Two Sundays ago, I performed what I now call the “Apostolic Shuffle” with my erudite Irish friend. This Apostolic Shuffle involved us carpooling to a nearby city, dropping said friend off at a Catholic Latin Mass, then me driving to Orthodox Divine Liturgy. After our respective liturgies, we rendezvoused at a local coffee shop to do some personal admin work – except Ireland walked from his church to downtown – about 20 minutes – in the merciless, stifling, southern heat (his choice, by the way! I didn’t abandon him). There’s nothing remarkable about these Sunday logistics if religion has always only had suggestive power in your life, or if you’ve never experienced walking in the southern oven in your Sunday best. But if you’ve ever been in a social bubble like mine – of which my Irish friend is a part – then there might be a good reason for you to be surprised. Certain folk in my social geist might describe the activity I’ve just described as religious indifferentism, relativism, or even ecumenism! Some fellows in my geist could, in theory, ask why I’m materially supporting my friend’s attendance of Catholic Mass, when I as an Orthodox Christian believe that liturgy to be schismatic.1

In the apostolic churches, whether Catholic or Orthodox, we believe in total objective truths. Two separate ecclesial bodies cannot both have the fullness of truth. And having fully participated in the traditional Catholic faith, I can from experience say that this shuffle would bring me anathemata in my Roman prime. Firstly, probably a social anathema, and then technically an ecclesial one. There was always a tinge of reactionary piety in the traditional Catholic circles; and this has its uses, to be fair, but most people don’t handle it well – and that’s to be expected from a subtype of piety that’s meant to be useful first, and then maybe sanctifying. So basically, this Apostolic Shuffle does not fit into the traditional Catholic paradigm – to which many of my contemporaries still belong.

But in the process of my conversion to Orthodox Christianity, I learned a very real humility – a humility that I was in dire need of, by the way. I think this is part of why I’ve come to accept something like the Apostolic Shuffle being an OK thing. After zealously believing in the Catholic faith for so many years, and now becoming Orthodox, I have discovered a couple of things alongside humility.

I now have to contend with the fact I believed so strongly in something that I now reject. This type of realization fundamentally sows a healthy distrust of self, without which we’d never be able to sympathize with anybody. I would have taken the sword for the Roman Catholic faith, but now I certainly wouldn’t. That’s humbling. In any case, however, I would lay down my life for Christ – so the crux of the issue was always where Christ is, not whether He is. And really, all Christians battle this question. For most people, this haunting situation happens with lovers and love. How do we contend with loving someone else after leaving someone we thought we’d both live and die for? The question, of course, was never whether we are capable of love, but rather where our love belongs, and where it will be received.

With this new insight into the human spirit, heart, and intellect, I’ve slowly found myself becoming much happier in my own head, and much more charitable toward my neighbor. I understood this to be a kind of signal grace, as it were, from God after months of begging Him to make my ways straight (Proverbs 3:6) and clear in between these two looming churches. Yet during all of these seasons of having toiled and rent my heart’s garments, I noticed my heart becoming quite the more red – warm-blooded and upright, even – and realized that every tear I shed compuncted my heart in a way that was actually productive; each tear inspired rightness within me, whereas typically, the shedding of tears would merely neutralize a sadness. After this revelation to my heart, and at the exact point of understanding, I almost instantly recalled this idea of holy grief in Orthodox Christianity – also known as the gift of tears.

The Gift of Tears & Rationalism

“… the Christian is able to reach by the gift of the Holy Spirit a state of conversion that makes the penitent break down in tears. To weep tears of purification was a duty for anyone serious about greater union with God through mystical contemplation. It was a sign of a complete “cracking” of the false-ego, moving one into new enlightenment and which would be confirmed by the state of constant joyful humility, incessant living consciously out of love for God that we have been calling the “prayer of the heart.” (Inward Stillness, 108-109)

“Before all else, pray to be given tears, that weeping may soften the savage hardness which is in your soul and, having acknowledged your sin unto the Lord (Psalm 31:5), you may receive from Him the remission of sins” (De Oratione 79, #5, 1168D).”

