- Sep 29, 2016
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So, my life from the time of my youth to now has been corrupted by sin and disorder, and up until I started going to the Orthodox Church I've been going to now for about 2 years, my life was on a downwards spiral.
I started changing some of my ways, and while I believe I've cast away a good chunk of my legalism (it's still there to a degree) and got to a point where my own room wasn't always in a complete disarray, I still was flawed in many respects, but still noticed a small climbing upwards from where I was in spiritual progress little by little, chunk by chunk.
For some reason though, from the time of the end of Pascha to now, I've hit a massive ceiling and feel like I'm not progressing and am getting worse and worse spiritually, and anything I do - prayers, Bible readings, asking for prayers, giving to the poor - nothing's at all changing it.
Now, as someone who has had depression in the past, I still struggle from it to a degree, and I sometimes am really mistaken about character judgments, and will sometimes come to irrational conclusions about how other people feel about me or think about me based on anecdotal evidence.
However, I feel like there was a veil between me and my Father Confessor, because my Priest would always say these wonderful platitudes and sayings, and would often times give me wonderful answers to questions I had, while also seeming to actually care for me - but it seems that now, after having spent this much time with him, that veil has torn, and I'm seeing him just as someone who really doesn't have a dynamic relationship with people - he repeats the same platitudes over and over and over again like a memorized script, and he appears to be really petty and passive aggressive towards people for little reason. In fact, there was a moment in time a while ago where I just snapped at him because I was quite sick of some of the seemingly passive aggressive comments that he gave me (if I'm not just overanalyzing it), to which I apologized for my behavior.
I might regret posting this because I do think he reads this site and might figure out who I am, but just today, we were talking about who Christ was, and we were talking about the Chalcedonian definition, and someone asked the question about whether Christ had a post-fallen or pre-fallen human nature, and he took like a whole 20 minutes elaborating on that without answering the question. He also briefly talked about the 6th Ecumenical Council and compromising with the non-Chalcedonians, so I asked a question, that it wasn't clear what a "will" was compared to an energy, other than I know they are separate, and he just said "Well, you know, I worked on my thesis with that, and it's fascinating, but that's beyond the scope of the class. Anyways, ..."
Like, maybe I'm reading way too into it, but like couldn't he just say "Well, we are running low on time, maybe some other time?" Or "Would it be okay if we talked about it another time, due to how complicated it could be?", or maybe even "Sorry, I don't have scope right now to answer to that one."
The class follows a very loose structure and is often allowed to be derailed, including such a complicated question like the above about human nature, but just the blunt, cold, rejection of my seriously innocuous question in a context where it seemed perfectly legitimate, considering he himself was the one who brought up the idea of the heresy of "Monoenergism," the thought that had enter my mind was "Wow, what a jerkish thing to say."
And there's instances like this all the time! He just says some things that either come across as possessing a pure unbridled apathy towards me, or sometimes even pure hostility. Like, he told me straight to my face that while I was not the hardest person to work with, I was "up there" in terms of my difficulty of working with me.
So, I feel like I don't have a Priest any longer whom I can talk with, I also have other people that I struggle with; while the older people in my Church really do care for me and are really nice, and loving to me, and there are people my age who do love and care for me, there is a clique of people who hang around the Church like mosquitoes looking for blood, who are my age and whom just seem like toxic and emotionally immature / unstable people to deal with. Like, I have a friend who used to go to the Church but left, and I told him quite frankly to his face that one of these people, a girl he used to date, is really emotionally unstable and immature, and he just started laughing at it in agreement, saying "you don't say!"
We had another Priest, and I considered this Priest to be a more dynamic person in how he relates to people, but he's leaving he Church, which is already a bad problem than switching to a different Priest in the same Church.
I'm only gonna be at this school for a couple of months, and I'm really conflicted about staying in this Church or going through the process of changing Churches just for the next couple of months, before leaving again.
Based on these things, I'm seriously voting for the latter, because I'm miserable in how cut off from others, and thus God, I can feel at this Church, and I think that this reason has been a subconscious root in my problems of not feeling confident in Orthodoxy - maybe my soul wants me to find ANYTHING to change my bad habits and paralysis that I can't get rid of.
And I know there's no such thing as a "perfect Church," but I feel like when it's at a point where the Priest is not helpful in paralysis, and only encourages such paralysis, there's a point where you just have to leave before he drags you to hell.
