Finding Purpose and Repentance in Orthodoxy

well I'm priest sarim Holland and uh this is mckin Texas St Nicholas Orthodox Church in mcken Texas I was uh raised Roman Catholic and at a certain point in time I became very disenchanted my dad was a man upstairs guy that's a term you might not know but in the old days there's the idea that uh you know you can worship God anywhere and he's the man upstairs which is I think weird but that was that was the terminology back then so my dad didn't go to church but he approved of whatever my mother did she went to the Roman Catholic church and what was called a good Catholic a good Catholic means you go on Sundays and days of obligation like Christmas or something I'm 65 so in 50 I was born in 58 so in 62 there was the Vatican uh second Vatican Council which I didn't know anything about I was four years old but the repercussions of that were when I was a young boy my mother comes to me and says you don't have to fast on Saturday on on Friday anymore because it was always fish Friday and that made me mad because it's like how can we change something that's been around for I thought it was around for 2,000 years I didn't even realize that they had mitigated fasting for hundreds and hundreds of years right I but that was my perception and I got mad about it so I shortly thereafter I just stopped going to church and uh this is kind of comical um maybe this is too much information but my dad would get up and make breakfast and I would watch the old Star Trek reruns while my mother mother went to church and then she'd come home an hour later and we'd have breakfast and then I went to college and I was looking for purpose in my life like most people well I I thought most people do actually I've learned that a lot of people don't think about their purpose in life which I don't understand but I was looking for purpose like what is my purpose why am I here why was I born and I thought okay I want to make the world a better place I want to be a doctor I want to be a heart surgeon and um that was what I wanted to do and uh then I had a kind of a conversion experience which is a ask Jesus into your heart kind of experience like a a Protestant would present the Roman Road to you or I I got it from uh campus Crusade for Christ which is a Evangelical organization I think they're still in existence that you uh ask Jesus in your heart that he's died for your sins you ask him your heart and you're saved so I started going to uh campus Crusade for Christ uh meetings in at Purdue University I met my wife uh she was Orthodox but didn't really understand anything about Orthodoxy nothing at all uh she knew how to make the cross and uh sign to the cross and she also knew that um PCA they had lamb that was it nothing else so I asked her let's go to your church which was in Indianapolis and so we went one weekend and went to her church and I was just absolutely it was the most amazing transformative experience I've ever had in my life because it's just a Vesper service just an evening Saturday evening service very simple and of course Orthodox Services have lots of litanies in them in peace let us pray to the Lord Lord have mercy and all that sort of responsive stuff and I was absolutely amazed I thought we're praying for Mercy what an idea cuz where I was people were saying you had mercy Jesus died on the cross for your sins you're no longer going to be judged you're going to heaven so Mercy was not really something that was really so much talked about and I thought as a young man I need Mercy for everything to keep my thoughts in check everything you know to to not be so lazy all the rest and so that was the beginning of my journey and I just started reading everything I could get my hands on uh which was not easy to do when the internet was you know sort of in its infancy I mean you didn't get it from the internet and uh I started studying and I was coming to sort of an impass I was thinking I'm with all these people that they pray and they and they go out and preach to people and we tell people about Jesus and they they say the prayer and they're saved and all this stuff and yet uh there was something very much missing CU everybody had their own conceptions as long as you believed in Jesus that was the one thing well what about if you believed in Jesus but you also thought that baptism was necessary okay fine that's good you think baptism is necessary but I don't but we believe in Jesus what about if you think the the priesthood and the Eucharist is necessary okay that's fine but we don't do that because we're Baptists we don't we just think it's a commemoration right etc etc so there were all these things this cacophony of beliefs that were contradictory but the one thing that United everybody was a loose affiliation with Jesus and saying I believe Jesus died for my sins and that wasn't enough for me it didn't seem right so I hooked up kind of with an idea that the Lord Jesus Christ said that he will send us the Holy Spirit who will lead us into all truth and I was thinking I'm not seeing all truth I'm seeing maybe some portion of the truth but not all of it so I had the idea that since I had scientific background so I was thinking okay if I can find the church then I can evaluate any Doctrine if it's in the church it's true if it's not in the church it's not true so don't evaluate a Doctrine the church by the doctrines CH evaluated the doctrines by the church right so and a lot of people they have a set of beliefs and they say what church conforms to my beliefs well that's not the right way to go about it the right way to go about it is to find