For all intents and purposes, I should not have so quickly recalled what was, at the time, an obscure topic to me. One might call this a coincidence, but it was a full revelation – a culmination of notes into a chord, played on the strings of my heart. It was then made clear that the gift of tears underpins so much of Orthodox Christianity in a sublime subliminal way; and this happening was undoubtedly the signal grace, as it were, from God that whatever the case between papal supremacy, original sin, the Filioque, Matthew 16:18, and whatever else might cloud my mind’s skies, my heart belonged in Orthodoxy, and Orthodoxy in it. Not because of some esoteric argument about ecclesiology, but rather because there, something raw is preserved. In the Orthodox tradition, great minds aren’t excessively concerned with definitions and clarity like in the post-schism Western tradition; but rather, they’re concerned with mystique, sanctity, humility, and wholeness with Christ. Mind you, it is possible to do this in the Catholic West; but the prominence of the scholastic tradition in the modern era has been used to contravene the dying secular culture, so the idea of being able to intellectually know almost anything about the Faith and philosophy remains alive and moving in the minds of young Catholics. Unfortunately, too much certainty on the ground level causes an augering of the heart, whereby the average layperson often cannot functionally differentiate between quality of knowledge of the faith’s facts, and quality of personal sanctity. Although this saddens me, I nearly cannot blame the Catholic West for weaponizing scholastic tools against secular culture. The only issue with such a weaponization is that it simply won’t work in the long run. The dying west is using the same somewhat cold, hard epistemology as the Catholic West, and the Catholic West can’t even preserve its own liturgies, piety, language, law, and clarity – four things which ought to at the absolute very least be preserved and coexist with their subscription to rationalism if they want to have any chance at recovering society. If Catholicism hadn’t basically canonized the rational faculty years ago following Thomas Aquinas, then they’d certainly be dead in the water today with just second class secular rationalism, a mediocre rite, and functional hatred of their forefathers’ ways from the top-down.

This rational augering of the heart often bottlenecked my spiritual development as a Catholic. Unfortunately, proper analysis of which bottleneck was causing me grief was rarely possible in those days. Over the years, I slowly began to realize that my heart chased Byzantine sentiments, but those wiser than me often had mixed responses to my inquiries into Orthodoxy – everything from total dismissal, to low-tier copy-paste apologetics, to people just lending an ear to listen to my struggle. In most cases, no help was to be found. 

As a response to the uninformed bottleneck days, and stuck between Eastern and Western echo chambers, I did what can be best understood as a long-term unofficial experiment. With almost no outside influence in either direction, I could try a tradition-mix and see if that’d help satisfy both the Roman and the Greek within me. This experiment consisted of private Eastern prayers (consistent and ancient) and preferences, and a public Western piety (predictable and familiar) – the latter mainly expressed through a Latin Mass liturgical life. Over time, however, this tradition mixer made me realize that I still love my Western heritage, but it had been changed a little bit too much, and in strange ways. After some time of living a Latin liturgical life and quasi-Eastern private prayer life, I began to notice the accretions and the odd devotions. I found comfort in the idea of Eastern prayers and liturgy as refuges from the liturgically schizophrenic Novus Ordo Missae/Tridentine Mass nightmare in Catholicism – which, by the way, some people are very good at ignoring on purpose; but I just couldn’t make myself ignore it for long. That such a schizophrenia exists within one rite undercuts the fundamentals of Catholicism; so LARPing as a medieval peasant who just submits to his local ordinary and doesn’t have internet access – a cognitive reframing that some people really do to cope with the nightmare – just doesn’t work for me. It’s intellectually dishonest, and you’d think that if anyone cared about remaining intellectually honest, it would be the Roman Catholics. This moved my heart toward Orthodoxy, with a kind of frowning, sad-like glare back in my rearview mirror.

