Q&A With Frederica Mathewes-Green

A Substack Collaboration

“Jesus is lying on his side on my dining room floor, leaning against the radiator, balanced on one finger and one toe like a gymnast. He is flattened, just a sheet of painted plywood, and from pointed toe to the tip of his halo he is about four-and-a-half feet tall. For protection, for storage, Jesus is swathed in a blue tablecloth that has been knotted around his ankles and pulled up over his head. When I push the cloth aside, I can see his form, a crucified body without a cross. He floats in misery, head sunk toward one shoulder, eyes tightly shut, face brimming cupful of pain.”

That quote comes from

Frederica Mathewes-Green

’s 1995 article “Through a Glass More Clearly,” and it captures why she’s beloved among Orthodox readers. Her prose is sharp and her reflections on her journey to Eastern Orthodoxy capture the strangeness and beauty so many of us were drawn to.

Back in 1993, she started a mission parish with her husband, Fr. Gregory Mathewes-Green. That’s how Jesus ended up wrapped in her blue tablecloth. In 2018, she and her husband retired and moved to Johnson City, Tennessee near the church her son, Fr. Stephen Mathewes, serves in. She has 3 children and 15 grandchildren.

She’s a writer’s writer, a convert’s convert, and a priest’s wife’s priest’s wife, and she graciously accepted my request to do a written Q&A. Since she’d recently launched a Substack, I thought it’d be fun to solicit questions from other Orthodox Substackers, so you’ll see I’ve tagged them where applicable.

I hope you enjoy the Q&A, and if you’d like to read more of her work, you can subscribe to Frederica’s World and I also highly recommend her book Welcome to the Orthodox Church. It’s my favorite primer on Orthodox Christianity.

Karis Rides

: What is the best and most effective way of discussing the Theotokos and saint veneration with Protestants. That’s still an issue I personally encounter with some of my friends and family, and I’d love to hear your wisdom on the subject. How do we help them see it not as idolatry?

FMG: This may be the most significant roadblock for Protestant Christians looking into Orthodoxy. Fr Peter Gillquist used to say that they have three problems: “Mary, Mary, and Mary.” And I have never found a magic key that works for everyone. But I can tell you what I’ve tried.

I wrote a book called “Mary as the Early Christians Knew Her: The Mother of Jesus in Three Ancient Texts.” I wanted to show, from early-church documents, that those early Christians loved her. And that they believed the faithful departed can pray for us. That it’s no different from asking a friend to pray for you.

They seem to think we believe that Mary can do magical things for us, whether they are in God’s will or not. They think that we almost see her as a God in her own right. (The Muslims actually do believe this about Christians; they believe we think the Trinity is God the Father, Jesus, and Mary.) Maybe Protestants think we feel too lowly to pray to directly to Jesus, so we go up many layers of saints instead. Like it’s a chain-of-command, and we have to get the request approved at all the desks, all the way up, before we can talk to Jesus.

So I was writing this book about the early church and Mary, and I loaned the manuscript to an evangelical neighbor. When she finished it she said, “It is very nice, but for me, I’m still going to go directly to Jesus.” I answered, “Well, OK, if that’s what you really want, I won’t pray for you any more.”

Because it’s the same thing. We ask our friends to pray for us, and we ask the saints to pray for us, because they are our friends too. Christ has destroyed Death and they are with him, and they are always praying now, so we ask them to pray for us as well. They are our prayer partners, just like our friends at church.

(One hangup you can find at this point is the people who think the righteous who have reposed are asleep, until Christ returns. We can show them the Transfiguration where Elijah and Moses are awake and talking with Jesus. Or Jesus’ parable of Lazarus, where the wicked rich man is awake and thirsty, and asking God to tell someone to bring him a drop of water.)

My son Fr. Stephen Mathewes takes another approach. He believes that reading and talking can only take you so far, and in the end you need to experience these things. There is no substitute for experiencing Orthodoxy. So to people who are resistant to Mary he says “Just try it.” Try asking her to pray with you for something. You might discover something that you would never know otherwise.

He told me a story about a Protestant who was very troubled about praying to Mary, and he had a dream. He was in a meadow and saw Mary standing in the air, above the ground. She said: “Here I am. I am your mother. ASK ME.”

His father had been given a terrible diagnosis, so in the morning he asked Mary to pray for him. Later his dad phoned him and said, “It’s gone. The doctors couldn’t find anything.”

