Posted on Byzantine Texas. Oops. Now I’ve Gone and Done it.

I’ve been Western Rite Orthodox for ten years, and you raise a serious point. When you love your previous hertitage / church identity, it’s impossible to just give it up or get over it. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

I’m fortunate in that the Temple I worship at is a great blend of Gothic architecture, Icons, great music and well-done Liturgy.

However, we wouldn’t be allowed to build such a Temple from scratch today. Instead, we would be forced to build a Romanesque structure, because “later architectural styles are ‘not orthodox.’”

This is where it gets frustrating. The highest and most beautiful western church form is the Gothic or Neo-Gothic Cathedral style church building complete with high arches, ornate wood-carving, glorious stained glass and all the other things a person would expect in such structures: Pipe Organs, Choir Lofts, Rood Screens as opposed to an iconostasis, etc.

The Western Church Tradition has a complete high artistic form, and to lop off pieces of it here and there or to forbid some aspects ruins the whole tapestry, so to speak. It’s a form of Iconoclasm, IMO.

You can add icons to such architecture and these don’t subtract anything, but when you forbid the other elements, it doesn’t feel like home.  

The reason the WR stays a tiny group of people is that it ends up being smothered in the cradle. If you undercut deep enthusiasm and attachment, you end up with half-hearted devotion. The Western Rite is really an all or nothing thing, IMO. You can’t half-posterior it.

By all means, grant the Western Rite it’s own Patriarch and complete autocephalous freedom to build according to our most cherished forms and not architecture restricted to pre-1054 A.D. We’ll keep the Icons the right way, of course, but allow everything else, please!

You couldn’t build a Western Rite Chartres Cathedral or Washington D.C. National Cathedral because “‘Tis-Outrage / This is not Orthodox.” It’s ridiculous and it eventually gets old, indeed.

How would The Greeks or Russians respond if some pompous official said they couldn’t have Onion Domes or Iconostasis, and perhaps you can start to get an idea how any Western Christian might feel with the restrictions we still labor under.

And we should be able to worship in a traditional manner with well-done modern English Liturgies. The Greeks and the OCA have no compunction about using modern English. We should “spoil the Egyptians” by taking the best things the West has to offer and not set some arbitrary acceptable period or date.

Passing the Peace like the Anglicans, Catholics and Lutherans do would also be encouraging and is really no different than Easterners doing the same thing with “Christ is in our Midst.”

Too many good things are still unnecessarily forbidden, IMO. Until we’re trusted as responsible, we’ll-intentioned adult Christians with our own heritage, what real space do we have to grow or thrive? No one knows our own heritage better than we do, and how to conform it to Holy Orthodoxy. Outsiders just aren’t expert enough.

Perhaps many more Western Christians would have converted already if they weren’t influenced to be suspicious of and to reject their own culture and traditions.

In many ways, the powers that be keep the Western Rite convert feeling like they’ve taken a trip to a foreign country instead of like a new, permanent long-term home.

To expect “high church” converts to even want to give up their heritage is to ask them to be Iconoclasts with their own traditions and expressions.

Don’t muzzle the ox while it’s treading the grain!


Respectfully Submitted,

Columba Silouan

Hanging Out with the Anglicans, Remaining Orthodox. Why?

In the past year, due to some developments in my life and family, I’ve started having regular ineteractions with the two biggest Anglican groups in the U.S.

I still am a member of my “local” Western Rite Antiochian parish, but I attend less than I used to:  Three Sundays a month.

One Sunday a month we go to the closest Episcopal church to our house and two Saturdays a month I attend the men’s Bible Study at the closest ACNA parish to our house.

Of course, I maintain the discipline of my own Church by not communing at either the Episcopal church or, when going to an occasional service at the ACNA parish, communing there, either.

The local Episcopal church is the home church of my fine father-in-law and mother-in-law, the grandparents of my children.

The ACNA parish has it’s own fascinating story, which I might convey later in a future posting.

Both congregations are ten minutes away from my house.

The Episcopal congregation has a large youth group, which is helpful for my kids, and especially for my son.

The Men’s Bible Study is a life helper (saver) for me.

At the ACNA parish, we study the four scripture readings for their Sunday service, and the Collect of the day, which is a modern English version of our own Western Rite Liturgy.

But God hasn’t released me to convert back to Anglicanism, and I don’t see Him doing so.

This is because the Orthodox claim that there is no Salvation outside The Church.

They mean The Orthodox Church, not some generic church or denomination.

Once you’ve been exposed to this claim / teaching, you really can’t unlearn it or be “unexposed” to it.

Do I think all my Anglican friends on both sides of this fence are “outside the church?”

Well, they are outside The Orthodox Church OFFICIALLY, but I think of them as being imperfectly joined to it at some level, and some of them as being closer to God than I am.  Maybe most of them being that way.

Unlike them, I’m accountable for what I know.  For me, I believe God originally founded One Visible  Church.  I believe this was His unchanging plan and design.  The Orthodox Church claims to be that Visible Church, and the claim is a sound one that can be backed up by history and sound doctrine.

I’m hanging with the Anglicans due to family and necessity.  Right now, it is helpful to me to supplement my Christian life with these two closer in parishes that compliment what I am already doing.

I still have hopes of being an Ambassador for Orthodoxy, but I know my Anglican friends are happy and content where they are.  So I accept them for who they are and rejoice in our commonalities.

I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy out of restlessness and necessity.  Salvation was offered there and I was having a dickens of a time finding it elsewhere.

But I Loved Anglicanism from my heart.  That love has never gone away, and probably never will.  That’s why I’m Western Rite, Liturgy of Saint Tikhon.

Sometimes you have to stick with what you really and deeply love.

This keeps your heart from getting too hard or discouraged.

It could take decades before conservative Anglicans convert to the Orthodox Church.  Two much negotiation and groundwork remains to be laid before that happens, in my opinion and experience.

In the meantime I will absorb the blessings I’m allowed to from my Anglican friends, and refrain from the ones my Church does not allow.  When I go forward with crossed arms to receive a blessing from Anglican and Episcopal priests, I believe I receive a blessing because they are still Icons of Christ.  Praying a Liturgy practically identical to my own conveys its own blessings, even when I can’t commune where I pray it when I’m “away from home.”

The Orthodox Western Rite is good, and a blessing, but I believe it can be and should be better.

If we make it better and more welcoming, I think it will be better for everyone.  Not compromised, but more user friendly and welcoming.  Not a rite more liberal / progressive, but one slightly more flexible and a tad more up to date.  Modern English finely done would be a good start.

Just my opinion, as of right now. There are reasons more Anglicans don’t convert, and some of those remain on us. If we “passed the peace” in our Western Rite services, that would forge deeper connections and help as well. Little things like these really aren’t little things at all. We need to learn this, IMO.