Why I need orthodoxy

cheese and rice!

Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said,
Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words and knowledge?
Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the cornerstone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?
When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddling band for it,
and brake up for my decreed place, and set bars and doors,
and said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed?

Job 38:1-11, KJV

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The other day I was walking home with three giant books in my arms. A nice neighbor of mine pulled up to the curb and shouted, “Need a ride?”

I said no, since I was just two blocks from home.

“Are those encyclopedias?” she asked.

“Uh,” I said, “they’re commentaries. Um, you know, for the Bible?”

She smiled blankly and just kind of shook her head.

I said, “Well, thanks, have a good day.” And I did my best to walk cooly and casually as my neighbor drove away, even as my face was burning. I should have just said they were encyclopedias.

My church is dissolving its library right now. It’s part of a series of big changes. Over the past few years our congregation has undergone a once-in-a-generation series of tragic events. We are entering a new chapter this fall. And part of that chapter includes the dissolution of the library. Making room for the new, I guess. So now I own three volumes of the Interpreter’s Bible, which I carried across town and scared my neighbor with.

I go to a mainline Protestant church. That’s not a super meaningful term, “mainline”. I just use it here to mean “non-evangelical” and “non-charismatic” and “non-fundamentalist”—think Episcopalian and United Church of Christ. The term inevitably takes on a certain “not like those churches” connotation, which I both endorse and disavow—it’s complicated. And of course, “Protestant” means that we are descended from the arm of the church that split off from Roman Catholicism back in the 16th century, after all that stuff went down with Martin Luther. In denominations like mine, we don’t speak in tongues, we don’t testify. We don’t have a praise band or a screen. We dress semi-formally. We sit quietly in the pews during the organ prelude and the sermon, we only stand up when the pastor asks us to. We sing hymns from a physical hymnal. We don’t think the wine (grape juice) literally turns into Jesus’ blood, but if you ask any random congregant, they might not be able to tell you exactly what the grape juice does do. Some denominations like mine say the Apostle’s Creed, but my particular denomination doesn’t make use of any creeds, though we do say the Lord’s Prayer (“debts”, not “trespasses”). We are Affirming (read “ok with gay people”). We have optional pronoun stickers for our name tags. We are governed by committees, not by the pastor or by patriarchy, and we don’t have a diocese or anything comparable. There are a lot of white people, but we said Black Lives Matter back when that was the issue of the day. We don’t genuflect, we don’t kneel. Nothing ecstatic or pentecostal has happened in our sanctuary since I’ve been there. But worship does happen—real worship, not entertainment. And I think that’s nice.

I love our church. I love the dutiful ladies who work in the nursery and keep the books and organize picnics and make the requisitely horrible coffee every Sunday. I love our hymnals, once discarded by our Methodist neighbors, now ours for keeps. I love the people that have sung in the small but mighty choir for longer than I’ve been alive. I love the brand new plastic chairs in the social hall that don’t match the very old tables. I love the men who still wear the same suit today that they have been wearing since 1977. I love the little kids who can’t keep quiet during the intercessory prayer, the babies that scream during the anthem. I love the people who drive me crazy with their asinine comments during book group. I love the people who are of the fourth generation of their family to attend and care for our church. I love the organ with its many quirks and the piano that won’t stay in tune. I love that our church welcomes homeless people to sleep on our grounds every night (this should be common, but it isn’t) as long as waste goes where it belongs. I love our rose window and our jumble-y stone façade.

In my real life I keep the fact of my religiosity to myself, mostly, hence my embarrassment with my neighbor. Close friends know that I go to church every week, my coworkers know that I have to leave work by 9 am every Sunday, but that’s about it. Based on the sheer amount that I say the word “fuck”, and also most other external things about me, I think secular people would be surprised to find out that I have ever been inside a church. I live in an area where there is a very high density of rich, highly educated, highly secular people. There are a lot of churches and a few synagogues here, but other than my church friends, I don’t know that many people who regularly go to them: most good atheists I know kind of look askance at you if they find out you unironically believe in God, and many have some contempt-laced suspicion of Christianity in particular. I know a lot of young sexy New Age types who found out about nondualism last week and so would be thrilled to tell you about the oneness of Creation, but most of them straightforwardly think that Christianity is the religion for spiritually immature or straight up stupid people, that the bible is too brittle, that the church is a tool of the oppressor. And many such hippies have some, uh, questionable beliefs about the Abrahamic faiths (especially Judaism) based on social media disinformation generated by the current situation in the Levant. And then there are the exvangelicals and ex-catholics with genuine and profound religious trauma—I find myself very self-conscious in their presence, because the admissions that I not only experience God but also that I like religion and think it’s cool would feel almost like a collusion with the the thing that harmed them.

