Staying Orthodox

BY: STEVE ROBINSON

"This Lazarus Saturday marked my 25th year being Orthodox. It is the longest I’ve been in one church in my life. Welll… depending on how you define being “in the church”.

I’ve purposely avoided writing “my journey to Orthodoxy” over the years. In retrospect, having read dozens of “journeys to Orthodoxy” in books, blogs, emails, and have listened to as many coffee hour short versions, it was comparatively pretty unremarkable. Oh for sure ALL “conversion stories” to anything must have an element of divine intervention otherwise a conversion wouldn’t be necessary nor affirmed by something beyond our own commonplace reasonings. So, I learned, even in my Protestant days, to be able to spin a decent hagiographic yarn about the coincidences (or more piously “divine providences”, it’s hard to discern which is which depending on your theodicy), set-backs, long pauses, hard realities (theologically and personally), and giddy and dark discoveries about my new faith. Converting is a messy business.

So, I’m just going to fast forward six years from discovering “The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church” in my Episcopal Church’s library (it had been checked out once in 25 years). In those six years I read books, got involved in Yahoo Orthodox Chat rooms, and talked with other inquiring minds. It all intellectually convinced me that I had found the Church of Christ and His saints. But finding Orthodoxy through books was kind of like online dating. I read the online profile, saw the pictures, flirted in comment boxes, and developed an obsession with her. I finally decided it was time to meet the Church in person. I attended a Vespers service at a local Greek cathedral with two other inquiring people.

We showed up to two acres of parking lot with two cars in it. Hmmm. The church was dark, but we saw a light in the door of a building next to the church, it was a small chapel. There was a chanter, one person in the “congregation”, and the priest… and the three of us sitting in a pew toward the back of the chapel. It turned out it was the chanter and his girlfriend, the assistant priest, and us who showed up for Vespers. It was not what I expected for a parish of 1,200 families and coming out of a Protestant traditions of “Sunday Morning, Sunday Night, Wednesday Night” as a measure of piety. Regardless, I was hooked.

Little did I know that my obsessive infatuation with my new theological lover that I had never met in person, the fantasies I’d constructed about her perfection, arriving unannounced and catching the reality of Orthodoxy in its tattered bathrobe and house slippers, smoking an unfiltered Camel (…actually, one of my catechetical experiences was helping with a Mission parish where the priest would go outside during the long choir parts of Orthros/Matins and smoke in the parking lot), my repressed disappointment with what I found, but her irresistible beauty incarnate when we finally met face to face that would draw me back again and again in spite of the betrayals, lies and disappointments, would be the template of my Orthodox experience for the next twenty five years.

So, I had found the Church and became Orthodox for the beauty promised. And, yes the beauty existed as advertised. As did the mind-boggling theological nuances, the profound spiritual direction, and rich liturgical depth. But, people also existed in it. I hoped for saints but over the years I found the church of Corinthian libertines and Cretan gluttons. I hoped for one uniform understanding of the Gospel of mercy, but found legalistic fundamentalist Galatians who viewed the Gospel as “law”. I hoped for the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace but found Timothean contentious schismatics who wrangled over words to create factions in the church. I hoped for humble pious clergy but found 3rd John clerics who loved their pre-eminence and respectful greetings in the marketplace. I hoped for the un-spotted bride of Christ but found the seven churches of Revelation: Ephesians who had left their first love, pagan Pergamites, lukewarm Laodiceans. I hoped for a church with one mind but found nit-picking Pharisees and savvy Sadducees. I hoped for speaking the truth in love but found arrogant, angry, condescending apologists. I hoped for pure Christianity and found sychretistic and superstitious Colossians.

I hoped I would find bishops that “rightly divided the word of truth”… but they often did not divide it according to the truth as I understood it from Orthodox websites and discussion forums. I found that Bishops’ decisions trump Facebook groups and clerics with cult followings (or at least they try to…).

I hoped to find the administration of the Church to be like how I managed my own business, with transparency, timely decisiveness, sensibility, with no respect of persons, and clarity in communication. But…, well…..

