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Forum, Christ is Risen!

I think we, the East, are a refuge for some of the people mad at the RC Church. Why? I am still trying to figure it out but nevertheless we welcome them.

We have some that become full on Eastern and learn and lead the singing and take up the charge against latinizations. This is good, and must be encouraged in order to keep and help grow a parish in the right direction, East.

Then we have the "converts" (angry refugees) who only use our churches as an aliby (sic?) for whatever reason be it Vatican 2 or modern RC church buildings. Again they are Christians and should be accepted but as in my case, the problems begin here because they don't like to accept what is OURS and they want to set up what is THEIRS. What is to be done about these "converts?" I think prayer is best and patience. They can be difficult to deal with and make a fuss when anything is added to their RC liturgy or church building yet they demand everything RC in our churches. Ironic.

I think if everyone acted as Christians and used respect, our parishes would be in much better shape. It is a matter of unity and working and praying together. We need to pray for converts and cradles alike in our parishes and then watch everything else fall into place.

Off to Liturgy,
-ukrainiancatholic

Actually I think that Latinizations were started not be RC transfers but by Greek Catholic bishops and clergy themselves who wanted to be "more Catholic".

Robert K.

[ 04-14-2002: Message edited by: anastasios ]

Dear Friends --

Reading this thread gave me a lot to think about.

I have always been a very intense person in whatever I have done. This intensity carried right over to my conversion to the Byzantine Catholic Church on Holy Saturday of 2001. Having just celebrated my first anniversary, may I say a few things:

A). Yeah, I've probably had at least a dozen Sundays and a number of times I have been a giant pain in the neck to the cradles in our parish. On of my fellow converts told me that he overheard a conversation in which the practice of converts making metanys (sp?) before the icons was annoying. We were referred to rather derogatorily as "boat people", a sobriquet which we have laughingly taken upon ourselves with gusto. I tell people that I was treading water from the shipwreck called Protestantism and someone threw me a life preserver and drew me aboard the Barque of St. Peter.

Anyhow, we do tend to do things to the extreme for a while. It just goes with finding something wonderful. You just cannot get enough of it. I am fortunate to have a wonderful pair of godparents and some really good friends in our parish who are helping me adapt, encouraging me in my faults, and leading the way by their lives.

B). You are correct, however, in warning against those who come into the Church and fail to discard the Protestant mindset. This is probably the hardest thing for us, harder the longer one has been a Protestant (25 years for me -- and 13 of them in Bob Jones variety Fundamentalism to boot!!). It seems, however, that by reading copious quantities of books from Light and Life publishing (what a GREAT place -- I LOVE it!!), I am coming to see and really understand that I do not have an Orthodox pleroma at this time and it will be many, many years before this takes place. Therefore, I need to humble myself and learn, not go into the church imagining that my Protestant background makes me some sort of "expert" or "teacher" of Christianity.

C). I would not want our parish to "Americanize" in any way. Fr. Mike has done a real good job of incorporating just enough Old Church Slavonic in the Liturgy to keep the authentic flavor without making either the boat people or the generation of cradle kids who are American born and bred not feel wierd or out of place. I desire to learn the Eastern way of thinking, and a part of this for me is to worship in the Eastern style. Without a lot of fanfare, we have been very careful to remove the latinizations from our parish. A few still cling, and perhaps will never be removed because of the way people seem to resist change.

I don't have to speak in Old Church Slavonic or wear ethnic clothing to have an Eastern way of thinking and worship. What I do believe I have to do is to read and study and pray. And keep in touch with my spiritual director on a monthly basis.

The first year's excitement is over and I have been coming back to terra firma in my journey with the Lord. This Lent (the first one I ever celebrated in my 53 years) was both a marvelous experience and a sobering reality for me. The Lenten devotional booklet which our eparchy put out gave me a LOT to think and ponder upon. I now face the real and serious journey which our catechist told us was the heart of the faith -- theosis. I am to become like my Lord by my union with Him, and yet I have begun to really realize how much UNLIKE Him I am in so many ways. The Protestant mindset teaches that to have a proper practice of Christianity, one must think proper thoughts and hold to right doctrine. But I see the Eastern way as described by St. Athanasius:

"God became man so that man might become god."

