Hello Kenny!

I was very happy to receive your Christmas letter. I have one other couple with whom I used to be friends many, many years ago and they still send a letter to me every Christmas. Thomas U. Jones (we used to call him “TUJ” based on his initials) and his wife Martha were friends to us when we were in that group in Virginia Beach that got me to repent and return to the vows of my baptism. They are the only ones who have ever contacted me, even though we all lived and worked together in close proximity for many years

I notice you are now working in education. Have you put aside the idea of a radio station?

It’s been an interesting year for me, although I have to say that as I approach my 69th year on this earth, I look back on my life with a great deal of sadness. What a terrible waste it has been overall, compounded by so many bad decisions I made. I’m sorry if I sound as if I am whining now, and certainly one needs to move on and always look to the future, especially hoping in God’s grace and leading, but at the same time, it is hard not to look back on my life and say to myself, “What if I had done _________ instead of _________?”

Perhaps the most bitter reality that I face is that none of my children want anything to do with God or the Christian faith. I can’t say I really blame them inasmuch as the churches I attended were filled with and pastored by people who were anything but the example of the love of Christ to them. What they got from the Fundamentalist churches we attended was a steady diet of condemnation…both of ourselves as Christians as well as of everyone else who was not of that particular church. I had a real knack for picking out loser churches with people who were not exactly shining examples of Christian charity.

Which leads me to my next issue that I have been working on this year – my association with the Roman Catholic Church. Even though I am not a Roman Catholic per se, my church is “in communion” with the Romans, which means to a lot of people that we must accept everything that Rome teaches as truth. When I was examining the apostolic roots of Christianity, I was told in catechism classes that the Byzantine Catholics are “Orthodox in Communion with Rome.”

If you understand what communion means, you will understand why this is simply impossible. The word “communion” infers the idea of unity in practice and beliefs, i.e., that we accept all that the others with whom we are in communion are teaching. That is the reason that the Orthodox and Catholic churches do not offer Holy Communion to Protestants (and in the case of the Orthodox, not even to Roman Catholics). How can one partake of a symbol of unity when one is not in union? How can it be said that we are in union if Protestants do not accept baptismal regeneration, the Sacraments, and the other dogmatic statements which the first Christians taught and which are practiced today in Holy Orthodoxy?

Well, as I studied in seminary and continued to study later on and up to this day, to be Orthodox means that you simply do not accept all that Rome teaches. A short note on this would be things like The Immaculate Conception, Papal Infallibility, the “treasury of merit,” penal substitution theory of redemption, the Filoque Clause to the Nicene Creed, and other things which Rome teaches as “de fide” teaching. As I continued to study, I realized that if I want to truly be Orthodox, then I need to leave my association with Rome and go all the way back to the very beginning of the Christian faith and enter into an Orthodox church. So as of now, I am praying and asking God to open the way for me to leave the Catholic (Roman) Church and enter the Orthodox Church. This will not be easy, as Elizabeth is a devout, cultural Catholic. By this I mean that she is completely devoted to the Roman Catholic Church and doesn’t know the first thing about her faith. A typical Catholic. When I floated the idea of leaving Catholicism for Orthodoxy, the first question she asks is “Are they in union with the pope?”

When I said no, she went a bit off her rocker. The Roman Catholic Church has this rather disgusting teaching from the Medieval Ages, first put out dogmatically by Pope Innocent III, Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. It is called in Latin “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus” and it means “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” It is an obnoxious piece of trash, inconsistent with the love of God for all mankind and out of sorts even with Scripture in which St. Paul clearly states that those who have never heard of Christ or the Gospel may nonetheless be saved. I think sometimes people speak of the love of God and don’t really stop to think about what it means that God is love. He simply cannot act outside of His character, which is love. And yet these same people who say that God is love will blithely condemn everyone else but themselves and those in their assembly to an eternal fire of torment. That is what Elizabeth was taught and she walks in fear of being anything else than Catholic.

Then there is my parish. After I was thrown out of seminary by the Ruthenian Byzantines, I offered to become a cantor, and when no one responded to my overtures, I finally figured out that I was not particularly welcome at the parish I was attending and decided to look around for something else. I started attending various other parishes in the area, including a beautiful Anglican parish that is in communion with Rome but uses the same rubrics for worship as the Episcopalian church. That is the church I grew up in, and I was very comfortable with the worship, but I still kept praying. I had a very simple prayer: “Lord, I am going to sit in the back and not volunteer for anything. If someone comes to me and asks me to help, I will take that as your sign that I am to join their parish.”

I went to the Roman Catholic parish of my wife, the Traditional Latin Parish, the Melkite parish, the Anglican parish, and while I was okay with them, I didn’t get that prayer answered. One day while I was doing some work in the diocesan website, looking for customers for my business in the local churches, I saw a very small parish in Manassas, Virginia.

