The Hitchhiker's Guide

Distilling the question of purpose & self worth

In my last post, I opened up a dialogue about where we draw our sense of worth from, especially with making the journey from an Evangelical perspective to one of the ancient faith of Orthodoxy.  I don’t have any answers, and in fact I think my list of questions continues to expand the more I think about this.  But after evaluating everything and processing things out loud in a dialogue with another tumblr member, I think I’m coming closer to the source of my angst and my doubts as a relatively new convert to Orthodoxy.

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So what now?

Although I was raise Lutheran, my roots in the evangelical way of life ran pretty deep — I was consumed by anything and everything that was of the church.  I was vivaciously active, “leading worship” wherever they would have me, going on retreats, leading bible studies, and consuming anything that I could get my hands on that would help reinforce the faint idea that God loved me and had a plan for me. 

Faint, yes. 

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Book Review: Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History

I picked up Orthodox Christians in America: A Short History a while ago and finally got a chance to finish it off last night. This is a very quick and fast read about the history of the Orthodox Church in America (only about 100 pages of narrative text). One of the unique things about Orthodoxy in America is that it’s still very tied to the “mother churches” in other parts of the world. Often times this has meant that American churches are caught up in the ethnic affairs of their homelands, even though they are thousands of miles away. This is the story that Erickson tells.

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First Eastern Experience

This past Sunday I had the honor of being able to experience the Eastern liturgy for the first time. Michael’s child was being baptized, and even though the baptism doesn’t take place during the liturgy, we were all invited to attend the liturgy beforehand. I decided to take them up on the invitation and see just how different the Eastern liturgy is, and so I thought I’d document some very brief thoughts.

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Almost there, almost

Tonight we celebrated the lamentation service of our Lord, where throughout a beautiful and ornately decorated setting, we expressed our lament of Christ’s death through spoken words, through sung lamentations, and in the candlelit sanctuary processed under an icon of Christ’s body representing our passing into death as did Christ — an expression of sharing in His sufferings and His death.

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Orthodoxy and culture: what is the fullness of the arts?

There has been a topic on my mind over the past several weeks as I’ve started on this journey towards Orthodox Christianity and into a life of theosis — when I become Orthodox, what becomes of my artistic expressions and what is that supposed to look like within the context of being an Orthodox Christian? And I must forewarn you, that there are far more questions in this particular entry than useful reflections or things we can all learn from. Instead, I would hope that it might generate some significant discussion that would ripple into the arts community within Catholic and Orthodox traditions — especially the latter of the two.

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Fighting the passions

We all have great intentions — I know I do anyway. I have great aspirations of maintaining strict disciplines, like a rule of prayer, fasting from certain passions, and even cultivating some of the artistic gifts I’ve been given. But the problem is that my passions (as known by the Orthodox; different from a passion for music, for example) are not passive and do not sit back and allow me to just lay my stake in the ground and claim it done. Unlike Evangelicalism™ which generally professes a transactional version of salvation — an event that happens, and then you’re saved — I am finding that maintaining and working out this gift of salvation and becoming more like God is going to be a long, slow, and arduous process, requiring much patience, faith, endurance, and above all humility.

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The church is not a museum piece

In my previous posting, I had laid a spread of questions on the table regarding the arts and Orthodoxy and my frustration with no contemporaries to look to for guidance, inspiration, and fellowship. These frustrations are accentuated by the idea that there is a fullness of the arts that ought to be created, expressed, and shared with the world, a fullness that just isn’t that prevalent in America. And it’s the idea of that fullness that has put a desire in me to find answers, and God willing, be a part of the awakening of the arts in the Orthodox church in America.

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The daily journey in prayer, reading and meditation

It seems that every time I walk out of St. George Antioch Orthodox Church — whether on a Sunday morning or at my catechumen class — I come home with more and more books to read. And anyone who knows me well, I don’t exactly finish books in a timely fashion (let alone at all). How I will manage to keep up is but a mystery… fitting as I am pursuing Orthodoxy and they’re all about mystery.

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Where I’ve come from: my context

As I’ve discovered in reading and hearing the stories of others on their journey towards a life of Orthodoxy or Roman Catholicism, there are vastly different stories but the themes usually resonate in harmony — people are hungry for an authentic faith that can be traced to the time of Christ; a faith that looks like the first century Church.

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