where is the church if if the church indeed is one body of Christ and there are and the gates of hell don't Prevail against it there must be one set of beliefs one way of life that is true and outside of that way of life there might be true things but not all the truth and I was looking for all of it so eventually um I came to understand that Orthodoxy was true and the most beautiful thing I ever saw still is the most beautiful thing I ever saw I never saw anything more beautiful um the whole conception of Salvation in Orthodoxy is completely different than I was taught it's completely beautiful and wonderful and uh I never looked back from the time I was baptized in 19 uh 80 just before I got out of school at Purdue University in my family my dad was a good Christian according to my mother but he didn't say I never heard him pray uh he just lived as life he thought I live a good life I'm a good father I'm a good mother I'm a ethical businessman um I love my father dearly uh he taught me really more about being a man than any other human being on the Earth but not as not as a Christian I mean I learned more from Little League than everything else until the church so it was it was good that he taught me those things but there was not any depth of spirituality and the idea was you go to church and that was about it there's nothing else and I it wasn't enough for me it wasn't enough for me so their idea of cons of Salvation was I remember going to what do they call them I think they call them CCD classes Christian something I don't remember what Catholic Christians I don't remember I think it was called CCD and I remember being so dissatisfied because they told us Old Testament stories almost like children's stories and very much emphasizing the pope is the Holy Father and you must submit to the pope and blah blah blah and L I learned later now that I have you know understanding as an Orthodox Christian that um I mean papism is is a is a toxin in to Christianity I didn't know that then but it was so much emphasis no emphasis about an inner life none at all and Orthodoxy is all about inner life it's all about struggle against your passions so that you can be free I didn't hear any of that as a Catholic I didn't hear any of that as a Protestant I only heard it when I became Orthodox now I've had people dispute with me that they had some of that when they were raised maybe in a in a different Catholic church or maybe in a different Protestant church but still it was only a glimmer of it not this intense spiritual life that the RO that the Orthodox church has for everybody I mean not just monks everybody that's the Crux of the matter if if you were in an elevator and you had to give an elevator speech somebody says tell me the differ between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism and you know that you got two more floors and they're going to get off basically uh Salvation is healing I was taught salvation was forgiveness not healing so it's a whole different Paradigm right you have children I have children do you just forgive your children or do you also teach your children and help your children to do better right what good does it do if you just forgive them for being bad you have to teach them to be good right so that's what Orthodoxy does it teaches us inwardly outwardly through the sacraments through the culture through fasting through frustrations through preaching through through the reading of the fathers reading lives of the Saints all of that stuff it teaches us to be better to be improved to become perfect for us salvation is perfection it's not to be forgiven because what good is it to be forgiven if you're still a sinner I mean sin in and of itself is is harmful even if you're forgiven of it right so I didn't ever have that flavor at all when I was Roman Catholic or when I was Protestant Protestants they didn't I was with people who were as we said in the time on fire we were on fire for the Lord but there wasn't really a concept of of we didn't talk about Sin so much we talked about getting other people saved and we talked about praising God and things like that but not really about about the inner life and Orthodoxy is all about the inner life which is healing I mean Jesus Christ is among other things called the Great physician and I never had that understanding really as of him being the great physician until I became Orthodox so salvation is healing salvation is becoming better confession is healing fasting is healing because when you fast uh you become aware more sharply of God you become aware also of your sins and uh everything improves even if you fail in fasting that's not so important it matters if you're struggling to Fast and the same thing with struggling to come to the services doing frustrations all the rest it's not a prescription of things that you have a laundry list and say do this this this and this and this but rather that all these things are helpful to you to open up your heart to God so there's not one legal rule in the Orthodox Church not one that one I think um Orthodoxy challenges us in a good way um where it's almost scary it's like wow if I become Orthodox that means I actually have to change I can't just uh check the box and say well I'm Orthodox I'll just show up on Sunday and you know I'm doing what I need to do well I I think there's there's two things one is why are you what is your purpose and I talk about purpose all the time it's my favorite question I always ask people that I I meet what is your purpose in life and you cannot do something without having a purpose if you want to be a really great basketball