Seek and you shall find... A couple's journey to Orthodoxy
My wife, Styliana, grew up in a family of non-denominational Protestant
missionaries. When she was five, she and her family moved to Colombia, where
they began working as missionaries among the Kogi Indians. Her childhood years
were spent divided between living in a mud and thatch hut, washing clothes in a
river and cooking over a fire, and living with other missionary families at the
mission station, complete with a school, a store and a clinic.
As the years went by, her father began questioning Evangelical Protestant
theology. He realized that salvation meant growing in holiness and not just a
one-time emotional experience. But while he was able to diagnose the problems
of Protestantism, he was not able to adequately formulate a solution. He still
maintained the Protestant view of an "in-visible Church," composed of
individual believers struggling on their own, equipped only with a Bible. Left
to her own, without any church and without any practical way to pursue
holiness, Styliana found herself falling into sin and becoming angry at God.
The holiness required by God was simply impossible to attain.
Once, on a visit to the U.S., she spied a beautiful church from the window
of her grandmother's car and commented on it. "But that's a Greek Orthodox
church," her grandmother responded. "What's that?" "Ah,
they're worse than the Catholics." Still later, as a teenager, she read
The Brothers Karamazov and was struck by the glimpse it gave of Holy Russia.
"What a wonderful kind of Christianity they had," she thought.
"Too bad I didn't live in 19th-century Russia." As a young woman,
working as a nurse in Dallas, she began to visit every church she could find,
hoping to find one that could help her. Where was true sanctity to be found,
and where were God's people? As she searched for a church that could help her,
she felt God reassure her that He still had his "7000 who had not bowed
their knee to Baal." But where were they?
I was brought up Baptist and, later, Presby-terian, though my father
insisted that denominations did not matter, as long as a church "preached
from the Bible." Even as a child I wondered then, why it was that there
were so many different churches, if everyone was claiming to be Christian. When
I was eight or so, I was urged to "accept Jesus" at a Bible camp, and
I began reading the Bible on my own. In junior high I attended the church youth
group on Wednesday evenings. The part I enjoyed most were the
question-and-answer sessions, although sometimes the pastor's answers seemed
too pat and unconvincing. At one session someone asked why we didn't include
the Apocrypha in our Bibles. To convince us that these books are just
"fairy tales," the pastor cited the passage from Tobit where Raphael
advises Tobias to burn the innards of a fish in order to get rid of a demon.
This kind of argument did not convince me. There are other parts of Scripture
far stranger than this that Protestants have no difficulty accepting.
One Wednesday the pastor told us that we were not too young to ask God to
show us what He wanted us to do with our lives. I sincerely wanted to serve the
Lord, and I began praying in earnest that if He had a plan for me He would make
it known. That very Sunday a family of missionaries visited our church. They
shared about their work of translating the Scriptures for an Indian tribe in
Colombia. They spoke of the thousands of people who do not have a Bible in
their own language, whose language does not even have a written form. It struck
me how much I took the Bible for granted. What if no one had ever translated it
into English? I had always been fascinated with languages, and felt strongly
that here was a speedy answer to my prayer: God was calling me to be a Bible
translator.
In my high school years I did whatever I could to serve the Lord and
prepare myself for mission work. Besides singing in the choir and helping in
the church library, during vacations I helped with children's Bible classes in
the inner city and with Hispanic communities in the countryside. One summer I
went to Mississippi to help restore houses for a local Christian ministry. As
my world grew larger and I met different kinds of Christians, my questions
persisted. Why were there so many forms of Christianity? What was a
Presbyterian, anyway? I searched the library for answers, but to my surprise there
was very little information on church history, and no one around appeared to
know much about it either.
After college I moved to Dallas to begin my training with Wycliffe Bible
Translators. Their philosophy was that since the Bible was all that one needed,
the best method of evangelism was simply to give people that Bible in their own
language. Whether the people then wanted to join a church, or form their own,
was up to them. I was also taught the principles of "dynamic equivalence"
translation. In this view, the language of the Bible needed to be
"clarified," since the meaning was often "obscured" by
poetry, metaphor and symbolism. Since "Son of man" was too exotic a
turn of phrase to be readily understood, it was better to translate it as
"Jesus." Since the blood of Christ was a metonym for His death (just
as one can say "head" and mean "cattle"), it was better to
say "death of Christ" rather than mention His blood. And if a culture
knew nothing of sheep, but sacrificed pigs, then it was legitimate to change
"Lamb of God" to... well, you can guess.
While in Dallas I met Styliana, who was there working as a nurse. Her
parents were shaken by the recent kidnapping of her brother - held by Marxist
terrorists for four and a half months - and had sent her to live in the U.S.
for a while. After we were married, we moved to Colombia to resume the Bible
translation work that her parents had set aside ten years before. Her family
had raised a Kogi youth named Alfonso, and had him help them translate some New
Testament portions into Kogi (the Kogi do not speak Spanish), although he
complained that he was too young for such a responsibility. When he was grown,
he returned to the Kogi area, and Styliana's family lost contact with him.
