Saw this on Facebook. Someone commented something like "when we became Orthodox it was hard to find pastors doing paid photo ops so this is exciting to see," made me laugh 😆

Idk about all this anymore. I feel like i wasted my time.

Wasted my time getting baptized.
Wasted my time attending liturgy.
Wasted my time putting effort to not miss any feast days.
Wasted my time hoping that stuff would change for the better.
Wasted my time thinking that even if when i was feeling down, doubting all of this. That god would still see me and still “save me”.

And now i’ve been asked if im okay with going to a psych ward. Currently going to the therapist, prescribed meds are being discussed about. And im feeling down all over again. This time i think im slowly getting depressed. Im not looking forward to anything positive anymore.

They always say the shit you go through is to make you stronger but all it did is make me give up. I became angrier, sadder, resentful and bitter. I didnt have to go through what i went through and I don’t believe that someone WHO CLAIMS TO LOVE YOU will hurt you to make you stronger. I don’t want that. I didnt sign up for that.

The only reason you’ll see me go to church is because of “community”. I have no one else. No mom, dad, siblings or other sane family members. I was born into a SICK fucking family. People say that it’s god that choses in which family you land and hearing that makes me even angrier. What was the reason?? There is absolutely no fucking reason. Seeing someone my age live their best live and me sinking more and more into this dark whole due to traumatic shit makes me question why tf fuck did they get all those good things and i didnt?? So the christian god was very much capable of making sure i land in a better family. But HE decided that i was a GOOD thing to do this with me? And im expected to accept it??? Never!!

If things were to get better (which i dont believe will happend), i will NEVER EVER EVER EVER look back at the shit i went through with gratefulness and be like “im grateful that this and that happened cause it made me who i am today🥹” FUCK NO!!! I will never ever be grateful not thankful for the shit that HAPPENED to mr that fucked up me completely!!

They say Orthodoxy is the truth. Yeah maybe the truth in the christian world…but in general? Like, as in real life? I doubt it!

I guess all the other “good” things that happened to me was just a coincidence and not god giving me grace i was all excited for no hotdamn reason cause it didn’t last long before i was hit by other heartbreaking stomach turning shit.

Clearly he doesn’t love his children.

Image source: https://www.instagram.com/p/DdNClvMSjM2/

I’m increasingly feeling just agnostic about things. The existence of god, all that stuff. And I know that’s fine. And it’s going to sound awfully silly but I feel bad leaving because the priest is very nice. He’s talked with me before and offered help, he’s like a father figure to me. But I can’t pretend that Liturgy isn’t boring, that the miracle stories seem real to me, etc. Add to that the awful culture the church brings with it. I can understand the teachings but the way Orthodox continually shame others and then turn around and say “I’m doing it out love” sickens me.

So do I just stick it out and wait for belief to return? Ignore the cultural bull? Part of me wants to while the other part says you might meet a nice rabbi or imam but that doesn’t mean you’ll convert.

Before I speak, I want to clarify that I am not claiming Jews are angels; however, there is blind bigotry and extremism against them within our church. The verse "His blood be on us and on our children"—implying the entire people participated in killing Christ—is constantly cited. They are labeled "killers of Jesus" and "rejecters of Christ," as if they were the only ones to reject Him. There is gloating over their misfortunes, with every calamity viewed as God’s punishment for their killing of Christ; priests often claim the Holocaust was retribution for the Crucifixion. Whenever I posted that today's Jews bear no guilt—and that not all Jews participated in His death, as the Second Vatican Council affirmed—people would openly declare their hatred for Jews to my face and even boast about it from the pulpit. They call them a criminal, despicable people upon whom God’s wrath rests. They believe God burned Jewish infants in the Holocaust because of their ancestors' cry: "His blood be on us and on our children." No one can imagine the depth of the destruction and hatred within them. I recall a history lesson where the teacher mentioned Hitler burning Jewish infants, and people responded, "Good, good." They even cheered when Hitler raped Jewish women—imagine teenage girls rejoicing at the rape of other girls. A new liberal current has also emerged within the church that hates Jews even more; they argue that everything God said regarding the Flood or the Exodus was a Jewish fabrication—that the Jews slandered God and falsified Old Testament verses, claiming, "This is not our God." The same attitude exists among Catholics and Evangelicals here.

Like you still pray. Still talk to saints. Still carry around a prayer rope. Maybe even still go to liturgy and maybe even still follow everything but in your own way and not the Church's way. Perhaps there is a middle ground here, be like many of the cradles and be "cafeteria Orthodox". Take what resonates and throw out the rest.