My journey has begun in earnest now. I love St. Ann's, the family I have there, and all about the worship. Yet I have, as Robert Frost once said "...and miles to go before I sleep."

Just some thoughts from a convert who is still very excited to be in the church and enjoying the riches she has to offer.

Cordially in Christ,

Brother Ed

Wow, Brother Ed. Thanks for the great post. I could feel and sense the thoughts and emotions that have worked in you, and the hoops that you have jumped through.

You seem to incorporate in your post all the important milestones that are characteristic of a true pilgrim.

Again, thank you for your wonderful words.

Christ is Risen!!!

Br. Ed,

Your post is wonderful.

My comments were not directed to converts such as yourself as you are obviously allowing the Christ and His Church to change your life. My comments were directed to those many converts who believe that they are fully Orthodox in mind and spirit from day one of conversion and are very judgmental, infusing their Orthodoxy with baggage from another tradition. Just as becoming a good Christian is the work of a lifetime so, too, is becoming a Byzantine Christian. The trick is to find the experienced and mature Byzantine Christian to help one choose the right diet to help one grow. This is the consistent advice of the Church to both converts and cradles.

Moose

Dear Brother Ed,

A belated welcome to the fold - and thank you for your sincere and heart-felt post!

One of my closest friends is a former Protestant who converted to the Orthodox Church and I was privileged to support him and work with him through it all, even though I'm Cath'lic .

Actually, I think our Protestant converts to the Eastern Church inject new life into old bones.

The ones we have have increased a much greater sensitivity to the place of Scriptures in our lives.

Now, don't get me wrong. Many of us know that the Gospel is "out there" being read during the Divine Liturgy.

But to read it onself, savour it, enjoy it, pray with it, meditate on it as one would a delicious spiritual meal? It's "youz guyz" that are teaching us about that (and people like Cantor Joe too! ).

Like Latin converts to us, Protestant converts often come from a sense of feeling betrayed by their former denomination, for its having "gone too liberal" etc.

Your strong dedication to the Gospel message, your sense of Biblical perspective and obedience to the Word of God, dedication to the assembly of believers etc. remind us of who we must all become through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

The Evangelical thrust of prayer, scripture, fasting and complete trust in the Mercy and Power of God - all this sounds Eastern, at least to me it does!

Our Protestant converts should be received with great love and appreciation by all of us for their special gifts with which the Holy Spirit has imbued them and by Whom they have been sent to us to share these with us.

So, forgive me, but you already HAVE an Eastern mindset or whatever you choose to call it.

We don't need to grow on you so much as you need to grow on us!

Alex

Dear Moose, Dr. John, Alex et al:

Thank you for your kind words of encouragement. I must confess that for the first six months I was really trying to teach Catholics what the Catholic Faith is all about. Hooooboy. What arrogance!!

It really comes from the fact that we Protestants have to really study and learn the Faith from the "inside out" so to speak. We must, by the gracious leading and insights of the Holy Spirit, teach and instruct ourselves right out of our own prejudices. When the light of truth breaks upon the soul, well, it is an experience which is both hard to describe and exhilerating at the same time. Misguidedly, one finds that one wants to share it, but winds up making something of a pest of himself. It is unintentional, but it happens.

The greatest gift God gave to me when I came to St. Ann's was Ray and Marie Gruber. Marie is cradle Byzantine from New Jersey. She was going to a Latin parish in York when someone told her of the St. Ann's and she has been there ever since. Ray, like me is a convert. Both of them are deeply rooted in the faith and very devout. I hold them and their opinions in the highest esteem and their friendship has been such an enormous blessing that words are almost insufficient to describe what they mean to me.

