**In any case, I am finding it increasingly difficult to answer Eastern Orthodox claims about themselves and claims about the Catholic Church. It seems the Catholic Church is strong on defending herself against the Protestants, but touchy about taking a stand against the Eastern Orthodox. **
Catholics generally are reluctant to take a stand against Orthodox Churches because we have been taught to respect them as āsister churchesā. Nor, for that reason, are Catholics prepared for it. The Catholic Church does hope for reunion. You will find that many of the Orthodox do not share that āpositive prejudiceā vis a vis the Catholic Church. Itās like fighting your sister who does not recognize you as her brother. Your heartās not in it.
The worst part of this is that I am not being spiritually fulfilled in my own Roman Church. It just doesnāt have the awe of the liturgies of the East.
I am tempted to go to the Divine Liturgy at the Eastern Orthodox Church on Sunday and not to the Catholic Church, but I know that that would be a sin since the EO are in schism. I am soooo confused! Any thoughts???**To some degree, all of us have aesthetic attractions to this or that. I find the TLM both aesthetically pleasing and āLatin cleanā, and it resonates in my Roman marrow. Wish there was a TLM offered near here. I was an English Literature major and am half in love with Anglican verbiage. Surpassingly clear and expressive and reverent. Wish there was an Anglican Use Mass near here. But I am in a rural parish, and the liturgy is as plain as plain can be, and utterly, utterly centered on the Eucharist. Half or more of the songs sung are old Protestant hymns. But then, I was raised in the hills of the Upper South, and when I was a kid, those hymns were almost the only thing you could get on the radio. You couldnāt even get TV then because of the hills. I listened to them, and sang them with the fundamentalists in the strawberry patches where they and I picked in the hot sun. I used to go watch the Fundamentalist brush arbor revivals on the hillsides (āchicken on the groundā) and the full-dunk cold-as-ice creek baptisms. And I would watch those people ācome to Jesusā in their simple, yet, to all appearance, fervent ways. And eventually I came to realize the Eucharist is the very thing they were all yearning for, but didnāt know it. Now, in my parish, at 10:00 a.m. Mass on Sunday, the music is played on a hammered dulcimer by the convert daughter of a deep country Missionary Baptist preacher. And we have lots and lots of converts; virtually all from evangelical churches. And the Eucharist is everything. Weāre all ācominā to Jesusā in our simple country way, I guess you could say. And Iām happy with that too.
A lot of this depends on your background; the one you grew up with, your educational background, your aesthetic sense (I love Edwardian English of Anglican Use and the Elizabethan English of the hills (yes thatās what it is), being both raised and educated with them; reveling in them like a hungry man at a feast. You love iconastis and Greek, I expect, being educated in the latter, and the mystery and hypnotic mysticism and sheer ancientness of it. But we just ought not lose sight of the Universality that is Catholicism. Thereās a black Catholic church in St. Louis at which Sunday Mass is mind-blowing color and loud āAMEN!sā and big bright hats on the ladies and long, stem-winding emotional sermons by the black priest, and some of the most beautifully rhythmic and harmonic singing you have ever heard-wonderful to hear. And thatās mine too, as I lived three years in the slums of St. Louis while I was in graduate school, and I am amazed to this day that I was at home there. And I sometimes go to the Hispanic Mass in our parish, at which the music is, to my ears, mariachi and men and women will sometimes, right during Mass, go up before the statue of Jesus and whisper their private sorrows and prayers to Him, sometimes in tears, and I wonder. And on Good Friday, theyāll walk up the (long) steps of the church on their knees, and I marvel at the emotion that would move them to do that; old men and women, beautiful young ladies and guys you would figure for ācholosā on the street. And thatās my Church too. And last Christmas, at a country Polish parish near here, I was treated to āLulaj-ze Jezuniu moje perelkoā. Chopin was fond of it you know, and incorporated it into one of his symphonies. The translated words will bring tears to your eyes; peasant simple and lovely. āSleep baby Jesus, my little pearlā¦:ā Look it up in full. Itāll make you choke down tears. All of this is my āUniverseā. My Catholic Church. Donāt give her up, man. **
