Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Orthodox Christian

I have been an Orthodox Christian for fifteen years, and am still becoming one. (The Orthodox Church is the ancient Church of the east, which divided from the Roman see over a long period of time, culminating in 1054.)

I started out as a vaguely religious secularist, and lived that way up until I was eighteen years old, when I experienced a dramatic conversion. I felt immediately at the time that I was called to ministry, and many friends and acquaintances started to attend church -- several were baptized by my Protestant pastor in the swimming pool in my back yard.

So I left and became a missionary for Youth With A Mission for a short while. In reaction to what I deemed to be an over-emphasis on experience to an exclusion of love for truth, I left and worked in a sawmill for several months, saving money to attend Bible College. There, I went to the other extreme and became a staunch five-point Calvinist. I bought and read all the contemporary Reformed books, the Puritans, Edwards, Warfield, Van Til and others. After becoming disillusioned with this, yet still strongly believing in it, I discovered the Orthodox Church through correspondence with a famous Protestant who had converted.

Two years later, after memorizing the inquirer's class of an excellent priest and teacher that I had on video tape, reading Bp Kallistos Ware's books and the books of others, I knew I wanted to become Orthodox. I entered into the life of a local parish in California, and after attending a catechism class and going to church regularly for a couple of years, experiencing the dogma (and having the living dogma as passed down through the centuries as the context of my experience), I was received into the Orthodox Church through baptism.

This initiated a journey of the spirit, one of vital life, which is ever changing and transformative, both a struggle and a joy, one that exposes my wickedness but also reveals the true good nature, the humanity that underlies the stain of sin. Christianity in the Orthodox Church for me no longer consists solely of either a series of varying experiences meant to bless or edify me, nor does it remain an abstract and academic series of discursive ideas that I am to strictly adhere to and then apply to my life. Rather, it is personal, living, often distressing and difficult, but always rich and fertile with the possibility of and often unexpected manifestations of joy, even in suffering, which has as its goal the actual, real, in space-and-time as well as timeless reality of personal change.

One gradually becomes not super-righteous or judgmental or puritanical, nor sappy and witless and ineffectual, but more real, intoxicated by sobriety, more deeply in tune with intrinsic meaning, closer to one's own unsoiled nature, alive and fully human.

I haven't arrived at any serious penultimate fulfillment of humanity in union with Christ, riddled with addictions as I am, but I am grateful to be on this path of being a Christian and constantly still becoming one.

No comments: