Where Am I?
I received a very wonderful phone call asking about my conversion to Judaism. Specifically wondering, “Where are you?” It was a wonderful phone call because it resulted in 2 hours of chat and a new friendship. But if a stranger can ask that question – open invite to ID yourself, btw – what must my friends be wondering? Todd probably knows best, so, open comment invite.
Most days, I’m on my 3rd Shift Schedule. At home, I’ve been praying out of a Siddur in the morning and struggling to learn the Hebrew for the heart of the service – the Blessings before the Sh’ma, the Sh’ma itself, the Blessings after the Sh’ma and the the Amidah. As the Hebrew gets easier/comes back to me, this gets a little faster.
This praying in Hebrew means nothing, though: the very heart of the Synagogue Liturgy is exactly where Christian and Jewish Prayer overlap. I can think of nothing in the service itself that an Orthodox or Roman Christian – and most Protestants – could not say.
At night, I sit in silence before my prayer corner, the Ner Tamid burning silently and me simply waiting to feel the touch of the Holy One reaching in. Then I go to work.
I work two shifts on Friday. I’m not going to get to a Friday Evening Service or go Shomer Shabbat right here and now. Just ain’t gonna happen even if I wanted to. Given the lack of a Jewish community, I keep going to Church on Sunday.
On Sunday I’m sitting in a pew debating with Fr Brent during the sermon. Father preaches a decently orthodox sermon for an Episcopalian, and he preaches a rather meaty sermon as well, so there’s a lot to argue with. It’s all in my head, of course, silently. It’s not like St Gregory of Nyssa Parish, where you can offer your feedback from the floor in the context of liturgy. But then I stand up and say the Creed with everyone else (minus the filioque – which a few Episcopalians skip). Then, when the time to lift up our hearts comes, I generally stick in “God” where the text says “him” – and “Blessed be ‘God’s’ Kingdom” etc.
This has been wonderful in other ways: for a few months ago I thought I wanted to pop right off the Christian spectrum. Sitting on Sundays an listening to Fr Brent has shown me was I still like about the Christian system, and what I would miss if I went beyond the pale. Mind you, I still like the idea of Praxis Buffalo. Just now, I may explore it differently – think Minyan.
And that’s where I am. I’m still involved in the idea of an incarnational God. I wonder how a totally transcendent deity can be involved at all. This I do not understand. By the same token I wonder how we move from a totally transcendent deity to an incarnational one. How is it possible for one even to evolve into the other? But that’s on a personal level – assuming God-as-Person. Once we step away from that, I’m far more in tune with Reconstructionist ideas. And if we broach God as “the sum of natural powers or processes that allows mankind to gain self-fulfillment and moral improvement” suddenly we’re in a place where I spent most my life. I don’t know how I feel about it. The primary claim of Christianity: That God is a Person who Loves us – is one that it is hard to define in any other way. Yet, I lived outside of that claim for much of my adult life.
Currently my plan is to keep exploring. As I said to my caller, if the claim of Judaism is that one needn’t convert at all, then why bother? Or, more to the point, why rush? I wrote to another comment poster yesterday that I’ve noticed a pattern whereby I rush in and get burned. I need to move slower. Right now I can see myself exploring Praxis Buffalo, as well as going to either the Conservative or Reconstructionist synagogues in town – and/or maybe both for a time and just sit in silence, simply waiting to feel the touch of the Holy One reaching in. Then I go to work.
I converted with a Rabbi who doesn’t allow anyone to rush in, which is a good thing, IMO. As I was slogging through all the months of studying with him I envied a woman I knew who converted with a spouse and child in just four months. I mentioned this to Rabbi and he told me I shouldn’t envy them. He was right. It takes time to convert inside, to become a part of a people, a community.
Since all people are different, short conversions can work out just fine for some, but I don’t think most of us should be on a fast track, and certainly this family should not have been since now they say they didn’t really know what they were getting into and have gone on to other things.