player well that's your purpose which means that you have to go out and shoot free throws because you're not good at free throws right I mean if if you don't shoot free throws you're a bad basketball player right you your purpose is to be good right your per what is your purpose is that as an Orthodox Christian as a human just as a human being we're made in the image of God to fulfill his likeness to become his according to his likeness that's your purpose and my purpose it's identical and so everything is for that is for uh to fulfill that purpose and so salvation is to become like God if we become like God we know God so you can't know someone unless you are like them you know we have a secular saying you got to walk a mile in somebody's moccasins to know them right well you have to be like Christ to know Christ so that salvation is the struggle to become like Christ now I'm not saying that every Orthodox Christian does that institutional Orthodoxy where people are you know born into it and they have big old gigantic churches and whatever that that doesn't NE necessarily happen but especially people are coming as converts um they see a a difference right and there's a huge difference and they see the beauty of Orthodoxy and how wonderful it is and it's a struggle it's a struggle to become better not not not in order to become good enough but because well we're we're born to be good we're born to be like Christ so why would we want to do something that's not like Christ when we can be learning to do something that's like Christ because Christ is beautiful so that's the reason why why why we do everything there is no legal law in the Orthodox Church I once uh was talking to a or I was hearing a monk give a presentation and he said in my Monastery we don't have a whole lot of rules we have very few rules because of love love is the primary rule so if there's love then I'm going to be kind I'm going to be humble I'm going to be good I'm going to think of another person I'm not going to steal etc etc love fulfills the whole law right and if you love what are you doing you're being like God because God is love you're doing something Eternal so everything we do is is sort of would the right phrase be organic not really but it's a it's just natural I me why does a child mimic you right uh because they love you and they see you as a model they don't see a rule that they're supposed to act like Daddy they just do so we act like God the best we can I think there's a huge Mis conception among like Protestants when they look at Orthodoxy and they say wow that that's a Works based salvation you're trying to earn your way to Heaven by doing all of these things um maybe talk a little bit about you know how that's a pretty bad misrepresentation of what Orthodoxy is yeah it's just a it's just a slander um it's you know a little bit over 500 years old I suppose maybe a little bit older than that uh it makes no sense if you look at scripture scripture is constantly about that we must become like God that U we must obey that if we don't forgive our brother we won't be forgiven I mean it's right there it's that we must fulfill the the greatest commandment which is love God with all heart soul and mind and strength and the second which is neighbor as yourself so if you don't love your neighbor as yourself you're just not obeying God I mean that doesn't make any sense if we say we're Christians if you love me you'll follow my Commandments the Lord said so that workspace is just a convenient way I don't say everybody does this purposely but the the devil wants to put in our minds that there's some sort of earning our way we don't earn anything let me give an example so we're married we say we love our wives would we love our wives if we had a mistress no why don't we have a mistress why don't we cheat on our wife why don't we gamble away the money why don't we you know Etc because we love our wives there's no rule that we signed when we got married saying I won't have a mistress I won't beat my wife I won't get drunk at home right but that's just obvious because we love our wives period that's all it's very simple if you love God you want to become like God so these are sort of Unwritten things I mean it's just obvious if you love someone then you want to give of yourself to them if you love God you want to give all of yourself he says give me your heart so we give him a heart as mangled as it is it's pretty simple really it's not about works at all you can't be saved by works but you won't be saved without works I mean because if you don't have works so if you're a married person and you don't love your wife and an expressive way then clearly she's going to think you don't love her so you got to love her with works as well as just with your words going back to what you were saying about purpose in your experience as a priest what do you see is the common pattern or or amongst people that come to the church and become members of the Orthodox Church what what what do you see as a common pattern as to their purpose you know why what are they longing for oh that's a such a good question I think a few years back I would have answered it in a much more simplistic way but I think life is so complicated people come with all of their baggage and all their difficulties so I think fundamentally people are looking for peace but they don't really know exactly how to find it and they're they're burdened with an incredible passions and um and habits bad habits and they don't understand that those passions and bad habits are dragging them down so they they don't understand that they're being called to