Letting go of divine abstraction and embracing the personhood of the Holy

Three ways my life has changed since becoming an Orthodox Christian - Part One

Hi friends! This is the first in a three-part series. I’m not sure when parts 2 & 3 will drop, but I wanted to give you heads up that this is just a beginning.

Also, I don’t use an editor, AI or human, to review my posts, so you may bump into a typo here and there. I do my best to catch them all, but I may have missed something. Thank you for your grace. Enjoy!

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Photo by Alessandro Guarino on Unsplash

Our lives transform from the outside in, and from the inside out.

This isn’t a novel idea, but go with me.

Our inner lives are formed by what we do with our bodies and our time. What we eat, where we go, how we move—they all shape our inner reality, the peace we do or do not feel, the energy we do or do not have, and the love we do or do not carry for others, as a few examples. Our outer lives shape our inner worlds.

And vice versa. In the gospel written by St. Luke, we have a record of Jesus saying, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”

I understand this to mean, at least in part, that whatever is within us overflows into how we live, the words we speak, and into the care we do or do not give to those around us.

Our inner lives and outer worlds are inextricably linked, and as we change one, we certainly influence the other.

I’m coming upon the anniversary of my being received into the Orthodox Church, and it has me thinking a lot about this inner-outer life dynamic. To become Orthodox is a whole life reorientation, from the outside-in and from the inside-out. Every aspect of what it means to be a person is baptized into the death of Christ, and resurrected into His life, that is, the liturgical, sacramental, and ascetic life of the Church. The liturgical life features our services of collective prayer, veneration, and worship. The sacramental life features those mysterious ways in which God’s presence is made real in our lives and in the world. The ascetic life speaks to how we limit and restrain ourselves, often bodily, in order to make room for the uncreated energies of God to meet and transform us.

With this anniversary around the corner, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect and share with you three ways my life has changed since becoming Orthodox. This list is far from exhaustive, but they all point to ways the inner life and outer life of faith dance together to bring healing to the body and soul.

Change #1 - On God

“God” is no longer an abstraction. God is a person: Christ.

This is by far the biggest transformation I’ve seen in my life and worldview. Following my deconstruction of evangelical Christianity, and my slow fade into New Age spirituality, “God” stopped being specific and became the very vague, obscure notion of “the divine.” When I would say, “God,” I was referring to an ethereal force, or energy, not to anyone in particular. This meant that I was praying to and interacting with a spiritual entity that I couldn’t possibly know or understand. And conveniently, it also meant that this vague spiritual entity, lacking in defined personhood, had no expectations of me. I didn’t have to actually change anything about my life in relationship with “the divine,” because “the divine” was an abstract force. It was an idea, an essence, that made me feel good (on the surface) and was content to let me devolve into a soul-corroding belief in my own self-deification. That is to say, I became my own god, and “the divine,” being a non-specific, abstract, vague force offered no challenge to my own little kingdom.

The thing that sucks about this is that I’m not God. I’m also not “a god.” I am person. A creature. A human being. And while I believe humans were created to become God-like in due time, it was never meant to happen apart from the One who created us.

I’ve been in a slowly moving Orthodox Bible study, unlearning much of what I once understood the the Bible to even be. Coming into a deeper understanding of what the Bible is and how it was understood by the earliest Christians has been transformative. I come from a sola scriptura background, where the Bible was treated like a god in its own right. Holding the text in that way never made much sense to me. In the Bible study I’m in now, we hold the text less like a strict set of rules dictating a worldview, and more like an unfolding story of a people group finding redemption through their continual encounters with the grace of God, culminating in the person of Christ.

One of the most striking stories I’ve been sitting with is from Genesis. This won’t be new to many of you, but its the story of Adam and Eve and their choice to pursue God-likeness apart from the One who Created them. I’m not an Orthodox scholar, so be gracious with me as I attempt to unpack this.

One of the ways we understand Adam and Eve as persons, in Orthodox tradition, is that being newly created, they had an immaturity about them. They were instructed to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil not because God was holding out on them, or tempting them, or testing them to make sure they’d choose him with their free will, but rather because he wanted them to wait until they were ready. He wanted them to grow in wisdom and understanding. He wanted them to have the knowledge when they were ready to hold it with depth, perception, and care. He created Adam and Eve, human beings, to become like him, and that process would take time.

Human beings are not static or fixed. It is our nature to evolve, grow, and change. The same was true of Adam and Eve. They needed to grow up first, and the time for them to have that specific fruit from that specific tree would come. Why else would it be in the garden?

When I began to understand this, it made so much sense. God set a boundary with his beloved creation just like any parent who has ever told a child “no” because their kid wasn’t yet old enough, mature enough, or discerning enough to steward that for which they’d asked. It’s good leadership. It’s love.

Adam and Eve’s shortcut, their grabbing for a power that God would have given them in due time, was tragic for a million reasons. Some would even say it was a traumatic event, one that we replay over and over again, even now, every time we decide to reach for our own power, security, or divinity apart from Christ. The tragedy here isn’t a moral failing, per se, but is rather the loss of our own understanding of our true personhood. When we set out to make a god of ourselves, or a god of other created things, we miss out on the richness, vibrancy, and depth for which we were designed. We also end up missing out on the healing and restoration our soul’s long for most.

All this possibility for connection, depth, healing, and even true justice, flows not from an abstract, nameless deity. It flows from God made flesh, dwelling among us, restoring our full personhood and teaching us how to live. We don’t have to fumble through life, leaning on a patchwork spiritual ambiguity in order to be okay. God has been so kind to give us countless, specific insights to who he actually is. We can know God. He has made himself know to us.

I’ve quoted Fr. Turbo Qualls a few times here and there, and I recently heard him say something else that I can’t get out of my head. He said, “People in America, in contemporary America, have already heard about Christ. They’ve already heard about Christianity, but what they haven’t experienced is the promises of Christianity.”

As a person who deconstructed and left behind so much of the evangelical Christianity I grew up with, this quote resonated with me as true. I left the evangelical church because I was longing for a depth and transformation, for both myself and the world, that I just wasn’t able to apprehend in those contexts. I then practiced new age spirituality for a while because magic, though dangerous, extractive, and toxic for the human soul, is real spirituality. But in time, I learned that it was a counterfeit version of the very good, also real, deeper spirituality that God intended for me and for all of us. This good, real, and deeply healing spirituality are the true promises of Christianity. I’m only beginning to enter into the river of this ancient faith and way of life.

If I were to give a TL;DR for this post, it would be this:

God is a person. The person is Christ. He loves us more than we can imagine.

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Thank you for reading. This is the end of part one of this series. Part two will get to you when life affords me the space to write it. It will be all about how political identity is no longer central to my worldview. Fun stuff. See you then.