God has blessed me with a warm friendship between myself and a parish priest of the OCA in the US. He discovered me through Orthodoxy in Dialogue. He doesn’t agree with everything my theological work on sexuality and gender represents, yet we recognize in each other kindred spirits for whom Holy Tradition is paramount in the life of the Church.

Today he wrote to discuss developments subsequent to my response to the ordination of a female deacon two years ago in the Patriarchate of Alexandria. Some of his parishioners, catechumens, and inquirers are shaken. They question their own commitment to a Church that looks less and less like itself in their experience. “Progressives” might mock the discomfiture of these sincere Orthodox believers. I do not.

I take the liberty of sharing my response to my friend.

✠

Father!

What a pleasure to hear from you, all the more so to know you still think of me after all these years.

You made me go back and reread that article. Good article! Ha ha.

I didn’t know these other developments are going on. Sigh. You know, paradoxically (although not paradoxical in my mind), I’m quite the traditionalist. I attend a church where women wear long skirts and cover their heads! When people call me and my work “progressive” Orthodox, I say no, my work and I are simply Orthodox. 

So I do understand the challenges of being a parish priest at this moment in time. 

In fact, not to the same degree, I share those challenges. People who discover me on Orthodoxy in Dialogue continue to turn to me for practical advice in navigating church life and for spiritual support. You might or might not find my thoughts helpful:

1. People coming to Orthodoxy thinking we all think the same thing are looking for a mythological church that never existed. A cursory knowledge of unsanitized church history bears this out. There never was a Golden Age, not even the patristic era. The Ecumenical Councils took place within a context of absolute ecclesiastical and imperial chaos. There never was a “consensus patrum” if by that we mean all the Fathers agreed on every topic. Ironically, the one thing they all agreed on is the one thing we most love to ignore: care for the hungry and the homeless.
2. In a certain valid sense, Holy Tradition has a life apart from us; but, in an equally valid sense, Tradition is only ever processed, understood, and transmitted by fallible human beings. It’s never quite clear where to draw the line—as if such a line even can be drawn in a neat, tidy, Scholastic way—between capital-T Tradition and small-t traditions, because (and this is very important) Tradition is always already expressed in and through traditions.
3. Orthodoxy by its very nature, and not as a “concession,” allows questions to be asked that have never been asked before and answers to be proposed that have never been proposed before. Homoousios encountered fierce resistance because it was a secular word (two pennies are “of one substance”) never before used in a theological context; but, neither had the Church previously been faced with the precise questions raised by Arianism about the nature of the relationship between the Son and the Father. 
4. What’s different now is social media. We have the ability to know about a thing in real time, not only immediately after it happens, but even while it’s happening. Nicaea I wasn’t hotly disputed in real time in the backwoods of Spain as it was in the heart of the empire. We no longer have that “luxury.” The ordination of a female deacon in Zimbabwe would have registered on no one’s radar outside of Zimbabwe. Now even Orthodoxy in Dialogue comments on it from faraway Toronto!
5. Encourage your flock to be faithful to the Faith as they understand it. That’s the most God asks of us. The Church is infallible, yes, but the mode of that infallibility reaching us mere mortals is a dynamic we live, without ever being able to define it. 
6. Christ sends us into the world not to fight culture wars or engage in polarizing polemics, but to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. If we’re on the right side of the female ordination debate while we ignore the beggar with hand outstretched right in front of us, we’ve already lost the script.

Pray for me, Father. I cherish your friendship despite the long silences.

With love in Christ,

Giacomo

Giacomo Sanfilippo is an Orthodox Christian, former priest, and Canadian theologian residing in Toronto. His PhD thesis on Father Pavel Florensky’s theology of same-sex love is on hold while he writes his first book, Our Life in Christ: Orthodox Spirituality for Gay Men.