Weastern Orthodoxy

As the research continued – especially in the last year and a half – I began to notice that my sentiments weren’t per se more Byzantine like I’d thought. Now, this isn’t a conversation I’m going to have with everybody. Getting to the bottom of things is exhausting, and nuance isn’t built for small talk. I’m calling back to the distortions and accretions of the Catholic Roman rite, i.e. Holy Mass, and its associated private devotions. I’ve been lightly scraping at the ancient English and Irish Christian traditions, both of which we simply assume to have been Roman Catholic. It’s not that simple, though. This assumption forces people to look back along the wrong timeline. There are works which strongly suggest that although their traditions were Western and Holy Mass-esque as far as aesthetics and select devotions go, their mythos and religious heart was much more Eastern – with some English Christian legends even still circulating in the modern day Orthodox Church. Works like Mirk’s Festial, an English collection of homilies from the 15th century, and the Golden Legend, a 1265 AD hagiographical work, suggest that there was a cultural threading of what we would now call “Eastern” ideas in the isles, and perhaps also mainland Western Europe. This has revealed to me not that “England was Orthodox,” but rather that the modern Orthodox seem to hold onto something that the West has lost. So although England and Ireland would have been under the See of Rome in those old days, it certainly didn’t look like Rome does today. With all of this being said, I’ve been closely following the Western Rite Vicariate of the Antiochian Orthodox Church. From what I’ve gathered, their goal is simple: be Orthodox and maintain Western traditions common to the Western Christian patrimony. Simply put, it’s the Western half of the Church before it went awry. Before the Vatican II (1962-1965) disaster, meaning all of the traditional Western sacraments before their reform (yes, this includes the traditional Mass of Pope St. Gregory, but in the vernacular). Before mandatory clerical celibacy, before strange, mechanical private devotions. Before the West did away with communing and confirming infants.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on this Vicariate, especially considering that the Antiochian Archdiocese of North America is accepting seminarians who wish to exclusively serve the Western Rite. If I were a gambling man, I’d wager that this Western Rite movement within Orthodoxy has interesting implications not just for my heart, but for America. Western Rite parishes existed well before the reforms at Vatican II, so I can’t imagine critics accusing the parishes of being reactionary. This Western Orthodox mission will become a real player in America, and pose a serious challenge to reactionary Traditional Catholic enclave societies such as the SSPX (Society of St. Pius X), FSSP (Fraternity of St. Peter), or ICKSP (Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest) – all of whom have an interesting, somewhat tenuous relationship with Rome, especially the SSPX. Living out your spiritual life in one of these enclaves, knowing that you’re against the papal grain even though your group is permitted, is extremely stressful. I’m speaking from experience here.

De Conclure

The revelations that this journey has given me just don’t seem to end. With age and the ebb and flow of enthusiasm about the truth, I’ve realized that most biases can actually be quite malicious and self-consumptive. People will defend and stick to what they believe is true, but oftentimes simply to protect their sense of self, not so much to ascent to what is true – to ascent to higher goods for the sake of God. I have seen the death of many of my friends’ curiosities. Some of them have good reasons. Others, not so much. I’m willing to admit many things now, and one such admission comes in the form of action, to be found in how I intend to treat my devout Catholic friends: no differently, if not better than I did before. To attempt to, or even consider passing judgment on them would be a capital sin in my estimation considering where I was just last October. The journey of my Orthodox heart certainly has its hippie-adjacent characteristics, but it nonetheless asks a hefty, intense task of me: that in light of a new faith which is exciting and tempting to share with everyone, I must take this new fullness and use it to remain lesser than, humble, meek, and upright before Christ, Whose image and likeness myself and all people are tasked with bearing. If I had to choose just one maxim that I’ve picked up from this journey, it would be this:

We must daily venerate the image of Christ in everybody, everywhere.