Another cross-post sourced from Torn Notebook. Kudos to him for finding and posting interesting material over the Holidays. As most blog readers and writers have noticed, from November to January posting in the blogosphere takes a noticeable dip.
Stages of Conversion
It doesn't seem to matter what version of the Christian faith you join, because this seems to be a near-universal process:
Phase 1: The Cage Phase
So you've found your new tradition, and you've finally discovered all the answers to life's problems encompassed within it. You've also read a few books that explain how every other Christian tradition (especially the one you just left) has absolutely ruined the piss out of the Christian faith as a whole. As God's apostle to the unconverted, it now falls upon you to save the world (especially your friends and family in the old tradition) by enlightening them as to just how perfect everything is about your new tradition and how stupid and wrong everything about their current tradition is. It is very important for you to have a blog during this time so that you can enlighten as many people as possible.
Phase 2: Addiction
After having ruined all your relationships from your past life, you are now disillusioned with the willful ignorance and impiety of all those outside your new church. Let the heretics stew in their heresy. It is now time to busy yourself with drinking as much religious Kool-Ade as you possibly can, preferably until your skin becomes the same color as Purplesaurus Rex and your body's pH levels are completely thrown off. You need to read every theological or devotional book you can, buy lots of the assorted trinkets associated with your tradition, and make lots of pilgrimages to either theology conferences or monasteries, depending on how your church rolls.
Phase 3: Apostle of Renewal
You've recently noticed that most of the other people in your church are not nearly as obsessed with it as you are. They aren't reading those books, and they aren't buying all that crap you've strewn your house with. They're more concerned with paying the bills than why those awful sectarians are wrong. They even have friends outside the church! Many of them are not aware just how right and perfect their church is, or how great their lives would be if they would just fling themselves with total abandon into the kind of obsession you yourself have. This is clearly a problem that must be fixed, for it threatens to destroy the purity of the faith. As God's chosen agent of change, you busy yourself with trying to whip up everyone in the congregation into the same frothing devotion you yourself exhibit.
Phase 4: Beaten by Reality
You've finally faced the harsh truth: The people in your new tradition are, at their core, a whole lot like all those people from your old tradition that you despised so much, with all the same foibles and failings. You give up on saving the world, on restoring your tradition to its purity, and have lost your confidence that God himself has appointed you to fix everything. You've discovered that your new church in fact has a lot of ugliness in its history, has a lot of jerks in its power structure, can't solve all of life's problems, and isn't always all that consistent or believable in what it teaches or what it does.
Phase 5, Option 1: The Rat Leaves the Ship
Clearly, you were had. You thought you had found the One True Perfect Tradition, but you were deceived. You know what you must do--find the tradition that really does get it all right, because it must be out there. Back to Phase 1 for you!
Phase 5, Option 2: Complete Disillusionment
You have realized, perhaps after going through this cycle several times, that you are perhaps the only sincere, thinking Christian in the world. Everyone else is a hypocrite or a dunce, and all these corrupt denominations and hierarchies have ever accomplished is completely screwing up everything. Completely embittered at the idea of organized religion, you isolate yourself in order to go be a true follower of Christ without all those awful other people screwing things up. If you meet some like-minded folk, you start meeting up with them in order to transcend organized religion by organizing a religion. It's very likely that you eventually realize that all religious people are deluded fools and become an atheist or agnostic.
Phase 5, Option 3: Partial Disillusionment and Accommodation
After facing the harsh reality in Phase 4, you've further realized that phases 1 through 3 ought to be renamed "Jackass," "Nutjob," and "Know-it-All," respectively, which suggests that you are, for the most part, much worse at being a decent human being than all those people too stupid and impious to realize how awesome your new religion is. While many of the reasons that you had for joining your current tradition remain, and thus so do you, you decide it's time to cut yourself, your church, everyone else's churches, and rest of the world some slack.
Phase 1: The Cage Phase
So you've found your new tradition, and you've finally discovered all the answers to life's problems encompassed within it. You've also read a few books that explain how every other Christian tradition (especially the one you just left) has absolutely ruined the piss out of the Christian faith as a whole. As God's apostle to the unconverted, it now falls upon you to save the world (especially your friends and family in the old tradition) by enlightening them as to just how perfect everything is about your new tradition and how stupid and wrong everything about their current tradition is. It is very important for you to have a blog during this time so that you can enlighten as many people as possible.
Phase 2: Addiction
After having ruined all your relationships from your past life, you are now disillusioned with the willful ignorance and impiety of all those outside your new church. Let the heretics stew in their heresy. It is now time to busy yourself with drinking as much religious Kool-Ade as you possibly can, preferably until your skin becomes the same color as Purplesaurus Rex and your body's pH levels are completely thrown off. You need to read every theological or devotional book you can, buy lots of the assorted trinkets associated with your tradition, and make lots of pilgrimages to either theology conferences or monasteries, depending on how your church rolls.
Phase 3: Apostle of Renewal
You've recently noticed that most of the other people in your church are not nearly as obsessed with it as you are. They aren't reading those books, and they aren't buying all that crap you've strewn your house with. They're more concerned with paying the bills than why those awful sectarians are wrong. They even have friends outside the church! Many of them are not aware just how right and perfect their church is, or how great their lives would be if they would just fling themselves with total abandon into the kind of obsession you yourself have. This is clearly a problem that must be fixed, for it threatens to destroy the purity of the faith. As God's chosen agent of change, you busy yourself with trying to whip up everyone in the congregation into the same frothing devotion you yourself exhibit.
