who got in on a hundred a year.

- David

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There is only one reliable way to find out whether a grape is ready, and it is to put one in your mouth.

We came out east to Kakheti for a few days, to a house on a winery. The harvest is still some weeks off. I am hoping to find one far enough along to be worth eating, and the weather out here is behaving, which is more than it managed for us in the mountains last weekend.

An instrument exists for the ripeness question, and it is small enough to carry in a pocket. A drop of juice on the glass, a look through it toward the light, and the sugar comes back as a number. Growers own them. Growers use them. And no grower I have ever heard of settles the matter on that alone. He goes out, picks one, eats it, works the seed against his teeth, and stands there a while deciding. What the reading gives him is true and is not the thing he needs to know.

Which is an odd habit to have kept, if you take seriously what nearly all of us say we believe. Because the official account, the one I absorbed young without anybody having to sit me down and teach it, is that the figure is the part that is really in the grape, and the taste is something taking place privately in the man doing the tasting.

I want to say where that account came from, because it did not fall out of the sky. It was a position. Somebody took it deliberately, and it has a date on it.

Take a glass of wine. Its volume, its weight, the alcohol in it as a percentage: those are in the glass, and they would be in it with nobody in the room. Now the color of it. The smell coming up off the surface. The taste. Galileo argued that those are not in the wine at all. They are in you. Remove the drinker from the room and they leave with him, because they were never anywhere else to begin with.

He was not being perverse, and he was not attacking anyone’s faith. He was clearing a bench. He had a method that could do astonishing things with whatever could be given a size and a count, and everything else was in the way of it. So he set the rest aside, and he was right to set it aside, and the work went forward.

And how it went forward. Anaesthetic. The engine. The road we came out on. The little instrument in that grower’s pocket is a direct descendant of the same morning’s work. I would not hand back one item of it, and I have yet to meet the man who would, including the ones who complain loudest about where it has all ended up.

The error came later, and the method did not commit it. A method built to report quantity will report quantity, and it will have nothing to say about anything else, and its silence is not a finding. We listened to that silence for three centuries and eventually took it for a description. If the instrument has nothing to report about the savor, then there is no savor to report on, and what you are calling savor is an event occurring in you.

Desacralization is the name for the long version of what that does to a person: a world described so completely in one register that whatever falls outside the register quietly stops being taken for real.

And it does not stay in the laboratory. An account like that gets into a person and settles there, and afterward everything he loves about anything is, officially, his own contribution to it. The wine is not good; he likes it. The morning is not beautiful; it agrees with him. His wife’s face is not lovely; he is fond of it. A man can live like that, and I did, for a long stretch of years. It is a smaller room than the one you were standing in before, and nobody comes and tells you the walls have moved.

We do not believe it, though. Not down where we live. There is a hundred-point scale for wine, and a bottle can be given ninety-two of them, and everyone who has ever bought one on that basis holds two things in mind at once without the least difficulty: that the number was worth having, and that the number is not the wine. Nobody has ever drunk a ninety-two.

I am not standing outside any of this. I would rather have a figure than an opinion most days, because a figure can be produced the moment somebody asks for it, and it does not require me to have been paying attention. That is a good part of its appeal, and I do not think I have ever said so out loud.

Tuesday’s letter made a claim, and today I want to put a date underneath it. That one said that when something beautiful reaches a person, he is not the one manufacturing it, and that something is being handed over. If that sounds like an extravagant thing to say rather than an obvious one, the reason is about four hundred years old, and I have just described it. The extravagance was installed. It is not native to us.

There is a line in the Psalms I read for years as a figure of speech: “O taste and see that the LORD is good.” Taste is offered there as a way of finding something out. Not as an ornament on knowing, and not as the poor relation of it. As the thing itself, the way a man learns what is in a grape. I am no longer confident that it is a figure of speech.

Out here the vineyards and the monasteries occupy the same countryside, and nobody in this country appears to have had to think about that arrangement or defend it. Alaverdi stands not far from where we are staying, and the monastery has been making its own wine on its own ground for the better part of a thousand years. We mean to go on Sunday if we can work out what time the liturgy is done, which is the kind of thing you can spend a whole afternoon failing to establish. Whatever the monks out there are doing with a harvest, it has never once required them to decide whether the sweetness is in the fruit or in the man eating it. That question has not come up. This is not because Georgians see more clearly than the rest of us, and there is a great deal here that the country would rather not show a visitor. It is that the cut I have been describing was made a long way west of here, and it never came the whole way through.

The measured world is not a lie. It is a true account with most of the page left blank, and we have spent a few hundred years reading the blank part as though it said there was nothing there.

The harvest is a few weeks out yet. When I find a grape that is far enough along, I am not going to ask it for a figure. I am going to eat it, which is what a person does when he wants to know something that cannot reach him any other way. Nobody had to teach me that. It was in me before anyone got around to explaining it away.

- David

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Photo by Lyudmila Arslanbekova on Unsplash

Colonel Philip Ludwell III of Green Spring, Virginia, is the first documented Orthodox convert out of the English-speaking population of British North America. He sat in the House of Burgesses, and from 1752 on the Governor’s Council of Virginia, and he held that seat until he died.

The argument built on him runs: here is an Orthodox Christian in high public office in America, so Orthodoxy and the American order were never at odds, and anyone saying otherwise has invented a grievance.

Every joint of that fails, and the document it rests on is the thing that breaks it.

Start with the polity. Ludwell died on the twenty-fifth of March, 1767. That is nine years and three months before the Declaration of Independence, and about twenty-two years before the Constitution took effect. He never held an office of the United States or of any American state, because there were none to hold.

The Governor’s Council was a body of the Crown, its members appointed by the King on the governor’s recommendation, sitting for life as the colony’s upper house and its highest court, and it was abolished outright by the Virginia constitution of 1776.

Whatever his seat demonstrates, it demonstrates nothing about the American political order, because he did not live under one. He lived and died a subject of George III.

Then where he had to go to become Orthodox. He was received in London, in the chapel of the Russian embassy, an upper room up a back alley off the Strand, on the thirty-first of December, 1738, by chrismation. He crossed an ocean for it.

There was no Orthodox priest, chapel, or congregation anywhere in the American colonies on that date, and there would not be a parish in what is now the lower forty-eight for another century and a quarter.

Then how he had to live once he came back. In 1761 the priest of that London parish, Fr. Stefan Ivanovsky, petitioned the Russian Holy Synod on Ludwell’s behalf, and the petition survives.

It asks what an Orthodox family returning to Virginia should do about worship: keep to prayer at home, or go to the English church now and then. And it explains why the question is urgent.

Here is the sentence, in the published translation of the Synod archive:

“there, and in the whole Province of Virginia, and in the whole of America, except nearby Pennsylvania, any other Religion except Protestant, is forbidden. Besides in his home country still nobody knows about his change of Religion, since he is a councilor in a high position in the King’s service.”

Read it twice, because it is the load-bearing document of the argument it is supposed to support, and what it describes is a legal prohibition and a concealment.

The reason for going to the English church three times a year was to draw off, in the petition’s own words, the anger of the local people. The reason nobody had found him out was that he was a councillor in the King’s service. His office and his silence were one fact.

The same petition contains a line that ought to end the discussion on its own. Ludwell’s heaviest trouble in Virginia, it says, was that in twenty years he had no access to the Eucharist, which he had longed for; hence the request that consecrated Gifts be shipped to him once a year in a proper tabernacle.

The exemplary Orthodox statesman of colonial America went two decades without communion.

Then the ending. He never went back to Virginia. He sailed for London in September of 1760 and stayed. He died there and was buried in the family vault at an Anglican parish church at Bow, in the East End.

Whatever permission the Synod may have given was never used by him, and no Orthodox community anywhere descends from him. He owned two hundred and thirty-five people at his death, which is a separate reckoning and not my subject here, though anyone constructing a Southern Orthodox lineage out of him is going to have to say it out loud sooner or later.

And the researcher who has spent fifteen years assembling his archive concedes, in print, that almost nothing written by the man survives: a one-page preface, a handful of letters, some inscriptions in books.

So here is the case in full. One man.

Converted abroad because he could not be converted at home. Keeping it secret in order to keep a Crown office. Twenty years without the sacrament. Gone from the country for good seven years before he died, and dead nine years before the country existed. A page of his own words in the record.

It is laughable to say this sets a precedent.

It is the exception that reports the rule, and the rule is written in the petition’s own sentence: any other religion except Protestant is forbidden.

When the case for a broad historical claim narrows to one individual, the claim has already lost. When the documents about that individual say the reverse of what is wanted, the honest move is to drop the claim, not to inflate the man.

A tradition that produced Ambrose and Basil and a thousand years of canon law does not have to be argued from a lone Virginian’s discreet chrismation, and the reaching itself tells you how bare the shelf is.