Often the big problem people point to is the hymns that say “Most Holy Theotokos, save us.” That’s because they understand “save” to mean Christ paying the debt for our sins to the Father. They should know that the Greek word, both here and in the New Testament, means “save” as in “save from drowning.” When we ask her to “save” us we are asking her to pray for us to be released from the grip of sin, for help in living a Christian life, and the strength to resist temptation.

I’ve heard it said that Orthodox theology considers God to be outside of space and time. So in worship all times are simultaneous, and when the priest prays the Eucharistic prayers, we are in some literal way in the upper room with the Apostles. By the same token we are with Mary when Gabriel comes to bring her the message, and at that very moment it’s like we’re saying, “Say yes, Mary. Begin the story of salvation.”

Probably another problem at this point is that they don’t understand the Orthodox view of salvation–our beliefs about why Jesus died on the Cross and how God forgives our sins. They think somebody has to pay the debt for our sins to the Father. But we believe the Father just forgives us, like the father of the Prodigal Son. He just absorbs the cost of our sins, waves it away, and welcomes us home. But that is a whole other complicated question, and I’ll recommend my most recent book, a short one, titled “Two Views of the Cross.”

And then they say “So if you don’t mean ‘save’ as in eternal salvation, why can’t you use some other word?” and all you can do is sigh. These prayers are hundreds and thousands of years old, and come from cultures very far from modern America. They should respect our tradition and seek to understand it, and not think they can come into our home and immediately start re-arranging the furniture. We know what we mean.

I’ve never figured out what Protestants think we believe. Do they think Mary is an idol and an impediment to God, and we know it and like it that way? Or do they think Mary is an idol and an impediment to God and we don’t know it, and they’re trying to help us? Maybe they could just listen to what we actually believe. That way they could learn something.

I’m sorry not to be more helpful! This is definitely a hard one to navigate.

Marjorie Habighorst

: One of the things that has amazed me, as a recent convert to Orthodoxy, is the richness of tradition and stories about the early church that I never knew or heard as a fairly well-read Catholic. I never once heard a peep, for example, about St. Peter’s wife. I only recently learned that his mother-in-law is mentioned in the New Testament, and Clement of Alexandria writes that Peter’s wife was martyred shortly before his own martyrdom in Rome. Do you know of any more traditions or stories about Peter’s wife, or the wives and families of the other apostles? It seems powerful to me to be reminded that the people of the early church were not disparate, disconnected individuals, but husbands, wives, and families.

FMG: Yes, the Apostles were interconnected, living in the same communities, and even attending worship together in the same church! It’s amazing to picture how human it all was.

Unfortunately I don’t know anything about Peter’s wife, though I know the story of healing his mother-in-law is in Mark 1:29-31, and in Luke and Matthew as well. I expect there are many early-church stories about the Apostles and their families, and about the early saints, like St. Photini, the woman at the well. The Church records that she traveled with her sisters and sons and preached the Gospel. The OCA Saints Lives website supplies good background stories for many saints; I read it every day. https://www.oca.org/saints/lives

Anonymous: “What are some of the lies the Devil wants us to believe today?”

FMG: -That this world is nothing but matter, and God is somewhere else

-That what we do with our bodies doesn’t matter

-That there’s no such thing as sin

-That we deserve to be comfortable and entertained all the time

-That you have to be true to yourself no matter how many other people it hurts

-Borrowing from CS Lewis, that we have “not a Father in heaven but a Grandfather in heaven, who likes to see the young people enjoying themselves.”

Becca Parsons

: My husband and I live in England with our two young children. My husband comes from a secular background and I was raised and baptised as a Reformed Baptist. We are currently catechumens at an Orthodox parish under the Ecumenical Patriarch. What advice do you have for new converts in terms of integrating Orthodoxy into their wider lives, i.e. outside of church attendance. One of the things that drew us both to Orthodoxy was its emphasis on a faith that is incarnational, but it also feels like there is so much for us to learn that it’s hard to know where to start.

FMG: God bless you! You are in for something so wonderful, that will keep unfolding a little bit more every year, and eventually you will see the beauty and symmetry of it, and how Christian faith gives meaning to every part of your life.

I think the best advice is to stay close to your church community and participate in as much of its life as you can; with two young children, you can’t do everything. At home you can put together a collection of icons in a corner or on a wall, and if it’s feasible, go there for family prayers at bedtime every night. Some parents say it’s a help to get a bathroom rug or just a folded towel and put it on the floor, and explain to the kids that that is where they stand when you pray together. Then take the rug/towel with you to church, and they can stand on it there too. (I’m picturing a church that doesn’t have pews.)

