Frederica Mathewes-Green on Eastern Orthodoxy

I've just added Frederica Mathewes-Green to the 'Food for Thought' list on the right sidebar. It's a list I've set up for people who I mostly don't have an awful lot in common with, but who I think are engaging and good at articulating how/why they reached their current opinions. Mathewes-Green is a writer, public speaker, pro-life activist and a convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. She doesn't have any ethnic heritage from the communities we tend to associate with Eastern Orthodoxy (Greece, Russia, etc)- she was originally a mostly-agnostic person who went through a period of identifying as Hindu. Then she and her husband converted to Christianity, and she accompanied him to seminary and helped him establish himself as an Episcopalian pastor. Eventually she and her husband got disillusioned with Protestantism, and so they both converted to Eastern Orthodoxy and established their own church in Baltimore (where he's pastor and she's Khouria, or Mother of the church).

Here are some quotes from her essays which I thought were interesting:

Excerpted from her book At the Corner of East and Now:

"Though westerners tend to think of Protestant and Roman Catholic as the two opposite poles of Christian faith, in eastern eyes this quarreling mother and daughter bear a strong family resemblance. The two circle around questions of common obsession, questions which often do not arise in the east: works versus faith, scripture versus tradition, papacy versus individualism. This very context of habitual argument creates a climate of nitpicking, and every theological topic that can be defined, and some which are beyond definition, gets scrutinized in turn. As a result, the east sees in the west an unhelpful tendency to plow up the roots of mystery."

"Since there is no locus of power where the [Eastern Orthodox] faith may be tailored to fit current fashion, it doesn’t change in any significant way–not over long centuries nor across great geographical distances. The faith of the first century is the faith of Orthodox today. When we meet in this little stone church outside Baltimore, we celebrate a liturgy that is for the most part over fifteen hundred years old. We join in prayers that are being said in dozens of languages by Orthodox all over the world, prayers unchanged for dozens of generations."

"Also, he [her husband] began to believe that the compromising flaw lay at the very heart of Anglicanism. The beloved doctrine of “comprehensiveness” suggested, “Let’s share the same prayers, the same words about the faith, but they can mean different things to you than to me.” Not a common faith, but common words about the faith— mere flimsy words. A church at peace can survive this way; a church attacked by wheedling heresies must tumble into accommodation reducing orthodoxy to shreds."

"The constant experience of doctrinal disagreements contributed to a Western tendency to make the Christian experience more about ideas than about heart-driven living faith, more what you think than what you do; more assensus than fiducia, more ideas about God than surrender to him. The Orthodox Church, escaping this sort of discord, could admire a butterfly without having to pin its head to a board. [...] For example, rather than over-defining Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist, or tossing out the concept entirely, Orthodox are content to say that the bread and wine become his body and blood simply because they “change.”"

From her book Facing East:

"A kaleidoscope of images flashes through my mind. The textures, the scents, the music of the liturgy, a continuous song of worship that lifts me every week. The Great Fast of Lent, a discipline far more demanding than I’d ever faced in my Christian walk. Kneeling on Holy and Great Thursday and listening to the hammer blows resound as my husband nailed the icon of Jesus’ corpus to the cross; seeing my daughter’s shoulders shake with sobbing. Easter morning giddiness and champagne at sunrise."

I thought this was quite interesting in terms of the CSR debate over what role doctrine plays in Christianity. I don't know much about Eastern Orthodoxy- maybe I should go look up some stuff.