When faith changes everything - Part One
Three ways my life has changed since becoming an Orthodox Christian
Hi friends! This is the first in a three-part series. I’m not sure when parts 2 & 3 will drop, but I wanted to give you heads up that this is just a beginning.
Also, I don’t use an editor, AI or human, or review my posts, so you may bump into a typo here and there. I do my best to catch them all, but I may have missed something. Thank you for your grace. Enjoy!
Our lives transform from the outside in, and from the inside out.
This isn’t a novel idea, but go with me.
Our inner lives are formed by what we do with our bodies and our time. What we eat, where we go, how we move—they all shape our inner reality, the peace we do or do not feel, the energy we do or do not have, and the love we do or do not carry for others, as a few examples. Our outer lives shape our inner worlds.
And vice versa. In the gospel written by St. Luke, we have a record of Jesus saying, “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
I understand this to mean, at least in part, that whatever is within us overflows into how we live, the words we speak, and into the care we do or do not give to those around us.
Our inner lives and outer worlds are inextricably linked, and as we change one, we certainly influence the other.
I’m coming upon the anniversary of my being received into the Orthodox Church, and it has me thinking a lot about this inner-outer life dynamic. To become Orthodox is a whole life reorientation, from the outside-in and from the inside-out. Every aspect of what it means to be a person is baptized into the death of Christ, and resurrected into His life, that is, the liturgical, sacramental, and ascetic life of the Church. The liturgical life features our services of collective prayer, veneration, and worship. The sacramental life features those mysterious ways in which God’s presence is made real in our lives and in the world. The ascetic life speaks to how we limit and restrain ourselves, often bodily, in order to make room for the uncreated energies of God to meet and transform us.
With this anniversary around the corner, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect and share with you three ways my life has changed since becoming Orthodox. This list is far from exhaustive, but they all point to ways the inner life and outer life of faith dance together to bring healing to the body and soul.
Change #1 - On God
“God” is no longer an abstraction. God is a person: Christ.
This is by far the biggest transformation I’ve seen in my life and worldview. Following my deconstruction of evangelical Christianity, and my slow fade into New Age spirituality, “God” stopped being specific and became the very vague, obscure notion of “the divine.” When I would say, “God,” I was referring to an ethereal force, or energy, not to anyone in particular. This meant that I was praying to and interacting with a spiritual entity that I couldn’t possibly know or understand. And conveniently, it also meant that this vague spiritual entity, lacking in defined personhood, had no expectations of me. I didn’t have to actually change anything about my life in relationship with “the divine,” because “the divine” was an abstract force. It was an idea, an essence, that made me feel good (on the surface) and was content to let me devolve into a soul-corroding belief in my own self-deification. That is to say, I became my own god, and “the divine,” being a non-specific, abstract, vague force offered no challenge to my own little kingdom.
