A Complaint

Why am I quoting an obscure psychological theory? Because I think it plays into the struggle of the Orthodox Christian "convert" living in the West.

Likely the first time this began to strike my thought, I was visiting a priest’s house and the children asked for a blessing to leave the house, and I realized that both parents are enabled, dependent on circumstances to bless children. But stranger than this is that this was not an "Orthodox" phenomenon alone: Roman Catholic parents in Latin America bless their children all the time. As a matter of fact, throughout Europe terms like "Godspeed" and "Vaya con Dios" are nothing more than the remnants of these "house blessings".

I felt a chill as I saw this, but I could not determine why at the moment. But the real reason, in the end, was this: the world I had abandoned, the heterodox West, had much more in common with the Orthodox East than we currently ever give credit for. Sure, some of our non-Western brethren speak in glowing terms of Romanides and early pre-schism Saints, but in the end the same old anti-Western bias never goes away. This is not true of all ethnic Orthodox—but I argue that you cannot fully understand something you are not a part of. Indeed, that’s what I was taught as a catechumen, and such a teaching is found in a great number of modern Orthodox writers.

I kept finding things like this until most recently, in a debate with a Roman Catholic, I began to notice (and was reminded of) a few facts which scared me somewhat.

The first noticeable fact was that the amount of work the Western Orthodox did to preserve Orthodoxy is massive. For centuries the Western Orthodox preserved—and preserved well—a slightly variant version of the same Orthodox Tradition. And they did so far more clearly in many cases than their Eastern brothers. Even the mass slaughters and destruction inflicted on the Orthodox West were not enough to destroy so much of the thinking of the people.

The second fact I noticed is a popular fear of Westerners among Orthodox today. Hatred always masks fear. And underlying the biting polemic of this or that group, we see simple ignorance under layers of fear.

Let’s now address this in the context of our current reality.

You have the physical children of these formerly Western Orthodox Churches coming to Eastern Orthodoxy and in their ignorant humility, stuck in a particularly unappetizing choice; supporting half-dead and communist-dominated Patriarchates and antiquated and xenophobic ideologies on the one hand, or perpetually shrinking extremist (and again xenophobic) mindsets on the other.

Westerners, looking for the true unity of Orthodoxy, are dragged into someone else’s world of division. They are given the option to become either cannon fodder for this or that ideologue attempting to build his own "church" or, at the least, forced to sound like members of this or that ethnic group to "fit in" to a more "normal" parish.

What does have to do with cognitive dissonance?

The reality is, as will be explained before, many Western converts are being brainwashed: they are taught their whole past was a lie, and then after they abandon it all, they are taught the same thing their parents taught them, under a newer, fresher banner of "truth".

When you re-encounter that Orthodox practice in your own "fallen" Western life, the life you try so hard to avoid, it begins to eat at you. You cannot operate your day to day activities without noticing it….

If, Westerner, you are educated in your past, you catch on quickly to the fact you are simply being taught many of the same previous behaviors and given cute new names for them. The question is, after you catch on, what do you do? Most people simply accept the sad world in which they live as the best (or only) reality. They work to build the prestige of this or that foreign Patriarch who had no right to inflict himself on this ground anyway, accepting that "the Church says this is something I didn’t know, so this is something I didn’t know".

We have forgotten, sorrowfully:

There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal 3:28 DRV)

Again, this is not true of all, but many.

Many in both World-Orthodoxy and those in True-Orthodoxy have misunderstandings concerning the West, and some concerning even their own principles. But it is the "convert" who feels the ignorance reverberate upon him. For he understands well what he walked away from, and what he walked toward. In no less a prophetic voice than Alexander Kailomiros, we see this ignorance rear its ugly head:

In the Orthodox Christian East, from the time of Constantine the Great until the Greek Revolution, such epidemics never appeared. The people of the East had come to know a God completely different from the god which the people of the West had known; that is why they never came to deny Him, no matter how sinful they were. The first atheists in Greece came from Europe. Their denial, without their even knowing it, was against the religion which they had come to know in Europe. Their atheism was nourished by the faults of the Christians and the adulteration of the Christian truth which had taken place in the West.

(A side note: In looking for the quote I need from "Against False Union"—and this is not it—I am seriously going to have to question my adherence to some of this writer’s teachings.)

Are those "native Orthodox" who speak of Westerners who join Orthodoxy as something less than themselves-- at a higher state of glorification? Are they truly illuminated because of their culture? Invariably, no.

But the new phyletists concoct a response—and now, we see an increase in the recognition of "nationalist Saints," such as St Nikolai Velimoric, easy to misread and misinterpret by both friends of phyletism and Roman Catholicism, who would use such writings of these Fathers to claim Orthodoxy is nothing more than a nationalistic museum. So it must have always been! But this new phenomenon only be motivated by nostalgic love of so many collapsed Orthodox cultures… we hear that each Orthodox land is the new Israel. What of my Israel, Rome, Carthage, Seville? What of my brother’s Israel, Armagh, Canterbury, Tours? Were these fit to die for not accepting, say, Canon 28 of Chalcedon?

