Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
September 2, 2026
I have not written this before, and it is time: some years ago I was received into the Eastern Orthodox Church.
I was raised Catholic, and I have written about what that gave me. But Orthodoxy held something I had not found anywhere in the Western church, and for a while I stood in its long services under the icons and had it. Then I stopped going. The reasons were not subtle. Parts of the church's hierarchy had lent their blessing to the war in Ukraine — preached it, even, as something holy — and the church's hard line against gay people sat wrong with me in a place that does not negotiate. So I left, the way you leave when staying would mean standing under words you cannot stand under.
That was that, I thought. Except that this month I have been reading The Brothers Karamazov, and the book has been quietly taking me apart — because everything I loved about Orthodoxy is in it, rendered more purely than I ever met it in a parish, and I find that I am not done with the thing I left. I am in mourning for it. This essay is me trying to be honest about that grief instead of managing it.
Let me name the thing, because "the mysticism" is too vague and the specifics matter.
Western Christianity — Catholic and Protestant both — runs on a legal imagination. Sin is a debt, the cross is a payment, salvation is a verdict. I wrote last week about courts, and I noted then that Orthodoxy is the tradition that never built one: it calls sin a sickness rather than a crime, and the church a hospital rather than a courtroom. The Greek word for sin, hamartia, means missing the mark — an archery term, not an indictment. What a sick man needs is not a sentence but a physician, and the whole tradition is organized around that difference. A former prosecutor perhaps notices this more than most people would: I spent years inside the courtroom picture, and the tradition that finally rested me was the one without a dock.
And its humility is not the West's humility. Western humility is mostly moral — a duty, a corrective, the antidote to pride. Orthodox humility is structural. It descends from kenosis, the self-emptying of Christ, and it treats lowering yourself not as good behavior but as the actual shape of divine life — the direction God himself moves. That is why the holiness in Dostoevsky does not look like moral excellence. It looks like Father Zosima bowing to the ground before a stranger, or telling his monks the thing I have not been able to shake since I read it: that each of us is responsible to all, for all. Not a metaphor. An accounting.
I wrote earlier this month about theosis — the tradition's staggering claim that salvation is not acquittal but transformation, genuine participation in the life of God. I wrote about it then as an admirer looking through a window. I am telling you now that I was in the room, and that I left the room, and that the window has been harder to stand at than I expected.
Here is what makes reading Dostoevsky in this condition so strange: the novel I am grieving with contains the entire case against the church I left. On purpose. In its strongest possible form.
In Book V, Ivan Karamazov tells his brother a parable. Christ returns — to Seville, at the height of the Inquisition — and the Grand Inquisitor arrests him. In the cell, the old cardinal explains, at length and with terrible lucidity, why the church no longer needs him: people cannot bear the freedom Christ brought, so the church has traded it away for the three things he refused in the desert — miracle, mystery, and authority — and has allied itself with power to keep the exchange running. It manages souls now. Christ's return is an inconvenience to the institution built in his name.
Christ says nothing. At the end he kisses the old man on his bloodless lips, and the Inquisitor shudders, opens the door, and tells him to go and come no more.
Dostoevsky set that parable in Catholic Spain because he believed the alliance of church and empire was Rome's disease. He was a Slavophile; he thought Orthodoxy — his church, my church — was the one communion that had kept the faith free of the trade. That is the part I cannot get over now. A hundred and forty years later, bishops of his own communion have blessed a war against fellow Orthodox believers and preached spiritual reward to the young men sent to fight it — salvation itself, offered in exchange for service to the state. The Inquisitor did not stay in Seville. He turned out to travel, and the transaction Ivan described is running today in the church of the man who wrote him.
Orthodoxy even has a name for its own disease. In 1872 a council in Constantinople condemned phyletism — the fusing of the church with nation and tribe — as heresy. The tradition diagnosed itself a century and a half ago. The diagnosis did not take.
Now the part that will not let me go.
Dostoevsky knew Ivan's indictment was strong. He said openly that it could not be refuted on its own terms — that he had built the strongest case against faith he could construct, and no syllogism would answer it. What he set against it instead is Book VI, placed immediately after, deliberately: the life of the elder Zosima. Not a rebuttal. A biography. A man who moved through violence and vanity into a way of being so saturated with humility and active love that the argument, while never disproven, stops being the most real thing in the room.
That is the whole strategy, and it took me until now to see what it implies for someone in my position. Dostoevsky's answer to the corrupted institution was never a defense of the institution. He did not answer the Inquisitor by claiming the church was innocent — his Christ does not say one word in the church's defense. The answer is a kiss, and then, a book later, a life. The kernel answers for itself. The institution is left standing in the cell with its own speech.
Which means the thing I have been doing — loving Zosima while refusing the palace — is not the compromise I took it for. It is approximately the novel's own position.
But I owe the tension its full strength, because there is a version of this essay that lets me off too easily, and Zosima himself is the one who blocks it.
Responsible to all, for all. Judge no one. If I take the teaching seriously, it does not obviously endorse my leaving. A church is not a brand you unsubscribe from; on its own account it is a body, and the Orthodox understanding I claim to miss would say that you do not amputate yourself from a sick body — you stay and are part of its healing, precisely because the sickness is also somehow yours. By that light, walking out was declining the responsibility the tradition assigns me.
And yet. Staying meant remaining under voices that bless a war on fellow Orthodox Christians. Presence is a signature. There are words you cannot remain under without cosigning them, and I could not.
I have spent a month writing that the honest verdict on a hard question is often that both readings survive — that letting opposing positions stand together is not a failure of moral seriousness. I did not expect the principle to come home like this. Both of these are true: leaving was a refusal of complicity, and leaving was a wound to something I was responsible for. I decline to pick one, not because I cannot face the choice but because I already made it, and honesty requires me to say it cost something real on both sides of the ledger.
Here is the strange mercy at the end of all this.
Orthodoxy has a word for exactly what I am feeling, and I did not learn it until I went looking this week. The Greek is charmolypē — joy-grief, a single compound word. John Climacus, in the seventh step of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, calls it the blessed joy-grief of holy compunction, and the tradition uses it to describe the whole atmosphere of Great Lent: bright sadness — mourning shot through with light, sorrow that is somehow not despair, because it grieves in the direction of something it still believes in.
Think about what it means that the word exists. The tradition I left is the one that equipped me to feel its loss correctly. It refused, characteristically, to let even grief collapse into a single thing — no bundle, sorrow and brightness, both, held. My mourning for the Orthodox Church turns out to be conducted in perfect Orthodox grammar. I left the building and the building's language walked out with me, still working, still naming what it finds.
So this is where I actually am, stated as plainly as I can: I am not in communion, and I am not done. I read Zosima at night and grieve brightly. The Inquisitor holds the cathedral, and holds it fluently, and I will not stand in it while he speaks. But the prisoner in the parable did not argue with the church that jailed him, and did not disown it either.
He kissed it, and walked out into the dark streets of the town, and the story does not say he stopped loving what it was built to hold.