Eastern Orthodoxy displays a great degree of uniformity in following a path of stillness of thought and silence of mind to achieve the prayer of heart in private devotion.  Saint John Climacus writes in The Ladder that “the beginning of prayer consists in chasing away invading thoughts…”   The mind is to be freed from all thoughts and images and focused on the words of prayer.  Further in the chapter on prayer, St. John instructs not to accept any sensual images during prayer, lest the mind falls into insanity; and not to gaze upon even necessary and spiritual things.

Unlike some forms of Roman Catholic spirituality, the Orthodox Tradition does not encourage the use of mental imagery.  In fact, it almost appears to forbid sensory imagination during prayer altogether.

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But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. …

The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.

Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.

Orthodoxy is a religion of memory, but conservative America (rightly reacting to statism) is dedicated to nostalgia. The past is framed with a sentimental, hallmark peachy filter, where the blemishes and moles are airbrushed away. Nothing happens in the past of nostalgia, except a succession of Norman Rockwell prints. The whole montage is narrated by the whisky voice of Thornton’s Our Town narrator: birth, youth, romance and marriage, hearth and home and death. Stephen Foster sings offstage.

I love this montage: I am drawn toward it like a siren.

Nostalgia and sentiment are perilous reactions to Babylon and its progress: going home and trying to find the little house on the prairie, with the apple-wood smoke curling up from the chimney and crunchy leaves and a ham on a marble slab and the silence of winter chill groves, draped in silver gauze is a place you want to visit now at your peril, and can, despite the morose fact that you were never there.

Christianity is history, which is always forgettable: the imaginations of nostalgia are easier come by. Christianity is history: history is Christianity.

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