It really doesn’t matter if we convert, so if someone wants to go slow, go slow. One woman I know studied with Rabbi for 13 years! I can’t imagine….
Your comment about praying in Hebrew….I definitely prefer to daven in Hebrew. It’s just much easier for me to transcend my own disbelief and arguments and reach a place of calm mediation when I daven in Hebrew. There is something about the language that speaks to my soul in a way English never can, no matter the meaning of the words.
I think there is a place in the world for each of us and that the journey to this place is seldom a straight shot. I look at the stories in Torah and people were all over the map! Yes, once I began studying Judaism I went step by step to conversion, but…. I was 28 when I read A History of the Jews by Paul Johnson and realized I wanted to know this God of the Jews. Since I didn’t know any Jews it never entered my mind to go with anything other than what I knew and as a result spent 13 years drifting in and out of churches, mostly out, slowly but surely working my way towards Judaism without even realizing it until the end. I was 42 the first time I visited a synagogue, 44 when I converted. Not exactly a quick trip around the block! I can’t imagine it happening any other way though. I’m where I belong and am happy with my life. It all worked out for the good.
Great blog, BTW. Always interesting to read about another’s journey(s).
Huw dito regarding the conversation. The only thing though is that, I think it was closer to three hours. LOL, at least according to my wife.
Huw,
The last time I visited your website was when I was journeying towards Orthodoxy from Anglo-Catholicism about 5 years ago. I was chrismated on July 18, 2004 and continue to attend All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago.
Like you, I started my journey towards Orthodoxy with a great sense of certainty that Orthodoxy was the true church and that the church I was leaving behind – ECUSA – was on a slippery slope to hell at worst and irrelevance at best.
This was a difficult time in my life. My father was less than a year away from his death when I began my journey in 2003 (was my embrace of patriarchal Orthodoxy an attempt to fill the father-void in my life? Who knows…), I was coming back from an Army deployment in Kuwait/Iraq for a war that I didn’t support and actually marched against and I was finishing up my bachelor’s degree and would soon face that scary time in a young person’s life when they
had to go forth into the world and find meaningful employment that paid the bills. In a phrase, I was in desperate need of certainty. ECUSA didn’t provide it. Orthodoxy did, so I made the jump.
Like you, that sense of certainty has diminished. My life experiences have taught me what a complicated world we live in, and it just bugs me that there are some people who think they have all the answers. What also bugs me more than anything is this attempt to turn back the clock by many converts to Orthodoxy. The Church’s stance towards women’s ordination, gays/lesbians and contraception are some issues that come to mind. I also find some of the nasty comments made about Islam by fellow Orthodox converts to be distasteful and simplistic.
Nevertheless, I’ve decided to stay with Orthodoxy. I don’t want you to think I”m judging you for not, but I’d like to give a few reasons why I’ve stayed and hope it leads to further discussion. The first reason is my contacts with secular people who lack rootedness and a sense of who they are. They tend to fill the empty spaces with the pleasures and passions of this world – sex, drugs, alcohol, over-the-top romantic relationships or fantasies of such, I-Pods, cell phones, gadgets, etc. One of my friends has come to the end of the road with such pursuits and is now living in a rather empty, unhappy place. My experiences of worldliness has taught me that Orthodoxy knows what it’s talking about when it talks about the passions and their sometimes adverse effects on the human soul.
Then there is my persistent belief that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the grave. I don’t see any other explanation for the rise of the early church. A good author to read on this topic is N.T. Wright. He doesn’t necessarily affirm the often pre-critical views of this topic (who Jesus actually was & did) that are often found in the Ortodox Church, but he also does battle against the reductionist views often found in the Episcopal Church. The Orthodox Church places a high premium on faithfulness to Christ and the tradition that centers on him. I haven’t fully worked out the implications of this to our post-modern world, but I think Orthodoxy is to be commended for such efforts.
Lastly and most importantly I felt that leaving the Orthodox Church would be a terrible breach of community. I have come to know and love many of my fellow parishioners at All Saints, and the thought of leaving them – of burning my bridges to them – is unthinkable.
