Well, well … how the plot thickens. As it happens, I have long been a supporter of +Jonah, though I’m not sure I can still be one in light of what’s recently been seen on OCA NEWS. A rather unseemly story.

Y’all still think Dreher is so great for the OCA and Orthodoxy in America? In record time he’s done some really impressive damage.

I seem to have touched quite a nerve there, Herr Dreher. I find it highly revealing – speaking of ad hominems – that you throw an arrow at me about +Jonah when I never mentioned the Met, or the current crisis, in any way. You’re obviously angry and personally overinvested, and I’m sure the debacle when you went to Philly and everyone thought you were dead didn’t help. Get better. And if you think the OCA doesn’t have molestation problems and bishops don’t cover such things up, you really are as naive and/or uninformed as I suspected.

Good for you, and good for him too! Attention to detail, the right thing teed up and waiting for you to do what you do!

Harry, yes. And the possibilities are always there. My motto is just live your life, God brings the people you need to help into your life.

Saturday I stopped to get gas. Walking into the store I see a young man, 26 years old, sitting on the grass near the door. I offered the perfunctory, “How’s it going?” That opened up a conversation that lasted over an hour, maybe two. The man was genuinely and authentically seeking Christ but overwhelmed with problems. I won’t go into all the details here but he was crying out to God for help. I even prayed with him and it was one of the intense prayers where he existentially and concretely encountered God. It completely stabilized him.

He was also a victim of the fatherless family syndrome our enlightened 60’s culture onward has fostered. I run into to this more and more. Now when I talk to lost young men like him who don’t know what to do I say (as I did to him), “I want you to listen to me. I am going to talk to you like I am your father. This is what you need to do.” Then I tell them what they need to do. They listen, and sometimes they even do it.

This man needed to completely start his life over. He was on his way to Miami for that new start. Then he froze. No one was there to help him. He lost his father (who left when he was 11 years old) and his brother who he looked up to all in the last year. I was going to find a job for him (the restaurant man again I wrote about upstream) but then saw he really needed that start. In fact, I could tell it was God leading him.

He called me today. He is getting settled in Miami. I think he really may make it because the inner core, despite his troubles, is solid, and his faith is real. And most important, God is a father to the fatherless.

If my tiny parish grows, I want it to become a place where people like him can find a home. Someday we will have enough healthy churches to do more of this kind of work (like St. Barnabas seems to do in CA).

Thanks Fr. Hans, and others.

Pravoslavac, you have no idea what you’re talking about, from start to finish.

You’re going to tell someone who came into the OCA during the Met. Herman scandal that he is shocked to find sinners in the Church? Please. I can’t be disillusioned about the OCA because I was never illusioned about it.

Anyone who has kept up with my work knows exactly why I lost my Catholic faith — and it’s not because of things that are also present in the OCA. It had to do with the widespread sexual molestation of youth by clergy, and (moreso) the systematic cover-up and (therefore) perpetuation of same by bishops. That, and the refusal of the Catholic institution to treat its victims — and its perpetrators — with justice. I got to the point where I just didn’t believe the Roman church’s claims for itself. If, God forbid, I was to discover widespread child molestation in the OCA, and a cover-up by bishops, I would be outraged and disgusted, but not scandalized, because I didn’t come into the OCA with the same set of assumptions as I did Catholicism.

You cannot point to examples of me setting myself up as an authority on Orthodoxy, except in the most general sense (e.g., gay marriage is not Orthodox) because I don’t know enough about Orthodoxy to say. You say that my “colleagues” when I became Catholic report that I set myself up as an authority on all things Catholic? Really? You know these people who worked with me in Washington back in the day? They’ve told you this? I don’t believe you.

Finally, my guess is you just don’t like the position I’ve taken on the +Jonah situation. That’s fine with me, but your criticism here is dishonest, ad hominem, and irrelevant. Of course I’m not a theologian, but the essay of mine that Fr. Hans posted is not about theology, Orthodox or otherwise. It’s about the effect on institutions — in particular, churches — when the leadership class fails to correct abuses and clean up corruption, and when they are seen by the people as running an institution according to their own narrow interests, instead of the greater good of the whole. One doesn’t have to have a seminary education to recognize the problem here.

An important aspect of the above, generally all of which falls in the category of telling God what it is he already knows you need, is the gift of clarification and prioritization that the activity itself, if done right, brings. My intuition is much of the boon there comes in the form of opening of the senses in the hours and days that follow to accept and be on the lookout for new possibilities– as your examples show.