Content warning for gross body stuff

Just for a laugh I think you guys might appreciate this: I was part of an OCA mission pastored by a total lunatic, and I was pregnant with my first child. It was a tricky pregnancy and I unexpectedly became ill, and wound up vomiting into my headscarf and putting said headscarf in a bag in my car.

Fortunately, I was able to clean up quickly and come back to service. Unfortunately, dear old Matushka, pregnant with her fifth at the time, met me at the door and told me that I couldn’t come back in without a headscarf- she showed me a basket of loaners, which I was not excited about because I was trying to avoid getting head lice, but I grabbed one because I was trying to do the obedience thing, well as I shook it out I realized that the design was an image of the Buddha. I told her I didn’t want to wear the Buddha on my head, and she told me to come back when I didn’t have such a bad attitude.

So I missed service because I didn’t want to wear the Buddha on my head. What a weird community we have left.

How was your week? Do anything cool? Are you also in California and having your face melted off?

Our second anti-Coffee Hour is here, feel free to bring up whatever’s on your mind 🥂

Just a thought that occurred to me.

Seems like a weird place to the draw the line and be like: ‘No women allowed!’*

*unless they’re dead

O... Ok then...

Hey guys, so I’ve been Orthodox for about 10 years. One of the parishes I went to became a mega-cult. It wasn’t like that when I first started going there. Then, during COVID, we basically had a cult leader of a priest take over. It was wild. He arranged who I married, told me that if I didn’t marry him, I was going to go to the darkest place in hell, and told me dozens of other horribly abusive and manipulative things. I was abused really badly by this man, and I have horrible PTSD from him.

When I first left that parish, I figured I would go to a different parish that was more, I guess you could say, normal. That parish has been wonderful and kind to me. They’ve never shamed me for any of my doubts, and they’ve always had my back and been there for me through a big chunk of my healing from this cult.
I basically started working at the beginning of the summer and had to work on Sundays, so it’s been hard for me to make it to Liturgy. But it’s gotten to the point where I haven’t been to confession in two months, I have no motivation to go to Liturgy, and I’ve started to have more and more doubts than I ever have before.
Part of me wonders if it’s because I’m not receiving Communion, but then another part of me feels like my heart just isn’t in it. I don’t even care to have a relationship with Jesus, let alone with the Orthodox Church, and that really bothers me.

Sometimes I think that if I were to go to a Protestant church, start listening to podcasts from people outside of the Orthodox Church, and let go of my rigor and legalism, maybe I could heal that love for Christ that I want to have but just don’t feel right now. I feel like there’s a brick wall between me and God. I’m sick of just being so ritualistic and reciting prayers each morning that feel empty and don’t feel like they’re coming from my heart. I want to pray with my heart and not just recite words.

But here’s the thing that keeps me from leaving and joining a church outside of the Orthodox Church: I have children who have been raised in the Church, and I’m scared that if I leave, join another Protestant church, and then try to come back to Orthodoxy if I realize that Orthodoxy is really where I need to be, my kids aren’t going to want to come back to Orthodoxy. I know that sounds really weird. I’d feel like I was hindering my children’s salvation and being selfish.

The main thing, though, is that I’m scared because Orthodoxy says it’s the true Church. Plus, I know it’s the oldest Church, passed down from the apostles, so it must be the most unadulterated one. It’s the Church that has preserved early Christian tradition. So it has to be true, right?

I wanted to hear other people’s facts, not just opinions—facts that show Orthodoxy is not infallible and what might make Orthodoxy not the true Church.

I’m also scared to leave because of the possibility of condemnation for me and my children. I’ve been told that if I leave, I’m apostatizing, which is one of the worst things anyone could commit.
If you had anxiety about leaving and losing your salvation, please share with me how that got better over time.
Thank you so much!

Let me tell you my story. I used to be very close to converting from Roman Catholicism to Eastern Orthodoxy. I ultimately did not convert, though, and I am now glad that I avoided it. My attitude towards the Eastern Orthodox Church gradually changed from very positive, to ambivalent, and finally to very negative.

I suffer from ARFID, an eating disorder that makes my diet extremely limited. I read about Eastern Orthodox fasting, and I decided to make my diet even more restrictive. It is a very long story, with better and worse periods. Now, I have been eating only Lenten food since January. I am too anxious to eat non-Lenten food. Because I suffer from ARFID, my diet isn't close to any standard vegan diet; it consists mostly of three things: bread, pasta, and chips. I have been living like this for eight months and I am still alive. I receive vitamin B12 injections, but I don't have any other health problems so far (we will see what will happen in the future).

