Well, in the end it is, of course, your decision. When I felt the Holy Spirit guiding me AWAY from the Catholic Church, I had trouble discerning his Will, frankly. I was in your shoes thinking, "hmmm, I want the liturgy stuff, like some of what the Fathers have to say, want the Eucharist and priests and deacons and some of the Catholic 'stuff' without the indulgences, papal nonsense, purgatory, and all the bad medieval innovations." I wanted things on my terms. So, I went Anglican. But when I went there, I felt the Holy Spirit stirring me. He made me ill at ease. He MADE ME READ HISTORY!!! I would see the Church united and very different from the modern RCC. So I'd stay Anglican. But I'd feel that this Anglicanism is ABSOLUTELY NOT what God intended His Church to be! Catholic AND Protestant? The Elizabethan Compromise!!!? That's God's will? God intended the small island nation of England to have a king who wanted a divorce, couldn't obtain one, left the Catholic Church, killed his new wife, killed the next one, and his minions like Thomas Cranmer, who were really influenced by Continental Reformist goons like Martin Bucer and the Calvinists, wrecked havoc on the Church!! Read the "Black Rubrics" and look at the awful iconoclasm and hardcore Calvinist garbage that ensued! Then here comes "Bloody Mary" with re-Catholicizing the country only to have it go right back to Protestant. Pretty soon Elizabeth's "compromise" was to allow two religions to co-exist in one religion in a type of bizarre paradox that some thought was really cool, but really resembles NOTHING of the ancient Church?
Did I want to be a member of a faith founded only 500 years ago by a group of politicians in England based on a divorce and Game of Thrones-style intriguing hormone-driven monarchs? Did I want to be in a church with the 39 Articles, basically Calvinism on steroids, as their catechism yet also claiming to be Catholic?
Would I join a Church created by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Nope! Why would I want to join a church based on paradox, contradiction, and politicking in 16th Century England?
So I'd go Catholic, to Anglican, Catholic to Anglican and kept feeling this AWFUL GULF!!!
I found books by Fathers Meyendorff, Schmemman, Ware, etc. I read these Orthodox priests and was BLOWN AWAY that THIS, YES THIS (!!!!) is what I read the Fathers saying!!! Then you get into the Church pre-schism, hey, yes, yes, yes!!! This is what these priests are teaching! Pretty soon you dig into the schism, the Photian stuff before it, the aftermath, and the patristics, and POOF---you have the faith of the ancients.
But they're too ethnic, right? Yeah, too ethnic! I can't go to a Greek or Serbian or Russian Church! I'm Anglo, old school Anglo white bread American. Yeah, uh, I'm Anglican.
Nope.
I have some authority on this topic because, unless I'm not aware, I'm the only person in this TAW forum (not like I'm bragging, actually in many ways I'm quite ashamed!) who has lived for extensive amounts of time in the
Catholic
Anglican
Eastern Catholic
Orthodox Churches.
I have run the gambit. Catholicism is really Catholi-schism. Anglicanism is a hybrid innovation of politics and happenstance for a king who let his glands and passions run his spirit. Orthodoxy is the unspoiled, untainted, pure, deposit of faith.
I'm not sure why you think the Anglicans, because they let you write a blank check, theologically, are preferable to the faith founded by Christ Himself 2,000 years ago that has maintained the purity of doctrine and deposit and sacramental life all that time? Why are you more qualified than the Fathers or the holy Hierarchs of the Orthodox Church to determine truth? What role is modern secular humanism guiding your journey? How much are you expecting the Church to CHANGE YOU rather than you somehow get the Church to do what you want? You say you could be wrong on some things, but so could that body. So, why choose a body that is only 500 years old that has already fallen into bizarre garbage like allowing freaks like "Bishop" Spong to even be a bishop!? Why be with folks who allow a man who suffers with same-sex attraction dump his wife, "marry" another man, and be a "shepherd" over a flock? Why be with a group that allows women's "ordination?" The Episcopals and most of the Anglican Communion allow sodomy and just about any sin to be perfectly fine. Come as you are----STAY AS YOU ARE. Sound like Christ or the Enemy? Do you think the Fathers would sign off on any of those issues? Katharine Jefforts-Schiori? Really?! Come on....
The Anglican Church is in B-A-D shape. Their only hope is the ACNA and common cause partners. My parents attend an ACNA parish. I wish, of course, they'd go Orthodox. Won't happen. I pray that God blesses them, and I pray He blesses you. I hope you re-consider. Secular humanism, modernism, "I'm ok, you're ok" a little bit country and a little bit rock 'n roll, a touch Protestant, a wee bit Catholic, and a whole lotta innovative modernism isn't, in my humble opinion, what God calls us to.
