Why I am an Orthodox Christian… and Why I’m Not
This essay is part of a series where I look at various faiths and explore where they have inspired me and where I have issues. Although I am a Christian, I believe that God wants us to explore and learn from other traditions as part of our spiritual journey. This is my journey, no one else’s, and the articles merely record how I see things. They are not intended to offend or convert, nor do I expect you to agree with me. I do however, appreciate feedback, friendship and further learning.
Other essays in the series:
Why I Am A Sikh… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Sufi… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Catholic… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Pagan… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Hindu… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Buddhist… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am A Jew… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am an Atheist… and Why I’m Not
Why I Am an Anglican… and Why I’m Not
The Lord is in This Place
I enter a church, crossing myself three times as I do so. The interior is dark, the chandelier hanging from the high ceiling doing little to compensate for the lack of natural light. But what those meagre bulbs do illuminate is a sea of images. The walls are frescoed with scenes from the Bible and the lives of the saints, but more prominent are the icons, stylistically unique representations of Christ, His Mother, angels, and saints, peering out from golden frames, often covered with gold or silver, only the faces and hands visible. Faces and hands where every gesture, every detail has a deeper meaning.
By the entrance is the icon to the saint that the church is dedicated to, whilst along the screen that shields the altar from the people are the two archangels, two of the apostles, Mary the Mother of God, and Christ Himself.
I, however, am drawn to one set apart on a stand. It depicts Mary cradling the infant Christ. She presses her face against that of her child, a beautiful symbolic expression of the greatest of loves. And in her eyes, she has a look of sadness yet also joy, despair yet also hope. I lean down and kiss the glass that encases her and then take the candle that I purchased before entering, light it, hold it aloft and then make a prayer, imploring her to protect or care for a loved one, to right a wrong, to commend that person to God, to intercede.
Then I turn to the icon of Christ, the male aspect of the Divine, His face stern yet also loving, kind yet also commanding. And I ask for Him to use me as he sees fit, to provide me with a holy purpose, to guide me.
And after I have made those prayers, I venerate the saints. The famous, omnipresent ones like Nicholas, George, Constantine, and Elena, but also the local divines, hermits who once lived in a nearby cave, long-dead bishops, martyrs cruelly put to death centuries past. All are here, the entire extended family of God.
And I stand there in the dark and I feel the power of God whilst the solitary priest intones the liturgy, unaware and uncaring of whether there is a congregation or not. After all, it does not matter. The importance is to recite, for he knows that God is listening even if no one else is.
My Orthodox Journey
As an Anglican, my Orthodox journey has been a slow one. Even though I once lived on the Greek island of Corfu, its religion did not leave a lasting impression on me.
Yes, I visited the monasteries and found them beautiful; I even checked out the shrine of St. Spyridon in the island’s cathedral, but that was that. I knew that they were Orthodox, that they celebrated Easter on a different day to us and that they all circled the church three times during the service. I attended that service at the small church of the village that had now become a holiday resort. It was the only time that everybody, Greeks, and ex-pats alike, got together. For a couple of hours we were one and the hedonism and modernity was gone. But beyond that, Orthodoxy left no impression.
I was more aware Orthodoxy, its differences and its similarities, by the time I lived in my second majority Orthodox country, Bulgaria. I was more aware because I’d just travelled through Russia on the way to get there. I was more aware because I was more aware of religions in general (and more religious in my lifestyle) and I was more aware because, well, I guess I was more aware of life in general.
I was starting to become aware of some of the divergences between the Western and Eastern Churches. I realised that in Orthodox churches it did not matter how many were in the congregation. Catholic and Protestant churches are all about numbers; we judge success on how many turn up. It’s the same in our secular lives. Take my profession of education, for example. A class needs fifteen students to turn up to be deemed a success. But what if forty come and learn nothing, or just one attends and receives some life-changing learning? Orthodoxy gets that; I’m not sure that Western churches do.
Our culture is all about numbers. It has to be quantifiable because that is rational. Western culture and religion are rational. The reasons behind that are understandable, but, as I wrote before in my piece Michael Jackson, Pierluigi, John Bunyan and the Pilgrim, we need some irrationality in our religious lives. We need that space to be irrational, to explore those places that normality does not allow.
But we must be careful. Too much irrationality can be dangerous. It can lead to conspiracy theories, paranoia, going down dark rabbit holes that aren’t — and never will be — either healthy or holy.
If too much rationality is the Western disease, too little of it is the Orthodox malady. Or, as Victoria Clark puts it:
“The still unfolding tragedy of the continent is that by the 1054 Schism each side lost something it could not happily do without. One might say that East and West, the one tending too much towards reason and worldliness and the other too much towards spirit and otherworldliness, was sadly deformed for lack of the other. To put it very baldly and at the risk of over-simplifying the case for the sake of clarity, western Christendom can be said to have lost its heart, eastern Christendom its mind.”[1]
Or perhaps one could say that one tradition focusses too much on the world; the other too little.
Fr. Samuel
Perhaps my first real breakthrough with Orthodoxy came in 2006 with Fr. Samuel — the local Orthodox priest.
Fr. Samuel had once been a local Anglican priest but when they ordained women, he didn’t like it so he left. He originally thought about becoming a Catholic, but then went on a pilgrimage to Walsingham to think about it and, whilst there, by chance, popped into the Orthodox church there, met the Orthodox priest (who was another former Anglican) and challenged him to “make me Orthodox.” The priest refused, replying that he would not convert him, but instead Samuel needed to ask his local saint.
Samuel confessed that he had no clue as to who his local saint was, so the priest told him to find out and pray to him. The saint turned out to be Bertram, my own favourite saint, and it was Bertram who converted Fr. Samuel. To this day, he retains a strong allegiance to the saint who touched his life and leads annual pilgrimages to Bertram’s shrine, something that, notably, neither the Catholics nor the Anglicans manage to do.
Fr. Samuel explained Orthodoxy to me in a language that I, as an Englishman, could understand. He also introduced me to the concept of venerating saints, particularly local ones, and that has transformed my religious practice. Veneration of saints is something completely alien to my Anglican upbringing yet central to who I am today. I need a religion that is rooted in time and place.
Take away the local, human element and it becomes abstract and, ultimately, meaningless. That’s my problem with faiths like Salafism or Evangelical Christianity. They are globalised and generalised. The former expects you to become Arab, the latter American. I need a religion where I can be happy in my own clothes, with my own name, praying in my own language. God has always come to people in their own place and through their own culture. The Orthodox understand this, as too do the Sufis. And, interestingly, Sufism grew up in a region saturated by Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy made its Islam local.
Chisinau
My next significant Orthodox step came in 2012. I was on a trip from Kiev to Bucharest and staying in the Moldovan capital, Chisinau. Whilst there, I decided to visit a monastery recommended in the guidebook.
The Ciuflea Monastery was not particularly remarkable as a building, but my visit there was. I was going through a tough period at the time, and I recall going into the church and staring at an icon and it touched my soul. I’d seen countless icons before — I recall walking bored through an exhibition of them at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow — and them leaving little to no effect. They were but one-dimensional, cartoonish pictures of Jesus. But there, in that monastery, for the first time, I truly got them. I gazed into the eyes of Christ and felt something. I felt compassion, understanding, love, but something beyond all that, something beyond human understanding. I can’t explain it, even to this day, but somehow I felt as if I had glimpsed through a portal into another realm and my soul had been touched.
The Orthodox understand this. Icons are central to their worship. They don’t look at them, they “read” them. They are not pictures; they are windows to God. The very first icons of Christ and Mary are said to have been painted by St. Luke himself from life. If that assertion is to be accepted — and the historian in me gets uneasy at this point — then they are a direct visual link with the time that God became man and walked on the face of the earth. Icons, if you let them, can touch you in an incredible way and, ever since, they have been an important part of my worship life.
After that visit to Ciuflea, the entire trip was charged with holy energy.
