Conversion Story
[An old essay, circa 2001]
From Denial to the Chalice
I grew up surrounded by my extended family in an inter-denominational church. It is part of the various national and international Community Church organizations. I would describe it as a melting pot of liberal mainline Protestantism. I believe the lukewarmness I encountered in that Church and its lack of interest in teens was the reason that by the time I was in High School I was an avowed agnostic and scoffed at Christ. For some reason I was drawn toward Buddhism and read what I could find. Oddly, even then two things interested me: ritual and monasticism. I longed for ritual in worship and for some reason thought Buddhists had it. I also had a romanticized interest in monasticism (perhaps I still do), gleaned from movies and books.
My wife and I married right out of High School and for several years we avoided talking about God. I, feeling like a hypocrite, went to Church on Easter and Christmas and few other times throughout the year, but that was it. Over the years I kept a strong belief that there was something more. I was not a nihilist or atheist in any real sense.
Then, in 1995, I read The Source by James Michener. It is a fictionalized epic of the history of Israel. It touched me in a surprising way. I wanted to know God and talk to God like the characters in the book. I bought a Bible and started reading the Old Testament. This also opened my mind to going with my wife to her Southern Baptist church. There the obvious faith of the congregation moved me. Even more so the faith of my father-in-law moved me. I longed to have what he had: to know that God exists and have a deep abiding faith. I prayed to God and, as cliché as it was, I asked for a sign. I was not looking for a shining cross in the sky, but I wanted something.
When I was eight years old, my parents divorced. My Dad moved my mother, siblings, and I back to Tennessee and he stayed in California. As we were driving through the desert, I wanted to play in the sand. I knew my parents would not stop, so I asked God if He would make us stop so I could play in the sand. A few hours later the U-Haul Truck broke down and we were stranded in the desert for a couple of hours while one of my parents went to the nearest town for help. We ended up staying two nights in a dusty town that made me think of Western movies. I never forgot my prayer and what happened. As a child, I felt very guilty about the whole thing. Looking back I see God answering the prayer of a child in such a way that demonstrates the power of prayer and planting a seed which would not come to fruit for another fifteen years.
I had asked God for another miracle. It was terribly arrogant, but I prayed that in some small way He would make his will known. At the time, I was working at a fast-food restaurant, biding my time until the fall when I would leave for college. Sometimes I would get very angry and frustrated at my co-workers. During my lunch break, I started asking God to grant me a calm heart, patience and humility. Immediately I felt better. I said a similar prayer every lunch and always felt recharged to get through the rest of the day. God, in his mercy, had sent me another sign.
Very soon after that, I made a profession of faith in my wife’s Southern Baptist church.
I have always been somewhat of an intellectual, too often an elitist. At any rate, it only seemed natural to change my college plans. I would not major in English with plans to teach; rather I would major in Religion. Mind you I had really only been a Christian for six weeks by the time I started my first religion class (Intro to Old Testament), but I took to religious studies like a duck to water.
I went to Berea College in KY. It is a private liberal arts college with a politically Liberal Protestant heritage. The religion major consisted of Biblical studies, history, and theology from a decidedly Western perspective and I loved every minute of it. The biblical study was mostly of the textual criticism school and I have since seen the errors of that method, but it introduced Christianity in a paradigm that I could grasp. I honestly think that I was still too intellectual, rationalistic, and even a shade agnostic to believe in Orthodox Christianity or even Protestant orthodoxy. I had every intention of going to graduate studies, getting a Ph.D., and becoming a college Prof.
During college, my journey in faith took a few turns. My wife and I came back home many weekends (about a two-hour drive), which made it difficult to find a church in Berea. We tried a few and felt less than satisfied. For a while, I became interested in the Qabbalah, the Rosicrucians, and Western Ritual Magick (if you don’t know what these are, don’t go looking). I thought that it would be possible to be Christian and practice what is often described as “Western yoga.” My fascination with those groups was short-lived (thank the Lord). I was still yearning for ritual worship and needed more than ever. I suspect that if I had not been led to liturgical worship, I would have become an apostate.
My interest in monasticism bubbled back to the surface and led me to Thomas Merton and I devoured The Seven Storey Mountain and his book on the history of the Cistercian Order. I began talking with a Roman Catholic Priest and started attending Mass and reading catechical material. About this time, I took a class called the History of the Christian Church, Pentecost to the Reformation. My instructor, a pious Roman Catholic medievalist, was innocently, but woefully, uninformed regarding the Orthodox Church. This was one of several close brushes I had with Orthodoxy.
I continued on the slow path toward Rome, not feeling particularly enthusiastic. I had finally found some ritual worship, but a poor taste in music and a modern spirit seemed to sap the life from the ritual. Had I been close to an Orthodox Church, I probably would have, for the sake of balance, tried it out as well. I had had contact with Orthodoxy a couple of times and had the impression that it was Roman Catholicism for Greeks and Russians.
The summer before my senior year in college two important things happened. First, I felt called to ordained ministry. After three years of my assuring everyone who asked, that I was going to teach, not preach, I suddenly felt like that was the wrong path. I talked to several professors and honestly felt like I was being called. Secondly, I began looking into the Episcopal Church. Originally I looked into Anglicanism because I knew, as a married man, I could not be a Roman Catholic priest [or so I thought at the time]. Despite this rather pragmatic reason behind my curiosity, I loved what I found. Finally I had true ritual worship–liturgy.
