My Journey to Orthodoxy. Follow Me.

The resurrection of Adam and Eve. By lifting The original Man
 from the grave, Christ redeems all of Adam's posterity.

I’ve recently been attending a catechism preparatory to entering life in the Eastern Orthodox Christian church. I’m a cradle Catholic and have practiced (often poorly) Roman Catholicism all my life. My mother was an Irish Catholic from the old sod, so I was brought up in a rigidly Catholic fashion that was doing its best to reconcile itself to the innovations of Vatican II. My father was an atheist, or more properly an anti-theist. He wasn’t supposed to interfere in my faith upbringing according to the nuptial agreement, but as a teen, on late nights after Mom went to bed, he would start probing, and I found myself defending my faith at a relatively early age. I would usually lose these philosophical debates, which did nothing but make me study so I could come back better prepared the next time. It also made me think a lot about my faith and why I believed the way I did.

Why am I a Christian? 

History records a man we refer to as Jesus of Nazareth. Like many holy men of history, he has a certain mythology about him, that we could attribute to legend and myth. He taught a unique philosophy, challenged the status quo, performed miracles. Nothing really to differentiate him from numerous other holy men on whom religions have been founded. The unique thing about Jesus, though, was the behavior of his followers. They weren’t the typical people from the fringe of society who gravitate towards the guru du jour. These were fishermen, tax collectors, tent makers, one may have been a minor politician. They were practical men in respected professions.

Had Jesus died on the cross and been put to rest and the Twelve had scattered and made their way to Galilee without being further arrested or harassed, they would have returned to their profession and the memory of the failed teacher they had followed would fade. They would have bounced their grandchildren on their knee and tried to impart some of the Wisdom of Jesus to them, but it would have just been a man they had once known. A man with great ideas, but mortal and flawed like anyone else, and his religion would have died with them or at most their second or third generation.

But something happened, something so profound that it changed these men, opened their eyes, and made them believe. They believed that Jesus was the Son of God and was in fact God incarnate. They believed this so vehemently that they would no sooner deny their knowledge than they would say that the sky wasn’t blue. They didn’t believe it, they knew it, and they went cheerfully to their deaths – all martyred but John – proclaiming this truth with joy with their dying breaths. The Gospels tell us why. After dying a public and humiliating death, Jesus rose from the dead, conquered death so that his followers would know that life is everlasting. And there’s no doubt that Jesus was dead. The Roman executioners were experts at their job. The mode of death in crucifixion is suffocation, as the diaphragm is paralyzed unless the victim can hoist himself upward for a breath. It was clear that Jesus had died because he was no longer breathing.

The behavior of the Apostles after the recorded account of the resurrection is the evidence for me to accept that the accounts of the Gospels are largely accurate. That Christianity has fundamentally changed the world and every culture it’s contacted is historical fact. The historical evidence is compelling, and the narrative is more consistent than one would expect from a work of fiction. The Shroud of Turin is, for me, a compelling relic. I’ve studied it extensively. I understand how the STURP investigation was adulterated to give the result the director was seeking. There’s no explanation for the shroud. I believe that it is in fact the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. There are too many details that would have been unknown to a forger, too many details that precisely match and even explain some of the Gospel accounts of the passion.

Why was I a Catholic?

Growing up Catholic, I wasn’t subjected to many of the myths about the Catholic church that are promoted by Protestants. If everything Protestants said about the Catholic faith were true, there would be no Catholics. Unfortunately for the Protestants, their understanding of the Roman Catholic faith is based on straw man arguments and propaganda promoted by Calvin and Knox to justify their many heresies. I’ve been a faithful Catholic because of what the church is, not what the protestants say it is, which has little to do with what Catholics actually believe.