Phase 4: Beaten by Reality
You've finally faced the harsh truth: The people in your new tradition are, at their core, a whole lot like all those people from your old tradition that you despised so much, with all the same foibles and failings. You give up on saving the world, on restoring your tradition to its purity, and have lost your confidence that God himself has appointed you to fix everything. You've discovered that your new church in fact has a lot of ugliness in its history, has a lot of jerks in its power structure, can't solve all of life's problems, and isn't always all that consistent or believable in what it teaches or what it does.
Phase 5, Option 1: The Rat Leaves the Ship
Clearly, you were had. You thought you had found the One True Perfect Tradition, but you were deceived. You know what you must do--find the tradition that really does get it all right, because it must be out there. Back to Phase 1 for you!
Phase 5, Option 2: Complete Disillusionment
You have realized, perhaps after going through this cycle several times, that you are perhaps the only sincere, thinking Christian in the world. Everyone else is a hypocrite or a dunce, and all these corrupt denominations and hierarchies have ever accomplished is completely screwing up everything. Completely embittered at the idea of organized religion, you isolate yourself in order to go be a true follower of Christ without all those awful other people screwing things up. If you meet some like-minded folk, you start meeting up with them in order to transcend organized religion by organizing a religion. It's very likely that you eventually realize that all religious people are deluded fools and become an atheist or agnostic.
Phase 5, Option 3: Partial Disillusionment and Accommodation
After facing the harsh reality in Phase 4, you've further realized that phases 1 through 3 ought to be renamed "Jackass," "Nutjob," and "Know-it-All," respectively, which suggests that you are, for the most part, much worse at being a decent human being than all those people too stupid and impious to realize how awesome your new religion is. While many of the reasons that you had for joining your current tradition remain, and thus so do you, you decide it's time to cut yourself, your church, everyone else's churches, and rest of the world some slack.
Posts
I'm surprised how different my experience has been from this list. Don't get me wrong, there certainly was a failure in my previous religious relations that was "fixed" by finding the Church that had it "right". (I won't go into this in detail here.)
ReplyDeleteActually, I think I started with Phase 4. That is, when I initially was interested in Orthodoxy the first source was wikipedia and non-Orthodox news agencies (the GetReligion blog). I found dark corners of the net, like an Orthodox message board who's editorial position was, if you weren't a militant, nationalistic, ethnic Greek, still living in Greece you weren't Orthodox. I knew about the OCA finances and the GAO child abuse and upheavals with Patriarchal fiddling.
I was aware of some of the ridiculous claims of some converts and encountered all the secessionists, calendarists, conservatives, liberals, Originites, and those still paranoid of the KGB.
Maybe more than anything, I just wasn't looking for the solution to life's problems. In fact, that was the real failure of my previous religious association. I'm not looking for solutions anymore. I'm looking for life.
Life is ugly, messy and wonderful. And I can pray for evil Presidents and I can kiss the hand of corrupt Bishops.
I am not disillusioned because I was never illusioned in the first place. I came to Orthodoxy to rid myself of illusions. Of my own competence and sufficiency, of the propaganda of religion, of the whims of the times. I am in wonder (I mean here, true astonishment) that God brought me to the Church partly through behavior totally at odds with the teaching of the Church! How wonderful!
Maybe, ultimately, I was saved by the striking prayers of St Nikolai of Ohrid which laid bare all of this mystically and Fr Schmemann's writings which blew away the fog intellectually.
"I'm not looking for solutions anymore. I'm looking for life.
ReplyDeleteLife is ugly, messy and wonderful. And I can pray for evil Presidents and I can kiss the hand of corrupt Bishops."
Wonderfully said. If you are looking for solutions you will often find yourself trying to "solve" other people by taking the religious template you chose and trying to put it on others.
That's one thing I'm finally beginning to learn. People are not problems to solve, but persons to love.
ReplyDeleteThe USCCB and SCOBA should each hire a person full-time to go around blogs and forums reminding people of that fact.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, this is why I'm so afraid of activism. It tends to obsess us over what we think things should be instead of focusing on the reality of what they are. People become objectified. St Maximus', "Sin is the misuse of things" fits perfectly here. The only *use* of a person is communion with the Father in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Our agendas, solutions, programs and plans (Machievellian as they are) are not the purpose of persons. Nor are persons our enemies (even those who oppose vote against us in committee meetings).
ReplyDeleteWe read the psalm concerning the destruction of the children of Babylon and we know from the fathers this is our sin, not real infants we are destroying before they can mature.
This is what I meant when I said I was saved even by people working contrary to the teachings of the Church. Paradox is especially satisfying. Many blogs, books and podcasts that are as far from humility and charity as one can get were still instrumental in familiarizing me with what the Church is.
Met Hierotheos of Nafpaktos put it, "The Orthodox Church is the inn and hospital in which every sick and distressed person can be cured." And also, "it does not do its work with human methods, but with the help and energy of divine grace, essentially through the synergy of divine and human volition."
I remember asking the first priest I met, "How can I trust my and my family's salvation to this Bishop of yours?" He said, "The Holy Spirit fills all that is lacking." And he told me of a story of a monk who saved his corrupt abbot through years of humility and obedience under the abbot's abuse.
Now, my Bishop is a great pastor of his flock. But even if he weren't, Christ would still provide that fullness which fills all in all.
Sorry, reading over that last post I wrote I feel oddly uncomfortable about it. Forgive me, a sinner.
ReplyDelete