Dating non-Orthodox Christians

Single Orthodox Christians have no easy road before them, especially if they suspect that they will be married some day. For most of history and in a large but shrinking portion of the Orthodox world today, single people did not have to worry about who they would marry: someone else chose for them. In the best cases, the people involved had veto power; that is, neither one had to accept the match. But in some cases one or both had no choice. Now we live in a world in which Choice is God. We cannot imagine not choosing our own hair style, clothing and career path; much less not choosing our own spouse.
We vainly imagine this power of choice is the same as freedom, but if we have no basis on which to choose other than our subjective urges, transient likes and dislikes, and fantasies based on movies, novels and occasional glimpses at internet pornography, then choice is not freedom but bondage: bondage to the ideals of a sick culture and the passions of a fallen mind. But this is the reality many Orthodox Christians in North America and Europe today. Some lucky few have relationships with parents or spiritual mentors that are close enough and mature enough to provide some guidance and advice in the search for a mate. Most, however, are out on their own. Even if they do ask for advice or guidance from a priest or parent or other responsible person, many young people are merely seeking confirmation for what they already feel or think or lust for.
So this is where we start: one priest's dating guide for Orthodox Christians.
First, and this applies not only to dating, but to all friendships: Hang out with people you want to become like. This does not mean that you do not hang out with people who are not perfect; that’s ridiculous, no one is perfect. What it means is that you look for Christ-like virtues: kindness, gentleness, self control, faith, joy, etc. People with these qualities or who are seeking these qualities will help you develop these qualities. Now I am going to say something shocking: Orthodox Christians are not always the most Christ-like people you know. (I probably didn’t surprise anyone.) Good people are good people no matter where you find them. Hang out with good people and you will become a better person.
Second, don’t differentiate between “dating” and hanging out, at least not in the early and middle stages of a relationship that may be leading to marriage. That word, “dating,” has killed more potentially wonderful relationships than any other word in contemporary English. “Dating” is a cultural construct defined by popular culture, chiefly movies and TV. Generally the only difference between dating and hanging out is that if you're dating you are admitting that you are sexually attracted to one another—not the best way to begin a relationship that you hope will lead to the martyrdom of Orthodox Christian marriage. Unfortunately, our culture has taught us that sexual attraction is key to finding a suitable life partner; in fact for much of our culture, good sex is the highest form of transcendence conceivable. But let me state the obvious: this is not a Christian culture.
Christians are called to a life of repentance, a life in which Christ is God and my life is His. Sex, even “great” sex, is a normal part of life for married Christians; but, and here is the irony for our culture, great sex is the byproduct of Christ-like loving and giving in the context of a life-long relationship. Feeling sexually attracted to someone you hardly know is certainly no way to determine if someone will make a good wife or husband. A good marriage can never be based on how the other makes me feel. Good marriage is based on my caring for and loving the other, even when it doesn’t always feel good to me.
Third, religion matters. Above I said that good people are good people no matter where you find them, but if you begin to think you might want to spend the rest of your life raising children with someone, then religion is very important. For most people, when things are going well religion is not a very important part of their life (no matter how strenuously they protest that it is). When we feel like things are going well, and nothing feels better than being in love, God drifts to the background, and we basically ignore God. I’m not making this up. Read Deuteronomy 32 sometime. It records the common experience of God’s people: when things are going good (when we “grow fat”) we ignore God. However, marriage, as many have observed, is the remedy for falling in love. Once a man and woman begin the hard work of sharing their lives together, God becomes much more important in their lives. I am not saying that marriage is all work and drudgery. No, not at all. The most wonderful, wonderful gift God has given me is my wife and children; however, marriage has also driven me to my knees again and again. When a couple do not share the same faith and same religious commitment, then when the going gets tough, where do they go for help?
The Orthodox Church allows marriages between Orthodox Christians and other Christians (not non-Christians). The main stipulation is that the couple agree to raise the children Orthodox. This allowance for mixed marriage, however, can be easily misunderstood in our modern world of choosing what’s right for me. This allowance did not have in mind an Orthodox boy choosing a Baptist girl because she’s hot. This allowance came to be in a world in which children were often promised in marriage before they were three years old. They had no choice; and so the church made allowance for the reality of a culture in which a man or woman could not choose his or her spouse. But we have a choice.
Young people, my daughters included, often say that there are no good candidates among the Orthodox Christians they know. I understand this problem. Often Orthodox Christian churches are small and choices are limited. Therefore, if you’re serious about finding and Orthodox Christian spouse, you need to get out and get involved in Orthodox projects, conferences and activities outside your little parish. Organize retreats, participate in diocesan, mission or service organizations, visit monasteries (you never know who else might be visiting), rent a van and crash a archdiocesan convention with seven of your buddies splitting the cost of the room. Be creative.
Let me sum up. It is not a good idea to date non-Orthodox Christians because it is not a good idea to date anyone. It is a good idea to have lots of friends, to learn how to be kind, generous, loving, patient and joyful by hanging out with people who encourage you to be more like Christ. If you suspect that a particular friend may indeed be someone with whom you could spend your life, then enquire if he/she suspects the same thing. If you are too shy to ask directly, then ask a trusted third person to make enquiries for you. Since you are already friends, you can skip the dating thing. You can now continue to be friends discerning together and with your priest(s), parents, and other trusted friends whether or not you are indeed right for each other.

