Entries in Life

I've really appreciated your recent posts on this topic, Mark. My only response will be to quote two paragraphs from an interview with Fr. Alexander Men.

Around fifteen years ago, a young man at my church started making occasional visits to the Baptist Church. I told him, you are Orthodox, of course you can go there because the church is everywhere, Christ is everywhere, the gospel is everywhere. Do both: go to the Baptist Church and don't forget your own spiritual roots. And when I explained the open model to him, he said, Oh dear, how uncomfortable! He ended up by becoming a Baptist.

That person could only be either a Baptist who did not recognize Orthodoxy, or an Orthodox who cursed the Baptists. He wanted to have a little hole to hide himself away in. Apparently Peter the Great also suffered from a psychological disorder—the fear of open spaces. He built himself tiny little rooms and so on. There is an illness like that—the fear of open spaces. In the history of religion, there is also this fear of open spaces.

The Russian Orthodox Church Today