This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Converts, Convertitis, and the Holy Tradition

Evan, in a reply to yesterday's post, writes:

How many among you, at least of those who write on the Internet, are recent converts? If tradition is so important to you, shouldn't you be silent before it for a while longer, to grow up into its 2000-year history, before you are so quick to judge those lacking it.

Let's just put it baldly: Evan's right. We should be silent, pray the Jesus prayer on our prayer ropes, fast, and give alms. Very little more than that, which is to say, very little else than loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves is necessary.

Still, for me and others of my kind, blogging does help me get into that process of immersing myself in, by forcing me to contemplate more fully on, the Tradition that claims me. I think the series of posts set off last week by the Kreeft lecture I linked to is one obvious example of how that is working for me. At least that's true for the most part right now, so long as I do not forget the most basic immersion of all: the daily struggle for theosis in the life and worship of the Church--which is 99% of the time not blogging, but changing my daughter's poopy diapers, asking my wife's forgiveness when, for the umpteenth time I've said or done something in anger, and so forth.

Yet Evan raises a very important point, and one we Orthodox converts (or, rather, in my case, still-on-the-way-to-converting Orthodox convert) would do well to square up to our claims about the Tradition. Karl helps frame a response when he comments on another post:

Frankly, it is new to all of us. Tradition is a deep well we never exhaust. Every day, we can enter into its life which is full of vigor, drama, and freshness. Just another paradox of the "traditionalist" life.

Which means, quite frankly, that we will never not be converts, and Evan's proposed "gag rule" will never not apply. It will be generations before our families can be said to have an Orthodox heritage, or at least one of any depth. Must we then remain silent about our faith? For some of us, working out our faith with fear and trembling will involve thinking aloud in public. The blog is great for that, and more to the point, it helps keep us honest when criticisms such as Evan's keep bringing us home to the main point.

That being said, it is precisely because of the various failures of our former religious communities and their ways of life, that has been part of the impetus of our turn to Orthodoxy. In my own case, a realization that the Restoration Movement Plea didn't go far enough (that an embrace of the New Testament Church we were trying to restore necessitated an embrace of the Church of history) was initially what set me on the path I'm at today. The realization of that lack led me to, amost at the same time, a turn toward Benedictine monasticism and a more biblical (and Traditional) understanding of what actually happens in the Lord's Supper. This in turn led me to Anglicanism, before the failures of Anglicanism pointed me toward Orthodoxy. If I am critical of the Stone-Campbell Movement, or of Anglicanism, I am so as one who has been an insider. And if I am critical it is not without also a profound gratitude for what these two traditions have given me. I think the same is true of my fellow Ortho-converts.

So are we converts overly critical of our heritage traditions? Perhaps. But only because we have taken these things so seriously. And if our criticisms sting, assuming that, for the sake of discussion, one can at least factor out our human sinfulness, perhaps they sting because they hit close to home.

Still, I regret to say that of all people it tends to be us converts to Orthodoxy that often give the Faith a bad name. We have, as Father Seraphim Rose would put it, zeal without knowledge. Too many of us (and we know what email groups and chatrooms I'm talking about here) head off into "supercorrectness" and like the Pharisees strain out a gnat to swallow a camel. A good way to tell a recent convert to Orthodoxy is to find someone who can wax eloquent on the filioque one moment, and the next flip off the guy who just cut him off in traffic. Much head, little heart.

This convertitis is something almost all converts to Orthodoxy become infected with at one point or another. It manifests itself, as Father Seraphim noted, in an overreliance on the Church canons and rubrics, and the external adherence to the way of Life in Christ. It knows too much and loves too little. And if left untreated, this convertitis can prove fatal.

But the only cure for convertitis is further immersion in the Tradition, which is not to say knowledge of the Tradition, but the living of the Tradition. Here, in my own experience, but also on the counsel of Father Seraphim, the lives of the saints are indispensable.

For one who is extremely cognizant of the fasting rules of the Church (a "label reader"), it is of some importance that they be faced with the "fools for Christ" the stories of whose lives have been preserved by the Church. These "fools" would go through their village during Lent purposefully and publicly consuming all sorts of Lenten "no-no's" like meat and milk--to "prove" to their fellow villagers that they (the "fools") were the worst sinners of all. But God would not let their sanctity be hidden, and even in their lifetimes some of them were known for the holiness.

I know for myself, I am one who is tempted by the dark beauty of human reason and intellect. A bookish sort, I am too, too tempted to the sort of things St. Nicetas was tempted to. I need someone like St. Alexander of Comana to bring me up short. Or, better, yet, Tripp's beloved Br. Lawrence.

We Protestant converts, especially, tend to be tempted too much to this head knowledge over heart loving. But, individual giftedness and temperment aside, that has a lot to do with the emphasis on knowledge and information in Protestantism. How many seminars, classes, and five steps to Christian happiness programs have we endured? Even the pragmatic-oriented teaching is more about information than the day to day living of it. If this is how we've been trained and discipled all our life, we are bound to bring this into Orthodoxy as well.

And that is precisely why we would do well to pray more, fast more, and give alms more, and talk/blog less. But given our human weakness, as this post reveals, we will likely still do a lot of blogging. Pray for us, then, as we are all still sinners.

Posted by Clifton at February 2, 2005 10:00 AM | TrackBack