And another year has gone past...

This morning I've felt really motivated to do some writing, and of course I have no time to really give to that right now. I need to get to work! There is so much I could share. I'd like to at least put down a few bullet points that can serve as reminders for future topics. If and when I write on those topics I'll try to remember to add links.

• Writing Post #4 of "Why Randy's Going East". I just realized I haven't written that yet!
• More about why I joined the Orthodox Church
• Why I'm still in the Orthodox church, how my outlook and expectations have changed, and how I view the Church differently.
• Joining the church - Chrismation
• Why I might rename this blog, or start a new one

• The Septuagint, the so-called Apocrypha, etc.

  • Why we use the Septuagint
  • Why we accept books that others (i.e. Protestants, and to a lesser extent, Catholics) have since rejected
  • Thoughts on some of the cool stories in these books to which I'd never been exposed before now: Judith, Tobit, Esther (unabridged!)...
• New Testament extra-biblical texts--the good, the bad, and the ugly. Actually I don't have much desire to write on this topic since I know very little about this subject. I'd have to do a lot of research for this one. The good news is that I can simply say that the Orthodox Church includes the same 26 books in our N.T. canon as do Catholics and Protestants.
• Mary, Jesus' mother, AKA The Theotokos ("God-bearer"). This is a touchy one for Protestants, I know. I intend to tread lightly here.
• Father Arseny
• St. Herman
• Other saints

This list doesn't have to be complete, but it's what I've got for now. Perhaps by making this list it will help me to actually put out some writing. Not so much because I think I'm all that wise (I'm not), but because I want to share the truth with my family and friends. By that I don't mean dogmatic truth, although I believe the Orthodox faith is true, but I mean I want to share what my faith truly is, i.e. clear up misconceptions.

Bright Week

Ha, well so much for the big Lenten comeback to blogging. Oh well. Still going to jot down some thoughts here.

I'm finding it a difficult challenge to remember that it's still Pascha. I mean, Pascha basically just begins on the evening of Holy Saturday, but it goes on for all of Bright Week in one sense, and for forty days in another sense! Now that the Great Fast (Lent) is over, it seems really easy to just go back to the "same old, same old", and not have my heart and mind oriented toward the spiritual. Not that I did a great job of it during Lent, but now with no food restrictions, it's tempting to just think I have license to focus on me, me, me again. Yuck. but the Good News of Pascha is that

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!

I'm not sure if I have any particular tactics for keeping my heart and mind focused on this hope, but if anything comes to mind, I'll be sure to write it down here. I know one thing I've been really wanting to do is get the recordings of the services off my recorder and posted online for everyone to access. In the meantime, I'll put up this awesome video of some kids singing "The Angel Cried". =)

Starting up again, for Lent

My absence

I have not written in this blog for about 10 months. Why? A few reasons I suppose. I guess it's because writing is both easy and really hard for me. I have a ton of thoughts buzzing around in my head that I want to put down on paper, but then I get caught up in my perfectionism of trying to make everything sound just right--to remove any traces of doubt about the meaning of what I'm trying to say. It's exhausting. I might try to keep the posts shorter. Another reason is that we've spent a lot of time just trying to actually be Orthodox, now that we've joined the Church (sorry for the spoiler). That doesn't mean that we've stopped thinking about what we believe, but we've been trying to do more listening than talking. And being a Christian isn't just about getting the right set of beliefs, but about your relationships with God and your fellow man. So there's that too.

Well, I've seen plenty of blogs that go silent for a long time, then come back with and "OK, I'm back!" post, and then after a few more posts are silent again. This may or may not be one of those blogs. We'll just have to see how things go. No promises. ("or demands... love is a battlefield...")

(From Mar. 2013) East vs. West

An Old Draft

I got started writing this back in March of 2013, and re-reading it today I thought that it would be worth posting it, even though I never quite finished it.

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Quick disclaimer: I'm not yet part of the Orthodox Church since I haven't yet been chrismated. But I am on that path as a catechumen, so for the sake of these discussions you'll hear me essentially identifying myself as Orthodox. Then again, I'll probably also identify myself as "Western" since that is where I come from. I hope you can follow.

