And so that seems very much more aggressively codified in Greek Orthodox practice.

Well, maybe, or maybe today it is, but I think it's essentially, I mean, I hate to go, Flannery O'Connor talks about the sort of like Manichaean trend, both in Christian writing and outside of it, but to separate mind and, or I think she says nature but it's also mind and body and so where that sort of like the important part of a person is the law of mind the part of us that can ascend into abstraction and that the body is like this skin cage that we like stumble around in until we don't have to anymore um but the eucharist for both catholic and orthodox churches and anglican a lot of anglican churches and So the Eucharist is essentially a mystery, but it's a mystery that binds together the eternal and the transient, the physical and the spiritual in a way that is like utterly unknowable to us.

And because it's unknowable, it doesn't mean it's less real.

And because we can't apply a scientific or like empirical epistemology to the Eucharist doesn't mean that it like, yeah, is less real.

less true.

So yeah, so I think that the relationship the Orthodox have with icons is like a natural extension of the view of the Eucharist, that the Eucharistic theology sits at the center of all of that.

But yes, so you can think of, and actually there's like something kind of cool and meta in the icon we're going to talk about.

The way that it is... painted or written, I guess, the way that it is written is extremely strange.

What did that experience teach you or force you to question about what a Christian woman is supposed to look like?

Yeah, that's a great question.

So I never really thought about what a Christian—this is something—we spoke a little bit before we started about the fact that I have a lot of friends who grew up in an evangelical context, but I have never been a part of a culture that had a lot to say about how women should act.

Mm-hmm.

And so in the Orthodox, I converted when I was 18, just like on my own.

And for me, that was always just sort of like a choice that I made, that I was opting into.

And I always felt that I could bring my whole self to that.

So explain