“It was just a little pin prick of light and nothing else near it for millions of miles. They’d built themselves a huge Youtube channel flaming with light, though it only shows as a pin prick from where I live. They went up and looked through one of the windows. The Orthobros and the Young Calvinists were there all right.”

“What were they doing?”

“Walking up and down-up and down all the time-left-right, left-right-never stopping for a moment… muttering to themselves all the time. ‘It was Luther’s fault. It was Gregory Palamas’ fault. It was Calvin’s fault. It was the fault of the Moderns.’ Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. They looked kind of tired. But they didn’t seem able to stop it.”

From the vibrations I gathered that the bus was still moving, but there was now nothing to be seen from the windows which confirmed this - nothing but grey void above and below. “Then the channel will go on spreading indefinitely?” I said. “That’s right,” said the Intelligent Man. “Unless someone can do something about it.”

Should you wish some quotes to serve as the backdrop to this chapel message (the kind no self-respecting communicator would weigh down a sermon with), here is Hieromonk Gabriel Bunge on the Orthodox side from his book Despondency:

In times when the demons, formerly driven out by Christ, have returned under new names and in other [digital?] disguises, more numerous than before, the commandment of the hour appears to be to name them once more by their correct names. This is all the more so because the quite incorrect opinion has spread that they should not be named at all. At such a moment, some believe that once and for all we have “demythologized” the mysterium iniquitatis (mystery of iniquity) and have finally transformed into pure imagination not only evil but also “so-called” evil. But then look! The one demon that is driven out returns with seven others that are worse, in order to seize the house all the more easily when they fine it unguarded (35).

And here’s Jordan Cooper on the Protestant end from his book Two Hands of Faith:

The doctrine of sanctification is an essential one in Lutheran [and we could add Anglican] orthodoxy. It is not negated or downplayed due to the centrality of justification in the Lutheran theological system…. Lutheran theologians have placed sanctification after justification as an essential elements of God’s redeeming work within the human creature. Salvation is both forensic and renovative. Justification is a legal term, referring to the imputation of Christ’s righteousness and the forgiveness of sins; sanctification is is about inherent righteousness which actually changes the believer inwardly…. In the Lutheran tradition, sanctification is not described as monergistic (92-93; 95).

So yes, my college president is right to insist “sanctification is not by faith alone,” and Protestant Virtue Ethics is not an oxymoron. This fact does not confuse the free, unmerited grace of justification. On the contrary, it confirms it. Or, if you prefer Luther himself, here he is in a text that could not be more central to the Reformation, the 1535 Commentary on Galatians:

Once a people are justified and through faith they possess Christ, knowing that He is their righteousness and their life, they will certainly not walk around with their arms crossed. As a good tree, they will yield good fruit. Since the believers have the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit does not permit laziness but provokes them to exercise devotion, love to God; to suffer patiently all afflictions… We also [like Rome] say that faith without works is nothing and empty… faith without work… is a mere daydream and illusion of the heart; it is false and does not justify (131).

And that is why ladders can be good, so long as they’re made from Calvary’s timber. Furthermore, a quick look at the mercilessly vertical alternatives out there might make you glad I chose the one I did.

It’s taken me nearly thirty years to write Toronto the Holy, which is a theologically front loaded take on the (I’d say “arguably,” but I’m not sure the point is arguable) best paintings in North America. In it I claim we need not mock or satirize the Group of Seven (if you don’t know who they are, that’s what the piece is for; if you don’t know how they’ve been satirized, count yourself blessed), but add to them, bringing the total to nine thanks to Emily Carr (an admittedly standard move) and the remarkable work of the contemporary Indigenous artist Philip Cote.

One of my contentions is that to view the Group of Seven, Emily Carr, or Indigenous painting through Theosophy is as tiresome as the insular debates about what counts as “Canadian.” This art was never about bloodless spirituality, still less about mere patriotism. Lawren Harris, for all his genius (a fair word in this case), went wrong in thinking beauty is a what, and it stunted his painting. Carr, the Group of Seven and so many Indigenous painters are right to remember beauty is a Who, and their infinity is consequently larger. “There is ‘no such thing’ as God,” insists Thomas Merton, “because God is neither a ‘what’ or a ‘thing’ but a pure ‘Who.’” Or as John O’Donohue memorably put it,

The who-ness of someone can never be finally named, known, claimed, controlled, or predicted. The who is beyond all frames and frontiers and dwells in the mystery of its own reflexivity and infinity. Who has no map. When we claim that God is beauty, we reclaiming for beauty all the adventure, mystery, infinity and autonomy of divine who-ness.

Who-ness is also what the beauty imitated by AI is too far removed from; but it bursts from the walls of the Art Gallery of Ontario and the streetscape of Toronto with near volcanic force. These paintings are glimpses of the future, pledges of what is yet to come, summons to an unnamed country we only see here in passing. They tell of a beauty fit for every nation, which—in our resurrected bodies—we will still require eyes to see. I hope you enjoy the essay. You can subscribe to future installments here for free.

“Ecumenism is now braindead,” wrote William Abraham more than twenty years ago. “The best and brightest in the younger leadership of the church have abandoned the ecumenical seas and gone sailing in other waters.” I couldn’t tell you what the best and brightest are up to today or what waters they’re sailing upon. But I can say that at least around here using art history to breathe some life into braindead ecumenism has been a regular strategy. More on how to do that responsibly (I hope) in the forthcoming book Mere Iconography.

In the meantime, I’ve identified a church that represents four confessions at once. I’m not referring to a nondescript airport chapel where a Bible, a few Ikea chairs and a pile of yoga mats aim to reference every known branch of Christianity and every known world religion as well. What I have in mind is considerably more exquisite than anything evoked by drywall, a drop ceiling and fluorescent light. I’m referring to a medieval church—one of the most beautiful I know of—with visual testimony to four branches of Nicene Christianity (Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Miaphysitism and, indirectly at least, the Church of the East). If you read the image above through the closing passage in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, perhaps one can read it through the Lutheran tradition as well.

The paper was just published in the journal After Constantine. There are some fantastic articles in the entire issue which, blessedly enough, is completely open access thank to the Orthodox Academy of Crete. You can download the whole thing here (Special Issue: “Entangled Christianities”).

Please also stay tuned for a new Material Mysticism coming early next week.

I’ve never been to Santiago de Compostela, but in the film about that pilgrimage, The Way, pilgrims similarly touch the trumeau of the portal of glory before they enter. I wonder if they do so for the very same reasons Thomas touches Jesus in this evening’s gospel passage, for the church represents the Body of Christ. I discussed this in an art history class this semester, and a student told me that on his pilgrimage to Santiago, the non-Christians he was traveling with did touch the trumeau, but they were turned off by something about the pilgrimage, almost offended. They were not offended by the tactile dimensions of the pilgrimage’s conclusion. No, what offended them was the fact that so many of the church buildings they had passed on the way had been locked. If buildings represent Jesus open body presented to Thomas, a locked building seems to suggest Jesus is not available to us the way he was so scandalously available to Thomas in this passage.

Last year, some of us convened not far from this church for a conference on sacred space. I was then moved by the suggestion of the one of the presenters about the accessibility of churches. Do our sacred spaces, she seemed to ask, exemplify the openness of Christ’s side wound to Thomas? I was moved by that presentation enough to subject the city of Toronto to a merciless multi-day randomly chosen pop quiz from an international visitor. I aimed to simply test how many of this city’s churches were open, the way Jesus is in open this passage. The grades are in, so let me report the results.

Spoiler alert: Toronto did not entirely ace the test. But to show some clemency, I will only report the names of the churches that got As, keeping the lower grades anonymous. My aim is not shame, but reform. I remember the days before COVID, when churches were more traditionally open. This has changed dramatically in recent years, around the world since the pandemic, and it’s not an improvement. There is a Quiet Revival afoot in urban spaces and a locked door, in effect, can say that this church is not a part of it. A locked church may signal to visitors that God is not available right now.

I know full well the challenges of keeping space open. Yes, there are those who vandalize. Yes, it is difficult to pay staff to keep a welcoming space welcoming not just with signage but with a human faces. But my pop quiz was not unfair. I visited in the daylight, during working weekday hours (9am-5pm) in accessible downtown spaces. First came Trinity College Chapel. I approached to a locked door, but before I could issue a harsh grade, I saw a sign that kindly told me to come around through the main campus entrance. I expected not to be let in as I’m not a student, but I was. I walked down the hall, and entered in as Thomas did, and lingered in the space freely. That open door was a prophecy of that door opening last night at about midnight when Fr. Geoffrey Ready banged on it and burst in while singing “Christ is risen from the dead” with his congregation during the Orthodox Paschal liturgy.

What about Wycliffe College Chapel? Same results. I strolled across the street and let myself in, down the hall to the chapel, which I had all to myself. Trinity and Wycliffe both get As. But other college chapels at the University of Toronto were sealed shut, even if I could get in the building. They got Ds. Over the course of three days I tried to get into another prominent campus ministry center three times, until finally on my fourth attempt, a door was open and someone was inside silently praying, so I joined him. That campus ministry earned a C+. I proceeded to downtown churches: St. Michael’s Basilica to an A+. Wide and warmly open at 9am on a Friday. The atmosphere was thick with reverence as it always is.

But this is not to say all the Roman Catholic churches did well. Several other Roman Churches were firmly shut, earning an F. One large Catholic church even had chains all around the gates, but it avoided an F, because a kind at least priest who told me to come back of 4pm when it would be open. They get a B. In the same neighborhood, Pentecostal street churches certainly had welcoming exterior signage, but you just cannot get in. As residents from the homeless shelter lingered nearby, I was sorry to have to fail these churches.

One church downtown was particularly interesting. Chains, and menacing surveillance cameras and warning signs obstructed beautiful carved exterior memorials, announcing to me that I was being watched, but not in a good way. I understand the need for this, but ponder with me for a moment the irony of a massive flag that says “All are welcome here” juxtaposed with a locked door and a surveillance sign that effectively says, “but not really.” Fortunately though, I saw that a tour of this building was just beginning. I asked if I could join, “Private tour,” I was curtly told. “Come back at 10am.” At that point I was permitted access, so, B-.

One beautiful Orthodox church was sealed tight, even though it was Nov. 21, the Feast Day of the Presentation of Mary in the Temple, when – according to tradition – she was given access to the Holy of Holies itself. I admit I’m no Virgin Mary, but I could not get into that Orthodox church on that great feast day that celebrates God’s accessibility. I issued another reluctant F. St. George’s Orthodox Cathedral also almost failed. As I approached the church, a construction worker announced to me that it would be locked. Don’t bother, he said. I almost turned away, but I tried the door anyway, I got in, and the construction worker looked surprised. The sexton gave me an impromptu tour and a prayerbook, earning his church an A.