I will grant Ludwell everything that is actually his. He found the faith on his own, in a foreign city, with nobody to help him. He translated a catechism out of Latin so his daughters would have it. He kept it for twenty-three years with no priest, no parish, and no communion, which is longer than most of us would last.

He is worth remembering, and I am glad somebody is doing the archival work. He is simply not evidence for the thing he is being made to carry, and I suspect he would have been baffled to be asked.

---

This is a snippet from my upcoming long format essay:

Give Me This Stranger
On the idea that America is a white Christian nation, and why an Orthodox Christian of all people should know better

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My son is four years old. Over the weekend he walked the whole way up to the church at Gergeti, on his own legs, in the rain, and I have not been prouder of another person in a long while.

We were up in the mountains at the top of the country, where the road runs out at the Russian border. It rained the entire time we were there. Mount Kazbek stands over that whole valley and is the reason most people make the drive at all, and for three days we saw nothing of it. Cloud, and rain coming out of the cloud, and a four-year-old going up it anyway. Then, packing to come home, it thinned and the mountain was faintly there, and we got in the car and drove back down.

Tomorrow, on the older count of the days that this country keeps, is the Transfiguration, the feast of a morning on a mountain when three men saw Christ shine. My own parish had it twelve days ago, on the newer count. I am not going to argue those two calendars in a letter. I only notice that a feast about a mountain arrived this year while I was standing at the foot of one and could not see it.

The morning the feast keeps is in Matthew, and it is told without ornament. Christ took three of His friends up a mountain the tradition names Tabor. Nothing on the way up was unusual. At the top He was changed in front of them: “his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.” Then a cloud came over the party, and a voice came out of the cloud, and when it was finished there was no one standing there but Jesus, and they went back down the hill.

I had the mechanics of that morning backwards.

The light was not sent down onto Him. Nothing arrived from somewhere else and lit Him up, the way a lamp lights a face in a dark room. What those three saw was what had been in Him before they ever met Him, let through for the length of a morning, because for that one morning they were given eyes that could take it. Nothing happened to Christ on that mountain. Something happened to them.

So the feast is not really an account of an unusual event. It is a claim about what is ordinarily the case, shown once, at full strength, so that we would know what we are dealing with.

And that lands on something I had no serious category for until I was a long way into my adult life. Beauty.

The second of these letters was about beauty getting to me before any argument did, in old churches in this city that I had walked into for reasons having nothing to do with God. It left the harder question alone: what beauty actually is, and whether anything is being handed over when it happens.

I held two accounts of it at once, in the way a man can hold two things that do not fit together. On the first, a beautiful thing is doing something inside my nervous system. Pattern, proportion, chemistry, a brain that likes what it likes and reports back. On the second, beauty is a pleasant feeling, and the decent thing is to enjoy it and not poke at it. Those sound like opposites and they arrive at the same place. Whatever I thought was reaching me off the mountain, or the music, or somebody’s kindness, nothing was being handed to me. All of it was on my side.

There is a third account, older than either of mine, and tomorrow is the feast of it. What reaches a person off a beautiful thing is God at work in it. Not His innermost being, which stays past us and always will, but Himself present and acting in what He has made, which the Fathers call His energies. The holiness you sometimes catch coming off a place is not your mood improving. Something is there, and it is not you.

That has to be said carefully, because it is easy to say wrongly. The mountain is not God. The light on Tabor was not Tabor’s own light, and no amount of standing on a summit has ever gotten anybody anywhere. God fills what He has made without ever becoming it, and keeping hold of both halves of that is the discipline the whole thing rests on.

Now the part the weather handed me, which I would not have thought to write on my own.

If beauty is contact, a man will want to know whether he is having any, and the first thing he reaches for to find out is how he felt. So here is the honest report from a weekend under a mountain I never saw. I felt a great deal up there. None of it was about Kazbek. It was about having got up to that church, and about a four-year-old having got there on his own legs, and that turned out to be the thing worth having, and it was not the thing we had driven up for.

Which cuts both ways at once. The best of that hill had nothing to do with the view I went looking for. And the mountain I went looking for was where it has been since long before anyone thought to name it, doing nothing differently for going unseen by us. What I felt and what was there were two separate facts, and neither one was a report on the other.

And that is the more useful half of it. A person can be leveled by a piece of music and be reporting on nothing but himself. Another can go through a two-hour service without a single stirring in him and have been in front of God the entire service. What I get out of a thing is not the measure of what is in it. If it were, all of this would run on my weather, and my weather is not steady enough to hang a life on.

There is a detail in that morning I used to read straight past. When the light came, the cloud came with it, and the cloud did not clear the view. It covered them. And the voice they were given did not come from around the cloud. It came out of it. Whatever those three carried back down, it was not an unobstructed morning.

I will not push that further than it goes. But I notice that the tradition puts the cloud inside the feast rather than as the thing that spoiled it, and I notice that I spent three days looking at cloud and came home with a good weekend anyway.

And then, packing the car to come home, the thinning, and something enormous faintly behind it, and then the road back down.

That is about the size of what any of us gets. Not the summit in full sun. A thinning, and something very large on the other side of it, and then the drive back down. What the feast says is that the thinning is not a trick of the light and not a mood I brought with me. It says the mountain is there inside the cloud, and that the light on Tabor is where all of this is finally going, every last part of it made bright the way that one body was for an hour, and nothing left as dull as I was trained to think it. What catches you now is that light getting here ahead of the day.

Which is far more than I had when I thought beauty was only my own reaction to it. My son walked up a mountain in the rain and there was nothing at the top to see, and he knew exactly what he had done. I am starting to think that is not the poor version of the story.

- David

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Seven years ago we ate at a restaurant in the mountains called Kazbegi Good Food. That is the whole name. They make their own wine there, and the kebabs are the best I have eaten anywhere, and the name of the establishment is Kazbegi Good Food. I have never once said it out loud without smiling, and I hope nobody ever explains to the man who named it why.

We were back up there this weekend. It is still there and it is still his, and I had photographs of the place on my phone from that first time, the sort you take because the room is warm and the food has come and you want to keep the evening somehow. I showed them to him. Seven years is long enough that we had no business being remembered, and it did not go that way at all. It went the way it goes when you run into someone you used to know.

Four things had changed in seven years, and all three came up inside about a minute.

Two of them were his. He has built a large addition onto the place since we last ate there and his young adult son now works at the restaurant with him.

The other two were ours. The first was our boy, who was not anywhere in the world the last time we sat in that room and was now standing next to me, four years old, and the man was delighted about him in the way people here are reliably delighted by a child. The second was that we told him we had become Orthodox.

I want to report what happened next accurately, because it is the reason I am writing this instead of what I had meant to write today.

Nothing happened. He was genuinely happy, but he did not ask why. He did not ask what we had been before, which is the first question where I come from and would have been a fair one. He did not congratulate us, and he did not test us, and he did not offer anything about himself in exchange. What he did was tell us to go to his church. It is in Sioni, he said, on the road back down. You should go there. (It is pictured above)

I have been turning that over since, and what keeps catching is how small a thing he thought he was doing.

Where I come from, and I mean me and not a denomination, because I did this to other people for years, a sentence like ours is an opening move. It earns a follow-up. It earns, at the least, a short careful pause while the other man works out what kind of Christian you have turned into and how much of his own position he is now going to have to hold. I have been on both ends of that pause. I was braced for it in that restaurant without noticing I was braced.

He was not in that conversation. He was in a different one. Somebody had told him a true thing about themselves, and the natural answer to a true thing is to hand over another one, and the truest thing he had to hand over was a building in a village.

That was the second building he had put in front of us inside five minutes. The first was the addition on the back of his own restaurant, and I understood that one at once, because a man showing you what he has put up is a language I am fluent in. The second he did not build and does not own, and he handed it over in the same breath.

That is a sentence I could not have read correctly ten years ago. My church. I would have heard it as shorthand for a congregation, meaning the people and the service and the thing you belong to and could in principle leave for a better one down the road. He did not mean that. He meant a place with a door in it, in a named village on the way back to Tbilisi, that would be standing there whether or not he was, and that he had enough claim on to give away to a family he had met twice in seven years.

One of the early letters here was about riding a Tbilisi bus past an old church and watching people who had never met one another lift a hand to the forehead mid-conversation and carry on. This is that same reflex with a mouth on it.

We went, on the drive down today. Sioni is a village on the road back, and there is a church there, and a monk keeps it.

His name is Mikheil, which is Michael. His house is next to the church. You can see it in the picture above. He has no English, and what we had between us went through a phone, badly. He asked where we were from. We said we were Orthodox Christians from the United States. He told us his name, and he shook our hands, and we gave him ours. Then we went up to the church.

Written out, that is the entire content of it, and it looks like nothing.