This is Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Ukrainian Catholic Church. As you can tell from the picture,  it is a pretty tiny church. 75 people fills it up from wall to wall. Our usual Sunday crowd is between 25 & 30.

A funny thing happened when I stopped in on Sunday to attend their Liturgy. Everything was familiar, but the people did not chant the Liturgy. In the East, we chant just about everything – the prayers, the epistle and Gospel readings, the Our Father ….everything. But the people just recited everything. I found that quite odd, but I liked the little church and decided to give it another try.

The next week the same thing happened! Puzzled, I stopped a man upon leaving the church, a man who appeared to be someone who was in charge of things.

“You have a nice church here. I like it. But why don’t you use plainchant?”

That’s all I asked him. Nothing else. And the first thing that came out of his mouth was

“Would you like to be our cantor?”

I mean, honestly, I was floored! I have never had such a direct answer to prayer in my life. So now I come to church every morning, set up everything for the Liturgy, and if our regular cantor is not in (he is a pilot for American Airlines and was out of town the first two weeks I attended) I lead the singing and chant.

You can read more about my experience with the seminary here:

Does the Church really want vocations?

This is my blog site and from time to time, I write things about my experiences or post one of my short stories for the one or two faithful readers I have.

And then, a couple of weeks ago, I was finishing up preparations for the morning Liturgy when Fr. Alex asked me if Ron would be in to cantor. I told him that I didn’t know, but I had practiced the tones (there are 8 different tones used in Byzantine worship) and I was ready. Fr. Alex regarded me for about 15 seconds, then said, “Honestly, Ed, I don’t know what this church would do without you.”

That was such a kind thing to say, especially after the unloving way the Ruthenians treated me. How do I just walk away from that? And in prayer for the last couple of months, I get the distinct feeling that I am to stay put where God has led me, which is fine with me. I will keep praying about this, but He is God and totally capable of moving me when the time comes.

So I will continue for now as a Byzantine Catholic, but I am distinctly Holy Orthodox in everything I believe and have zero interest in following anything the Roman Catholic Church teaches that was not taught in the first 1000 years of the Church. Roman Catholics, especially the more traditional Romans, who think that the church at Rome is THE Church. I do not believe that for a second anymore. St. Peter was given a place of honor and headship over the Church in the first century. What he was not made was a dictator over the Church, and especially when it comes to matters doctrinal, such at the Immaculate Conception. Whenever there was a problem in the Church, the whole Church met in council, such as at the Council of Nicea/Constantinople where the Nicene Creed was hammered out in opposition to the heresy of Arias. I was thinking this morning how it is that whenever you find some doctrine which is heretical, such as for instance, the heresies of the Sabbatarians such as the Seventh Day Adventists, it always comes from one person who thinks that he (or she) is smarter than the united Church, the Holy Traditions of Christianity, and the witness of 2,000 years of Christian belief.

Sorry….didn’t mean to get off on a preaching tour there.

In August of this coming year, Elizabeth and I will be married for 7 years. That again is another interesting story for me. Had I known all the difficulties I would face with her psychological problems, which are quite deep (and she hid from me during our dating), as well as her physical issues, I would have declined this marriage. It is, however, in God’s good will, the very thing that I needed. You see, I was a very selfish man in my first marriage. I didn’t even realize it until after Karen died, but the Lord showed me one night just how selfish I had been and it broke my heart (I spent most of that evening weeping over what He showed me).

After that revelation, and the knowledge He gave me that I was to leave the monastery where I discerning a possible monastic life and instead go back to the world and learn to truly love people, I felt perhaps another marriage might be the opportunity to learn how to be a self-giving person and to learn how to really love, which means to serve. To truly love means to serve others, and no one is a better example of this than our Lord, who said, “For the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give His live a ransom for many.” What greater love (service) is there than to lay down your very life for others as He did that we might have eternal life? He is my example, my goal is to be like Him in giving to others. And this is so different from how I used to be. The demands which Elizabeth puts on me give me an opportunity to express love in service. Sometimes I do it well, and sometimes I fail (and then go to Confession). But the challenge is there – grow into Christlikeness!

I’m still working, mostly in my little business repairing cleaning equipment. Last month I started driving for LYFT. So far they are a great company to work with and it is a great way to pick up some extra money when I have no vacuum cleaners or floor machines to fix.

So, all in all, I approach the coming year in good spirits and with a certain amount of interest to see what is coming next. I am in fairly good health, my Hepatitus C has been cured (that’s another story for later), and I am slowly coming out of the condemnation I have felt all my life to understand God as loving Father rather than some Medieval constructed God-of-wrath who is sending everyone to be burned forever. I would ask of you the favor of your prayers for my children, that Christ our God would reveal Himself to them and show them that all they are seeking for in life is to be found in Him and His abundant love for them.

With warmest regards and wishes for a blessed new year, I remain

Your old friend,
Ed

PS…thanks for sending my your cell number. I lost it the last time you sent it. I will call you in the future and we can talk.