I have received some encourgement from a good friend to blog. The email I received that encouraged me to do so read something like this - "Zeke - blog ...blog." And that was it.
So here it goes. With this same person I seem to have an ongoing discussion concerning ecclesiological issues, namely, the Orthodox Church's claims to being the "true Church" or the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" or the very "fullness of Christ." Now this is a complicated issue that receives altogether too much attention and results in altogether too much pride. I'm not saying that making these claims is necessarily prideful or arrogant - I really do believe that the Orthodox Church lives in the fulness of Christ - but what I am saying is that too much of this talk amongst us Orthodox folk puts us in the wrong frame of mind. There is a time and a place for argument and even polemic but generally speaking it gets out of hand and begins to control us.
Father John Jillions addressed this issue in a beautiful way in his homily last Sunday. He said that a lot of people are trumpeting the Orthodox Church as a the "true Church." He said that an undue emphasis on these issues misses the true question and that is "Does our Church show the love of Christ? When a person walks into the door of the Church, do they see people aflame with the love of Christ?" Too much talk of the "trueness" of Orthodoxy is tainted and disfigured by a corelative and parallel discussion of why other Churches are not true, what they do that is so bad, and it is often quite poisonous to ourselves and to others. I'm thinking here of Matt 23:11-15 -
11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. 13 But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. 14 15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.
The problem comes when we make ourselves look good in comparison to all others.
And for converts to Orthodoxy, such as myself, the discussions of the truth of Orthodoxy and the things lacking in other Churhces, manifests itself is a hatred of our past. To be sure, there are certain things in my past Church experiences that I hate with a passion but it seems to me unjust and triumphalistic to forget the places that have nourished me long before I became Orthodox. To forget what has already been preparing me is to knock out the rungs on the ladder by which I was enabled to climb to the Orthodox Church.
What really drew me to the Orthodox Church was the prayerful life, the inner life, the liturgical life, beauty, the saints and the loving condescension of Christ made manifest at each and every eucharistic gathering of the faithful. It primarily wasn't polemics against the Pope or women priests or gay priests or Vatican II reforms or Evangelical styles of worship or anything of the sort that drew me in - they may have played a part because these were questions I had. What drew me in was the realization that in the Orthodox Church, there is the beauty, the grace, the saints, the love and the very vision of God that transfigures people in a way and to a degree that I simply could not see in any other place. In short, the love of God drew me in.
Even though we don't have instruments in our liturgical worship, maybe we toot our own horns a bit too often. This is something I'm desperately trying to change within myself. I still let people know what I think, especially if I think it wounds the heart, but I'm trying to do it differently. I'm trying to conduct these convesations as though the ideas with which I disagree have a face. Many ideas have a face who honestly and sincerely believes in a given idea and when I remember that, it changes my approach from polemical dismisiveness to real engagement with the heart of another human made in the image of God.
So here it goes. With this same person I seem to have an ongoing discussion concerning ecclesiological issues, namely, the Orthodox Church's claims to being the "true Church" or the "one, holy, catholic and apostolic church" or the very "fullness of Christ." Now this is a complicated issue that receives altogether too much attention and results in altogether too much pride. I'm not saying that making these claims is necessarily prideful or arrogant - I really do believe that the Orthodox Church lives in the fulness of Christ - but what I am saying is that too much of this talk amongst us Orthodox folk puts us in the wrong frame of mind. There is a time and a place for argument and even polemic but generally speaking it gets out of hand and begins to control us.
Father John Jillions addressed this issue in a beautiful way in his homily last Sunday. He said that a lot of people are trumpeting the Orthodox Church as a the "true Church." He said that an undue emphasis on these issues misses the true question and that is "Does our Church show the love of Christ? When a person walks into the door of the Church, do they see people aflame with the love of Christ?" Too much talk of the "trueness" of Orthodoxy is tainted and disfigured by a corelative and parallel discussion of why other Churches are not true, what they do that is so bad, and it is often quite poisonous to ourselves and to others. I'm thinking here of Matt 23:11-15 -
11 The greatest among you will be your servant. 12 All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted. 13 But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them. 14 15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.
The problem comes when we make ourselves look good in comparison to all others.
And for converts to Orthodoxy, such as myself, the discussions of the truth of Orthodoxy and the things lacking in other Churhces, manifests itself is a hatred of our past. To be sure, there are certain things in my past Church experiences that I hate with a passion but it seems to me unjust and triumphalistic to forget the places that have nourished me long before I became Orthodox. To forget what has already been preparing me is to knock out the rungs on the ladder by which I was enabled to climb to the Orthodox Church.
What really drew me to the Orthodox Church was the prayerful life, the inner life, the liturgical life, beauty, the saints and the loving condescension of Christ made manifest at each and every eucharistic gathering of the faithful. It primarily wasn't polemics against the Pope or women priests or gay priests or Vatican II reforms or Evangelical styles of worship or anything of the sort that drew me in - they may have played a part because these were questions I had. What drew me in was the realization that in the Orthodox Church, there is the beauty, the grace, the saints, the love and the very vision of God that transfigures people in a way and to a degree that I simply could not see in any other place. In short, the love of God drew me in.
Even though we don't have instruments in our liturgical worship, maybe we toot our own horns a bit too often. This is something I'm desperately trying to change within myself. I still let people know what I think, especially if I think it wounds the heart, but I'm trying to do it differently. I'm trying to conduct these convesations as though the ideas with which I disagree have a face. Many ideas have a face who honestly and sincerely believes in a given idea and when I remember that, it changes my approach from polemical dismisiveness to real engagement with the heart of another human made in the image of God.
posted by Enthymemosis at 12:07 a.m.
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