The Weird One

It's no secret in my family that I'm the weird one.

I'm day-dreamy, I dress like an incurable hippie, I wander over the North and Central Florida wilderness at random, and yes, I went through a simultaneous goth and pagan phase in high school. So really, it was no surprise to me that when I announced to my family that I was converting to Eastern Orthodoxy the collective response was, "Huh?"
I expected it.
I've gotten used to patiently explaining myself over the years.

Explaining Orthodoxy to my family---one half Holiness Pentecostal, the other half Episcopalian---has been no easy task. My dad kind of gets it ("Hey, we had incense in church when I was a kid!"); my mom doesn't have much of a taste for it ("Too much sitting and standing and bowing and the incense gives me the worst headache"). Pascha this past year was the breaking point. After two hours of chanting and sitting and standing and bowing and censing they were content to let me do whatever I wanted ("it's better than that Wiccan crap you used to be into"), so long as I didn't feel compelled to drag them along too. They're tolerant, and happy that I've found something that at least has the word "Christian" concerned in there somewhere, but still, Orthodoxy is one of those "weird" things about me, like my penchant for orange blossom water and pashmina scarves. This attitude has created some humorous and bemusing encounters---what I like to call "collisions"---of Orthodoxy with the Protestant South where I was raised, and where my family is rooted.

Admittedly, blogs of this nature have been done before by people more articulate than I (there's a particularly popular one by a Houston priest called "Orthodixie"), but it's gotten to the point where I've felt the need to share these encounters with people---not out of contentiousness, but out of my own deep appreciation and love of whimsical absurdity. Things have also gotten unexpectedly changed up a bit since I moved to St. Augustine. Being the lone Orthodox in the religion program at Flagler College (which is mostly Catholic and Calvinist. Yeah, I always look foward to theology class), and living out Orthodoxy in a city with Catholicism as its very foundation has deeply impacted my own faith in ways I hope to elaborate upon here.

More to come soon---as I'm spending the winter break with my parents I'm sure to have plenty to add here over the coming month. ;)