When we arrived in Colombia, I was not sure what work I was going to do. I
had no way to learn the Kogi language - I didn't even know any Spanish yet -
and there was no one to assist me in the task of translating the Scriptures
into Kogi. God's Providence soon rescued me from this quandary. Shortly after
we arrived in Colombia, a Kogi came down from the mountains bearing a letter
from Alfonso-the first anyone had heard from him in ten years-announcing that
he was now ready to resume work on the Bible translation. He had no idea that I
had just arrived in Colombia with that very intention.
After a few years I knew Kogi well enough to begin the task of translating
the Scriptures with Alfonso. This work was challenging not just because of the
complexity of the language, but also because it made me realize how superficial
my understanding of Scripture was. When you are forced to render something into
another language, you have to have a good understanding of just what that
something means. I suddenly found that I wasn't sure what many key terms really
meant: justification, grace, blessing, holiness, even salvation. How could
these be expressed in Kogi? How could I get Alfonso to understand them if I
didn't understand them myself? It took eight years to translate the entire New
Testament and the book of Genesis. Those eight years were also a time of
intense study in the Greek and Hebrew texts. In the process I discovered that
the Christianity that I was raised on bore little resemblance to what I was
finding for myself in the original Scriptures.
I began to study church history, which I had never been encouraged to read
before. I had been raised to understand that between the Apostles and Martin
Luther, nothing important happened. It was understood that the Church had
"apostatized" at an early date and that no one really understood what
Christianity was about until the Reformation. Now I was seeing that I had been
deprived. I also realized that the West, both Roman and Protestant, had been
unduly influenced by Augustine without being balanced by the more ancient,
Eastern Fathers, who, unlike Augustine, read the Scriptures in Greek. I shared
all of this with Styliana. Her response was, "Well, if the Greek Fathers
had everything right, then maybe we should check out the Greek Church." "You
mean, like Greek Orthodox?" I asked. That seemed out of the question. I
figured that since they looked so Roman Catholic, whatever truth they once
might have had was now lost.
Our convictions, however, were becoming more and more Orthodox, which puzzled
our friends. The church we attended put me in charge of the adult Sunday school
class. I began it with the idea of just holding a round-table discussion on
Gospel passages, where the Holy Spirit would lead us to the Truth. But soon I
found that each of us had our own slant on the Truth; in a group of ten there
could be eleven opinions. Each class ended with us more divided and more
convinced of our own views. There was no final court of appeals, so where was
the Truth? When I was invited to preach, my sermons tended to be on topics such
as fasting, the struggle for holiness and the danger of apostasizing. Such
non-Evangelical ideas were coldly received.
When Styliana was asked to head the Sunday school department, she decided
to replace the materials which typically spoke of Jesus as our
"buddy" and contained a page where the child could sign his name on a
dotted line to "receive salvation." She ordered materials from every
Protestant Sunday school publisher she could find. To her dismay, they were all
the same. "If this is Protestantism," we decided, "then we're
not Protestants." But we knew we were not Roman Catholics, either. So what
were we? Finally we had to pull our sons out of the Bible club at the Baptist
church. They would get points for memorizing Bible verses, which were
invariably taken out of context and twisted. At one point they were to learn:
In the beginning was the Word... All things were made through Him... The
passage itself was intact, but the accompanying drawing depicted a giant, glowing
Bible moving over the primordial waters. The message was clear: the Bible is
the Word, therefore the Bible created the universe. That was the last straw. We
withdrew our boys from the club, which scandalized the missionary community.
Soon thereafter, we went to spend some time in the U.S. We were staying in
Minneapolis, when one day Styliana came home from a garage sale with a book
that she thought might interest me. It was The Orthodox Church by Bishop
Kallistos (Ware). It hit me like a bolt of lightning. I found that the Church
of the Greek Fathers still existed after all. Why had I never looked in this
direction before? On the very first page he quoted Khomiakov as saying that all
the West knows is a single datum a. "Whether it is +a in the case of the
Roman Catholics, or -a in the case of the Protestants, it is still the same
a." It blew my mind to see that there was a Christian tradition that saw
Catholics and Protestants as merely two sides of the same coin! Here was a
whole terra incognita, so new and yet so old. Here were theosis and synergy,
the Seven Ecumenical Councils, hesychasm, Mt Athos, and two thousand years of
saints I had never heard of. All week Styliana heard me "oohing" and
"aahing" over the book and saying, "This could be it!"
"It?" she asked. "What it?" "The Church," I said.
"But you don't believe there is a Church," she reminded me.
"Well, maybe there is after all."
The next Sunday, Styliana asked where we were going to church. "Oh,
the same church we've been attending, I guess." "But why? All week
you've been saying, 'The Orthodox Church, this'; 'The Orthodox Church, that';
and now you want to go back to the same old church?" "But you don't
understand," I tried to explain. "You can't just show up. They might
not let us in. Besides, they might not even speak English." "Well,
call one and ask," she suggested. At random I chose the OCA cathedral (it
turned out to be the one where Fr. Alexis Toth had served). The deacon
reassured me that we were certainly welcome, and when he met us at the door, he
said, "You've come on a special day. It's Pentecost."