I have come away from far more articulate afternoons with less. Not one sentence up there was an argument, and not one of them could have been, because neither side had the equipment for an argument even if it had wanted one. What passed between us was: where are you from, here is who I am, here is my hand, the church is up there, it is open. Nothing was missing from that. I keep going back over it looking for the part that was missing.

When we left he gave my son a bag of candy.

I will do nothing with that. It is not a symbol and I would rather not turn it into one. An old man who looks after a church on a mountain road gave a small boy sweets on his way out the door. There is no second meaning in it and it needs none.

Nor will I build much on a friendly weekend. Two men were kind to a family with a small child in a country where that is close to a civic reflex, neither of them was making a point, and it would be a poor return to convert either of them into evidence. Georgia is not an Eden, and I have never met a Georgian who thought it was.

But I do notice what I came prepared for and did not need. In the restaurant I was ready for the conversation and got directions instead. At the church I had no language at all and came away with a name, a handshake, and a bag of candy in a four-year-old’s fist. Whatever I have spent years carrying around as the necessary equipment, the case and the vocabulary and the ability to hold up my end, was not asked for on either occasion.

He gave us directions this weekend and we followed them today, and the church was where he said it would be, and a man was living beside it who could not tell us one thing about it and did not need to. I spent a long time assuming this had to be carried in an argument, mostly because an argument was the only way I knew how to carry anything at all. Two men in the mountains handed it over between them this weekend without making one, and the second of them did it in a language I will never speak, and my son came back down the hill with his fist around a bag of candy.

- David

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Today is the first day of a fourteen-day fast in Georgia, and the last day of the same fast on my own calendar. Thirteen days apart, one seam, and the seam falls on a Friday when we happen to be in a car as this letter is scheduled to send.

We are driving north out of Tbilisi, up the old military road into the high Caucasus, to a town called Stepantsminda that sits under Mount Kazbek a short way from the Russian border. It is cooler up there, which in the middle of August is a larger share of the reason than I would like to put in writing.

Georgia keeps the old calendar, thirteen days behind the one in my phone. The parish I belong to keeps the new one. So the fast the country starts tonight is the fast I am finishing, and the feast at the end of it, which the Georgians call Mariamoba and mark as a national holiday, arrives for them on the twenty-eighth and for me tomorrow. I will not argue the calendars in a letter. That argument is older than the country I was born in, and it is carried on by people who have read far more than I have. What interests me is the one thing the gap makes impossible to miss. Neither of those dates was ever mine.

For years the calendar came to me empty and I furnished it. Every landmark on it was one I had set there myself. The week the school year opened. The morning a payment came due. The two or three holidays that asked nothing of me and handed back a day off in exchange. I could move any of them, and I moved them constantly, and not once did I have to be ready for something on a morning I had not picked. I took that for the ordinary condition of a grown man. It never crossed my mind that a year might show up with anything already written on it.

That is a recent way to have a year, and it was built rather than found. Hours were made uniform, then countable, then available for purchase, and once time is a quantity a man spends, a day stops being a thing he is handed. A revolution had already tried resetting the whole calendar to Year One, on the theory that history could begin again the moment a sufficiently confident committee said so. What was left, by the time any of it reached me, was a long run of interchangeable mornings with my own appointments written across them.

I had fasting wrong for a long time. I took it for a religious diet with a rule sheet attached, and it is not that, and it is not a health regimen either. It is not a stretch of self-discipline undertaken to produce a tidier version of the man who started it, and I have run that program often enough to know the difference from the inside. What it does is more ordinary and harder to look at. Take away the thing a person has been using to keep his own appetites out of view, and by about the fourth day he has a fairly exact measurement of them.

But the part I could not have anticipated is the part about the date. I did not set the day it opens or the day it closes. I cannot slide either one to a week that suits me better. And I can fail my way clean through the middle of it, which I have, without the fast noticing or shortening by an hour. There is nothing in it to hit. It is not a goal with a number attached. It is a season, and a season runs on over the top of whatever you are doing inside it, including badly.

Nor is it mine in the other sense, which is that I am not the one keeping it. Earlier this week I wrote here about the long Georgian table, and the toasts that run straight past the people sitting at it. From tonight, in houses all over this country, that table has different food on it for a fortnight. The menus shift. No one announces it, and no one is asked to sign up.

We went up to Gergeti years ago, my wife and I, before we were Orthodox. It is a small stone church from the fourteenth century, standing by itself on a ridge above the town with the mountain behind it, and I remember that as one of the better days I have been given. We chose the date the way you choose any date on a trip, by looking at the forecast and at what else we wanted to see. The day had no other business. It was a Thursday, or whatever it was, and we put a church in it.

Our son has not been. He will see it for the first time on this trip, and we will drive on to the gorge at the border, to a monastery none of the three of us has seen. What has changed is not the church, which has not moved, and it is not the mountain. It is that the morning we go up on came to us with something written across it already, in two hands, and neither hand was ours.

Sacred time is the old name for what I am circling here, and it is one of the things the West set down somewhere behind us without ever being told it was carrying anything. Down at the level a person lives at, it means only this: some of the days are not yours. They were named before you arrived and they will go on being named after you are finished. The church on that ridge has stood six hundred years, and the feast waiting at the end of this fast was old before anybody laid the first stone of it, and neither has ever once waited on me to be ready.

I was certain for a long time that a calendar with nothing on it was the free kind, and that anything written there ahead of me was somebody’s hand on my arm. I had it backwards, and I was tired for years without being able to say why. A year I have to furnish is a year I am answerable for furnishing. This one came furnished, by hands that were at the work a long time before mine, and all it asks of me today is to be in the car while the fast turns over.

- David

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We went out to Lisi on Sunday afternoon. It rained on us for part of it, not hard, and it was a good afternoon anyway. That is the entire report from the weekend. I set it down because a decade of coming here has taught me that the hours worth having in this country are rarely the ones anybody planned.

The churches are what a visitor writes home about. I did, for years. They are beautiful and badly lit and very old, and they photograph well, and for a long stretch that was all I could get out of them. What finally took my assumptions apart was not a church at all. It was dinner.

Georgians eat at something they call a supra. It is the long table, laid for a family and for whoever else has attached himself to that family by evening, and it runs for hours. Food sits on it the whole time and so does the wine, and neither one is what the evening is built around. The toasts are. A man is appointed to carry them, the tamada, and his job is not to keep the mood up. He holds the order, and the order is fixed, and it is a great deal older than anybody sitting under it.

The first glass goes to God. Later on, one goes to the dead, and they are named aloud, one after another, by people who knew them. Another goes to children who have not been born, to no one in the room, to a family that does not exist yet. The country gets one. So does peace.

The table is not set for the people sitting at it. Or not only.

I was at a great many of those evenings before I could read one. I liked them the way a foreigner likes any custom that is warm and costs him nothing to account for. What I could not see was that I had carried my own account of a meal in the door with me and had never once set it down. On my account, a meal is the people who chose to come, the food in front of them, and the hours until it is over. Everyone at it is a separate person, and the meal is the thing they do near one another. I would never have said that out loud. I never had to. It was in me the way an accent is.

At the end of July I wrote here about a city bus going past a church, and the strangers riding it making the sign of the cross mid-sentence, without appearing to notice they had done it. The supra is the same country doing the same thing after dark, indoors, with the wine open.

I am not going to make the evening holier than it is. A supra is loud. Much of what gets said at one is funny, or boasting, or about nothing whatever, and by the third hour a man can lose the thread of it entirely and be no worse a guest for it. None of it is solemn, and none of it is trying to be.

But it does not stop being what it is because it is also a party. This is the oldest wine country there is, and people have been making it on these hills for something like eight thousand years, older than nearly anything else anyone here knows how to do. The wine in the glass at that table came off a vine. The wine on the altar on Sunday morning came off the same vine. Nobody needs that pointed out to him here, and nobody would think it a clever observation. The plant does not become a different plant when it goes indoors.

Which is why the toasts do the one thing I could never have imagined a meal doing. They keep the guest list longer than the company. The dead are called by name at a table where they cannot eat. Children with no faces yet are drunk to by people who will not live to meet them. And the first glass of the evening went up to Someone none of them can see, and it went up before anyone had eaten, which tells you what the meal is understood to be a part of.

I had a category for that in a church. I had none for it at dinner. Where I come from, the sacred keeps to its building and its hour, and the rest of the week is ours, and a meal is unambiguously ours. Here the line I was taught to draw is not drawn at all, and I have yet to hear anyone announce that they were not drawing it. It does not come up. You cannot argue a people out of something they have not noticed they believe, and you cannot argue them into it either, which is a fair part of why I gave up trying to reason my way toward any of this.

The vine on the hillside, the wine in the glass, and the dead spoken to by name are not three things here. They are one long table, with a good many more places set at it than there are chairs. I sat there for years, warm and well fed and entirely wrong about where I was, and the only man in the room eating alone was me.

These letters go out on Tuesdays and Fridays, and they are free.