So I just really don’t want to get into it a lot of the time, you know?

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I stopped in for a little while
and warmed up to the thought
I wandered off a little while
Expecting to be caught

Cass McCombs, Brighter!

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When I lived in Texas seven years ago, I was in a bind. The practicing Christians in RGR went to some kind of megachurch with a screen and a rock band, which was not my style. So I decided to visit Judaism: I went with some friends to shul. Most of those friends grew up reform, one grew up conservative. I was the only goy. We tried out a reform synagogue nearby, we didn’t like it. We wound up at a Chabad house instead. Our first time there, we showed up weirdly early because we had misunderstood the website. The rabbi greeted us paternally. One girl tried to shake his hand. He jumped back and explained why that wouldn’t fly: negiah.

“I don’t touch things that aren’t mine,” he elaborated.

The rabbi helpfully explained that since this was an orthodox shul, the service might be a little different from what we were used to.

“This is the real Judaism,” he said. “It’s not watered down. We hope you feel comfortable here.”

We stood in the social area trying not to violate halakhah while we waited for other congregants to show up.

We sat on the left side of the shul. A wooden screen obscured us from the view of the men, who sat on the right side. There were books for us to follow along with that were all in Hebrew. I recognized five letters: the four that are on dreidels, and aleph. An Israeli woman in front of me whispered the word “shema” a lot. The rabbi and the other men near the front of the room all rocked back and forth. My friend who grew up conservative helped me understand what was going on. We were invited to stay for the meal after the service, and we did.

We came back every week. I eventually learned how to sound out Hebrew.

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In fact, the believer not only need not say that he believes in the existence of God, but he did not even believe in it; precisely because in his eyes there can be no doubt about it: the existence of God is not believed in, but perceived.

—Jean Pouillon, Remarks on the verb “to believe”, 1982

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I grew up going to church. This was a WASP church, kind of like the one I go to now, only it had a lot more money and took itself a lot more seriously. I always say it was “High Church inflected”, meaning it was very fancy, and liturgical when it felt like it: the choir and pastors and acolytes processed and recessed every Sunday (except during Lent), we observed the liturgical calendar by changing the sanctuary vestments each season, we sang the Kyrie and said the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving—all this while only celebrating Communion once per month. Some of the pastors wore clerical collars, some didn’t, but they were all highly academically accredited. Nobody fasted for Lent. There was a lot of Vaughan Williams in the hymnody, Howells and Fauré anthems, a lot of Buxtehude organ preludes, a full professional brass ensemble was often hired on Easter.

My family were very active members in my very early years, my parents eventually stopped going. But I kept going, all through my teenage years and beyond. I didn’t like church as a kid, didn’t think I believed in god. I didn’t have an ecstatic conversion experience or anything. But what I did have was a need for somewhere to go and someone to care about me. I also had a desperate need to be contained, guided, and told what to do by someone who gave a shit what happened to me. I was able to get the former things from loved ones in church choir. I was able to get the latter things from God through Scripture. I came to understand that I didn’t need to believe in God; I already experienced Him everywhere.

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So here’s what I used to think:

I was going to finish my fancy degree with honors at my fancy high-churchy music school. I was going to master volume upon volume of Kuhnau and Bach on the organ, I was going to become a sensitive, artful choral conductor. Then I was going to go to a seminary for a denomination that was High Church enough to be very stately and majestic but low church enough to ordain women, and I was going to get an MDiv or DMin, so that I would be legit. Then, with my legitimacy, I was going to get a job as a choir director at a large church of the same denomination and demand to be paid what I was worth¹, because I was ordained and therefore worth paying.

This was a pipe dream. I was completely dysfunctional during my entire youth, and I didn’t become functional in music school; I got hospitalized several times and then dropped out. My fantastic desire to become worth paying in the eyes of the church was completely grandiose. Also, my imagined denomination that is both High Church and socially liberal enough to ordain women? That denomination doesn’t exist, at least not the way I expected and wanted. Unfortunately and not by necessity, theological conservatism and social conservatism tend to go hand.

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Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

The Apostle Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, 4:8, KJV

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It’s not like I don’t understand why people are squicked out by Christianity. Christianity has been used to oppress and subjugate many people since not long after its inception. It’s still used to oppress and subjugate people, globally and locally. The crusades, colonization in the Americas and the global south, the social ecosystem of American fundamentalism that keep women subservient and keeps men straightjacketed and makes you disown your gay kids, the epidemic of child sexual abuse by clergy… yeah, I know about that stuff. A big reason I’m not interested in talking about Christianity with many people is that I feel like secular people implicitly want individual Christians to either disavow the horrors perpetrated by Christian institutions or own those horrors as our own. I’d like to paraphrase my friend Phil and say that everything is a tool of the oppressor when it is in the hands of the oppressor. Christianity is not uniquely evil. It’s not uniquely good. It’s a medium-old, very widely practiced religion, and as such, it’s got a lot going on with it. I am not The Church. It would actually be insanely arrogant of me to apologize to people on behalf of The Church for x atrocity committed by some distant arm of The Church. It would be just as arrogant to dramatically fall on my sword over x atrocity. It would be most arrogant of all for me to say, “well yes, some Christians do things like that, but not us.” It’s not my job to be the arbiter of what Christianity should be like², who can practice it, the ways it can be used, or what constitutes misuse, and it’s not your job either. The one in charge of that it not a person at all.

