I was brought up a Methodist in a small Cornish town. There was Sunday school, the Bible, and not much enthusiasm for beer or betting.

When I became a rebellious adolescent, my mother let me make my own decisions. My first decision was to dump everything to do with religion and I thought myself a great hero at school when I refused to say the Lord's Prayer in assembly. However, something kept nagging at me, so I became a Buddhist. It was a way of having religion without a god.

But Christianity wouldn't go away. At university, I started creeping into church for Evensong. In the end I went to the college chaplain and virtually demanded to be converted. He was a good man, and I still remember that his response was to take me through the Nicene Creed; in between listening to his Wagner records. So I left university as an Anglican, subsequently married, and came to Lincolnshire.

We regularly attended our village church, but it was when I trained to be a lay reader that my troubles began. I had to take courses on the Bible, church history, contemporary social issues and church practice. The courses were clearly designed to promote a 'modern' view, but they had exactly the opposite effect on me. The Bible course revealed to me, as a scientist, the arbitrary nature of much so-called scholarship. The history convinced me that my church had wandered far from its roots. I found that the contemporary social issues course promoted the view that the Church should follow the views of society, rather than the other way around.

By the late 1970s I knew that I was in the wrong place and began to search elsewhere. Was it a coincidence that I remembered coming across Orthodoxy briefly at university? Whatever the reason, I rang up an Orthodox bishop who had written the only book on Orthodoxy I knew about and said, "So what do I do?". My arrogance was met with kindness and understanding. I was directed to an Orthodox church and a priest. I made an appointment and went to the church. When the priest asked why I had come, all my bitterness spewed out. Once I had stopped complaining, I think it took him less than ten seconds to point out that frustration with my own church was not the same as being Orthodox.

It seemed like the end, but he invited me to go around the church. We went to the icon screen. In front of the icon of the Mother of God he said, "This is the Christmas story". I thought that was a lovely way to explain the icon to a Protestant. Then we came before the icon of Our Lord. I was quite surprised at the priest's approach. Instead of talking about religion, he described the icon in secular, artistic terms. He showed how the face had been made to look authoritative. He explained how the robe presented the figure in a very aristocratic way. "In fact", he said, "he is painted as if he were a God". There was a pause and then he said, "Because that is who He is".

Our Lord "painted as if he were a God because that is who He is"- that is why I am Orthodox.

Mission Accomplished by David Hudson

Not long after I arrived in Romania as an evangelical missionary in 1993, a Baptist pastor with whom I was working said to me, "You think you came to Romania to do something for God, but perhaps He wants to do something for you".

It was true that I was on a pilgrimage that had started when I was a child with an unusual thirst for spiritual things, but I really did not expect my searching to come to an end in Romania.

I was raised in the conservative Wesleyan movement, and baptized at the age of 8. Even as a child I was willing to stand alone for my religious convictions, and I strove to live a consistent Christian life. I learned to play the piano while in Junior High, and soon my whole identity was wrapped up in music ministry.

There was a very great emphasis on both inward and outward holiness in the churches of my youth, but I became disillusioned as a Bible College student, when I realized (1) that the "entire sanctification" we expected to receive instantaneously wasn’t working, not only in me, but even in church leaders I admired, and (2) that I was in a religious ghetto and needed to find the true Church. I found my way into the Reformed faith, which seemed to be the answer. No shortcuts, no superficial claims of sinlessness, lots of "Christian liberty", and whatever couldn’t be explained otherwise was swept up into the mighty and mysterious sovereignty of God. The fact that it was a more intellectual faith also appealed to me at the time, as I was in the process of "upward mobilization".

Through marriage, however, I became part of the leadership of an independent evangelical congregation where "my" theology was tolerated, as long as it didn’t get in the way of the mission of our growing church. Everything was subservient to evangelism, everything was user-friendly, the visitor was king, and our still conservative Christianity was effectively marketed to the upwardly mobile that we considered our "target group". My music ministry took a secondary place as I took on more administrative responsibility, eventually serving as Executive Pastor.