The Pascha dinner I had last year at their house was one of the most memorable and wonderful experiences I have ever had. The rich symbolism of the dinner and the various items in the basket, the joy of Christ's being risen, the wonderful Resurrection Matins. And of course, my first true experience with our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist. It just fills up one's cup and you tend to overflow on people.

But now the work begins in earnest. I thank God that Ray and Marie will be there to help me and guide me. I thank God for my spiritual director, Fr. John Szada, a godly and good priest with great wisdom. His catechism classes were rich and full. This is what converts need the most -- a good spiritual director and a devout and wise set of godparents to bring them into the Church. Gentle and loving guidance in the Spirit of Christ.

Alex, your words are kind, but I must disagree that I have anything of an Eastern mindset. From all that I have read of the great saints, I find that I have days lately in which I almost despair of ever attaining to such a mindset of Christ as these men bore. Yet there is no turning back, and our God is faithful, Who has brought me thusfar, to complete His work if I but merely rest in Him and take advantage of the Sacraments, the Church, and my spiritual leaders. I think that one of the worst things of this Western society is that we treat spiritual maturity in the same way we order a Big Mac. Why, I joined the Church last week, I ought to be at least a bishop by next week!!! Hey, it doesn't work that way.

BTW -- Two of my greatest joys at St. Ann's are singing in the choir and serving at the altar (hence the nickname) when the schoolkids are not there. Fr. Mike put out a general call for the men of the parish to fill in when the schoolboys could not make it. Sadly, the convert, wagging his tail like a puppy, was the only one to respond.

I remember a post on another forum in which we were reminded that the Church has had her great "high" periods of spirituality, and her low periods, such as I believe we are going through now. Let us all pray that the Spirit of God will bring about a great conversion of hearts -- both for those within the Church to greater sanctity and godliness, and for those outside Her walls that they may see the richness and glory of Her worship.

And may we all some day, East and West, again be one in fraternal love.

Brother Ed

Christ has risen from the dead. By death He conquered death. And to those in the graves, He granted life.

(How I love to sing this and exalt in the glory of its truth)

Brother Ed,

Thanks for the words. They are very encouraging for a fellow struggler who comes from the same place and also benefits tremendously from the generosity of a great spiritual director.

Dr. John,

Thanks for your response to my question about dukh. I hadn't understood before, but feel that I'm getting a better handle on it. with your explanation it seems that this spirit is peculiarly eastern and so the answer to my question is that it would not be found in a western parish, but rather you would hope to find in a western parish an authentic western manifestation of the Catholic faith.

There are two schools of thought on hybrids:

We all know about hybrid vigor, but we also know that hybrids are often sterile.

It seems that many fear influence west on east and vice versa. It seems to me that the more we influence each other the closer we will be to real unity. Developing eastern and western peculiarities is part of what caused division in the first place, right? It just seems to me that influence is not only inevitable but also healthy.

Am I out of line here?

David

Dear Altar Boy,

Well, I think the experiences you describe are precisely those of the Eastern experience of spiritual struggle.

The Jesus Prayer for instance is about the experience of self-emptiness, like a vessel, into which Christ pours His Oil of Healing which is the Holy Spirit.

That is the Eastern experience.

And we are always "converts" and new acolytes to that experience.

There never will come a time when we can be prideful of the "notches" on our spiritual belts and say, "Yep, I've really accumulated a lot of Grace etc."

Everything else comes from the Spirit in His good time.

While He may use the parish Baba or whomever to communicate Himself, He'll reveal His presence in our lives when He wants to and only then.

Woops! This soapbox I'm on has a lose piece of wood . . .

Alex

Dear David,

What an interesting line of thought!

But I wouldn't be talking to Dr. John about it, mind you, you should be talking to me!

(As far as hybrids go, Dr. John was a Byzantine Rite Jesuit scholastic - enough said? )

Personally, I think that each Rite/Church owes the Church of Christ its own ritual integrity.

