Breathing with Both

IC XC
✙
NI KA

WHEN I LEFT THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH on this journey back in 2002, Fr Victor Sokolov, of Blessed Memory, wanted to make sure that I was not looking for a “Pure Church” but only for the “True Church”. There is no pure church he said, and I would be doing the wrong thing to leave. Although I gave the right answer at that time, it was, perhaps, not 100% true. Like a lot of Protestants (and not a few others) I wanted, at least, my experience of the Church to be pure. Of course, I had very clear ideas of what that purity would look like and they warped my perceptions and my experience. It took a few years (ok, a decade and half) to work through that miasma, but eventually God managed to shred enough of my pride to see that something, maybe, needed to change – and that was, maybe, me.

Two things kept pestering me: first was how thin the Orthodox Church was on the ground in the US. There are just not that many Orthodox parishes in this country and, once one is outside of a major city, there are often several miles (or even hours) to travel to get to the closest parish for liturgy. The same was true at the turn of the last century, which is why my Patron, St Raphael of Brooklyn, urged people to pray what are called Reader Services and these are still a valued and important part of lay (and clergy) piety in this community. Still, one wants to be with people when praying. The clergy use these services because there are some things that Eastern Clergy cannot do if there are no other persons around. A priest cannot, for example, celebrate a Divine Liturgy when alone.

The second thing that was bothersome was more an issue of purity: there are many problems in the Liberal Mainline. If Luther knew his 95 Theses were going to lead to Drag Bingo in Minnesota, he would have stayed Catholic. (Happy belated Reformation Day, btw.) These problems are very visible in the Catholic Church: one needs only to take a click through the internet. So, I assumed I was avoiding these issues (or at least delaying them) by not joining the RCC. However, I was mistaken. This second issue is related to the first: the Orthodox Community is so small in the US that sex issues, people advocating for women’s ordination, etc, are just not newsworthy. When an Orthodox monastery in the midwest closed for scandalous reasons, no one seemed to care outside of the local laity who suddenly had nowhere to go for liturgy. Were the same thing to happen in a Catholic church or monastery there would be news helicopters and a three- or four-week news cycle. And it would come up over and over again in flashback chatter.

There is a “liberal mainline” in Orthodoxy as well. The issue is with American cultural religion, not with the Churches, per se. All the same people are everywhere, just in different masks of piety, so I didn’t need to run: there was no place to run to. I just needed to buckle down and start working on myself. Maybe if I live somewhere else, I can do that? But that was only more running. God seems to want me here in San Francisco. Having tried the Geographical Solution several times, I opted, finally for the Ecclesiological Solution. I joined the Roman Catholic Church: the largest, not-pure True Church going. I have been here for a while and God is good.

Several people asked me why I wasn’t a member of one of the Eastern Rite Catholic Churches. I had no desire to be and I was assured by several folks that my baptism (in the Methodist Church) made me a Western Christian. I was a member of the Roman Rite and all was good. But then came up several questions about when I joined the Catholic Church and there we get some interesting data. According to the Canons I joined the Church when Fr Victor Chrismated me. So my “Sacrament of Initiation”, pardon the term, was in 2002 in an Eastern Rite body. How then did my Methodist baptism make me Western in spite of that? Eastern Theology even says that the one is not completed until the other has happened. So, even separated by 20+ years, my Baptism and Chrismation are part of the same rite. What am I?

It was confusing, but strange, and so there I was until a conversation with a Canon Lawyer occurred and the answer was, actually, exactly the reverse. Yes, my baptism had “situated me imperfectly” within the Catholic Church (generically) but my Chrismation had made that imperfection Eastern Rite. And suddenly I was no longer a Roman Christian, but a Russian again. The implications are not very great: an historical fluke means that my Russian Bishop is also the local Roman ordinary. And I’ve already been doing volunteer work at the local Russian parish for the last 16 months or so in addition to my job at St Dominic’s so day to day, the only two changes have been a refocusing on what we might call Byzantine Piety, which I could have done even as a Roman Catholic; and a different set of “canonical” holidays. But I’ve been doing both for over a year anyway. (This is not new news as such. This has been going on for a bit, I’m just posting now.)

This is the way things work, it seems: one big circle and God’s sense of humor. You get to work on the things he wants you to work on even if you have to go to Oz and back before you realize you need to do the work. And when you get back to Kansas, you discover it’s Oz anyway.

Fr Victor, pray for me.