St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church got one too. On the outside is a sculpture of a homeless person by Timothy Schmalz inspired by Hebrews 13:1, “Be welcoming to strangers, many have entertained angels unawares.” If you walk around the sculpture, the back morphs into wings. That sculpture exemplified that church’s approach to this visitor. Even though a daycare facility was being hosted there—they had good reason to refuse me entry—I was welcomed in. A+. My last stops were Redeemer Anglican and St. Thomas Anglican, and you’ll be glad to know you both aced the quiz. They were wide open in the middle of the day. Accessible as Jesus is in this passage.

My point is this: Open buildings are an invitation to enter Christ’s mystical body, expressed architecturally. We should be able to enter, not just with our fingers but with our whole selves. The twelfth century mystic William of St. Thiery, put it this way:

Now we do not only place the finger of our hand in his side like Thomas did. We enter through the open gate, all the way into the shrine of your soul where all the fullness of God dwells.

The discipline of architectural history, important as it may be, may be too constrict to grasp that mystical insight. In one of her visions, God the Father says this to Catherine of Siena, “Let your place of refuge be Christ crucified, my only-begotten son; dwell and hide yourselves in the cavern of his side.”

It was this particular understanding of camping out in the wounds of Christ that was so effectively deployed Moravian missionaries among the Leni Lenape on this continent, the same Christianized Leni Lenape that my country chased into yours. Mystical abiding in the wound, communicated by Moravian illustrations, spoke to Indigenous people in ways that comparatively cold Presbyterian theology could not. I neglected to report in my grading that the Chapel Royal so beautifully painted by the Indigenous artist Philip Cote got an A. It too was mystically accessible to this visitor.

If you’d like a Lutheran witness to this understanding, here is Jacob Boehme, who thanks to William Law has been infused into the Anglican tradition. Yes, Boehme condemned the steinkirche, the merely stone churches. But mystical Christianity needs its sacred stone buildings as well. Boehme says,

Lead my soul’s hunger into Your wounds, from which you poured your holy blood and extinguished the wrath in the soul.… Your wounded side, [I] throw myself completely into it.

And yet, when many today, wish to throw themselves into a the side of Christ through a graciously open building, that church is locked.

But, here is the good news of the Gospel. Even IF churches must stay locked for legitimate reasons, God remains permanently open. Surely you will have noticed in the passage tonight that Thomas’ encounter with the wounded, yet healed Christ happened, chapter 20 verse 26, “although the doors were shut.” A sealed entrance was no obstacle to Thomas great confession.

We do well to keep our sacred spaces welcoming and open, but even if a church cannot manage that—as I admit my small suburban Anglican church cannot—Christ still finds a way to access encounter those for whom he died. Even if the church fails; I am tempted to say even WHEN the church fails, people will continue to come to Thomas’ conclusion, “My Lord and My God,” nonetheless.

Those words, from a one time doubter, those words that have been called the “most escalated of all the confessions in all the Gospels,” those words permeate even a church doorway that is unnecessarily or even irresponsibly sealed. I cannot say those words for you, and you cannot say them for me. But every time someone says (as I hope you do) “My Lord and my God,” the church of Christ, which exceeds our buildings but is still expressed by them, endures.

No, this is not a post about Mary’s Enneagram number (I couldn’t say), just a creative way of getting you to choose from nine (actually, I squeezed in twelve) different articles about her.

1. The Perfectionist: You might appreciate an emphasis on Mary and the doctrine of grace, how she models Gelassenheit.

2. The Helper: You might enjoy how Mary intervened to keep me from a dangerous path.

3. The Performer: You might admire the glorious staging for the re-emergence of Marian piety at Walsingham under Anglican auspices.

4. The Romantic: You might need to be rescued like Merton (also a 4) had to be from your worst impulses.

5. The Investigator: Your might appreciate the unexpected depths of Marian grottoes worldwide.

6. The Loyalist: You might admire both Catholic and Protesant Marian fidelity in the city of London, or if you’re from Chicago like me, you might prefer to keep it local, or at least French.

7. The Enthusiast: You might need to be calmed down through contemplative prayer in Mexico City.

8. The Challenger: You might be amused by a Protestant playfully trying to out-Mary Notre Dame, or evangelicals making their own Madonna of Mercy.

9. The Peacemaker: You might value how one Marian icon of sorts offers a belated answers to global tensions from more than two decades ago… and surely there will be as yet unimaginable forms of healing to present conflicts as well.

As Bernard of Clairvaux put it, de Maria numquam satis, one can never say enough about the Virgin Mary, so please expect much more to come. Also, to spare any questions as to how one does all this without being Catholic or Orthodox, the quick answer (in addition to reading the great Protestant Marians like Jacob Boehme) is that we just get it all from Calvin, who wrote,

[W]e honour Mary because Mary is honoured by God. [We] esteem her because of the blessing God has conferred on her… The greatest praise we can render Mary is to take her as our teacher: she must instruct us, and we will be her pupils. (14, 30).

So, with nine months until Christmas, happy Feast of the Annunciation Eve to all, and to all a good night!

If you’d like, you can always subscribe here for future installments as well.

You can only fit so many reproduction in print (where this essay first appeared), so here are a few other illustrations of the parallels I identify (and one I might have added as well).

This holiday (Dec. 2014) The Atlantic’s readers (The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis) breathed sighs of yuletide relief, assuring themselves that the mid-life crisis they have had, are having, or look forward to having would inevitably result in a biologically determined sextogenerian rebound. “The U-curve,” writes the author, “offers an opportunity for society to tell a different and better story about life in middle age and beyond: a story that is more accurate and more forgiving and much less embarrassing and lonely.” In sum: U complete me.

Not one to waste time, I aim to apply the insights. Wisdom, said article relates, is (merely?) neurological. Hitherto known as the three wise men, I will henceforth refer to them as the three “older people [who] compensate for deterioration in specific regions of the brain by recruiting additional neural networks in other regions—an increase in so-called neuroplasticity that compensates for cognitive decline and perhaps brings other benefits.”

Spoken with the sarcastic disdain of someone yet to gain lasting wisdom, I know; but that is a direct quote from what would have been a far more fulfilling article were it not fortified with neurological reductivism like so much Viagara in a dissolute quinquagenarian. It’s not that the findings are inaccurate (I’m unqualified to say), or that neurology is unhelpful (it availeth much), or that it’s a bad article (I admit I appreciated much of it). Nor is it that the findings, as the article at one point concedes, are anything new. But what they are is upside down.

Indeed, the history of art has long asserted that the arc of life is indeed curved: Beginning with youthful, relatively clueless ambition, cresting with arrogant self-reliance, and followed by the humility that comes with age, when, that is, age submits to Divine reality, adoring—as one gorgeous Epiphany collect puts it—“the fruition of thy Glorious Godhead.” The Epiphany curve, furthermore, can take its course at any stage of life, and indeed occurs many times within it. This is the curve at the heart of the Psalter, the one that infuses the writings of the saints, or modern spiritual guides such as William Barry (really worthwhile), Ken Shigematsu (quite good) or Jacques Philippe (spiritual classics).

But above all, whereas all The Atlantic has to offer is images of Middle Aged guys looking mopey (how I felt, at points, when I read the article), the Epiphany Curve has centuries of unparalleled beauty behind it, and some impressive names as well:

Please don’t question my elegantly-placed yellow curves; I didn’t get my Ph.D. in art history for nothing. More importantly, happy Epiphany millinerd reader(s), as you revel in the “mystery that the Gentiles are fellow heirs” (Ephesians 3:6). And remember, it too (like Christmas) is a season, not a day.

If you don’t count its 24-year-old millinerd prequel, this Substack began by delineating all the horrible ideas of 2024 (which I handily refuted with long form essays that I’m quite certain absolutely everyone has read). Following said custom, all the horrible ideas of 2025 have now been likewise refuted below in my year end review (now with handy highlight paragraphs). This genre of writing, by the by, is an ancient Christian literary form known as the “Panarion,” Greek for “medicine cabinet,” which afforded literary antidotes to various intellectual toxins. If any of the below ideas have infected you, your remedy awaits.

1. Only celebrity artists matter. Antidote: Broken Beauty Revisited (a conversation with Bruce Herman). As Bruce puts it (with advice that applies just as much to writing as to painting):

   All of us desire to be seen. To be known. The question that haunts the artist is, Who cares? We often find that our work does indeed make us “strangers in a strange land” because painting is no longer seen as a vital thing in our culture. It is relegated to antique or luxury status as image making—because TV and film and CGI are the current lingua franca of image making. As a result, artists can feel very alone unless they happen to get recognition from some influential gallerist or critic or curator. But my advice to younger artists is simple on this score: make your art for the One who entrusted this gift to you in the first place. Don’t worry about making a name for yourself—rather, concern yourself with making the work. Period. Let the chips fall where they may. The beautiful and meaningful form that then is revealed under your chisel and mallet will emerge in the melee of flying chips. If it is the authentic article—real and costly art—it will compel other eyes to look. But it is always a gift. There are no guarantees. We work, we make, and we wait. It is all in the waiting.

2. The Christian Gurdjieffian esotericist Cynthia Bourgeault is entirely unorthodox. Antidote: The Wildest Christianity of All.

   Because she was in the room where it happened [that is, she was at Thomas Keating’s death bed], Bourgeault is able to report that “despite his earlier proclamation that ‘religious rituals and symbols . . . are meaningless to me now,’ Thomas returned faithfully to his old monastic breviary, reading and digesting the psalms as he had from his earlier year of monastic formation.” The passing Keating clung to Charles de Foucauld’s classic Abandonment Prayer “like a long-lost friend.” “Father,” Keating asked his monastic brothers to pray over him, “I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will.” Faced with the assumption from her followers that Keating’s appeal to a heavenly Father amounted to an offensively trinitarian “regression,” Bourgeault stands her ground: “This was not a regression, only the return of a mode of relationship that had carried him all his life.”

3. Christian spirituality should be as tediously illuminating as florescent light. Antidote: The Mary Underground.

   A descent into the Tomb of the Virgin in Jerusalem, where this journey began, illustrates the cryptic utterings of the church’s myriad mystics. This chamber, along with its countless global siblings, tells us that that depth outpaces height. The Mary underground is an atlas of architectural humility, an international template of contemplative prayer. Where the once-proud above-ground churches have vanished, sometimes only the depths remain. I expect that in the eschaton, the same thing might be said of Christianity itself, not to mention our own biographies. Only the depths remain.

4. Contemporary art is hopelessly “secular.” Antidote: The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (an interview with Jonathan Anderson). As Jonathan puts it:

   [S]ometimes what appears to be hostility [to religion among artists] is only a surface presentation, or a surface reading, of dynamics that in fact involve serious theological struggle and real theological insight. I’m quite interested in the ways irony, misdirection, paradox, self-deception, and negative dialectics surround the topic of religion in contemporary art. We are often talking about more than we think we are. Furthermore, overt hostility is often only one stage within a longer, more interesting development of a person’s life, thought, or art-making. The vast majority of artists who populate the histories of modern and contemporary art, for example, were raised in religious homes, and their work often involved a (sometimes hostile) distancing from this upbringing and a critical engagement with it. But it is also surprising how theologically important these processes often are and how many of these artists returned to some sort of faith later in life.