Among converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, "The West" can be somewhat of a favorite punching bag--especially among those of us who come from Evangelical-Protestant-Reformed-ish backgrounds. It's really easy to dis "Western Christianity", because many of us feel frustrated that for so many years we've been following the "wrong" path, almost as if someone has led us astray. Now, I wouldn't actually blame anyone in my past for this, but it's easy to blame "Western Christianity" as a whole. While we do have many issues with the way of thinking that predominates Western Christianity, we can take it too far and make some broad, sweeping generalizations that aren't really true. Kinda like politics. Oops.

When I was listening to a podcast this morning by one of my favorite Orthodox speakers, Matthew Gallatin, I thought heard strains of this "West-vs-East" theme creep in. Matthew said the following:

Life with God in the Christian West is fundamentally a mental activity. In the East, it is a dance—a holy dance, in which we embrace God as a living, moving, literally present partner. He is not way out there somewhere, allowing us to contemplate Him. He is right here, and we are lovingly, repentantly, fearfully, humbly, and awesomely aware of His presence.

I had to pause right there and think for a minute. I'd just finished listening to a few songs on our local Christian music station, Hope 107.9. I don't usually tune in to that station anymore, but I guess Andrea was listening to it when she had my car last night. Anyway, one of the songs they played was "By Your Side" by Tenth Avenue North. I was struck by how in spite of the "non-Orthodoxy" of the band and probably some of the lyrics, the song spoke of an intimate, personal love of God for us. Frankly, most of the songs on Christian radio don't really talk much about theology. They talk about wanting to know God, or being thankful to know him, or struggling to live as he asks. In those lyrics (saccharine as they may be sometimes) I don't hear a "mental exercise". I hear hearts crying out for God. Modern "praise and worship" music is all about that, right? So I really had to take issue with Matthew saying that in the West, Christianity is "fundamentally a mental activity".

Still though, I have to agree that Matthew has a point. Here's what I think: I think that in the West, there are scores of folks who want to know God in a deeply personal way. And that is what all our youth group leaders promise--it's about knowing Christ as "your personal Savior". "It's not a religion, it's a relationship." Right? I think that many Western Christians do truly know Him. Unfortunately though, I think this is often in spite of Western theology and philosophy. My personal struggle has been that I've wanted to know God my whole life (more some times than others, for sure), and yet was not having success through the normal avenues of reading my Bible and feeble attempts at prayer.

A Visit to an Eastern Orthodox Church

Coming into the community of believers at worship should be disconcerting. It should leave the visitor with several impressions: whatever this is these people take it very seriously; I don't understand it; if I join I might have to change.

— Frederica Mathewes-Green in At the Corner of East and Now

Our first visit to St. Anne's Orthodox Church was the first Sunday of Advent, December 2, 2012. In my (Andrea's) previous posts I've explained why we walked in the doors in the first place. Here I will describe (as best as words can) what happened that first visit. For the sake of fluidity (and length) I will do as little explaining as I can in this post. As questions pop up ask in a comment below and those will be topics of future posts!

Why Randy's Going East - Part 3

In which I take an aside to briefly discuss my delay in writing, and where I finally explain how we came to attend St. Anne's. I must make the disclaimer that this is really long, and I've struggled to finish it for lack of memory on some of the details. I know I'm probably missing important details, expounding too much on trivial ones, and just generally not explaining myself very well. Please bear with me (or don't--you can stop reading at any time!).

Also, here are links to the previous articles:
| Part 1 | Part 2 |

Why Randy's Going East - Part 2

Previously, in Part 1, I shared that the EFCA seemed like a good home for us, denomination-wise, and that the particular church we were attending seemed like a very good one. To fill that out just a bit—talk about a family-friendly church. Our girls were very well-loved by the nursery workers and Sunday School teachers and it was hard to have to tell them we were leaving when the time finally came to do so. We were in a supportive adult Sunday School class of parents of young children, and enjoyed their company and sharing a little bit of our lives together. I say all this to emphasize that it was not because of the people at our last church that we left it. Quite to the contrary.

Getting back to the “Christian Libertarianism™” (I'm going to trademark that phrase and make MILLIONS!) thing... Looking back on our experience in the EFCA, in my opinion, if you're in a church that does leave a lot of doctrinal specifics up to the parishioner, the church ends up somewhere on this spectrum:

1. No one in the church will be able to agree on much of anything, because of all the differences in doctrinal opinion, and there will be chaos.
2. Everyone in the church will ”get along“ without really agreeing on deeper theological matters, and therefore just have a weak sort of surface unity.
3. There will (mostly) be a unity of doctrinal belief—it just won't be codified.