A Stop in Athens

Earlier this summer I stopped in a little chapel in Athens, not the kind visited by tourists or full of famous frescoes—but a small Byzantine chapel tucked on a little street south of Ermou, seemingly forgotten by time. An elderly lady and I were the only patrons there, and we were both there to light candles, no doubt for the memory of our loved ones. Mine for my newly deceased elder brothers, both gone in just six months time, who left such a mark on the lives on my younger brother and me. She likely for a late husband, a child, mother or father, who she obviously still mourned. She was adorned in the black dress of a Greek widow, and she looked to be the kind of sweet lady who would be spotted in a small village on my home island of Naxos, or in the Peloponnese. She looked out of place and out of time in the middle of a fashionable part of Athens, as out of time as the little chapel itself did. The chapel, I learned later, is known as the “Little Metropolis,” or more specifically as the Church of the Panagia Gorgoepikoos, no more than 7 x 12 meters, one of the smallest and oldest churches in Athens. As she and I entered, an elderly priest with sad eyes and a dark grey beard had just concluded the liturgy, and the odd pair, myself and the elderly lady, crossed ourselves as we entered. There was no band playing Christian rock, there was no big screen projector, there were no sermons that promised prosperity or chastised us for failing to acknowledge some new class of victim. There was the liturgy, then silence… and memory. This confirmed something that I was more recently coming to understand—that the crisis of modern Western Christianity is not a crisis of belief, but of memory. The Orthodox Church remembers, each and every day, each and every Sunday, and preserves the past every day. Protestantism, and more lately Catholicism by design, forgets. In reading and thinking about my next project, coming to grips with the idea of the Broken Hellene, I have come across an important relic from the writings of the past. But it is no ordinary relic, since it has made me understand the mystical nature of our calling as Christians. Is “salvation,” as it is termed in the West, a courtroom verdict? Protestantism, especially in its American form, has defined faith as a transaction—a personal decision, a contract. For the Protestants, salvation has been reduced to a sola fide declaration. In exchange for the “correct belief” or ideological purity, you are “saved” as part of a transaction, a “deal,” a quid pro quo. It meets all the rigors of Roman jurisprudence and Germanic precision. In its new modern, high-tech format, with video screens and state-of-the-art sound equipment, this “deal” between the believer and God has been outfitted in new contemporary clothes of either evangelical marketing or “social justice.” On the Catholic side we find the legalism of Roman law, and on the Protestant side, we find the experiential hyper-individualism of Luther. But, as I looked into the pained eyes of my fellow worshipper on that late Sunday morning, this is not what I saw. I saw a desire more than anything to be healed. And it is there I realized that the Orthodox message is not one of making a “deal” but a prayer for healing. Orthodoxy speaks—and the Bible speaks—of transformation, deification, of metanoia, or being transfigured through suffering, liturgy, fasting, and love. It occurred to me at that moment why those who suffered the most seemed to have the most profound and unshakeable faith. Because they were never looking for a “deal,” they were seeking truth, they were reaching out for God. They were asking to be healed. For the Orthodox, “sin” is not an action, it is a “condition.” Its only cure is to act contrary to it, to be willing to suffer, to sacrifice, to love, to feel empathy—true empathy—and that only comes through suffering. Transformation is not instantaneous; it is a lifelong decision and a process.

The Protestant emphasis, especially in America, on salvation as a declaration or the correct belief has stripped the Christian life of its communal, ascetic, and sacramental dimensions. It is no accident that churches have come to look like bus stations or airport terminals. And it is no accident that this theological shift has coincided with the rise of the modern sovereign individual, a self with no obligations beyond the self. Our spiritual amnesia has led us to the brink of cultural collapse. We now struggle to remember what a family is, a husband, a wife, what a man or a woman is, or what beauty is. Our twisted sense of art now denigrates representational art as “bourgeois.” Profundity has become passé. The memory that once bound time, soul, and place together has been erased by ideology, technology, and moral relativism. Orthodoxy has been criticized for being anachronistic and irrelevant. It is. That is its genius. It is not a museum; it is a living memory. The West is not dying because it is too Christian, or because Christianity is oppressive. It is because it became Christian in the wrong way: disembodied, disenchanted, dismembered from its community and spiritual roots. While writing my latest book, *Manuel and Me: Looking for the Soul of America”, I traveled through Tuscany and central Italy. I traveled to Florence and although beautiful, it was exhausted—an open-air museum, trafficked by millions of tourists and spiritually hollowed out by commerce and spectacle. In Lucca, I found my home, because it felt intact, a city whose walls still hold memory, ritual, and where there is community and familial warmth. In America, I spent my life searching in vain for meaning—in the inner city, in law, in music, in academia. But I came across it in Lucca by accident: in a pause for lunch, a beautiful and empty church, a child holding his grandmother’s hand, or a shop-owner getting on her hands and knees to pet a neighborhood dog. I found it in the acknowledgment that life is ineffable and the phrase, “piano, piano.” I found the remnants of a Christian culture rooted in mystery, just as I had in Athens that Sunday morning.

The book’s title, Manuel and Me, refers to Manuel Chrysoloras, the forgotten Byzantine scholar who brought the Greek classics to Florence just before the fall of Constantinople. His presence there was not just intellectual, it was prophetic. He brought memory to the West, just as the West was about to forget. He brought light to the West, just as it was about to go out in the East. If the West is going to recover, it will not be through innovation or political solutions. It will be through repentance—a remembrance that we are dust and we are in need of healing. It will be through understanding that through love and sacrifice we can find healing and ultimately holiness. The Orthodox tradition says no to the world, and through its hesychasm, icons, fasting, and humility it resists modern fragmentation. To be Orthodox in the West today is not to live out of nostalgia, but for fidelity. We reject novelty for beauty. We reject trends for truth. We reject relevance for reverence. And we bear witness to the reality that Christianity is not a brand, but a path—ancient, narrow, and full of life.

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Spyridon Andrews is a Greek American lawyer, writer, and musician who divides his time between Los Angeles and Lucca, Italy.

A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Elmhurst University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology, he has also studied in Greece and at Northwestern. He is the author of Manuel and Me: Looking for the Soul of America in the Heart of Italy. His forthcoming works include The Broken Hellene, a reflection on modern Greek identity, and a tribute to his late brother, George Andrews, a pioneering NBA agent and philanthropist.

He is the proud father of two wonderful adult children, Jake and Lucy, and has been happily married to his wife Rachel for over 40 year