Yakov Tsypin, Sophia Brotherhood
The discussion about the spiritual path of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, as I see it, raises a much broader question. It is not only about which church practices should be preserved, which distortions should be abandoned, and which experiences of other Local Churches should be adopted. The real question is different: what can the Orthodox Church today offer a person as a coherent spiritual path? And this is not a problem facing the Orthodox Church of Ukraine alone. Practically all of historic Christianity is confronted with it.
Just a few generations ago, a person was born into an already established religious world. They were baptized, they saw their parents or grandparents pray, they knew the Church feasts, fasting, the church, confession, marriage, and burial. Even a person who was not particularly religious still remained within a Christian culture. Today, this mechanism is gradually ceasing to function. A modern person can be born, receive an education, start a family, build a career, experience love, loss, the birth of children and the death of loved ones, and live an entire life almost without the Church.
Moreover, the question no longer necessarily takes the form of a dispute between faith and atheism. Far more often, it is simpler: “Let us suppose that God exists. But why do I need the Church?” Orthodoxy will have to answer this question more and more often.
Simply Returning to the Past Will Not Work
Christianity possesses an immense spiritual heritage: the ascetic tradition, monasticism, the liturgy, the theology of the Fathers, and the practices of fasting, prayer, repentance, and spiritual guidance. It would be strange to abandon all of this simply because it is ancient. But it would be no less strange to think that we can simply transfer the way of life of a person from the fourth, fifteenth, or nineteenth century into the twenty-first century and obtain the same spiritual result.
The human world itself has changed. Family, work, education, attitudes toward authority, the information environment, medicine, psychology, and ways of communicating have all become different. Things have emerged that previous generations did not know in their present form: social media, digital addictions, an endless flow of information, mass pornography, artificial intelligence, psychological burnout, loneliness in large cities, and the crisis of traditional community.
For many such questions, it is impossible to find a ready-made quotation in Saint Basil the Great or Saint John Chrysostom. But this does not mean that their legacy has become irrelevant. The Church Fathers did not know smartphones. Yet they knew a great deal about the human person’s dependence on their own desires, about habit, passion, attention, thoughts, self-mastery, and freedom.
Perhaps this is precisely how we should understand Tradition: not as a catalogue of ready-made answers, but as a system of coordinates through which every generation must once again answer the questions of its own time.
Simply Saying “Let Us Return to the Gospel” Is Not Enough Either
There is an obvious temptation to give a simpler answer: we need less of everything superfluous and more of Christ, the Gospel, prayer, and ordinary Christian life. There is much truth in this. Christ truly must be at the centre of church life, and the Gospel cannot remain merely a text from which passages are read during worship.
But another question immediately arises. If the whole of Orthodox life can be reduced to the formula “read the Gospel, pray, and try to be a good person,” then why is Orthodoxy itself necessary? For this, one does not necessarily need a complex liturgical tradition, the episcopate, monasticism, a canonical order, and two thousand years of Church Tradition. Orthodoxy would then gradually risk becoming a form of general evangelical Christianity with icons, beautiful liturgy, and historical memory.
Therefore, returning to Christ must not mean reducing Christianity to a few moral principles. On the contrary, it compels us to raise anew the question of the Church itself. If the Church is merely an organisation that tells people about Christ, then it truly is not indispensable. But the Orthodox understanding is far more radical. The Church calls itself the Body of Christ. For the Church, the Eucharist is not merely a commemoration of the Last Supper, but a real participation of the human person in the life of Christ. It is precisely here that an answer may begin to emerge to the question of why a modern person needs the Church.
The Problem Is Not Old Practices, but the Fact That We Have Often Stopped Explaining Their Meaning
Perhaps contemporary Orthodoxy does not need to invent a new spirituality. What is needed is to understand anew why the things we already have exist. Take fasting, for example. It can easily be turned into a system of dietary rules: what one may eat, what one may not eat, when fish is permitted, and when oil is permitted. But Christian asceticism did not arise for the sake of a special menu. Its purpose is to teach a person freedom from their own desires.
And here the ancient ascetic tradition suddenly proves to be remarkably contemporary. Today’s world constantly teaches a person the opposite: if you want something, get it now. Watch one more video. Buy one more thing. Read one more news story. Open one more message. Do not remain in silence even for five minutes. In such a society, asceticism can be not a relic of the past but a school of inner freedom. But for this, it is not enough simply to tell a person that one does not eat meat on Wednesday. It is necessary to explain why a Christian learns to deny themselves in the first place.
The same applies to confession. It can be turned into a list of rules that have been broken. Or it can be understood as a school of honesty before God and oneself. Why do I constantly do what I myself do not want to do? Why am I so easily offended? Why do I want to appear better than I am? Why is it so difficult for me to forgive? Why am I dependent on the approval of others? Here an enormous field opens up for dialogue between Orthodox anthropology and contemporary psychology. There is no need either to replace confession with psychotherapy or to declare psychology a competitor of the Church.