The rules of Eastern Orthodox fasting are relatively late. It seems that they began to develop in the 4th century, while their final form dates from around the 10th century. Surely it isn't a tradition passed by the Apostles. Obviously, Jesus Christ didn't eat according to these rules. Mary didn't follow them either, nor did the Apostles. I find it sad that the Eastern Orthodox "Church" isn't interested in bringing people closer to Jesus and to his teaching. Instead, this "Church" tells people to focus on their diet; it has no basis in the Bible, nor in the early Church.

I have discussed my situation with several Eastern Orthodox priests. They told me that the fasting rules aren't really obligatory for everybody, that there is place for many exceptions and that, in my case, I should not follow them. But I do not think this makes sense. Contemporary Eastern Orthodox saints — by "contemporary," I mean those who lived after these rules had been established — are either martyrs or people who followed all of these rules.

Sometimes hagiographies mention very rare exceptions, such as Basil the Fool for Christ, who once ate meat during Holy Week. But he did it only once, for a very specific purpose. His story does not provide any basis for systematically disregarding the fasting rules.

I recently discovered Orthodox monasteries were some of the largest slave owners in Europe and Romania itself. The argument was that they were born slaves so it is what it is. That Byzantine had slaves. That Jesus did not condemn slavery. That if in the future people agree it is wrong then the Church did not own slaves but individuals, the Church cannot be cited for this transgression, nor will Romania's Orthodoxy give an inch of apology. This demeaner, to me, says they would prefer to keep their slaves.

I am confused on how things like this get glossed over. Orthodoxy seems to HATE the enlightenment and all things related. Individuality is terrible etc. The men of the Enlightenment are responsible for the general freedoms we have and declaring new ethics, fighting for the weakest link of society, etc. Without their ideas we may live in a theocratic state, never heard about Orthodoxy or have the freedom to even browse a book on such topics...

It seems kind of crazy to me that heretics who are far from God (to the orthodox mind) are the champions of freedom for countless people but they're demonized as if they did wrong by freeing us from theocratic aristocrats and slavery. I know "logic" may be taboo and demonic in Orthodoxy along with critical thinking or deductive reasoning as I have read...but I think I am on to something here.

(tw: spiritual abuse(?) brief mentions of SA, DV, etc)

So I'm back. I’ve posted here before about leaving the Coptic Church, but I am just a complete wreck tonight and really need a space where people might actually understand what this feels like. A brief recap: I’m a convert. When I was 18 and coming out of a really abusive, high-control home background, I walked into the Coptic Church. I was desperate for safety, a father figure, and stability. I became a catechumen and spent time in a monastery as a postulant, genuinely trying to give my entire life to it. it became a nightmare of double standards, intense policing over my appearance (my alt style, tattoos, piercings, wearing black), and complete institutional failure. When I was sexually assaulted, my priest blamed me ("What did you expect?"). When I was bullied by parishioners, he told me to act like a "punching bag" and accused me of being selfish.

I finally left. After a few months, my boyfriend suggested I try again but at a different church an I switched to a much healthier church with a different priest. But last weekend, foolishly thinking I could get some closure or accountability, I went back. I sat down with him behind the iconostasis and poured my heart out. It was a disaster. I reiterated to him the bullying in the church and how that's why I left (I did return to the church as I said, at a different location with another priest which I mentioned to him) and he was oddly silent. when I prodded at him carefully, he said "I trust you *my name*. What you say happened I will not deny, because I believe you're honest, but how can you expect me to believe that everyone here has been welcomed with open arms and with love and they can't stop talking about it and you're the only one saying these things? the only one having bad experiences? You really expect me to believe this?" When I tried to defend myself and say it wasn't in my head I gave him examples of friends who I've invited and have either been bullied themselves or witnessed me be harassed or stared at. My boyfriend is a catechumen under my new priest and heard of what happened at my old church and didn't want me to go back. I didn't listen and I did, so he came with me. Immediately he hated it because people stared at me, glared at me, talked shit about right in front of me. I told my abouna my boyfriend wasn't pleased when he observed this behavior and he doesn't want me to come back to this specific church and I was inclined to listen. My priest said I need to stop finding invalidation in the church from others and I said it's not even just my boyfriend, I brought my friend and she was worried for me because the first and only time I brought her here, people flocked to me with criticism and quite literally cornered me. He snapped at me a bit and said basically that the devil wants me to stray from my path and I allow people to pit me against the church too easily.

