The post I put up earlier this week about young people walking away from religion has inspired me to re-post this item from three years ago.  In it, I quote a passage from a Japanese-American writer who went to Japan as part of mourning her father’s death. She met there a Buddhist cleric:

He was an extraordinary character — a sort of severe and serious, eccentric character — who told me with great pride that his nickname, when he had been in the monastery for 20 years was Darth Vader. …

I told him about my meditation training. And I told him how irritated I was to have to sit there for three hours, how irritated I was … because I had thought that if I wanted to understand anything about Buddhism and what Buddhism had to offer, I thought I was supposed to read sutras and texts and, you know, think — like what I did in college. And he said, “Oh, you Westerners … You always want to know why you have to do something before you do it.” And he said, “In Japan, we make you do something, and then you learn ‘why’ afterward. … Sometimes, you just need to do something and learn the lesson later.” Which is perhaps a healthier way to live, because you can’t always know why you’re doing what you’re doing. Sometimes you simply have to go through and experience.

To which I said at the time:

Yes, I thought, that’s exactly how it is. And it’s how it is in Orthodox Christianity. Maybe this is what the friend at St. Seraphim Cathedral in Dallas meant when she told Julie and me, upon our entering the Orthodox church, “It will take you ten years to become Orthodox.” She meant “to begin to think like an Orthodox Christian.” I thought at the time that was a strange thing to say, but in the past year or two, I’ve come to appreciate the truth of it. If you surrender to the rituals, to the liturgical prayers, to the Psalms and all the rest, you begin to see things about yourself and the world that you wouldn’t have seen otherwise, and to experience the world in a new way.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been e-mailing with a couple of different readers interested in Orthodoxy. One is a Catholic having a crisis of faith; the other is a Mainline Protestant who is strongly considering becoming Catholic, but who wrote to me because he’s interested in why I left Catholicism. The Catholic has been visiting a local Orthodox Church, and said something in an e-mail this morning that I found really insightful:

“Catholicism has a system you can map; Orthodoxy has a place you can inhabit.”

The Catholic reader’s observation came to mind when thinking about the thoughtful e-mail I received from the Protestant reader who is probably going to become a Catholic. What attracts him so strongly to Catholicism is exactly that: it’s depth and coherence as a system. I understand that well.

What’s difficult to convey to people is that Orthodox piety is just not that interested in system-building. It sounds to many that Orthodoxy is touchy-feely, and can’t stand up to Catholicism intellectually (reading Vladimir Lossky, for one, will disabuse you of that error). In fact, Orthodoxy is more Eastern in a way the Buddhist monk is Eastern. An Orthodox apologist could lay out an intellectual case for Orthodoxy, but he would also tell you that you’re missing something important if that’s your angle of approach. In my own case, if the insufficiency of the perfect religious intellectual system had not become clear to me by my own utter brokenness as a Catholic, I would not have been open to the Orthodox approach either.

Note well that I’m not saying that this makes Orthodoxy true — though I believe it is true — but am making a point about the nature of religious truth, and how we relate to it. Kierkegaard really nailed it when he said that “truth is subjectivity.” He did not mean that all truth is relative. He meant that religious truth is the kind of truth that has to be known by committing your entire life to it. This does not mean that reasoning about religion is wrong. It only means that knowing about God is not the same thing as knowing God.

In 2015, the Catholic writer Maclin Horton, who reads this blog, posted something along these lines. Well, he wasn’t talking about this strictly, but he made a parallel point. Stick with me here. He begins by agreeing that churches today do a lousy job creating a sense of sacredness, awe, and depth in the experience of God. Horton might also have said that the churches do a lousy job of catechizing people, of explaining to them what Christianity teaches and why it teaches it.

But here’s his point, and it’s a great one:

I’ve come to the conclusion that even if the liturgy were always reverent and beautiful, and all the clergy and faithful were shining lights of truth and charity, the basic situation of the Church in the formerly Christian world would not be much different. The fundamental problem is succinctly stated by a commenter on the Dreher piece who signs himself “Dominic 1955”:

There is no man so blind [as] those that do not want to see and no man so deaf as those that do not want to hear-which is ultimately the problem with “Modern Man” (which in turn is a fantasy like the New Soviet Man) in that no matter what the Church did, he was done with it.

That’s part of a long comment which I encourage you to read (that link should take you straight to it). Casting doubt on the whole Vatican II reach-out-to-the-modern-world enterprise, he concludes, somewhat chillingly:

We are dealing with a scourge of God, a hardening of hearts the scope of which probably hasn’t been seen before, not something to dialog with.