5. Evangelical elitism is helping. Antidote: I Kissed Evangelical Elitism Good Bye.

   [I]f I may boast just a little, I consider my own disillusionment to be more radical than that of the evangelical “elites” who may be compromising and selling out, catering to a need for esteem. I know there is something to be said for calling out the errors of one’s home community. Indeed, that is exactly what Noll was doing, which is why he described his famous book as an “epistle of a wounded lover.” But for some of the “evangelical elites” today it is all wound and no love, and that’s just boring. Maybe that’s why God played a trick on them by having the best of these critical historians of evangelicalism, Molly Worthen, show all of them up by herself converting to evangelicalism, and that’s not boring.

6. True mystics have no need for routine liturgy or actual congregations. Antidote: The Puffins and Evelyn Underhill.

   Evelyn Underhill, the first woman chosen to be an outside lecturer at Oxford, slowly concluded that mysticism flourished best within, not outside, classical Christianity. She insisted on calling a more mature publication not Mysticism but Mystics of the Church. “There is always, in the church as in the family,” Underhill intones in the book, “a perpetual opportunity of humility, self-effacement, genteel acceptance; of exerting that love which must be joined to power and sound mind if the full life of the Spirit is to be lived.” Though she appreciated Meister Eckhart’s vertiginous rhetoric, she came to prefer the clarity and dependability of Jan van Ruusbroek instead.

7. Thomas Merton was basically a Buddhist, never came to his senses after his reckless affair, and it was great for poetry that William Everson swapped his Dominican habit for buckskins. Antidote: Merton’s Nurse.

   Against the baseless rumours that he had become Buddhist, the very same day [Dec. 8, 1968, two days before his death] he wrote to a friend, “I have not found what I came here to find. I have not found any place of hermitage that is any better than the hermitage I have, or had, at Gethsemani, which is after all places, a great place.” Griffin wisely concludes that “had Merton returned from the East alive, he would have become more and more silent. . . . He would have gone on writing . . . but he would have published less and less.” Merton once prayed to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, “Teach me to go to the country beyond words and beyond names.” And she answered.

8. Everything is God (without any qualification on what we mean by “is”). Antidote: Boundary Waters.

   This Christian paradox of divine presence is to lazy pantheism what freshly ground pour-over coffee is to the Folgers crystals we have to satisfy ourselves with at our campsite. “My only ‘me’ is God. In my soul I see no one but God,” says Catherine of Genoa. “God is who we are more than we are,” writes Thomas Keating. Henri Nouwen testifies that true prayer of the heart is where “there are no divisions or distinctions and where we are totally one.” But in the richness of Christian tradition, these claims exist alongside Gregory of Nyssa’s insistence that “God dwells in you, penetrates you, yet is not confined in you.” R.S. Thomas’s declaration in “Emerging” that “[prayer] is the annihilation of difference” runs parallel to Karl Rahner’s claim that “God establishes and is the difference of the world from himself, and for this reason he establishes the closest possible unity precisely in the differentiation.”

9. Generative AI is great for education, especially freshman. Antidote: Welcome to Chartres.

10. Julian of Norwich is the property of one Christian confession. Antidote: Julian for Everyone (with some more info here).

    Ironically, the very same passages that cause some to conclude that Julian “reproduces insights of the great theologians of the Eastern Church” (and hence everyone should become Orthodox), might cause others to conclude that the deifying impulses retroactively labeled “Orthodox” are in no way limited to the East, enabling us to contentedly remain in Western traditions. That having been said, God’s call on others is (of course) not my call to make. When glaciers melt, hitherto concealed pathways emerge; may our mutual Lord guide the footsteps of each of us as we make sense of this softening terrain.

11. Psychedelics are essential building blocks for a well-integrated life, and modern psychologists don’t believe in demons. Antidote: Decoy Enlightenment (being my interview with Ashley Lande), with considerably more on the subject here. Here is Ashley:

    The irony of psychedelic ego death is that it often has the opposite effect—the ego becomes inflated, delusional, convinced of its immortality and superior grasp on some kind of esoteric meaning beyond meaning that the inexperienced do not possess.

12. The void gets the last metaphysical word. Antidote: Salvation By Dread Alone.

    The drugs did not generate the void any more than a dog whistle generates an attacking rottweiler. I know this because I had summoned the very same void as a child all on my own. I had what are now classified as “night terrors” when I was around twelve years old. I called forth these terrors honestly, which is to say, I thought my way into them rationally. It started when, on my bed in the dark, I began to entertain the idea of eternity as duration. As I went down that rational pathway, my soul and heart recoiled at the idea that such a duration might not necessarily be good. Instead, I sensed my posthumous existence might not end even if I wanted it to, even if I desperately wanted it to. My mind may have opened the doorway to this horrifying prospect, but what I encountered behind that doorway—I knew with certainty—was real. I knew it to be a discovery, not my invention, precisely because I so much wished it were my invention.

13. Evangelicalism is so over. Antidote: Evangelicalism: A Love Story.

    I have several times been among groups of Protestants invited to attend symposia at Mundelein Seminary, the flagship Catholic Seminary in the Chicago area. On one such occasion, we investigated medieval Catholic understandings of the doctrine of grace that were more in line with the Reformation (understandings that, arguably, were proscribed by the Council of Trent). On this occasion, I witnessed a remarkable moment. Just before the case could be made that the Catholic Church had always promulgated a robust Pauline sense of grace, the great scholar of mysticism Bernard McGinn interrupted the discussion and announced (and I quote from memory), “But by the sixteenth century, this understanding of grace had been buried!” Forgive me if I imagine the author of the biography of the Summa theologiae might know what he is talking about. And the Catholic defenders of John Henry Newman who concede “he most probably never read Luther firsthand” might know what they’re talking about as well.

14. Toronto and Chicago are entirely “secular” cities. Antidote: Toronto the Holy and (now with original photography), Our Lady of Chicago and Miracles on Roosevelt Road.

15. You have to choose between theistic evolution or young earth creationism. Antidote: On Christ and Coral. Which, some will have noticed, is a further antidote to horrible idea #8 above.

16. John Ruskin hated Mary and debates about complex theological issues are best advanced on social media. Antidote: Reefer Madness.

More next year, Deo volente, though not at such a steady rate. Material Mysticism will be toned down to six per year so I can finish Mere Iconography, which is coming along nicely. My sincere gratitude to readers of this stack. Happy Fourth Day of Christmas to all!

The mixing of rocks and art history in said piece is deliberately, you will have already suspected, Ruskinian. John Ruskin’s holistic regard of science, nature, economics, and art anticipated the “Sophiological” elements of the celebrated Russian Orthodox theologians who came after him. Both Michael Wheeler and Aidan Nichols have suggested as much at book length. “Sophiology,” after all, is just a stylized, deeply Scriptural way of saying that there is a deep Wisdom embedded into how God made the world, a wisdom that cannot be entirely reduced to, but most certainly culminates in, the Virgin Mary’s yes to God. Not to mention yours and mine.

And make no mistake, Ruskin the lover of Wisdom was also a lover of Mary. Those who don’t think so have clearly not been to his house. Ruskin’s office at Brantwood in the Lake District, after all, is effectively a Marian shrine. “[T]he lustre of the limbs of the Aphrodite is faint beside that of the brow of the Madonna,” the young Ruskin wrote in Modern Painters (WJR, I, 114). Or as the mature Ruskin wrote in The Eagle’s Nest, “[W]e are commanded to know her,” that is Wisdom, “as queen of the populous world, ‘rejoicing in the habitable parts of the Earth, and whose delights are with the sons of Men’” (WJR, XXII, 136). Ruskin’s so-called “unconversion” of 1858 must be paired with his re-conversion in Venice in 1876-77, where the Christmas story in particular convinced him that “love survives the grave; that human personality continues; that men and women live on earth under heavenly guidance even if they cannot discern it” (151-52).

After farming (shout out to a real live actual farmer I know), one might even say that art history has long been a primary mode of Sophiology, at least in the discipline’s Anglophone, Ruskinian mode (until the Germans ruined it). As Brian Robinette argues—drawing on Rowan Williams and Sergius Bulgakov—sophianic perception, more welcoming than dominating, “does not require the accumulation of peak aesthetic experiences so much as it entails a sustained willingness to welcome and grow more sensitive to the beauty at the heart of created reality, just as it is” (260). Ruskin was, and I think through his writing remains, a supreme exemplar of such sustained willingness.

Speaking of things as they are—including strip malls—here’s the video for my “regional interest” (I love that phrase) talk regarding miracles alongside Roosevelt Road in Chicagoland, wherein I express the smallest of frustrations with Carlos Eire’s wonderful book, They Flew. Perhaps it’s a set up for an essay I may one day write on the spirituality of Route 66. But with a print essay coming out this month in Mockingbird Magazine about the Precious Moments Chapel, maybe Route 66 is already covered. If you don’t live anywhere near Roosevelt Road I don’t see why you would in any way be interested in this talk. If you do, how could you possibly look away?

On the podcast end, my friends Tim Taylor and Enoch Hill and I enjoyed discussing saints at Choosing Better, my friend John Drury re-released a Christmas conversation at Fresh Texts, some others have told me they have found this conversation helpful from the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, and I have a forthcoming (next week) tell-all Christmas conversation with Mark Labberton where we cover some new Marian terrain.

Now an apology. I truly hate internet debates (and Substack’s awkward comment thread formatting doesn’t help), and I’m genuinely sorry to have stirred one up by making a sarcastic remark about confirmed universalists that emerged from hearing Christ’s words read aloud during an evening prayer service. I did not intend to cast aspersion on all who believe in universalism or who have written about it, but only to maintain room for those such as myself who consider that this particular path of inquiry is best left open. The hope-not-doctrine position seems to be drawing more and more aspersion of late (“worse than Arianism,” said one interlocutor to me), but I take it the hell of uncool theological opinions is only purgative, not eternal.

Precisely because I hope that all shall be saved, I continue to wonder if it is wise to proclaim that in the present as settled fact. With respect and even affection for both, I therefore side with Hart the elder. I remain drawn to the universalist position (especially as Al Kimel so irenically formulates it, but really, no one can top my son’s case). Still, in such delicate and weighty matters, my casual sarcasm was uncalled for. I should have done what Jesus counsels in that passage instead of posting about it. I am cheered that my universalist friends were consistent enough to not just say go to hell; and again, because I do hope all shall be saved, this is a debate I desperately hope to lose.

Finally, if anyone is disappointed because they wished from the title that this post would be about psychotropics, sorry, not this time (but I had you covered a few months back).

Merry third week of Advent, and soon Christmas. The Word became flesh, which is the best of news for anyone with flesh. Those with flesh who still actually read long essays like the one here introduced, thank you for doing so, and all pity to the rest of you so-called “readers,” the tiny, fleshless, ontologically bankrupt web-scanning bots who try.