If I am to be a Christian, then I naturally want to practice the faith that most closely represents what the first Christians believed. All Protestant sects – every single one – derive their faith and traditions from the Roman Catholic church, either directly or indirectly. They’re either breakaway sects who broke faith directly from Rome, like the Anglican or the Lutheran, or they’re offshoots of those who did. Some are homegrown versions of Christianity who picked up a Bible and tried to reproduce what’s there, but that Bible came to them through the Roman Catholic church. Almost all western Bible translations are derived from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate – the authoritative Latin translation from the fifth century. Why would I be a Protestant – be a branch on the tree – when I could be a Catholic, the trunk from which all branches derive?

As a Catholic, I celebrate an unbroken line of apostolic succession from the twelve Apostles, particularly the Apostle Peter, to present day. I practice a faith that was practiced for decades before the first gospels were written, and for centuries before the canon was finalized. The Bible is based on the Catholic faith, not the other way around. The term Catholic means “universal” and was first applied to Christianity by Ignatius of Antioch in his letter to the Smyrnaeans in the year 107. 

Growing up, the idea of the infallibility of the Pope didn’t sit well with me, but when I joined the military, I began to understand and reconcile myself to it. The idea is that the Pope is infallible by virtue of his authority. It doesn’t mean he’s necessarily right, it just means that if he says something is so, his decision is infallible, because the responsibility falls on him, not on those he’s charged with leading. There are other beliefs that I wasn’t quite so fond of defending. I understood the theology well enough to argue it but doing so felt uncomfortable. It seemed to me that sometimes the church developed its theology by running an idea beyond where it should have ended, like the concept of the Immaculate Conception. The doctrine goes that Christ couldn’t have been born of a woman tainted with original sin, so for Mary’s womb to be sacred enough to bear Christ, she must have been born free of original sin. This brought up a whole slough of uncomfortable questions to me, though. Did Mary have free will, or was she predestined to be the mother of Christ? If she was born immaculately, how could she have been born so if her mother was tainted with original sin? When you run into a question where the answers do nothing but create more questions and paradoxes, something in your understanding has gone wrong.

When I was a teen, the church we attended had a folk choir, with guitars. They were very good, and the music was wonderful, but I realized something was wrong at the end of one Sunday mass when they gave a rousing recessional song, and at the end everyone applauded. That didn’t sit well with me. We were supposed to be there to give glory to God and worship Him, not attend a music festival. As an altar boy I had a behind the scenes view of the liturgy and appreciated the solemnity of the sanctification of the gifts and the sacrifice of the eucharistic liturgy.

Why am I an Orthodox Christian?

The break for me came when Pope Francis was seated in Rome. Francis is a small man, not up to the standard of the Papacy. I was dismayed with his political calls to embrace socialism, for the USA to go against its best interests and throw open its borders to foreign invaders. I began to refer to him as the commie pope. The commie pope enacted policies of appeasement towards the arch-enemy of the church, Islam. The commie pope embraced the deviant and anti-family agenda of the alphabet soup crowd, instead of calling them out to repent and return to Christ. The commie pope embraced the manmade climate change narrative and scolded Catholics for generating too much CO2.

Apologists have argued that none of these have been enacted with the Pope’s dogma of infallibility, which is only when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra on matters of faith and morals. Until that happens, it’s just one man’s opinions. Yeah, but. . . . The Pope is the leader of the Roman Catholic faith, and faithful Roman Catholics are obliged to embrace his teachings even when he’s not speaking ex cathedra. I cannot in good conscience do so. I know as clearly and profoundly as the apostles knew that Christ had risen from the dead that Islam is the arch-enemy of Christianity worldwide. I absolutely know that socialism and communism is an evil, bankrupt economic model that’s been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of people and the suffering of countless more in the last century. I know as a scientist who has investigated the claims from the perspective of my particular specialty field that the claims of the manmade global warming apologists are flat out wrong, and that the physics of CO2 spectral absorption are such that adding more CO2 cannot possibly result in increased global temperatures.

How can I follow a man who’s profoundly and fundamentally wrong on three critical issues like this? And what does that mean for me as a Catholic? Christ prophesied that his church would withstand the Gates of Hell, but I’m watching it melt into an incoherent mess riddled with political corruption and sexual deviancy right before my eyes.

