Five and a half months into the pandemic, my family still find ourselves earning the title "Most Cautious People We Know". We still haven't attended a liturgy as a family since the first week of March. The last time we attended church at all was Forgiveness Vespers. Our parish's safety standards, while not trivial, are still not to the degree that would induce us to return. In reality, at least at this juncture while I am still working to improve my own Covid risk factors, church will continue to elude us as long as it continues indoors. And let's face it, no one's going to be offering outdoor Liturgy in Texas during the month of August.

Since I posted previously about this topic, I've received not a hint of solidarity from any Orthodox Christians I know (save two friends I directly sought out feedback from), despite my site analytics telling me the post did at least make some minor rounds. The awkward silence can possibly be attributed to the fact that a majority of my Orthodox acquaintances, if not scandalized by the prospect of multiple Communion spoons, are more likely to remain quiet about the subject than to join the debate or "take sides". But the silence is thick in my corner of American Orthodoxy nevertheless, and makes one feel isolated. I also hate to think of my own venturing of comments on this topic as an act of "taking sides", per se, rather than a positive instructive impulse in response to friends who are encountering a spiritual stumbling block. Indeed, the thrust of my aforementioned post was nothing more than to say, "This isn't the stumbling block you thought it was. We're ok. You're ok. Breathe a little. Maybe get off the internet and quit listening to that pet podcast."

To the imaginary people who follow this blog, I have an announcement: more content is coming. Yesterday evening, I deleted my Facebook. Not just deactivated, but actually deleted. I'd been battling through a years-long love/hate relationship with the platform for a host of reasons, but the collision of a pandemic, nationwide race riots, and a presidential re-election campaign heightened the multidimensional awfulness of Facebook to a degree that the decision to finally and permanently leave the place became quite easy. I expect to fill the increased free time at least partially with more reading and writing than I've devoted energy to in the past, so it's likely I'll be publishing here more frequently in the months to come.

When I was received into the Orthodox Church in 2015, my godfather half-jokingly told me that I was now prohibited from speaking about the faith for seven years. The stereotype behind the joke is that converts to Orthodoxy--especially Evangelical converts--often tend to become insufferable know-it-alls to their new, "cradle" Orthodox brethren. In that spirit, I have dutifully refrained from publicly voicing my thoughts and opinions on various hot topics within the Church, partly out of respect for my cradle brothers and sisters, but also as an exercise in humility. After all, the very fact of my decision to become Orthodox speaks to a reality that should mark all of our behavior, our thoughts, and our words as regards matters internal to our lives in the Orthodox Church: there is always much to learn. But having offered this disclaimer, it also needs stating that silence isn't a virtue unto itself. Oftentimes we must learn by speaking. In doing so, we can open ourselves to needed correction and so continue our journey of spiritual learning. Alternately, we can bless others with a different perspective, and God willing, to their edification. I pray that what follows does not run afoul of that goal, and I invite any clergy to rein me in if my observations miss the mark.

Among all the things I've learned since becoming Orthodox on April 4, 2015, perhaps the most humbling lesson has been this: liturgy is rarely a time of worship for parents of small children. That reality is magnified the more children you have, which in the case of my wife and I, is five. Well, four young children (ages 2-7), with a 12-year-old who bears her elder status with at least a small amount of tolerance. I admit to losing many hours over the last five years to resentment about this difficulty, especially when well-meaning friends of older generations, who've never born my burden, console me that, "This is your present cross. This is your form of worship." I can assure you, I'm not worshipping. As such, I'm afraid my wife and I have probably born these many weeks of liturgical absence better than most.

The older of my two adopted sisters, Mary Grace, died nine days ago of a drug overdose in a hotel outside of Houston, TX. There is absolutely no way to convey the depth of this tragedy to anyone who was not close to Mary throughout her life, though a precious few friends and extended family have an inkling of the loss. The untimeliness of Mary's death, even the manner of it, was simultaneously shocking and anticipated. Her life, which was marked by joy in the early years but almost total heartbreak as an adult, made her funeral preparations a challenge to her family. My Dad, brother, and I did our best, between each of our funeral remarks, to balance honor of her with honesty about the hard lessons of her life. Below are my own remarks, with minor edits to the draft I read at Mary's funeral.

I was recently asked to serve my parish's bookstore ministry by writing a blurb in the church's monthly email newsletter in hopes of driving more foot traffic to the store after Liturgy on Sundays. For my inaugural effort, I did a high-level overview of Fr Andrew Stephen Damick's Orthodoxy & Heterodoxy: Finding the Way to Christ in a Complicated Religious Landscape. My "hook" was an assertion that Orthodox Christians in the deeply pluralistic West bear the burden of 1 Peter 3:15 much more heavily than do their brothers and sisters in historically Orthodox lands, and even more heavily than other Western Christians due to the rather exclusive nature of Orthodox historical claims. "Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you," urges the Apostle Peter to his readers. I've gotten to thinking in the days since writing the above blurb about how I might answer if thusly called to account, and this post is an effort to flesh out that account prior to being put on the spot. And frankly, I am prone to calling myself to account on a semi-frequent basis, so what follows is something of how I tend to answer the challenge.

Some years ago now (I can't recall how many), the headlines one morning were filled with news of church bombings in Egypt. There have been so many in the last handful of years that I can no longer remember if it was Christmas or Easter, or some other high feast day of the Coptic Church. In any case, I somehow came upon an Arabic report about the event that had been translated into English. In it, Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria, leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church at the time was asked to comment on the attack which had left multiple ancient churches battered and blood-soaked from all the dead and injured. While the event had stoked the outrage of Western Christians, Pope Shenouda spoke only of his sorrow for the darkened souls of the terrorists, and even pleaded with them to embrace the love of Christ so that they might even embrace their victims as brothers and sisters (my paraphrase because I can no longer find the report online). My heart had never been on the receiving end of so searing an indictment, and nor has it since.

As I assume occasionally happens with other Christians whose minds are especially active, today I struggled with doubts about my faith. While the details of those doubts are not important for this post, it's fair to say that a majority of my doubts these days essentially distill down to a difficulty accepting the probability of the claims of the Gospel. In other words, how likely is it that the classic Christian claims about Jesus' life and nature(s) are in fact true? Sometimes God is not subtle about how He addresses my doubts.

In 2005, I was gifted a book called Slander, by Ann Coulter. There's no other way of describing my experience of reading that book than to say that it was responsible for my political birth, for good and for ill. I learned from Ann that mainstream media is agenda driven, not facts driven. I also learned from her that historians, like scientists, are generally not unbiased observers. They bring political philosophies and personal hobby horses to bear on events of the past and present. As obvious as these things are to most adults,  these were world shaking revelations to me in 2005. "Truth is everywhere at risk!" I realized, and set about a self-appointed quest to contend for its preservation in my own small ways.