- David

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Tonight there is Vespers in English in this city, the service the Church keeps at the end of a day, and tomorrow morning a Liturgy in English as well. Both are served in an old church that is under repair. The building is not finished. The services go on inside it anyway, and nobody there appears to think those two facts sit oddly together.

The room is an odd collection. English is the one thing most of us hold in common, and we do not hold much of it in common either, since the accents come off a long list of countries and I could not give you the whole roster. A Georgian priest learned enough of the language to serve people who are not his own, and he is not the only one; there are a few of them, in a few parts of the city, doing it for whoever turns up. What turns up is a scatter of foreigners who came to this country for a hundred ordinary reasons and are finding, one at a time and without much fuss, the faith that was here long before any of us thought of coming.

Nobody in that room is being assessed.

It took me years to notice the absence, because I had lived my whole life inside the opposite arrangement and had never once heard it said out loud. I took religion to be, underneath everything else, a matter of standing. Where do I stand. Am I in good standing. Is the account square as of this morning. The word I would have given for the answer was grace, and there was nothing hollow in my giving it. But the machinery under the word was judicial: a charge, a defense, a ruling, and a low steady hum of anxiety about which way the case was going that day.

That is not a habit belonging to one tradition, which is the part worth saying carefully. Take the faith out of a man and the courtroom stays behind. He goes on reviewing himself. He keeps the file, argues both sides of it at two in the morning, and hands down a ruling most days before breakfast. It is the shape a modern person is in whether or not he believes anything at all.

Fr. John Romanides, a Greek-American priest and theologian, put the alternative in a sentence I have not been able to unhear since. The Church, he said, is a hospital, and not a courtroom.

Both rooms are in the business of finding out precisely what is wrong with you. Neither is soft, and neither pretends nothing is. But in the one, the point of the finding out is to establish what you have coming. In the other, the point of the finding out is to treat it. The facts can be word for word identical and the two rooms will do nothing alike with them. Which is why the diagnosis, when it finally reached me in this tradition, did not arrive as an accusation. It arrived as the first useful thing anybody had ever said to me about myself.

A week ago I wrote here about the nous, which the Fathers named the eye of the heart: not the faculty a man reasons toward God with, but the one he was built to see Him with. Mine had sat shut for most of my life. What that letter did not get to is what this Church proposes to do about a shut eye, and the answer is that it proposes a course of treatment, worked out a very long time ago and written down.

There are three movements to it and they go in an order. Katharsis, purification, the slow and unglamorous business of getting loose from the compulsions that drive a man where he never meant to go. Photismos, illumination, when prayer stops being an item on the day’s list and starts being closer to sight. And theosis, deification, which the Fathers state without flinching: that a person comes to share, by grace and never by nature, in the life of God Himself. Naming them was most of the relief. For years the inner life had been a fog I could take no bearing in. It turns out to have a course, and a sequence, and a pace that is not mine to set.

This is not the hospital that tells a man nothing is wrong with him. That is not mercy, it is a physician who has quit. The account of what ails a person here is heavier and more exacting than anything I was handed growing up, not lighter; what moved was never the severity of the diagnosis but the purpose of it. And it is not a program for producing a better-running version of the man who walked in. There is an entire industry for that, and I have been a paying customer. This is aimed at something else, at that man being remade rather than improved, which is a slower and more alarming proposition, and nobody takes it up because it sounds pleasant.

Which is why there is a service tonight, and another in the morning, in a building that is not finished. Nobody appears in court twice a week. You go back to treatment as often as it is offered, and you go back alongside everyone else who is going back, and not one of you is keeping the record you spent years assuming was being kept. The Church is a hospital and not a courtroom. It took me longer to want that than to believe it. I had liked the courtroom. I knew the rules in there, and I was doing well.

Tonight I will be standing in that half-repaired church among people I cannot place by their accents, most of us a long way from where we started. I will not be there as anybody’s physician. I am some distance into a course of treatment, and that is all the standing I have in the matter.

If you have left a church, or quietly stopped going, and could never say precisely why: what were you looking for on the day you first walked in? That is the question I would put to everyone in that room tonight if it were mine to ask, and I would rather have your answer than my own.


- David

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A church I spent years in when I was younger got new leadership several years ago, after the man who founded it retired. It is a big place, thousands of people on a Sunday, the kind of church with a staff directory and a parking team. I did not go looking for any of this. Months after the fact the announcements came across my feed, one and then the other, each a name with a line of text underneath, and that is how I learned the two people who took the church over had resigned in the spring.

The line described a working life in full. Organizations built and turned around. Leadership formation. Coaching. Thirty years of it, accurately summarized, and no doubt all true. What was not in it anywhere, in any form or any softened key, was the other thing. What those two people had been to several thousand souls for five years was simply not there. It had come off the way a job you no longer hold comes off.

Resigning is not remarkable. People leave hard work for good reasons, I do not know theirs, and what little I have seen of that work up close says it costs more than anyone watching guesses. What I could not get past was how cleanly the thing detached.

I want to put an image down before I say anything else, and I will not be sly about it, because this is the tradition that raised me. Pastoral ministry in the American church I knew works something like a uniform. Inside the building, on the platform, in the counseling office, a man is a pastor and everyone present can see it. Out on the street he is a man in a car. Nobody can tell. And the reason nobody can tell is not humility. It is that there is nothing to tell. Nothing has been done to him that would show.

I am not standing outside this throwing rocks. I was two years into a pastoral program in that same world, working through it at night, and if that road had run all the way out I would have been ordained on it. I would have been ordained roughly the way a man is hired: examined by a board, approved, appointed to a position, and, when it ended, released. Everybody involved would have loved Christ. I did. That is not the part I am questioning.

This is the part. In that account, ministry is a role, and a role is a thing a person occupies. It has a start and a finish and a description. When a man steps out of it, the role stays where it was and the man walks off whole, available for other roles. There is no scandal in that. It is a coherent way to run an organization.

It is only a problem if the church is not one.

Set it beside what the older Church does and the two stop looking like two styles of a single act. In Orthodoxy a man is ordained inside the Liturgy, at the altar, in the middle of the one service the whole room is already standing in. A bishop lays hands on him. He is vested by other men, one piece at a time, and as each piece goes on the people answer out loud, Axios, he is worthy, because none of this is his private business and never was. It is one of what the Church calls the mysteries, which is its word for the sacraments: the short list of physical, everyday things God has bound Himself to act through, so that a man is actually changed by water, or by oil, or by somebody’s hands on his head.

And then the Church does not do it again. A priest can be deposed, forbidden to serve, and men are; the Church is not sentimental about it. But if he is ever restored, he is not ordained a second time, because there is nothing there to repeat. I am no canonist, and I will not pretend to know precisely what remains in a man who has been set aside; that is a question for people who have given their lives to it. What I can say is what the practice plainly assumes.

Ordination is something done, not something held.

Follow that difference off the platform and into the pews and it explains something that puzzled me for years without my ever getting it into words.

If a church is an organization, then belonging to it is a preference. You attend the one that suits you, find you can live with the people in it, and stay for as long as that lasts. When it stops lasting you go elsewhere, and nothing has been torn, because nothing was tied. Church-hopping is not a failure of nerve in the people who do it. Denomination-hopping is not a failure of seriousness. Both are the structure working exactly as designed. Where the bond is agreement, the bond ends when the agreement does, and nobody has broken faith, because on those terms there was no faith to break.

I hopped. Baptized into a Baptist church as a teenager, then years in the non-denominational world, and then eventually the largest move of the lot. I am the last man here with standing to be sharp about somebody else’s transfer. I made every one of them, and I made them for reasons that felt at the time like discernment and look to me now a great deal like shopping.

What took me years to see is that the last move was not one more of them. I did not find the church that suited me. Nobody asked whether it suited me, and the question would have been slightly beside the point if anyone had. I went into the water, and something was done to me that I did not perform and could not have performed, and I came up something the Church now treats as settled. It does not do that a second time either. That is the same grammar as the altar, worked out on a layman. Whatever I am to that body, I am not a member of it the way I have been a member of everything else I ever joined.

I know how this lands from the other side of it. The world I came out of is full of people who love Christ, some of the most serious I have met anywhere, and it carried me for years I am not going to be ungrateful about. But I have lost the ability to say that a church is a body and mean it as a figure of speech, and the figure of speech is what I think has done the damage. If the word is only an illustration, then a church is a voluntary society with vivid language about itself, and the rest follows without anybody deciding it. A man sets the ministry down the way you set down any other line of work. A family moves across town over a music director. Years of a congregation’s life comes off a résumé in an afternoon, and nobody is at fault, because on those terms nobody can be.

None of which tells me one thing about those two people, and this letter has no business pretending it does. I hope they are well, and I mean that without an edge on it.

