This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

The Sunday of the Samaritan Woman

I'm more and more discovering the loneliness that is Orthodoxy. Orthodox are cut off from modern U. S. culture by the very nature of their Faith. U. S. culture offers all-you-can-eat buffets, and the ritual of Thanksgiving engorgement. Orthodoxy offers fasting--at every opportunity: twice weekly, prior to Christmas and Easter, for a variable period of weeks toward the end of June, for two weeks in August, and on other seasonal occasions. U. S. culture offers sex on demand, whether with others, or in one's mind. Orthodoxy constrains sex to the heterosexual union of marriage and condemns lustful thoughts. U. S. culture offers the American dream through incurred debt. Orthodoxy offers tithing; I mean, literally, ten percent of one's income. U. S. culture offers the cult of conscience, of following one's own convictions. Orthodoxy offers the submission of one's convictions to the authority of Christ revealed in Scripture, the Liturgy, the canons, the lives of the Saints, Tradition--in short, the Church.

So, no matter how winsome are the non-Orthodox, non-Christian friends we know, at every meeting there will be the barrier of the Faith. There may be a meeting of the intellect. There may be an emotional bond. But there can never be the oneness of spirit in the phronema of Christ.

But the loneliness of Orthodoxy also extends to my Christian friends.

It became clear to me within the last couple of days that things I now take for granted, my non-Orthodox Christian friends consider either up-for-grabs, or feel they must parse. Some of those things are such things I noted above: issues surrounding ascetical discipline, sexuality and specific doctrines. I have changed. Some of the jokes and asides I once "got" I'm no longer in on. And some of the humor--gallows humor as it may be for those of my Christian friends suffering as faithful within their own churches--no longer strikes me as humorous but tragic.

I know that all of the above makes me come off as some stuffed, self-righteous prig. And, if truth be told, I probably am. I've been accused of much more than that.

But I mention these things not to elevate myself, or denigrate my friends, but only to highlight the reality of adherence to Orthodoxy as it makes headway in my life.

I'm very fortunate. It could be--it has been--worse. Though Anna is integrating into the parish here at All Saints, I think it safe to say that it is primarily (though not only) right now on the social level. But a year ago, she was actively resistant to even going to All Saints or any Orthodox Church. The rest of my family bemusedly just doesn't get it. I'm as accepted and as loved as ever, but the reactions to my move toward Orthodoxy range from incurious indifference to mild incomprehension and some irritation.

But we have no family here. All we have here in Chicago are friends. And as an Orthodox wannabe, as wonderful as are the friends I have--mercifully putting up with me as they do--I am distant from them. Some, by many rows of fences. A few by only a step or two, but just enough out of one another's reach that the brotherly embrace is a distant handshake rather than the bear hug of koinonia.