Orthodoxy and the Wounded Imagination
By: Shreyas Jain
Date: 10/1/23
I did not come to Orthodoxy through argument. I came to it through exhaustion. Exhaustion with a kind of faith that spoke often of truth, but rarely of beauty. A Christianity that explained much but healed little. What I needed was not a sharper doctrine. I needed something that could restore what fear and striving had disfigured — my imagination, my trust, my memory of peace. I needed a God who did not thunder down judgment from above, but who came close, like light on stone or warmth in silence.
Icon of Christ healing the demon possessed
I. Icons: Windows Into Heaven, Mirrors of Healing
The first time I stood before an icon of Christ Pantocrator, I did not understand what I was looking at. I felt my soul begin to stir, a senation I was more than unfamiliar with. And more than anything, it felt as if the icon looked back at me.
Orthodoxy calls icons “windows into heaven,” but they are also mirrors of the soul. They do not ask us to look at God from a distance, but to remember that we were made to be like Him. The eyes of the Theotokos (Mary the Mother of God) do not accuse. They invite. The hand of Christ does not strike. It blesses.
What I began to realize is that icons restore what sin distorts: the imagination. In a world flooded with images designed to provoke envy, fear, or desire, the icon reorders the gaze. It returns us to the dignity of seeing and being seen rightly. It lets the eyes rest — not in fantasy, but in beauty that is real and incorruptible.
And in that stillness, the soul remembers what peace looks like.
Unknown Byzantine Artist. Christ Pantocrator. Deësis Mosaic, 1261, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
II. The Liturgy: The Presence of Christ, Not the Memory
Western Christianity often speaks of remembering Christ at the Eucharist — “Do this in memory of me.” But in the Orthodox liturgy, it is not only memory we invoke. It is presence.
He is there.
The Divine Liturgy is not designed to entertain or instruct. It does not adapt itself to trends or seek to make the sacred palatable. It invites the whole person — body, senses, spirit — into an encounter with Christ that is as close to heaven as the earth can bear.
It is not efficient. It is not flashy.
But there, in the rhythm of ancient words and long silences, I have found the space to actually grieve. To actually forgive.
To begin again.
I’ve come to see that peace is not the absence of struggle. It is the presence of God in the midst of it. The liturgy makes this real — not by solving my life, but by sanctifying it.
Unknown Photographer. Great Entrance during the Divine Liturgy. St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church, 2023. YouTube, uploaded by Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Australia
III. Theosis - Becoming Flame Without Burning
Orthodoxy does not reduce salvation to a transaction. It does not imagine Christ as a substitute on a cosmic ledger.
Instead, it speaks of Theosis — that man is not merely rescued, but raised. That the human person is meant not just to be pardoned, but transfigured.
"God became man so that man might become god," the Fathers say — not in essence, but by grace.
For years, I thought of holiness as becoming smaller. Duller. Less human.
But in Orthodoxy, holiness is expansion. Light.
We do not worship because we fear punishment. We worship because the fire of God does not consume — it purifies. The saints are not escapees from humanity. They are its fulfillment.
And the journey is not through conquest or assertion. It is through repentance. A quiet and constant turning. A healing.
Icon of the Transfiguration of Christ (15th century, attributed to Theophanes the Greek).
This icon reveals more than Christ’s divinity — it foreshadows the destiny of humanity itself: to be transfigured, illumined, drawn into divine light. In Orthodoxy, this is Theosis — not escape from the human, but its radiant fulfillment.
IV. Peaceful Evangelization: A Church Without a Sword
One of the most striking features of Orthodoxy, especially to someone raised on triumphalist versions of Church history, is how little it has sought to conquer. It does not campaign. It does not colonize. It bears witness.
While Western Christianity spread through state-backed missions and forced conversions, and Islam through sweeping caliphates and conquest, Orthodoxy moved quietly — through monasteries, through families, through the slow, difficult witness of enduring presence.
The light of Christ spreads not through power, but through holiness.
And that, more than any doctrine, is what first moved me: that Orthodoxy does not compel belief. It invites the soul home.
The Orthodox Church does not need to win arguments. It only needs to be what it already is: the stillness at the center of the storm.
St. Innocent of Alaska on a Missionary Journey by Andrei Mironov.
A quiet moment of faith and courage on ice-covered waters. St. Innocent brought the Gospel to Alaska not through force, but through presence — learning the languages of the people, living among them, and bearing Christ with reverence.
V. Incense, Chant, and the Quiet Reordering of the Soul
There are no rock bands in an Orthodox church. No clever visuals. No tight TED Talk-style homilies.
There is incense. There is chant.
There is silence.
And over time, I’ve come to see that these are not aesthetic choices. They are medicine.
The world forms the soul through noise, urgency, and spectacle. Orthodoxy forms it through reverence, through slowness, through beauty that doesn’t need to explain itself.
Incense sanctifies not just the altar but the breath.
Chant sanctifies not just the ears but the rhythm of thought.
Silence sanctifies not absence, but attention.
The mind is not won through force. It is reordered through wonder.
Unknown Photographer. Orthodox Priests Censing During the Divine Liturgy. 2020, Church of the Holy Apostles, Athens. Courtesy of The National Herald
VI. Forgiveness and the Wound That Doesn't Harden
Before Orthodoxy taught me anything doctrinal, it taught me to forgive.
I came carrying griefs — some that were done to me, others that I had done.
And in confession, I did not find judgment. I found a priest weeping with me.
There was no performance. No spectacle. Just another sinner, kneeling with me in the dust, speaking peace over what I could not fix.
God is not a Judge waiting to crush us. He is a Healer, waiting to mend what we are too ashamed to show.
And slowly, through prayers repeated until they become part of the blood, through fasting that teaches love not control, through prostrations that remind the body it too must bow — I began to believe it.
Contrary to what is often taught now, forgiveness is not forgetting. It is remembering in a different light.
Orthodoxy has taught me that light is real.
Icon of the Prodigal Son (St. Elisabeth Convent, Minsk).
At the heart of this icon is not the sin of the son but the embrace of the father. Orthodox Christianity does not depict forgiveness as a legal pardon, but as a reunion — a return to the arms of a God who runs to meet us before we can even finish our confession. This moment lives in every liturgy, every confession, every whispered Kyrie eleison: not judgment, but joy.
"If you are tired of noise, come and listen.
If you are wounded, come and be healed.
The Orthodox Church does not ask you to perform or to prove.
It asks you to come home... and to be transfigured."
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