What I can speak to is the other arrangement, from underneath. I am studying theology now, properly, and slower going than I expected, and it is possible that somewhere at the end of all that I am ordained to something. It is equally possible that I am not. What has changed is what I would be asking for. It is not a position. I would be asking a bishop to do a thing to me that cannot be undone, that I could not resign from in a bad year, and that I would carry into rooms where nobody knew it was there. That this frightens me is the first honest evidence I have that I understand what it is.

A church you can walk out of without tearing anything was never holding you. A body you cannot resign from sounds, from outside, like a trap. From inside it is the first thing I have belonged to that I could not talk myself out of on a bad Sunday. The two look identical from where I used to stand. I could not have told them apart, nobody was hiding it from me, and I no longer think it can be seen from out there at all.

I have no uniform. Nothing about me on a Tuesday would tell you anything. But I have stopped believing that what happened to me in that water is a thing I could take off, and somewhere in the last few years I stopped wanting to be able to.


- David

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Sioni Cathedral sits down in the old town, on a street too narrow to stand back and take it in properly. It is low and heavy and built of stone that has been there a very long time, and in August that stone gives up whatever coolness it gathered overnight by about nine in the morning. We went on Sunday. There are no pews; you stand. A bishop was serving, which lengthens everything, and by the second hour my shirt was stuck to my back and the candles in the sand tray had begun to lean toward one another in the heat.

The morning carried a memorial for Patriarch Ilia. You can see his pictures off to the left in my photograph above. He was the Georgian patriarch for forty-nine years, most of the people standing there had never known another one, and he died in the spring. Nobody edged toward the door. Several hundred people stood in that heat and sang for a man that almost none of them had ever spoken a word to.

The strange part of that morning is not the heat, and it is not the length.

Ask why a church full of people does that and there are answers waiting, all of them modern and most of them decent. Tradition. Discipline. A community holding itself together. Grief doing what grief does. What every one of those answers shares is that it puts the whole morning on our side of the room. We hold the service, we perform the rite, we generate the meaning, we carry home whatever comfort there was to carry, and the man in the ground receives nothing, because on that account there is no longer anyone there to receive it. The traffic runs one direction only, outward from us, into a world with no capacity to answer.

That was the account I lived inside for most of my life, and it had nothing to do with unbelief. I held it for years and would have called myself a believer through every one of them.

The Fathers had a word for what the account leaves out. They called it participation, and they did not mean a warm feeling about God. They meant that the traffic runs both ways: that a creature really shares in the life of the One who made it, takes that life in the way a lung takes air, and becomes more itself the more of it arrives. A river, an hour of a Sunday morning, a human face, a man some years dead. On that account not one of them merely sits beside God on a list of things that happen to exist. Each is held in Him, carries something of Him, and means what it means before anybody shows up to assign it a meaning.

What the West lost, before it lost anything else, was that thread. Not belief in God, which held on for centuries after and holds on in plenty of places still. The thread itself, the line running between God and everything, cut a little at a time over a long stretch of years, mostly by serious men who loved Him and could not have guessed what they were setting loose. That story has names and dates in it and belongs to other letters. Today I want only its shape.

Here is the shape, and I was slower to see it than I would like to admit. Cut a thread and you do not get one loose end. You get two.

One end is the world. I wrote about that end a couple of weeks back: the creek behind the house I grew up in, described accurately as runoff and gravity and quietly demoted in the describing. That is the end people notice first, because it is the one you can point at.

The other end is us, and I never noticed it at all, for the reason that I was standing on it. If nothing out there means anything on its own, meaning has to come from somewhere, and there is exactly one candidate left in the room. So the job falls to me. Everything I look at means whatever I decide it means, my own life included. That gets called freedom. It sounds enormous, and I built my twenties around it, and I have already written here about reaching the end of that road holding everything I had aimed for and feeling nothing at all. I read it then as a failure of the goods. I think now it was simpler than that. I had been handed a job no creature can hold down. Sole author of all significance is not a promotion. It is a shift nobody can work.

Which is why a morning like Sunday’s is built, end to end, on the opposite assumption. Nobody in that church was generating anything. The chant is not being composed; it is being carried. The prayers are older than the building, and the building is old. The whole arrangement of those hours assumes something arriving, and its business is to have a roomful of us standing where it lands. You do not go in order to have an experience. You go because there is something to receive, and it does not come out of you.

Say that in the vocabulary I was raised in and it sounds like superstition. Stand in it for three hours and it is the most ordinary thing in the world. That is the difficulty with all of this. The two accounts do not really argue with each other. They cannot both be describing the same morning.

My son stood through the whole of it, the memorial included. He understood nothing, since the service is in Georgian and he is small. No one had given him a job to do, no one was checking whether he did it, and there was nothing waiting at the other end of it but the walk home. He stood the way the people on either side of him were standing, and he stayed when they stayed. I kept waiting for the question and it never came. Somewhere in the second hour it occurred to me that he was not sitting through something. He was one of the people it was made of. A member of a body does not leave the body because he is warm.

Two things need saying before this hardens into something it is not. The first is that no part of the physical description of that morning is false. Stone building, hot air, sound moving through it, people on their feet. Every word true, and I have no use for a version of this that needs the measurements to be wrong. What I am disputing is not the description. It is the small assumption riding underneath it, that the description is the whole of the traffic.

The second is that nobody did this to us on purpose. There is a way of telling this history as a roll call of villains, and it is a bad way, because the men who made those cuts were, most of them, careful and devout, and would have been the first to disown what their work eventually came to. Choices carry a logic that outlives whoever makes them. That is a sadder story than a conspiracy and a truer one, and it hands nobody a reason to feel superior to his own ancestors.

We walked out into the worst heat of the afternoon, and I had made nothing, followed a fraction of what was said, and produced no result that would survive an audit. I was not empty. Whatever I came out with, I had not carried in.

Nothing can be given to you by a world you have decided is dead, and nothing can be given to you while you are the only one in the room who counts. Those are the two ends of a single cut, and it is why so much of our repair work goes nowhere. We labor at the one end or the other, and what is severed is the thread. But a cut thread is not a demolished building. Both ends are still there, lying nearer to each other than anyone believes, and everything I have found since I started looking says they can be tied. That is what was going on in a church too old and too warm on Sunday morning, and it is what my son was standing in without knowing the name of it: a knot being tied, patiently, at the rate these things are tied, for a man who is not as gone as I was taught.

I have not tied anything yet. I have found the two ends, which is further along than I was, and these letters are what I do with them twice a week. There is room beside me.


- David

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We are going to a water park this Sunday, because by early afternoon a Tbilisi day in late summer will have burned the shade down to nothing and there is no other sane plan. My son will be in the water before I have found somewhere to put the towels. He is a good swimmer, which is another way of saying he does not think about water at all. He gets in.

I could give you the number for the heat. It is on the phone in my pocket, it is accurate, and it is worth very little. The mornings here are close to perfect, cool air still coming down off the hills, and the evenings are perfect again, long and gold, the tables out on the sidewalks until late. In between there are three or four hours that will flatten you. The same number stands over all of it. Nobody ever learned what noon does in this city from a number. You learn it stepping out into it, on the backs of your hands and in the top of your lungs.

Earlier this week I wrote from here about a faith that lives out in the street, carried by a whole people, as ordinary as the traffic. Today I want to turn the letter around and tell you what mine was for most of my life. It lived nowhere but in my head. And there is a version of that difference between the number and the noon that took me years to catch, and it cost far more than an afternoon.

In my mid-twenties a crisis of meaning knocked the wind out of me, and I went looking for information, because information was the only tool anyone had ever handed me. I signed up for a pastoral program, two years of it, taken at a distance over whatever hours the work left me, studied the way you study for an exam you mean to pass. I learned the creeds and the councils, and by the end I could have defended any of it across a table.

Through all of it the praying stayed what it had been since I was a boy: words sent up into a quiet that never once sent anything down. I believed it was heard. I did not expect an answer, and I had never met anybody who did.

Here is the confession, and the rest of this letter hangs off it. The trouble was never that I knew too little. By the end I knew a great deal and most of it was right. The trouble was where all of it sat. Everything I had gathered went into the one part of me equipped to receive it, the part that weighs a claim and files it, and the part built to meet God had gone unused since birth. It had not occurred to me that I had one, and I do not believe it had occurred to anyone who taught me.

The Fathers of the early Church had the distinction sitting there the whole time, and running into it years later did not feel like learning something. It felt like being told what had been wrong with me. It was obvious to them that a person is equipped to know in two different ways. One is the dianoia, the reasoning mind, the instrument that argues and compares and concludes, and it is the one carrying you through this sentence; nothing here is a word against it. The other is the nous, which they called the eye of the heart. It is what a person perceives God with. Not the argument that He is there. The perceiving.

What surprised me is how matter-of-fact they are about it. This is not a temperament, the way we say some people are spiritual and others are not. It is an organ, as ordinary in their account of a person as the ear, and everybody is issued one: the farmer, the woman at the register. It can be clear or clouded, open or shut, and it can sit unopened through a whole life while the life carries on quite successfully around it.