I hoped to find clerics and parish life that fit my understanding of competent, pastoral, wise church leadership and ministry, but it never occurred to me that my expectations were filtered through my American fundamentalist, congregationalist Bible Church culture and experience. I soon found I had to figure out how to live in a clerical leadership paradigm of a Middle Eastern culture that was explained to me as “God is an Arab Sheik and the priests are his princes…” And it was not received well when I asked, “where is this in Scripture?”Well… you get it. In short, I didn’t get it. At all. I was a spiritual adolescent (and in many things an infant). I thought I was more mature than I was and knew more than I thought I did. I knew SOME stuff, but not enough stuff. I knew how to live in my head but not how to live in a real, big world I’d never had to actually navigate and not just pontificate about. I “knew” almost everything, judged almost everyone, and understood almost nothing. I knew book and internet intellectual Orthodoxy. I had no clue about 2000 years of culturally informed “lived Orthodoxy”. In short….

I soon found that my bishop, priest, fellow cradle parishoners, and the Church in general didn’t care about my (nor my internet friends’) opinions, prognostications, interpretations of the canons, the Fathers, spiritual disciplines, and who should be ordained, defrocked or commemorated. They were less impressed with my keeping the visible spiritual disciplines as I was about their lack of them. I remember sitting at coffee hour with a group of other converts during Lent and Walter, a crusty old Russian guy (click the hot link!), looked at us and said, “Why don’t you people shut the hell up about fasting and just do it.” (He later became one of my best friends. He and I used to sit in the parking lot during the homily. He had a foldable 3 legged stool in the trunk of his car and he’d smoke and we’d chat. I consider those conversations with him as my true catechesis in real lived Orthodoxy. He was also the inspiration for “Mudge”.)

So, intellectually I understood the Church was still in existence dogmatically and practically. And I kind of knew that the Church of Acts 28 was not identical to the Church of Acts 2, nor is the Church of 2024 identical to the Church of Acts 28. To be Orthodox one must accept that the Holy Spirit has guided the changes in the Church (from structure, to liturgy, to Canons, to vestments, to clerical offices, to non-dogmatic doctrines, prayers, etc.) from Acts 2 to the present day. Even through the really messy parts of the story. And when you really understand Church history you know there’s about as much messiness as there is holiness. Contrary to my old Bible church’s teachings, New Testament Christianity didn’t have to be re-discovered, recovered, or restored to its minimalistic First Century purity, it has always existed.

I came to accept that the Church has both an unbroken apostolic succession and an unbroken succession of broken sinners. Both within the clergy and laity. And just as the presence of Christ Himself in the flesh and His 12 first-hand witnesses and 70 disciples empowered by the Holy Spirit couldn’t give us a prettier picture of the Church in the New Testament, so 2000 years of tradition can not either. Church history only affirms and puts an exclamation point on the picture of the Church we see in the Epistles.

In actuality, that is good news and bad news, but not really bad news, just real news.

What does all this mean? It means that sooner or later you will meet someone who is considered by “church leadership” to be in good standing who is a living saint and someone who is a crappy, broken and even evil human being at best or demonically deluded at worst. You will encounter the uncreated light and the utter darkness of sin. You will encounter the beauty of the divine and the twisted ugliness of evil. You will be drawn to holiness and you will be disgusted by ungodliness. You will love truth and hear lies. You will find peace and you will find spiritual warfare. But there is nothing new under the sun. It means you are in the New Testament church.

This is not a justification of any evil done in or by the Church. This is NOT to say “Oh well, you just have to learn to deal with it… and if you can’t it’s all on you.” This is NOT to say that it is “spiritual” to stay in a toxic relationship with a dysfunctional spiritual father or bishop, or in an oppressive parish or monastic culture. This is not a guilt trip if you have decided to leave the Church because you’ve seen darkness you cannot bear. I’ve done it myself.

I’ve left several things “Orthodox” over the years. Of course, some of my illusions about Orthodoxy. But I’ve also left parishes, bishops, priests, leadership positions, ministries, friends, and dearly held concepts. Each “leaving” was because I encountered the “true Church”. There was conflict, frustrations, adversity, despondency, exhaustion, burn-out, disillusionment, mis-understandings, blatant lies and obsfucation, inattention, neglect and malfeasance. Of course the severity and consequences of some of that was my own estimation, and my unwillingness to tolerate being neglected, gas-lighted, or turn a blind eye, or…..

