Why I'm no longer Orthodox

since you've all been asking...

So people often ask me why I’m no longer Eastern Orthodox. The reality is, I was never Orthodox, canonically speaking. I was baptized Catholic as a baby, and then two months later was baptized, confirmed, and received communion in the Greek Orthodox Church (my “culturally” religious parents wanted to appease both sides of the family). Technically, I “converted”…but since I was a baby, it was against my will, so it didn’t count. In the eyes of the Roman Church, my second baptism was invalid and illicit, while my confirmation and eucharist were illicit but valid…thus I was confirmed in the Catholic Church through the Orthodox sacraments. I know…tedious details that only aspy rad trads would care to know about.

But despite all the canonical stuff, I did grow up in the Orthodox Church. And on the few occasions I went to Catholic church, I didn’t really like it–more often than not, it was in boring, rice-cracker suburban parishes. The only Catholic stuff I liked were the saint feasts, most notably that of Saint Gerard at Saint Lucy’s Church in Newark. 

Though I was never really catechized in the Orthodox Church (I went to Sunday school a couple of times…child-of-divorce problems), I learned about Eastern spirituality “osmotically” through the liturgy, rituals, and through the “magical thinking” of my family members, most notably my schizophrenic grandma (I’ll write more about my theory that Western spirituality breeds rationalistic neurotic autists while Eastern spirituality breeds magical-thinking psychotic schizos at another point). 

I fell in love with the beauty of the Divine Liturgy, the mystical bent of Eastern theology which is less rigid than Western theology, the monastic tradition, and yes, the unique brand of magical thinking characteristic of Eastern saints. 

So why did I leave? Why did I return to “the rite of my father”?