A different perspective on the meaning ‘Be still and know that I am God’.

How much of serendipity comes from the energy to pay attention to detail and act upon it? I’ve never been one to think that understanding some fair fraction about how something good comes to pass makes it less a miracle.

Folk able to read this on the internet who are having struggles might do well to watch these programs, just to get a perspective of where the tire really meets the street. Especially ‘Congo’ and ‘Brazil’. http://www.hulu.com/deadliest-journeys

Fr. Peter Dubinin :

What would God do with us and in us if we really did repent?

Repentance cleanses the heart

As a general rule fasting and praying awaken in a person the desire for a more spiritual way of life. When the passions of the body become pacified, a person’s mind is enlightened, and he begins to see his own shortcomings better. He becomes ashamed of his sinful deeds and bad habits, and he feels a strong desire to cleanse his soul through repentance before God.

[…]
After the descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, when the crowd asked, “What shall we do, brothers?” The Apostle Peter answered: “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the Gift of the Holy Spirit … Save yourselves from this corrupt generation!” (Acts 2:37-40). These words pointed out the deep, sinful sore in humanity, which can be healed only through repentance, rebirth in Christ, and unity with Him.

So, as we see, the Apostles called for profound changes in people’s attitudes, a break with their past, and suppression of passions. The acceptance of Christ as our Savior requires a fundamental transfiguration of our thoughts and feelings: a sincere desire for a New Life in Christ. That is why the Church is so persistent in its calling to repentance during Lent. Repentance is the beginning of salvation. And fasting — being a restraint from gluttony, all kinds of excesses, and worldly concerns — contributes to true repentance! That is how the goal of our faith is reached, as Saint Paul teaches: “Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature: former things have gone” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

http://orthodoxinfo.com/praxis/elderjosephandprayer.aspx

We firmly believe that the return of Athos to interiority and prayer and generally to Hesychast Theology is due largely to the presence of the sanctified Elder Joseph the Hesychast. As you will know from all that has circulated up to now about the blessed Elder Joseph, he was a man who did not possess the skill of worldly things, was not even a beginner among them. He studied to the second grade. And it is easy to see this if you look at a copy of one of his handwritten letters. But as a possessor of the fullness of divine grace, having achieved by full enlightenment of his grace-filled mind to ascend to the highest steps of Theology and become a perfected theologian. For we know that a theologian is not one who has studied in the modern Theological Schools but one in whom speaks God the Logos. Theology is a gift of the Holy Spirit. The blessed elder wrote concerning this, “When in obedience and stillness one purifies the senses and calms the mind and cleanses the heart, then he receives grace and enlightenment of knowledge. He becomes all nous, all clarity, and filled with theology such that if three were writing they could not keep up with the flow. He spreads peace and complete inactivity of the passions throughout the body.”

Lot’s of truth here. One way my pastoral ministry radically changed when I realized prayer was a boatload more effective than talking about stuff. Yes, talk is important, but only when it is important. Prayer can be much more powerful and often the one thing needful. So, instead of talking about something when talking wouldn’t do much good, I’d say, “Let’s go into the Church and pray.” We would trek over to the Church and pray. I saw problems get resolved for people that way.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. A family was in terrible financial trouble. I’m no financial planner, but I could see the squeeze was so tight they would go bankrupt if something didn’t change (an elderly couple past their working years who didn’t have the health to go back to work). We prayed and it worked out — not perfectly and not all at once but enough to where they did not lose their home.

Once I had a young man struggling with mental illness who was obviously over-medicated. I couldn’t tell his parents. They were devastated, overwhelmed, way beyond trusting anyone, and did not know what to believe. Besides, who was I to be giving medical advice? So I prayed that they would come to see and accept it on their own. Through a series of events that could be termed miraculous, they found the doctor who could help. He reduced the medications almost 90%. A few months later the young man was back to himself. (This happens a lot. Prayer sometimes leads the sick to the right doctor and they find healing.)

A businessman came to me facing total ruin. He was afflicted with the deepest anxiety. He is a good man and a benefactor to the needy. It all hinged on a leveraged piece of property that was threatened with foreclosure, a strip mall that emptied when the commercial real estate market tanked. I told him I had no idea what to do financially, but I’ve been at the end of my rope a couple of times and what I do is pray. So we went out to the property, blessed it (really gave it a bath), and then we both stood in front of it and prayed for help from God. A few weeks later he heard that the bank decided not to foreclose. He is not out of the woods yet, but a whole lot better off than he was two years ago. Sometimes prayers are answered slowly, but they are still answered.

