You are a light to many…even to this old lady…
Much love in Christ to you,
ByzantineSuzanne at DC

Yes, I used strong language to describe the sense of rejection one must feel for the world–and that includes our former Christian confessions that were, at their finest moments, merely inadequate, and at the worst were actively conforming to the way of the world. I stand by it. If you read closely what I stated (and I assure you, I parsed over the sentence several times before I committed to it, precisely because I didn’t want this confusion), which was “outside the perfecting ability of the Holy Spirit working on you as a member of Christ’s own Body,” it is the being a member of Christ’s body (that is, partaking of the divine body and blood in communion–as opposed to merely believing that Jesus is God) that creates the ability for the Holy Spirit to work in transforming us. I’m not in any way saying that the Holy Spirit does not work outside the bounds of the Church–but where that happens, it is the Holy Spirit calling those outside Her home to Her. Nothing more, nothing less.

I am sorry that your husband has had bad experiences with Orthodox folks. The overt religiosity that you describe is, I think, a post-convert symptom of the very thing I am talking about. Blessed Fr. Seraphim prayed for the day that the non-intellectual, the average, blue-collar American could find the grace and truth of the Church. I lament that this has not been the case just yet, and I hope that we can eventually make that a reality. But in th mean time, we’ve got people who are landing out our doorsteps who are interested in Orthodoxy, but have no idea about what it takes to become Orthodox in the heart–and, frankly, from what I’m seeing, the catechetical process is failing them. I was, in this essay, merely attempting to show that there are holes in the process, and there are big problems with some people that are falling through those holes. Lord have mercy on us if we neglect those who are coming looking for bread, and we hand them stones!

Whatever our personal failings–and please understand, I have many that I am aware of, and probably 3x that many that I am too blinded by my own pride to see–we do a disservice to those who come to us by not being honest about what the narrow way of Christ demands of us. Circumcision of the heart is a painful process–and it’s not something that we should spring on people AFTER Chrismation.

pax tecum
justinian

“To enter the Church, you have to come to her in humility–you have to admit that everything you were before you came to her was wrong. Even the things in your past that you previously thought of as right or good; it has to be understood that there was nothing good in your past, because it was outside the perfecting ability of the Holy Spirit working on you as a member of Christ’s own Body. Anything less is holding on to the passion of pride, and will just cause more grievous harm to the person once they are received into the Church.”

I think you would find this triumphalist perspective refuted by many of the Saints and indeed at points by Christ Himself. There is a parodox and tension that is in the Gospels yet seems to me to be missing from your statements here. I think of Mark 9:38ff as contrasted with Matthew 12:30. We cannot say for sure even that someone who does not even formally profess Christ is not somehow, by the mercy of God, being saved.

Therefore, in actuality, I expect your statements here to be true of professing Christians coming into full Orthodoxy [in terms of formal commitment to an Orthodox parish] only in a qualified sense and in widely varying degrees. In many important respects, this was my experience, but not in as absolute a sense as you suppose here. There was much of Orthodoxy that, by the mercy and grace of Christ and the conviction of His Spirit, I had already embraced prior to formally joining an Orthodoxy parish. I say this not at all to my own credit–it was a sheer gift of God’s grace in resposne to my own sense of desperate need to understand His ways more fully and literally to prevent me from losing my sanity. I was able to embrace Orthodoxy to some extent as much because of some of aspects of the gospel that I was explicitly taught in my evangelical context as it was in spite of others. What led me to want to re-examine some of the assumptions of my former evangelicalism also were not merely intellectual or rational convictions, but involved deep matters of the heart, of soul-searching self-examination, and of the meaning of the gospel. I suspect on some level this is true for many coming into Orthodoxy from another Christian communion. Unless the Spirit were already active in our lives and consciences on some level, melting our pride, many of us would not have been drawn to Orthodoxy in the first place. I believe what you are warning against here is indeed a real danger–to be drawn into Orthodoxy for all the wrong reasons and find oneself yet unhealed. Yet I think it is also dangerous to presume that because your own attitudes and Christian convictions before (and even after) becoming (formally) Orthodox may have involved unmitigated pride, that this is absolutely true for everyone. It is one thing to look starkly at some doctrines that are not fully Orthodox and pronounce them as leading necessarily to pride as their logical conclusion (quite correctly). It is quite another to refuse to recognize that few people have examined every logical extension of the beliefs they have been taught and embraced them on that level. Very often they may be responding to the aspect of those beliefs they find to be true as a result of the Holy Spirit’s work in their heart and in their own experience of Christ’s mercy. Not one of us can claim to be free from pride, but it is always dangerous to go from general truths of the gospel, and attempt to apply them in black and white terms to anyone other than ourselves. We will always find three-fingers pointing back at ourselves, no matter which side of the defining line of full communion in the Orthodox Church we find ourselves.

Paradloxically perhaps, on the flip side to letting go of unworthy self-esteem, we all must know, in the sense of deeply experiencing it, that we are deeply valued and loved, no matter the level of our spiritual attainment or lack thereof, just because Christ loves us and has created us in His own image and has declared His love for us. In other words, we must experience grace if we are to be healed. Indeed it is only in the degree that we experience this love that we are able to see our sins for what they are. It is, too often, the absence of a sense of this awareness for those “outside the group,” even coming from “Orthodox” Christians, that hinders the everyday guy or gal in our culture (the non-intellectual, underachieving, average “sinner,” who nevertheless feels his need of God) from even considering Orthodoxy with all its explicitly hyper-religious language and pious expression in terms of style of worship (all appropriate in their context, of course, but a context that is very difficult to grasp without a solid undergirding in this love and grace, which can only be experienced in real relationships!). I love Orthodoxy. I do not believe we should compromise our Liturgy or spirituality in any way. But it is sobering to realize that “to whom much has been given, much is required.” I am burdened that my non-intellectual husband, who eould not not boast of any particularly stellar spiritual attainment or theological expertise, but who nevertheless has responded in his evangelical context to the love and grace of Christ, feel truly welcomed into Orthodoxy. That has yet to happen (which, perhaps, in a way, only serves to underscore a major portion of your point here). Unfortunately, it is remarkably difficult to find a parish populated by the likes of St. Silouan and St. Seraphim of Sarov, and that sometimes seems to me to be what it would take to overcome my husband’s deep insecurities around very overtly religious people, the result of deeply painful past experiences! Pray for us, sinners, that God have mercy on us!

What a relief, and a blessing, to find a place that only expects me to know what I know. And all I really know for sure is what I’ve learned in the Orthodox Church.

Excellent post, brother.

Kyriaki: “Pride goeth ever before a fall, and a haughty spirit before destruction.” How well the words of Solomon are burned into my memory. Most of us learn the hard way–I just take comfort now in the fact that I realize I have so much to unlearn and am just now (albeit barely, with lots of fitful restarts) learning what truly matters. The ‘circumcision of the heart’ of which St. Paul speaks is frightfully painful.

Pax vobiscum

I’m talking to someone at the moment online who is in somewhat of the same place I was, though he has his own reasons for investigating Orthodoxy. And I wish I could somehow convey this – that what you know, what you can debate, your intellectual criticism of the Church will get you nowhere, and it’s only in knowing nothing that we can begin to learn, but despite all these desires I know that he will have to learn, as I did, the hard way. Lord have mercy.

I’m still learning the hard way – in some ways I think it would have been better had I never studied theology, I have so much to unlearn!

I’m commenting late, I know, but I wanted to add this now.

Thankyou Justinian.