As a Black Friday bonus, this lecture and post are totally free (actually, they’re always free). But thank you sincerely to all subscribers.

Also, if you’re in Toronto tomorrow (Wednesday) please come on out for the Larkin-Stuart lecture. It’s free and you can register here. Outlandish and even puzzling melange of subject matter absolutely guaranteed.

Also, if you’d like to join us at the University of Toronto for the Larkin-Stuart lecture entitled “Toronto the Holy” later this month, please do. There are several events surrounding the 70th anniversary of the sumptuous Trinity Chapel by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. I’ve managed to squeeze a lot into this Canadian cocktail of an address: Henri Nouwen, Inuit art, Emily Carr, Ojibwe Christianity, Piero della Francesca, even the meta-historical Fall. It’s free but if you’d like to attend you must register here. The conference the next day looks wonderful and I’ll be there for all of it.

Right after that I’ll be the Orthodox Academy of Crete for a conference on Entangled Christianities. The rush of a research breakthrough is quite the thrill, and for this paper, I’m glad to say I think I made one. I am therefore especially excited to present on unexpected places that Church of the East (a.k.a. “Nestorian”) Syriac influence appears in the frescoes of Cyprus, frescoes which remain the key to all theologies (more on those frescoes this book of course).

On the local end, if you’d like to come by on Dec. 8 to learn about a string of Marian “Miracles on Roosevelt Road” here in Chicagoland at the good ol’ Wheaton Public Library, you can register here. You can watch this one online as well, but to have you in person would be wonderful.

Also, please stay tuned for an article in Mockingbird Magazine on the Precious Moments Chapel (wherein kitsch will be redeemed), and for this month’s Material Mysticism which will be entitled “Evangelicalism: A Love Story” (you can sign up, as always, here).

Thank you as ever for reading.

This post has a great title, but it is borrowed. It’s part of a chapter title from Boston College theology professor Brian Robinette’s luminous book, The Difference Nothing Makes (which is now in paperback and therefore much more affordable). Robinette’s Merton-infused book explores “the liberating but also painful and sometimes ambiguous process of being purged of distortive conceptions of God.”

This purgative process involves a kind of death, a relinquishing of false securities and projective fantasies that set themselves up as ultimate, but which turn out to be suffocating self-enclosures…. (176)

Turning toward modern atheism, Robinette then claims there to be a

potential filiation between [this] contemplative dispossession and the existential homelessness felt by many in our contemporary age—the sense of being in a spiritual desert, of being rudderless, hollow, or perhaps ontologically forlorn, abandoned to a time when God seems absent or barely noticeable (177).

This book is no revisionist abandonment of theological essentials, which is in part why I commend it. On the contrary it begins with a thorough evisceration of such juvenile maneuvering, moving us toward genuinely Christian mysticism instead.

The contemplative disposition is not a defensive reaction to this void but, paradoxically, an abiding with it and in it, of patiently allowing it to be. Contemplation does not fight the inchoate sense of “nothingness” that lurks within human consciousness, or simply declare it tragic, absurd, but entrusts itself to it with poverty of spirit. In this way [and here comes Merton] “the option of absolute despair is turned into perfect hope…. From the darkness comes light. From death, life. From the abyss there comes, unaccountably, the mysterious gift of the Spirit sent by God to make all things new, to transform the created and redeemed world, and to re-establish all things in Christ” (179-80).

I cite Robinette here for self-serving reasons. Namely, to set up my likewise Merton-infused claim to have enshrined (I hope) similar insights in narrative and material form. The narrative aspect I refer to is my own bouts with the so-called void, and the material dimension is the way all of this came to a head for me amidst the ruins of Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest. Which is to say, if Robinette takes us to a metaphorical desert, I take us to a literal one.

I hope you enjoy Salvation By Dread Alone, the October edition of Material Mysticism.

Thank you as ever for reading. And remember, you can subscribe for future installments (one email per month, no spam) here.

This August my colleague Tim Taylor and I walked into an evening worship service at Wheaton College’s campus in northern Wisconsin. It was part of our new student orientation retreat, and on the surface there was not much to comment on: just a room packed full of students praising God together, expounding the Bible and praying—pretty standard around here. What was not standard though was that it was completely unscheduled in the formal program, and entirely student organized and led. A freshman woman looked at the two of us as we entered and said, “The class of ‘29 has a real heart for the Lord.”

Now well into the semester, this “Quiet Revival” of sorts continues, in step with similar happenings around the globe. Events have taken place on campus and in dormitories, as reported by The Wheaton Record. There was a scheduled service of all-night prayer, confession and worship just this homecoming weekend as well from 10pm-6:30am. Perhaps it’s enough to wonder if critics of Wheaton earlier this year who declared the “Shekhinah has departed” from our college will find themselves asking, “Has the Shekhinah returned?”

I remember well Wheaton’s oft-commented upon 1995 revival, which events such as these are often measured against. When I lecture about Savonarola and the bonfire of the vanities in fifteenth-century Florence, I always tell the ‘95 revival story of a massive bag full of repentance contraband (porn, explicit CDs, drugs) that were piled into a pick-up truck and brought to a nearby dumpster with the driver praying he would not get pulled over as there would be a lot of explaining to do. I also remember some fellow students deciding that because of that revival, their studies could be sidelined. Why should one bother studying chemistry or studio art, for example, when one could, inspired by the revival, cast down your nets to pursue full time missionary work instead?

As it happens, just a few hours before this weekend’s all-night prayer service took place came a wonderful answer to that question. Two Wheaton alums from back in the ‘95 revival days, who now teach at Asbury (Josh Smith and Margaret Park Smith of Dovetail Practice), gave a talk for their current show Attention Bridge that beautifully exemplified how serious art can in fact contribute to and honor such happenings. During the Asbury Outpouring in February of 2023, these professors fired and glazed gorgeous urns, took them to the revival services to absorb the atmosphere (depicted below), and then reverently sealed the vessels.

There is no superstitious silliness at work here, but a conceptually sophisticated and even playful “containment” of the Spirit who, these believing artists very much know, can never be contained. These artists spoke of God’s presence not just in dramatic worship experiences (important as those may be), but in snail-pace, everyday quotidian silence as well. “In quietness and in trust shall be your strength” (Isaiah 30:15). As these skilled and highly trained makers spoke about their efforts to avoid commodification while retaining intellectual rigor and humility, there was a joyful sense of their passing on the beauty of what happened at Asbury to Wheaton. Shortly thereafter, this weekend’s all-night prayer vigil commenced.

Questioning how the liberal arts integrates with Christianity, Tertullian famously asked “What hath Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Dovetail Practice asked, “What does art have to do with revival?” The answer to both questions is… a lot. For like those urns, we too are earthen ware!

Whatever is going on at Wheaton (and as my colleague Dan Haase says, it might be best not to label it), it is too early to tell what will come of it. As a wise carpenter once said, you will know them by their fruits. But integration is everything. I wish they had pasted a massive sign with those words in the back of Pierce Chapel where the revival took place back in 1995. Confession and adoration are abundantly necessary, but folding such elements into everyday life is equally indispensable, helping us realize that all vocations can be properly “spiritual.” I am grateful that the artists of Dovetail Practice, drawing from revival experiences at Wheaton and Asbury, made that so clear this weekend. Which is to say, we’ve learned a lot about revival since the Nineties. I even wonder if this show marks a new maturity in Christian colleges and Art departments within them.

Back in ‘95, I wish I had known more about the ancient desert fathers and mothers, the Abbas and the Ammas, who also knew how to integrate laudable spiritual ambitions. They too had their all-night prayer vigils. But when faced with a monk who went beyond even that, who was so “spiritual” that he desired to wear a scratchy, straw mat in perpetual penitence, Abba Ammonas told him, in effect, he didn’t need to. The zealous monk responded by tripling down, going even further, saying to Ammonas:

“Three thoughts occupy me, either, should I wander in the deserts, or should I go to a foreign land where no-one knows me, or should I shut myself up in a cell without opening the door to anyone, eating only every second day.” Abba Ammonas replied, “It is not right for you to do any of these three things. Rather, sit in your cell and eat a little every day, keeping the word of the publican [i.e. the Jesus Prayer] always in your heart, and you may be saved” (Ammonas 4, p. 26, italics added).

With Ammonas’ counsel to integration and moderation in mind, I hope our prayed up students get some good rest. We’ll see them on Monday in the Art Department where they’ll be making art, where we’ll keep up our study of (among other things) the Virgin Mary in Scripture and tradition and the mosaics and icons of the Early Church. We’ll be doing all this just a few floors above the gallery exhibition where the Spirit is reverently sealed in an urn—the Spirit who, I am happy to report, keeps on getting out.

That case is not so hard to make anymore. It is encouraging (is that the right word?) to read Robert Falconer’s The Others Within, made well known by this somewhat skeptical and oft-cited review. Falconer’s dramatic healing from a sexually abusive childhood led him to Internal Family Systems psychology, which entails engaging separate parts of the psyche in pursuit of wholeness. Falconer naively assumed all such parts were fragments of benevolent psychic whole, until (like Peck) experience taught him the “no bad parts” ideology was false. “I’m going to crush her like a worm, the same way I’m going to crush you,” says one of these “parts” to him during a session with a female client. This was the “case that changed [his] life.” Falconer came to see that “the trauma model [he was trained by] must be contained in something much, much larger (25). I far prefer Peck’s wisdom in cleaving to a traditional Christian metaphysics when dealing with these entities. Nevertheless, Falconer has the humility to say:

I have no idea about the metaphysical realities behind it, but I think we can say with great certainty that possession and possession-related phenomena are one of the most widely distributed cultural characteristics, found in tribes and cultures all over the planet and as far back in history as we can trace. This phenomenon can destroy people’s lives, and it can also help them changes in wonderful ways [i.e. by moving them from evil toward wholeness]. It is psychologically important — this is absolutely clear. Because of this, I think it is incumbent upon us to take it seriously and study it, not just sneer and walk away (68).

The book is a treasure trove of cultural traditions surrounding possession and interviews that offer strategies for healing, including insights from Christian exorcists (Catholic and Protestant) and the perspectives of Thomas Aquinas, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maggie Ross and William Johnston (some of my favorites). Perhaps the book’s most unintentionally humorous line comes when, commenting on the reality of demonic entities, Falconer concedes, “this does seem to be what the bible says” (235). Still, I found it particularly interesting that the copy I got from the library came with certain sections on Indigenous evil spirits covered up by a previous user. Maybe there is some wisdom to this reticence.

However, I will admit to some confusion that in the face of the reality of evil, Falconer welcomes further exploration, including engaging what are commonly called “machine elves,” namely, the beings encountered by people tripping on DMT. I am as puzzled by accounts of these beings as anyone, and am aware that recorded interactions (and I expect most are not recorded) with such beings are frequently “positive.” Still, wouldn’t Falconer’s “radical pragmatist” approach open to “what works” also be willing to entertain the Catholic exorcist’s advice recorded in the very same book, namely “not to dialogue with them — they are more intelligent than we are and are very tricky” (66)?

