In the summer of 2020, English Catholics renewed their devotion to the Theotokos, whom they call “Our Lady” at a shrine in Walsingham. That feudal term harkens to the Middle Ages when English Christians believed that England was “Mary’s Dowry.” That personal language and relationship is what helps us to keep close to each other and it deepens our knowledge of God and our faith. Marriage can be treated as simply a business contract, a wise economical choice for the common good of the family, or the fulfillment of our own personal desires. Friendships can be sought after on Facebook or other media outlets. These aren’t very personal revelations. But Orthodox theology preaches a personal God, who gave us not an organization or earthly kingdom, but a personal place to worship the Holy Trinity called His Church. Likewise, when we pray to God for the deliverance of our most personal problems, we call the Most Holy Virgin Mary in the Akathist “Our Lady of the Inexhaustible Cup.”
The three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have different degrees of divine personalness, while the most impersonal of beliefs could be considered atheism and agnosticism, which became increasingly popular even among the learned Greeks and Roman. Metropolitan Hilarion starts with Abraham because of the personal nature of his experience with God and the content of prophecies and promises that were given to him, which were traced genealogically to Jesus Christ Himself. Orthodox Christianity has always held the seemingly paradoxical belief that God became man in Jesus Christ. That was a cornerstone kerygma that caused philosophical and religious bewilderment among Jews, Greeks and Muslims. In the scholastic tradition of the west, Thomas Aquinas exemplifies the approach of tending to resolve and answer all difficult theological questions and paradoxes through logical proofs and argumentation in the style of Socratic dialogues or Aristotle’s dialectics. Scholasticism was also a method for proving God's existence to Muslims and pagans. Western theologians became aware of apophatic (via negativa) and cataphatic theology. Orthodoxy, however, teaches that the faith, like that of Abraham and of our own, is of a kind “exceeding both thought and reason,” says St. Maximus the Confessor. Existential poet and writer, Søren Kierkegaard argues similarly that as Abraham had so much faith that he could suspend the ethical dilemma of sacrificing his only son, Isaac. Christians too who have much faith let the rational tensions and thoughts of the mind dangle in front of God. If Abraham had deliberated too much, it wouldn’t have made sense for him to make an act of faith. Orthodox Christians, therefore, are called to enter the mystical realm of prayer and listen to God ex silentio so that we might experience the Holy Trinity by faith just as our spiritual forefathers have done for millennia. Prayer that waits in faith for God to reveal Himself is one approach. Rational inquiry that seeks to unravel the mysteries is another approach.