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A Mathematician's Journey into Orthodoxy: Ramblings on Becoming Human
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Some of my friends have asked for an account of how I entered Orthodoxy, and I never gave them an answer I really thought was fitting. I could give a few turning points, and that was true so far as it went, but it always seemed I was only giving--could only give--the tip of an iceberg.
The one answer to that question that most impressed me was when one man said that he came to Orthodoxy--the "good, old-fashioned way" as a repentant sinner--and the story of how he came to Orthodoxy had been told to his confessor/priest under confidential conditions (the "Seal of Confession") and he received absolution for what he confessed. My answer may be long, but I think that brief answer has something deep that mine doesn't. However, as I have been praying, what has come out of those prayers is an attempt to write a spiritual autobiography.
The story of my coming to Orthodoxy is not something that begins with a particular doctrinal idea, or a shift away from being Protestant; nor, I believe, was it a completed work when I was chrismated and first took communion in the Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy is a long, gradual transformation, and not just for former Protestants. All of that is important, quite important, but I understand my entry into Holy Orthodoxy as a transformation reaching both all the way back in my life, and all the way forward to my death (Lord willing). In other words, giving a full answer to how I became Orthodox is not telling simply about moving away from Evangelicalism and into Orthodoxy that ended when I become a member, but a lifelong story, properly told in a spiritual autobiography. And there is one theme I would like to lay out early in writing this.
There is a maxim which has rumbled down through the ages: "The divine became human that the human might become divine." One recent author fittingly enough observed, "The divine not only became human that I might become divine; the divine also became human so that I might also become human." Much of what I will write is about becoming human, and my striving to become more fully human.
I will look at several pieces of writing, mostly my own; I would like to specifically look at Yonder to flesh out some of what I mean by becoming "more human." The Divine Comedy has provided a model to authors I like: C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, and Peter Kreeft in Three Philosophies of Life, use a broad framework of a journey: from Hell, through struggle, to Heaven. I owe something to both of these latter books, and without my consciously using that model, I wrote Yonder in a way that has a lot to do with a journey from Hell to Heaven.
The journey in Yonder is a journey that turns much of science fiction on its head. Much of the premise of (some) science fiction is that it would be really cool if we could travel beyond the earth, or have technology make us immortal, or have more powerful bodies, for instance. That premise got science fiction going, even if some of the newer stuff can be very gritty and much less enchanting. What Yonder says, in essence, is a mathematician's style of "reduction to absurdity" argument: it grants, at least for the sake of argument, a world where minds could travel however much they wanted, and be technologically immortal, and could (if they wanted) have much more powerful bodies than we do, and complete control over having as much pleasure as they wanted, and some other things as well... and then says, "What do we have if we really have all this?" The answer is simple: "Hell."
The Heaven that the story moves to is in fact our human existence with its many pains, and Yonder's vision of Heaven reaches a story within a story in which the characters suffer quite a lot: in Yonder, the vision of Hell is a "Utopia" as it would be imagined by spoiled children, and the vision of Heaven is the life-amidst-suffering of maturing adults.
That is one aspect to what happens, and probably one of the bigger ones, perhaps the biggest. But another aspect of the vision of Hell is a sense of being in a "prison of ideas," and I would like to explain what I mean by "prison of ideas."
There was one person whom I showed Yonder. He was the science fiction guru at a local library, and his comments on a science fiction work-in-progress are wisdom I would not dismiss lightly. He read Yonder and said it would read much better if I cut down the philosophical discussion to a fraction of its length and much more quickly got to the later story within a story. But I think it was something more than author stubbornness behind my decision to keep the dialogues as they were, at least in that respect.
Yonder opens with the characters stuck in a philosophical discussion--not trapped by an outside force, perhaps, but reaching for meaning and substance and having precious little with their science fiction powers that will let them do anything worth writing home about. They can satisfy any desire a spoiled child would have, perhaps, but it seems they can do precious little besides satisfy a spoiled child's desires--and they realize that this fails to satisfy them, and want something better. And in their efforts to reach for something better, they struggle in philosophy--but cannot break out to something beyond a philosophy that does not lead to anything more than ideas. They have that discussion, at length, because they are in a "prison of ideas."
I would like to hold that moment before I mention my first memory. My first memory is from when I was a little, boy laying in my bed, thinking, and the memory is really more of what I was thinking, than of anything physical. Psychologists sometimes say that our earliest memory gives a glimpse into us as people, and my memory is somewhat unusual. There are at least two things that can be said if you start sampling a web search for "first memories":
The memories are frequently a story, or at least a vignette that's a bit like a story.
They are usually about people and/or a physical place.
And to say a little more about my memory--from when I was a little boy--is that one of the questions I remember thinking about was, "Is there an outside world, and if so, am I really connected to it?" And if people are willing to take that at face value, there are at least two kinds of response I can see to comparing what others remember with some of my questions:
You're brilliant.
There is something very disturbing about this picture.
The second response is the one that interests me here. I believe that it has much in common with the world I describe as the starting point for Yonder, which is, quite simply, a vision of Hell. It's not Hell like some people's troubled childhoods: my parents loved me, are still married to each other, and I had the luxuries one would expect in a middle class neighborhood in the first world. And I'm really hoping not to cheapen the abusive childhoods of some people I know. But I want this account of my life, like Yonder, to start with a kind of Hell and move towards Heaven. I could start the account at conception/birth, but I would rather start with my being skeptical of whether the outside world was anything like it seemed to be, or whether I was at all really a part of it, before describing a journey from Hell to Heaven.
As my childhood continued, the outside world no longer seemed so strange, or so distant. If I was less and less trapped in the "prison of ideas," it's not so much that I worked my out of it, as that with interaction, the outside world came to be something I was a part of. In that sense I had left the Hell of being halfway towards solipsism. But there was another sense in which I had much to go. People use "solipsism" as the belief of someone who believes there is genuinely nothing outside of himself, but "solipsism" is also used more metaphorically for people who believe that of course there may an outside world, but all that really interests them is themselves, and it is this second solipsism that was the more enduring danger for me. Much of my spiritual progress has been letting go of this second solipsism in different ways.
To stop here would be to paint a lopsided picture. I had a somewhat idyllic childhood, in many ways; I read books, played with my younger brother, built with Legos, loved the family dog, built a toy or two in my father's workshop, and before too long had my first taste of exotic computer games like "rogue."
My parents both took the Christian faith seriously, and their faith was something that was always in the air. At church, the people I connected with were usually adults, and though there should be other dimensions to a church, I'm not sure I connected with the social side of the church as a child. But I did grow into a faith which was sincere and deeply held.
Overlapping with this, I entered kindergarten at Lowell School, where the school officials and my parents met and wondered if Lowell was really challenging me. I transferred into fourth grade at Avery Coonley School. They ended up offering me a fourth of the total financial aid they gave out for at least one year so that I would be able to attend. I was interested in a lot of subjects at school, but when I ranked seventh in the USA in a math contest during eighth grade alongside other mathematical endeavors, I took that as evidence that God had created me for work as a mathematician. (That was also the year my twin brothers were born.)
After graduating from Avery Coonley School, I skipped a year to enter the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy as a sophomore. My first year there, I connected with a group of mostly seniors who were wonderful friends, and the place seemed to be missing something when they graduated. I was involved in math contests all three years of high school, but as time went on, I spent less and less time sharpening myself for math contests, and more time writing in online forums. I wrote voluminously, and over that time slowly learned how to write in a way that wasn't quite so incomprehensible.
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A Mathematician's Journey into Orthodoxy: Ramblings on Becoming Human
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