What's the Hurry?

 In the introduction to today’s article “Rushing Through Life” you mention that it includes “new age ‘inner work’” that your “Christian readers hate so much,” and I wanted to say that, speaking as an Eastern Orthodox Christian who reads your column faithfully, I found nothing in the piece with even the faintest trace of “New Age” thinking. Truth be told, I’ve never read anything of yours that showed anything other than perceptive insights about Man’s spiritual nature. The Christians you refer to are specifically Evangelical Protestants, and their aversion to what they call ” New Age” is a symptom of their brittle, sterile theological minimalism, one of their inheritances of the Reformation, which was itself a reaction against (among other things) Roman Catholic Scholasticism.

 I wish to point this out only because there is a widespread ignorance of Christianity’s Eastern origins; people assume that Christianity consists of Catholics and Protestants, and no one else. This ignorance drives well-meaning, spiritually-starved Catholics and Evangelicals to seek genuine, mystical experience of the numinous in places like Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation , not knowing that a “branch” of Christianity already exists that speaks to the very real need for something transcendent, something that is felt first and understood second, not the other way around. All of the “wacky new age stuff” included in your writings integrate harmoniously into the Orthodox Christian understanding of these matters, and your column today is a wonderful example of such; Orthodoxy is endlessly concerned with the individual believer’s ability to wrangle unwieldy thoughts, finding instead a quiet, peaceful center in the Eternal Now of God’s infinite Love and Mercy. Again, love the column. Keep up the good work, my friend.