First – a letter I wrote to a gentleman I met at Holy Transfiguration Melkite Church. I have asked him to be my spiritual father.  He is wise, theologically astute, and waiting to be ordained to the priesthood. When I found out that he is trained in pastoral counseling, I knew I should ask for his help. I am one screwed-up Christian mess.

Hello Good Brother –  

I managed to make it to  Vespers on Saturday. I found it interesting to see that the form of the prayers is exactly the same as in the Ruthenian Prayer Book which I use in order to celebrate Vespers privately. The only difference was that I obviously do not do the litanies that the deacon and priest would do. Very nice though.

Spiritually I am in much the same place. I have come to a point where I am tired of listening to the Traddiedox and the RadTradRC’s both claiming that they are the Church and both of their adherents sending to hell anyone who is not a member of their assembly.  I will admit that I find it more than frustrating on the occasions when I wonder why God allows such confusion, especially when our salvation may be dependent upon it. The Early Fathers had little good to say about the eternal future of those who were outside the arms of the Church.  On the other hand (and perhaps I mentioned this to you) I wonder if East and West really are not separate but are both still the Church. Now Western Trad RC’s and Eastern Trad Orthodox would stridently deny this, but here is something that I am pondering, something that came to my mind recently.

To be in the Church is to be in the Body of Christ.  The Body of Christ is present sacramentally in the Eucharist. St. Paul describes it as such.  Therefore, whoever partakes of the Eucharist with the knowledge and belief that this is the very Body and Blood of our Lord, becomes one with the Body of Christ and ipso facto, is part of the Church, no?  Therefore, the only way that the Trads on both sides can lay claim to exclusivity regarding the Church, the Body of Christ, is to claim invalidity to the Sacraments of the other.

So………does heresy invalidate the sacramental reality of Christ for an ordained man or for a worship body such as RC or Orthodox?  I was tossing this about in my mind this morning (ironically, I was going to Email you today, but you beat me to it!) and didn’t some of the Early Fathers admit that even the Sacraments of the heretics remained valid?  I need to find those quotes.

BTW — your parish by far and away is the most Orthodox Eastern Catholic parish I have attended in terms of liturgical praxis.  I am sorry if this doesn’t sound charitable, but the Ruthenians have lost their minds liturgically.  You never know what you will get from parish to parish liturgically, including one parish I was at that was so badly Romanized that about 6 of my friends said “That it!” and doxed.  The worst part of it all is trying to say something corrective. Even in a gentle manner, it is met with resistance.  I guess people just get settled in and don’t wish to be bothered.

I had a nice long talk with Father Deacon Joseph after Vespers on Saturday, discussing pretty much the same things that you and I have talked about.  You know what I am doing now?  Instead of getting all worked up about it, I am just praying “Lord, I am staying where I am unless you open an unmistakable door for me to leave.” That’s it.  But more than that, it is an act of trust.  I will tell you why this is important. It is because I need to see God as loving Father and not like my earthly father, whom I could never, ever please.  One of the things I have learned over my years of study in various disciplines is that we as human beings tend to imprint upon God the Father the relationship we had with our earthly father. If we had a good and loving father who was actively involved in our lives, it is easier to see God as loving.  But if our father was distant, cold, and couldn’t give a compliment if his life depended upon it, then we also see God in the same manner.  My father’s pet nickname for me was “stupid,” and when he wasn’t saying it out loud about something I did wrong (rather than helping me do it correctly) he was inferring it by facial expression and bodily gestures.  I have come to understand that I regard God the Father in the same manner, which I know from my mind is wrong, but that reality hasn’t really grasped my heart yet. So I see God at the Judgment Seat looking upon me in displeasure and saying “Why weren’t you in the Church?  To hell with you.”

Not a pretty picture, is it?  And the really odd thing about it is that I know all this mentally, but even knowing these facts, I cannot get to the point of walking in the love of God and resting in Him. Seems I am always trying to do something to curry His favor instead of resting in His love and responding out of love.  I would call that a very unbalanced (sick?) relationship.  Of course, it didn’t help me at all that I was for 13 years in the kind of highly dysfunctional Fundamentalist, Bible-thumping religion that presents God in exactly this manner. I still remember one sermon by some Tennessee Windsucker in which he was ranting on and on about tithing (I guess their little assembly needed more funds). He told a story about a man who withheld his tithe for a week because money was tight and sure enough – the car broke down and the bill came to exactly -TO THE PENNY – the amount that the tithe would have been.