A while back I read a piece in America describing all the things the Church does to alienate young people. Some of it was fair criticism, some not, but I found myself becoming impatient with the whole premise: if young people leave the Church, it must be the fault of the Church, and when we figure out what they don’t like and stop doing it, and start doing what they do like, they’ll stop leaving. Young People–who collectively are treated as a semi-mythical entity somehow continuing to exist in the same essentially callow state for decades on end–thus escape all blame for the situation, absolved of responsibility for their own fundamental choices. This is both mistaken and futile.

The more typical truth, I have little doubt, is that young people leave the Church because they’re much more interested in other things and because it tells them they can’t do what they want to do. And what they want is to enjoy sex and the many other pleasures and comforts which life in a rich and licentious society has to offer. That is to say, Young People are Modern Man in his youth. Sometimes I think the solution to the mystery of the great apostasy is that our material progress has made life so comfortable for so many that they no longer see the point in paying much attention to the spiritual life, except in a consumerist or therapeutic sort of way. No, that’s not the whole story, either, but it’s an important factor.

There is just not a great deal that we can do to make the faith attractive to people who simply don’t see, or want to see, the need of it. And they don’t see the need of it because they don’t see the need of salvation.

Read the whole thing. 

That was me, mostly, in college. I knew that there was a lot of inner disorder in my life, so I didn’t need to be convinced that I needed salvation (by which I mean a sense of being connected to God in a transformative way, one that was rightly ordering me to the cosmos). What I needed more than anything else was a change of heart. That is, I needed to want what the faith promised more than I wanted my own will.

There was nothing that the Church — any church — could have offered me to convince me to embrace it, until I experienced suffering. Or rather, in my case, until I had a close call with realizing what a mess I was making of my life, and how I couldn’t just drift along forever waiting for things to change. There was a mystical element present too. After a certain event that shocked and awed me, I could not deny that there was Something Beyond me, and that I had to choose. Choosing to delay the choice because I was afraid of having to give up pleasures (that had brought me less pleasure than anxiety and guilt) was a refusal to take responsibility for myself.

I kept telling myself at the time that if only somebody could explain Christianity to me in a way that made sense, then I would be able to believe it. I was lying to myself, of course, but even if I had been 100 percent honest about the obstacles between myself and belief, it still would have been a very rationalistic way to approach faith. I know now — this was hard-won wisdom — that I put far too much stock in mere rationality as a defense against challenges to my Catholic faith.

Nobody chooses a mate these days by making a wholly rational set of calculations. If it were possible to have a thick dossier detailing every knowable fact about a potential mate, and even if it were possible to make a logically airtight argument for why you should marry this person, none of that is enough to fall in love. Love is not the conclusion of an argument. Neither is faith.

Please don’t read this post as an argument for or against Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or Protestantism. I mean it as a general commentary on religious faith, and how to find it (or how not to find it) — and of differences in the pious styles of various forms of faith. Frederica Mathewes-Green told me once that she noticed at ecumenical gatherings, Catholics and Calvinists tended to group up and talk about doctrine, while Orthodox and Pentecostals grouped up to talk about worship. I get that. If you don’t want to find God, then you almost certainly won’t. If you do want to find him, you need to be honest with yourself about the search, and what is holding you back. And if you do find him, you will need to work on keeping him. It’s not like a system or a contract; it’s like love and marriage. Sometimes you simply have to go through and experience.

I’m eager to read your comments, but if you want to engage in hostile disputation, save yourself the trouble.

UPDATE: Reader Brendan:

I think when it comes to differences in the styles of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, a lot of the misunderstanding here arises from the fact that Orthodoxy is more “narrow” in style than Catholicism is.

Catholicism is kind of a “grab bag” — you have a very philosophical type of Catholicism for those so inclined, you have a Catholicism that is focused on contemporary miracles and apparitions if you are so inclined, you have a kind of Western mystical Catholicism centered around certain devotions, Eucharistic adoration and so on, you have circles of charismatic Catholicism which overlaps with some of Pentecostalism, you have distinct spiritual schools of pious praxis that grew up around certain saints and are memorialized in religious orders (Benedictine, Franciscan, Dominican etc.), you have low liturgical/folk Catholicism, high liturgical/TLM Catholicism, SJW political Catholicism, pro-life activist Catholicism and on and on. Catholicism has a lot of diversity in it, and that’s even before you start looking at the contemporary manifestations of Latin Catholicism outside the West.

Now of course most Catholics will point to this and say that it’s a more or less obvious indication, if not “proof”, that Catholicism is “true”, or at least “truer”, than Orthodoxy is, because Orthodoxy is narrow in comparison. I disagree with that, obviously, but I’ll address that at the end.

