MISSIONARY-POSITION ORTHODOXY
Our annual 3-day diocesan clergy conferences (I have just returned from my third) are mixed blessings. Valuable opportunities to catch up with other priests, meaningful morning prayers, a few excellent one-to-one conversations, offset by the inevitable lengthy ‘discours de circonstance’, and a constant being careful of whom I say what to.
This year’s conference, however, brought me up hard with a situation I am finding hard to express properly or to digest. For lack of a better term, I will name it ‘Missionary Position Orthodoxy’. Represented by one of the speakers from a well-known English monastery.
The fact is that many Orthodox parishes suddenly face an inrush of young inquirers, in the majority young men, wanting to experience Orthodox practice. It would seem that a lot of them are looking to find clear bases, frameworks in which to live, against an ‘anything is permitted providing it does not directly harm others’ teaching on sexuality and gender in schools, and very often coming from broken or reassembled families.
The catechism - ‘the Orthodox way’ - proferred, at least by this monastery as I understand it, is basic, much of it involving (sexual) morality: no masturbation, no sex before marriage, no abortion, no porn, no homosexual expression. The general trend seems to be heavy accent on the ‘passions’ and how to overcome them.
I’m careful not to be cynical: being in such a Christian structure has twice saved my life: giving me a sense of meaning as a teenager in a family which, while outwardly stable was inherently damaging, and a second time in my mid-thirties, when after being asked to leave a monastery, unresolved conflicts came to the surface and nearly swamped me.
But what does this chaste, against-the-current lifestyle supposed to lead to? A rather run-of-the-mill family life, in which ‘church’ seems to be the main outside activity. I sense of lack in this 'way' of being part of a wider creation, or striving for something really beautiful, a sense of being ‘dépassé’ by something. We end up, not ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’, but in moral, suburban dullness.
Or am I missing something ....