Why Orthodoxy?

I'm often asked why I became Orthodox. People don't expect a "Fr. John Daly" to be married with a child just graduating college; most Fr. John Daly's (and there are quite a few of them) are to be found in Roman Catholic parishes. Few, if any, have children and, at least if they are in the Latin rite (the one most people identify with Roman Catholicism), none are married.



Thus, it isn't at all uncommon for someone to ask me if I became Orthodox so I could be a married priest. I suppose such a question would seem reasonable to many Americans who have difficulty understanding the venerable practice of celibacy among Western clergy. Personally, it would be a grievously sinful thing to abandon one's faith in order to be ordained in another simply in order to get around celibacy. Only modern Americans could think of such an action as anything other than profoundly dishonest (and dishonorable)!



Others have asked whether or not I wasn't one of those Catholics who had been "turned off" by some of the changes in styles of worship and music since the Second Vatican Council. Again, the answer is, "No". There have been many changes in Roman Catholic practice since the Council that I think are less than healthy, but in recent years there has been a significant movement back towards healthier and more grounded liturgical and spiritual practices. Both Pope John Paul II and the current Pope Benedict worked mightily to restore 'order' to the Roman Church. Again, it would have been reprehensible to leave because I was offended by some of the silly liturgical antics of the clergy during the Mass. As to the far more devastating scandals that erupted over the past decade (long after I had converted to Orthodoxy)--they are heartbreaking reminders of the power of sin to reach into the depths of the Christian community. But to leave one Church for another because of the evil actions of some of its ordained ministers would have indicated a rather shallow and unrealistic understanding of the universality of wickedness. In other words, sinful actions abound everywhere and the scandals that have erupted among evangelicals and Orthodox are no less appalling than those that arose in the Roman church.

So if it wasn't for reasons of marital status, liturgical aesthetics, or moral scandals, why did I leave the West for the (predominantly) Eastern Orthodox Church? The simple answer is that I was searching for the same eternal goodness, truth, and beauty that philosophers have been talking about at least since the time of Socrates. I was looking for the unchanging faith of the Apostles without all the trappings of the legalism and individualism of the West. Neither Roman Catholicism, with its absolutist political structure and juridical legalism, nor Protestantism, with its emphasis on individualism and lack of church consciousness had what I sought. For quite some time I wondered if it existed at all.


First, I must share some of my own religious history. True to my Irish name, I had been baptized and brought up in my childhood in the Roman Catholic church. My family was "mixed", however. My mother had been brought up in a fundamentalist/evangelical home in Oklahoma and my paternal grandmother had been brought up a New England Congregationalist. My grandmother made a whole-hearted conversion to Roman Catholicism when she met and married my grandfather, but my mother resolutely refused to become Catholic for deep theological reasons. She was always respectful of the Roman Church and attended mass with the family on a weekly basis. She simply could not bring herself to assent to doctrines she really didn't believe in. In a way she was a role model to me for making the "good confession". I came to understand that conforming to a belief that one truly didn't accept was in itself sinful. Still, as a child I was deeply intrigued by the beauty and majesty of the high mass we usually attended at our local parish. Even after my parents' marriage soured and we stopped attending church together as a family, I continued to go on my own--right up until my early teens. It was then that the full force of the Post Vatican II reforms hit our parish and, seemingly overnight, we went from a very formal liturgical life to one full of tambourines and guitars. It hit me hardest in Holy Week, when I was fourteen and the old solemn procession of the sacrament to the singing of "Pange Lingua" was replace by a sort of trot around the church to the singing of "They'll Know We are Christians by Our Love". It struck me that if something so profound could be turned into something so silly it probably wasn't all the profound to begin with--at least in the minds of the people who were in charge of worship.