I’m not saying Christians shouldn’t grapple with the fucked up history and present of the church. We absolutely should. But what I am saying is that what my job is as a practicing Christian to…practice Christianity. That means that the bulk of my religious attention should be focused on God, on glorifying Him and doing His will according to the wisdom of the Scriptures and according to the institutional knowledge of my tradition. If I am focusing my attention on those things in a serious and disciplined way, then knowledge of moral rectitude is impossible to escape. Moral action may or may not follow, but I can have better tools to discern what moral action can and cannot look like, and the rest is between me and God. I think keeping my attention there can actually help me keep my nose out of where it doesn’t belong. If I am occupied studying and mulling over the Song of Songs or the words of the Prophets, if I am busy trying to learn Aramaic, if I am doing hours of devotional practice, I will never have the bandwith to do the crusades, and I’ll also never develop the need or desire to do the crusades.

It’s my observation that socially progressive churches, like the one I grew up in and the one I go to now, often seem to be catering to the side-eye of our secular milieu. We are so sorry for the harm We have caused, they seem to be saying. We are so bad, but we swear We can do better. We swear we aren’t like those bad guy Christians. We are Listening and Learning, we swear. See, we ordain gays! We say “siblings in Christ”! We have a Land Acknowledgement! We know that Black Lives Matter! We are just so humble. We mean, we are striving toward humility so hard. We have to decenter and unlearn so much. As if the secular milieu can absolve us. Everyone knows about Catholic Guilt, but no one seems to be talking about Progressive Mainline Guilt! To my mind, the two are equally areligious, psychically harmful, and narcissistic: guilt is necessarily self-absorbed. At least Catholic guilt is nominally about God, though! Progressive Mainline Guilt is for and by the zeitgeist, not the Heiliger Geist.

So yeah, I understand why people are squicked out by Christianity. I also am not convinced that doing things like getting rid of the word “Kingdom” in worship will un-squick it for people. And if it would, I don’t think making worship more sensitive to secular sensibilities should be a primary or even secondary goal of the church. It’s not what I want or need from church, even though it might feel comfy cozy or whatever. Worship should feel a little weird and uncomfortable. I don’t want worship to feel like the rest of my life. I want to clear away worldly concerns for one fucking hour of the week. I want to turn my attention to God, not to the social mandates of the day, not to my own sensitivities, my own ego.

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The worship of will is the negation of will ... If Mr Bernard Shaw comes up to me and says, 'Will something', that is tantamount to saying, 'I do not mind what you will', and that is tantamount to saying, 'I have no will in the matter.' You cannot admire will in general, because the essence of will is that it is particular.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

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One week at that Texas shul during the meal after the service, someone accidentally hit the light switch and the room was plunged into half-darkness. Being an orthodox shul, the congregants kept a strict shabbat. That means no lighting fires, which in modern day means no using electricity. So no one could turn the light switch.

After about 10 minutes of half-light, my friend looked at me sidelong. “You’re not Jewish, so you could technically turn it back on,” she said. “But no one can ask you to. And you don’t have to.”

I felt panic rise in my chest. This wasn’t my religion. I didn’t know how to hear what I was being told. I understood that I was being asked to turn the light on. I also knew that the light was not supposed to be turned on by an observant Jew, even by proxy. Would I be helping my friend sin if I turned on the light at her shrouded request? Even as a gentile, I was in the house of the G-d of the Pentateuch, the Torah. Would my friend and I be struck with lightening then and there? Would a plague beset Texas? The G-d of the Torah does stuff like that, to anyone and everyone. If I did something wrong, surely G-d would understand that I didn’t understand, right? Not so surely.

So I just sat there sweating lightly until it was time to leave. We ate in half darkness that day.

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I stopped in for a little while
And learned a host of sins
I wandered off a little while
’cause you can’t never win

All eyes move to thee
All eyes aren’t born free
All eyes want to see
Incinerate me, angel!

Cass McCombs, Brighter!

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If you know anything about Orthodox Christianity, then you know based on reading this essay that I am far from Orthodox. In fact, probably a lot of readers are finding me really heretical right now.