What brought on the division was not the differences in the Rites - in the West at the time there was the Celtic, Gallican, Gothic, Milanese, Trondheim, Sarum, Hereford et al. Rites.

What brought it on was when the East and West stopped communicating with each other. For example, when the good Cardinal excommunicated the Patriarch in 1054, the Latin document had first to be translated into Greek before the Greeks knew what it was all about.

Ritual uniformity caused problems as well when one church wished to impose their own perspective on discipline on the other.

In almost every case of a situation of schism, it was when the distinctive patrimony of a church wasn't respected or even offended that caused the schism.

We must find new ways of remaining who we are while yet being familiar with one another and respecting one another's differences.

Wow, this soapbox is really in tatters . . .

Alex

[Our Protestant converts should be received with great love and appreciation by all of us for their special gifts with which the Holy Spirit has imbued them and by Whom they have been sent to us to share these with us.]

Amen Alex! Most of them come with such enthusiastic hunger to learn the faith. They devour books on the faith!
My latest Godson is from the Protestant Episcopal Church and he studied Orthodoxy EIGHT years before converting! The first time I met him after Liturgy he asked me to recommend books on Orthodxy and every one I mentioned he had read! He was the organist at the Episcopal Cathedral in the area.
He has also studied Iconography and has written some of the most beautiful (and completely Orthodox) Icons I have ever seen! I had a few books on Iconography in my book shelf and gave them to him.
So, it depends upon the stage a person is in when they seek conversion be they Roman Catholic or Protestant.
Now for the 'other side' of the coin. Two Sundays ago a Roman Catholic showed up for Liturgy. After Liturgy we talked and he said a RC priest sent him to us (probably to get him off his back). The man is probably in his mid fifties and has a love/hate relationship with the RCC. He starts off by criticizing and berating the RCC and ends up by stating that he would never turn his back on the Catholic Church!
He was a Veitnam veteran and married an Englishwoman. They had seven children. Early on in the marriage she abandoned him and the kids and ran back to England with another man and divorced him. He had to raise the kids himself and is deeply hurt that the RCC punishes him by not offering him the Sacraments. Because he did what a Christian father would be expected to do in this particular circumstance (and he's absolutely right). Recently he met a divorced woman and they got married in the Episcopal Church. His second wife attends a Lutheran Church. He doesn't feel like he's really married because the Episcopals aren't Catholic (his words).
It was the Sunday of the 'Veneration of the Cross' so naturally all us Slavs were doing the prostrations which he found weird (his word). He then started to criticize the people because not everyone was paricipating in the Liturgy because they weren't singing with the choir. I asked him if every RC sings with the choir at Mass or do some of them pray like some of these people were doing/ He, of course, didn't answer.
I ended up by telling him I would rather see him do his best to once again become a practicing RC than a luke warm Orthodox. I think the RC priest sent him to us either because he wanted to get rid of him and his anger & frustration or that this may be a way for him to retain his 'catholicity' (the divorce and remarriage issue). And that, would be using Orthodoxy. And it has been done in our parish before. RC's show up attend Liturgy for 6 mos to a year. Study and ask for conversion. Convert and get remarried in the church. And gradually you don't see them as often and then not at all. Only to find out they are back attending a RCC. Its happened twice that I know of. This guy would have been another one of them.
Why the big spheel? Because, the point I am making is that potential converts will show up for a variety of reasons. Some are sincere while some want to either use the church or control the parish.
So how converts affect the parish depends upon their reasons for being there.

OrthoMan

Dear Alex,

What you say about each tradition offering their own ritual integrity to Christ, yet continuing to communicate with and love one another sounds exactly right.

Things are unusual in my parish. As far as liturgy goes, we stay entirely western in almost every way (save celebrating Easter with our Orthodox brethren). But if you look in our Parish library or in our bookstore, what you find is not terribly different from any eastern parish.
Our Bishop is a wonderful and holy man (probably over-worked) but his influence, along with all of that of all the diocesan parish life and youth events that we participate in, is decidedly eastern. I don't have a problem with this. We still stay very western. I just think we're an interesting experiment in east-west relations.