That part I did not arrange for myself. Long before anyone laid out the Ohio town I come from, the West had shrunk the word knowing until it covered only what the reasoning mind can do, and everything else was moved off the books: filed under mystery, then under feeling, then under imagination. Nobody had to disprove the eye. It was written out of the description of a human being, which is quieter and works better; by the time that description reached me it had the settled look of a fact. These letters opened with a boy who believed in God as long as he could remember and never knew what the belief was supposed to mean. This is what was wrong with him. He had the right God and the wrong instrument, and it was the only instrument left in the house.

Two misreadings sit a step away, and I should fence both. The first I have already touched: this is no case against thinking. My error was never that I used the reasoning mind, but that I had nothing else.

The second is the one I would have made myself at twenty-five, which is to hear all this as a plea to feel more. Nobody who formed me was cold about God. That world went hard after His nearness, hands raised, the music built to move you, and something real happened in those rooms often enough that I will not, from the other side of a conversion, call it manufactured. Some of it was grace. But being moved is not seeing. A strong feeling arrives from outside and leaves on its own schedule; a man can be full of God at eleven at night and back to himself at the traffic light. What I am describing is not a visitor. It is a faculty coming back into service, so that the perception holds steady and belongs to you, as available on a dull Wednesday as in a crowded room on a Sunday. For years I took the weather for the eyesight, and nobody was surer of it than I was.

The better news is folded inside the diagnosis, and I was slow to hear it as better. If I had been born without some spiritual talent other people were issued, there would be nothing to do about it. That is not the trouble. The eye is not missing. It is shut, and a shut eye is a medical situation rather than a metaphysical one. It does not open by learning more about it, which is the first thing someone like me tries. It does not open by wanting it harder, which is the second. What opens it is a long, unglamorous healing this tradition has been performing on ordinary people for two thousand years, and it is a method rather than a mood, which was the relief of my life. Describing it is most of what these letters have left to do.

As for mine, I will not overstate it. It is not standing wide. Something is happening to it, at a rate I do not set, with a great deal of forgetting on my part in between. I have not been healed. I am being healed, slowly and mostly without my help. That is the report.

In a little while we will be at the water, and I will do what I always do, which is stand at the edge a beat longer than necessary, testing it with one foot, running the small arithmetic adults run. My son will already be in. He could not tell you one fact about water. He knows it from the inside, the way he knows how to walk, and has never once been asked to account for it.

I spent most of my life at the edge of the thing I wanted most, taking its temperature and getting the numbers right, and I would have told you I was in it. The eye of the heart is the part that goes in. Every person ever born has one. Mine stayed shut for decades, and nobody around me, myself least of all, thought to ask why.

If that is anything like the formation you were given, I would like to hear it. It is the question I most want answered in these letters, because for a long time I was fairly sure it was only me.

- David

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We are back in Tbilisi for the summer, as we have most years for a decade, and within a day of landing I am watching the thing I always forget to expect. A city bus labors up one of the long avenues, crowded, everyone bent to the small private business of a commute. It passes a church. There is always a church. And without any fuss, without lowering a phone or breaking off a sentence, a scattering of the people aboard lift a hand and cross themselves, and go on. A young man does it in the middle of a laugh; a woman manages it with a grocery bag hooked on the same wrist. None look up to see who noticed; it does not occur to anyone that it is a thing to remark on. A church went by. You mark it the way you would mark passing your own street.

I have spent a good part of ten years trying to say what it is about this country that took hold of me, and I keep coming back to that gesture on the bus. It is so small, and gives away so much. Where I am from, faith is something that happens on the inside of a person, when it happens at all: a conviction you reach, weigh, defend, and could in principle lay back down. Here it is on the outside of everyone. It is out in the street, in a hand lifted toward a passing dome, as unremarkable as the traffic it rides through. And I could see that long before I understood the first thing about what I was seeing. That is the part I am anxious to get right.

It is the whole strange fact I want to hand you in this letter. The faith here is not an opinion the country holds. It is the air the country breathes: the common condition, the case before anyone decides anything about it, felt by a stranger in a week, years before he could tell you a word of what any of it means.

I did not come here looking for it. I want to be honest about the man who first got off the plane, since he is the ignorant one in the story and I will not dress him up. I came for the amenities, the same as any traveler: the wine out of the oldest cellars on earth, the food, an old city that had somehow stayed beautiful and cheap and unhurried all at once. I was an evangelical then, growing in the only Christianity I had ever been handed, and Orthodoxy had not once crossed my mind. So I walked through the old churches the way you walk through anything old on a trip, appraising them, photographing them, moving on to lunch. Whatever was inside them I could not read; I was looking through the only eyes I had packed, and they reported the surface as the whole of it.

In one of the first of these letters I wrote about the afternoon that broke that open: a chant I could not understand, in a dark church I had ducked into to get out of the sun, reaching a part of me my arguments had never thought to knock. That was one of these buildings, on one of these streets. But what I am after today is larger than a single afternoon, and slower, and I was slow to catch it. What I picked up on, once I had been coming back a few years, was that the faith did not stay inside the churches at all. An icon rides the dashboard of the taxi; a candle burns in the corner of the little shop where I buy bread; the calendar behind the pharmacy counter keeps the saints’ days and not only the numbers. It set the shape of the whole year, too: weeks when the shops went quiet and the tables changed what they carried, and weeks when the city seemed to give itself over to a feast. On a feast morning the streets tilt toward the churches. People step out of their houses and drift the same way, the old and the young, dressed for it, until an everyday avenue has become a slow river moving toward the open doors at the top of the hill. No one organizes this. There is no sign-up sheet. It is a whole town remembering out loud, at the same hour, what day it is on a calendar the modern world has largely thrown out.

This past Sunday we joined it ourselves. The Patriarch was serving the Liturgy up at Sameba, the cathedral over the city, and the whole of Tbilisi seemed to have turned out, not as a spectacle but as a matter of course. That morning has a letter of its own, Heaven and Earth on a Sunday Morning; what belongs here is the crowd. Students, grandmothers, a man or two straight off a night shift, packed in for the hours it ran: a cross-section of a whole people, keeping a Sunday.

And it is not only the devout who are carried along in that current, which is the hardest thing to translate for anyone raised where I was raised. Back home, faith is a choice, and we are proud that it is; each person weighs it and takes it up or lays it down, and the choosing is thought to be the whole dignity of the thing. Here it is less a choice than a mother tongue. You are born inside it. It is what your grandmother’s hands did, and what your name-day was, and what the whole street does on a feast morning, and a person no more resolves to belong to it than he resolves to belong to his own family. I am not telling you every Georgian believes; a good many would tell you outright that they do not. I am telling you the faith is theirs even so, the inheritance that sits under the believing and the not-believing alike, the way a language sits under everything its speakers say and doubt and argue.

I should stop here and keep the praise honest, because a country described this warmly starts to sound like a fairy tale, and this is not one. Georgia is no paradise, and the tradition slowly forming me has never gone looking for a paradise on this side of things. It is a poor country. For thirty years its most dependable export has been its own young, who leave for wages in places that pay more and pray less, until some villages hold mostly the old and the framed photographs of the gone. Drive far enough north and you reach a fence standing in open farmland where no border has any business being, close to a fifth of the country sealed behind it, held since a war in 2008 by another government’s soldiers, who every so often shift the wire a few meters deeper into a field while a farmer sleeps. There is corruption. There is a politics as bitter and unsteady as anyone’s. I am not showing you a holy country. I am showing you a real one, wounded in all the usual ways, that happens to have kept hold of the one thing most of us set down.

And that is what keeps me on the corners longer than a grown man should linger, watching a bus full of strangers cross themselves at a church they have passed ten thousand times. It would be the easiest thing to file the gesture under old-world charm, a picture to take and forget. It is not charm. It is evidence. Here is a whole people still living as though the world were full of meaning and their commonest days answerable to it. Not because anyone won an argument, but because the thing was never surrendered here, and so it is just the climate a Georgian is born into and grows up breathing without a thought. I was born on the far side of that, where the same inheritance drained off so slowly no one alive remembers losing it, and I grew up certain the emptiness was only how the world is made. I am not certain anymore. Somewhere the fuller thing is still the lived reality of an entire country, one with an airport and a rush hour and a miserable exchange rate, and you could be standing inside it by this time next week. It was never lost. Where I come from it was only mislaid, and a thing you have merely mislaid, you are allowed to go looking for.

That looking is what these letters are for, twice a week. If you know the thinness I mean, come and walk out with me.

- David

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The last letter left my hands somewhere over the Atlantic. We landed in Tbilisi on Saturday, and on Sunday morning I did what this city does on a Sunday morning: I joined the crowd moving up the hill to church. These letters keep to Tuesdays and Fridays, but a few things in a year refuse to wait their turn, and this was one of them. The church on the hill was Sameba, Holy Trinity Cathedral, the seat of the Georgian Church, and the man serving the Liturgy that morning was the Patriarch himself.

