Found an interesting little piece written by Steve Hayes, a deacon in the Orthodox Church in South Africa.
A Generous Orthodoxy – Brian McLaren in Pretoria
Steve wrote what many of us who have converted or are converted to Orthodoxy have found: what we were looking for and trying to recreate all along was right there in Orthodoxy:
What he said confirmed what I had begun to suspect from my attempts to follow “the emerging conversation” in the blogosphere — that many of the emerging church people are looking for what the Orthodox Church has had all along, and which the West lost with the onset of modernity through the Renaissance, (Counter)Reformation and the Enlightenment.
Wilfred McClay, a Presbyterian, once wrote in a Touchstone Magazine symposium on the “Emergent Church Movement” , and speaking about the Emergent movement:
“Indeed, I wish I didn’t have the feeling, reading this document, that I was reading about the roll-out of a self-consciously “retro” new-model car, a sort of ecclesiastical PT Cruiser, which thinks itself “ancient” because it can play Gregorian chant on its sumptuous audio system.”
I spent a number of years, once I got out of a rather closed-in-on-itself denomination which had its origins in the 19th century, looking for “authentic Christianity.” I explored with other Christians who were “emergent,” even before the term became popular. There was a part of me that was fascinated with truly ancient Christian practice, theology, and spirituality. What I have since discovered, by God’s grace — and knowing myself, certainly not by my own ingenuity — is that the Body of Christ has been there all along, preserving not only ancient dogma, tradition, art, spirituality, liturgy, social action, etc., but that a return to the roots of our Christian Faith brings immeasurable existential authenticity, as well. There is something about reconnecting to the historical Church — Her prayer life, liturgy, Tradition, Hagiography, Scripture, and daily praxis — that deepens my own spiritual experience and being, my own Christian existentialism.
My own past taught me — drilled into me week after week — to “not trust your feelings.” And, to a degree, I am appreciative of that solemn warning. Certainly, too many people in the Christian world depend on feelings first, truth second, though they would likely never conceive that this was the case. But, too many who despise “feelings” depend far too heavily on their own perception of truth, rather than on the historical Faith of the Apostolic Church. Yes, feelings can be mistaken. But, in my own experience, the intellect can be mistaken just as well.
What Orthodoxy does is to wed the two. Nowhere have I found such a beautiful marriage of both dogma and mysticism, of both factual, historical dogmatics and noetic, spiritual beauty. The key, as Chesterton might have said, is to hold both extremes “furiously,” to insist that neither “truth” nor “feelings” can or even should exist on their own right, in isolation. God is truth, but He is also Love. He is Beauty. He came to us neither as a fact book nor as a fresco, but as a Person.
All this, and more, I have found in Orthodoxy.