Once again, I don’t pretend to know all or any of the answers, and I certainly don’t agree with everything my priest or fellow parishioners believe. Nevertheless, I love them, I love Christ, I love the suffering world around me (for I am suffering with them) who desperately needs what Christ and his Church has to offer – the love and forgiveness of the person of Christ. Let’s talk some more.
James –
Thank you for your thoughtful and charitable comment. I think it shows how parallel we are although in a very surprising way.
Lastly and most importantly I felt that leaving the Orthodox Church would be a terrible breach of community.
When I left the Episcopal Parish of St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, my housemate was a member of the parish, many people I worked with, pretty much everyone I knew, socially, in fact, was a member or at least a friend of the parish. With few exceptions, most people I knew, called for sudden dinners, decided I wanted to “go out for drinks” with, have brunch with, etc, were all members of the parish. Additionally, most of my friends online were Episcopalian. Most of my social network was as well. If I was travelling out of town for a meeting or a gathering, other than to meet my BF, I’d say 9 out of 10 chances were it was for something Episcopalian.
When I became Orthodox, I gave up all of that.
What my housemate said to me was, he didn’t care about the theology: I was dissing his community and he couldn’t forgive me for that.
5+ years later, that sense of community, that sense of presence and love never recoalesced. If this (Orthodoxy) was the Body of Christ, it was doing a piss-poor job of it compared to the heathens, agnostics and heretics who weekly danced around the altar at St Gregory’s parish.
I recognise that is a function of place and time. My experience of dysfunction, spiritual abuse and lack of community was exactly because I was here, in Asheville, NC, attending St Raphael’s parish, confessing to Joseph Hunnycutt and in an all-convert community that was convinced it was right and even all the other Orthodox parishes in Asheville were “world orthodoxy” and horribly wrong.
If I had been anywhere else – or even followed Father Victor’s advice and joined the Greek parish in town instead of St Raphael’s, things might have been different and you might be talking to a member of the Orthodox Church now. It took a lot of time even post-St Raphael’s to find out that there were other Orthodox out there besides the folks I had met. It took comments from Fr Ernesto (on this blog) and Fr Greg and Fr Peter to help me realise that I’d just made some wrong choices. Things could have been different.
So, here in 2007, I feel as though I seriously f**ked up back in 2002 and I did that by seriously f**king over a community that loved me and still does (as evidenced by how they welcomed me home when at last I found enough metanoia to go back).
I have come to know and love many of my fellow parishioners at All Saints, and the thought of leaving them – of burning my bridges to them – is unthinkable.
Perhaps your own line is the most telling however: when I left the Episcopal Church in 2002, I felt certain I had to burn bridges. They were still reaching out for me, praying for me, loving me. They welcomed me back as soon as I was ready. But *I* ignored them. I had to, you understand, to be “really Orthodox”. I could never go back. I had a couple of requests for dinner/lunch/brunch. I socialised briefly and then dropped out of their social orbit.
When I started attending an Episcopal Parish here in Asheville, leaving an Orthodox Community to do so, I had no phone calls, no “Where are you”, no check ups… Fr G wouldn’t have asked after me except we ran into each other at a showing of Harry Potter last summer. In fact, the Episcopal Priest showed more concern for me in the last 6 months than the Orthodox clergy.
I left. And so I’d left. (Admittedly when last I visited, I got lots of hugs… but no one called even after that visit to see how I was.) The bridges seemed to burn behind me all of their own volition.
I didn’t burn any bridges… I tried to leave in a much more gentle fashion than when I left ECUSA. But what I found was ECUSA left all the doors open and kept the light on in the hope I’d come home. Orthodoxy – at least locally – pulled up the draw bridge and blew out the candles.
Again – this is local. Your Mileage has clearly varied. BRAVO!