George Eliot

Kh. Krista West, in her podcast, The Opinionated Tailor, mentioned once her love for the novels by George Eliot, particularly Adam Bede. Since Bonnie and I are rather addicted to 19th century novels, we are always looking for recommendations. We went out and bought most of her novels (btw, “George Eliot” is the pen name for Mary Ann Evans Cross). I started with Middlemarch and was mesmerized. Bonnie tried to begin with Middlemarch too, but found the vocabulary a little tough, so went to Mill on the Floss, which deals with less educated characters and consequently less obscure, Latinate vocabulary and almost no literary allusions except to the Bible, and they are abundant. After Middlemarch I took an Eliot break and read Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy while Bonnie went right on to Eliot’s Adam Bede—I do have a point coming up; thanks for hanging in there through this wandering set up.

Bonnie couldn’t put Adam Bede down. She kept reading sentences to me, summarizing snippets of plot, and suddenly uttering under her breath, “Oh, this is good.” I rushed through the last chapters of Return of the Native so I could start Adam Bede as soon as Bonnie finished. For anyone who’s interested, like the other Hardy novels that I have read, Return of the Native is delightfully melancholy and depressing stuff: slowly watching human weakness destroy a life on the backdrop of bleak English countryside. Yes, choices have consequences, eventually.

I am now five chapters into the fifty-five chaptered Adam Bede and I see why Bonnie loved it so much. One of the early characters (whether or not she is a main character remains to be seen) is a young Methodist open-air preacher; and her sermon and her technique and the description of her feelings could have exactly described me twenty-five years ago. I was an occasional street evangelist, emotionally charged, conversionist who was sure everyone was going to hell who had not experienced conversion the same way I had. I was not of the puritanical bent, in that I did not condemn anyone; rather, I was of the earnest, pitying bent: I was worried about the afterlife of those around me. I wanted others to be sure that they were saved, as sure as I was; and my certainty lay in my emotionally overpowering conversion experience and my regular booster shots of emotional high, administered at regular intervals by evangelists and praise bands.

It wasn’t until my thirties that I got a steady job and developed enough routine in my life raising a young family to take deep breaths and think a little more deeply about life, God and the universe. Then a terrible thing happened: I began to listen to Bach. Surprise is to weak a word to describe my becoming aware that “the Holy Spirit” was in Bach’s music just as strongly as it was in Bible preaching and worship songs. I struggled with this awareness for a couple of years, noting with growing concern that Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and, much to my shame, even really good football games seemed to have “the Holy Spirit” too. Then a small light began to shine. Maybe what I have been calling “the Holy Spirit” was really just my being excited about something.

When I look back, I must again and again give thanks to God, that patient Fisher of men. He caught me in his net using the bait I needed, emotional certainty. Or as my Baptist foster mother put it, “to know in your knower.” God used what drew me to draw me; as the troparion of the Nativity states, “Those who worshiped the stars were drawn by a star to worship you, the Sun of righteousness.” Here I can quote George Eliot too, who is clearly no fan of late 18th century Methodism: “Still—if I have read religious history aright—faith, hope and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords [i.e. grammatical logic], and it is possible—thank God—to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings.” Then Eliot goes on to cite an example of someone who selflessly gives up the best parts of her own food in the false assumption that the extra food will help heal the “fits” [epilepsy?] of her neighbor’s child. Although the remedy is “inefficacious…the generous stirring of neighborly kindness that prompted the deed has a beneficent radiation that is not lost.”

For hurting people, the religious certainty of fundamentalism, be it of the emotional Pentecostal variety or the more cerebral Reformed type, goes a long way to helping them find peace with God and with themselves. It provides a larger-than-life story in which their (my) miserable little life has a place and has meaning. But more than a narrative, Christian religion of almost any sort introduces people to Jesus Christ and the possibility transformation: the possibility that I might come to love as He loved, serve as He served, give as He gave. My own experience (and yours too, I am sure) is sufficient to confirm that not everyone who comes into Christian fundamentalism develops “very sublime feelings” such that they are willing to go hungry to help their neighbor’s sick child. Yet, I think the percentage of Pharisees and hypocrites is no larger among Protestant fundamentalists than it is among Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Orthodox—it’s just that the Protestants may be a little louder than the others.

Elliot has really got me thinking. I can’t wait for chapter six.

