Another copy and pasted article from my blog. Don't worry, I normally don't post this much. Substack link if you want pictures.
My struggles as an Orthodox Christian convert, and why I can't seem to walk away from Christ despite my doubts
Going to church today for the proto-anastasian liturgy (Easter is tomorrow for us Orthodox Christians), I have to admit I have some doubts about the Resurrection and the whole story of Christ being the Son of God.
Usually I can sort of deny these doubts within myself, but during Holy Week, the sincerity of the people around me, the Church services every night and during the day (not that I go to them all), and just the general intensity of everything really brings my cognitive dissonance to the forefront.
I’m about a year and a half post my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and when I took the vows to follow Christ, bear His cross, and keep to the strictures of the Nicene Creed, I was sincere. At least as sincere as I could be. I had doubts of course, and my priest was well aware. After all, I took the name of the premier doubter in the Christian mythos, Saint Thomas the Apostle.
When I was converting, I had multiple experiences of Christ coming to me. I dealt with extreme chronic pain, debilitating suffering, and He saved me. I don’t talk about this often online because it feels gauche, and I won’t go into detail now. But suffice to say I had genuine experiential evidence to believe the Christian story.
Unfortunately, as Christianity has ceased to be novel and exciting and a big change in my life, that evidence feels more and more hollow, less convincing to my overly rationalized, modern mind.
More and more I find myself thinking: “Is this really true? What if His body was just snatched away and lies were spread? Wouldn’t it make more sense for all the women at the tomb and the apostles to just be delusional, even if they genuinely believed it? The Jews said that they stole the body, the early Christians obviously claimed they were lying, how can we ever know for sure?”
When I first started to doubt, even before I converted, these thoughts would plague and torment me. Sitting there in church I would fret, “How can I feel this way and sing hymns, how can I take communion while not genuinely believing that it’s the Body and Blood of Christ?”
Still today these doubts and thoughts bother me, but I’m learning to be more at home with them. I can’t ever know the truth of the Resurrection. In all likelihood, the intense experiences that convinced me to convert won’t come back. My spiritual father and my elders in the faith have all warned me that’s the case.
So, if I doubt the Christian story so much, why continue going? Aren’t I living a double life? Aren’t I lying to myself and my community?
Perhaps I am. It certainly bothers me, as I pride myself (heh) on being an honest and open person. I discuss my doubts with my priest and close confidants, but generally keep them close to the chest in my broader church community.
In a way it would be easier to just leave church. To take the path I took as a teenager, be an atheist, say it’s all fake. But I simply can’t deny the beauty of Holy Orthodoxy, the haunting power of Christ’s story, and His words.
When I first saw an Orthodox Divine Liturgy, I was blown away. I came back a second time and ended up bawling the entire service, crying more in that couple of hours than I had my entire life prior. Eventually one of the parish council members had to shoo me out of the pews, because I stayed there crying so long that everyone had packed up and they were closing the church.
Something about Orthodoxy, something about Christ, just compels me. Even if it doesn’t make sense to my rational mind, my heart can’t let go of Him. Reading the pre-communion prayers, I do honestly have difficulty firmly and strongly acclaiming that YES, I DO believe this bread is the Body of Christ, and the wine is the Blood of Christ.
But I can honestly say that I love Him, that I want Him dearly, that I long for Him to be a part of me. I can say that when I participate in the Eucharist, I feel filled with a mysterious life that I can’t explain, that perhaps isn’t divine but certainly is closer than almost anything else I’ve experienced in this world.
Who knows what actually happened two thousand years ago in the tomb of Christ, it’s probably one of, if not the most, controversial historical topics ever. We will never truly know what happened, regardless of what evidence comes out or new techniques archaeologists discover.
All I know is that for me, the beauty and power of Christ’s Church and His legacy that has been kept alive for almost two thousands years by His followers is something I can’t seem to do without. It has made my life better in every way, and made me more like Him. My role model, my Lord, my Savior. When the mood strikes me, my King and my God.