Get a church calendar and notice which saint is the saint of the day, and read up on him (I recommended above the OCA Saints Lives website, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives.) Hearing stories about brave Christians will make an impression on the kids, and you will find some new friends among the saints. Have an icon of each family member’s patron saint in the icon corner, and maybe over their beds too.

Keep the fasts to the extent you are able, and in the way your parish does it. Cross yourself any time you hear of something you need to pray for, or when you hear a siren; try not to stop yourself from doing this even if you are in public. Pray a blessing over your food even in a restaurant. Just be a Christian in every moment of your life, and confront yourself when you feel embarrassed. It gets easier and easier to do that.

Anonymous: “What advice would you give to young parents today, especially for converts who want their kids to keep the faith?”

FMG: I gave a couple of suggestions in the question above, but that was for younger kids, and when they get older it can be different. The character of each particular child becomes more of a factor than it may have been before. Some kids are quite settled in their hearts about their faith, and for them it just keeps flowing along; other kids might be sincerely troubled by doubts and looking for reassurance.

But there are other kids who express doubts and skepticism, but they’re not looking for answers. They want out. Often a factor is that there are things they want to do that the Church does not allow, and nothing you say makes any difference. They are not asking sincere questions, seeking answers; they just want to put up walls. Parents can spend a huge amount of effort crafting answers to their skeptical questions, but they actually have their minds all made up already and nothing you say will make any difference. (Do I sound like the voice of experience?)

For those parents, make friends with St. Monica, and keep praying for your kids. God can keep surrounding those kids with challenges to their skepticism and their choices in life, and you can be a partner in that cause through your prayers. Conversions happen.

Dr. Zac

Porcu: I loved your article “Why I don't want to go on a hero's journey.” If the Hero's Journey is the archetypal story for males, as you suggest, what do you think is the equivalent female archetypal story? Any good examples come to mind?

FMG: I don’t really know what a female archetypal story might be, but I bet there are other people who have thought a lot about that and have some suggestions!

[

Nicholas Kotar

has some thoughts on this topic — BC].

Anonymous: When I come into an Orthodox Church, I don’t see altar girls or deaconesses. On a related note, there’s a lot of talk of Orthobros entering the Church because Orthodoxy is a “masculine” faith. Could you comment on the role of women in the Church?

FMG: Personally, I felt much more welcomed and affirmed in the Orthodox Church than I ever did in the Episcopal Church. Episcopalians were much quicker to put men up front, rather than women like me who were pro-life. But Orthodox churches, publications, and organizations began asking me to speak or write for them almost immediately. The difference was stark, and it was wonderful to feel welcomed and appreciated.

I do understand why people call Orthodoxy a “masculine” faith, but that’s a comment on our overall culture rather than actual masculinity or femininity. It’s the culture that’s become so much softer and comfort-oriented, which people think stereotypically is feminine. All churches were tougher, if you go back a couple of centuries, and the faith was generally more demanding.

It began deteriorating in the early or mid-sixties, when churches took on the please-the-customer ambience which was becoming endemic everywhere. My drycleaners’ clothes hangers may say “We care about you!” but you know they don’t give a d**n about me. They don’t even know how to spell my name. The whole phony “We care about you” thing has swept the country, and it has made perfectly good words meaningless, made advertising even more a parade of lies than ever, and gleefully goes on undermining the very thing we need to recover, the human connection.

Well, that’s a pet peeve of mine. How this affected churchgoing is that churches saw that they were in competition with each other for customers. They wanted to attract more customers by giving them what they want, which is apparently rock bands and funny skits and Starbucks in the foyer.

But what if what people want is not what would actually help form them as Christians? What if they don’t even know enough to know what they actually need, or even what they really want? They are sheep without a shepherd.

Orthodoxy has not experienced the sort of inter-church competition that prevails in the West, so it hasn’t changed. It’s continued to be what it always was, which is certainly “tougher” than today’s comfortable and entertaining churches.

And, for whatever reason, that does seem to be something men recognize as the very thing they want more quickly than women do. When I’ve asked women, “When you were objecting to Orthodoxy, but you finally came around, what answered all your questions?” they say that, actually, the questions were never answered. They just somehow receded in importance. What made the difference was just going to worship. Saturating in Orthodox worship, week by week, over and over again. Somehow they just “got it,” and the questions faded away.