In all fairness, I might well have been able to ride out the "Silly Seventies" and the following decades of liturgical darkness in the American Catholic church had I been less inclined toward theological thought in the first place. Once the door to questioning opened (encouraged by the iconoclastic young priests of the period) it was nearly impossible to shut. The very core elements of the faith no longer made sense to me. How could Jesus really be the Messiah if the world continued to be so manifestly wicked and lost? It seemed to me that Christianity itself was grounded in falsehood. For the next several years I wandered through a spiritual wilderness. I seriously considered converting to Judaism (they, after all, were still waiting for their Messiah); then I tried out various Eastern and New Age spiritualities. Ultimately, I found myself cautiously and very selectively re-considering Christianity. In the college town I was living in there was an Episcopal Church with an excellent choir and a profoundly intellectual rector who gave very compelling sermons. It seemed as if I could have my cake and eat it too. I found the beauty of liturgical worship accompanied by a theologically "free-thinking" attitude to doctrine. It was only a matter of time before I was formally received into the Episcopal Church and not too much longer after that before I petitioned the diocese to send me to seminary. In the fall of 1983 my wife and I found ourselves at the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church in the Chelsea section of Manhattan.


If someone were to predict that I would find my true spiritual home in Orthodoxy when I entered the Episcopal seminary back in 1983, I would have thought they were crazy. I was already married, I loved the liturgical richness of Anglican worship, and, while I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with some of the stands the Episcopal Church was taking on issues like abortion and sexuality, I was one of those people who believed that the church was broad enough to include every opinion quite comfortably. In fact, it was life at the seminary itself that led to the crisis that would finally bring me to Orthodoxy.


By my senior year at the seminary, in 1986, that growing discomfort had turned into full fledged horror at what appeared to be a wholesale rejection of the theological and scriptural traditions of the Christian Church. This was a bit of a paradox; I had entered seminary as a fairly liberal Episcopalian (though I was already moving toward more 'traditional' belief). Within two years I had become convinced that the trajectory of the Episcopal Church was dreadfully wrong. And it as all because of the excellent education I was receiving about the teachings and practices of the Early Church and the way that the Holy Scriptures had been read and interpreted at various stages of church history! I faced the same set of questions I had as a teenager in my old Roman Catholic parish--if the foundations of the Church's faith and tradition were one thing and the current practice was entirely different, something or somebody was wrong, either at the start or somewhere along the way. In the past I had opted to believe that the story was flawed from the beginning, but by this point in my life I had become convinced once more that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Only Savior of the world. I could not turn my back on Him a second time. So, the obvious conclusion was that somewhere along the way at least some Christians had consciously chosen to pull away from the true Church.


I had no interest in pursuing the various Protestant denominations--none of them seemed close to the early Church they professed to have recreated 1500 years plus after the fact. Even the most basic knowledge of the liturgical and sacramental beliefs of the real early Church proved that much. When I considered the Church of Rome, I found myself facing the same questions I had before. If all power resided in the hands of one man, no matter how good and holy, there would always be room for confusion and error. The Protestants had had that much right; they simply came to the wrong conclusions about what to do about it. Here is where I felt close to despair. If the early church had held fast to the "faith once delivered" how could it have disappeared from the face of the earth. It was the combination of a research paper assignment given by my professor of theology and the undergraduate courses I had taken in Russian and Byzantine history that led me to my first Orthodox liturgy.


My theology professor had assigned us to write a paper on another religious 'denomination'. Seemingly out of the blue it occurred to me to write about Orthodoxy. I figured that if any Christian 'denomination' had kept the original early Church perspective it would be the Orthodox. That seems self evident now, but it certainly wasn't the case back then. In my courses on Byzantium and Imperial Russia the image of the Orthodox Church was almost always presented as backward, superstitious, and opposed to all things modern. Western textbook writers had pretty much uncritically swallowed Gibbons' ( the famous author of "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire") scathing attack on the Byzantines as a virtually irredeemable perversion of civilization. Orthodoxy was at the heart of Byzantine life, so it was portrayed in very negative terms; it was always on the wrong side of every dispute. The same was true for the Russians--merely a northern and even less civilized version of Byzantium. In short, I hadn't been predisposed to look for anything positive in Orthodoxy until I was driven to consider it in despair of hope anywhere else!