I watched him arrive. An SUV came slowly through the crowd near the doors, and when it stopped and he stepped out, the people nearest it seemed to lean toward him and grow still at the same time: hands crossing, heads bowing, a hush that no one directed moving back through the crowd row by row. The man stepping down was Patriarch Shio, the newly enthroned Catholicos-Patriarch, the ancient title carried by the head of the Georgian Church. Georgia buried Patriarch Ilia this spring, after forty-nine years at the head of this Church, and his successor has been on the throne barely a season. I mention the succession because of what it did not change, which is everything that happened next.

Inside, Sameba was serving at full strength. Seven bishops stood with the Patriarch, and around them hieromonks, monks ordained to the priesthood, and more priests and deacons than I could count from where I stood. The cathedral itself is young, finished only about twenty years ago, raised on a hill where it can be seen from most of the city. What was happening inside it is not young at all.

I have been sending these letters for two weeks now, and so far they have had to work the way letters work: an argument handed over a piece at a time, in words. What I stood inside on Sunday was not an argument. For the length of a long morning nothing was explained and everything was done: the incense, the chant rising and settling, the bread and the cup carried out to the people. The Church has an old name for what that hour is. The Liturgy, it says, is where heaven meets earth. Not a picture of the meeting; the meeting. I used to file that sentence under poetry. It does not file so easily anymore.

A little over a thousand years ago, a pagan prince in Kiev sent envoys out to see the great faiths at worship and tell him what they found. The ones who reached Constantinople stood through the Divine Liturgy under the dome of Hagia Sophia, and the report they carried home has outlived the empire and very nearly everything else about their world: they could not say, they told him, whether they had been standing in heaven or on earth. They had no category for what they had seen, and rather than invent one they let the confusion stand. A people was baptized downstream of that sentence.

Here is the part I most want to hand you. The service those envoys could not place is, in its bones, the service I stood in on Sunday. Most of an Orthodox Sunday, nearly everywhere on earth, is the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, and it has been for well over a thousand years. I do not speak Georgian yet. I carried a transliteration with me, the service written out in English letters so a foreigner can follow the sound, and the surprise was how little I needed it. I knew where I was the whole way through, the way you know your own house in the dark. The same litanies in the same order, the same Creed, the same long approach to the same table. In America I stand through this liturgy in English, in a parish that would fit inside one of Sameba’s side chapels. On Sunday it wore another alphabet, and nothing underneath the alphabet was different.

I had wondered, on the way up the hill, what it would be like to see the head of a Church at worship, whether the morning would organize itself around him. It did not, and the way it did not is the thing I keep turning over. For nearly the whole of that long service the most exalted man in Georgia stood with his back to the crowd, facing the altar, because he was doing what everyone behind him was doing. Seven bishops, the ranks of clergy, the choir, the thousands standing shoulder to shoulder, the jet-lagged American with his transliteration folded in one hand: one body, turned one way, doing one thing. Hierarchy, whatever it looks like from outside, looks from inside like a procession. Nobody in that cathedral was the audience, and nobody was the show. The whole room, from the Patriarch to the man following along on paper, was aimed past itself, at Christ.

The envoys’ report used to read to me like a beautiful exaggeration, the kind of thing travelers say. I am more careful with it now. I make no claim to their vision; I was a beginner in a crowd, minding my page, losing my place, finding it again. But there was at least one stretch of that morning, the chant going up, the doors open, the whole cathedral leaning into one prayer, when the question of which world I was standing in seemed like a fair question, and no one was rushing to answer it. That is the whole of what I can claim, and it is more than I ever expected to. Heaven, whatever we were told, is not far. On Sunday it met the earth partway up a hill in Tbilisi, in a language I am still learning, at a table I recognized from the far side of the world. It will do it again next Sunday. It always has.


- David

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By the time this letter reaches your inbox, I will be somewhere over the Atlantic, belted into a window seat nearly seven miles above the water, on the long flight to Tbilisi, the city that has been our family’s second home for about a decade, where we go for the summer.

Outside the small oval window is one of the grandest sights a person is ever given: an ocean seen from a height almost no one who ever lived was allowed to reach. Let me tell you what I take in when I glance down at it between drink services. Distance. A grey field with a little texture on it. The white plane on the seat-back map dragging itself along a thin arc, four hours and change still to run. Below me, water enough to swallow every cathedral ever raised, and I am checking the time.

This is not the tiredness of a long travel day, though the day is long. It is a habit of looking, older than this flight and a good deal older than me, and I was slow to catch it in the act. Once you have caught it, you find it everywhere, which is the joke the habit plays on you: the one thing it will let you see clearly is itself.

Here is the habit said straight. We are taught to see the world as less than it is, and coached to call the smaller sight realism. It is a blindness with good manners. It never introduces itself as blindness; it arrives looking like maturity, the clear-eyed adult putting away childish things, and for the better part of my life I mistook it for clear sight.

The first place I remember it happening was the creek behind the house I grew up in, in an eastern Ohio town of a hundred and seventy-five people I have written about before. It was a creek you could cross on a fallen log. I spent whole afternoons at it, and I felt, the way a child feels the things that matter before he can defend them, that the creek was somebody, that it had a face turned my way. Then I grew old enough for the account that corrects a boy out of all that. Runoff and gravity. So many cubic feet a second. Oxygen, hydrogen, and whatever the farms upstream had sent down. Every word of it true, and under it ran the lesson the words were really teaching: that the something-more I had felt at the water was weather inside me, not news from the creek. Mine. And so, beside the point.

The rest came easily after that, because a boy is a quick study. A meal turned into fuel, a tank topped off on the move so the body would keep. The year turned into a flat belt of days that carried you along and added up to nothing, a long grey middle where one month was the last one run again, holidays that asked nothing of you and gave a day off in return. Faces, weather, work, the hills at evening: all of it pressed down to what could be counted and priced, and the pressing felt like nothing at all. It felt like growing up. It felt, and here is the whole trick, like seeing things at last as they are.

I want to be careful, because none of this is a complaint against the measurements. The creek is obeying gravity. The numbers are right, every one of them, and I would not hand my son to a doctor who thought otherwise. The sleight of hand was never in the numbers. It was in a small word slipped in beside them, the word only, or merely, or nothing but: the word that quietly promotes a true account into the only account, and turns whatever it cannot measure into a rounding error. The creek is only water. The meal is just fuel. You are nothing but the chemistry that happens to be doing the feeling. Say only often enough and the living place goes quiet around you, not because anyone argued it dead but because you were handed a pair of glasses in the cradle that filter the light back out, and were told the glasses are your own two eyes.

The same blindness followed me into adulthood, onto the beautiful coast I wrote about earlier this week, where a view people save forty years for moved me about as much as the furniture in the room. I blamed the emptiness of the life. Some of that was fair, but I was also looking at the sea the way I had learned to look at the creek.

There is a heavy word for the long version of this, and I will hand it to you once and then set it down, because the word matters less than the thing it names: desacralization, the slow un-hallowing of the world, the draining that leaves a mechanism where a creation used to stand. It has a history, with names and dates and wrong turns in it, and that is for another letter. What I am after today is the feel of it, because the feel is what a child gets and what the adult forgets he is still getting. Nobody reasons his way into this blindness. You are raised inside it, the way nearly everyone reading this was.

So this is a letter of diagnosis, and a diagnosis can land like bad news. This one carries better news folded inside it. If the world had died the way the account says, if the creek were nothing but runoff and the ocean nothing but salt, there would be no work to do, and these letters would be a long and elegant complaint. But nothing out there died. Not one thing. The creek is running behind that house tonight exactly as much as it ran when I was small and knew it was somebody. The ocean under this plane is not one ounce less than the deep that every earlier century crossed in terror and wonder and prayer. The year I was handed as a flat belt of days had a shape in it the whole time, waiting under the flatness to be seen. What went thin was never the world. It was the looking.

And a poverty that was learned can be unlearned. An eye schooled shut can be schooled back open. Not by trying to feel more, which fogs the glass, but by a slower work these letters will get to in time. For now it is enough to say the one thing the habit most wants kept from you: you were not born into a dead world and left to pretend it lives. You were born into a living one and taught not to see it. The teaching can come undone.

I am no further along in the undoing than a man who has noticed the problem and turned to face it. But noticing is where every recovery begins. These letters are that noticing, done out loud, twice a week. And I would be glad of your company, here at the window.

- David

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The suitcases are down from the closet again. By the end of this week my family and I will be on a plane to Tbilisi, where we will spend the rest of the summer and a good part of the fall, the way we have most years for about a decade. There is a choreography to it now: the mail held, the bags by the door, the apartment on the far end waiting for us. I can lift my life off the ground and set it back down somewhere warmer or older whenever I choose. That freedom is the oldest thing I own. I built my whole young life to have it, I got it early, and for a long time I was sure it was the point.

