AT BEST, I am tired. Sunday mornings, I crawl from my shell of sleep and cross the wastes of the city to the Greek Orthodox cathedral at the top of the hill. Past warehouses and freight yards, and the broad avenues of embassies, through expensive neighborhoods of thirties Georgians and trees, to climb the stone steps and arrive, as always, at the incense, the icons, the altar.

My toddler son struggles in my arms: he and I share this faith. My husband does not. A lapsed Catholic still, he is furthermore a guitarist in a rock band and regularly stays out all night long on weekends. He works at night during the week, as well. Sometimes he comes with us, the yawning father in tie and overcoat who goes to park the car, and sometimes he does not. “Light a candle for me,” he says, wearing last night’s T-shirt as he kisses us goodbye, and I think of this in the cathedral narthex as my son and I touch a beeswax taper to flame, then set it in a tray of sand alongside the candles of others’ prayers. My son leans forward to the icon to match the Virgin Mary’s face to his lips. I touch my own to her golden halo, and wonder again why it is that I am here.

The usher opens the door of the temple to us, and we take our places in a corner near the back, next to an icon of the Holy Spirit descending upon the apostles, because at any moment my son might grow restless and we might need to go back outside. In our corner, we are standing in shadow, untouched by the glowing light from the gold mosaics on the ceiling and the walls.

Why am I here? In this urbane, extravagant congregation, it is inescapable that this faith is not a function of my blood heritage. Rather, in this room filled with Greeks—two generations ago fishermen; one generation ago restaurateurs; today lawyers, doctors, and hedge-fund managers—this daughter of sorrowing parents comes bearing a different patrimony. My inheritance is puritan, Miltonic, the despair that Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” so well describes:

I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—

This is the self that I bring into the temple. Unlike many of my fellow convert adherents to this faith, I am not here to use tradition as a kind of bludgeon against secular modernity, or to escape liberal churches or women priests. I am here because of the temple and what transpires inside. I could describe the origins of the liturgy, its historical evolution (though I am nobody’s earnest explainer), but its meaning for me is something I can only approach by metaphor.

Four metaphors, then, for what I came here seeking:

One. I am a child in the backseat of my parents’ 1973 Ford. My parents are deep into middle age; their other five children are already grown, and so their schedules are unmoored from the conventions that guide other families: mealtimes, bedtimes, any kinds of shoulds and oughts. Always, it seems we are returning from somewhere late at night, driving through the dark countryside that surrounds our town for miles, up and down hills that are shrouded in vines of kudzu. Already (for I am under seven), I am conscious of how alone I feel, how distant from these aging adults, how small I am under this inky and obscure sky. But just as we are almost home, there is a shimmer of blue light visible through the trees, and it grows stronger, clearer as we drive closer: Yazoo Motel. It is the stark neon sign of the sole motel in town, and the sight of it coming visible in the darkness always fills me with an inexplicable hope.

Two. When I was a high school student at a fancy boarding school in a small New England town, I hung out for a while with a small group of students who fancied themselves rebels against the authoritarian strictures of the preppy establishment. (In reality, this was an era in which the institution had almost no rules.) We cut classes, bagged sports practices, strode self-importantly down the elm-lined avenue that led down the hill into town. Most of the time we ended up at a modest coffee shop owned by Greeks, where we flopped with elbows on the Formica tables for hours and hours, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. On one of those afternoons my boyfriend at the time smoked so many Marlboro Reds he made himself literally sick; the smell of cigarette smoke penetrated deeply the layers of damp wool we wound around ourselves against the cold. And all of that coffee, endless refills in heavy china cups. We stubbed out our cigarettes in saucers, poured out fake lines of “cocaine” from packets of Sweet’n Low on the counter. We were consummately ill-behaved, but we were never upbraided by the owner, whose name I cannot recall, or his wife, Stella. They were absorbed by graver matters, the Sisyphean tasks that running the restaurant required, the wiping down of countertops and tables, the removal of hot, steaming glasses from the basket that had just emerged from the dishwasher’s forge. In retrospect, their boundless dedication seems almost a species of magic, and it is that which strikes me now, rather than our own callow disregard.

Three. Her name was Marta, and she was fiftyish, Puerto Rican. For some reason I did not understand, she had never been promoted above assistant producer at the media organization where we worked. She lived alone, said the rosary—she said—while taking the city bus. There was a husband, semi-estranged, who lived overseas. But her face flooded with joy through sadness. We were in an office prayer group that met furtively to share each others’ woes.

