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