Falconer is himself inspired by Peck’s insistence that “explanation is falsity; mystery is truth” in this baffling spiritual arena. Falconer admits, “I want to have that engraved over the door to my house, but still I have this ceaseless urge to explain” (188). But wouldn’t “radical pragmatism” consider there to be serious risk in such an approach? If—as Falconer’s books makes undeniable—evil entities exist, and that they are opposed to goodness, might it not be wise to avoid the drugs that—Falconer’s book also makes undeniable—resolutely expose us to them?

All of this is by way of introducing the September issue of Material Mysticism, an interview with talented writer, Ashley Lande, author of The Things That Would Make Everything Okay Forever: Transcendence, Psychedelics and Jesus Christ. Lande has tripped circles around most presumed experts on psychedelics, and along the way she learned a great deal about evil, and how to be delivered from it. There are aspects of reality, she discovered, to which it is a mercy that we remain closed.

Falconer’s book rightly counsels against fear when confronting the demonic, and on that score, please spare me the claim that Lande’s firm position against psychedelics (which, incidentally, I share) is “fear-based.” On the contrary, Lande’s position, growing from vast experience, has matured into a fearless caution. Lande’s approach to evil reminds me of Teresa of Ávila’s remarks about Satan.

I don’t understand these fears, “The devil! The devil!” when we can say “God! God!” and make the devil tremble….. A fig [a rude gesture in Spanish society at that time] for all the devils, for they shall fear me. (223).

But for both Teresa of Ávila and Ashley Lande, their fearlessness does not come from IFS techniques, “Path” meditation, appeals to the Jungian “Self,” Tibbetan tulpas or ayahuasca retreats (interesting as all that may be), but from the power of the name of Jesus Christ. Psychedelic enthusiasts who mistake Lande’s measured prudence for timidity, and who encourage further exploration into the full pantry of psychedelics, might ask themselves a very pragmatic question: How do you know you’re not like the early M. Scott Peck?

The only reason I can think of for not reading Ashley’s wise commentary on the psychedelic revival in this interview is because you choose to just skip to her remarkable book instead. Better yet, why not do both?

And remember…

Note: This was published in 2018 at the Studio for Art, Faith and History following the completion of a painting created by a group of students led by Bruce Herman and I in the summer of 2016 in Orvieto, Italy. I have added more photos and a new epilogue departing from remarks I gave at Bruce’s retirement celebration (but, “retirement” or not, Bruce shows no signs of slowing down).

Introduction

The year 2017, and the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation with it, has come and gone. Germany tour coupons have expired, Luther artifacts have returned to their home museums, celebratory volumes have been printed, and the Reformation specialist speaking circuits have finally wound down. The church, of course, remains divided. Some even speak of a chilling of inter-Christian concord, an extension of what many have called “ecumenical winter.” It is a tone well expressed in Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory's closing words to the two volume catalogue of the magnificent Minneapolis Institute of Art’s Luther exhibition: “Luther's stand created the skepticism he wanted to avoid. Where to stand now? Wherever.”

But international possibilities complicate primarily American conversations. In the summer of 2016, with the quincentennial of the Reformation in view, Gordon College’s program in Orvieto, Italy, decided to give receptive ecumenism another try. And so, we made a Madonna. Or more accurately, we made another one. Already there had been considerable ecumenical efforts in this regard in this hilltop Italian town. Under the generous patronage of the Augustinian friar and beloved former Catholic bishop Giovanni Scanavino, international conferences had brought Protestants and Catholics into serious conversation. These controversial initiatives resulted in an astonishing procession: When a local Catholic woman who had served as a model for a painting of the Virgin Mary by artist Bruce Herman tragically died in childbirth, the town of Orvieto witnessed what might have been a first in Christian history: A Catholic woman being mourned through a procession of an image of the Virgin Mary painted by an American evangelical college professor.

A New Madonna of Mercy

To continue this tradition of ecumenical risk, Orvieto program director Matt Doll invited Bruce Herman and myself to bring a studio art and art history class together, a collaboration which would result in another painting that questioned traditional Christian divisions. Our efforts went well with recent appreciations of Luther’s view of beauty, vindications of the Reformer’s view of incongruous grace, alongside what has been called an ecumenism of beauty or ecumenism in the arts. Our experiment took the form of a Madonna della Misericordia (Madonna of Mercy). The image has a longstanding history in this region of Italy, a history exhaustively explored by Katherine Brown’s gorgeous monograph on the subject. But our aim was not just to study the history of the image, but to contribute to that history ourselves.

We had four short weeks to create the painting, which we named Madonna of the Chapter House (the name we gave her, echoing the former monastery where students now gather). Research, design, construction, and installation all needed to occur within this time frame. Our fantastic group of students were divided into an art history class taught by me, in which we read the Beneficio di Cristo, the illegal devotional manual that disseminated proto-Protestant ideas in Italy, and which influenced Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna (whose Orvieto connection is described in Damon DiMauro's three-part essay). The studio art class was taught by Bruce Herman. The art historians shared with the studio artists what we were learning in our classroom, and the bottega (Italian for art studio) shared with us whether what we were learning could practically fit into an altarpiece.

Looking Back

While we hope that the image, to a certain extent, speaks for itself, a few comments are in order to clarify our intention. First off, following a very ancient art historical tradition, we included living figures in the painting, including some participants and the instructors of our course. Most of the people depicted in the painting protested their inclusion (myself especially!), but we finally resigned to permit ourselves to be depicted—not as a selfie with Mary, but as representations of the living church, which is what the Madonna of Mercy image is primarily about. We realize that there are some who would argue that Protestants do not belong under the banner of the true ecclesia. But well, there we are. Mary shelters us too.

Beyond the group under Mary’s garment on the right is Professor John Skillen, the founder of the program in Orvieto, holding a book. He represents the Benedictine order, and seems to be sliding down the zebra-pattern Orvieto Duomo. To the left is program director, Professor Matthew Doll. He represents the Franciscan order, alongside the works of nature represented by Umbrian farms. Overall, the right and left sides display the proper (and ever elusive!) relationship between structure and spirit, nature and culture, deans and professors, institution-building and prophetic critique. Both are necessary. Needless to say, the inability to retain this balance—through the fault of both parties—is what led to the divisions of the Reformation in the first place.

There is another dimension to our inclusion of St. Francis as well. The excessive polemics of sixteenth-century prints, what Carlos Eire calls the “saturation carpet bombing” of Reformation propaganda (for and against it) was so extreme in Luther’s time that even Francis was caught in the crossfire. In one particularly nasty print by Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515-1586), Francis was mocked as an ineffective mediator before a furious Father raining wrath on the indulgence trade. But as the evangelical historian Tim Larsen points out, Francis may have been more committed to the classic evangelical distinctives (biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism and activism) than any evangelical who has ever lived. Accordingly, our positive inclusion of the great Francesco was one attempt to make amends for undeniable Protestant mistakes.

Perhaps the most notable part of the images is that Christ is under Mary’s garment along with students and professors. Here we liberally quoted from Michelangelo’s pièta for Vittoria Colonna. As Alexander Nagel has argued, the exchange of poetic and artistic gifts between Colonna and Michelangelo offered an alternative to the “prevailing system of works, indulgences, and ‘endowments’ in which art production had become so centrally implicated.” Michelangelo’s gift of this particular drawing to Colonna represented the gift of God’s free, unmerited grace and the new birth of faith. The image suggests that even Mary, who gave birth to God, was also born again by faith. We are well aware that Michelangelo and Colonna’s involvement in reform circles does not make them “Protestants” per se (which was, of course, illegal), but their comparative sympathy to Reformation currents is very well attested. Both figures were members of the Spirituali, the Italian reform movement that sought Catholic rapprochement with Protestant ideas without dividing the church, a movement which also offers much to those hoping for the healing of that division today.

By placing Christ underneath Mary we have admittedly offered a Protestant correction to the Madonna of Mercy motif, but it needs be kept in mind we are not the first to suggest such an amendment. In sixteenth-century Basel, as the Reformation swept through the area of modern Switzerland, the artist Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) painted his own Madonna of Mercy. But instead of Mary being the dispenser of grace, as she is in Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks, it is Jesus who offers the hand of blessing instead. Holbein could not continue this fruitful motif, however, because Reformed iconoclasts soon put him out of a job, and he fled north to paint Erasmus and Henry VIII. And so, in our Christ-centered Madonna of Mercy, we simply picked up where Holbein left off.

Looking East

The Orthodox tradition sometimes stands aloof from Protestant/Catholic infighting, but we managed to drag them in as well. After all, as historian Ron Rittgers observes, “Perhaps the larger goal of 2017 should be to prepare the way for 2054 when Christians will observe the millennial anniversary of the tragic, unnecessary schism between Catholics and the Orthodox.”

Accordingly, we brought in the beloved Orthodox tradition of the “Pokrov Icon,” celebrating when Mary appeared in Constantinople, spreading her veil in a sign of protection (the red cloth above her head). There is a wonderful resonance between the Catholic Madonna of Mercy’s protective garment, and Mary’s protective veil in the Orthodox tradition—and in our image that blanketing love extends to all of us, Protestants too.

But there are divisions within the Orthodox world that we aimed to also address. We therefore included the oft-neglected Oriental Orthodox communions by depicting the modern martyrs of the Oriental Orthodox Church, beheaded on the shore of Libya by ISIL on February 12, 2015. These figures, to which we are united in what Pope Francis calls an ecumenism of blood, can be understood as a modern version of the forty martyrs of Sebaste. But in our image, the murder is more immediate than we might like. It happens not in a distant place, but on the front pavement of the Servite monastery that houses the Gordon program in Orvieto. The connection to the European refugee crisis is deliberate, and the tents are not dissimilar from Marc Chagall’s employment depictions of threatened homes in his White Crucifixion of 1938.

Looking South

But we went further than this in an attempt to include the booming church of the Global South. Karen Bergman, who was assistant director of the Gordon program in Italy as we created our image, spoke movingly of her experience at the Third Lausanne Congress in South Africa that resulted in the Cape Town Commitment. Karen’s role as a volunteer was to work the translation booth. She was the first face these Christians from around the world saw, and as anyone who has met Karen knows, she has the gift of hospitality. And so, we made a difficult choice. It was tempting to insert an artificial diversity into our image that did not accurately reflect our community. But instead we used Karen’s face as the face of welcome to other parts of the Body of Christ, because of her experience in South Africa. This may not be satisfying enough for some, but it was more important for us to be honest about where we are than to pretend we have arrived.

Notice, however, that Karen is distinguished from the historical Mary in the background, about whom we know so little. "God has revealed very little to us about her," writes Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation, and "hers is the most hidden of sanctities." The point of the juxtaposition is straightforward enough: Every ordinary Christian is called to be Marian in one dimension or another, which far from being controversial, is a hallmark of the Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions. We may not yet be able to eat together, but we can agree with St. John Paul II when he writes that “there is a profound analogy between the Fiat which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord.”

