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Orthodoxy & The Power Of Words

A couple of you have sent me this interesting interview with the poet Scott Cairns, who is a convert to Orthodox Christianity. Excerpts: I was born into a fairly fundamentalist Baptist group, very conservative, and I guess was oblivious to the alternatives. Then when I went away to college, I started reading a little more […]

A couple of you have sent me this interesting interview with the poet Scott Cairns, who is a convert to Orthodox Christianity. Excerpts:

I was born into a fairly fundamentalist Baptist group, very conservative, and I guess was oblivious to the alternatives.

Then when I went away to college, I started reading a little more and meeting other people and my world grew a little, and I found that sort of cranky faith untenable and found a little more generous version of it among the Presbyterians.

In time, I became more interested in sacramental theology and a sense of the world as being worthy of our attention and of our care. This was concurrent with my having discovered rabbinic genres of text — in particular, midrashim.

I was awakened to a different attitude toward words; the words themselves became stuff, and not just names for stuff.

Q: That would be appealing to someone who is a poet.

Right. And so there was a time period, a brief period, when I was actually visiting with my rabbi to study Judaism as if I might actually convert. It seemed to me that this understanding of words was true — a much truer understanding of how words worked, what words are, than the sort of referential activity that I had just assumed that words were limited to doing.

But then about that time I came upon Syriac Christianity, which is also Semitic in its understanding of words. So here we have a Christian community, Orthodox community since the earliest centuries of the church who also shared this Semitic understanding of how words are things and do things.

Their own readerly habits of opening texts, scriptural texts in particular, was more nearly that of the rabbis, and so I found a kind of meeting place for my two loves — language and Christ.

More:

I find in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church it’s very bodily present — one brings himself or herself fully to the space. The air is filled with incense; the iconography is everywhere; our bodies kneel, prostrate. We kiss things. We kiss each other.

There’s a very tactile, visual, scent-centered sensuous engagement with worship, and then it becomes worship, and not just talk of worship or ideas about worship.

You find yourself worshipping, and that teaches you who it is you’re worshipping in a way that talking about it never could. The practice of poetry prepared me for the practice, I think, of Orthodox worship.

I’ve never seen it stated quite that way, but boy, is Cairns ever right. This is why I was so intensely attracted to historic Catholic Christianity when I first encountered it — its sacramental life. This was not a religion of the head only, but also of the body. Orthodoxy is far more so. After only seven years at this, I couldn’t imagine living without the Orthodox liturgy now. It gets into your bones, because it comes in through your senses in a way no other form of Christianity does. Catholicism is the closest, but it’s not Orthodoxy, not these days, anyway, not in America. That’s not the same thing as saying that Orthodoxy is true, of course. But that’s not my point here.

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