Orthodoxy, by contrast to what I have just described, is a much narrower “system”. For example, while the mystical strand is present in Western Catholicism, it is certainly not central or dominant — a small number of people have that as their praxis, and the rest don’t. In Orthodoxy, by contrast, the mystical strand is central to the entirety of the tradition of piety, and is dominant. To take another example, while there are certainly very smart Orthodox who have written very cogently about various aspects of Orthodoxy (including Lossky, whom you mention), there is no scholastic tradition in Orthodoxy that comes anywhere close to the Catholic philosophical tradition, and the intellectualized aspects of Orthodoxy are indeed fairly marginal to the tradition of piety. What Orthodoxy has is a narrow, tightly-wound, tightly inter-related set of pious practices that all riff more or less directly on each other, reinforcing each other, to create a very robust whole: the sacramental life and liturgical praxis riffs with the Jesus Prayer and the Philokalia, riffs with the practices of fasting and abstinence (not just food, but alcohol and sex), riffs with the traditional daily prayer rules. It all hangs together relatively tightly because much of it comes from the Orthodox monastic tradition, adapted in various ways for life as lay and clerical people outside monastic life. It is “narrow” in the sense that Orthodoxy has no scholasticism, no orders organized around saintly spiritual schools, no charismatic style, no contemporary focus on contemporary miracles (they exist, but don’t get the focus they do in some circles of Catholicism), no low/folk version, no political activist version, etc. — it’s all tied to the same set of praxis for everyone: liturgy/sacrament, personal asceticism and discipline, prayer (formal and jesus prayer/mystical). This is the source of much of the “strength” of the Orthodox approach, in my experience.

That’s why I would disagree with the (many) Catholics who would argue that Catholicism is superior precisely because of its diversity in praxis/piety, whereas Orthodoxy is “too narrow for many people!” — and I say this as someone who was a cradle Catholic, Catholic school for 12 years, pretty much didn’t know anyone who wasn’t a Catholic until I entered college, and was received by Orthodoxy 18 years ago in my early 30s. What can appear “from the outside” to be narrow is in fact a source of great strength, as a system, due to the mutually reinforcing nature of aspects that simply fit together well because they are drawn from the same source: Orthodox monasticism. The Catholic tradition does offer more variety, that’s clear, but the result is a lot less coherence between the various strands in practice. There is more to choose from, but everything is less closely linked together, and there can be a tendency for one to be “off on one’s own” (or if not on one’s own, then at least among one’s fellow travelers) in a certain strand of Catholicism, where the link to everyone else is still there in the Eucharist and the Mass and the sense of one large Catholic global family and so on but otherwise relatively weak (and even there, somewhat attenuated due to people often customizing the “kind” of Mass they prefer as well). In extreme cases it can even get to the point where the various strands can be, to some degree, openly antagonistic towards each other (as we see with the various liturgical strands, the historical antagonisms between different “orders” and their approaches) — something which can scarcely be seen as a strength in my opinion.

In any case, apart from trying to get ahead of the obvious counterargument about the “narrowness” of the Orthodox approach, my main point is that there is this difference between narrowness/focus on the Orthodox side and variety on the Catholic side, and this makes a colossal difference in how each side “works”, as a spiritual system of piety for individual believers, whether you think one system is better or not.

Reader Luke:

“What attracts him so strongly to Catholicism is exactly that: it’s depth and coherence as a system.”

Goodness this resonated with me. I’m an ELCA seminarian – I posted on here before, Rod told me run. That day is likely drawing near, and the switch will likely be to Roman Catholicism. I don’t want to go overboard and declare the Reformation project doomed, but these are profoundly dangerous times for any Christian expression that leans on the five solas.

Whenever Scripture (and even the limited tradition Lutheranism allows as a backstop) is subject to radical redefinition through various postmodern hermeneutical lenses, the whole thing disintegrates. It’s hard to describe how nutty things have gotten, just in the past two years. Just this month, I had a classmate declare Karl Marx his biggest influence after Jesus. A recent grad from my seminary went on a twitter screed about how Christians needed to stop “colonizing” the Old Testament with their Christological readings. Luther, the “conservative” ELCA seminary, recently featured a drag queen in their talent show – hosted in the seminary chapel. I wonder if that last one might have been a message from God. If my pride is keeping me from admitting a mistake, perhaps the only thing that will get me out of here is the humiliation becoming too much to bear.

Anyway, back to Catholicism. The rocks I have leaned on throughout this have been mostly Catholics, including a friend training to be a priest and a Benedictine monk. The reformers rejected scholastic theology as essentially human barnacles covering up that which ought to be clear: the grace of the gospel. But what about in an age when no truth is clear?

I desperately need a coherent system right now. The last two years have been like rowing a boat in a storm – getting exhausted, seasick, and absolutely nowhere.