About twelve years ago I took a year “off” from Orthodoxy. I had been in Mission parish leadership for over a decade that dealt with the removal of three priests while being “essential personnel”. Not “kissing the right things” and the consequences took a major toll on my spirit. I left my parish and basically just stayed home. I was done in, disillusioned, and burned out. I wish I could say I did reader’s services at home, fasted and prayed 10,000 Jesus prayers and did 500 prostrations a day, and read a hundred books by “Holy Mountain” people while I was gone and that’s what brought me back, but I didn’t and none of that did. I went into the wilderness, alone, without provisions, nor a plan or timeline, expectations or goals.

The arena was at the intersection of “Where else can I go?” and “Why would I go back to that?” I eventually wrestled myself back to the Church and my parish during Lent the next year. But I soon fell back into my former roles, responsibilities, commitments and engagement with church heirarchy and leadership. I had not “deconstructed” as much as perhaps just licked my wounds, had a few beers, recovered from the beatings, set a few internal boundaries that were pretty amorphous, and went back with at least some acceptance of “reality”.

The second leaving was more forced on me by circumstances. We had moved my parents in with us. It was hard to juggle being caregivers and “essential personnel” at church (my wife was the choir director so she was more essential than I was). Then I got diagnosed with rectal cancer. Right at the beginning of COVID. I had to stay home for three years during my treatments and through the deaths of my parents. My house became my domestic monastery, church, spiritual disciplines, liturgy and wilderness. I prayed the “Abbreviated Psalter”: God d*mn it. Holy sh*t. F*ck me. What the hell. My life itself became my sacrament.

But this time I did more than just rest, recover from burnout, and reconsider my involvement levels in my roles at my parish. I won’t use the word “deconstruction” as much as “re-calibration” of my compass to find my path toward God to define what happened.

I had to figure out how to “let go” not just of functional roles and degrees of involvement, but of my self-definition of what it means for me to “be a Christian” apart from my church roles, public persona, internet facades, and church relationships. Ultimately I chose to leave the parish I had spent 20 years as a founding member and in leadership. We returned to our former parish that had grown ten-fold and became (somewhat) anonymous. I sit in the back, am willfully ignorant of how the “church sausage is made”, and just pray and go home and try to be a Christian in the world. After a year I’m still working out how to move through the intersection of “involvement” and “entanglement” at church. I’m still sitting at the red light. I’ve become the “cradle Orthodox” whose spiritual life I judged, and I think I’m getting it.

Anyway, over the years I’ve “talked” to a lot of people who have left, are leaving, who are thinking about leaving their parish or the Church entirely. And some people who are cautiously and fearfully thinking about returning somewhere, somehow.

If you’re considering leaving the Church, I guess if I had to distill this down now, this is my best advice:

Find someone who doesn’t speak in memes and platitudes about the Church and what it means to “be really Orthodox” to talk to about it. It may not be someone in a black robe. Find someone who has won wisdom the hard way not just from books. Maybe someone like Walter/Curmudgeophan.

Find true friends, not just echoes.

Don’t make any sudden moves.

But… Move if you must. God is where ever you are going. He is, after all, everywhere present and fills all things, even where you don’t want Him to be and in the stuff you don’t want Him to fill.

Embrace the wilderness if you enter it. Pray there if you can. If you can’t pray, then just try to listen. But be aware Satan also speaks in the wilderness. Don’t try to find the Church again. Find your first love again first: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and your neighbor as yourself for this is the Law and the Prophets and the dogma of the Church.

And some day, and you will know that day, knock on the door of the Church if your heart points you toward it, even if it scares you…. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

I listened to St. John Chrysostom’s Paschal Homily this year with new ears.

I thought of my 25 year journey into, through, out and back to the Church. I thought how Curmudgeophan’s Paschal Homily might go:

If any man be zealous and love God and become obsessed with the Church, and drove his priest nuts demanding to be let in NOW, if any have labored long in fasting and two hour prayer rules before you were even catechumens, and attended every service even with six kids from the first hour, then fell off the wagon at the third hour and went to the bar, then staggered to the job at the sixth hour but half-assed it and ended up taking a nap behind the J-John until the Ninth Hour, then decided to give it a go until the eleventh hour, then just gave up and threw in the towel and had the balls to ask for an advance on your paycheck… the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept it all, from the first flirtation, to the zealous pursuit, to the lapse in focus, to the falling asleep, to the half-assed attempt, to the well intentioned screw ups: He gives full recompense and rest unto all.

Because Jesus loves you. Perfectly.

This I know, for the Bible tells me so."