Living-Deliberately.com

I have found over the course of this year that writing about Orthodoxy has been very difficult. I can scarcely articulate the wonder and joy it brings me, nor the reason why… it is overwhelming at times with it’s vastness and crowdedness and a whole host of words that may have to be experienced to (not) understand. More irony I suppose. It is also quite deeply “my sacred” and I hold it close. I find I can not hold it out there to be opinioned against, such as I could a lifestyle choice I recently made or deliberate goal I’m working on. For more reasons than could be counted I am grateful for my priest, Fr. Stephen Freeman, but one of those reasons is his blog. Today he has a stronger-than-usual position post on how differently the ancient church viewed both the church and salvation than does our modern culture; it is these very differences that ring true to me, having come from modern “traditions” with manufactured authority structures and a random-feeling, situational and fluid stance on what role the church plays (or should play). It was with ideas such as this,

“Anyone who does not know that the Church is what salvation looks like has not begun to work out his salvation with fear and trembling. We cannot love one another unless there is another to love. Indeed, the New Testament, with the exception of the Book of Philemon and the Pastoral Epistles is written only to the Church. And those exceptions are written to men only in regard to their place within the Church. The New Testament belongs exclusively to the Church. If you are reading it as an individual and not as a member of the Church to whom it was written, then you are reading someone else’s mail.”

that, upon hearing, was like a light switch of rationale….a peg of a certain shape finally finding a fitting nest.  At times, Orthodoxy reminds me more than I ever could have imagined to remove the largest idol I have, my self, finally placing me into the context that was meant in the beginning.

I do not have a comment policy on this blog currently in place. Though for this post, and any that tremble so close to what is dear to me,  I would ask commenters tread gently and respect whose space this is; I share in an effort to present myself authentically, which should not be mistaken as an invitation to debate certain things.

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