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.