The title of my blog is μυστήριον, which in Koine Greek means secret or mystery but would probably be better understood as that which can not be known by empirical evidence but instead requires revelation. The inspiration for μυστήριον is my journey into the Orthodox Catholic Church, perhaps better known in the West as the Eastern Orthodox Church, though I will undoubtedly blog about more than just this journey.
As a child I was a unitarian universalist long before I was aware of any such historical movements, or even the proper theological words to describe my beliefs. By unitarian I mean that I believed that the trinitarian god of 'traditional' Christianity was incorrect, possibly blasphemous, and that Jesus was simply a really good man. By universalist I mean that I thought that everyone eventually found their way to Heaven. Whether that path to Heaven was through something akin to purgatory or reincarnation or something else altogether I was resolutely undecided. I was almost indescribably spiritual and spoke daily, and sometimes hourly, with God. These conversations were not the normal intercessory prayers that so many seem to be focused upon, but were instead conversations about what happened in my day or what I was thinking about or found important.
As a teenager when I started to read science, history and philosophy and began to study religions such as Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism I found myself adrift of my rather weak Christian moorings. In fact it would be better to say that I wasn't moored to Christianity at all. Rather I had floated about in vaguely Christian shallows and when the storm of new philosophies and ideas swept over me I found myself asea with no bearings. I also found that my sense of spirituality had ended and I no longer found myself speaking with God.
In my late teens I found shelter from the stormy theistic seas in the grey harbor of atheism, though I'd have demurred at the label on the grounds that I was a scientific realist who was open to the evidence of the divine and should be considered at minimum a nominal agnostic. The bar that I set for evidence of God was high. Evidence had to be empirically measurable and so axiomatically everything was physical. This meant if someone were to offer evidence of a vision, I would redefine the vision as a hallucination and explained it away as a fundamentally biological process that was explainable by any number of just-so stories, though if pressed my response would have been that it wasn't incumbent upon me to prove why it wasn't evidence, all that I had to prove was that an alternate explanation was possible.
I was never a comfortable atheist. I took an unseemly delight in foundering the faith of those about me and yet did not find my belief system useful in making sense of the world. The morals that I subscribed to all had as their foundation Christianity and Judaism, yet so that my beliefs were not tainted by irrational theism I ascribed my morality to ideas such as social contracy theory. Oddly however, these theories were not the source of my morals but were instead purposefully sought out as equivalences. This left me often in the odd position of holding a moral belief but having no foundation upon which it sat or even, more dreadfully, having a moral belief that my foundational equivalence, if taken to its rational conclusion, opposed.
So it was in my late twenties that I found myself thinking again about God and religion, not in a dismissive or anthropological manner but instead as a way to better understand reality and find purpose to life. My life as an atheist had soured me to 'organized religion', though as the son of parents who were religious only in the nominal sense of the word (I had in fact always thought them both atheists until I asked them about it when I was an adult) I had never developed much of a taste for it. Besides, the idea of being bound by some form of orthodoxy felt too intellectually constraining.
It wasn't until the birth of my son that I again began to look seriously at churches. I didn't want him to have such a shallow understanding of his beliefs that encountering other religions and philosophies would be as if encountering a whirl wind for the first time. The various forms of Protestantism were my first areas of inquiry but I found each of them (though some offered more theological freedom than others) wanting and often incoherent. In the end only two 'churches' made sense to me: the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Catholic Church. In coming posts I'll describe some of the reasons I found the Orthodox Catholic Church to be the more compelling of the two.
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