The Path of Return

HOW WALLS COME DOWN

The wall was always temporary. Let that sentence govern this chapter, for it separates the confessor from the sectarian more surely than any other. The sectarian settles behind his wall and makes it a homeland. The confessor camps behind it and watches the road, because its whole purpose is the day it comes down.

Walls come down in the Church in one of two ways, and history shows both. Either the Church, gathered in council, condemns the error and deposes or receives the repentant teachers of it, as Nicaea and Ephesus and Chalcedon and the Seventh Council did, and then the walled off simply resume the commemoration of shepherds who now confess the truth, their whole posture vindicated as the canon promised. Or the erring hierarch himself repents, publicly, as the error was public; and the wall against him dissolves in the same hour, for it was never against the man, but against the confession he had made his own.

In either case the return costs the confessor nothing but joy. He has no institution to fold, no synod to negotiate, no pride of separate identity to bury, precisely because, if he kept the boundary stones, he never built any of these. Blessed is the wall that leaves nothing behind it but a healed Church.

For the longing behind the wall was never for separation but for the true union; and Saint John of Kronstadt, no friend of the Latin errors, and a severe judge of them, spoke that longing for every confessor:

Who would not wish it: the wall is raised by men who ache for the day of its removal. But the union he longed for, the saint insisted in the same breath, must be union in the one true Faith, never by the abandonment of it; for a reunion purchased with the truth would heal nothing, being itself the deepest wound. That longing, purified of compromise, is the heartbeat of this whole chapter, and of the Lord's own prayer, that they all may be one as He and the Father are one: in the truth.

RECEIVING THE RETURNING

The Church has likewise always known how to receive back those who come from the other side of every wall: from heresy, from schism, from the counterfeit separations. Her two hands in this work bear the names the reader has met, akriveia, exactness, and economia, discretion. By the one she receives with the fullness of the rule; by the other she bends the manner of reception, never the faith, to heal the person before her; and the seal of the Chrism, as the eighth chapter showed, has been her ordinary instrument for renewing the broken bond.

This book does not adjudicate the reception of any particular soul; that belongs to the bishops and the confessors of the returning. It insists only on the spirit the saints showed: no gloating, no long memory, no second class membership for the healed. The Nicene fathers received the Novatian clergy in their orders. The Seventh Council embraced the repentant iconoclast bishops. The Church after Florence received back the very signers of the decree, upon their confession. The confessor who has suffered for the truth and then makes the returning brother eat dust has undone at the door of the Church what he defended at her wall. The Father of the parable runs to meet the returning son, and puts the ring on his hand; and the elder brother who sulks at the music has misread the whole household.

THE CROSS AND THE HEART

And for the one returning, and for the one who never left but has watched and wept, the same inner path is prescribed; for confession without repentance is a shell.

The cost of confession is real, and this book has never hidden it: livings lost, friendships strained, the long loneliness of the interval, the slander of being called a divider by the dividers. To take up the truth is to take up a cross, and the saints who walled off carried it to prisons and to fires.

And the ledger of the Beatitudes stands open over every such cross: Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you... Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven.

But the cross is carried, not brandished. The inner discipline of the confessor is prayer that does not slacken; repentance that begins each morning with his own sins, and not his bishop's; forgiveness held ready in advance for every persecutor; and the guarding of the heart against the subtle pleasures of the fight, the relish of being right, the appetite for news of scandals, the secret disappointment when a rumoured enemy proves innocent. Whoever finds these pleasures growing in him is losing the war while winning the arguments.

The old counsel stands: keep the confession with the mind of the canon and the heart of Silouan, weeping and praying for the whole world, including, and especially, for the men whose names you can no longer say at the altar. For the day you stop praying for them, your wall has changed owners.