All the activity and success with its unending pressure took a toll on our souls, and we felt that something was missing in all this. Going into midlife, we decided to break with this high paced, all-consuming ministry enterprise and to go for a second career in missions. I had dreamed of music ministry in Europe for a long time, and we decided this was the time. After a period of re-training and support raising, we were off to the university city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Mary and I, and our three daughters, Heidi, Heather, and Hannah.

Despite some difficult challenges, we adapted well and were thriving after a few years. We learned the language, the girls were in public schools, and we even bought an apartment with the intention of staying long term. We were working with Baptist churches in worship renewal, especially in the area of music, and even beginning to compose some well-received songs in Romanian.

Then our whole life was turned upside down by Orthodoxy, as devastating as any tornado that ever hit Kansas.

I had nothing against Orthodoxy when I came as an evangelical missionary to a mostly Orthodox country. I didn’t see myself as a threat or competition to the majority faith. I did believe that the Orthodox Church, like older churches in general, was mostly dead, but I wanted to believe that there was some life and renewal in it. With pluralistic open-mindedness, I set about to find out what there was in Orthodoxy that was good, assuming that the roots of Romanian evangelicalism must be in Romanian Orthodoxy.

By coincidence, I had read "Becoming Orthodox" while in missionary training, and was impressed by what I read. But I didn’t see much in Romania that resembled Peter Gilquist’s glowing presentation. Orthodoxy seemed tired, stale, superficial, superstitious, frightfully formal, or, as one person commented, "feudal". Compromise and corruption, and a museum-like fixation with the past, were the impressions I got from the non-Orthodox people I talked with. The services in the Cathedral were like an opera without a plot, and it didn’t seem to matter whether you could follow what was going on. It was light years from the overhead projectors and didactic emphasis of churches I had been involved in! In another downtown church, where I would duck in to pray occasionally, people just seemed to come and go all through the service -- if you could call it that -- much in the way that the priest appeared and disappeared all the time behind the curtain in the iconostasis. The chanter seemed somewhere between bored and distracted; it was routine to him. Why didn’t anyone seem to be interested in communicating anything to the visitor?

As one Romanian duhovnic recently said to me, it is truly a miracle that we became Orthodox in Romania. Absolutely no one did anything whatever to convert us.

Convinced that there had to be more to Orthodoxy, I kept wanting to get to the bottom of this mystery, even though I was too busy to give it a lot of time. The opportunity came at last to get to know a priest who was "evangelical", just what I was looking for. He was young, still finishing seminary, and in his fourth year of pastoring way out in a tumble-down village. Father Iustinian had been raised in a pious Orthodox home and had taken a stand for his faith under communism as a teenager, and now was in the priesthood. Not nominal or superficial in his faith, he was convinced of the claims that I had read about in Gilquist (and now others). After some discussion, I asked him to celebrate a Divine Liturgy in such a way that I could understand it. He took me into the Holy Altar, explained as much as necessary, allowing me to watch every action and hear every prayer. That day, in early May of 1995, I was "smitten" with Orthodoxy. I knew I had come into contact with a grace and a power and a holiness that I had never experienced before. It was unexpected. It was compelling.

What to do? Our missionary career was just taking off, and our family was just feeling settled after the traumas of uprooting, relocating, enculturation, etc. We were fulfilled and excited about the future. I didn’t even dare to speak to my wife about it, as I knew this would mean an upheaval in our lives — one too many. Just at that time, we were scheduled for a summer furlough in the U.S. As we came back, I was haunted by Orthodoxy, and felt compelled to take steps to pursue it. And yet, everything we had worked for and suffered for as a family was on the line. When my wife started to catch on, she warned me that she didn’t think the girls could take this. But as she began to study and pray about it, she, too, began to see the reality of Orthodoxy.

After discussion with our mission society leadership, we decided that we must resign in order to pursue our newfound (and fragile) discovery. By mid-summer of 1995, we were embroiled in a heartrending conflict with loved ones, who felt betrayed and cheated. By the end of the summer, our "missionary career" was over and we were sidelined and stranded. Although at that time we came to the conclusion that we had been mistaken about Orthodoxy, trust had been destroyed and we were not able to resume our ministry.

