Newness

     The last six months have been all of newness. Firstly, I need to rescind things I have written in past posts that contradict my current beliefs. I won't point them out individually, but they must be viewed with a grain of salt. When I wrote every post on this blog antecedent to this one, I was in a place of oscillating confusion, doubt, anger, and fear. I didn't have a solid belief structure to hold my mind together. Because of this, my mind was free to wander to all sorts of ridiculous conclusions. I will not erase my past posts, and the various elements of my thoughts that I now find to be to a degree unwise and also to a degree heretical.
     Following my return home from Cheltenham, England, I knew I wanted to be a Christian. I had doubted it before, even encapsulating much of 2010, but following a full day spent in prayer and study the Sunday before my Wednesday flight home, I was decided. I entered into my last semester at Malone this past January still seeking which church would be most profitable to my significantly-less-visible-than-a-mustard-seed-faith. I nearly lost hope by March. But by late February/early March I felt inside me the desire to give something a second chance- the Orthodox Church. I had gone in February 2010 to a Divine Liturgy (Sunday morning service) but didn't like it. In fact, my going then may have contributed to the general "beef" I had against Christianity altogether and harbored for another nine months. The point is that I felt I needed to go again. To make a short story long, I went with some friends who hadn't given up on me the whole time, and at this point I am about to become a Catechumen, essentially I'm in about a week going to be formally entering the Church, as the process usually takes some time.
     What I was initially drawn to was the spirit of worship at the church I have been attending- Holy Assumption Orthodox Church. The reverence is astounding- I can, as I have never been able to do, regularly feel the presence of God in the chanting and litany. I would have scoffed at such a statement only half a year ago. Becoming Orthodox from a Protestant upbringing isn't as much denying what you used to believe as it is supplementing it. "Adding" of course bears the completely wrong connotations: the reason I avoided the word. My past understanding of God and of my responsibility as a Christian has been "fattened up," as it were; I have been delighted to discover the wealth of wisdom found in writers from the earliest days of the Church. In my period of doubt, I would have scoffed at those same writers, and I'm sure in a journal entry at some point I wrote that now that we have such a better understanding of the universe and the anthropological and psychological and sociological (at this point you can add any number of adjectives that fit) inter-workings of the human race that those past writers' work has become null and void. Essentially, I thought that in the face of Post-Modernism, nothing of worth could be grasped from the Pre-Moderns. Now, however, my perspective is leaning the other way. More of that to come.