The Orthodox Christian of today is overwhelmed to open St. Gregory’s Book of Miracles and find there just what his soul is craving in this soulless, mechanistic modern world; he finds that very Christian path of salvation which he knows in the Orthodox services, Lives of the Saints, the Patristic writings, but which is so absent today, even among the best of modern Christians, that one begins to wonder whether one is not really insane, or some literal fossil of history, for continuing to believe and feel as the Church has always believed and felt.
It is one thing to recognize the intellectual truth of Orthodox Christianity; but how is one to live it when it is so out of harmony with the times?
And then one reads St. Gregory and finds that all of this Orthodox truth is also profoundly normal, that whole societies were once based on it, that it is unbelief and renovated Christianity which are profoundly abnormal and not Orthodox Christianity, that this is the heritage and birthright of the West itself which it deserted so long ago when it separated from the one and only Church of Christ, thereby losing the key to the secret which so baffles the modern scholar—the secret of true Christianity, which must be approached with a fervent, believing heart, and not with the cold aloofness of modern unbelief, which is not natural to man but is an anomaly of history.
Featured image: Crows and crane in Seattle, WA. c. 2017. Alana Solomon