The husband came back to the United States to accompany Marta to my wedding, and they are there in the pictures, elegant and smiling in their formal clothes, no trace of alienation visible between them. As a present she gave me an immense, ersatz Lalique vase, sparkling crystal touched about with frosted lilies.

A few months later, she told me she had decided to move closer to her brother; she sold her tiny apartment; she left town before I could tell her goodbye. She had made herself inaccessible. I tried a few times to call or write, and four years passed. Then word came that she had died. She had been sick for years. I had an infant then and there was no way I could make it to the memorial. All I have is this vase, which I turn in my hands carefully under hot, soapy water, thinking of Stella from the coffee shop too, as the steam rises to my face.

Four. He was the only child of working-class parents—his mother a maid and his father a fireman—from a coal town in the north of England. He was the first person I ever met who claimed, for real, to be a socialist, though he was dazzled too by his fantasy of America. Two years younger than I, he was courtly and protective, without expectation. He had a sly understanding of the ways his northern accent might cause him to be judged at this southern university, a safety school for upper-class Sloane Rangers who had not gotten into Oxford or Cambridge. At that age, I was preoccupied by a different kind of man, someone more entitled, one who might, let’s say, drink port and crack open walnuts while talking about Schopenhauer around the fireplace.

Still, we spent hours in each other’s company. It was he who first explained the ending of James Joyce’s “The Dead” to me, the revelation to Gabriel of his wife’s lost love occasioning the recognition of his own selfish desire; it was he who gave me the Iain Wanwright biography of Robert Lowell (“I myself am hell—nobody’s
here”), a giant Faber and Faber paperback that I still have. But when I returned to the United States the next summer, my letters and calls, at first monthly, then yearly, met with advancing silence.

Nine years later I returned to England, unemployed and baffled, to find him living in London. He had acquired a Ph.D. in film; the northern accent had flattened. An uneasy, tentative meeting blossomed over the space of several days into the romance we had not had before, the kind that seems to consist of infinities compressed. We slunk along the sidewalks of Westminster, we kissed in the escalators of the Embankment Tube Station. The time was filled with guilt and sadness too, though, because he was living with a woman.

The time for my return to the United States arrived, and because it is the way that these things happen in the real world, we said an awkward goodbye at dusk in Lincoln’s Inn Fields just as I was darting in a pub to meet some people and he was headed home to the house he shared. Letters and phone calls followed, but in the end we were undone not because of distance or the deceit involved—let’s say it, the sin—but by what I suppose he, with a European’s faith in a benign agnosticism, viewed as my American preoccupation with salvation and Jesus. “That overarching chasm,” he called it in one letter, still months before noting in the last e-mail he ever wrote to me, “I still love you, also.” Then I met and fell in love with the man who would become my husband, learning that staying and being were the more substantial stuff of love. I haven’t spoken to Jonathan— the name of the friend that David mourned—in the seven years since, but to paraphrase Joseph Cotten’s character in Citizen Kane(another movie we saw), not a day has passed since that I haven’t thought of him, and missed him as a friend.

It is that same preoccupation with salvation and Jesus that has brought me, daughter of defeated confederates, to this immigrant cathedral. Thirty-seven now and disillusioned, I wait for the priest in his brocade vestments to emerge from behind the altar’s icon screen with the jeweled Gospel book in what is only the first of multiple entrances and exits. One might rightly wonder, though, what these personal recollections have to do with Holy Orthodoxy, a faith notoriously uninterested in promoting any kind of subjectivity or self-absorption as a criterion for Christian belief, and one that, furthermore, does not admit any necessity for “relevance” or compromise with the modern world, of which the measured, digressive Divine Liturgy is a prime illustration.

“Like pearls on a string” (R.M. French’s famous observation is cited in Stanley Harakas’s introductory volumeLiving the Liturgy) the Divine Liturgy consists of a chain of liturgical acts: the “little” entrance from behind the iconostas with the Gospel, later the “great” entrance with the gifts of bread and wine that will become the sacrament of Holy Communion, along with others, interspersed with fixed and variable chanted hymns. The divisions of worship a Protestant or Catholic would recognize are there, what they might term as the liturgies of “praise, word, and sacrament,” but they are contiguous, they drift through chanted prayers into one another as in a dream.

