For all my reader’s edification and much to the scandal of my detractors my wife and I have been consulting with an Orthodox hiermonk priest and will be entering the catecumenate of the Antiochian Orthodox Church Sunday next.
The reasons are positive: we are not merely fleeing the culture wars and liturgical emptiness of the post-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, we earnestly desire the return of the Roman Pontiff to Orthodoxy so that the Roman Patriarchate may again have the fullness of Catholic tradition.
I have said in other posts that “faith is more than belief”, it is something which transcends the rational assent to doctrines taught by religious authorities: Faith is the outcome of noetic perception, the acquiring of the Orthodox phronema which is the common mindset of the Church as transmitted by the Apostles. Because it is True, Faith transcends the limitations of doctrines and dogmas, because it is perceived, Noesis, the vision of the Heart is something that is verifiable and it has been verified since the Apostolic times to this very day. Because the light of Divine Theoria it can be seen and verified, it can be proven and is science in its purest form. Because it is science it informs the material sciences of the ontologic and epistemologic bases of their partial knowledge. Thus Orthodoxy preserves and maintains the highest and most illumined aspect of Christianity, a perception of the Divine and of the Human which informs doctrine rather than the reverse, doctrines which seek to limit and filter the perception of Divine and human reality.
Starting with the Niceo-Constantinopolitan Creed in which the original text states the Procession of the Holy Spirit is from the Father and with the definitions of the manner of being of the Incarnate Word at Chalcedon, Orthodoxy establishes and preserves a view of reality, of Truth, that does not accommodate the varying trends of the world: the Humanism of the Renaissance, the Individualism of the Reformation, the Bolshevism of Russia, and today’s Modernism all break like waves of the sea on the walls of Orthodox doctrine.
Thus my friends, I will be starting a new blog at which I will explore my entry into Holy Orthodoxy, it is my prayer that you, Dear Reader, will follow me there.
