I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. (John 14:6)

The Church gives us not a system, but a key; not a plan of God’s City, but the means of entering it. Perhaps someone will lose his way because he has no plan. But all that he will see, he will see without a mediator, he will see it directly, it will be real for him; while he who has studied only the plan risks remaining outside and not really finding anything. (Fr. Georges Florovsky)


One of the best known Desert Fathers of fourth century Egypt, St. Sarapion the Sindonite, traveled once on a pilgrimage to Rome. Here he was told of a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in one small room, never going out. Skeptical about her way of lie – for he was himself a great wanderer – Sarapion called on her and asked: “Why are you sitting here?” To this she replied: “I am not sitting. I am on a journey.”
 

No substitute for direct, personal experience

There is only one means of discovering the true nature of Christianity. We must step out upon this path, commit ourselves to this way of life, and then we shall begin to see for ourselves. So long as we remain outside, we cannot properly understand. Certainly we need to be given directions before we start; we need to be told what signposts to look out for, and we need to have companions. Indeed, without guidance from others it is scarcely possible to begin the journey. But directions given by others can never convey to us what the way is actually like; they cannot be a substitute for direct, personal experience. Each is called to verify for himself what he has been taught, each is required to re-live the Tradition he has received. “The Creed,” said Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, “does not belong to you unless you have lived it.” No one can be an armchair traveler on this all-important journey. No one can be a Christian at second hand. God has children, but he has not grandchildren.

As a Christian of the Orthodox Church, I wish particularly to underline this need for living experience. To many in the twentieth century West, the Orthodox Church seems chiefly remarkable for its air of antiquity and conservatism; the message of the Orthodox to their Western brethren seems to be, “We are your past.” For the Orthodox themselves, however, loyalty to Tradition means not primarily the acceptance of formulae or customs from past generations, but rather the ever-new, personal and direct experience of the Holy Spirit in the present, here and now.

Describing a visit to a country church in Greece, John Betjeman stresses the element of antiquity, but he also stresses something more:

The domed interior swallows up the day.
Here, where to light a candle is to pray.
The candle flame shows up the almond eyes
Of local saints who view with no surprise
Their martyrdoms depicted upon the walls
On which the filtered daylight faintly falls.
The flame shows up the cracked paint –
Sea green blue
And red and gold with grained wood showing through –
Of much kissed ikons, dating from, perhaps,
The fourteenth century…
Thus vigorously does the old tree grow,
By persecution pruned, watered with blood,
Its living roots deep in pre-Christian mud.
It need not bureaucratical protection.
It is its own perpetual resurrection….

Betjeman draws attention here to much that Orthodox holds precious: the value of symbolic gestures such as the lighting of a candle; the role of ikons on conveying a sense of the local church as “heaven on earth”; the prominence of martyrdom in the Orthodox experience – under the Turks since 453, under the Communists since 1917. Orthodoxy in the modern world is indeed an “old tree.” But besides age there is also a vitality, a “perpetual resurrection”; and it is this that matters, and not mere antiquity. Christ did not say, “I am custom”; He said, “I am the Life.”

From the Prologue to “The Orthodox Way”, SVS Press, 1978.