What has becoming Orthodox made us better at noticing: the faults of other people, or the image of God in them?
Giving our lives to Christ should change the way we see and love the world. As we enter more deeply into the life of the Church, we should become more capable of recognizing the image of God in our neighbors, receiving the good with gratitude, and responding to brokenness with mercy.
Yet this is not always what happens. Sometimes, as our knowledge of Orthodoxy increases, so does our capacity for disappointment and contempt. We acquire a more developed account of how things ought to be, then use it to find fault with the people and communities God has given us to love.
The Scriptures warn us about this possibility. At the end of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham says that those who will not hear Moses and the prophets will remain unconvinced even if someone rises from the dead. We confess precisely such a resurrection. But we must still ask whether our hearts are becoming receptive to the life it offers.
Saint Paul presses the question further. We may speak with the tongues of men and angels, understand mysteries, possess extraordinary faith, and give away everything we own. Without love, we gain nothing.
These are warnings for people who believe, study, worship, and sacrifice. They are warnings for us.
The riches of Orthodoxy are given for our salvation. The Scriptures, the Fathers, the services, the ascetical disciplines, and the mysteries of the Church give us traction in our life in Christ. Through them, we learn to fulfill the great commandments: to love God and to love our neighbor. As our knowledge deepens, our love should deepen with it.
To turn these gifts against that purpose is a terrible misuse of holy things.
Learning to Love Our Spouses
Consider a marriage. A husband and wife enter the Orthodox Church, grateful to have found the fullness of the faith. The husband begins to study. He learns about marriage, the household, and the responsibilities of husbands and wives. Soon he has accumulated an impressive collection of teachings about how his wife ought to behave.
But what fruit does this knowledge bear? Does he become more patient? Does he see her sacrifices more clearly? Does he become more attentive to her burdens and more grateful for her gifts? Or does he simply discover more reasons to criticize her?
There is something tragic about using the Church’s teaching on marriage to become increasingly disappointed in one’s spouse. Marriage is meant to be an icon of communion. Its disciplines should help us repent, serve, and grow in love. When our study chiefly equips us to catalog another person’s shortcomings, we need to examine what we are doing with what we have learned.
Here is a temptation that reaches into every part of our lives: we learn what holiness looks like, then begin measuring everyone’s distance from it while giving comparatively little attention to our own need for repentance.
Recognizing Grace in Our Parish
The same thing can happen in our relationship with the parish. We encounter the Church’s beautiful account of herself: the Body of Christ, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, the communion of saints. We learn to appreciate the depth of the services and the glory they reveal. These discoveries should help us perceive more of what God is doing in the actual community where we worship.
Instead, they can become a standard against which everyone nearby is found wanting. The parish is poorly organized. The priest does not match our expectations. The bishop disappoints us. The people seem insufficiently serious about the things we have recently learned to value.
Some criticisms may be justified. Faithfulness sometimes requires correction, and love requires us to respond to real harm. But we should pay attention when the principal fruit of our religious life becomes an expanding list of complaints and criticisms. Are we learning to bear one another’s burdens? Are we becoming more willing to serve? Can we recognize holiness when it appears in an unfamiliar or unimpressive form?
The glory of the Church should help us recognize the grace at work among these particular people, including people whose weaknesses resemble our own.
Loving Our Country Through an Election
A third example concerns our country. Here I should acknowledge my own disposition. I am an American and a patriot. I am a Son of the American Revolution. I am grateful for our founding inheritance and believe that our constitutional arrangements contain considerable wisdom about governing a fallen people. Others will assess that inheritance differently. My argument does not require everyone to share my enthusiasm.
Whatever our judgment of America’s founding or present condition, growth in Christ should make us more capable of gratitude, truthful criticism, and service to the people who live here.
But I am troubled when growth in Orthodoxy seems to make someone less able to recognize anything good in the country and culture that helped form them and gave them the freedom to know and grow in Christ. Instead, every imperfection becomes evidence of comprehensive corruption. Every expression of gratitude seems naïve. Despair begins to pass for discernment.
Election seasons can intensify this habit. We are invited to imagine that everything depends on the next result and to catastrophize the future under the rule of those we regard as our political enemies. We rehearse the disasters their victory might bring until fear and suspicion shape the way we see the people around us.
Eventually, a neighbor’s vote becomes sufficient reason to dismiss his kindness, doubt his motives, or stop listening to him. We can describe the catastrophe we fear in great detail while overlooking the person standing before us.
Political judgments matter, and their consequences can be serious. We have responsibilities to exercise discernment, oppose wrongdoing, and protect our neighbors. But those responsibilities require us to remain attentive to the people affected by our choices, including people whose choices we oppose. Our convictions should not make us incapable of recognizing their goodness or receiving their kindness.
The saints could recognize evil while remaining attentive to the good that evil had failed to destroy. We need to develop that capacity. If our growing religious knowledge makes us less able to perceive and nourish goodness, we should ask what is forming our vision.
Letting Christ Heal Our Sight
This question reaches beyond patriotism. The image of God remains in every person, however obscured the likeness may be. We should expect our healing in Christ to make us more sensitive to that image. We should become better able to recognize goodness in our spouses, our children, our fellow parishioners, our clergy, and people whose lives differ profoundly from our own.
When that is not happening, the answer may not be to intensify the habits that have brought us here. We may already be working very hard at finding faults, defending positions, and measuring the distance between our ideals and everyone else’s performance.
We need to let the Gospel turn our attention toward our own repentance and open our eyes to our neighbor. Can we now see someone’s generosity where before we saw only his politics? Can we receive love from the spouse or parishioner we have become so practiced at correcting?
Christ saw us in our brokenness and came to heal us. He met our blindness with light and our estrangement with the offer of communion. As we receive that mercy, we can begin to approach others with the patience and attention of someone who desires their healing.
As Orthodoxy begins to work on us, we should start noticing people we previously overlooked. We should discover goodness in people we had written off, become willing to listen to people we once dismissed, and begin to love people we once hated. We do not have to discover their virtues before we owe them love. But as our hearts are healed, we should become more capable of seeing what our contempt had hidden.
We have received an extraordinary abundance of spiritual riches. May our knowledge bear fruit in patience, our worship in gratitude, and our repentance in mercy. And may the people we once failed to love encounter, through us, something of the love with which Christ has loved us.