The hand of the Lord was upon me, and brought me forth in the spirit of the Lord: and set me down in the midst of a plain that was full of bones.

And he led me about through them on every side: now they were very many upon the face of the plain, and they were exceeding dry.

And he said to me: Son of man, dost thou think these bones shall live and I answered: O Lord God, thou knowest. (Ez 37: 1-3 DRV)

Now there are Orthodox throughout what Easterners call the ‘Diaspora’ (as though they were the Jews of old among the pagans!) Indeed, the Russians, exiles from their country, have some semblance of an excuse, being tossed from their native lands. And they worked, God be praised, among the native Americans in the Western borders of America. But suddenly greed for "pagan Western" money has led Orthodox from every ethnic group to place a flag on Western soil and claim control of the land!

Indeed, we have been without an Orthodox Pope of Rome in the West for so long that we audaciously claim "the territory is pagan wilderness" and allow Constantinople and Moscow to tear at the bones.

I think by now the reader knows where this essay is going.

Some say: " but what shall we do then? Shall we all become so-called Western Rite non-canonical Orthodox?" I say: it is better than what we are doing now. Then, the indoctrinated respond: "But we should just do our Byzantine liturgy in English, and that is sufficient". I remind those: you had two hundred years. As far as I am concerned, you are too late. I want what is mine returned to me. I want my legacy in my hands again, because in your hands my Fathers become so many cheap footnotes without so much as an Icon to look at. In your hands, the saints of my lands have been forgotten, taking a modern-day prophet from among you to dig them up. And what did you do to him? You engaged him in the civil courts until his death….

Some point out that many glorified Saints were very interested in restoring Western Orthodoxy, such as Alexei Khomiakov, St Tikhon, and St John Maximovitch. I agree. And what have their successors and sons done? We hear instead from them, a new tune: "maybe in a hundred years". When St Innocent of Alaska passed on, his successors did such a poor job following up on the native tongues some reverted to Russian usages! Why do the Saints say "give the people their own"? And worse still, why can we not agree with them? The answer is power.

Some say: "according to your foolishness, you will end up electing a supposed Pope with no following." I respond: why not? If the Orthodox in the West can support no less than ten parallel hierarchies, we cannot support one Western hierarchy? Is it because the restoration of that hierarchy, according to the canons, would be dangerously close to removing the current power bases of the day, power bases so corrupted and compromised that they are divided against themselves?

A Closing, For Now

I was blessed with the opportunity to study the Canons and the Fathers of the Church for this debate, and I am blessed to have much of this fresh in my mind. What do we find in the history of the Church? How many times did the Orthodox West preserve the East from heresy? Where did almost all the great heretics come from that would make their names in the anathemas of the Ecumenical Councils? Were they not from the East? Who stopped their mouths? Were they not Westerners? When we look at the life of St Julius of Rome, who in the Council of Sardica, alongside St Hocio of Cordoba, created a canon to give St Athanasius of Alexandria the right to appeal to him, what happened to him? The Arian "Christian East" deposed them and worked to exile them. (Sozomen, HE, 3.12)

When the Church of Constantinople seized power at the close of Chalcedon and attempted to flatter Her Bishop’s rank at the risk of violating the decrees of Nicea, who stopped them? Again, holy Popes of Rome, for the protection of the other Petrine Sees of Alexandria and Antioch, and this I have covered in my debate.

When Monothelism took over the Church, who preserved the Faith of the Apostles? St Maximos the Confessor, yes, but we must not forget the Church that offered him asylum, nor Her Bishop, St Martin.

During the Iconoclast controversy, the West preserved our holy Icons and the Iconographers. In every controversy, when the heretics took over, the West took in the Orthodox from the East; what happened in reverse? I know only of St Anthony the Roman, who travelled not to Constantinople but all the way to Russia, who was given asylum, there must have been more, but certainly we do not see in the Western receptions a sort of "this was demanded by God" thinking….

But today so much as mentioning the restoral of an Orthodox Roman See and you are given the worst of responses—one going so far as to say that "God removed the right of Primacy from that pagan city!" Did God kill all the innocent Orthodox Christians in the West through massacres to give honor to Constantinople? Enough of these Satanic arguments.

From this day forth, I will make certain to honor all my brethren in the Eastern Calendar, but also my Fathers in faith in the West, from St Irenaeus to St Victor to St Hippolytus, from St Stephen to St Cyprian, from St Hosius to St Silvester to St Julius, from St Augustine to St Jerome, from St Leo to St Gregory the Great, from St Martin of Rome to St Martin of Tours, from St Vincent of Lerins to Sts Isodore and Leander of Seville, and all saints in those "fallen, pagan lands", who live in the splendor of Christ God. I do so in the hope and prayer that we one day are given back that so miserably squandered, and that these dead bones rise and glorify Christ God, gloriously reigning with the Father and the Holy Spirit, always, from this age to the next and forever.

Closing: Clarification