I travelled onto Romania, visiting monasteries and churches that touched my soul. The highlight was a day trip to the town of Targu Neamt from where I took a taxi to the Agapia Monastery and then walked around 8km through the forest to the isolated monastery of Sihla where the hermit St. Teodora lived in a cave. Praying where she once slept, I felt a connection that was incredibly powerful.
Ever since then, I’ve been visiting Orthodox places of worship, both abroad and locally. I’ve sought out monasteries and churches in Cyprus, Serbia, and Bulgaria, meditated in their temples in the Holy Land, become an occasional visitor to Fr. Samuel’s Mass.
I prefer these sacred sites to both Anglican and Catholic churches — ot the great cathedrals, but the small, rustic churches.
Orthodox churches have a peasant simplicity about them which speaks to me. They are earthy, they are natural, they are a suitable home for God on earth where you can be yourself and worship your Creator comfortably.
So, have I become an Orthodox?
Erm… no.
I won’t say that I haven’t thought about it, but so far it has not happened, and I believe it is crucial to explain why, for the reasons for not making the leap are equally important as those that have made me consider it.
Firstly, politically, I am not a nationalist. Indeed, I detest nationalism. It divides people falsely and it poisons relations between neighbours. And nowhere is that clearer than in the Balkans and, I guess the majority of my Orthodox experience has been Balkan. In that region, as elsewhere, Orthodoxy has become a tool for nationalism, for national identity is bound up with faith identity but, unlike the more globalist Catholic church and Islamic communion where one size fits all and it is much the same wherever in the world you might be, Orthodoxy with its national patriarchates, falls into the trap of equating faith with nation.
That’s not to say that there haven’t been exceptions to this. In Sarajevo for example, there is a wonderful old Orthodox church where the priest became famous during the war for supporting all communities even whilst the shells from his Orthodox Serbian brothers rained down on the city. But his story is more the exception than the rule and this ethno-nationalistic streak presents a real barrier to me.
A religion with a sense of place and a local element to it is one thing. A religion that supports narrow nationalisms is something else entirely.[2]
There is another reason behind my decision not to convert though, and that is one of theology.
Orthodoxy is a religion that believes it is right — that it is the holder of the truth. The term “orthodoxy” itself implies that there is a correct path, and it is an exclusive religion in that the Orthodox believe that Christianity is the only route to God and that Orthodoxy is the only true Christianity.
And it is that exclusivity that presents the real barrier for me. Like the Catholic Church, the Orthodox are not always enthusiastic about interfaith work; like the Catholics, the Orthodox Church refuse communion to non-members and, as with Catholicism, if I were to convert, the Orthodox Church would not be approving of me attending services and being buried in an Anglican church. And that, in my opinion, is a path I cannot tread for I believe that God welcomes us all, whatever our denomination.
So, there we have it: I am not an exclusivist and so, in all honesty, I am not Orthodox. I have a great love for the faith, but, if I am to be entirely truthful, my love of Orthodoxy is primarily aesthetical. I love the aesthetics of it, the dark churches, the naively-painted icons, the flickering candles, the chanted liturgy, the rustic simplicity. Theologically though, I am less sure. I am with them on the icons, on the liturgy and on the saints, but in other areas, I have problems. And conversion should be primarily about the theology. What you believe, not the setting.
And so, I am not an Orthodox Christian and yet, in many respects I am.
I will still head to the mountain monasteries; I still light candles daily in front of icons in my home, and I still visit my local saint’s shrine to ask for his guidance in tough times. Whether I ever make the leap or not, one thing is without doubt: I am on a journey with Christ and Orthodoxy has been central to that.
Thanks to Scott White (Orthodox Gardener) and Elizabeth Arif-Fear with the conversations and suggestions when writing this piece.
Written 29/07/2023 Manchester Piccadilly to Stoke-on-Trent & Smallthorne, UK
Revised 09/08/2023, Stoke-on-Trent to Birmingham New Street, UK
Copyright © 2023, Matthew E. Pointon
[1] ‘Why Angels Fall’ by Victoria Clark,
[2] This might sound a little hypocritical considering that I am Anglican, another national church. However, Anglicanism has made great efforts in recent decades to distance itself from nationalism, and for that it deserves commending.