Prophetic Ministry

I have been thinking lately about the prophetic ministry. Particularly, I have been thinking about how this ministry is manifest in the Church. Coming from a Pentecostal background, I have a lot of experience in what the prophetic ministry is not. Prophetic ministry does not include utterances in King James English or ecstatic proclamations preceded by “Thus sayeth the Lord.” Nor is prophetic ministry about prediction. Based on the example of the Old Testament prophets and the ministry of Jesus, prophetic ministry is about being aware and helping others to be aware of God’s presence now.

In the Church, this ministry is often seen in the monastic calling but is not limited to that calling. Monks, at least some of the monks I know and many I have read about, are trained to be aware at all times of God’s presence. This awareness helps them to be sensitive to the inner world where angels and demons are perceived as thoughts (logismoi) and spiritual warfare is a matter of emptying oneself of all that cleaves to what is external so that when the evil one comes he finds nothing in them (c.f. John 14:30). And the evil one comes quite regularly; so emptying, or dying to oneself, is not an episodic experience, but a way of being. This way of being—continual self-emptying and awareness of God’s presence—sometimes makes confessors seem clairvoyant.

Although “clairvoyant” is the word commonly used in Orthodox circles to describe an elder or confessor who seems to know what is going on in your life before you tell him, I am uncomfortable with that word. I have associated that word with fortune telling and the ability to read the minds of others. St. Seraphim of Sarov (and other “clairvoyant” elders) have describe their experience of this phenomenon not as a reading of the mind or heart of the other, but as an awareness of what the Spirit of God is saying or doing (as perceived and discerned as thoughts in the Saint’s mind/heart/nous) at that moment. The clairvoyant word of the elder is not something he perceives outside himself (by reading your mind, for example), but merely a continuation of what he does all the time: being aware of the presence of God right now.

Furthermore, and here I get to the heart of what I want to say, without self-emptying love, the whole process quickly becomes a sham. I say this because it is common in some circles (circles I orbit), to label as prophetic ministry the pointing out of the sins of society, organizations, governments and powerful people in general. While clairvoyant elders may point out the sins of others, their ability to see those sins clearly comes from their deep awareness of their own sin and their ongoing struggle to repent of their complicity in the very sin they are pointing out. (btw, for convenience sake, I am using the word “elder” to refer to the one exercising prophetic ministry, but it is possible that grandmothers, parish council chairmen, priests, monks, little children, college students, or even corporate executives and government officials could speak prophetically.)

My favorite biblical example of prophetic ministry is Jeremiah, the weeping prophet. Jeremiah condemns the sins of a nation, a corrupted government and religious establishment, and a compliant populace eager for gain at the expense of others. But Jeremiah’s words are the words of a man with a broken heart, a man who so identifies with his people that he refuses to escape the very judgment that he is warning them about. Jeremiah does not condemn the sinners from a mountain top (literal or mental) but from the bottom of a muddy well in the king’s prison court (both literally and mentally—he is in the middle of it, accepting whatever punishments are thrown his way out of love for his neighbor and awareness of God’s presence everywhere: “I called on your name, O Lord, from the lowest pit and you heard my voice” Lam. 55,56.) Even when the siege is over and Jeremiah’s word is vindicated and Nebuzaradan offers Jeremiah his freedom, Jeremiah chooses to return to Jerusalem eventually to be taken to Egypt by the rebellious remnant to experience with his people yet another siege by the Babylonians, the very thing he said would happen if they went to Egypt.

The point here is that seeing other’s sins does not make one a prophet. In fact, it is the effect of sin that we so easily see the shortcomings and sins of others and not so easily our own. A film I once saw portrayed this dynamic quite well. A wealthy suffragette in the early twentieth century mercilessly abused her domestic workers, yet wondered why no one seemed to take her passion for her just cause seriously. One of her domestics (behind her back, of course) speculated that her motivation was boredom, and the conviction that she could run the show better than her inattentive husband. Of course no one took her seriously. In some of its grosser forms, this might be called arm-chair quarterbacking: the delight we have in finding fault in those much more powerful (athletically, politically, economically) than we. When we add to this arm-chair quarterbacking phenomenon the dimension of personal loss, or potential personal loss—in the form of a job or a freedom or an opportunity or a resource—then we convince ourselves that the emotional response within us is nothing other than righteous indignation. But it is more likely just regular anger motivated by self righteousness and selfishness.

Indeed, the loss, or potential loss (or sometimes merely the loss of an ideal), may be due to sin and injustice of others. But to clearly hear within ourselves what God may be saying about the situation and the actions of others, we must first be trained and disciplined in hearing what God is saying to ourselves. Furthermore, to speak in such a way that we may be heard—if God gives us words to speak—we must be well practiced in speaking to ourselves (and hearing those who speak to us) and practicing these words through repentance.