Crossing the Bosphorus
Frederica Mathewes-Green's Facing East
John S. Gardner
October 1, 1997
Facing East By Frederica Mathewes-Green (HarperCollins, 1997) 245 pp.
Frederica Mathewes-Green, well known to rq readers, has written a superb introduction to daily life in the Orthodox faith. It is not a devotional handbook nor a theological or historical work (for the best one-volume all-purpose guide to Orthodoxy, read Bishop Kallistos Ware's The Orthodox
Church), but instead the recounting of how one Orthodox family lives the Christian faith through the Church year.
Mathewes-Green's husband is a former Episcopal priest who was received into the Orthodox Church and who leads a small and diverse (both converts and "cradle Orthodox") Antiochian Orthodox parish outside Baltimore. The author is, therefore, a khouria, a priest's wife, and that status brings a special perspective to the book. But this is far more than the story of pastoral calls and the demands of raising children in a clerical home (the couple has at any rate done an excellent job on that point—their children's faith is real). We see the family setting up every week the temporary arrangements for their church in a building belonging to an adult day care program, buying meat at the supermarket at the end of the long Lenten fast, and rejoicing over the birth of children in the congregation. Mathewes-Green manages well the transition between a simple family journal and an explanation of the intricacies of Orthodox practice, many of which are fairly new to her and her family as well.
What comes through most clearly is a sense of worship. Her perspective is truly Orthodox: it shows how "orthodoxy" (right doctrine) and "orthopraxis" (right practice) flow naturally from each other. The book also serves, de facto, as a comprehensive introduction to the variety of ...
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