2. Orthodox Enounters June 2000 through January 2002 (Part B)
Having watched the Schaeffer video, I did some searching and found his book Dancing Alone at a local library, and checked it out and read it. More research led to two of Frederica Mathewes-Green's books, Facing East and At the Corner of East and Now. A few weeks later, on a trip home over the Fourth of July, I visited my favorite bookstore, Eighth Day Books, in Wichita, Kansas, and purchased the revised edition of Peter Gilquist's Becoming Orthodox as well as the book he edited, Coming Home, of personal accounts of how men from various Protestant backgrounds had become Orthodox priests. There would be many more like this.
This initial interest and burst of reading generated many sessions of surfing the web, looking for information on the Orthodox Church. From the books that I'd read, as well as many web links, I found the website of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of America, and through it's parish directory search got the information for All Saints Orthodox Church. I contacted the parish pastor, Archpriest Patrick Reardon, and was warmly invited to come worship at the Divine Liturgy.
At this point I had almost decided not to return to seminary, and, in fact, to leave the Episcopal Church altogether. I had discovered Orthodoxy, and in the space of about a month and a half had been so drawn to what I had learned of the Orthodox Church that I was now wondering if I shouldn't continue my Christian pilgrimage, leave Canterbury, as it were, and continue on to Antioch. In fact, I made a list of resolutions in which I began to attempt to appropriate the life of the faith of the Ancient Church. As far as I could then tell, it wasn't Anglicanism that had that life, but Orthodoxy. And so the last resolution was that if I ever left ECUSA, I would become Orthodox.
Of course, the question is properly raised: How could I so suddenly, having just started at seminary to discern a vocation to the priesthood in the Episcopal Church--and having uprooted my family and limited our employment and educational choices--even think of abandoning the Episcopal Church? Hadn't I spent about five years investigating Anglicanism before my confirmation? Hadn't I spent four years trying to further assimilate Anglo-Catholic traditions into my faith practice? Hadn't Anna and I worked hard to come to some compromise about the Episcopal Church, my confirmation being something she had been opposed to? Was I ready to throw all that away?
Not yet. My journal entries at the time were full of ambivalence. My initial picture of the Episcopal Church had been fueled and fed by Robert Webber's, Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. But the picture that book had presented was now a decade and more out of date. In fact, one may well question whether Webber's optimism of the place of evangelicals in ECUSA was either unfounded or misplaced. I now had a more realistic understanding of where the national church was and where it was headed. My questions now had less to do with whether or not I was called to the priesthood, but whether, if so called, I could serve without compromising my faith or putting my family at spiritual risk. Still, my parish priest was a significant influence through his friendship and pastoral mentoring. And my bishop was an example of godly leadership against the tide of rejection of biblical and traditional norms of faith and life.
And, given my experience of judging a church on the basis of reading alone, I was much less sanguine that reading a handful of books and surfing the internet was a solid basis for making a change that would involve scrapping the hard work and planning that had brought us to Chicago in the first place.
Still and all, Orthodoxy beckoned, so on 23 July 2000, I worshipped for the second time at an Orthodox Church. I went to the Divine Liturgy at All Saints.
I was absolutely blown away. Since Fr. Reardon was out of town that weekend, a deacon from another parish served the typika liturgy. The service was still foreign to me. And the differences in pious practices was evident. I genuflected whereas everyone else bowed. I crossed myself backwards (or was it the parishioners who were crossing themselves the "wrong" way?). I bowed at the Gloria Patri, whereas everyone else crossed themselves (though many also bowed). The singing was a capella, which would have called to mind some worship experiences in some of my heritage churches, except that the hymns sung were all unfamiliar to me. I recognized, of course, the Pater Noster, the Sursum Corda, the Nicene Creed (sans filioque) and a few other pieces of the Liturgy, but the rest of it was a jumble, despite the copies of the Liturgy (with explanation) in the pew.
But what wasn't foreign to me was the content of what I was hearing. At the seminary I had already been subjected to liturgies that eliminated the Fatherhood of God, that struck out the human maleness of Jesus, that replaced robust Trinitarianism with bland Sabellianist notions of a monochrome God, that nixed confession of my personal acts of sin, and that offered a running critique of the Tradition as patriarchal, oppressive, and, well, outdated. Here, however, all of that which had been denied me at the seminary liturgies was present in all its fullness. Here the Trinity was confessed in full, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Here Jesus' two natures, united in one Person, was confessed and expressly linked to the cause of our salvation. Here God was Father, fully and completely. Here our sins were confessed in a variety of ways. Here the Tradition was alive, fully vibrant, and salvific.
If I could have, I would have become Orthodox right then.
But, in God's wisdom, he has blessed me with a wife that frequently intervenes to bring me to a more level-headed and realistic path of action. Some time after worshipping at All Saints, I was still enthusiastic about the Orthodox Church, and in a conversation my wife and I were having, that intensity shone through. But she bluntly and firmly drew the conversation to a close by saying, "We're not changing churches again."
That accomplished God's purpose, which was to give me pause and to deeply consider the claims of Orthodoxy. It is not a coincidence, then, that I did not return to worship at All Saints for some six months. Nor is it a coincidence that I decided to return, after all, to seminary. I determined that I should try to enter more deeply into the Anglo-Catholic traditions I had known as a way of surviving the seminary experience.
But I did not stop my pursuit of and inquiry into the Orthodox Church.
[Next:2. Orthodox Enounters June 2000 through January 2002 (Part C)]
Posted by Clifton at February 12, 2004 07:11 AM | TrackBackI am Evangelical (as far as those titles go) but have enjoyed reading snippets of the Desert Fathers that are in the Orthodox tradition. Have you every read The Wisdom of the Desert? It is a compendium of Desert Father sayings, put together by Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk. I wonder if it is still in print? But a fun little book that gives one a taste of the 'desert perspective' on spirituality.
peace to you,
Matt
Matt:
I've not read Merton's work, but I have read the translation by Sister Benedicta Ward of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. The Orthodox Church, in my study and experience, is very much in keeping with the faith and practice of the desert fathers.
Posted by: Clifton D. Healy at February 12, 2004 09:42 AMA couple of entries ago you mentioned conditonal baptism. I was going to ask you about it, but thought you might say more about it. May I ask what that was, and how it was different in your understanding from re-baptism? And also your view of sinning after baptism, since you said that was a factor in your decision to seek conditional baptism.
Posted by: Jennifer at February 12, 2004 12:40 PMMy heritage churches (Stone-Campbell/Restoration Movement) had a view of baptism that was pretty much sacramental. However, they also taught candidates for baptism must be able to make an act of faith. Those of us, like myself, who were baptized young, often faced a dilemma later in life if our living was pretty godless: do I need simply to "rededicate" myself, or was my baptism somehow invalid (I may not have had faith)? Those who were baptized (again), sometimes spoke of their baptism as a "re-baptism" but in reality what they would have meant is that the first "baptism" may not have been the real thing (in which case the "re-baptism" was actually one's first baptism).
My heritage churches lacked the technical sacramental vocabulary surrounding baptism, so we generally did not speak of "conditional baptism." But given our understanding of baptism, my "second one" was, technically, a conditional one, in case there was something lacking about my first.
I think were I to do it again, I would not have sought a conditional baptism. I would instead have focused on confession and repentance (non-sacramental, since our churches didn't believe confession to be a sacrament).
Posted by: Clifton D. Healy at February 12, 2004 12:54 PM