Perfection moral perfection some people do but most people don't really have a good conception they they see Orthodoxy is something that is um uh intellectually more better than protestantism because protestantism a lot of it doesn't make any sense and Catholicism Roman Catholicism so they see it as something better they get on YouTube and they see all these things and they and they say this appeals to me intellectually and maybe they love the iconography and they love the beauty of the services and the poetry and the holy fathers and lives of the Saints and all those things but they don't really understand most people until they've gotten into it for a while the whole point of being an Orthodox Christian is for illumination to become perfected and to know God that's that's it that's the whole reason so I I think a lot of people are coming without uh an understanding that Christianity is aesthetical it's a bad word in our culture aestheticism has a tinge of a legalism earning your way uh being um uh well now with our all of our Rainbow Coalition stuff being phobic or being this or that you know well asceticism is absolutely necessary so you have children when your children were crying at 3: in the morning one or the other of you had to get up to get them that's aestheticism right if you love your child you're going to get up and get her and bring her to bed right that's the way it's going to be so there has to be aestheticism in life and people are missing that we don't have uh enough aestheticism in our in our way of life anymore and people don't understand understand that that salvation is earned with asceticism I said the word earned somebody go oh he said earned you earn your salvation we we obtained salvation through a Synergy with God we give him like you know one millionth of one% but have to give him that because he wants our heart we give him an incomplete effort but but an effort and then he magnifies it the thief on the cross first of all the the thief on the cross his name is dismas we know his name the other one was Justice and uh they actually met Christ on the road to Egypt when they were fleeing to Egypt after he was born and they were going to rob him but dismus didn't want to Rob him because he thought that that Christ was so beautiful so his mother the Theos Mary said my son will remember you so here they fast forward and they've been thieves murderers brigin and they're hanging on the cross and both of them are blaspheming Christ both of them are yelling at him but then dismus comes to the understanding by grace that that this man has done nothing to miss so he testifies right and if he had come off the cross if they had cut him down from the cross right then and there then he would have lived a repentant life because obviously the Lord said you'll be with me in Paradise so he wouldn't have recanted but he didn't have time to to live a repentant life for the rest of his life he had only a few hours left so everybody's different you know some people live for uh for 100 years some people live only for a few days we can't we can't make a a rule based upon exceptions you know we think that dismus was baptized in his blood right Martyrs are baptized in their blood he's not technically a martyr but the Lord said you'll be with with me in Paradise today so I think that's a that's a good enough uh that's good enough for us I think that you must struggle to have compunction in our day everything is so flippant and there's there's so much uh distraction so you have to work against distraction and you have to struggle to read the scriptures prostrations I tell people to do prostrations all the time uh to read the Salter the Salter is the perfect prayer book of the church we use it for everything and so you do all those things read the lives of the Saints so you're you're doing those things as a priority right and so you're bathing yourself in those things and you're not bathing yourself in well ironically I'm going to say tick tock right and stuff like that because that's just dissipating right and you're you have to struggle to be to have repentance and you have a relationship with a Confessor or a spiritual father you uh you confess frequently and uh you have a a humble force yourself to be humble a great way to be repentant is to work on your pride in in small ways we don't like to do what we're told right we don't like to be told what to do shall we say right especially by someone who's less than us right well if you look for opportunities to be obedient to others then you're becoming humble I mean even it's being obedient to your three-year-old three-year-old wants you to read the same book again you read the same book again right and uh your wife wants you to do something you don't feel like doing it well you do it you have someone at work maybe you're a boss but there's somebody who's hard to deal with and you make concessions to them because of humility and when you humble yourself and don't just pop off all the time then you're create in in your heart an an environment where God will come in so it's not just being sorry about the stuff you did it's about creating an environment in your heart and there I guess there's another thing too in our day we have so many habitual sins so do we react to the sin or not or are we just sorry Judas was sorry he was really sorry Judas was not a monster Judas loved God he loved loved Jesus he did Miracles but he had that problem with money and then when he went and tried to what he thought was going to be a little bit of a quick cash grab it turned out it was going to get his his mentor killed and he was very sorry