Finally, viewers of the Madonna of the Chapter House will not miss the threefold rose that represents the Trinity. We had Canto XXXIII of Dante's Paradiso in mind here: “Within your womb was lit once more the flame/ Of that love through whose warmth this flower opened / To its full bloom in everlasting peace.” But of course, rose symbolism has also been used by Protestants, whether the Luther rose which has long represented the Reformer, George MacDonald (“the fire was a huge heap of roses,” Phantastes) or T.S. Eliot (“the fire and the rose are one,” Little Gidding). That there are three of these roses is a subtle evocation, as opposed to direct representation, of the mystery of the Trinity.

But lest this all be teetering toward the theology of glory of which Luther was suspicious, we capped off our image with an inescapable reminder of the theology of the cross. The angel with the instruments of the Passion above allude to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a Catholic icon at St. Alphonsus Ligouri in Rome, which originated as an Orthodox image on the island of Cyprus in 1192, where it was known as The Virgin of the Passion. In its original form, this icon was an Orthodox Christian response to the violence of the Crusades, evoking a non-triumphalist faith of suffering Christian love. The history of the Virgin of the Passion icon, now embedded in the Madonna of the Chapter House, is tangible evidence that God can repurpose the most aggressive Christian violence no less surely than he redeemed the violence of Calvary.

Looking Forward: Our Lady of 2054

Art, of course, is no substitute for sacramental communion. It is an appetizer at best. But we did share many appetizers at the opening reception for the Madonna of the Chapter House in 2016, when we invited the Catholic townspeople to come see our response to their own Madonna of Mercy in the Orvieto Cathedral, even if we cannot commune in that Cathedral ourselves. Since then our image stood watch in Orvieto through the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. It might even stand watch over a different anniversary, marking one thousand years of schism between Catholic and Orthodox Christians in 2054.

The mystery of Christian disunity – whether the fractures of 431 and 451 (the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon), 1054 (the Great Schism) or 1517 (the Reformation), is not something any singular shifting of personal allegiance can solve. “All Christians must be considered schismatics,” continues Rittgers, “no Christian church is immune from this accusation, including Catholics and the Orthodox.…” To ask a Protestant to “choose” between the conflicting claims of the Catholic or Orthodox churches presents an “impossible choice between two mothers.” Our verbal theological systems demand consistency, but as Stephen Long puts it, “Our divisions should never be rendered intelligible, and we should never be satisfied with them. They are, and always will be, like evil itself, puzzling, enigmatic and absurd.” Some may hasten to a premature wedding feast, convinced the whole church subsists inviolate in one particular communion. It is hard to begrudge such excitement. Others of us are waiting to attend the wedding feast, “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God….” (Ephesians 4:13).

But that doesn't mean we can't work on the décor.

Epilogue (September 7, 2025)

I had foolishly thought I had written everything I could about this painting, but years after its creation, while describing it to students, I noticed some additional dimensions. First, I realized that we had also inadvertently made an image of St. Anne, the mother of Mary, which is to say, the grandmother of God. A comparison of our image to a classic image by Masaccio shows that figure hovering behind Mary in the background is perhaps best construed as Anne. I am therefore much more comfortable now referring to the foregrounded figure, which Karen modeled for, to be Mary herself.

Identifying the frontal figure as Mary, and the background figure as St. Anne, does not eliminate the Marian dimensions of all Christians mentioned above, but only amplifies them. Karen, our model for Mary, is both the Virgin and herself. We need not choose between actual (the historic Mary) and ecclesial (all Christians) dimensions of Mary. Both are always in play, especially in iconography. For as Augustine put it,

[Mary] conceived Christ in her heart before she did so in her womb…. Being Christ’s disciple was more meritorious than being his mother. The maternal relationship would have meant nothing to Mary is she hadn’t carried Christ in a more blessed way in her heart than in her flesh” (Sermo 72A 185-186).

Insofar as she literally gave birth to God in Christ, Mary is very much unlike us. Insofar as she believed and trusted in Christ for everything, she invites us to be like her indeed.

But I discovered more than Jesus’s grandmother alone. As mentioned, we were deliberately drawing on the Pokrov tradition when we made our painting, but it turns out we were drawing on it in more ways that I had thought, even to the point of personal humiliation. The Andrew who received the vision of Mary related in the Pokrov icon is not just any Andrew, but Andrew the Fool, the unglamorous tenth-century slave of a Constantinopolitan bodyguard. Andrew’s unique vocation was to “mock the world.” Accordingly he feigned drunkenness by day and prayed to God by night. In so doing he became the laughing stock of the town, but also the revealer of hearts.

A brief excerpt from the Life of St. Andrew offers a vivid sense of his modus operandi:

[W]hen [Andrew] was relieving himself behind a tavern in front of the passers-by, a young man who saw him easing himself without blushing told the tavern keeper, and he, coming out and catching sight of the holy man, took a rod and beat him with all his might. Another shameless man of brutal character passed by… and struck him with his rod as hard as he could, so that the blow was heard far away. The holy man looked at his tormentor and moaned bitterly. He rose and, coming close to him, fell down on the ground and kissed his feet, praying for him (75).

Indeed, long before St. Francis of Assisi, there was a different holy fool who went naked in public, and dramatically forgave his assailants. But Andrew’s foolishness becomes the gateway of grace. It all culminated in a vision of heavenly wisdom, which is to say, an appearance of the Virgin Mary herself covering him and the church with her veil.

The late discovery that I made, that Bruce may very well have been cheekily aware of all along, is that in this painting I was cast in the role of the fool, appearing where the half naked Andrew does in the traditional composition (though I am fortunately clothed).

Perhaps this placement, and my now drawing attention to it, is the ultimate manifestation of vanity concealed as piety. Look at me, I’m as humble as Andrew the Fool! But to put a kinder spin on this discovery, maybe it conveys Bruce’s counsel not only to me, but to all of us, to be that fool, to (if you’ll pardon the tired phrase) not to take ourselves too seriously. To not just study the art history of the past but to defy one’s scholarly training—against a cacophony of inner protestation—and take the risk of imitating it in the present. To not just admire the traditions discretely labelled “Catholic,” “Orthodox” and “Protestant” by their fastidious contemporary custodians, but to go so far as to attempt a reverent fusion (more on that here).

Theology matters, and falsehood is to be assiduously avoided. Much ecumencial work remains to be done, not the least of which is to restrain Protestantism’s disastrous tendencies to separate itself further from classic communions with increasingly antinomian or antimetaphysical claims. Even so, the grace-centered tradition of Protestantism—Anglicanism in particular—is where I find myself. If I did not have that option, things might be otherwise; but thanks be to God I do. If you consider that foolish, go ahead and whack me; I just might kiss your feet.

May the same foolish wisdom apply to you, wherever you find yourself in the scattered, wayward, faltering, beautiful Body of Christ. And if you’re not yet a Christian, fix that. Get yourself baptized, gather for worship, recite the Creed, receive the Eucharist (not occasionally, but weekly). Which is to say, sidle over here under Mary’s ecclesial mantle right quick, and don’t be content with the fringes.

Because it’s crazy out there, and not a one of us will make it alone.

Credits: Matt Doll: program director / design
Bruce Herman: maestro painter
Karen Bergman: assistant to director / Mary model
Matt Milliner: art historian
John Skillen: founding program director

Student artists/art historians: Michael Degenero, Sara Golden, Lexi Carlson, Tiffany Gong, Annika Schultz, William Bruno, Katie Bracy, Ellen Bazzoli, Rachel Goliher, Natalie Haleen, Nathan Tarr, Amy Tews, Emma Wagner, Daniel Simonds, Skylie Dozier, Emmeline Zhu

One evening in 1995, at an evangelical Bible study in New Jersey for twenty-­somethings, I learned that an acquaintance of mine had just dropped out of medical school and was planning to drive to a Hare Krishna ashram in Northern California. We were both tired of the kind of evangelical Christianity that had spawned the group that brought us together, the group that taught us about Christ’s love and his impending return, the group that cared for us both deeply. She was leaving the next morning. I decided to go along.

On the other side of the country, we visited the pleasant garden compound that my friend was planning to join. I briefly contemplated joining myself. This was a Hare Krishna 2.0 kind of place, with less swaying and more business sense. The guru’s name was Siddhaswarupananda, though his parents would have known him as Chris ­Butler. ­Butler became a self-realized yogi by the age of ­twenty, which is certainly more than I could say for myself at that age. The list of those he has influenced is impressive, including the first Hindu member of Congress, Hawaii’s Tulsi Gabbard, who was sworn in with her hand on a copy of the Bhagavad Gita.

While at the ashram, I wrangled with those who were assigned to answer my questions about Hinduism. I was touched by the sincerity of the devotees, who were largely right—it seemed to me—in their assessment of Western cultural exhaustion. Their yoga poses impressed. One young man, a redheaded Norwegian in his early thirties, guided me through a book filled with images of Krishna while his eyes dewed with tears of love.

When my questions kept coming, I was ushered into a room with a small television playing videotapes of Butler’s lectures, which I dutifully watched. I was prepared to be convinced, but later that night, a good way into the videos, Butler flatly suggested that the early Church Father Origen believed in ­reincarnation. It was then that the spell the ashram was weaving was broken. True, the guru’s charisma could not be channeled through a VHS tape, but more to the point, I had learned enough about ­Origen in the mandatory theology class at the evangelical college I was attending (and where I now teach) to ­realize that Butler’s claim was false. I left the next morning, with no money to speak of, and hitchhiked my way back across the country to the Christianity I had left behind.

Only a few years later, I was a youth minister at a Presbyterian church and preparing to take a group of high school students to Shanghai as part of a cultural exchange program. On a preparatory trip to orient the leaders, we visited the Grand Buddha at Ling Shan, a nearly three-hundred-foot-tall bronze statue located a few hours’ drive from the city. The site was swarmed with people who were making their way, on their knees, up the massive stairway toward the statue. I walked up the stairs and, at the top, realized that the Buddha’s big toe alone was nearly the size of my Ford Focus. I asked a companion, a Presbyterian minister from a different church, what he made of the scene. “They’re worshiping idols,” he flatly declared. Our Chinese leader was a Protestant pastor whose Buddhist father had beaten him for becoming a Christian. He was radiantly kind, passionately committed to Jesus, and did little to help us understand the statue.

When I brought my students back to the same site, they asked me about the massive Buddha. Despite considerable preparatory study, I couldn’t do much better, I’m afraid. Our journey was fruitful nonetheless. Back in Shanghai, a young Chinese student, hearing us singing praise songs one evening, requested that we baptize him. The baptism was performed by our Chinese host, who poured water over his head in the hotel bathroom as we all squeezed in to watch. Why the young man came to us, I still don’t quite understand. The churches in Shanghai were so packed that we had to arrive an hour early to get a seat. But his baptism meant a great deal to our group, to him, and, of course, to God.

