We see how the world suffers, and it breaks our hearts. This is one reason we love the Gospel: it is the proclamation of mankind’s deliverance from suffering, sin, death, and the powers that hold us captive. We have given our lives to this Gospel because it is the Truth that offers salvation not only to individual souls but, ultimately, to the whole creation.
But it is possible to love even good things wrongly. We can take something precious into our hands and hold it so tightly that our whole posture changes. Our fingers close. Our hands become fists. And before long the very thing we intended to protect becomes something we use to strike our neighbor.
The Gospel itself can be treated this way. So can doctrine. So can tradition. So can canonical order. All of these are good. All of them matter. But none of them was given to us so that we could use it against the salvation of our neighbor.
Our Lord said that His disciples would be known by their love. The truth is never opposed to love, because both have their source in Christ. But it is possible for us, through our passions, to separate things that belong together. We can defend truth without love, order without mercy, purity without humility, or unity without patience. And once we do that, even the defense of something genuinely good can begin to deform us.
We see something of this danger in the Gospel of the demoniac in the country of the Gadarenes. The man Christ encounters is in terrible condition. He is isolated from his community. He lives among the tombs. He has lost control of himself. Whatever attempts others may have made to restrain or help him have failed. He is tormented.
And Christ delivers him.
When the people come out, they discover the man who had been possessed sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. This should have been an occasion for rejoicing. A brother had been restored. A human being who had been living among the dead had been returned to the living. A man who had been isolated had been restored to communion.
Yet this is not the only thing the people see. They also see the swine. Something valuable to them has been lost. Their familiar order has been disrupted. Christ’s healing has cost them something. And they become afraid. Then they ask Christ to leave.
It is tempting to tell this story as though these people simply loved pigs more than people. Perhaps there is truth in that. But I suspect the spiritual problem is subtler, and therefore more dangerous. People rarely tell themselves, “I choose livestock over my neighbor.” We tell ourselves that we are protecting something important: our livelihood, our community, our traditions, our stability, our rights, our order. And often these really are important things.
The spiritual danger begins when a good thing becomes so important that we can no longer see anything beyond it. Then the good ceases to serve its proper purpose. Instead of serving love, communion, and salvation, it begins demanding that they serve it.
This is one of the great dangers of the spiritual life: not merely that evil things may possess us, but that good things may become disordered within us. The desire for justice can become hatred of the unjust. Concern for truth can become fascination with error. Love for the Church can become contempt for those whom we think threaten her. And concern for canonical order can become so consuming that canonical order itself begins to obscure the purpose for which the canons exist.
That possibility should make every Orthodox Christian uncomfortable. It certainly makes me uncomfortable.
For several years I have thought about this in connection with the ecclesiastical crisis in Ukraine. The temptation is to tell that story very simply. Millions of Orthodox Christians wanted an ecclesiastical life free from the divisions and historical burdens that had accumulated around them. Constantinople intervened and granted autocephaly to the newly constituted Orthodox Church of Ukraine. For those who supported that decision, this looked like an act aimed at healing division and restoring people to full ecclesial communion.
Others saw the same events very differently. They believed that canonical boundaries had been violated, that ecclesiastical order had been overturned, that people previously regarded as schismatic had been received improperly, and that Constantinople had acted outside its legitimate authority.
Those concerns should not simply be mocked. Canonical order is a good. Continuity is a good. Episcopal responsibility is a good. The preservation of ecclesial boundaries can be a good. The fear that political or national pressures might manipulate ecclesiastical structures is not imaginary either.
Indeed, it would undermine the entire argument of this essay if I were simply to declare that my preferred ecclesiological good is holy while someone else’s is merely a herd of swine. That is precisely the temptation I want to avoid.
The harder question is this: What happens when one ecclesiastical good becomes so dominant in our imagination that we can no longer perceive the other goods that are at stake?
Canonical order matters. But communion matters. Historical continuity matters. But the healing of schism matters. Jurisdiction matters. But souls matter. Stability matters. But so does the missionary and pastoral responsibility of the Church to gather those who desire to live within her sacramental life.
