![]() ![]() “It’s the undivided universal Church.” He was fond of absolutes. “Not the eastern Church,” Michael shot back. In an ecumenical spirit, I said I was happy to defer to the eastern Church on the matter of the Filioque. Since we use the western aberration of the Filioque clause, we are not really saying the Nicene Creed, but only a defective imitation of it. “We recite it in the Sunday liturgy.” I was wrong about that, Michael insisted. “We do have the Nicene Creed in common,” I said, trying to find a point of agreement. ![]() Michael reassured me that Anglicans were his favorite schismatics, but our novelties and lack of theological rigor were clearly not up to his standards. My own thoughts and questions began to seem weightless and trivial in the face of such passionate certainty. I was intimidated by this strange and demanding figure. He was terse, acerbic, and opinionated, as harsh and unyielding as the landscape. ![]() ![]() Embracing the desert spirituality of renunciations, he had little patience for the inessential. “A monk’s past is meaningless,” he said brusquely. Michael was a young American, but he rebuffed my curiosity about his journey from a Pennsylvania childhood to an ascetic community in the Egyptian wasteland. Sinai, I met a monk from the Orthodox monastery at the foot of the mountain. Emperor Constantine and bishops holding the Nicene Creed. ![]()
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