The word “orthodox” is from the Greek ὀρθοδοξία, which means “right opinion”. Orthodox Christians adhere closely to creeds; in fact, another name for what most people mean when they say “Orthodox Christianity” is “Nicene Christianity”, after the creed³ , the Nicene Creed, that those traditions adhere to and say during worship. I mentioned earlier that churches in my denomination don’t say any creeds at all. My denomination believes in the competency of laity to understand Scripture and have a personal relationship with it, and to be guided by that relationship. That’s a very serious responsibility, if a person chooses to really step into it. It means that you don’t just get to make things up. It also means that you can’t just ask a priest what The Teachings on a given subject are and then simply do what he says. You have to confess your faith the way your faith really is. The stakes are high.

So yeah, me and my fellow congregants in my tradition are not Orthodox. But me, I flirt with Orthodoxy sometimes. I fantasize about it. I fear it. I miss it.

Years ago, when I was on the hunt for churches in my town, I made a friend who was Orthodox-curious, like me. The entire basis of our friendship became going to church and drinking beer afterward. We went to services at the Greek Orthodox church, the Russian Orthodox church, evening prayer at the traditional Episcopal church. He was a Roman Catholic convert. He taught me all about the Great Schism and why he was allowed to take communion at the Greek church but I was not. He told me about how I could become a nun if I wanted to. I was completely starry-eyed about the High Church. I loved wearing a veil, standing for hours in a small perfumed, candlelit room, crossing myself with my whole body. I loved the way the unfamiliar mystic tongues of Church Slavonic and Koine Greek washed over me. I loved the ancient echoes in the plainchant at compline. I loved the warm hugs from the Russian ladies, hugs that took us from strangers to sisters in Christ in an instant. It was easy to feel God the Father looking down into those rooms.

The pull was hard to resist. In all ways but one, that is: I knew that if I were going to take that path, I would have to marry a man. So I dragged my feet and dragged my feet. There was no way that was my destiny, right? There had to be another way to devote my life to God that didn’t involve the convent (the traditional path of self-aware gay people) or being a meek, obedient wife to my strong husband (the traditional path of self-hating gay people).

One Ash Wednesday there was a terrible ice storm. All of the churches at which I’d planned to go to services decided to close their doors due to weather. There was one church, one little Mainline Protestant church with a jumble-y stone façade and a beautiful rose window and two kindly co-pastors, where a dear old friend of mine happened to be the choir director, that stayed open. At 7 pm I skidded downtown to see what was up. Even though I thought I was done with Protestantism, I needed those ashes on my forehead, if nothing else. And it would be good to see my friend.

I don’t remember much about the order of worship. But I remember the divine presence in that room. I remember the reverence and solace. So I went back and I haven’t stopped going back for almost five years. I was done with Protestantism, but Protestantism wasn’t done with me. It’ll never be done with me. It’s my tradition, my lineage, whether I like it or not (and I do both of those things).

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So, here, readers, is why I need Orthodoxy.

I need to measure the distance between myself and the descendants of Abraham who have kept the Right Opinion for generation upon generation. I need to know where I am the concentric circles emanating from The Center.

I don’t want to be affirmed. I don’t want to be told I’m good enough just as I am—I don’t know much, but I know that’s not what imago Dei, בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים, means. I want to be guided on the right path. I don’t want to be permitted. I want to break the fucking law. I want to be heretical, I want to blaspheme. I want to throw the entire weight of my body against the strictures of my tradition and have them hold firm. When I am all flailing arms and legs, I want to be held down by hands that love me. I want to be boxed in so I can spill out. I want to know that I am not the most important thing in the universe. I want to know that I am nothing in the universe, and that despite that, I am worth saving. I want to know how small I am and how large He is. I want to know that I am dust. I want to be obliterated.

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Then Job answered the Lord, and said,
I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee.
Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me.
I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

Job 42:1-6, KJV

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I made a Spotify playlist of songs I listened to while thinking about this essay. It could alternatively be called “songs that need orthodoxy”. I recommend listening in the given order.

1. Underpayment of church musicians has been a pervasive problem even since before church membership started declining, long before covid existed.

2. I do fall into this trap sometimes, though, like in the first section of this very essay, and in very many private conversations. I do literally think that there are some stripes of Christianity that are more biblical than others, and there are some that creep me out for a variety of reasons. But I need to remind myself that it’s actually super not up to me to decide whether or not a given form of worship pleases God.

3. The creed is named after having been written at the First Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., which was where a bunch of bishops got together and said, “what are we really doing here? what do we believe?” It got so ugly and heated that Bishop Nicholas of Myra punched a guy and got sent to jail. But that’s too inside baseball for this essay.