It's okay, I assured myself. The church isn’t the Pope or the Bishops. The church is and always has been the rank-and-file congregation. All I have to do is ignore the many Obama and Biden bumper stickers on the cars in the parking lot as I make my way into mass.

My first exposure to Eastern Orthodoxy was when a colleague invited me to the Pascha service. Note to my Orthodox friends: if you want to invite someone to experience Orthodoxy, the Pascha service is probably not the place to start. It was confusing and disorganized to the point of seeming randomness, with a lot of motion and bustle that I really didn’t understand.

When I married my wife, who’s Eastern Orthodox, we did so on the understanding that our faiths were very similar and that we would respect each other’s faith and beliefs. We attended mass at the local Catholic church, and then also at a slightly more distant Antiochian Orthodox church.

Attending the Orthodox divine liturgy made a big impression on me. It was strange at first, because while all the elements of the Catholic mass are there, they’re rearranged, and out of order. The common prayers, like the Nicene creed are the same (almost), but the translation is slightly varied. The meaning is the same, but in English there’s always at least three ways of saying something, and it’s clear the Orthodox and Catholics didn’t share the same English translators. Then the Orthodox has some parts of the liturgy that are missing in the Catholic ordinary mass, like a beautiful prayer before communion.

Shortly after having attended the Orthodox liturgy, I happened to attend mass at the proto-Cathedral of St. James in downtown Vancouver. The priest there was a traditional curmudgeon who used the building’s status as an historical landmark to remove the free-standing altar and restore the sanctuary to what it had been before Vatican II. It was the first time I’d experienced the mass said ad orientum (toward God) instead of vox populi (toward the congregation). The Orthodox always celebrate the liturgy ad orientum and go one step further by placing the priest behind a screen, with only a door through which to view him. If he’s on the other side of the screen, he’s praying to God. To address the congregation, even to give a peace blessing, he comes through the door to our side of the screen. It was the mass at St. James that made me realize what an insidious heresy it was to say the mass vox populi. By orienting the priest towards the congregation, he quits being the leader of the congregation leading the prayer directed at God, but becomes the focus of attention, removing our attention from God. When the priest says mass ad orientum, we’re naturally inclined to direct our attention at that which the priest is attending, and the focus is on God. Using vox populi, the priest’s attention is either on us or behind us, and our attention is on him, interrupting our attention which should be towards God.

This then manifests itself in all sorts of undesired behaviors. The priest naturally falls into the role that his position casts him in, and he quits being the liturgical celebrant, but the master of ceremonies, with a retinue of supporting cast, in the form of altar servers, liturgical ministers, and even a live band to provide an appropriate soundtrack to set the mood. Since I was young, I’ve seen innovations of allowing lay persons to distribute the consecrated Eucharist, bringing girls and women onto the altar as servers and ministers. I’ve seen priests invite non-ordained lay people to the pulpit to give a homily. And at the end of mass, I’ve even seen the priests invite the crowd to “give it up” and applaud the altar boys, the band (I refuse to dignify it by calling it a choir), and all those who help produce the show.

Honestly, after attending the Orthodox divine liturgy with my wife, it was embarrassing to go to the Catholic mass. I can only remember once or twice that I attended a High Mass outside of the Easter Vigil, and I don’t even think most parish priests know how to celebrate it.

So I started investigating the differences. The most glaring difference is the Orthodox have no Pope in the way that Roman Catholics understand the Pope. This goes back to the Great Schism of 1054, when the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic church mutually excommunicated one another. The proximal cause of the schism was that the Roman Bishop had made some changes that hadn’t been approved by an ecumenical council. When the question arose if the Bishop of Rome had the authority to do that, four out of five of the Christian patriarchs at the time said he did not.