but he didn't repent whereas Peter denied the Lord three times went out wept bitterly but he repented because he stayed around and and he he wanted to be changed he wanted to be redeemed and then of course the Lord actually did twice saw him after his resurrection on the day of his resurrection he saw him personally and then we have that event where there was the fishing I mean those are the ones that are recorded there were other ones so repentance is something that you must uh you must work work on and and and not just say you're sorry so to be a little bit um explicit so many people are problems with pornography right it's a habitual thing well or maybe some other habit maybe they smoke and they don't want to smoke anymore but they keep smoking well what are you doing when you smoke are you saying Lord forgive me that I'm smoking are you doing frustrations saying in the morning say Lord help me not to smoke so much today help me not to look at pornography today help me to be more to be chased today if you're not then no wonder that you're going to fall into pornography that afternoon or that evening or whatever because it's a pattern you know the pattern the pattern is you're tired and boom and there it goes so you're not really struggling against it you're just reacting to it with sadness that's not repentance repentance is proactive and reactive and that we need the proactive part to repentance that's the really important thing this the prayer the doing fasting the doing prostrations uh reading the Suter all of the spiritual exercises not because they're a checklist but because they life and then when we're when we're tempted to do something and we fall well then perhaps we we have a rule maybe our spiritual father gives us a rule when we fall into a sin you know not as a legal remedy but as something that is just a reaction you know I mean if you cut your finger your reaction is to wash it and bind it right you don't just look at your finger and say oh it's cut it's bleeding you do something about it so when you cut your soul with sin you do something about it not just be sorry so I would think that's those two things are the major factors of repentance one is the before part which is the spiritual life if you don't have a spiritual life you're just you're a play thing for the devil and then when you fall into sin or you fall into temptation or you are tempted and even if you don't sin then you react to it with some sort of reaction confession frustrations reading a rule saying the Jesus prayer something right in reaction to the sin so there's the two parts most people don't have the first part well they don't have the second part either most most people only have the I'm sorry about it part how do you think uh Orthodoxy differs in the confession um versus like let's say Catholicism oh well when I was a kid confession was you go and you say a couple things and he says say three omares and three our fathers and boom you're done there was no conso for us confession is well what is confession about when I was a kid it was you get forgiven Boom for us confession is not about forgiveness that's not the primary thing it's about healing it's about I'm something wrong with me I keep being irritated I don't want to be irritated how can I not be irritated and the priest is speaking with you in the context of a conversation with Jesus Christ and uh by the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ something is said and you have something that helps you to to struggle against that sin plus just saying it out loud gives it less power so for us confession is healing not forgiveness I mean forgiveness is inherent in healing right you're a father do you forgive your kid when he does something bad well duhh of course you do but what else do you do you teach him or her why they shouldn't have done that thing etc etc right so there's healing as well as forgiveness forgiveness is a given what what's like a big stumbling block being a spiritual father what's a big stum Ling block that you see with you know your spiritual children when they're when they're going into confession like like a recurring pattern I think most people um don't really have a really understanding of really what's wrong with them and their confessions are pretty shallow you know pretty shallow and I don't think they have the underlying some of them don't have the underlying spiritual life uh to really help them to heal they're sorry about things but a lot of times I hear things like you know well I I had a pretty good week no you didn't or well you know I did this but there was there was this reason no there wasn't a reason you just did it right there's not really people don't take full responsibility as much and even if they take full responsibility they still think of like I need to have this sin forgiven no you need to be over this sin you need to overcome this sin and the sin is not a static thing that you did right so if you've stolen something you say I stole something well the the sin is not that you stole something the sin is that you are inclined to be a thief you have a a deficit in your personality which makes you sometimes steal that's the problem and why do you have that deficit maybe because you don't have enough love maybe you're very selfish maybe you're you're very self-centered lazy Etc right so it's not just be forgive me of my of my stealing something I want to be able to not be the person who would think about stealing

Channel: Roots of Orthodoxy

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Id: qTmkRgreZrc

Length: 31min 10sec (1870 seconds)

Published: Tue May 28 2024