Edited in after original posting: As far as dysfunction, it is perhaps most telling that, of the families attending St Raphael’s at the point where it closed no one is currently Orthodox. I was the last one at all even attending an Orthodox parish… And, of the other communities in town – ROCOR, GOA, Carpathian and OCA – the only ones willing to try to talk to the others are the OCA. None fo the clergy socialise. Mostly (except for some ROCOR/OCA interchange) the parishioners don’t even hang out together. No one even wants to have a “Sunday of Orthodoxy” service together. (The OCA monks keep working to change that, I pray that, like the widow in the Gospel, their persistence will effect change.)
So, again, your mileage has clearly varied. But I didn’t have the same experience as you did.
I’d been wondering what you were doing in terms of Sabbath worship, given what I know of your work schedule.
Reading about your local experience just makes me sad. Well, and a little angry, too. More and more I’m beginning to realize how blessed we are in Toronto – and that has nothing to do with those folks at the Airport!
A question I’ve been harbouring for some time now is, what do you think of Y’shua? Did he exist? What role does he play in your mind, heart, understanding now? (This is one of the interesting silences I noticed over at the “Why Are You Not Orthodox” discussion you linked to earlier.)
One last question – is the choice of anti-spam word totally random, or have you assigned particular words to specific categories? The one I entered for this comment is particularly appropriate.
Peter, my brother: you are also one of the Other People who has showed me that Orthodoxy isn’t at all like what I’ve experienced. I know it’s not *only* a local experience, as I’ve shared with you, for I know other clergy who fit the same pattern as I’ve found. But equally, I know others – the ones listed in my blog roll, for example – who don’t fit that pattern. These more seem like Christ to me and if the late Fr Victor had a blog, he’d be there as well.
Anti Spam word is random – but I picked the words in the list. A number of folks have commented on its ability to seem prescient. :-)
Yeshua;
Rabbi? Yes, who fully participated in the Rabbinic debates of his time. Messiah? I’m confused as I look more into what Jews thought of the text they had. God-in-the-the-flesh? Well now…
So much of the theology I understand, so much of the theology by which I see God, experience the word, deal with my neighbour, understand forgiveness, healing/salvation/wholeness (tikkun olam) is exactly incarnational. I can’t make the leap. If Jesus isn’t God in the Flesh, not only does Christianity not make sense, but so also does nothing else.
I tried to hint at this struggle with the bald theological line “I wonder how a totally transcendent deity can be involved at all.” In fact, this a problem I have w/ Eastern Orthodox theology as well: at times it got so focused on Christ-God that it seemed like Jesus-the-Guy who went through a voice-change and puberty and acne and probably tried to figure out why he suddenly had back hair… this guy gets lost in all the Gold Icons and hymnography.
Right now, I need this guy to help me make sense out of God. For his ability to help me through that, I love him deeply. I can’t imagine life without him. Indeed, I can’t imagine God without him.
Ironically: the God that hairy-backed Rabbi helps me most understand is the God I find in Judaism. Hence my confusion.
“When I started attending an Episcopal Parish here in Asheville, leaving an Orthodox Community to do so, I had no phone calls, no “Where are youâ€, no check ups…”
My experience of Orthodoxy has been different than your’s. When I stopped attending Divine Liturgy for several weeks,a concerned parishioner who works with me at a farmer’s market selling cheese asked why I was missing church and we met for coffee and lunch several times to discuss my issues with the OC. A friendship has developed from this experience. The priest also tried to contact me, but my phone number and email address had changed. I recently met up with him and reconciled with the church. I think that’s why leaving All Saints would be unthinkable. Not necessarily the theology – if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t have left the Episcopal Church – but because of the love I have experienced. I am sorry by your cold experience with the OC and fully see why you left. May you find the love and acceptance that we all are looking for in your journey.
Thanks, James! And may the Quest be a blessing for you as well
Huw, thanks for this personal update.
I appreciate your honesty, and I can definitely sympathize with many of your hurts and disappointments.
Please be assured of my continued friendship! May God bless you richly!