And it can go on and on, two hours on an average Sunday, three hours or more on a feast day like Pascha (our Easter) or the elevation of a bishop. Even for the pious, it can, at times, be mind-numbingly boring—I am thinking in particular about the marathon Service of the Twelve Gospels that is celebrated on Holy Thursday, which begins around seven in the evening and, if you’re lucky, lets out around ten-thirty or eleven. There is always the moment when I think I can no longer take it, that I have to get out of that room right that minute, dazed by incense and the cramped conditions of so many bodies crowded together—for this is the season when even the agnostic baptized return.

In this sense—and this is a partial answer as to how personal history can dovetail with transcendent worship—Orthodox liturgy has the shape of life itself. The temple is the world, in fact the other world, for Orthodox Christians believe that to celebrate the Divine Liturgy is to be present in that space beyond time when heaven and earth are truly and actually united. Thus the famous description of Orthodox church design (also a part of the liturgy) as intimate and enclosing rather than soaring and lofty, like the archetypal western Gothic.

So, too, is the liturgy intimate and enclosing, sometimes too much so. We bring to it what we are. Before I became Orthodox and for a long time afterward, I was harsh in judgment toward the tendency of some ethnic believers—“cradle Orthodox,” as converts often term them, as though there is something unusual about this—to arrive halfway during the service, moving around lighting candles at inappropriate times. No more. Who among us is worthy? My son screams, and the sound echoes on the cool marble; people stare, and it is time to leave. To the narthex, to the church auditorium where the sober silver urns are already set up for coffee hour and my son turns in circles on the linoleum floor, to the high balcony where the golden mosaics are glittering and near. Even out of earshot, the liturgy reaches into all these places and all the people as they are, even to the man downstairs with the raffle tickets and this weary mother

As I take my squirming son into and out of the temple and back again, I also encounter the particularities of the other souls who have assembled: a retired contractor who forty years ago built a local football stadium, the pious native Greek who aspires to the priesthood, the Methodist who married a Greek nearly sixty years ago and bears a number of ailments in silence. One day an usher in the narthex saw my husband struggling with our son and offered him a beer from the refrigerator downstairs, a humorous gesture that earned the amused gratitude of us both.

Yet in its circularity, its seeming formlessness, the liturgy uses the vehicles of beauty and art to convey immortality. It is that neon Yazoo Motel sign that offered both the comfort of home and the promise of something better. Most Protestant services and many modern Catholic masses are primarily ideological constructions, tight little sequential arguments arrayed like proofs on a page. This is What We Believe and Why, and this is often addressed as part of the service. (“Now we are going to sing a hymn about God’s boundless grace to man. Please stand.”)

Whereas the Orthodox liturgy is designed simply to be. It is the thing itself, direct and unmediated. It is what I, as a teenager, heard echoes of in music, not only in Beethoven and Henryk Górecki but also in old albums by Pink Floyd and King Crimson, the needle moving slowly across a lake of shining vinyl. At the end of that Twelve Gospels service, after I have hit the point I can’t go on and have come up from it again, everyone spills out into the night air in a kind of euphoria, like Grateful Dead fans leaving the arena.

There is nothing on this earth that is outside the scope of God’s radiance, the liturgy says. It does not admit qualification; it does not apologize. It is the mystery of the Incarnation that I can see the face of God in wistful Marta and gentle Jonathan, the loss of whom I mourn and of which I write, but who in this liturgy remain close enough to touch. My husband, too, and his long, white guitar-player hands, at home asleep under starched cotton covers, after a week of working nights. The personal is lifted from the limits of the sinful self; the self is
transformed by fire into the body of God.

And at the inextricable center of this celebration is the altar, visible through the space in the iconostas, the priests moving back and forth with cruets of water and wine, golden trays and bread, like Stella in the coffee shop on a snowy Massachusetts afternoon. Forgive me my teenage rudeness, Stella, those lines of fake cocaine on the Formica table. Thank you for your faithfulness—the faithfulness of Marta, Jonathan, all of it the faithfulness of God, even as we are unaware.

Now Father is coming from behind the icon screen with chalice and spoon, from the place of mystery. A couple of weeks ago when the time for Holy Communion approached, my husband had taken our son, who was fussing, out of the temple. Even the baptized babies in Orthodoxy (Who among us is worthy?) receive Holy Communion—I went outside to find them, but could not. I ran through the narthex, up the stair into the balcony, then down into the auditorium and even out onto the avenue that fronts the thirties Georgians and trees. Resigning to communing alone, I walked back inside the temple to see instead my husband, unprompted, holding Alexander on the dais in front of the icons, Father touching the fiery golden spoon to our baby’s lips—everything that I had hoped for given unexpectedly, once again, to me.