We went into a year of "exile", working low paying jobs to survive and trying to get our wits about us. What had happened? What went wrong? How could we have been derailed so easily after a lifetime of Christian teaching and active ministry? Orthodoxy had seemed so beautiful, so right. It had put a new perspective on the unresolved questions and unsatisfied hungers in our spiritual lives. It was a new paradigm in which, suddenly, everything fit into place with nothing left over and pushed out of the doctrinal grid, as is the case with the doctrinal systems we were familiar with. It had seemed so true, so real, so much more spiritual than anything we had known. Could it really be a fantasy, as some said, or an abomination, as others said?

We tried to pick up the pieces and get on with our lives. The girls were devastated, and their trust in us and others was deeply shaken. We felt paralyzed and lost. We had seen too much new light to go back to our former way of being Christians. We could not really be evangelicals anymore, and since we could not be Orthodox either, we tried to forge our own way, combining the best of both. It was a desperate attempt to make sense of things and to satisfy our frustrated thirst for Orthodoxy.

In that state of mind, we returned to Romania on our own after our "year in exile". It seemed we had to, for several reasons. We had left our apartment, car, and belongings in limbo. We had left our friends and colleagues without good-byes or explanations. Our oldest daughter, Heidi, was going to enter the University of Cluj, and so we pulled ourselves together and mustered our fragile faith and headed back. Of course the main dangling question was Orthodoxy. We had to "return to the scene of the crime", to convince ourselves one way or another. We were graciously accepted back into our former Baptist music ministry, and we tried to make a go of working in a Protestant environment with Orthodox ideals. Outwardly it was fairly successful, but inwardly it was not satisfying. We knew that we had to give Orthodoxy another chance, this time a real chance.

So in the summer of 1997, we took the plunge and started going to the Divine Liturgy on Sunday mornings. Through Fr. Gordon Walker of St. Ignatius Church in Franklin, Tennesee (whom we had met in 1995), we became friends with American converts who had also come to Cluj as missionaries. Craig and Victoria Goodwin introduced us to an Orthodox daily devotional publication, DYNAMIS, a ministry of their home church, St. George Cathedral in Wichita (see the web site at http://dynamis.cjb.net). Using DYNAMIS for our discipline of daily Bible study, things began to fall into place; questions began to be answered. We also began to overcome our intimidation and to meet more priests and lay people who impressed us with their truly Christian hearts and lives. The Archbishop of Cluj, BARTOLOMEU, granted us his blessing to begin translating DYNAMIS into Romanian and publishing it as a supplement to the Archdiocesan monthly. Through all this, no one made any effort to pressure us to convert, and even when we eventually requested to be received into the Church through Chrismation, no one was in a hurry. By that time, it was we who were impatient!

Mary, Heidi, and I were chrismated on Pascha, 1998, in the village where Fr. Iustinian now serves. What a peace settled over us when we finally got out of the stormy seas of pluralistic, idiosyncratic, and eclectic Christianity and into the ark of the historic, original, continuing life of the Church! Heather chose to remain active in the Baptist high school and church, and having faced such trauma together over our conversion, we felt she needed the freedom to come to Orthodoxy if and when she is ready herself. Hannah was baptized a few weeks after Pascha of this year, 1999, just before turning twelve. It was a beautiful service, and a wonderful testimony to share with many who had taken their baptism for granted. With this milestone, we feel we have come a step deeper into the peace of the Church and closed another chapter in our pilgrimage.

Conversion is not easy, either before or after Chrismation. There is so much to learn, and it is hard to go back to grammar school after a lifetime of leadership. In a way, it is like emigrating to a new country. You get your ticket and go; that is like being catechumens. Eventually you get your new citizenship; that is like Chrismation. But you still have to adapt to the new culture and find your place in it; that is like the ongoing process of working out your salvation once you are in the Church. Pat answers and instant solutions are not part of true Christianity. But there is a real opportunity for everyone who "strives for the prize" to attain the riches that our new Motherland offers us.