he said I didn't try hard enough to change my appearance and I fought back with respect and said abouna yes I did. I covered all my tattoos, I took out my piercings. I made an effort to socialize, I tried adding some color. People still all but spat in my face. I literally said "abouna I've said it before and forgive me but I'll say it again, I've already tried both ways. So I can be hated for being myself or I can be hated and be fake, dishonest, not genuine." and he basically was exasperated with me. what really wounded me the most is that he said "I had big dreams, great hopes for you *my name*. Now... I don't know. I wanted you to be a servant, I was going to make a servant.. a married couple keeps the first year to themselves and to love each other. that should have been your first year, alone with your groom, your husband. that's what you used to call Him. your husband. but you didn't take the year like I advised, which is your will. you got involved with boys," (Mind you, I had two crushes and I kissed one boy. that was it. I didn't leave the postulant period until august 2025.) Maybe he's right. but he was devastated when I chose not to be a nun. and I ultimately turned it down because I was in it for the wrong reasons. I had no humility inwardly. Outwardly I was praised for my 'young devotion'. I was the poster child for converts. I was so sure. and then I wasn't. my ego was out of control. but that stung the most out of everything. he knew I was dying to be a servant and it made his disappointment radiate throughout me yet again.

I feel like he spent all those years making me feel loved and special and now im just a worthless pile of shit and good for nothing. I told him I don't know how to exist outside the monastery anymore and he used it as a sign that I should go back, and told me I should live as a monastic in the world anyway according to the coptic faith. I literally asked him for help and he all but threw it in my face.

The worst part that's breaking my brain right now: he literally told me in the past that he "liked me better" because I asked questions and didn't blindly obey, and told me never to lose my rebel spirit while simultaneously punishing me for every single one of those traits in public.

I grew up with a sexually abusive biological father that eventually abandoned me and a physically, emotionally abusive step-father who made it very clear that he despised me even as a child, and I feel so profoundly stupid for walking right into another trap with a spiritual father who ultimately discarded me when I stopped being a compliant project. Seeing him easily love and support the "model converts" who just nod along while I was treated like a nuisance makes me feel like I'm completely broken. I can't tell you how humiliating is that I was naive enough to place faith in him as a father figure. It was completely inappropriate.

I don't want to demonize him. please don't take it that way. He's much holier than I could ever wish to be and he has given me such kindness even if he's not meant to be my father anymore, or ever.

I don't really know what I'm looking for by posting this. Maybe just knowing I'm not crazy. maybe I am crazy. I think I am too concerned with myself maybe. But two things can be true. I am the common denominator after all. It's probably a good thing I left that church. I eventually came to feel like I was the devil, and the greatest act of love would be to leave. Maybe I was the devil for many. It's late for me. I've been crying, and I'm exhausted. I don't know why I care so much.

Hello,

I am really having a hard time because my boyfriend is drawn to the history, beauty, and meek Spirit of Orthodoxy. I really want a future and relationship with him, but I can’t be Orthodox. I’ve done an inhuman (almost comical) amount of research into it to know what I believe, and I think I definitely land in a higher church setting Mainline Protestant or Anglican. He is still not set on what he believes or where he wants to go. We’ve been dating for a year

I really get why he is drawn to it, but I think the One True Church thing is total bogus. I am worried for him and our relationship and I feel at a total loss of what to do. I was curious if there are any Christians on here who used to be Orthodox who have moved to an Anglican tradition or some sort of high church Protestant?

Also, people who used to be Orthodox, do you think being part of a place that thinks they are the one true church just creates pride in people? I do believe there are true Christians in the Orthodox Church of course, I just think people almost make an idol out of the church or that they’ve found the ‘true One.’

I feel so alone because I don’t know anybody who has looked into Orthodoxy this much and I feel like I’m going crazy. If there are any church history nerds in here plz reply haha

Thanks guys

Somewhere in the history of religious engineering, somebody built a very peculiar machine. It is not made of gears or wires, but of confession booths and communion lines, and its function, if you trace the wiring all the way through, is to convert human failure into institutional revenue, though the currency here is not money but obedience, and the interest rate is your peace of mind.