I don't know, thoughts?
I started changing some of my ways, and while I believe I've cast away a good chunk of my legalism (it's still there to a degree) and got to a point where my own room wasn't always in a complete disarray, I still was flawed in many respects, but still noticed a small climbing upwards from where I was in spiritual progress little by little, chunk by chunk.
For some reason though, from the time of the end of Pascha to now, I've hit a massive ceiling and feel like I'm not progressing and am getting worse and worse spiritually, and anything I do - prayers, Bible readings, asking for prayers, giving to the poor - nothing's at all changing it.
Now, as someone who has had depression in the past, I still struggle from it to a degree, and I sometimes am really mistaken about character judgments, and will sometimes come to irrational conclusions about how other people feel about me or think about me based on anecdotal evidence.
However, I feel like there was a veil between me and my Father Confessor, because my Priest would always say these wonderful platitudes and sayings, and would often times give me wonderful answers to questions I had, while also seeming to actually care for me - but it seems that now, after having spent this much time with him, that veil has torn, and I'm seeing him just as someone who really doesn't have a dynamic relationship with people - he repeats the same platitudes over and over and over again like a memorized script, and he appears to be really petty and passive aggressive towards people for little reason. In fact, there was a moment in time a while ago where I just snapped at him because I was quite sick of some of the seemingly passive aggressive comments that he gave me (if I'm not just overanalyzing it), to which I apologized for my behavior.
I might regret posting this because I do think he reads this site and might figure out who I am, but just today, we were talking about who Christ was, and we were talking about the Chalcedonian definition, and someone asked the question about whether Christ had a post-fallen or pre-fallen human nature, and he took like a whole 20 minutes elaborating on that without answering the question. He also briefly talked about the 6th Ecumenical Council and compromising with the non-Chalcedonians, so I asked a question, that it wasn't clear what a "will" was compared to an energy, other than I know they are separate, and he just said "Well, you know, I worked on my thesis with that, and it's fascinating, but that's beyond the scope of the class. Anyways, ..."
Like, maybe I'm reading way too into it, but like couldn't he just say "Well, we are running low on time, maybe some other time?" Or "Would it be okay if we talked about it another time, due to how complicated it could be?", or maybe even "Sorry, I don't have scope right now to answer to that one."
The class follows a very loose structure and is often allowed to be derailed, including such a complicated question like the above about human nature, but just the blunt, cold, rejection of my seriously innocuous question in a context where it seemed perfectly legitimate, considering he himself was the one who brought up the idea of the heresy of "Monoenergism," the thought that had enter my mind was "Wow, what a jerkish thing to say."
And there's instances like this all the time! He just says some things that either come across as possessing a pure unbridled apathy towards me, or sometimes even pure hostility. Like, he told me straight to my face that while I was not the hardest person to work with, I was "up there" in terms of my difficulty of working with me.
So, I feel like I don't have a Priest any longer whom I can talk with, I also have other people that I struggle with; while the older people in my Church really do care for me and are really nice, and loving to me, and there are people my age who do love and care for me, there is a clique of people who hang around the Church like mosquitoes looking for blood, who are my age and whom just seem like toxic and emotionally immature / unstable people to deal with. Like, I have a friend who used to go to the Church but left, and I told him quite frankly to his face that one of these people, a girl he used to date, is really emotionally unstable and immature, and he just started laughing at it in agreement, saying "you don't say!"
We had another Priest, and I considered this Priest to be a more dynamic person in how he relates to people, but he's leaving he Church, which is already a bad problem than switching to a different Priest in the same Church.
I'm only gonna be at this school for a couple of months, and I'm really conflicted about staying in this Church or going through the process of changing Churches just for the next couple of months, before leaving again.
Based on these things, I'm seriously voting for the latter, because I'm miserable in how cut off from others, and thus God, I can feel at this Church, and I think that this reason has been a subconscious root in my problems of not feeling confident in Orthodoxy - maybe my soul wants me to find ANYTHING to change my bad habits and paralysis that I can't get rid of.
And I know there's no such thing as a "perfect Church," but I feel like when it's at a point where the Priest is not helpful in paralysis, and only encourages such paralysis, there's a point where you just have to leave before he drags you to hell.
I don't know, thoughts?
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