Does it mean that there are not stumbling blocks and snares in the Orthodox Church? No. There are obviously many citizens in this new land who languish in spiritual poverty and disease, who, while they have the citizenship, do not cultivate the characteristics and privileges it offers. But there are towering examples of "success" to point the way for us. Dying to everything that is false and unworthy, first of all in ourselves, we find ourselves reborn as more human, more real, more peaceful, more settled, more healed, more loving and forgiving, even while we remain sinners. This is what Orthodoxy is about. It offers us real holiness, regaining the lost likeness of God; and we are not just given theories, but also the wherewithal.

Father Rafail Noica, an eminent Romanian duhovnic and himself a convert to Orthodoxy, says that Orthodoxy is the true nature of man, "red, yellow, black, or white". When we come home to Orthodoxy, we "come to" our senses, we become our true selves. Lord, where else could we go?

Now we know why the Lord brought us to Romania. Our mission was to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, and in so doing, to become a few more candles shining in the Church for those who, even in an Orthodox country, do not yet understand what their faith is all about. And perhaps for others who, like we were, are searching for something but don’t expect to find it in Orthodoxy.

A Tiny Step Away from Deepest Faith

How God Came to Me
 

Autumn in New Jersey is mind-boggling. It's as if the golden-cherry leaves fall into the sunset and everything is haloed by silence and smoke and some distant humming. It's hard even to walk to class during the day you don't want to go inside and if it weren't for the biting cold I probably would just stay out. It's so beautiful it makes me ache, and that's all I can think about as my friend and I walk from the student center beyond the grass and the trees and the rich blue sky to go see our math tests. We are talking about faith, though the word doesn't come up.

I don't remember what sparked the conversation that day, but we were talking about our lives, about our unhappiness, about our despairs and failures. And we started talking about faith. We talked about the fact that humans are not rational creatures. We're expected to be rational, and maybe all the philosophies pushed on us indoctrinate us into thinking we are, but even as teenagers we have  discovered that reason can only go so far. I talked of my paranoia that my friends didn't care for me, for example rationally, I know that they do, but I can't apply that to my life, it is not real for me. I talked about my friends with eating disorders, who rationally know that they are not fat, that what they are doing hurts them and doesn't make their problems go away and yet they don't know it, inside; it's not real but only dry, stale facts that exist on some other level. I started talking about my ideas on philosophy and history, and to my surprise my friend didn't look bored she nodded vigorously yes, yes it's not about what we know with our reason, she agreed.

I am a person of faith, I realize, and this makes me somewhat uncomfortable, because that label has come to mean so many things. When I was younger I would have equated it with a person who was not in touch with reality, a person who relied on feelings instead of the truth. And yet for me faith is the undercurrent of everything in my life. Every breath confirms my trust sometimes strong, sometimes wavering in a Truth that endures, in something beyond myself. Every step I take, from the student center to the math building, is aided by the help of my belief in God. It started happening too long ago for me to really appreciate its novelty, but I find that everything I do is permeated with the words of the Nicene Creed: "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord, Jesus Christ. . . ."

It's this sudden realization of the fullness of faith in my life that shocks me, because I remember too well the emptiness, the pointless grabbing in everyday life for something, for someone, always for some dream or person or idea that I had latched onto without knowing why. I realize that all my sadnesses now are just bittersweet, because underneath their skin is a firm conviction I never before would have considered. I talked to my friend on the phone a few days later: We, you and I, I said, are passionate creatures, we throw ourselves into things, and that comes with being lost, with emptiness, because we won't settle for anything but perfection. . . . She knows what I mean, and I wonder how many people I know would say the same thing. I expected her to not know what I was talking about I tend to do that with people. I like to think I am unique, but when I express my feelings or beliefs I find that everyone understands what I am saying and reacts to the same things as true or meaningful. If there is any common thread, it is emptiness, it is a sense of meaninglessness, but also a deep-seated need for something more, a stretch for the beyond from millions of broken people.