Those goods will sometimes come into tension. And when they do, slogans will not save us. Neither “canonical order” nor “autocephaly” is sufficient by itself. Neither “this is our canonical territory” nor “these people are Orthodox and deserve their own Church” resolves every ecclesiological question. The Church must discern how all these goods serve the greater purpose for which Christ established His Body: the salvation and sanctification of His people and their communion with Him and with one another.
That is why the aftermath of the Ukrainian ecclesiastical dispute should trouble all of us, regardless of which canonical analysis we find most convincing. The result has not been greater visible Orthodox unity. Communion has been ruptured. Jurisdictions have hardened against one another. Suspicion has deepened. National and geopolitical antagonisms have become intertwined with ecclesiology. People who confess the same Creed, celebrate the same Liturgy, venerate the same saints, and receive the same sacramental tradition increasingly speak of one another as though they were enemies.
That should cause all of us to examine ourselves. Because once we reach the point where the preservation of our position requires permanent estrangement from other Orthodox Christians, we ought at least to ask whether something has gone wrong.
That question does not automatically tell us who was canonically correct. One, both, or neither could be correct. Nor does it erase legitimate questions about jurisdiction. It does not mean that communion can simply be restored without addressing serious disagreements. It means something much more basic: canonical order exists for the life of the Church; the Church does not exist for the preservation of canonical arguments.
The canons protect communion, sacramental integrity, episcopal responsibility, peace, and good order. They are therefore enormously important. But their purpose is therapeutic and ecclesial. They are part of the Church’s medicine. And medicine is given for the healing of persons.
This brings us back to the Gadarenes. Their mistake was not necessarily that what they valued was worthless. Their mistake was that when Christ restored a human being before their eyes, they could see only what the restoration had cost them.
That possibility should haunt us. What if I become so attached to something genuinely good that I can no longer rejoice when my brother is healed? What if the preservation of my preferred ecclesiastical arrangement matters more to me than reconciliation? What if vindication becomes more precious than communion? What if proving that I was right becomes more important than finding a way to live again with my brother?
And perhaps most dangerously: What if I become so convinced that the other side is possessed by ideology, nationalism, ambition, or pride that I never notice the thing that has begun to possess me?
This is where the Gospel turns its judgment back upon the reader. It is very easy to identify the swine belonging to somebody else: their nationalism, their canonical theory, their historical grievances, their patriarch, their jurisdiction, their politics, their pride.
It is much harder to identify our own herd. The things we have fed for years. The things around which we have organized our identity. The things whose loss frightens us so deeply that, if Christ were to threaten them for the sake of reconciliation, we might prefer that He leave them alone.
This is why I now think the question raised by the Gadarene Gospel is less, “What pigs do they love more than the salvation of man?” and more: What good thing have I begun to love in the wrong way?
That is a much more frightening question. It also leaves room for repentance.
The solution is not contempt for canonical order. Nor is it indifference to ecclesiology. It is to put every ecclesial good back into its proper hierarchy. Truth must serve communion justly. Authority must serve the building up of the Body. Canons must serve the health of the Church. Jurisdiction must serve pastoral responsibility. Tradition must bring us into deeper conformity with Christ. And all of them must serve love—not sentimental affection, but the difficult, cruciform love that seeks the salvation of the other without abandoning the good, the beautiful, and the true.
This requires open hands. The Gospel cannot flourish in fists. Neither can canonical order.
If we hold these treasures as gifts received from God, then we can offer them for the healing of His Church. But if we clutch them as possessions, we should not be surprised when they begin to possess us.
The path forward in Ukraine—and in every Orthodox dispute—will require more than proving who was right. We all know the Canons; we all have very big brains; and we can justify our positions well. Instead, it will require repentance. It will require patience. It will require cooperative historical and canonical work by people who are willing to learn and benefit from well-intentioned people with whom they disagree. It will require people willing to surrender the pleasure of seeing their opponents as enemies and condemning them. And it will require the willingness to ask not only what justice demands from the other side, but what love requires from us.
Perhaps then our hands can open again. Perhaps then what we have received from Christ can cease being a weapon and become what it was always meant to be: a gift offered for the life of the world.
And perhaps then we will be able to look upon a brother restored to communion and simply rejoice that someone who had been far away is now sitting peacefully at the feet of Jesus—and then turn, together, to the necessary work of repairing whatever canonical proprieties were damaged in the process of his restoration.