“He can’t see the forest for the trees,” the saying goes. It’s a recognition that attention to detail can obscure an overall pattern. Of course, someone could respond by saying, “He’s so overwhelmed with the forest that he can’t see the trees.” In point of fact, human beings are hard-wired for both trees and forest, the larger pattern as well as detail. However, it is best when they operate in the right manner. According to the neuroscientist and philosopher, Iain McGilchrist, the proper order is when the overall pattern is dominant with the attention to detail in a secondary position. His first major work, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, explores how the two hemispheres of the brain (right and left) are wired for precisely these functions. He also contends that Western civilization (modernity) has flipped the dominance and become overly interested in detail. We frequently do not see the larger picture until it’s too late.
Our attention to detail, has been a hallmark of technology and science. We break things down to see how they work. Of course, “how things work” is frequently something greater than the fragmentary studies for which our technology has become so well-known. We have become a culture of specialists. In a world of rapid change, we often discover the “unintended consequences” of our actions long after our actions have gone into effect.
The Protestant Reformation holds a place in history that largely coincides with the Industrial Revolution. They shared a confidence about the nature of change. I have seen a Protestant slogan, semper reformanda (short for ecclesia semper reformanda est), which translates as, “the Church must always be reforming.” Change has become more than a timely corrective: it is a necessary way of life.
I’ve long thought that the notion of change became part of the woof-and-weave of late medieval Western culture. It is reductionist to suggest pure causation – that the Reformation led to the Industrial Revolution – though major figures have suggested this for years (cf. Max Weber). I think it is more accurate to say that “change” came to be “in the air.” Nevertheless, we are the inheritors of this cultural shift. We assume change as the normal state of things. More than this, we assume change as a matter of progress, a movements towards something better. The Church doesn’t just reform, it must be always reforming.
The past few decades or so, doubts have begun to creep in to this assumption. There have been critics of the change/progress narrative all along, but the unintended consequences of our progressive practices have begun to accrue in a manner that brings change into question. We are slowly discovering that when you change one thing you risk changing everything. Such a risk suggests going slower and learning to look before we leap.
Those most vulnerable to change’s unexpected consequences are the young. To be born at a time of significant change means that its consequences will likely be unknown until it’s too late. You cannot recover or repair a lost childhood.
It is interesting to note that Orthodoxy pre-dates the cultural shift that created our modern world. Indeed, Orthodoxy lived in a “cultural cocoon” that was a stranger to the whole of Western culture. Nevertheless, we are here now. This reality goes far towards explaining Orthodoxy’s hesitancy regarding Western culture as a whole and its abiding critique of semper reformanda.
What would we change?
Orthodoxy has many “trees” within its traditioned existence, but it has received them in the form of a forest. Orthodoxy is not “many things” – it is everything. Orthodox conversations (and there are so many in our internet-ed world) are frequently drawn into the cultural habit of focusing on details. Whether on doctrinal matters, or just practical, pastoral matters, our conversations can become discussions of “trees” of details-divorced-from-their-context. Inevitably, such conversations run the risk of misunderstanding and distorting the object of their focus.
Orthodoxy is everything – by definition. Anything less than everything is not Orthodoxy.
St. Paul describes, in Eph. 1:
the mystery of [God’s] will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him.”
This is the Church – “everything gathered together in one in Christ.”
It is the reason that he can write to St. Timothy and describe the Church in this manner:
the house of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth. 1Tim 3:15
I think that this is a primary reason that Orthodoxy often describes itself as a “way of life” rather than as a set of doctrines. Indeed, the very word Orthodoxia, means “right worship,” describing the whole of our life in union with God rather than just what we do in Church. The Orthodox life is a life in the presence of everything.
When my children were young, they often made a choice with their questions. Either, they could ask their mother and get a short, practical answer. Or, they could ask their father, and get a lecture about everything. We had long conversations, when we had them.
To this day, I think about everything when I think about anything. The only response, I believe, to everything is: “Glory to God for all things.” In those words is not a way of dismissing the world. It is a way of embracing all that is (God included), and accepting and blessing my own place within it. My place is to say: “Glory to God for all things.”
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