Currently Reading...

I just finished reading the book The Kite Runner. For those of you who haven't read it, fair warning: it is a heavy, heavy read. And by heavy, I mean dark. There are definitely silver linings to the dark clouds, but I would venture to say that roughly 80% of the book is that way. Anyhow, I started up a couple of other books--one recommended to me by a friend, entitled, Dancing Alone: The Quest for Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religion by Frank Schaeffer (son of the well-known Protestant theologian Francis Schaeffer), and the second one is a book that I have been wanting to read for a long time: Dune by Frank Herbert. (What is it right now... it seems as though I'm on a kick for authors named Frank??)

First impressions of Dancing Alone: Obviously he is passionate about his struggle, his own conversion, and the history of the church. He feels betrayed in a sense, because he was raised in a family of evangelists, but who had no real connection to the historic, Apostolic Church. He finds many similarities between extreme Evangelical protestants and extreme secular atheists.

Amanda and I were talking about the tone of the book and how it felt reading his words. We definitely know what he felt--we've been there, too. However, we both agreed that for us, that was a passing stage. Yes, we had to find out for ourselves about the history of the church, about how we came to be where we are, about how our churches came to practice what they did and so forth. However, once we made that choice to enter the Orthodox Church, all those things that once seemed so important paled in comparison to what we saw in front of us.

Orthodoxy is not about pointing out how wrong everyone else is. Sometimes it feels that way, and sometimes people (like me) express rather poorly things that others can explain very simply. While I think that those initial steps do need to be taken in our intellect, once we made that transition into the Church, it was all about how are we living--every moment--in and for Christ. This is the wonder of Orthodoxy.

Orthodoxy is about praying like the Church has prayed for thousands of years--using the same prayers that saints have uttered. It is about believing the same things that Christians have believed since the very beginning! For me, I want to believe the same thing that the Apostles believed. I want to live my faith the same way that their disciples did. I want to worship and pray the way that the martyrs and confessors did. That is the faith of Jesus Christ--that is the Church--that, we are assured by Jesus Himself, the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.

So... all of this to simply say that Orthodoxy is more than a set of rules about fasting and prayer. It is a way of life. It is a worldview. It is life.