Crap like that paints a vile picture of God and scars the mind forever.  And when one is young, impressionable (I think I was about 25 at the time) and doesn’t know good theology, well….you tend to lap it up as truth and then walk around scared spitless to not give God his tithe.  It is no wonder that the Early Fathers were so hard on heretics. They could foresee the damage that a heretic does with such preaching. And as I said, I  can tell these stories, I can step back and see what garbage this sort of thing is, but deep in my heart, it still exists. Combine that with my sins, which I seem to be A.) always committing and B.) always confessing, and you have a nice recipe for cringing before God thinking that He is really annoyed with such a depraved human being as the one who dares approach Him asking mercy.

So that’s a little update this  morning. I would truly love to have lunch with you some day just to chat.  Or coffee and bagel in the morning if time is limited. Whatever would please you. Perhaps you could offer me a few tidbits of spiritual guidance and discipline which might help get me on a more sane spiritual footing.

Best wishes always,

I chose the picture I put in this post for a reason:  I simply cannot imagine this happening to me. It happens to everyone else, but not to me. I don’t see Jesus waiting to receive me in this manner. I see Him sitting on His glorious throne in judgment, the book of my life open, and every rotten thing I have ever done is going to be discussed – in painful and sorrowful detail. In the vision of meeting God, I don’t hear Him saying to me, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of the Lord.”

Nooooope!  Uh uh!

This is why I have such a strong bone to pick with Fundamentalists of all brands and varieties.  To me, they are all sick puppies who themselves need some serious help.  In every single case, whether it be those distinctly evil and lying Jack Chick tracts of which the Baptist Fundamentalists are so fond, or the visions of the various Roman Catholic “saints,” the message is the same – you are a no-good, despicable, trashy, worthless sinner and when God gets His hands on you…..

KAPOWIE!!!!

And I am not alone in this.  My wife, a devout Roman Catholic since birth, confided to me last week the same fears. I was thinking out loud of converting to the Orthodox faith because I am pretty much fed up and disgusted with Roman Catholicism in general, and she asked if Orthodoxy is under the pope. When I said no, she went on a five-minute long litany of fear of going to hell. Apparently, the Dominican nuns who taught her put the same understanding of God in her mind as I have been assailed with for most of my life – angry, vengeful, and unless you do everything just right…….you are toast, Ace.  And not belonging to the Roman Catholic Church.  GOD FORBID!!!! To RadTrads, hell is even now filled with unfortunate pagans who had the misfortune of never hearing of Christ nor being able to join the Roman Catholic Church.  I find such thinking disgusting beyond belief, and certainly not representative of a God who is both loving and FAIR IN HIS JUDGMENTS!!!

My first wife, Karen, passed away in  2006. We had a rough marriage, mostly because we both came from very sick, dysfunctional families. Neither one of us grew up knowing what love and acceptance is. Looking for help, we went to a marriage counselor. I remember one day, in a one-on-one individual session, the counselor asked me if I could imagine sitting in God’s lap and him hugging me. Intuitively, as a good counselor, she had seen something in our discussions. She reached out to touch that area of my life.

I didn’t say a thing. I sat in the chair and cried like a baby, shaking my head in the negative.  This is what bad families and bad theology can do to a person.  And I am not alone in this.  I would bet all that I have that millions and millions of people struggle with this vision of God – harsh Judge, great King…anything but loving Father who will respond in love to all His children and heal them of their spiritual sickness. I hope someday the knowledge of God as loving Father goes from a mere fact in my mind to a joyous reality held as a treasure in my heart.

It will make all the difference in the world to me.

 

PS – I think the vision of God as fearful Judge has done wonders for the various hierarchies of the various religious persuasions in keeping the riff-raff complacent and in line through fear. From the God of Jonathan Edwards, holding sinners over the fires of hell as some “loathesome spider,”  to the musings of Dante on the levels of hell and all the various imaginative instruments and means of torture imposed upon sinners, God has been presented as a monster to be obeyed – OR ELSE!!

I am still looking for my Father.