A couple of weeks later my wife was using the computer at the public library, an older couple sits down and starts hunting for job listings. They had no idea what they were doing. The ask her for help and my wife hears their story. They are unemployed, flat out of money, desperate to do anything. The wife was a waitress, the husband had some kind of serious disability (walking problems I think but I don’t recall). My wife calls me, I call the businessman, he hires her (he has a few restaurants). Like I said, he is good to others and maybe that’s one reason why God is good to him. The woman said these events were the answer to her prayer.

I think Fr. Johannes put his finger on it: It’s probably not how Dreher has changed over time that concerns some, it’s his opinion of the situation with Met. Jonah. The criticism sounds like a somewhat watered down version of the general “anti-konvertsy” narrative. I could be wrong (but doubt it).

Pravoslavac, most members of the OCA are converts…. nothing wrong with brainy and enthusiastic, is there? I think we can and do learn from each other, converts and cradles.
In my parish we have about 20% cradles and 80% converts, we have a lot of university educated brainiacs and some, well, not so much. But we are a big loving family that lives and prays together. At lunch-hour we discuss the silliness of our Greeks, the earnestness of our Russians, the happiness of our Romanians, the disorganisation of our Ukrainians and the overall smartassiness of our converts…. Give RD a break. We need lots of people in the church who are enthusiastic about their faith. Where there is great passion there is sometimes the danger of going overboard… so what. I look at it this way, we are all brothers and sisters in Christ and the family includes also the idiot cousin… (who of course would never ever post here, hahaha)

It’s a vague complaint, Pravoslavac. All I read is that he is violating a sentiment.

+Fr J: My concern is that, virtually from the moment he was christmated, Dreher had the habit of explaining what Orthodoxy is, and is not. Way out of his lane, IMHO. Most of the usual caveats about brainy and enthusiastic converts apply. His colleagues who knew him when he converted to the RCC tell exactly the same story … hence my statements. Let us pray I am incorrect about this go-round.

He also wants a virbrant parish life. If he expects to walk into a vibrant parish that meet his expectations he will be largely dissatisfied. My original parich 20 years ago was dysfunctional toward converts, especially female converts; had a priest who should never been ordained and was certain he was going to hell (his own words to me at one point). Three priests later, a good core of younger folk willing to take over leadership as the old guard dies off and they seem to be righting the ship. The parish I ultimately moved to had been in worse shape years before, but with good leadership and a willingness to change, has bloosmed into a model parish (IMAO). So it takes work, dedication and a lot of blood, sweat, prayers and tears.

Personal opinions can get in the way (my own do all the time) but I think Rod is seeing the foundational approach to Jesus Christ is substantially different in the EOC than it is in the RCC. He might toy with the idea of switching jurisdicitions, but since (even if we refuse to be united on positive things) our problems are Pan-Orthodox, it would not do him much good. I think he sees that from what I’ve read.

One thing he won’t do is cover-up. If that is what is expected from a ‘real’ Orthodox person, he won’t be one, and I will not either.

I do believe many of our younger Orthodox pastors mistakenly and to our loss do not encourage cultivation of nor direct attention as to the existence of ‘the interior life’. So full of proclamations about who was killed at the doors of the Greek Patriarchate in 1851 and the many requirements related to ‘standing good enough to approach for communion’ , quite a list of exterior policies, procedures, pronouncements, hold your hands like this, kiss that, pray for this see if the propitiated God will notice the obesiance and leash the evils– there’s no ‘why’ to any of it and as a result, we see the result.

I bet if you asked 100 younger people what ‘contemplation’ was, the responses would be generally about trying to remember all the various rules regarding when to stand, what not to eat when, what to read out loud (and forget the moment after) before doing this or walking there..

You don’t talk directly about the ‘interior life’ as one among the various pietisms to be performed lest you get sideways with grandma and the pastor — you model it, you model the consequences of experiencing it yourself, you explain why it is worth the bother of attending to in the first place. Then people might rumble to the notion a whole dimension to their own life that they did not attend to is available.

Interior life — you need one yourself to be able to educate about it to others.