We're also a classic case-example for some of the arguments made here. We're not just a parish of converts but a convert parish, and it's not an easy transition. It takes a lot of time and my clergy struggle with it daily. It doesn't happen overnight and we've got a long way to go and probably still have no idea about the greatest pitfalls. The interesting thing is that we have not been asked to change rite or custom.

David

Dear David,

I have an Anglican friend who is interested in joining your Communion! I'll share the Western Orthodoxy website with him and if there's anything else you could suggest, please let me know!

One of the really positive things I see in the Western Rite Orthodox movement is the resurrection of the Western Catholic Rites that went "over and out" over time.

The current challenge for the Eastern Churches as a whole is to try and overcome the anti-Western views that so many of us have where we don't like the West either because of the Filioque, the Crusades, struggle with Latinization - one could always come up with a justification, I suppose!

The East too has its tradition of running rough shod over legitimate Eastern traditions. I believe that had the Oriental Orthodox not gone their separate ways, they probably would have been smothered out of existence by the Byzantines.

This happened in the Patriarchate of Antioch with the Liturgy of St James, to be sure!

But I see a great future for the Western Rite Orthodox and it is a great credit to the Antiochian Church in the first instance for its openness to and respect for the Latin and Anglican Rites within its fold as well as to its "Evangelical Orthodox" wing.

I understand that a Lutheran group, the Polish National Catholic Church and the Anglican Catholic Church, as well as your regulars from among the Old Catholic and Old Roman Catholics, were, or still are, interested in becoming one with Orthodoxy through Antioch, but still maintain their integral identity as Churches.

And more power to them - and to you!

Alex

Dear Orthoman,

Excellent points and great examples!

If I can sociologize for a moment, and I could be way off, it seems there is a qualitative difference between a Protestant convert to the East (forgive me for using this as a generic term for purposes of presentation here!) and an RC convert to the East.

I think a Protestant convert sees his move as quite a radical one, once he or she decides to make it.

They realize there really is no liturgical or other connection with the East or with Orthodoxy to be specific, and so they are plunging themselves into uncharted waters and so "eat it all up" so to speak.

Their tradition of scripture reading and sermonizing etc. naturally lends itself to them reading widely and deeply about Eastern theology, liturgy, history etc.

The RC convert, on the other hand, might see the Orthodox Church as a close relative.

Sometimes I get the impression that they see the East as a place they can "hang their hats" until Rome gets its act together.

This is why they tend not to assume Eastern ways, but to impose RC understandings on customs and traditions that appear similar to them and which they may even feel are traditional RC things (save for prostrations and "the rest of that strange stuff").

In essence, a Protestant or other convert would probably fare better in Orthodoxy than an RC who has left because he or she feels betrayed by their Church.

In the former instances, the break with their religious tradition is more final and total. It isn't necessarily so with the RC convert.

And this is not to say it is impossible, only more difficult.

I once met a fellow who was a convert to Orthodoxy from the New Age.

The thing is that fasting, praying the Jesus Prayer, standing for long hours for services, incense etc. all this was so natural to him and he said these things "held in common" with his former tradition attracted him to Orthodoxy.

The same for a Tibetan Buddhist convert to Orthodoxy who told me that so much of Orthodoxy relates to Tibetan traditions, especially the prostrations.

An Anglican friend wanted to become Orthodox and I assisted him with questions about the liturgy etc.

His biggest problem was devotion to the Theotokos.

I thought he'd never get over the difficulties he was having with this.

But today he is the biggest promoter of devotion to the Theotokos I've ever seen!

And don't even think about questioning him about that.

He'll bare his teeth at you!

God bless,

Perhaps one day we'll be united and you won't have to go through the feeling of being soiled by having to converse with a heterodox like me .

Kidding, kidding . . .

Alex