Ten Years

As some of you may have noticed, my previous post was my first in over seven years. I'm not sure who was more surprised: the sixty people who saw it, or me that there were sixty of them!

This extended hiatus was not just due to laziness or neglect (though there has been plenty of that, too). It was a reflection of my growing awareness that my adopted Orthodox faith is not just (or even primarily) a matter of intellect and ratio that can be expressed in words, especially disembodied blog posts. I'm sure I expressed this truth many times in my old posts during and after my conversion, but as long as I kept writing and posting like I had been, I had to question whether I was really, consistently living it. Consistency, harmony both within my faith and between faith and life, was one of the main things I was seeking in my conversion, after all.

If the life in Christ is a ladder, as St. John Climacus (whom we just commemorated a week ago on the fourth Sunday of Great Lent) depicted it, words and blog posts alone will only get you to its foot. Actually climbing it takes practice, discipline, prayer, obedience, watchfulness, and so much more (including the persistence to get up and back onto it as many times as you fall, which will be a lot). The older I get, the more I realize how insignificant, how insufficient merely reasoning about things is to the Christian life. But this only adds to my joy, because it means I am seeing more and more just how much more there is to the faith I grew up in than I once imagined.

In Orthodox spirituality there is a concept called phronema, a Greek word that originally meant something like "mind", "understanding", or "thinking", but like many other Orthodox terms has taken on a wealth of meaning that is difficult to encompass in a precise definition. Its full meaning isn't just intellectual, but involves values and an entire way of life, a way of life we don't choose or invent for ourselves but receive through our participation in Holy Tradition, the deposit of faith given by the apostles and nurtured by the Church through the age. The Orthodox phronema is a mindset that sinks down "into your bones", and acquiring it is not simply a matter of learning facts, but of discipline, of practice, of formation, of organic growth, of habit-building. It takes time and dedication, and after my conversion I began to sense that continuing to approach my faith in the intellectual, often polemical way I had been on this blog, among other places, was hindering me. This is why I stopped posting for so long.

You may ask: Why, then, are you back? Have you finished acquiring the Orthodox phronema? Of course not, though perhaps my phronema has at least caught up with my thoughts. Having come to understand just what all being a 'theologian' in the Orthodox sense of the word entails, I understand now that the kind of 'theologizing' I used to do so blithely on this blog needs to be done in proportion to one's growth in faith, in prayer, in the virtues, in Christ, to avoid being a mere intellectual exercise. As St Paul wrote, "though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing." (1 Cor 13:2)

Today, St Mary of Egypt Sunday, marks the tenth anniversary of my chrismation (in church years), my reception into the Orthodox Church. I've been Orthodox for longer than I was evangelical and it feels even more like home than it did at first. As I've begun acquiring something of the Orthodox phronema, the parable of the talents (or, in Luke, the minas) has been weighing on my mind. I don't want to misuse my gifts, but I also don't want to sit idle on them. When does it become more perilous to continue keeping silence than to speak?

For much has changed in the world in the past ten years, at a seemingly ever-increasing pace. Technological 'innovation', or at least proliferation, aims to 'disrupt' every part of our lives and mediate more and more aspects of our lives through the web, through screens, through algorithms. The concentration of ever-increasing amounts of wealth into the hands of ever fewer continues, a self-reinforcing cycle aided by innovations in speculation like cryptocurrency, the short-lived fad of the 'Metaverse', and the increasing popularity of betting on everything from sporting events to deadly airstrikes. A global pandemic forced us into isolation, strained the fabric of society, and brought out a wave of science and public health denialism in response. More recently, generative AI has invaded everything from children's toys to refrigerators to news, insatiably consuming electricity, water, silicon, and money while further undermining our shared sense of reality, even as some of its proponents express worry that it might maybe possibly sort of be an existential threat to humanity (but that it's very important to keep feeding it to avoid being beaten to whatever future it's leading to). And the rising tide of secularization from the ashes of Christendom, once seemingly unstoppable, has met fierce opposition from a toxic white 'Christian' nationalism with a thoroughly anti-Christian ethos, leaving us caught in the crossfire of an escalating culture war with new frontlines in empirical reality and once-uncontroversial virtues like empathy and mercy.

How do we as Orthodox Christians in the world live in times such as these? How do we resist the gravity of modernity and remain centered in the faith, in the gospel, in Christ? Saints and spiritual fathers both ancient and modern have much more wisdom than I do, but the gap between the often older, often monastic context they are writing from and our rapidly-evolving situation as moderns creates room for us to fool ourselves into believing that we are living faithfully even as the counterformative forces of modernity work on us in ways we're unaware of. The words the Lord spoke to His disciples are certainly applicable to those of us in the world: "I am sending you out like sheep surrounded by wolves, so be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves." (Matthew 10:16) We must be watchful and discerning, as sojourners in a foreign country. (cf. Hebrews 11:13, 1 Peter 2:11) This is a good and (in my view) necessary application of the intellect for those who live in the world.

These are the questions and issues that I have spent a lot of time thinking about recently. Like when I first started this blog, my brain seems to be overflowing, and I hope that what comes out might be relevant and helpful to more than just me. Like the period from 2011 to 2014 that began my trajectory to Orthodoxy, there is a sense of tension that drives me onward--only this time it isn't a tension within my with, but between faith and life, or faith and world. I've been doing a lot of reading lately surrounding these subjects, particularly technological ones that as a (now senior) software engineer I'm at least a little more qualified than the average person to speak to. I hope to share the fruits of this reading and thinking here, as well as a separate project on church history I'm doing for my church. Please stay tuned, and thank you for reading!