One week from full Lent. Tomorrow, Orthodox Christians are to cease eating meat until Pascha/Easter.
How last Sunday began for me
A young man paced the sidewalk nervously as I approached Church for Matins. We exchanged names, his sounding middle-eastern.
“I’m an inquirer,” he said. “First time in an Orthodox Church?” “Yes.” “What drew you?”
Notable hesitation, then one word: “Repentance.”
“You picked a good Sunday for that. The theme is the parable of the Prodigal Son. Do you know it?”
“No. I just started reading Matthew.”
(Edited to make me sound slicker than I was.)
So I summarized the parable for him and then left to do my part in the services.
Seldom have we had someone starting with such a “clean slate,” innocent of any knowledge of the faith.
But remarkable, too, that seldom have we had someone give a confident answer that “repentance” is what drew him. That is probably the very best of all possible answers. I don’t know where he got it.
He stayed all three hours through the Divine Liturgy. I think God’s up to something in this young man.
His Catechist will have to change or abandon curricula crafted for Catechumens coming from other Christian traditions, sometimes with deep knowledge of scripture but always with some knowledge.
Speaking of repentance …
Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.
Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity
The full-meal deal
Almost all the good stuff in the spiritual life is risky, but although the Church knows this, she views the risk differently that Protestants do. Traditional forms of Protestantism are risk-averse; their tendency is to view all spiritual risk as impermissible. But the [Orthodox spirit] is that we should embrace all the good stuff while rejecting all the distortions. Don’t let the harmful things frighten you from enjoying the beneficial ones. Don’t let the false doctrines frighten you from embracing the true. From a[n Orthodox] point of view, that would be like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
For example, to avoid unhealthy attitudes toward the dead, an Evangelical will decline to invoke the intercession of the saints at all. To avoid the temptation of drunkenness, a Baptist will use grape juice, not wine, to commemorate the sacrifice of Christ. To avoid the danger of polytheism, an old-fashioned Unitarian will reject the doctrine of the Trinity ….
Adapted from J Budziszewski, who wrote these sentiments about Roman Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy.
This is one of the ways in which Catholicism retains much of the Orthodox spirit.
Thin memory
In churches with thin memory, Christianity quietly reorganizes itself around personalities … Authority is denied in principle and exercised constantly in practice. Someone still decides what matters, what counts as faithful, what gets emphasized—but those decisions are no longer accountable to anything older than the present moment.
When tradition is pushed aside, it doesn’t leave neutrality behind. It leaves a vacuum.
And into that vacuum rush charisma, moral urgency, cultural pressure, and the unspoken anxieties of the age.
…
I didn’t return to the creeds because I wanted certainty. I returned to them because I realized I couldn’t keep pretending faith was a solo project.
… Faith was never meant to be sustained alone. The creeds weren’t written to stifle thought or end conversation. They were written to ensure that what Christians confessed together remained recognizable across time and place.
When we say “I believe” together, we are admitting something deeply unfashionable: belief is not something we invent from scratch. It is something we receive. Something we are carried by when our own confidence runs out.
The Church remembers on our behalf. It holds words steady when our language falters. It confesses truths that do not depend on our clarity, enthusiasm, or emotional health.
…
Tradition does not eliminate authority. It restrains it. It binds teachers and leaders to something older than themselves.
Tradition does not promise certainty. It promises continuity.
Adam Finkney. As always, the caveat that “Mere Orthodoxy” is not an Orthodox site; it is a site full of thoughtful young Calvinistish guys (mostly) who sometimes stumble hearteningly close to the truly old truths.
The Orthodox difference
But how could we ever relate to God or, even more challenging, truly unite with Him? Of all religions, only Orthodox theology emphasizes union with God—in a real and actual sense—as the goal and purpose of all human life. We rarely speak of “going to heaven,” as though it were a destination. We do not speak of experiencing a “beatific vision” of God, as though God could be viewed but remained at some distance from us. Rather, Orthodox Christianity speaks of theosis, the divinization of the human person. We expect, hope, and strive for actual union with the perfect, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, and changeless God. But we are flawed, limited, and come into existence for a brief time; we are confined to one place at one time, and we are constantly changing. So how is union with God possible? The Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Son of God, gave us the ability to truly connect to God and become united with Him, transformed and illumined by Him, not simply because He died for us but because of the way He lived among us.
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 