The moment we walked in we felt God's presence in a way we never had
before. What was different? We couldn't put our finger on it. When Styliana saw
the icons her first reaction was, "This is Roman Catholic." But then
she thought, "No, this is different." Having grown up in Latin
America, where the Roman Church is especially corrupt and paganized, she had
been around many Catholic churches and always felt an aversion and a spiritual
oppression around their images. I had had the same experience in the
Philippines. Yet these icons, far from repulsing us, attracted us. Rather than
a heaviness, there was a particular lightness to the atmosphere. It was a hot
day, our sons were restless, the service was mostly in Slavonic, yet it was
wonderful. Styliana said afterwards, "I don't know what that was, but I
know I will never be the same for having been there." With only a few
weeks left before returning to Colombia, we visited different parishes to learn
as much as we could. The next Sunday we went to an English-speaking parish. As
Styliana read the words, she cried and cried. They were saying everything that
should be said: "Lord have mercy... That the whole day may be perfect,
holy, peaceful, and sinless... a good defense before the dread judgment seat of
Christ... grant this, O Lord." One priest was especially kind, giving us a
whole Orthodox library and offering to visit us in Colombia. At his parish,
Styliana had an experience that made her take a big step forward. At Vespers,
she felt frustrated at all the bowing and formality, so unfamiliar to her
experience. At the end of the service I asked if she wanted to venerate the
cross. "Ah, they just do the hokey-pokey and turn themselves around,"
she muttered. "I'm not kissing anything." The next morning at Matins
she walked in and saw Christ in the apse frowning at her. She felt convicted
and vowed to venerate whatever they offered. At the veneration of the Gospel,
she kissed the icon of the Crucifixion in the center, and as she did so she had
a vision that to this day she cannot put into words.
On our return to Bogota, we began reading through all the books we had
acquired, and many of our questions and doubts were finally resolved. One issue
in particular that had been difficult for us as Protestants had been the role
of the Theotokos. We had seen so much error in the Roman Church. Howdid the
Orthodox understanding differ? The book that set this matter straight for us
was The Orthodox Veneration of the Mother of God, by Saint John of San
Francisco. We finally reached the point where we knew we had to become
Orthodox. It was everything we had been seeking all our lives. We searched for
an Orthodox church in Bogota and eventually learned that there was only a
small, non-functioning Greek parish under Constantinople. It would be a full
year before we met any clergy serving this parish. During this time we shared
about our new-found Faith with everyone we knew and were pleased to find that
there was a good deal of interest. But since there was no functioning church,
all we could do was have informal reader services in our home. I was ambivalent
about this since I knew that what we were doing bore no resemblance to an
Orthodox service. We had no icons, we didn't know how to chant, and I was
afraid that we were giving people the idea that Orthodoxy was just some form of
Protestantism. We gradually made contact with some of the Greek community, but
they were not interested in lay services. "Just wait for the priest,"
was their advice.
We wanted not only to become Orthodox ourselves, but we felt a need to
start up an Orthodox mission. We began looking for whatever Orthodox materials
we could find in Spanish, but there was (and still is) little available. I had
to translate materials myself to share with Colombian friends. The most help we
received was from Christ of the Hills Monastery in Texas. They sent us Spanish
materials that we found had originally been published by the Russian Church
Abroad in Chile. We were pleased to find that there was already an Orthodox
presence in South America, and that an attempt was being made to reach out to
Spanish-speaking non-Orthodox. We also gradually realized that of the Orthodox
materials that we owned, the ones that were most instructive, most serious, and
most in line with what we understood Orthodoxy to be were those that were
published by Old Calendarists. Eventually I wrote to Holy Trinity Monastery for
direction, and we received letters from Fr. Luke of Jordanville and from Bishop
(now Archbishop) Hilarion. They also sent materials explaining more about
ecumenism and modernism, issues that had disturbed us, as had the involvement
of so many Orthodox jurisdictions in the WCC. After a period of trying to be
Orthodox "by correspondence," we came to the understanding that we
had to live in an Orthodox community. We sold our car and furniture, handed
over our house, and, with Vladika Hilarion's blessing, we moved to Jordanville,
where I am now attending Holy Trinity Seminary.
We feel strongly that we must return to Colombia and establish a mission
there. It is the only South American country without a single functioning
parish. There are a number of Orthodox living there with no opportunity to
worship. In the last two years we spent there, we told many people about
Orthodoxy, and a surprising number showed interest. When they would ask to
visit our parish, it broke our hearts to tell them there was none. We even met
a young man, Javier, who had dropped out of Roman Catholic seminary. From his
study of church history he realized that Rome had apostatized, and so he began
seeking the Orthodox Church. He finally tracked us down just before we left the
country. For his sake alone, Orthodoxy must be planted there, but we know there
are many more like Javier, disillusioned with Rome. Please join with us in
praying to all the saints of America to intercede not only for North America,
but for the other America as well.
Source: http://www.roca.org/OA/149/149i.htm
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