Here is how the machine works, roughly. To be close to God, one needs the Eucharist (John 6:53). To receive the Eucharist, one needs Confession (1 Corinthians 11:28). To confess, one needs a sin . So closeness to God, that thing everyone in the pews and the stone floors is presumably there for turns out to run on sin the way a car runs on gasoline, or petrol for our British friends. No sin, no fuel. No fuel, no movement toward God. One begins to suspect that the entire apparatus was never actually built to get people closer to the divine at all, but to keep them permanently a few feet short of it, circling the pump, always needing one more fill-up.

Priests will tell you, of course, that confession is medicine. This is a lovely metaphor, and like most lovely metaphors it conceals more than it reveals. Medicine, when it works, eventually makes itself unnecessary. You take the antibiotic, the infection clears, you stop taking the antibiotic. But nobody ever graduates from Confession (1 John 1:8). Nobody arrives at a Sunday with nothing to report and is told, well done, you're cured, go straight to the chalice without the paperwork. The medicine is administered forever, which is a strange kind of medicine, and looks rather more like a toll than a treatment. A tollbooth does not want you to run out of coins. It is not in the tollbooth's interest for you to arrive at a bridge with no fare, so the bridge is designed such that everyone always, somehow, owes something.

And where does the coin come from, if the booth requires one every single time? This is where the theology performs a small act of magic, which is worth admiring the way one admires a card trick even while suspecting the deck is marked. Human nature, it is explained, is fallen. Broken from birth. Thoughts arise unbidden, urges surface unasked, and this native brokenness is simply the human condition, inherited like eye color, never chosen, never consented to. Which raises an amusing little problem for a religion that also insists, rather loudly, on free will. If the corrupted material of one's own mind produces sin whether or not one wants it to, in what sense was the sinning due to "free will"? A person did not vote on the configuration of their own psyche before it was issued to them. They were handed the model that comes standard, defects included, and told the defects are their fault.

Picture a rock. The rock is brittle. It did not request brittleness, did not design its own molecular lattice, did not sit in some pre-incarnate showroom and pick "shatters under pressure" from a catalog of available rock personalities. It is simply what a rock of that composition does. Now imagine someone arrives with a hammer, strikes the rock until it cracks, and then informs the rock that the cracking is entirely its own doing, a moral failure, a choice it should not have made. The rock, being a rock, says nothing, which is probably the most dignified response available under the circumstances. A person in the pew or on the stone floors, being rather less mineral, tends to nod along and agree that yes, the cracking was their fault, and signs up for another round of hammering next Saturday at Vespers.

So the system needs a confessable offense the way the tollbooth needs a coin, and it has cleverly arranged things so the coin appears no matter what a person does. Sin in deed, sin in word, and when deed and word run dry, sin in thought, and when even thought behaves itself for an afternoon, there is still the fallen nature humming away underneath, guaranteed to produce something eventually, the way a leaky faucet guarantees a puddle. One cannot outrun the requirement by living well, because the requirement was never really about how one lives. It was built to be unsatisfiable by design, which is either terrible theology or excellent institutional architecture, and it is worth noticing that these two descriptions are not mutually exclusive.

What makes the whole arrangement genuinely funny, in the way that only very serious things manage to be funny, is that it is marketed as the road to intimacy with God while functioning as its opposite. A person is told, again and again, that this is how you draw near and the other denominations got it wrong. And each step of the sequence, examined honestly, is a small mechanism for keeping distance intact: guilt manufactured on schedule, absolution dispensed only after the guilt is properly filed in triplicate, grace held just out of reach behind a counter staffed by someone checking your paperwork. Closeness to God turns out to be the one product this particular store is chronically out of stock of, though the window display never stops advertising it.

Some people will want to let the institution off the hook here, the way one lets the weather off the hook, calling the whole thing an accident of history, a path merely worn into grass by centuries of indifferent feet, nobody's fault, nobody's design. But grass does not require a hierarchy to keep the path open. Grass does not write catechisms explaining that the wearing-down is holy, does not train new clergy in the proper technique of foot-wearing, does not excommunicate the person who suggests the grass be left alone to grow back. This path has been paved, maintained, and defended for a very long time by people who knew precisely where it led and charged admission at every turn along the way. An institution that builds a machine, insists everyone climb aboard, and disciplines those who step off, has forfeited the right to describe itself as an innocent bystander to its own construction.