The Bishop of Rome has always held a special place in Christianity. He was considered the first among equals by the other bishops. This was on account of his physical proximity to the Roman seat of government, and his subsequent ability to influence legislation and imperial decrees. This never gave him any authority over the other bishops. Catholic apologists will direct you to many historical instances to demonstrate that the Roman Bishop did, in fact, exercise such authority over the rest of Christendom since the earliest days of Christianity, but they wonderfully ignore the many historical times when the rest of Christendom told the Roman Bishop to go screw and he had no recourse but to do anything but mutter about it. Indeed, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles tells us about times when St. Paul called out Peter on something he felt was wrong, and argued him back to parade rest, thus destroying the myth that the throne of Peter is infallible. The doctrine of infallibility is a relatively recent innovation in the Roman Catholic church and would have been quite a foreign concept to the earliest Christian churches. When the Great Schism happened, the Pope claimed ecumenical authority over all of Christendom. Sad for him, four out of five patriarchs disagreed.

The Roman Pope had the secular power to anoint kings, and this made who sat on the bishop’s seat a huge political issue. Consequently, many Popes were pretty rotten people, and corrupt through and through. One Pope turned the Vatican into his personal brothel, and from his position of power pretty much sexually assaulted anyone he encountered, be they male or female. Another bankrupted the Vatican treasury to outfit his personal villa, and resort to the heretical practice of selling indulgences to prop up his flagging finances. Other Popes murdered their way into power, executed rivals, had children by mistresses, pretty much proved the adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and put to lie the doctrine of papal infallibility. These abuses disenchanted many Catholics, to the point that Martin Luthor nailed his thesis to the door of the church (Luthor approached the eastern Orthodox to avoid the abuse of the Roman Pontiff, but was given the cold shoulder, because an Orthodox infringement into Roman Catholic Germany would have started a war).

By their fruits you shall know them.

Differences

Ask any Orthodox and the first difference they’re likely to cite is the filioque. The filioque was the point of contention that led to the great schism of 1054. The Nicene creed, amended by the first Council of Constantinople stated, “[we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.” 500 years later the Western church under Rome begin to insert a single word, filioque, which means “and the Son”. Catholics today are used to the creed saying, “[we believe] in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified.” Part of the reason for this was to address the ongoing Arian heresy in the west, which the Eastern Orthodox church didn’t have to deal with. The question of whether this is correct or appropriate is relatively insignificant, although most Orthodox will disagree. It’s a question that should be addressed in an ecumenical Council. I could make a case from Scripture for either position. The real issue was whether the Roman Pope had the authority to make such a change to the creed without an ecumenical Council. It was the last of a long list of doctrinal issues that the Roman Bishop had unilaterally resolved outside of an ecumenical Council, to the dismay of the other bishops Christendom. It’s not really a doctrinal hill that I’m interested in dying on.

More significant, to my mind, is the understanding of original sin. The Roman Catholic understanding is that we are all born tainted by original sin, and that this sin is washed away with baptism. The Eastern Orthodox understanding, which is apparently more in line with what the earliest Christians believed, is that we all suffer the consequences of Adam’s original sin, but we are only guilty of the sins that we commit. I’ve never been a fan of the theology of the children bearing the guilt of their parents, which seems unfair and arbitrary. This also results the paradoxes created by the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Without the guilt of original sin there’s no need to postulate that Mary (Or, as the Orthodox refer to her, the Theotokos or Christ-bearer) was immaculately conceived, and therefore no question whether her fate was predestined. Indeed, it glorifies the Theotokos, in that she was without sin through her life of her own agency. This makes much more sense to me.

Of course, the Orthodox have no Pope in the way that the Roman Catholic church understands it. The Orthodox resolve doctrinal issues through councils the way it’s been done since the earliest days of Christianity. They don’t have to apologize for the infallibility of their church leaders when they do fail.

Culturally, the Roman Catholic church is very legalistic, with a list of rules and prescriptions for punishment if the rules are broken. To the lay person and many clergy these are rigid and inviolable. Do this, or do that, you go to Hell. They say the Jews invented guilt and the Catholics perfected it. The Orthodox church, on the other hand, seems to take the rules and glance at them, then throw them over their shoulder and get to work on saving your soul and keeping it saved. Indeed, it seems the Orthodox priests take their charge as shepherds very seriously, and if you’re seen to be straying, they’re not shy about snapping you back in line. 

