My wife and I have been reflecting on some of the milestones on our way to Orthodoxy. In each one, a possibility presented itself: we could think more deeply about Orthodoxy and have a seamless way out of our current situation. Almost invariably, God said ‘no’ to the particular route presenting itself so we could trust him more fully and test the mettle of our resolve. So there have been a number of u-turns over the last four years. Most of them no one has known about. All of them have brought my wife and I closer to each other and to Orthodoxy. Here are a few of them:

In February through July, 2021, I spent my days off in the studio of a Russian iconographer. As I ate, drank and painted with the master iconographer, a presbytera and another student, Orthodoxy took on flesh. I thought this could be a way out of ministry and into Orthodoxy; maybe I could study iconography full time. St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary had launched its Institute of Sacred Arts. My wife and I encountered this formula for the first time: “creativity ⇋ holiness”. That notion ran counter to my fundamentalist formation and rang the chord of God’s voice in my heart. But I was getting ahead of myself. My wife was just realizing how serious I was becoming about Orthodoxy. She hadn’t begun to attend Vespers or explore on her own and now I was talking about becoming an iconographer. I needed to slow down.

At this time, our parish started the process of making a formal call for me to stay. My appointment as vicar was for two years, but nine months in there was pressure for us to figure out whether we would stay. We struggled to figure out how we would pursue Orthodoxy. We wanted to move slowly and take steps as we became certain, but there was a time crunch. I wasn’t ready to renounce holy orders, but Protestantism was becoming the wrong bucket for what I had to carry. 

I told my bishop I was working in second and third tier gift sets. I described my first tier gift as “contemplation”. But what does that mean? How does contemplation help me exit ministry and enter Orthodoxy, …and provide for my family? Academics was the closest approximation. My wife was supportive of me chasing this down as a potential solution. 

I looked at St. Vlads again, this time for a ThM, but decided we shouldn’t move our growing family to Yonkers for just one year without knowing what might lie beyond that. I applied to postgraduate research programs in the UK, thinking the stay would be long enough for stability and we could explore Orthodoxy freely while I studied. I was accepted to Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh for studies in Patristics. 

We started getting rid of anything that couldn’t make the trip to the UK. We thought carefully about how we could love people in the parish without raising their hopes that we would stay. We received the blessing of our bishop for further study. It was perfect. 

Then an agonizing four months ensued as we waited for scholarship information. One didn’t have funding available. One didn’t answer at all, so we figured out there wasn’t any. For the third, a glitch between university and college kept my application in limbo until the deadline had passed. We were too poor to self fund and too close to the academic year to uproot. Our way out was a closed door. 

We took this as God’s desire for us to concentrate on parish work. We were ready for him to bring us further in our journey, or see if the desire for Orthodoxy waned. I became rector in August, 2022, and tried to bring vigor and patristic wisdom to my work. My wife was attending Vespers more and we were growing closer to the local priest and his wife. For the next year, she prayed, researched and asked questions until we both came to the place where we knew we could be catechumens, albeit from different places of departure.

Another round of potential transitions arose this summer, all of which would either complicate the catechumenate for us or become an end in themselves. We considered moving to California and starting from scratch. That was deer-in-the-headlights-what-do-we-do-now syndrome,  a reaction fueled by the thought that our friends and family might disown us. Closer to home, a job offer, which was connected to an Orthodox parish with a lovely priest, appeared to solve several problems and fit our timeline. But we saw that having a job tied to a parish could subtly pressure us, especially my wife, to rush the catechumenate. I entertained taking on a curate in our Anglican parish to help transition our parish into another pastor’s hands. But that started clouding our ability to envision the end properly. The Orthodox priesthood came to mind. But that was putting the cart before the horse. We started looking at home buying. But buying the right home in the right location, etc., started becoming an end of its own. 

Each possibility, each eventual u-turn, started with good enough questions. Yet, each time, the desire to be fiscally responsible, to be pastorally helpful and to transition my family into reasonable security turned into anxiety and blurred the vision of the kingdom we had grown to love. 

Our struggle to convert has become a struggle for maintaining a home in this world without obscuring the true end of leaving this world. I’ll write more about inserting my own rationalism soon, but I want to get this posted. For now, God willing, the plan is still for us to leave by summer’s end, to rent near an Orthodox parish, to renounce holy orders, and to become catechumens.