Decades later, I found myself reading Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist texts. As an art historian I had learned enough about Eastern art and architecture to discuss them with some degree of sensitivity. Now, however, I was reading for personal rather than professional interest. I was wading more deeply into the territory of the mystics: the Philokalia and the Victorines, Bernard and Francis, Eckhart, John of the Cross, and Luther. And I had been trying, as a result, to do less thinking and more silent praying, which I suppose helps explain my attraction to Eastern sources. Just as those who enjoy discursive theology find themselves drawn to non-Christian philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger for refinement and calibration, so the discovery of Christian contemplation necessitated—for me at least—deeper familiarity with the East.

For readers of my time and place, Thomas ­Merton remains an important guide. I had heard varying opinions as to whether he remained faithful to Christianity in his Eastern experiments. I was surprised, therefore, to realize that Merton never lost his bearings. Merton died in 1968, and in his 1967 ­Mystics and Zen Masters he insists, “[Zen] is not by itself sufficient. We must also look to the transcendent and personal center upon which this love, liberated by illumination and freedom, can converge. That center is the Risen and Deathless Christ.”

When approaching Buddhism less as a rival theology than as a series of “acts emerging out of a certain quality of consciousness,” Merton finds much to learn. Zen is a way more than a doctrine, which is why Merton observed that comparing Zen and Christianity was like comparing tennis and ­mathematics.

Merton’s engagement with Hinduism was no less principled, especially because Hinduism is where his journey with Catholicism began. While a student at Columbia University in the 1930s, Merton met a Hindu monk named Mahanambrata Brahmachari, who advised Merton not to become Hindu, but to discover the wealth of the Judeo-Christian tradition instead. It was good counsel. Merton could engage Hinduism much more intelligently as a seasoned Trappist monk than as a young secular seeker. He showed great interest in many varieties of Hinduism, and while visiting Calcutta, tried (unsuccessfully) to meet with Brahmachari again. But Merton also cautioned against mixing certain aspects of yoga and Christianity. He insisted that humanity and God remain distinct, and even claimed that gurus are unnecessary when one has access to the ultimate guru: the Eucharist.

It is telling that some of Merton’s fans tend to avoid these clear affirmations of Christian truth when lionizing their hero. Other of ­Merton’s followers are more responsible. Most ­interesting among them is the Jesuit William Johnston (1925–2010), who gained the training and experiences in Zen monasteries that Merton was hoping to attain. If Merton cleared a footpath ­between Christianity and Buddhism, Johnston turned it into a manageable road. Living in Japan for most of his life, Johnston is most famous for his translation of Shūsaku Endō’s Silence, but he was quite an author in his own right as well. To read his books—Christian Zen, The Still Point, or “Arise, My Love…”—is to inhabit the land that Merton only visited.

Merton observed that Christian mysticism shared with Eastern practices the quest for a “quality of consciousness.” Johnston identifies the common denominator between Zen and Christianity as the “inner conviction that all is well.” This is not a theological convergence: “Clearly no authentic Buddhist will say that all is well because God loves the world.” The overlap is phenomenological. The Buddhist “will claim an inner security based on the conviction that everything is alright—an inner security which stands in the midst of suffering, earthquake, flood, famine and war.”

Julian of Norwich, who was famously told “All shall be well” by the suffering Christ, evokes the same inner security. If Christians lack this providential conviction, Johnston suggests, the Zen Master sits waiting to remind them, or at least to challenge them, to learn how to sit calmly in the midst of life’s turmoil.

But Johnston, like Merton, also recognized the limits of Zen. “From Zen I can, and will continue to, learn many things,” he writes. “But I am convinced that it is not the same as the Christian contemplation to which I feel called.” The differences are fundamental. “It is one thing to say that sentiments and thoughts of God are inadequate: it is another thing to say [with Zen] that they are illusory.”

Johnston was fond of quoting the Dalai Lama’s observation that being Buddhist and Christian at the same time is like putting a yak’s head on a sheep’s body. His principled commitment to Christianity established the itinerary pursued in his remarkable book, The Wounded Stag (1998):

Having spent many years comparing Christian mysticism with its Buddhist counterpart, having searched for similarities . . . I felt that the time had come to investigate the unique dimension of the Christian experience and to look for its ­distinctive features. . . . I wanted to go beyond St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, beyond ­Meister Eckhart and The Cloud of Unknowing, beyond Augustine and Gregory, to the very origins of that mystical prayer which assumes increasing ­significance in the lives of contemporary men and women.

What is striking to me about that passage is the similarity it has to a certain type of Protestant approach to the spiritual life; for some Protestants—evangelicals especially—also like to skip through the centuries in search of the pure land of the past. Perhaps this is why Johnston recognized that the Japanese convert to Protestantism Kanzō Uchimura had made Christian inroads into Japanese culture in ways that other Christians had not. “Buddha is the Moon; Christ is the Sun,” wrote Uchimura, “I love and admire Buddha; but I worship Christ.”

Still, it is often thought that evangelical ­Protestants have little to offer interreligious dialogue. Perhaps mission trips like the one to China that I participated in confirm this suspicion. But when Protestant faith returns to Pauline pulses of grace, a genuine evangelical contribution to interreligious dialogue emerges.

There have been Protestant Mertons. Tucker ­Callaway was a Southern Baptist missionary to Japan after World War II. Responding to the hatred of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, Callaway devoted himself to mastering Japanese because of Christ’s command to love your enemies. In Zen Way—Jesus Way (1976), Callaway gives a profound account of his experiences at major Zen monasteries in Japan, where he enjoyed frank and penetrating conversations with monks, including the great D. T. Suzuki whom Merton also knew. That said, the second half of Zen Way—Jesus Way hammers home Christian distinctiveness with more force than necessary. For the Protestant Callaway, the line between Zen and Christianity that Merton and Johnston took for granted has to be emphasized to a fault.

It would not be difficult to take Callaway’s Zen Way—Jesus Way in a different direction. There are touchpoints between Protestantism and the religions of the East. In the Tao Te Ching, for example, which so influenced Zen Buddhism, Lao-tzu famously offered what can be read as a proto-Trinitarian insight. “Tao gives birth to one. One gives birth to two. Two gives birth to three. Three gives birth to ten thousand things.” Lao-tzu has proto-Protestant moments wherein he expresses the paradox of effortlessness: “One does less and less until one does nothing at all, and when one does nothing at all there is nothing that is undone.” This has curious resonance with ­Martin Luther’s 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, in which the young Reformer insists, “The law says, ‘do this,’ and it is never done. Grace says, ‘believe in this,’ and every­thing is already done.”

Anticipations of Protestant theology can be found in the third-century Mahāyāna Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, a contemporary of ­Origen: “Some exert themselves diligently, while others quickly enter non-retrogression by the easy practice based on faith.” In the earliest surviving printed book, The Diamond Sutra, a central text of Zen Buddhism, these convergences expand. The Buddha asks his disciple Subhūti, famed for his generosity, whether someone who donated enough treasure to fill the universe would accrue considerable merit. Several times Subhuti takes the bait, replying in the affirmative. In each of these cases, the Buddha responds with distant analogues to the Protestant principles of sola gratia and sola Scriptura:

If a disciple studies and adheres with implicit faith to even a stanza of this Scripture, the intrinsic merit of such a disciple would be relatively greater [than giving great treasure]. And why? Because . . . all owe their beginning to the Truth of this sacred Scripture—the Truth of Emptiness and ­Egolessness. . . . Enlightened disciples . . . never think of merit and its commensurate reward.

The Buddha sounds like a good Lutheran pastor as he drives home this message of grace over and over throughout the Diamond Sutra. Asked one last time whether merit is of any value, the proudly generous Subhuti finally gets the message, conceding, “No, Blessed One; a Buddha is not to be known by his works . . .” It’s wrong to imagine a theological convergence, but these passages show that the Reformation recovery of grace was not just peculiarly suited to sixteenth-century Europeans. Humanity’s ugly tendency to self-justification is universal.

Karl Barth recognized a dramatic meeting of Buddhism with Protestantism that takes us away from Zen Buddhism to the rival Pure Land School, sometimes referred to as Shin Buddhism. The parallels with Luther, and perhaps Calvin as well, are remarkable. Pure Land Buddhism, with its three main sutras, stretches back to the early centuries of the first millennium, was revived in the tenth century by the monk Genshin (942–1017), and was taken further by Hōnen (1133–1212), founder of the first independent Pure Land School.

Hōnen attempted to master the elaborate meditative techniques of medieval Japan, but never succeeded. He replaced his failed striving with a resolve to trust instead in the name of Amida Buddha with all his heart. (Amida, sometimes rendered Amitābha, means “infinite light” in Sanskrit.) Hōnen believed the Amida Buddha, who lived in a distant time and place, had vowed to save anyone who simply recited and trusted in his name. If Luther’s breakthrough came from “giving assent to the promises of God and concluding that they are true” (Commentary on Genesis), Hōnen’s came from a similar trustful assent: Shinjin, translated as “deep hearing,” “true entrusting,” or even “faith,” is sufficient.

As with Luther, the Pure Land School disrupted the religious establishment. Shinran (1173–1263) refined and developed Hōnen’s breakthrough, even to the point of giving up strict fasting regulations and leaving his monastic vows to get married. Shinran insisted that increasing awareness of sin results in ­increasing dependence on grace from beyond the ego. He could be as forceful in delivering this message as Luther: “With our evil natures hard to subdue, our minds are like asps and scorpions,” he wrote. “As the practice of virtue is mixed poison, we call it false, vain practice.” ­Shinran might as well be citing a favorite passage of the ­Reformers: Romans 3.

Shinran’s realism, like Paul’s, results in mercy. “Even the good person attains birth in Pure Land. How much more so the evil person!” Self-power (jiriki) cannot deliver salvation, but other-power (tariki) can. And it is available to every common ­householder, not just monks and nuns. As Hōnen puts it, “In the path of the Sages one perfects wisdom and achieves enlightenment; in the path of Pure Land one returns to the foolish self to be saved by Amida.”

According to Shinran, good works follow from trust in Amida Buddha. As Paul Chung explains in his extensive study of Luther and Buddhism, these works are effectual “only when done out of thankfulness and gratitude for having been liberated and enlightened by the power of Amida rather than for the purpose of attaining enlightenment.” Luther’s On Good Works makes the same point. The Christian “does all gladly and freely, not with a view to accumulating merit and good works, but because it is his great joy to please God and to serve him without thought of reward.” As two contemporary advocates of Pure Land Buddhism put it in their book Great Faith, Great Wisdom, “Faith ultimately trumps practice.”

Interestingly enough, Merton appealed to this particular school in his final book on Buddhism, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968). In a heated back and forth with Suzuki, Merton distanced himself from Zen, concluding that Pure Land Buddhism was a better contact point with Christianity because of its emphasis on the pure gift of grace. (Suzuki, the Zen expert whose first love was Pure Land Buddhism, may have been pleased.) Merton’s move should come as no surprise, for the Trappist monk had a considerable Lutheran streak. As ­Merton argued in New Seeds of Contemplation, “The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved.”