What This Might Look Like in Practice
Let us imagine a perfectly ordinary situation. A man of about thirty-five comes to a priest. He says that he hardly prays, is constantly on his phone, watches videos and reads the news until two in the morning, has become irritable, barely speaks to his wife, has no energy for his children, and can no longer concentrate properly at work. One could tell him: “You need to pray more, spend less time on your phone, and fast.” Formally, all of this is correct. But the person most likely already knows it himself.
Or one could go a little further. The priest could explain to him that the problem is not merely the phone. The Christian tradition has long known the condition in which a person loses freedom and begins automatically to follow every inner impulse. In the past, this was described in the language of passions and thoughts. One can then propose a very concrete spiritual practice.
For example, during the fast, the person not only abstains from certain foods but also leaves the phone outside the bedroom, does not open social media during the first hour after waking up, spends at least twenty minutes in silence every evening, reads a short passage from the Gospel, and observes what happens within when the habitual stream of stimuli disappears.
Confession can then focus not on how many minutes the person spent on Instagram, but on what exactly they are looking for there. An escape from anxiety? Constant approval? Entertainment without which they can no longer remain alone with themselves? An unwillingness to speak to their wife about problems? If there are signs of genuine addiction or depression, the priest can directly advise the person to consult a psychologist or a physician.
At the same time, the underlying spiritual logic remains entirely Orthodox: attention, watchfulness, the struggle against passion, asceticism, prayer, repentance, and the restoration of one’s relationship with another person. Nothing new has been introduced into Christianity. What is new is only the response to a specific form of unfreedom that the Church Fathers simply did not know in this particular form. This, perhaps, is an example of living Tradition.
From Spiritual Dependence to Spiritual Maturity
Spiritual guidance should likewise be reconsidered. The monastic tradition of obedience has its own history and meaning. But mechanically transferring the monastic model into the life of a layperson can sometimes turn an adult Christian into someone who is afraid to make decisions independently.
A priest should not decide on behalf of a parishioner whom they should marry, which profession they should choose, where they should move, or which apartment they should buy. The purpose of spiritual guidance could be different: to teach a person to see their own motives, discern good and evil, take responsibility for their decisions, and live before God in freedom. In other words, the task of the Church is not to form an obedient person who asks permission for everything, but to help form a mature Christian.
The Church Should Not Be Afraid of a Person Who Asks Questions
The modern person wants to understand. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to accept the answer, “This is how it must be because this is how it has always been.” This does not mean that the Church should abandon truth or put dogmas to a vote. But it must be able to explain its own faith.
Why fast? What happens in the Eucharist? Why is confession necessary? How does Christianity relate to evolution? What in Church tradition is an unchanging part of the faith, and what arose under particular historical circumstances? How should we approach the difficult chapters of Church history? A person who asks such questions is not necessarily moving away from the Church. Perhaps, for the first time, they are beginning to approach their faith as an adult.
An Opportunity for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine
It is precisely here that the Orthodox Church of Ukraine has an interesting opportunity. Not because it should create some special form of Ukrainian Orthodoxy, and not because it should abandon the tradition of previous generations. Rather, as a young autocephalous Church, it has the opportunity consciously to shape its own church culture without automatically copying any ready-made model.
This can be an Orthodoxy centred on Christ, but not reduced to the Protestant principle of “the Gospel alone”; an Orthodoxy centred on the Eucharist, but which does not reduce church life to the performance of rituals; an Orthodoxy that takes asceticism seriously but does not cultivate fear and neurosis. An Orthodoxy that is not afraid of science and psychology; that preserves Tradition without turning it into a museum; that loves Ukraine without making patriotism the primary content of Christianity; and that is capable of dialogue with other Christians without pretending that differences between confessions mean nothing.
Perhaps it is important even to formulate the very question of “our spiritual path” somewhat differently. Not “What should a distinctively Ukrainian Orthodoxy look like?” but “How should a person in twenty-first-century Ukraine live the Orthodox faith?” This is an entirely different way of framing the question.
Orthodoxy After Inertia
It seems that what we are witnessing is not the end of Orthodoxy, but the end of a certain way of its existence. The time is coming to an end when church life could be transmitted almost automatically through family, culture, village life, the state, or the social environment. Increasingly, many things will have to be explained anew: Why Christ? Why the Church? Why the Eucharist? Why prayer and fasting? Why repentance? What does it mean to be a Christian in a world where it is entirely possible to live comfortably without religion?
The answer “this is how our ancestors lived” hardly works anymore. And perhaps this is precisely one of the principal tasks facing contemporary Ukrainian Orthodoxy: not to replace one church subculture with another, not to abandon Tradition for the sake of modernity, and not to hide from modernity behind Tradition, but to learn to speak in the language of our age about the experience that the Church regards as eternal.
Not merely to repeat the answers of the past, but, while preserving the Orthodox system of coordinates, to seek anew answers to the questions of people today. Perhaps this is precisely what living Tradition is.
The views expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Sophia Brotherhood. The Sophia Brotherhood may not share some of the author’s views, assessments, or conclusions.