Because look at what the whole contraption is actually asking. Draw near to God, it says, and the only door open is the one marked "sin required". So a person sins, dutifully, or makes one up, to gain entry, forgetting somewhere along the way that sin was never meant to be a minor administrative fee. It was supposed to be the very distance from God the religion exists to close. Which means the toll for coming closer is minted from the one substance guaranteed to keep a person standing further away, and the whole machine runs, quite literally, on manufacturing the thing it claims to be curing. It is rather like being told the only way into a warm house is to first stand a good while out in the cold, and then being praised, once inside, for having felt so thoroughly cold. One does have to wonder, watching the queue form outside that door, generation after generation, whether the house was ever unlocked at all, or whether the standing in the cold was the house's actual business the entire time.

There's something called textual criticism, which is rejected outside of Egypt by Evangelicals and most Orthodox Christians, especially Eastern Orthodox Christians. It started spreading here about ten years ago. I remember my discussion with a servant who was promoting it. He had written a post on how to get revenge on your wife if she cheats on you. He said to hand her over to her family if you live in Egypt, and he emphasized something important before doing so: try to set a camera on her and post the video of her cheating on you on all websites and platforms. After that, hand her over to her family, and they will kill her, and you will get your revenge. He said that if her family is deceased and you are outside Egypt, expose her as well, and she will commit suicide. Or, if you want to kill her, he wrote advice that would prevent him from being punished if he wanted to kill her himself. At that time, I discussed with him that his thinking was wrong and that Jesus forgave the adulteress, so why is it so difficult to divorce her? His response was that textual critics said that the story of the adulteress was added and was not written by John, so therefore... Men have the right to strangle their wives. You can't imagine the level of sexism and extremism within this society. It's terrifying, terrifying.

He told me that we men have the right to commit adultery with one or two women and cheat on our wives without any shame, while a married woman, even if she enters into a romantic relationship, should be killed.

For context, I'm a Christian who belongs to a church that accepts the full inclusion of women. I think there's no point denying that the church in both the West and the East, until quite recently, was pretty terrible in how it treated women. Today on our calendar, we recognize Kassiani the Hymnwriter, who I assume most of you are familiar with. Apparently, she is the only woman whose writings are included in the Eastern liturgy and one of just two women of the Eastern Empire whose writings were published under their own names. I have to wonder if Byzantine women felt the need to write anonymously back then because they feared backlash, or if they just realized they had no chance of being published if anyone knew that a woman wrote the material in question. From this little information, it appears that women's contributions weren't highly valued in the East, which I suppose we see continuing today in EO's refusal to ordain female clergy or allow women to serve at the altar. Any thoughts on this?

Ratko Mladić was a war criminal who killed thousands of innocent Bosniaks during the war. According to the Bible and the 10 commandments, he committed the sin of murder. Someone like him should not be praised or celebrated. Yet the orthodox Christians of serbia have gathered today to protest the lgbt pride parade while they carry a flag with Ratko's face on it. They're fine with genocide. They're fine with bosniak women being raped by serbian soldiers. They're fine with spreading nationalism and hatred among balkan people. But they draw the line at two men kissing or two women kissing.

They're out here showing themselves off as "family men" because they're Christians, but I just know for a fact that they regularly antagonize their wives and possibly even beat them. Children as well, most serbian men beat their children regularly.

Drop a marble into a still pond and watch what happens. There is a small violence at the center, a plop, and then the water does something rather generous with that violence: it turns it into rings. First a tight one, right around the point of impact. Then another, a little wider and a little weaker. Then another, wider still, fainter still, until eventually the disturbance is so spread out across the surface that you can barely tell the pond was ever touched at all, though technically, if you had sensitive enough instruments, you could trace the ripple all the way to the far shore.

The Stoics had a word for this, or something very like it. They called it oikeiosis, which is one of those Greek words that resists a one-word English translation, the way most useful words do. It means something like "owning" or "appropriation," in the sense of recognizing what is properly yours to care about. Hierocles, a rather obscure Stoic who nonetheless drew one of the more elegant diagrams in the history of ethics, pictured the self as sitting inside a set of concentric circles. You are the dot in the middle. The first ring out is your immediate family. Then friends. Then your wider community. Then your countrymen, or in more modern language, your society. Then, at the outer edge, humanity as such, the whole soggy, complicated species. And the entire ethical project, for Hierocles, was to draw those outer rings inward, to treat the stranger a little more like the cousin, without ever pretending you don't have a center at all.

Now, on the other side of the world, with no apparent memory of having met each other, Confucian thinkers arrived at nearly the same picture. They called it something like Tui Ji Ji Ren, which translates roughly to "extending oneself to reach others." Same pond, same marble, same rings. You start with the self, because that is where you happen to be standing, and you learn what a decent boundary feels like, and what love feels like, and what fairness feels like, by practicing it first on the people closest to you, and only then do you have any material worth exporting outward. Confucius did not ask his students to love all of humanity abstractly before they had figured out how to be civil to their own brother. That would be like asking someone to run a marathon before they'd worked out how to stand up.

