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So what happened to you?

We're in Dublin sightseeing. I walk into a church. We're admiring the windows and altar and so forth. In a corner of the church there was a small altar with a white marble statue that showed Jesus' heart exposed on his chest with flames coming out of the top and thorns wrapped around the heart. As I was looking at this, I suddenly realized that I was on my knees. And as if a radio inside of me suddenly clicked on, I could hear a voice. I didn't hear it with my ears, but it was like a presence that filled me. The voice said, "I am your life. You thought that your life was your history, your name, your personality. You thought that your life was the fact that your heart beats. But that is not your life. I am your life. I am the foundation of everything else in your life." It was pretty incontrovertible who it was that was speaking to me.

Wow.

Wow.

How did you reorder your life after you've encountered Jesus?

My ideas were still very skeptical, so I was trying to assemble it. I wanted to find out who this guy was. So I started reading the Bible and I found that I just disagreed with Jesus about a lot of things. But something had happened to me in that church in which I realized that I didn't know everything about the world.

Gradually we were able to come into faith. It was several months later that a friend of ours said, "Well, have you ever given your hearts to Jesus? Have you ever asked Jesus to be your Lord?" You have to picture that both of us grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, him Episcopalian, me Catholic, and our response was, "We're not Southern Baptists." Our association with that kind of talk is that you have to be Southern Baptist for Jesus to be your Lord.

He said, "Actually, it's for everybody."

We said, "Well, you know, we're in graduate school."

"No, even for you."

So the three of us knelt down together and prayed and asked Jesus to be our Lord, having no idea what that would mean but wanting so much to find out.

So how did you gravitate toward Orthodoxy?

Fast forward. My husband was an Episcopal priest for 15 years and I was doing the Bible studies and raising my kids. And we saw some things going on in the Episcopal Church that were disturbing to us. Not only moral changes. We were very strongly antiabortion, for example, because we saw that as a kind of violence. It was also theological changes. It was bishops questioning whether there really was a resurrection and so forth.

We looked into Catholicism and the Continuing Anglican churches, but had no idea what Orthodoxy was. We were afraid that it would be works righteousness. We were afraid it would be idolatry. But bit by bit our questions were answered. And what really turned the tide for my husband was attending an Orthodox service, which he found overwhelmingly beautiful. I guess the test of any faith is the worship: When they turn to face God, when they fall on their knees and let their hands down, how true does it ring?

So that was about eight years ago that we decided to enter the Orthodox Church. My husband was ordained again, and we founded a little parish here near Baltimore and have been growing a little bit every year since.

You talk in The Illumined Heart about theosis, which is kind of the aim of what we're supposed to be about. But you're saying that it's more than following Jesus, it's the process of transformation.

In Western Christianity we tend to think in terms of following or of being like Jesus. And in the early church, and a tradition that was maintained all through Eastern Christianity, it means being transformed and actually having the life of God within you. Theosis is the Greek word. And when it gets translated into English, the term is alarming. It is deification. And that's a term that's so easily misunderstood I usually just stick with theosis. But deification is not far off the mark. The analogy that I use is that it's like a coal that's been set on fire. And as fire moves all through the heart of the coal, it destroys every impurity in its path. And so finally the coal has achieved its destiny. It was made to burn. The entire thing has been permeated with fire. And so in eastern Christianity our presumption is that we are meant to catch fire with God and be transformed.

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46