My First Introduction to Orthodoxy and how I found it a second time (before a third and a fourth)

10/7/19

In about 2004, I discovered Orthodox Christian icons in the form of a calendar. At the time I had no idea what they were. I was just dumbstruck by their beauty and drawn to them. I started by taking images from the calendar and putting them up on my dining room wall in a frame. Then, I started buying icons on Ebay. Then I found out that a friend of mine was Orthodox, and she would take my icons with her 90 miles to her parish and have them blessed on the altar. I put them in the windows of my dining room. Icons are the windows into heaven. I didn't know that at the time, but later I appreciated my instinct to put them in the windows. Mostly, I just didn't have anything to affix them to the walls with, so that seemed the easiest way to display them. 

I was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (The Mormons). I can't really say that that was because of my parents, either, as they were inactive until I basically dragged them back to church. 

I had a strong yearning for God from a very young age, which prompted me to ask a lot of questions and ultimately to want to go to church. I suppose Mormonism was it because my parents has both been raised Mormon. And I liked Donny and Marie Osmond (I know, that dates me!). 

After I left the Mormon Church, I did some reading to try to understand what Christianity is. I got a hold of Kallistos Ware's book The Orthodox Way, but I think it was too much for me to try to understand on my own without someone to help me unpack it. Christianity and Mormonism are sufficiently different that Christianity seemed strange to me at first, and I had a hard time understanding it. Learning about it has been a long journey, and has included a lot of reading, conversations, scripture study, prayer, and reflection. And as a result of that journey, Orthodoxy again and again has been what calls to me and where I end up. 

When I first started learning about Orthodoxy, I didn't have a lot of support for it at home. The parish was 90 miles away, and it seemed too daunting to pursue. I visited the parish a couple of times, bought an icon and chotki at the bookstore, and that was about it. I remember the priest swinging the incense censer down the center of the church and standing a lot, but I don't remember much else. 

For a long time, my spiritual life was dormant. I still collected icons, and added crosses to the collection, but I didn't give it much thought beyond the aesthetic. 

All of that changed when I met my husband, Darren, nearly four years ago. After several months of reading scripture with him and praying, my yearning for God started to wake up and I identified as a Christian (much to my horror, having believed for several years that Christianity was responsible for most of the world's ills, but I have reconciled my beliefs since then). 

Since then, Darren and I have been on a journey together to find a spiritual home. It hasn't been easy. We first attended an Episcopal Church in Missouri, where we were living at the time. We liked it, but we didn't continue attending. We were watching an online preacher who taught the Bible verse by verse, and we were content to stay home and watch that. 

We moved to Utah, for various reasons, nearly three-and-a-half years go. And that's when the journey started twisting and turning. 

Our first year in Utah, we attended a small Bible church in a small town. It was an easy decision: It was the only Christian church in town that wasn't heavily Baptist (my husband was raised in a small, Baptist cult, so that was NOT an option) or Catholic (no English). However, we didn't love the parish. We liked a few people from the parish and joined (for awhile) a Bible study that we really enjoyed until they started introducing commentary from John Piper. John Piper is a Calvinist, and we don't subscribe to Calvinism in any way, shape, or form. So we broke from the group. 

Around this time, Darren bought a Book of Common Prayer and talked about wanting to investigate the Episcopal Church. I must be a firm believer in running before walking, because I said, "Well, why don't you just go back to the beginning and learn about Orthodox Christianity?"

I think he said something about it being just like Catholicism, and it turned out that I didn't really know all that much about it except for the icons (and I didn't know the history of them or why the Orthodox have them or about saints or venerating, certainly), so I really had no idea what I had just recommended. It makes me laugh a little now. 

So, before we had quite left our Bible Study, we started googling the Orthodox Church. Darren said at the time, "Don't tell anyone from Group that we're doing this. They will vilify us." 

At the time, I didn't understand that at all. I thought, "Why would they mind? Wouldn't they be happy that we're still Christians?" 

I understand so much more now. And I have watched Evangelical Christians chew up and spit people out who dared to choose Orthodoxy or Judaism over non-denominational (or Baptist or Calvinist) forms of worship. I call non-denom and Calvinism "worship" very loosely. But I can still see the effect that the Evangelical Protestant (EP) worldview had on our journey to Orthodoxy, and I will discuss that in another post.