Orthodox both like and different from others

I am having a different kind of experience, Scott. Having said goodbye to a rather large and widespread base of friends from my Protestant background - I am finding it harder to make the same kind of headway into making friends in the Orthodox world. Part of it is my hesitancy and tentativeness with so much that is new and unfamiliar to me in the jargon of the Church (I still think Kontakion is someone from Kentucky), the lives of the Saints and the rubrics of worship. I still don\'t really know the difference between worship and veneration. Outwardly, it looks the same - and I haven\'t cultivated what it\'s supposed to be like inwardly. Another part of this feeling that I\'m still an outsider is because a large portion of my identity as a worshipper was nullifed. If you had asked me to describe my worship five years ago, I would have claimed that I was worshipping in spirit and in truth. Now I realize that it was more like \"Wisdom: let us pretend\" - and I am still in that mode. My worship is extremely shallow. Still, another contributor to my floundering is that the parish I attend is extremely small and I don\'t quite know how to persuade people to \"come and see\" - although I do ask... nobody seems to be interested in taking me up on the invitation.

Thank you for sharing your comments. As a cradle Orthodox I have been doing the two all my life, but I don’t know if I can properly explain it in words. I think the more you practice them the more you will see the difference. If you permit me, hoping I am not stepping over my bounds, I may be able to offer a definition, as I understand it and visualize it in my mind and heart and which is limited to my personal experience. I compare veneration to greeting someone, a guest or holy person, who comes into your house or whom you go to visit. In your best manners, you don\'t yell your greeting across the room- you go up to them, say hello and invite them in or thank them for the invitation. In the same manner, when we see a relic or a saint depicted on an icon, we go up to them and say hello. We bless ourselves because they are holy and greet them with a kiss. Sometimes we ask them for help. Other times we thank them for answered prayers. But mostly- it’s just an expression of good manners. Prayers or supplication is a different thing. Now, in worship, we are relating directly with God. Sometimes we use the words given to us through traditional prayers, because we don\'t always have the appropriate words to address someone as great and wonderful as God. There are other times we address God with personal thoughts and concerns. I am having a hard time defining worship except that it is reserved for God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The word worship is so intertwined with prayer, thanksgiving, respect, relating, giving over to… maybe because when we come to worship God in liturgy for example, we are doing so many things like prayer, thanksgiving, committing ourselves etc. The defining “fine line” differentiating veneration from worship is that the Saint’s hope is to direct us to God so that we too can have a relationship with Him. Therefore we only worship God, who is the source of Life and Salvation.

Thank you. This was well put. One thing that the Orthodox Church offers abundantly is ways to search out one\'s own sin and beg for God\'s limitless forgiveness. Since Scripture forces us, the Orthodox, to look at our own sin, and this impulse is reiterated by the prayers and the words of the saints, we have plenty of work to do before we condemn those outside the Orthodox Church.

I like that this article talks about the invisible nature of the Church. The body of Christ is eschatological. We only know who is a part of the Church at the Judgment. Fr Schmemann talked about the church being an icon of the Kingdom. By analogy, the church we go to on Sundays looks as much like the Kingdom in heaven as the icon on the iconastasis looks like Jesus in heaven.

[url=http://antiochian.org/node/16917]http://antiochian.org/node/16917[/url] (I like to make links \"clickable\") Thanks for the article, James. And thanks for the simple analogy of greeting friends. I hadn\'t thought of it that way, even though I remind my kids to \"Go, greet the icons QUIETLY\" when we enter the church. Silly me. That\'s what happens when I go on \'autopilot\' I haven\'t experienced much cultural barrier among the various parishes we had visited. Maybe it\'s because I am obviously of a different ethnicity that nobody bothered to ask \"Hey, are you Greek/Russian/Palestinian?\" Or maybe they thought I didn\'t speak English.

Maybe you should have asked if Christ\'s true Church was just for Russians or Serbs. To the Greek fellow, I would have asked what they did at the Antiochian Church that was so different than what was done at the Greek church. I can\'t believe such ignorance. We have a catechumen in our Greek parish who is black. I hope that our congregation has acted as they usually do and welcomed him. I\'ll usually go out of my way to talk to someone at Liturgy who I\'ve never seen before, even if it\'s just to say hello. After all, what the heck are we doing if we think that Orthodoxy is just an ethnic club that has great food festivals?