With so many different options available to you, why is Holy Orthodoxy the right Path for you? It is the right Path because because you, like me, face five challenges that affect out lives:
1. You are a mortal human being, afflicted by the reality of sickness and death in both your body and soul.
Even if your body could be altered with technology so that it regenerates itself over and over, allowing you to stay young and active for year after year with old age always seeming a far destination way into the future, you would still be mortal, still afflicted by sickness and death. Immortality is a different way of being altogether.
2. You live in an imperfect world, infected by brokenness, conflict, and chaos, and you share in that imperfection.
You can see the defects everywhere, especially in relationships – from the politics of international relations to the inter-personal relationships of people we know. We tend to notice the imperfection in other people, whether we know them or not, much more clearly than we see our own problems, the darkness in our own hearts, the defects in our thought processes, and our own unhealthful behaviours. If you’re honest with yourself, you will have to admit that while your friends aren’t perfect, neither are you. On a scale from less perfect to more perfect, which of us can’t use some improvement? The road to perfection is long one, and most of us still have a long way to go to reach our potential.
3. You don’t know everything, and you may not realize how much you don’t know.
As human beings with imperfect knowledge, our ignorance of ourselves, each other, and the universe as a whole is huge. Some facts we accept as correct may actually be wrong and some opinions we hold may be based on inaccurate assumptions. When we begin learning about a topic, we can easily assume we understand that particular topic far more than we actually do. You may not recognize all of your own problems, but you probably don’t realize the height of your potential either or what’s standing in the way of you reaching it.
4. You need to discern the difference between truth and lies, what is real and fake, and what is good for you and bad for you, to be healthy and reach your potential.
We live in a society with different groups that have opposing interests trying to draw us into a particular ideology with its own constructed model of reality. If you accept this model, then you see the world with a particular filter that makes everything fit that model of reality.
When we watch videos, encounter political messages, read the news, scan social media, listen to music and podcasts, take classes in school, and talk to friends who themselves have been influenced by an ideology, our opinions, ways of thinking, and behaviors can be changed and shaped to fit what others believe or want us to believe.
As you know, there’s often a difference between the pictures people put up of themselves online and their true selves. Someone can appear always happy in images, but really feel depressed and anxious inside her true self. She can publicly present herself as being in happy, stable relationships, while really feeling terribly isolated and unloved. As we can use a digital filter to create an inaccurate image of ourselves that doesn’t correspond to reality, we can adopt a worldview-filter that skews reality.
5. You cannot solve these problems alone.
You can’t become immortal or cure those deeply-rooted illnesses in your own soul on your own. Sure, you can change your negative thoughts to positive thoughts and change your lifestyle choices from harmful to healthful. For these psychological and behavioral changes, you may just need a good therapist. What we all need, though, is the kind of knowledge and discernment that guides us toward the deepest healing and keeps us from the fraudulent paths of dysfunction and damage. To really overcome these challenges on the deepest level so that you reach the fullness of your individual potential and take hold of your purpose in life, consider where the Tao of Holy Orthodoxy can take you and who it can teach you to become.
Carefully listen to the instruction, learn the Way in your heart, and put these life-changing teachings into practice step by step as you go through your day. Then, you will see for yourself the benefit of the Holy Orthodox Way.
Text copyright © 2017-2021 by Fr. Symeon D. S. Kees