Am I Still Orthodox?

The Mysteries, and the Fear of the Chalice

STILL ORTHODOX

Now the book must come down from history into the trembling of a single soul, and answer the questions that are actually whispered at kitchen tables.

The first is the question of identity, and it is asked with real fear: if I cease to commemorate, if I wall off, am I still Orthodox? Have I not, whatever the canon says, stepped outside?

Answer it from everything this book has established, and answer it plainly: yes, you are still Orthodox. More than that: the walling off, rightly done, is precisely the act of remaining Orthodox when remaining has been made difficult. Nothing that makes a Christian has changed in you. Your Baptism stands. The seal of the Chrism stands. The Creed you confess is the Creed of the ages, unaltered by one word. The Mysteries you seek are the Mysteries of the one Church, from Orthodox hands. The bishops you honour are the Orthodox episcopate throughout the world, and the councils you await are the Church's own. What has changed is one thing only: you have declined to let your amen be attached to a public falsehood.

The canon's own words, remember, run the other way from the fear. Such persons are worthy of the honour which befits them among Orthodox Christians, not exiles readmitted, but Orthodox honoured. The identity to worry over belongs to the other side of the wall: to the teaching, in the canon's dread word, of the pseudo teachers.

One more fear hides beneath this question, and the desert named it seventeen centuries ago: the fear of being thought mad. The world will say so; the majority will say so; Saint Anthony the Great foresaw the day when they would:

The father of monasticism spoke it in the very century that watched the episcopate go Arian; and his word stands for every faithful soul since who has been called divisive, extreme, or unwell for declining a fashionable falsehood. The diagnosis of the majority is not the judgment of God. Sanity is measured against the truth, not against the crowd, and the reader who keeps the faith of the ages, with grief and without pride, may bear the world's verdict lightly.

THE MYSTERIES CONTINUE

The second question follows at once, and it is the practical one: what of the Mysteries, for me and for my children? Shall my child be baptized, my son married, my mother buried?

Yes, from Orthodox hands, as always. The wall changes where you stand in the network of commemoration; it does not change what the Church gives her children. The faithful behind the wall seek out the priests who share the confession, as the faithful of Basil's day sought the open country liturgies, and as the faithful of the iconoclast decades were sustained by hunted priests. And where necessity presses, the Church's ancient economies stand. From the earliest times she has held that in danger of death any Christian may baptize, the Church supplying afterward what order could not supply in the hour; and no marriage, no burial, no soul is abandoned by God because the times are broken.

Two boundary stones, though, stand here as everywhere. The first: never despise the Mysteries, nor treat a season of deprivation as a virtue. The wall exists for the sake of the chalice; and a wall that ends by starving the soul of the chalice has been built in the wrong place. The second: never pronounce the Mysteries absent where you cannot see them, for that is the sectarian's despair which this book has condemned from its first pages. You are not the assessor of grace. The question you are answerable for is not what God does at other altars, but what you confess at the one you approach.

NEITHER FAMINE NOR FALSE FEAST

And here the heaviest whisper of all must be heard out and answered gently, for it comes before all the others in the heart. If I wall off, shall I be left without the Mysteries altogether? The parishes near me commemorate the men I must refuse; the true hands may be a day's journey away, or hidden. Is a rigorous famine holier than a compromised feast?

We concede the anguish entirely, and refuse to cheapen it. But the question, in its final form, asks the believer to weigh the Mysteries against the confession, and that weighing the Fathers refused, because the two were never separable. The Eucharist is not a substance to be obtained wherever it can be had, like bread in a famine. It is the seal of a shared faith, received unto judgment or unto life according to the confession in which one approaches; and the Apostle's warning about eating and drinking unworthily, not discerning the Lord's body, falls with all its weight on the man who, knowing a confession to be false, seals it with his amen for convenience. What shall it profit to receive the medicine of immortality in the act of confessing what one knows to be a lie?

The saints answered with their lives: Basil's people under the rain, counting the wilderness with the truth better than the temples with the blasphemy; the faithful of the iconoclast years, fed in secret; the confessors who went without for a season rather than receive upon a false confession, and whom God did not abandon, for He is not in the habit of abandoning those who choose Him over comfort.

The counsel is therefore neither famine nor false feast. Seek, and seek far if need be, the true hands, for they exist, and to deny it is despair. Endure, if God allows a season of lack, without panic and without despising what you lack. And trust the Lord of the Mysteries to feed those who would not lie to Him, as He has done in every generation.⁹³

THE FEAR OF THE CHALICE

One more fear belongs to this chapter, because our own generation lived through it and the wound is fresh: the fear of the chalice itself. In the days of the pestilence, voices were raised, some outside the Church and some, more grievously, within her, suggesting that the common spoon and the common cup might be a danger, that the Holy Gifts might carry disease, that the manner of communion should be altered for safety.

Let the matter be said with both exactness and gentleness. The faith of the Church, confessed in her prayers and lived for twenty centuries, is that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of the Lord, of which He said, Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life, and which Saint Ignatius called the medicine of immortality, the antidote against death, unto the healing of soul and body. Her people received from the one spoon and the one cup through ages that knew contagions deadlier than ours, plague years in which the clergy communed the dying by the thousand; and the Church never taught, in any age, that death is in that Cup. To tremble before the chalice as before an infection is not medicine. It is, at the root, an error about what the chalice is, and so, at the root, an error about the Church; and the reader now knows the family such errors belong to.

But the frightened are not enemies. Fear is a suffering, not a heresy; and the shepherd's answer to the frightened sheep is not contempt, but the patient rebuilding of faith, and his own visible, joyful communion at the head of the flock. This book judges no trembling soul. It records the teaching, so that when fear returns, as fear does, the faithful may know what the Church has always known: that they approach the Cup of life; and that everything in these pages was written so that this Cup, and no other, should reach their lips.⁹⁴