The Bhagavad Gita also contains Christian resonances. The relationship between the Old and New Testaments is sometimes used to describe the relationship between the earlier and more severe Vedas and the later Bhagavad Gita. The moods of the Gita vary, but certain passages warn against quantification and reward. “You have a right to your actions,” Krishna says to Arjuna, “but never to your action’s fruits.” Krishna has mercy on all in the Gita, even the ­untouchables:

Even the heartless criminal,
If he loves me with all his heart,
Will certainly grow into sainthood
As he moves toward me on this path. . . .
All those who love and trust me,
Even the lowest of the low—
Prostitutes, beggars, slaves—
Will attain the ultimate goal.

Reading these lines, I can see why the redheaded Norwegian I met so many years ago at the Hare Krishna ashram was moved to tears. Krishna’s famous pledge to Arjuna in the Gita’s eighteenth chapter strikes notes of trust and mercy: “Abandon all ­varieties of dharmas and simply surrender unto me alone. I shall liberate you from all sinful reactions; do not fear.” Even more strongly: “The fire of eternal wisdom burns into ashes all works.” Unsurprisingly, the Anglican poet T. S. Eliot selectively borrowed from the Gita in his Christian masterpiece, Four Quartets.

Hinduism’s tendency toward monism—the ­injudicious merging of God, the soul, and reality—is at odds with the Judeo-Christian tradition, and risks rendering meaningless Hinduism’s fleeting moments of grace. Yet certain Hindu philosophers have attempted to create a backdrop that can sustain these intermittent eruptions of mercy. A Hindu figure equivalent to Hōnen in Buddhism is Rāmānuja (1017–1137). Rāmānuja approaches something akin to theism: a metaphysical structure where God and reality are somewhat distinct. From this emerged Bhakti yoga—a complex method of devotion and a distant forefather of the yoga at the ashram I visited as a young man. From this form of yoga also emerged the concept of prapatti, which resembles the Christian concept of grace.

Saiva Siddhānta, a branch of South Indian philosophy, also keeps God and reality distinct, which enables the possibility of grace to emerge. Just as a cow would not refuse to lick the dirty wounds of her calf, so does God (Shiva in this case) not hesitate to dwell with sinners.

His form is grace, his attributes are grace,
His functions arise from grace, his limbs are grace;
And his grace is all for the souls and not for himself.

There are limits to the analogy. In his comparative study of grace in Christianity and Hinduism, Bishop Sabapathy Kulandran of the Church of South India cautioned that in the logic of Hinduism, karmic determinism cannot be overcome, only interrupted. “When the very possibility of grace [in Hinduism] may be disavowed so easily and casually,” he explains, “the question arises of how deep-rooted the doctrine can be.” But there are glimmers of salvific hope nonetheless. The sentence “Śiva destroys by experience the karma there in the body” (Siddhiār VIII.10) makes a claim remarkably similar to the biblical proclamation “[Christ] condemned sin in the flesh” (Rom. 8:3).

Catholics have undertaken daring interreligious experiments with Hinduism. One of C. S. Lewis’s students, Bede Griffiths (1906–1993), became a Benedictine monk and moved to India. Together with Jules Monchanin and their more radical colleague Henri Le Saux (who became Abhishiktananda), he participated in the Christian ashram movement that took up Eastern spiritual practices as a way to deepen Christian faith. They were indebted not only to great Catholic missionaries in India from past centuries, but also to Protestant workers who immediately preceded them. The very idea of a Christian ashram solidified during the 1912 National Missionary Society meeting thanks to Kanakarayan T. Paul (1876–1931), an Indian-born leader of the YMCA, and the Anglican Charles Freer Andrews (1871–1940), Gandhi’s close friend.

Andrews helped his English readers to see Hinduism in a more charitable light. “In South India,” he argued in 1912, “devotion to Shiva has been allied to a noble doctrine of grace which has redeemed it from its earlier crudity and horror.” Inspired by this new openness, the first Christian ashrams were established, including the Christukula ashram in 1921, and then the Christa Seva Sangh ashram led by Anglican priest Jack Winslow. Protestant-Christian ashrams were a major force in Gandhi’s movement of nationalism. Without them, later Catholic-­Christian ashrams would have been inconceivable. Had we known about these Protestant experiments, my ­med-school dropout friend and I who considered forsaking evangelicalism for an ashram would probably have made our cross-country trip anyway—but we might have thought twice.

Christ, the conqueror of death, cannot say with the unpredictable, and sometimes immoral, ­Krishna, “I am death, shatterer of worlds, annihilating all things.” In the Judeo-Christian tradition, God the Creator is a far cry from Shiva the Destroyer. Moreover, the physical life of Amida Buddha, who is said to have lived millions of years ago, and possibly (according to some descriptions) not even in this world, is vastly different from Jesus Christ, who “suffered under Pontius ­Pilate.” Unlike any other religion, Christianity offers a real incarnation (not an avatar), in which real sins (not illusions) are really taken care of (not transcended) on the hard wood of the Cross. But the definitiveness of this revelation enables us to recognize mysterious anticipations elsewhere. In the Gospel of John, Christ is “the light of all people” (John 1:4). Christ is the one in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17). There is no corner of culture, even religious culture, where something of that light might not be found.

In retrospect, my passing engagement of Hinduism on a cross-country joy ride and my visit to the East leading a church group were closer to tourism than genuine spiritual engagement. These were missed opportunities. I’ve come to understand that the Protestant tradition can help us see something noble and fitting in Eastern religions. Observing the faiths of the world, Luther wrote,

Their rites are different, but their hearts and thoughts are the same. . . . That is, they say, '“If I have acted in such and such a way, God will be well disposed toward me.” The same feeling is found in the hearts of all men.

I think Luther is right on that score. The world religions and many traditional philosophies, those of the East as well as the West, reflect our natural desire to justify ourselves. Yet there is more. When it comes to finding Christian themes in other religions, C. S. Lewis famously posited, “We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.” Perhaps we can say the same for Luther’s assertion that we are saved by grace, not merit. It, too, ought to be there.

Prioritizing unmerited favor affords an additional benefit for those, like me, who grieved my parents by absconding to a California ashram and hitchhiking back, who failed to adequately engage a Krishna devotee, and who flubbed an opportunity to compare Jesus to the Amida Buddha, who—it turns out—is the very form of the golden Buddha I visited with my students outside Shanghai.

Namely, forgiveness, which no avatar or Zen Master can grant.

Melting Scandinavian icebergs may not be encouraging environmental news, but it has been encouraging to watch the chilly relationship between Lutheran and Orthodox traditions melt thanks to the Finnish school of Lutheranism in the last fifty years that emphasizes our real participation in Christ. This used to just be an interesting Seminary factoid for me, but now, working my way through some of the remarkable volumes, from both the Lutheran (Jensen & Braaten, to the Mannermaa translation, through his student Kärkkäinen, and now both of Jordan Cooper’s irenic, principled books) and Orthodox sides (what a gift Bradley Nassif gives us, along with the fresh translation of Mark the Monk and approaches to Palamas much less barbed than Meyendorff, helpful as I continue to find him), this convergence is becoming more of a lived reality. For both the Lutheran and Orthodox traditions, salvation—which is to say, deification—is both an event and a process, both declarative and transformative. If physicists tell us that light is both particle and wave at once, maybe something similar can be said about our participation in God’s uncreated light. The difference is in emphasis, and the emphasis does matter.

Anglicans are poised to benefit from these developments, offering their own contributions to the doctrine of deification. Mark McInory, for example, shows how Richard Hooker (1554-1600) insists that “God hath deified our nature,” and “by virtue of this grace man is really made God.” McInroy also shows that for Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), “real holiness is our participation in God and our resemblance of him… this makes us really deiform.” Andrewes and Hooker, moreover, manage this without surrendering the Reformation distinctive of justification (on that score, thank you Davenant Institute, for reissuing a classic). Deification also pervades the nineteenth century Oxford Movement. For Pusey, those who are “faithful, by His amazing condescension, become what they receive, the Body of Christ.” Then there is C.S. Lewis and A.M. Allchin in the century after that.

Deification in Lutheranism and Anglicanism can be surprising to those who assume it to be an “Eastern” doctrine. But McInroy also reveals, undeniably in my opinion, how the retroactive “branding” of deification (whether negatively by F.C. Baur or positively by the venerable Vladimir Lossky) appears increasingly untenable. It is not Orthodox property as much as it is a common treasury shared by the entire Church. The doctrine is “ancient, not Eastern” (265). To believe otherwise is to be (unintentionally) duped by liberal German Protestants like Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack. In light of all these developments, Paul Gavrilyuk’s ecumenical hopes around this doctrine are anything but naive, even if popular reporting on the convergence completely (deliberately?) ignores the robust Protestant contributions (which are happily on offer in the marvelous Oxford Handbook of Deification itself).

Because a predilection for such refined theological discussions is rare, I’ve tried to translate them into a material key, in what I hope is a lively pilgrimage account from Chicago to Norwich where the anchorage of the first known woman to write in English has been so lovingly reconstructed. On the way, I engage the Jesus Prayer and some of the history of Orthodox/Anglican relations. I examine recent Orthodox attempts to adopt the English anchoress, and conclude—in conversation with Julian herself—by allowing Anglican sterility (horrible, really) and Orthodox warmongering (more horrible still) to be eclipsed by the deifying grace proclaimed by the woman who appears to have anticipated all of these developments more than six centuries before they took place. The saints are always ahead.

And I saw no dyfference between God and oure substance, but as it were all God. And yet my understandyng toke that oure substance is in God, that is to sey, that God is God and oure substance is a creature in God (Long Text, Ch. 54, p. 84).

Our soul is made trynyte lyke to the unmade blessyd Trynyte (Long Text, ch. 55, p. 286).

[W]e are all bounde to God for kynd [i.e. nature], and we be bounde to God for grace (Long Text, ch. 62, p. 92).

Ironically, the very same passages that cause some to conclude that Julian “reproduces insights of the great theologians of the Eastern Church” (and hence everyone should become Orthodox), might cause others to conclude that the deifying impulses retroactively labeled “Orthodox” are in no way limited to the East, enabling us to contentedly remain in Western traditions. That having been said, God’s call on others is (of course) not my call to make. When glaciers melt, hitherto concealed pathways emerge; may our mutual Lord guide the footsteps of each of us as we make sense of this softening terrain.

At any rate, the essay I’m introducing, so patiently edited by the extraordinary folks at Comment (without whom it would be tediously breezy and unhinged), is entitled Julian for Everyone. I can’t wait to meet her (if I can bear to get close enough). You can can sign up for more from your wannabe theological Jacques Cousteau either by subscribing here at substack or through the monthly Material Mysticism. Thank you sincerely for reading.