UnOrthodox

I hadn't seen my spiritual director for months. It had taken ages to arrange an appointment, and then something else came up in the busy life of a retired clergyman making the date we'd sorted impossible, and what with Easter and holidays it was weeks before I even managed to speak to S.D., let alone get to see him. I began to reflect that it might simply be unrealistic to expect him to find the time to see me at all regularly and thought I might try and find an alternative.

It occurred to me that one of the brothers at St Cyprian's Orthodox monastery not too far away from here might take me on, although the only contact I'd had with them was buying some of their incense. An Orthodox religious might be a bit sterner with me, I thought, and we certainly wouldn't end up talking about folded chasubles and Anglo-Catholic arcana as I and S.D.'s sessions all too often degenerated towards. Encounters would tap into the riches of the Orthodox spiritual tradition, its intensity, its transcendence and confidence in the Spirit. It wouldn't be as cosy.

So I looked up the monastery's blog, and discovered that most of those riches of the Orthodox tradition are there devoted to slagging off Orthodox jurisdictions different to the one St Cyprian's is part of. It turns out that, Russian though the monastery is in tradition and connection, it is nevertheless part of the Old Calendrist observance that separated from the Autocephalous Church of Greece in 1924 when that Church adopted a version of the Gregorian Calendar. The vituperative language gives a strong impression that one group of Orthodox barely regards the others as Christians, although when I bought my box of Lachernae Rose from St Cyprian's the brother who sent it me happily addressed me as 'Father', which I suppose reflects the old truth that one is tempted hardest to be rude to those closest to one.

All Christian denominations have their flaws and temptations, and that of Orthodoxy is tribalism. Orthodox Christians regularly complain themselves about the way their Churches reflect national sentiments and boundaries in problematic ways. I recently and accidentally came across the work of the Russian artist Mikhail Nesterov and his moving religious art depicting the heart of Russian Orthodoxy. There is this picture from 1916, for instance, that terrible phase leading up to the Revolution, entitled The Soul of the Russian People:

That the Russian people should be led in their devotions by a pious child is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Orthodoxy and not something which you would find depicted in much other Christian art. But the first use of this painting I came across while Googling was on a disturbingly violent Russian nationalist website full of anti-Ukrainian vitriol; an image of peaceful piety put to the service of something entirely different. 

It was a relief that, in the end, I managed to book in an appointment with S.D., and I can therefore carry on admiring (aspects of) Orthodoxy from a safe distance.