To some extent I know that this is nothing new. I think of Nikolai Stavrogin in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Demons, and his meeting with the retired Bishop Tikhon in a chapter that never made the final cut for the book. The tortured anti-hero interrogates the old man, seeking out condemnation or solace. He asks Tikhon about Christ's words to the Laodiceans in the Revelation of John: "And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write, ‘These things says the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God: "I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of my mouth. Because you say, ‘I am rich, have become wealthy, and have need of nothing' and do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind, and naked "'" Nikolai protests; why should God favor the cold over the lukewarm? Bishop Tikhon explains the one in the most darkness stands much closer to light than the one who doesn't care either way. . . .

The issue of faith and unbelief, of indifference and suffering and hope and despair goes back much farther than my own generation. However, I believe my generation epitomizes it. It is easy to condemn us for our lack of faith in anything, in our depression and suicide rate and self-destruction and out-of-control behavior, but it is all of this that in fact gives me the most hope for us. We have ceased to believe in anything else the utopian dreams of our parents hold no water for us, and bland ideology and trust in rationality do not keep us interested. We are iconoclasts, throwing down everything that those before us set up to guide us.

We don't believe in simple answers. We don't believe that if we can prove a fact in a Petri dish it makes any real difference. We want something more, anything more, something that doesn't have to be anatomized, something that can be experienced. We believe in personal encounters. We believe in the human touch. We don't believe in cheap happiness, in settling for second best, in mediocre joys. It's all or nothing and if we are now stuck with nothing, it's just because we're waiting for the All.

I don't know many lukewarm people. Most of my friends who have any religious convictions at all, like me, spent years violently searching out faith. I chased it from eighth grade to eleventh before getting hold of it, and most I know took longer than that. If we truly were a "godless" nation we wouldn't be devouring whatever we could see or read in order to find God. I cannot count the amount of times people I previously assumed to be non-religious or even anti-religious have come up and talked to me about their beliefs, or about what they wanted to believe. I never initiate the conversations, but I talk about God regularly at school, and I am taken seriously. There is a tangible thirst for faith that over a hundred years of secular humanistic bias and education has failed to erase in the hearts of youth.

I have often heard adults accuse us of being cynical, sarcastic, bitter far too much for children, anyway. But I would be more disturbed if we weren't. It is good that we should reject the intellectual and cultural wasteland around us; it is good that we should question it and consider it unfulfilling. It is good that we should seek higher things, for our dwelling is in the heavens.

Nikolai Stavrogin hanged himself, though he was perfectly sane. My friend and I sit in the math building, and that memory comes into my mind without my understanding why. The more I talk to her, the more I realize the hypocrisy of my babbling on for ten minutes about how words and ideas and reason will never be enough to express the search for the deeper truth, which can only be expressed in love. I wish I could just go up to her and hug her human touch is the greatest thing in the world but my social inhibitions stop me; my fears about people and friends leave me leaning against a desk, quoting my favorite philosophers.

Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesian Church that faith was not something we can muster up ourselves, but the purely gracious gift of God. I feel frustrated, because I know that none can come to Christ until the Father draws him, and I can't convince anyone to be happy; I can't convince anyone that their joy "shall be made full." I can't do anything with words or ideas, even with my beliefs. I try to remember that Jesus always spoke about love not in its wishy-washy ideal but in its head-on, dangerous, painful, and personal reality. I try to remember that He spoke of that and not of convincing others to believe in anything.

I believe and I now love those words that we are ready for perfect joy. I believe that perfection exists, and Truth, in which there is no shadow of darkness, but only the blinding Light of the Transfiguration. For a long time I didn't see that, didn't experience it, but still I kept searching for it, kept reaching out for it, in so many gods and finite people. And yet I knew that they weren't enough and that rejection brought me to God. It is only necessary to refuse to put your trust in anything but the Truth, and one day or another everything will be made perfect. I believe that, truly  . . . but even as I think that I have to silence myself. It is not about ideas but about pure, unshakable faith.

My friend and I walk back in the autumn rosiness, looking at the sky. And I believe that she, and I, and all of us, are meant for something better. And I stop talking, and simply believe.

Marjorie Corbman lives with her parents in Randolph, New Jersey, where she is a senior at Morristown-Beard High School. She was baptized into the Orthodox Church in the Paschal season of 2005.

The Holy
Theotokos