Just read something about being “truly Orthodox”….
A former Orthodox-convert-blogger, who was quite popular (and controversial) in Net Orthodoxy in his day, then became Catholic, is now becoming Orthodox again–and I discovered he lives near me. And will be coming to my church. 😀
I’ve been checking out what traces are left on the Web of his old blog, to see what the controversy was in the old days. I missed it somehow. Either I encountered his blog many years ago and forgot about it, or he wasn’t mentioned on the Orthodox forum I spent time on, or it was during the time I dropped out from Internet Orthodoxy (after the Richard/Tracy crap soured me on Orthodoxy for a time).
I only found his newly-revived blog recently by accident, through another Orthodox blog’s post which included a link to one of his posts. And discovered he lives very close.
Anyway, I found this comment by 123 on one of his old blog incarnations:
More practically, one hasn’t started becoming truly Orthodox until you’ve had your heart broken by the Church or someone in it, until you’ve found yourself at a a level pervasively well below what you strived for, and then you’ve stayed put for a few years.
That’s not something converts are prepared for, they aren’t prepared for the real heartbreak of conversion, of failure in the spiritual life (in oneself and others), they aren’t prepared for that ‘abandonment’ on the other side of the awe one experiences the first few years of Orthodoxy.
Yes, Orthodoxy is Pascha, joy, joy; but it’s also the Cross, it’s also pain, suffering, and all those things in the hymns and the lives of the saints we assume are far off, past, poetic hyperbole, or metaphorical.
No, Orthodoxy really the dumps, too. And then there’s also Pascha once a year. All that talk of struggle, the fact that clergy and monks are shown truly falling to their deaths from the top of the Divine Ladder, that’s really what the spiritual life is about.
It’s when you experience and know that that the converts starts shutting up, it’s then that people start assuming you’re foreign and were raised Orthodox (they assume you have an accent because you never speak, and you start looking world-weary like an Eastern European, or like someone going through the motions because it’s all you can muster, and you can’t stop doing even that because it’s simply what you are, even when you’re bad at it.)
And this gave me pause, because that’s where I’ve been for the past 4 and a half years. Staying put in Orthodoxy even after discovering that my spiritual mentor and idol (Richard) had feet of clay, that he was an abusive narcissist and enabler of abuse.
He’s the one who broke my heart, and he (at least in name) was Orthodox.
And here I am, often going through the motions, wondering how much of it is true, yet still here. Too stubborn to leave, even though it is common for converts to do so. According to 123, that makes me “truly Orthodox.”
And I get to see someone who also has had my doubts and frustrations, leave and then return.