I was in my mid-twenties when I first held it in my hands. I had come from the other end of the American map, a small town in the Ohio rust belt where the winters were long and the factories had mostly closed, the town I wrote about when I began these letters. My wife had grown up in a bigger city across the state; we married young and left for the Florida coast together, where the cold never found us and the water moved all year. My work lived on a laptop, so it traveled when we traveled; we kept a home near the beach and spent the summers abroad. By the yardstick nobody in America says out loud but everybody carries, I had made it, and made it young. The boy who grew up watching the paint peel off the houses in a town of a hundred and seventy-five people now lived where the paint stayed bright and somebody else was paid to keep it that way.

And it did nothing for me.

I want to be careful here, because there is a flattering version of this and it would be a lie. I did not see through the money while I had it, holding it at some wise arm’s length. I chased it as hard as anyone I knew and caught it sooner than most, and then I stood there with the exact thing I had been promised would make me whole, waiting to feel whole, and no part of me answered. It was not that the feeling came in smaller than the brochure said. The feeling did not come. The promise had been exact, and I had believed it exactly: get out of the dying town, get free, get enough, and the old ache would finally go quiet. I had done all three.

Last week I mentioned, in passing, a coast that had given me a great deal and answered none of it. This is the part I skipped.

I could see that the life was beautiful. I could see it the way you see a photograph of a place you will never go: the beauty sits there on the surface and not one bit of it gets in. The morning walk to the sand, the water working through its colors, a view that people labor forty years to retire into. I took it all in, and it registered as an address and a price. I had the best seat in the house for one of the loveliest things water and light can do together, and it moved me about as much as the furniture. I would close the laptop by midday with the whole bright afternoon in front of me, mine to spend on anything I could think of, and nothing I could think of felt worth the spending. I had imagined, from inside the gray Ohio winters, that boredom was a rich man’s luxury. It turned out to be his weather.

So I did what the arrangement tells you to do when the reward lands empty. I assumed I had not gathered enough of it yet. The fix was always more: a higher number to aim at, a next rung that would hold what the last one hadn’t. I could always name the thing that would finally fill me, and it was forever the thing I did not yet have. But I had already learned better without meaning to. I had reached the mark I once thought would be plenty, stood on it, and felt nothing arrive, and some part of me suspected a higher mark would pay out exactly the same, and still wanted to reach for it. There is a particular loneliness in getting the very thing you worked for and feeling the wanting quietly pack up and move on to the next thing, without once sitting down to rest.

For a long time I read this as a private failure, some fault in my own wiring that kept me from enjoying what any reasonable person would be glad of. I have come to think I had it backward. I had not done the thing badly. I had done it thoroughly, further and faster than most, and the thoroughness was the whole trouble. What I had taken for my personal defect was the advertised result, arriving on time. Most people live with a quiet suspicion that the prize is hollow and are spared the proof of it. I went and collected the proof, and it weighed nothing. That is harder to survive than failure, in its way. Failure lets you keep believing the thing you want is still out there, one more try down the road. I had gotten the thing, and the getting was the disappointment.

Under all of it, under the getting and the chasing and the number I kept moving, something other than an answer kept surfacing. A question. I have never quite set it down.

So what was the point of all this?

At the time it felt like the floor going out from under me. I had done everything right and arrived nowhere, and the question read like a sentence handed down over the whole of my life. I hear it differently now. When I began these letters I wrote about an ache I had carried since childhood and could never name, a low hunger with nothing in the world I could point to and say, there, that is the thing I want. That ache had finally been made to speak, and this was the sentence it had been trying to say the entire time. The emptiness I had paid so dearly to reach was the most honest thing my success ever gave me.

A question like that is not a verdict. It is a beginning. Everything I have found since — and I have found something, which is what these letters are slowly for — started on the far side of it, on the day I stopped trying to answer it by acquiring one more thing. I will zip the bags this week and fly off on the very freedom that once carried me nowhere that mattered, and I have made a kind of peace with it. It was never going to be the point. It does not have to be.

If you reached the thing you were certain would fill you and found the rooms empty when you finally walked in, I would count it a gift if you said so below. A great many of us arrive exactly where we were aimed and find no one waiting. It helps to hear the others say it out loud.

- David

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The wine was the reason I first went. People have made it in that country for eight thousand years, fermented in clay vessels buried up to the neck in the ground, and I wanted to drink it where it came from. There were the cheap flights on top of that, and a friend who kept insisting the place was like nowhere else, and my own liking for a city where a metro entrance and a church a thousand years old can sit on the same corner. Those were my reasons. They were good enough for a trip, and not one of them explains why I kept wandering into dark old churches I had no business entering and staying inside them long after I had seen everything there was to see.

Let me be honest about the man who wandered in, because nobody would have bet on his conversion. I was an evangelical in those years, and an earnest one, holding a faith that lived almost entirely as a stack of right answers. I could have laid out the doctrines for you in order. What I had no feel for at all was the idea that God might be Someone a person could be met by, as present as whoever is sitting next to you. So I read those churches the way I read the rest of Georgia, as one more charm of a charming country. The gold behind the candles was just décor to me. The singing was something the locals kept up. The icons I took for the sort of thing an adult faith hangs on to for mood and could clear out tomorrow without missing. I was seeing with the only eyes I had brought, the modern ones, and they did their work. They took in the surface of it all and told me the surface was everything.

And still I kept going in. I would blame the architecture, or the need to get out of the sun, and then I would stand there far longer than architecture or sun could explain. The inside was cool and dim after the street. It smelled of warm wax and of something else, sweet and a little bitter, that I would later learn was incense. Candles guttered in a bed of sand. The walls carried an old gold that seemed to keep the little light to itself instead of giving it back. And from a corner I couldn’t see, a man was singing, very low, in a tongue I did not have a syllable of, one line that rose and turned back on itself and appeared to be in no hurry ever to arrive. It reached somewhere in me my religion had never thought to knock. I did not feel talked into anything. I felt found, before I had said yes to one thing.

Earlier this week I wrote about a hunger I carried the whole way through childhood and could never put a name to, a low ache underneath everything that would not settle. By the time I was standing in that church I had spent years trying to quiet it and getting nowhere, including on a bright stretch of coast that gave me a great deal and answered none of it. What I could not have seen from inside the moment was that the ache and the singing were the same subject. The reaching in me had finally come up against the thing it was cut to fit, and it knew it before I had any idea.

It took me a long time to find words for what had happened, so let me say it outright for you now. Beauty is not a coat of paint over the truth, the nice packaging around a set of hard claims. For some of us it is the way in. It got to me before any argument could, long before I could have made a case for a word of what I now hold, and it could get to me because it was never only beauty. Something was there. The quiet that settled over me in those rooms was not my senses enjoying the room. It was contact. God was at work in the worn paint and the low voice, and whatever went still in me was answering Him, not inventing Him.

I think that is the very reason it got through. I had defenses ready for arguments. Put a case to me and I could raise a counter-case, or set it on a shelf for later and get on with my day. I had nothing prepared for a room. Beauty does not come at you as a claim you can weigh in your hand and lay down again; it slips in under the door while you are congratulating yourself on being there only for the old masonry.

I want to be careful, because this is easy to shave down into something safe. I am not telling you I had a pleasant mood in an atmospheric building. A person can go misty at a fine view and have met nothing past the edge of his own skin, and I have done just that. This was the other thing. Whether my feelings played along or not, something real was being handed to me through a made object, and the holiness I half-registered coming off it was not mine and had not started in me. Years would pass, and a lot of reading, and more wrong turns than I want to count, before I had any language for it. In the moment I had none. I had a bank of candles, a voice in the dark, gold dimming on the walls, and a tug I couldn’t account for and didn’t trust.

This is why I no longer treat that ache as something wrong with me. It is a homing. And what it homes toward does not start by putting a proof in your hands to be finished before you may feel a thing. The way in is lower and humbler than that, and nobody has bolted it. You do not have to master the doctrines, or work out what the modern centuries did to the way we all see, before you are welcome to come close. You can walk toward a beautiful thing for reasons that would fall apart under the first hard question, the way I did, and feel it give under your hand anyway. I went in for the wine and the old stones. What met me was a room full of dark gold and candlelight and a voice I never saw, carrying a line I could not understand, and it reached the part of me that nothing before it ever had. I am nobody special, and it opened for me. Beauty went first.

That is what these letters mean to keep circling, one way or another: the door, and the long road back to it. If the reaching in you has never gone quiet either, walk along with me. There is more of this coming, twice a week.

- David

New? Start here — what these letters are, and who is writing them.

Two letters a week, Tuesday and Friday, and sometimes one that would not wait. Free.

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