It was in the midst of Great Lent that I found myself in St Nicholas Cathedral of the Russian Orthodox Church on 97th Street in Manhattan. I wasn't sure that I would be welcome and my nervousness was only increased when I entered the cathedral--much darker than the Western churches I was used to. Men and women stood mostly apart in separate parts of the Church. The choir sang beautifully in Slavonic, but the melodies were very different from Anglican or Gregorian Chant. The order of the liturgy (I didn't realize that it was a hierarchal liturgy with a bishop) was virtually incomprehensible to me. But about half way through I remembered the words ascribed to the group sent out by Prince Vladimir to observe the liturgy at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople a thousand years before, "We did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth, so great was the beauty of that place". I did not understand everything that was going on around me, but I knew that I was having a glimplse of heaven and, against all logic, I knew that I had no choice but to become Orthodox. It really was that simple--and that complicated.

I began to read everything I could about Orthodox Christianity. I tackled the writings of Vladimir Lossky (something I wouldn't normally advise a neophyte to do!) and dreamed about the Trinity. I bought Orthodox prayer books and recordings of Orthodox music. My poor wife was in a panic--all this time and expense to go to an Episcopal seminary only to become Orthodox!


For awhile I pretended to myself that I could adapt Orthodox beliefs to fit an Episcopalian existence. I don't think I really believed it. I certainly kept returning to that interior certainty I had felt in the cathedral that I must become Orthodox, but I was afraid of the consequences of actually leaving the Episcopal Church. I had many friends in the Church, there were still things I loved (and continue to love to this day) about it. In my uncertainty, encouraged by my diocesan bishop, who thought I would grow out of my infatuation, I was ordained to the diaconate and priesthood of the Episcopal Church. I enjoyed a very happy three years as a curate at a large Episcopal parish in New England--except more and more often I found myself preaching sermons in opposition to abortion and theological syncretism (the blending of traditional Christian beliefs with distinctly non Christian beliefs). In the process I exasperated the poor rector of the parish who constantly found himself having to explain his young curate's atypical (for a New England Episcopalian) opinions to the more liberal members of the community. In the end, it was clear that there was no place for me in the Episcopal Church. My wife, after not a few tears over yet another disruption to our lives--which now included our infant daughter, slowly came to understand Orthodoxy and find in it the solidity that she had never found in the Episcopal Church (she had never converted).


In the autumn of 1989 we were received into the Orthodox Church and I was soon ordained a deacon and, after a year of "re-tooling" at St. Vladimir's Seminary, to the priesthood. During Holy Week 1992 I was sent to St. Nicholas parish in Southbridge Massachusetts where I became rector and where I have served ever since.


So, in the end, after twenty years what have I found? Why did I become Orthodox? And why have I remained Orthodox? (The first and the second questions are not entirely the same).


I have long gotten over the initial stage of 'convertitis'--in which I felt I had to define my Orthodoxy against everything I had known before. Being Orthodox is far more than not being Roman Catholic or Episcopalian. Indeed, if that were all it was, I would be terribly impoverished. I am part of a community of believers that makes up at most 1% of the population and which is often identified with cultures not well known or well respected by most other Americans. Becoming Orthodox has not been a move up the social ladder!


In becoming and remaining Orthodox I have acquired a new and tremendously refreshing understanding of God's creation--one that really isn't easily accessible in the main line western faith traditions. In fact, I believe that the spiritual groping of many Americans that leads them to various kinds of New Ageism and the adoption of "Eastern" religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) is none other than the desire to find what is already present in Orthodoxy.


Orthodox Christianity is immensely positive in its understanding of humankind and of the meaning of life. It takes very seriously the cancerous power of sin and the fact that no one can be saved except through union with Christ. But, it does not see the human race as a "mass of perdition"--completely lost to God through Original Sin. Indeed, Orthodoxy celebrates human freedom, specifically our capability to freely respond to God's grace. There is nothing imposed on us from outside. The gift is offered and it is for us to accept it or decline. This is a VERY different world view from the strict Augustinian one of the West (and Calvinist Protestantism in particular). On the other hand, we are not at all acceptable as we are--we must repent of our sinful desires and behaviors and the Holy Scriptures and Tradition of the Church is very clear as to what those sinful behaviors and desires are. Orthodoxy is not for libertarians!