Perhaps I’m a hypocrite, one of those people Christ condemned that mouthed the prayers without really believing deep in their hearts. I certainly know I’m a sinner. But ultimately, I just can’t seem to walk away despite the dissonance and the doubts and the confusion.
I’m reminded of the story in the Gospel, when Christ was about to go to His Passion, and he gave his disciples the ritual of the Eucharist. He told them that they would be eating His body, drinking His blood. Many of His followers, even those healed by Him, were freaked out, and understandably so!
They went Ok dude, we can accept that you’re a holy prophet healing us, but you want us to be cannibals? You want us to EAT you?! That’s a little too weird for me, sorry, I’m out.
Christ turned to His disciples and said, “Will ye also go away?”
Simon Peter responded, in a quote that haunts me two thousand years later because I feel the exact same damn way. He looked at this beautiful Man, this incredible healer, teacher, prophet, king. He searched his heart, and responded:
“Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”
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Notes -
I don't know if this is the right place for it, but what the hell. Maybe you can help me out.
I've struggled with spiritual matters for most of my life. I have wrestled with the problem of theodicy, particularly, since I was a young child who did not know the word existed. Surviving abuse puts a different spin on the idea of a loving, powerful God who died for our sins.
I've since come to terms with it, but I still struggle with the idea of the Church. I've read the Bible cover to cover twice in my life, once in English, and once in Latin. Both times, the same passages have stuck with me in a way that I can't let go of.
Matthew 6
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
John18:36
Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews; but now My kingdom is not from here."
Matthew 18:20
For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them.
Maybe it's because I don't know if I am Christian or not, but I have always had a deep suspicion that if I were, going to Church would be sinful. I don't know how else to explain it. The Word itself states that I should not publicly proclaim my faith. It says that the presence of the divine is in all worshippers, regardless of any structure. It says that the trappings of this world are irrelevant, because his kingdom is not here.
How do you reconcile something like that?
I don't think Christ is saying that you can't pray with others at all. The earliest Christians, even Christ and His disciples, prayed together often, sang hymns together, etc. Corporate worship as a whole is definitely never outlawed by almost any Christian sect I've ever heard of.
It sounds to me like you are overly scrupulous. I have similar tendencies. Ultimately there are many contradictions within Christ's message if you take everything literally and try to follow all of the rules. The Orthodox talk a lot about how interpreting scripture is tricky, and you have to have the right mindset or phronema to understand. That's why we tend to defer to the early Christians and Fathers of the church when it comes to interpretations.
I’m odd as a Catholic in that the liturgy itself never beguiled me very much, but I’ve never attended a service of any variety that generates these kinds of experiences for the attendees. Christianity was always an intellectual compact I had with the religion and its one I never found fully convincing but I love and enjoy the trappings of the ideology and the fact that I grew up in it. Even atheism wouldn’t cause me to fully abandon the religion. I always enjoyed watching movies like The Seventh Seal that explored the difficulties of believers.
One of the benefits of it over say Islam, is that the Bible wasn’t as tightly written as the Qur’an is. Therefore you can be more unconstrained in your interpretive schemes to reconcile things. In the Qur’an on the other hand, the fact that Allah can’t do fractions and that it’s caused lots of Muslims to apostatize has made some of its verses very difficult for scholars to reinterpret. So difficult in fact that medieval theologians had to invent a whole system just to make it work. When Islam dies it dies ‘hard’. The advantage Christianity has is its durability as a concept to last through the ages.
When a written document is given to any group of people, it’s much more complex than the superficial readings of a text that you get at the first pass. Some people think US Constitution allows people the right to own slaves and others think it doesn’t allow women the right to vote. If you just read the historical casebooks that have foreshadowed amendments to our understanding of the founders intent, certain interpretations of our founding document have fallen out of favor because of how inconsistent they are with the modern world. This is by no means a problem unique to religion. Science can falsify all kinds of theological assumptions and philosophical premise's, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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