After my “History of the Christian Church” classes, I knew that Protestantism could not claim any real connection to the Historic Church. Although my thinking at this point was still a Protestant ecclesiology, “branch theory” I was moving toward a truer understanding of what The Church is. I began a seeing an Episcopal Priest and looking at Episcopal Seminaries. In October, I visited Nashotah House in Wisconsin and felt at home. It was very High Church and had a monastic feel to it. Many of the seminarians wore their cassocks to class after morning worship.
Alas, it was not to be. My wife, still a Baptist, had no desire to be a “preacher’s wife.” I told I could do other things as a priest besides parish ministry (although that’s what I really wanted to do). In the end, she had had enough of being away from home and wanted to move back to Tennessee where our daughter could be surrounded by her extended family. Wisconsin was way out of the question.
In December 1998, just before graduation (I was a winter Graduate) I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church of the USA. We moved back to our small town and I took my degree (BA in Religion and History) and went to work selling Mattresses. Soon thereafter, I started serving as a Reader and Chalice bearer for the 8 a.m. Rite One service. Regarding future education and ministry plans, I bided my time, knowing that if it were God’s will, eventually He would open a path for me.
Sometime over the next few months, (early 1999) I saw an ad in the Religion section of the local paper. It was no more than two inches square, but something about it caught me. It was for an Orthodox Church. I had been to the Greek Festival at the Greek Church, and was impressed with the church, but this did not mention any ethnic group. I cut it out and put it in my wallet.
And there it stayed for about two years.
In the summer of 2000, I visited the St. Photios Shrine while vacationing in St. Augustine Florida. I came back with a small diptych icon, a thin book on Orthodoxy by Fr. John Meyendorff, and an appreciation for how a church ought to look. In fact, I commented to Father Chris, my ECUSA Parish priest, “that is how a church should look.”
Over the next year, I began maturing in my beliefs. My personal theology or beliefs started to shift to what Protestants would call an orthodox (with small “o”) or conservative position. I had started out as a self-proclaimed “theological liberal and liturgical conservative” (Whatever that means)! However, I was realizing that liberal theology required great feats of verbal gymnastics, reductions, and justifications to carry any water.
This shift brought me into a crisis of conscience in the Episcopal Church. Every Sunday, as we recited the Creed (I had already started omitting the filioque myself) I slowly realized that I was not in the “One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.” And, that any verbal gymnastics justifying multitudes of denominations were just so much smoke. I realized that if you believe something, you should act like it. If you do not believe what your denomination teaches, you are in the wrong place. This was a hard lesson for me. I desperately wanted to make the claim for my church that we were the closest to the truth. However, I realized that if the church leadership could not do that without qualifying it with “political correctness” statements then I was in the wrong place.
I know this seems very obtuse and I am not sure how to make this clearer. For the first time in my life, I realized that, contrary to what I had been taught, there is Truth. And if you find The Truth, it is worth defending. Furthermore, I realized that all the multitude of churches could not all posses The Truth–by definition, the Truth is singular. I knew I had to make a change. For some converts there is an accretion of reasons to leave the past and convert, or to begin looking at the Orthodox Church. For me, it was more of an “AHA!” moment, extended over a week or two. One week I was explaining to my wife the positives and negative of the Episcopal Church and serving as Reader and Chalice bearer for the Diocesan Convention and two weeks later I was telling my Episcopal priest that I needed to pursue Orthodoxy. All the flaws of ECUSA came crashing at me. There was a convergence of my own move toward “theological and moral conservatism” and the continuing liberalization of ECUSA.
With the realization that I had to leave ECUSA, I thought about my options. I wanted liturgical Christianity with a claim to represent some historical continuation of the ancient Church. I looked on the Internet and in the phonebook for a continuing Anglican Communion. Fortunately, I could not find one reasonably close. I had already experienced Roman Catholicism; my third choice was the Eastern Orthodox. As it happened, I was doing a little reading at the time that made the choice abundantly clear.
During this period, I started a Masters Program at the University of Tennessee in religious Studies. Through the library, I started looking into Orthodoxy under the pretense of doing a paper for Platonic Traditions in Early Christianity. As I read for the class and looked at various sources written by and about the early Church, I realized that they were all Orthodox or found in the “Orthodox” section of the library catalog. I never wrote the paper because I withdrew from the program for financial reasons. However, I picked up and read Bishop Kallistos books The Orthodox Way and The Orthodox Church (in that order). What I read in The Orthodox Way seemed like fragrant, fresh air. And The Orthodox Church sealed my fate. As a student of history, I knew that I belonged in the Church described in those pages. As important as historical claims were to me, the unapologetic position Orthodoxy took on matters of dogma was what convinced me.
Remember that two-inch ad from the newspaper almost two years before. I still had it and I called the number. The priest I spoke with seemed to know immediately where I was coming from. I did not tell him, but I knew when I went to meet him, later that week, that there was no turning back for me. I think that is why I had not called or visited before. I knew that what I would find in the Orthodox Church would be the fulfillment of everything I had been searching for.
It has been and continues to be.
My wife has not been a large part of my search. She has always been content to remain Southern Baptist. So we struggle. But as Love hopes and believes all things, I hope and believe that someday we will partake of the Body and Blood of Christ as Husband and wife.