The Orthodox world view is deeply sacramental. All of creation (as St. Paul so beautifully expresses in Romans 8) is called to be included in the Resurrection. The entire universe has been created by God and is intended by God to find redemption in His Kingdom. Matter is good and blessed in its original intention and in its final disposition. God uses and transforms the material universe to participate in our salvation. Bread and Wine truly become the Body and Blood of Christ our God (as is clearly attested to in the Scriptures and was never doubted until the schisms of the Western Church in the 15th century). Water is sanctified to become the material means of salvation in baptism. Oil is blessed for healing, and so on. We do not see the world as an opposition between spirit and matter with spirit being good and matter indifferent or evil. In fact, a world view that condemns or ignores the material dimension is heretical.

Orthodoxy truly believes that human beings are made for communion with God; that the created and the Creator can and must have direct communion with one another. There is no other explanation for Jesus Christ. "God became a man", says St. Athanasius and many other Church fathers, "so that man might become god". This teaching of theosis ('becoming divine') does NOT mean that we become additional persons of the God-head (an infinite multiplication of the Divine Persons). We are and forever remain creatures, but we are creatures who are made to share in the grace, love, and goodness of God (in His "energies", as St Gregory Palamas put it).
This is indeed the high calling of the Christian. For Orthodox the "humility" of God in Christ was not a means of paying back the Father for His just outrage at human rebellion, but a means of restoring and healing our alienated nature from within. This teaching, too, is very different from the mainline teaching of the West and very much more positive.

Finally, Orthodox expresses itself through a real COMMUNITY of faith. We do not rely on a central authority figure and most definitely do not believe in any kind of individualistic "me and Jesus" relationship. Our unity is expressed in our common communion with the faithful bishops of the Church (our spiritual fathers and leaders of the local churches). It is their common adherence to the faith and traditions of the apostles that holds the church together--along with the testimony and assent of ALL the faithful people. Yes, there are bishops who abandon their role--but they are rejected and expelled from the body of the faithful. Likewise, there are lay people who reject the faith and practice of the Church, but they, too, are expelled from the Body--either through formal excommunication or by means of apostasy (leaving the Church for another religious or political ideal). The Community of the Faithful, the Church itself, is always unassailable by her enemies. It needs no "reformation" because it is united to the one who is ever "faithful and true", Jesus Christ.

This last understanding tends to inhibit legalism. We have our fair share of people who would like to interpret the Churches canons (traditions and customs surrounding fasting, etc., for example) in a legalistic way, but in the long run they can't make much headway because Orthodoxy is naturally 'holistic'. You can't really take just bits and pieces of it and elevate them to "most important". You have to accept the Orthodox faith as a whole, which means understanding in all humility that it is infinitely more than our own personal "take" or opinion on any particular thing.

Finally, Orthodoxy affirms life. Our God is the God of the living, the God who destroys death and bestows Resurrection "on the fallen"--both the spiritually and the physically dead. There is no place in Orthodoxy for the ideologies of death--be it abortion, euthanasia, war, capital punishment, and so on. We refuse, as a Church, to ever endorse death as a means of promoting life--the obscene foolishness of such a thing is obvious throughout our tradition of worship, prayer, and evangelism.

These are the things that made me Orthodox and these are the things that keep me Orthodox--though I could add a great deal more to them! And this is my answer to those who ask me why I converted. To those outside the Orthodox Church who read this and say they, too, agree with what is written here, I suggest that you learn more about what your own tradition teaches. You will find that, though there may be much in common between your tradition and Orthodox in a number of particular points, in the end it will not add up. Orthodoxy, by definition is the fullness of the faith "once delivered". It is not the negation of everything else, but its fulfillment in Christ.
So, "come and see". You will not regret the journey.