I don’t think Orthodoxy is a more masculine religion than other churches. I think that it is continuing to be as tough as all churches used to be. And I think men are often the ones to get it more quickly than women, though I’ve certainly seen the reverse. Sometimes it’s the wife who gets it, and is trying to coax her husband along.

Dn.

Nicholas Kotar

: As someone who came of age in the age of legacy media, what advice do you have for young Christian creatives navigating a new media landscape of limitless information but limited attention span?

FMG: Dear Dn Nicholas, I wish I knew! You are surely more up-to-speed about it than I am. One thing that I’ve noticed, with some despair, is that almost everything my grandkids have truly loved has been a big-business product or part of a franchise.

My childhood memory is of grownups telling me stories; my grandchildren tell me stories, distilled from their favorite videos. I’d like to read the little ones “The Snow Queen,” and they can barely conceal their boredom. It was a dark day, I’m telling you, when I learned that they didn’t know the song “I’ve been working on the railroad.” Not that that is a noble height of American culture! But the ordinary-guy culture, our shared history, is getting lost too, and I regret that.

I think the basic problem is that storytelling and singing goes one way now–from kids to grownups. And it gets to kids directly via screens; it’s nothing we can modify to each particular child, infusing our faith perhaps, as parents have done for thousands of years. I wish I knew how to fix that, but we just don’t have the money or muscle to get their attention. (I’ve been doing a lot of complaining about Elsa lately!)

Ben Christenson

: How do you interact with pop culture today? I know you were a film critic, and I’ve heard you quote Joni Mitchell, but it all seems so much coarser now.

FMG: I don’t interact with it much any more, Ben. I’ve made a tactical retreat, and since I’m no longer writing reviews I don’t have to encounter much of what is out there.

And a funny thing, once my kids were grown I stopped listening to music. I thought I was interested in contemporary music, but it turned out I was just interested in my kids. I have a silent house (unless my husband puts something on) and I love to hear the birds. My recreational reading was written a century or more ago. I’m reading through an Edith Wharton collection now.

And you know what I watch? Movies from 1929-1934. It’s like another world. There are plenty of classic movies after that, and some good ones still appear, but I like the strangeness of the early sound pictures, so different from our time.

Michael Warren Davis

: “What are your favorite books for children, religious and non-religious?”

FMG: Just a few ideas off the top of my head.

Smaller kids: The large-format books with art by Niko Chocheli, like “The Book of Jonah” and “Christ in the Old Testament,” are amazing.

For mid-years kids, I like “Icon” by Georgia Briggs a lot. It will produce some tears at the end. All the books in Grace Brooks’s “Every Tuesday Club” series are also recommended.

A non-Christian book that a grandchild recommended to me, that I enjoyed a lot and still think over, is “We Were Liars.” It had the kind of twist you never forget.

Anna

: “What are your favorite Orthodox books to read, especially ones that you have read more than once?”

FMG: I have read “The Bible and the Holy Fathers for Orthodox” by Johanna Manley over and over, until the cover fell off and I had to figure out how to repair it. It gives you the Epistle and Gospel for each day, and then Manley supplies a paragraph or so of a Church Father’s commentary.

But apart from that, “Father Arseny” is a favorite, and “Everyday Saints,” “Father George Calciu.” When I was newly Orthodox, it was “The Art of Prayer” that I read over and over.

Anonymous: There’s a Substack trend of giving your worldview in 4 books. What 4 might be in your list?

FMG: Oh, let’s think! First would be “Alice Through the Looking Glass” (the sequel to “Alice in Wonderland”). I liked it better than “Wonderland” because it was stranger, more surprising.

Second, when I was 13 my mother gave me a collection of short stories by H.H.Munro (pen name Saki), an English writer who died in World War 1. Most of his stories are set at large houseparties like they had at Downton Abbey. His wit and gift for the perfect turn of phrase made me want to be a writer too.

Third, as a Christian, CS Lewis’s “The Great Divorce” gave me so much to think about–the nature of temptation, the healing of sin, so many things in such a short book. I grasped things in this bit of fiction better than I did in great books about prayer.

And the curve ball will be… “Spiritual Midwifery” by Ina May Gaskins. I have always had a fascination with childbirth–unmedicated, natural childbirth–and taught natural childbirth for many years before becoming a writer. Gaskins’ book was entirely birth stories, babies born at home, in her hippie commune “The Farm” in Tennessee. I was reading obstetrics textbooks and things like that, but sometimes something comes from an entirely different angle and makes you realize things you never understood before.