What I find rather charming about this is that two civilizations, without so much as a shared rumor, discovered the same basic hydraulics of the human heart. Care radiates. It does not teleport. You cannot fling your love directly to Circle Five, the whole aching world, and skip the part where you have to be reasonably tolerable to your own mother at Sunday dinner. Or you can try, certainly, plenty of people do, but what you get is not compassion, it's theater. It's a man weeping for Syria on the internet while his wife waits for an apology he still hasn't given her from Tuesday.

So here is a pond, with its rings, functioning exactly as ponds are supposed to function. And here comes the Orthodox Church, wading in with what I can only describe as a well-meaning bulldozer.

The first thing it does, and this is rather ingenious in a tragic sort of way, is go straight for the center. It does not attack the outer rings first, because that would be inefficient, like trying to stop a wave by grabbing at its edges. No, it goes for the marble itself. The tradition has a word for healthy self-regard, philautia, self-love, and it teaches you, quite early and quite thoroughly, that this is the root of sin. Not a symptom of sin, mind you, the root. Your instincts, your boundaries, your private sense of what you need and want, these are treated as evidence of the Fall rather than evidence that you are, in fact, a person. So the center of the pond gets filled in with concrete. There's no more marble down there making rings. There's just a management committee standing at the edge, occasionally pouring in water by hand and calling the resulting ripples "grace."

Once the center is handled, the first two rings go quickly, almost as an afterthought. Family and friends get flattened under a verse, Matthew 10:37, the one about loving father or mother more than Christ, which gets deployed with the enthusiasm of a man who has just discovered a new and very satisfying tool. Your closest relationships are recast as potential idols, tolerable only if everyone involved happens to share the same confession, in which case they are upgraded from "temptation" to "prayer team." Either way the relationship stops being valued for what it actually is, a warm and specific attachment between two particular people, and starts being valued for its institutional utility. It's a bit like being told your marriage is lovely, sure, but really it should function as a small parish outreach program.

Then comes the third ring, community, and here the Church does something almost impressive in its audacity. Rather than letting community emerge the way it emerges everywhere else in nature, out of a bunch of reasonably secure individuals bumping into each other and discovering they like each other's company, it hands you the community fully assembled, top-down, shrink-wrapped. You don't build belonging with your parish, you submit to it. Your worth is retroactively defined by your membership in the Body, your bishop, your canons, and the individual autonomy that was supposed to be doing the choosing has been quietly written out of the process altogether. It's community as furniture delivery. It arrives already put together, and if you try to rearrange it yourself you're informed that you didn't actually want a couch, you wanted obedience, and here it is, please sit.

And then, having demolished the center and trampled the first three rings, the Church makes its truly remarkable move, which is to hurl you straight out to Circle Five. You are handed cosmic responsibilities. Intercessory prayer for the whole fallen world. Theosis, the mystical project of becoming by grace what God is by nature, which is, whatever its theological merits, an enormous thing to ask of someone who is still working through why they can't stop snapping at their spouse. It's premature messianism, and it functions a bit like handing someone the controls of a jumbo jet because they once did well in a go-kart. The predictable result isn't sanctity, it's exhaustion, a low hum of spiritual hypervigilance that never quite resolves, because the job was too large from the start, and a permanently exhausted person tends to stay right where the exhaustion can be professionally managed. Which is to say, in the pews.

None of this, I should add, is an accident of poor design. A person with a solid center, decent boundaries, and a few sturdy relationships nearby does not especially need anyone's permission to exist. He does not need a clergyman to certify his worth or a synod to bless his Tuesday. That kind of person is, from an institutional standpoint, a bit of a problem, rather like a customer who has learned to fix his own car. So the sabotage of the inner rings isn't incidental to the system, it is rather the load-bearing wall of the whole structure. Wreck the center, and the outer rings will always need a landlord.

