“From that time Jesus began to preach and to say, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven
is at hand’” (Matthew 4:17)
When the Orthodox Christian hears that first word preached from the Lord Jesus, he understands by it that by obeying it to the fullest he will be transported to a dimension of existence far more profound than what meets the eye.
The Lord Jesus is not just saying, “change your minds,” or “alter the way you now look at life,” or “adjust the way you are doing things,” or else “make a new beginning in the way you deal with others.” [Metanoia] demands an about-face within the deepest place of your soul. It includes all of the above definitions and more. Here is the place where we frequently lose so many sincere spiritual searchers who find their way to the Orthodox Church and may even become communicants, yet who never completely grasp the inner spirit of the faith. We ourselves who are both Americans and Orthodox Christians too often remain on the fringe of the traditional faith, looking at everything—the world, ourselves and even God—with a western mindset. I mean by “western” the premises that underlie the way we learn anything, including theology. It is part of our framework for comprehending what comes to us through our senses.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant put the problem so clearly for us. He stated that a chasm exists between what we can know and what we can only believe exists. On one cliff stands all that we can assimilate with our minds—the so-called phenomena elements. These include all that can be measured, weighed, timed and of course described. Everybody knows this from junior high school science class. All else that we claim to know that is beyond the phenomena, including deity, heaven, angels, demons, fall into the second category called the noumena. These we can grasp only through faith experience, which are outside of revelations, terra incognita to our powers of reasoning, which obviously presents us problems, since reason is the way we humans understand things and make sense to one another. End of story? Not quite.
The Orthodox Church understands that the way of knowing is not by the separation between the subject and object—the one who knows and what he knows, as though it were possible to understand God objectively, which would require that He make Himself known among the objects He created. We do of course know Him in Jesus Christ, because of His incarnation—but the Father and the Holy Spirit remain unknowable in that way, for no Person of the Holy Trinity except Jesus Christ became Man.
So the only way to really know God in Trinity is not by our minds, but in our hearts. It demands our hearts rather than our intellects, our love before our understanding. The only way to know God is by union with Him, a procedure that negates the way through reason. We should have a clue to the way of love if we think about our human affections. How do we anticipate what our child will do before it happens? Not by logic, but by intuition. Something within us comprehends before she does the way she will act in a given situation. It applies as well with man and wife. We may say, “I know what he will do,” but what we mean is, “I sense it.” “I feel it inside.”
This is a profound mystery, the knowledge of the heart, and we will be challenged by saying so, because we are raised in a culture that feels emotions only complicate the way we understand all things. So it happens that we are often demanded to show proof for the existence of God. But we ought to correct ourselves with the awareness that proof is in His love for the world and us. We hear that “God is love” so often that it should correct our inner compass. Because He is love, the way to know Him is through love. What of repentance? Where does it fit in? To love is to find Him in our hearts. If your heart is cluttered with things and thoughts other than God—if your love for Him is not total, then you will sense His absence. He is a jealous God. He demands your total affection. All serious Christians must know that.
For many potential Orthodox Christian converts, the Kantian wall is too high to surmount. They gaze on the Church from afar, entranced with many aspects of our faith: Holy tradition, consistency in all parts, liturgical order and beauty of worship, and the ways we encourage one another to spiritual growth by knowing that through unity with Father, Son and Holy Spirit, fasting, prayer, contemplation and charity—yet they are unable to give their whole hearts to the Lord.