If you go to a divine liturgy, everything seems out of place at first. It takes two or three times, but you begin to recognize that all the essential elements of the Latin Mass are there, and then some. The normal first reading from the Old Testament seems to be missing, until you realize that the Sunday Divine Liturgy actually starts on Saturday Evening with Vespers, and the old testament reading is there.

If Divine Liturgy is scheduled for 10:00am, as most are, you’ll walk in and think you’re late, because the service already seems to be in progress. That’s because Orthros starts about an hour beforehand and segues right into the Divine liturgy. After you’ve been a few times, you realize that the Divine Liturgy actually starts with the small entrance (A holdover from days when the Orthros was often said in a smaller chapel from the main sanctuary). The Creed, the Our Father, and the eucharistic prayers are all nearly identical to the Roman Catholic rite, with a few translation differences that have no impact on the meaning. There’s a beautiful prayer before communion that the Roman Catholic church lacks. Many Orthodox churches in America service an immigrant congregation, so the Divine Liturgies are often bilingual.

Most Orthodox churches have no pews. You stand through the whole ceremony, in a kind of Brownian motion around the sanctuary. Wear comfortable shoes. More western congregations have pews.

The decoration will seem strange. The religious artwork is mostly icons. The Eastern Churches never participated in the medieval art renaissance, so traditionally their artwork isn’t as photorealistic as it is in the Western churches, and it certainly eschews the modern look you see in many Protestant and some unfortunate recent Roman Catholic churches. If you know to look, you’ll see that in the icon art, the saints and holy subjects of the art aren’t illuminated, but the illumination seems to come from them. There’s no proscription against statuary or more realistic artwork that you see in Roman Catholic and more traditional Protestant churches (which, after all, derive their sensibilities from their Roman Catholic roots), but it’s just not a tradition that caught on in Orthodoxy.

The communion uses leavened bread which is mixed with the wine and served to the communicant on a spoon. Very different. No lay people are involved in communion, the Orthodox take the Eucharist very seriously, as the Roman Catholics have forgotten how to do.

At the end of the liturgy, there’s no recession, and you don’t just get up and leave. The congregation is called forward as in communion to venerate the cross, at which time they’re dismissed individually. Frequently antidoron is distributed either with communion or during the dismissal. This is the bread that was blessed but not consecrated, and all congregants can partake, unlike communion, which is only for the Orthodox who have prepared themselves through confession and fasting.

If you’re a Protestant, you’ll find the Divine Liturgy strange. The degree of strangeness will depend on how traditional your Protestant background was. Lutherans and Anglicans probably wouldn’t feel too out of place. Baptists and Pentecostals will find it unrecognizable. The Orthodox church isn’t a place you go to get saved, or have your faith jumpstarted by a motivational speaker, or sing and dance and show how happy you are to believe in Jesus. The Orthodox Divine Liturgy is where you go to worship God, admit to yourself that you are a sinner unworthy of His love or Forgiveness, yet by His divine grace you’ve been forgiven and loved. It’s a hospital for the soul, whether you need to heal the hurts of the day or deeper wounds that haunt your sleep at night and make your soul ache. You won’t leave the Liturgy feeling good about yourself and ready to excitedly go out in the world and make it better for Jesus, but you’ll leave with a sense of calm and relief that there’s hope for you but knowing that you face a struggle to stay true to His word and example in the coming week. It’s not unusual to cry at some point during the Liturgy if you’re really paying attention to what’s happening.

If you’re a Catholic who’s sick of what’s happening in the Church and feel powerless to do something about it, a Protestant who’s realizing that the Sunday services are still leaving your spirit hungry, or a lonely soul looking for a meaning, come to Divine Liturgy a few times. Give it a chance for the strangeness to fade, and you’ll realize you’ve come home.