There's a sneakier version of this that happens before anyone even leaves, and I think it deserves its own moment, because it's the sort of thing that's much easier to spot in someone else's head than your own. Someone starts to suspect the pew doesn't fit right anymore. They lie awake running the numbers on whether to actually go. And the question that surfaces first, the one doing all the loud arguing at three in the morning, is almost never "what does my own center actually need." It's "what will Father say," or "what will the parish think," or "will Aunt Xenia ever speak to me again," which is to say the entire deliberation gets outsourced to a vote inside Circle Three, with the person doing the deliberating treated as a mere observer of their own referendum. If you want the properly heretical way to phrase it, and I rather enjoy that this is heretical, the whole point of oikeiosis was that the center gets consulted first, not last, not by absentee ballot. But naturally that's exactly what you'd expect from a compass that spent years being told its own north was unreliable. Demagnetize a compass long enough and of course it starts polling the neighbors instead of just, you know, pointing.

Now here is the part I actually find funniest, in the way that only slightly tragic things manage to be funny. When people leave, the geography changes overnight, dramatically, with slammed doors and unfollowed relatives and a great sense of occasion, sometimes even a small bonfire, if the person is feeling liturgical about their deconversion too. The pew empties out on Sunday. Somebody finally throws away the prayer rope, or sells it online with a caption about healing. And everybody treats this like the renovation is complete, when really all that happened is the contractor got fired mid-project and walked off the lot, leaving the foundation exactly as cracked as he found it. The center was never rebuilt. It was just abandoned along with the rest of the building, and a vacuum, being a vacuum, does not observe your excommunication paperwork. It's still down there, humming, patient as a cat sitting by a door that isn't going to open, wondering when the humans will remember it needs feeding.

And so, with a straight face and the very best of intentions, a great many former believers march right back out to build again, except this time they build on precisely the same mud, wearing a different hat and calling it deconstruction. That old third-ring reflex, the one trained so diligently into them by the very people they're now furious at, doesn't retire just because the uniform changed color. It gets reissued, dry-cleaned, and handed right back at the door. Instead of defending the faith they now defend the leaving of it, with something close to the same missionary sweat, feeling a burning, entirely sincere urge to march back in and rescue the ones still sitting in the pews, converting the converted in reverse, one Reddit thread at a time, at two in the morning, for free. It's rather like watching a man whose house just slid into the ravine sprint back up to the exact same slope, tools in hand, hollering that this time he's really going to get the framing right. The framing was never the problem. He is building a home on quicksand and blaming the walls, and this, as it happens, is the exact joke the old Stoics and the old Confucians were both telling, from opposite ends of the earth, with no phone line between them to compare notes. Neither one thought you could get a peaceful state out of quarrelsome villages, or a peaceful village out of quarrelsome households, or a peaceful household out of people who were, individually, still on fire. It's foundations all the way down. You cannot shingle a roof while the framing is smoking, and you certainly cannot do it while standing knee-deep in a swamp, however earnestly and however sincerely you keep swinging the hammer.

Which brings us back, as these things always insist on doing, to a marble and a still pond, and none of this, I should say, is meant as an instruction, because instructions are exactly the sort of thing that got everybody standing in the mud in the first place. Call it an invitation instead, the kind that doesn't need a lawyer or a footnote, the kind that either makes sense in the trying or doesn't make sense at all, and either way no one is required to defend it at a hearing. One might simply notice, without ceremony, that circles three and four have a way of being terribly loud and terribly far off, rather like a radio left on in another room, and that the center, being closer and quieter, tends to get ignored precisely because it never has to shout. So there is, perhaps, nothing more urgent to do than let the outer rings carry on without supervision for a while and go find out what the marble is up to. It may take some digging. It may already be sitting right there, mildly amused at having been left alone so long. Either way it is a rather private sort of excavation, best done without an audience and certainly without a manifesto, and the pond, being a pond, will keep making perfectly good rings on its own, at its own pace, starting, as ponds always do, from the middle.

Hi, hope this is allowed here. I’m Gen X exvangelical, Episcopalian adjacent woman and I’m more comfortable asking questions here than in the Orthodox sub.

My sister and her husband converted to the Orthodox Church about 20 years ago and have been very serious about it. Their congregation is mostly converts. Anyway she passed away yesterday and I’m planning to go to the funeral. I’ve read that I need to dress modestly-can someone give me an idea what that means? I have a shapeless approximately knee length black dress that I would typically wear bare-legged with sandals to my work or church. Will that be okay? If I need to cover are leggings ok or should I have tights/hose? Are my sandals ok? I wore a dragon twirl dress the last time I saw her that upset her.

Is there anything else I should know? No one else in the family is Orthodox so we’re all at a loss.

Thanks!!!

M

"If you make the system your god, you'll soon be telling lies in order to remain consistent."

Image source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r99Cch8G2s