Like everyone else who comes to the church “already catechized” I did not know that internet Orthodoxy is like reading an online dating profile and looking at carefully chosen, Photo-shopped pictures. The personality, habits, disposition, attractiveness, and compatibility of my new theological lover were just fantasies that I’d constructed. Of course they were… I had never talked to her, gone out on a date, and encountered her in person. I had never shared a meal with her, known her relatives (often from a foreign country), dealt with cultural shock, accommodated her idiosyncrasies, hung out with her raucous family at holidays, met her drunk uncle, learned her language, or sat in prolonged silence with her. Everything I knew about her was second hand hearsay by other people who had never been out on a date with her either, but had opinions about her personality filtered through their own “personal research” online.
When I showed up at vespers unannounced, I caught the reality of Orthodoxy in its tattered bathrobe and house slippers, no make-up, smoking an unfiltered Camel with a mason jar of cheap chardonnay in her hand. (Actually, one of my catechetical experiences was helping with a Mission parish where the priest would go outside during the long chanter’s parts of Orthros/Matins and smoke in the parking lot.) I repressed my disappointment with what I found, because there IS an ineffable, irresistible, unexpected beauty when you meet her face to face that no description, dogma, testimonial or digital experience can give you.
So, like many who come to the Church via the internet, I had found the Church and became Orthodox for the beauty it promised. And, yes the beauty existed as advertised. As did the mind-boggling theological nuances, the profound spiritual direction, and rich liturgical depth. But, unlike the internet, real people with real spiritual lives and real issues also existed in it, and I could not delete, unfriend, or fire a condescending, insulting comment over their digital heads and go to bed checking how many “likes” it got, and smirk at my correctness and cleverness. When you sit across from someone at coffee hour the rules of the game are incarnational, not digital and far more complicated.
… I hoped for saints but over the years I found the church of Corinthian libertines and Cretan gluttons. I hoped for one uniform understanding of the Gospel of mercy, but found legalistic fundamentalist Galatians who viewed the Gospel as “law”. I hoped for the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace but found Timothean contentious schismatics who wrangled over words and created factions in the church. I hoped for humble pious clergy but found 3rd John clerics who loved their pre-eminence and respectful greetings in the marketplace (and the internet). I hoped for the un-spotted bride of Christ but found the seven churches of Revelation: Ephesians who had left their first love, pagan Pergamites, lukewarm Laodiceans. I hoped for a church with one mind but found nit-picking Pharisees and savvy Sadducees. I hoped for speaking the truth in love but found arrogant, angry, condescending apologists. I hoped for a purer Christianity and found synchretistic and superstitious Colossians. […]
… I was a spiritual adolescent raised by the wolves of the internet (and in many things was still an infant). I thought I was more mature than I was, and thought I knew more than I did. I knew SOME stuff, but not enough stuff, nor the right stuff. I knew how to live in the small world I made up in my head but not how to live in a big, real world I’d never had to actually navigate and not just pontificate about. I “knew” almost everything, judged almost everyone, and understood almost nothing. […]
… Contrary to my old Bible church’s teachings, New Testament Christianity didn’t have to be re-discovered, recovered, or restored to its minimalistic First Century purity, it has always existed both in maximalist dysfunction and piety.…
… And just as the presence of Christ Himself in the flesh and His twelve first-hand witnesses and seventy disciples empowered by the Holy Spirit couldn’t give us a prettier picture of the Church in the New Testament, so 2,000 years of tradition can not either.…
In actuality, that is good news and bad news, but not really bad news, just real news.