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Yes, it makes perfect sense. Wouldn't mind grabbing a beer sometime in lieu of the church things? I'm not the holiest person but I absolutely adore things religious and don't have as many religious friends as I would like.
Oh believe me, I know all about not being "the holiest person". I could tell you some amazing stuff about that. And I'm not even talking about anything particularly scandalous or seedy. I'm talking about stuff on a whole different level. But that's another story. Listen: send me a message and I'll reply back to you with my email address and then we can spend a month or two getting properly acquainted with each other's personalities and boundaries and stuff, and then once that's established we can arrange to meet up and hang out if you're still interested. 'cause I'm pretty cool with Catholicism as well, since it did come out of the same scene as Orthodoxy. So I'm down with the idea of having a practising Catholic as a friend. Plus outside of my pursuit of Orthodoxy, I do have a penchant for all the statuary-type stuff that you guys are big on. I mean, I think icons look more serious and "woooo~!", but Catholic statues have their own kind of beauty and charm. And it all goes back to mainstream Christianity from early in the 1st Millennium AD anyway so how bad can it be? Sure you'll get your detractors saying that images and praying to saints and so on is like the stuff of "false religion", and they'll say that we shouldn't have dudes who chant and get around in robes and whatnot because "that's what the Hindus do" or "that's what the Taoists do" or whatever, and because "there's nothing about it in the New Testament". But if you ask me it's more like God's looked at all those other religions and basically responded to them like "Anything you can do, I can do better; anything you can do, I can do too." And He should know 'cause He had that thing going back in Old Testament days with blinged-out breasplates for priests. I mean, like anyone needs twelve giant gemstones on their chest. But He can do stuff like that 'cause He's God and He answers to nobody so He can just roll however He wants to (as long as it's within His nature of course!) and there ain't a thing anyone can do about it. And that's why He's the best.
Sounds like a good idea. But I should also contact a few a bit further out just to broaden my options!
It's no biggie. People die all the time. He's got a friend who's a minister anyway so perhaps he can do something for him. As it is though, he's at the state where he'd be lucky to even move his head to read five words on a page or stay awake long enough to hear anyone say anything important to him. In any case we can't always control whether or not someone goes to "The Good Place" or "The Bad Place", so sometimes it's better to not think about it too much and to just focus on getting ourselves to where we'll be better off. God knows what He's doing.
It's especially bad when he uses the really flimsy kind of sandwich bags with the plastic that splits easily and all your body parts fall out before you even get tossed into the water and you end up all over the river bank and people come along the next morning and start puking and screaming in terror to the point that you can't even get a word in edgeways to ask any of them if they know anyone who's good at sewing and can reassemble you so that you'll be able to look decent when you go out for lunch later the same day. It's like they don't even have a sense of decorum.I hate it when Guido does that.
Indeed. And in my case it's additionally important that I am able to have a sense of integrating on a social level because for most of my adult life the "real life" me has been a timid reclusive type who avoids social interaction and finds the unwritten rules of such things too confusing and too taxing on my mental energy reserves to even bother with — I'm accustomed to barely even having to worry about whether I'm dressed well or whether my hair's a mess simply because I rarely go anywhere where I'll be seen by anyone apart from my mother and one or two other people during the course of any given week. And I literally don't have any friends, and I wonder if even having friends would do me good anyway, since it kind of seems like it would be burdensome dealing with someone trying to get to know me by asking questions about my life when I have very little life experience for my age and have lived most of it in a way that's been neither wonderfully virtuous nor outrageously depraved and/or decadent. So wherever I end up, socially it will be like jumping into the deep end of an olympic pool with only rudimentary swimming skills. That's why it's very important that I take my time. 'cause the last thing I want to do is scare myself silly and run away from something that should be good for me. So although distance is important, it's equally important (and maybe even more important) that the congregation includes people that I can relate to and have some kind of rapport with. I say this because there's a saying which goes something like, "A lone Christian is no Christian" — so there's no point in me joining something like that if I'm effectively going to be unable to relate to anyone just because they've already had spouses and kids for over a decade or because the only single people there are teens and twenty-somethings or old widows and widowers and everyone's at least semi-regularly employed (if they're not in school or retired) and the only disabilities they've encountered are stereotypical physical ones. Getting around the problem of effectively going from being a "lone Christian" to the complete opposite is as much about how well I play my part as how well they play theirs. It's got to be a two-way street. That's why I'm going to really take my time and ask some very serious questions including questions about the kind of members they have and how they run things. Because if the Church is supposed to be like a spiritual hospital then it makes no sense to do anything less than make sure that the particular congregation of it that I join lives up to that and doesn't come across like an understaffed hospital that doesn't even have all the right equipment and medicine (metaphorically speaking). 'cause I know that joining Orthodoxy is a serious choice and I know what Metropolitan Philaret of New York said about people who join the Eastern Orthodox Church and then leave it for something else. So I know it's not to be taken lightly. It's not something for me to do just because I happen to like the external religious trappings of pretty icons everywhere and clergy in funny outfits and candles and chanting and whatnot. It's something that I should only do once I'm absolutely certain that I'm not going to try to push the proverbial undo button to bail myself out of it. Because this is about my own eternal fate and about how Jesus Christ is going to look at me and regard me on Judgement Day. So I really need to plan ahead and plan very wisely and not be ignorant of potential stumbling-blocks such as things that could make me feel overly discouraged or make me wonder what the point of it even is. Because I'm in my late thirties now and I haven't been a regular in any sort of Christian congregation since I was barely twelve years old (it was "Open Brethren", which I'd been attending since I was about five years old) except for one time when I was about 14-and-a-half and I went to an AOG service for a bit of a laugh. I mean, over the course of the past 17 years I haven't really had any sort of fellowship with people of any religious persuasion at all. The closest I've come is visiting a local Taoist temple about, oh, I don't know.... Twenty times? If that. And over half of that was around 1999 to 2001 because at the time I lived nearby and it was just convenient for me to go there whenever I wanted to hang out in a place with a quasi-mystical "feel" to it with the guy I was good friends with during that period. Because it's always open during the day even if they're not doing any services, so I could go there and find a place to chill and not really be bothered by anyone. But of course, as tends to happen when you hang out in those kinds of places a bit too much, eventually a bit of syncretism crept into my spiritual philosophy and I ended up with a bit of an addiction to things like certain kinds of divination and some Chinese ideas on how to keep evil at bay and the power of chi and stuff like that. And I don't view that sort of stuff as intrinsically "bad" per se; it's had a very non-threatening impact on my worldview … but spiritual impurity is spiritual impurity so it's probably not good for me to be keen on getting into Heaven with a mentality that's basically got strong Journey to the West-style philosophical undertones to it. I mean, like God's going to be thrilled if I die after a lifetime of sod-all Christian fellowship and then rock up to be judged with a "monkey magic" attitude. [lol] I think we can all imagine how that would go down.
G'day. [lol]
