A life lived in Christ for others: Fr. Anthony Chan On Dong, 1926-2009

On July 21st, 1996, Fr. Anthony Chan On Dong baptized me and confirmed me in the Catholic faith.

Last Saturday I received news that he died earlier that morning after a long and intense battle with cancer. In our last conversation several months before, he had told me how grateful he was that God had given him a sign of his imminent death: a growing lump on his shoulder which his doctor said indicated the final stages of cancer. “Many people leave suddenly, without preparation,” he said his thick Chinese accent, “but God has given me this sign so that I can prepare for death. I am so blessed.”

Everyone who has faith of some degree cannot escape the realization that we owe that to someone. At the wake yesterday and the funeral Mass today I became more aware than ever of the great debt of faith which I owe to Fr. Anthony. Had it not been for him, I might never have found the apostolic faith—or kept it. In an earlier post several months ago I recalled perhaps the most important lesson I learned from this priest:

Several weeks before my baptism, Fr. Anthony requested a brief meeting with me. During our time together, he asked me why I wished to be baptized. I gave the standard catechumen’s answer.

“Because I want to follow Jesus Christ and do what He has commanded,” I said a bit sheepishly, wondering I’d said the correct words in the correct order.

He smiled, and said to me, “Good. Then it is for Jesus Christ that you are doing this. There will come a day when someone in the Church will disappoint you, or perhaps even hurt you.  Maybe it’ll even be me. Maybe I’ll run off with some woman and leave the priesthood. But you must remember your answer. You are doing this for Jesus Christ, and while everyone else in the Church might disappoint you, He won’t. So don’t leave Him.”

The picture albums that were set out during the wake and the packed church at his funeral Mass today were powerful reminders to me of the fruitfulness of a life lived for others. Even in his old age, he would go places in his scooter to visit parishioners and administer the sacraments. Having left his homeland of China as a young seminarian, he frequently expressed his wish to return to his village to celebrate Mass and give alms there—a dream which his friends helped him realize at the end of last year. The video footage showed him, all smiles, giving out ang pows (red packets filled with money) to dozens of people at a dinner he’d organized for them. Even on his deathbed, Fr. Anthony told my godfather that there were people he wished he could see so he could talk to them about Jesus Christ.

A life lived in Christ for others. This, it seems to me, is how Fr. Anthony’s life should be summed up. And what a crucial and refreshing contrast this pattern is against the frenetic quest for self-actualization and self-fulfillment that has become staple for our world and, unfortunately, for us Christians.

“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies….” Fr. Anthony died to so much while he was alive, and because he did I owe him this life I have in Christ. Now that he has passed through the veil into the Age to Come, I count on his prayers more than ever before and hope to receive at least a fraction of that life-giving generosity that so marked his days with us.

 

 

Stoopids (being the closest thing to a retraction)

What’s worse: thinking, “I know better” or thinking, “I used to think that I knew better, but I actually do now”? Or are both the same?

I’ve been reading some online stuff by other converts to Orthodoxy, and the tone is always the same: “I’ve read such-and-such books and I’m quite well-informed about whatever it is that I’m now writing about, and although I’m a young convert I have faith in the Church, live as a monk in the city and start all my spiritual conversations with, ‘My spiritual father told me…’ or, ‘The Fathers say….’”  That, when they’re not gushing about how old icons are, how long (“holier?”) our services are, or how uncompromising the Church has been on moral issues. All of it irritated me very much.

One of the most sobering rebukes ever given me was, “You hate most the faults that you find in yourself.”

Zing.

Several years ago, I gave a talk on the Eucharist, relating it to how and why I became Catholic, delivering it with the kind of hubris of which only a sophomore is capable. Most Catholics, I said, don’t know how central the Eucharist is or what a great gift it is blah blah blah. After that, a good (and honest) friend who had been raised Catholic came up to me and said, “But who are you to tell these people who’ve been Catholic all their lives what they should or shouldn’t do?” It shook me up a bit, because I was more used to praise along the lines of, “Isn’t it great that you’re a convert and can show us poor cradle Catholics the treasures of our own faith?”

But you know, the suspicion that she was somehow right has never left me. These past few days I’ve been slowly sinking into the realization that the very things that bother me about my fellow converts to Orthodoxy are my own flaws. It’s akin to spitting on an image that one later realizes is one’s own reflection in the mirror. In the short time that I’ve been Orthodox, I’ve repeated most, if not all, of the significant mistakes I made as a Catholic convert of 12 years, both on this blog and elsewhere.

At first I thought about deleting all the posts and comments that bear witness to my rashness (like the ones on Christology, the papacy, etc.)—maybe even the whole blog—, since in blogdom it is actually possible to recant nearly all that one has said without publishing a book of retractions. Erase that past (or at least most of it) and move on.

But then I thought, “Maybe that’s not what this is supposed to be about. Maybe it’s about leaving your faults to be seen by the public but actually apologizing for them.” I decided to listen to that voice, which I hope is not that of the Devil himself.

So, the bottom line is this. Readers, forgive me. I have written far more than my real knowledge warrants, and I have only myself to blame for my misguided zeal.

As for my posts, both after and before my reception into the Orthodox Church, they will remain here for all to read as monuments of my weakness as a Christian. I hope that whoever reads this blog will always be able to take whatever resembles wheat and leave the chaff behind.

I remember a story told by Fr. Benedict Groeschel (not my spiritual father—get it?), in which an event he had been planning turned out to be a complete failure.

He told Mother Teresa of Calcutta afterwards, “I feel so humiliated.”

“That’s not so bad,” she told him, “humiliation usually comes before humility.”

I hope she’s right on that one.

That said, I resume, and hopefully by a different way.

The Bible and the Church: Reviving an earlier post

Thanks to the input of a new reader named Francis and the much-loved Fr. Paul, there is now something of an ecumenical conversation about my earlier post, “The Bible as ‘a book of the Church’“. Since those reading this blog via a feed aren’t able to see the “Recent Comments” box and might not be privy to this, I wanted to notify them and invite anyone to join in the conversation if they’re so inclined. Seems like it’s been a while since an ecumenical discussion took place here.

In a comment there, I talk a bit about an issue that eventually led to my becoming Orthodox. Several readers have asked me to write more about that journey, but I’ve found it difficult to do partly because the paint is still wet, so to speak, and also because I don’t know how to talk about it without a specific context (plus, I’m trying to minimize the convert blogorrhea here). One of Fr. Paul’s comments, though, was something of a springboard, so I took the opportunity to explain myself a little more. If you’re interested in that, you can check out the comments for that too.

Don’t forget the new dandy WordPress feature that allows you to subscribe to comments on any post so you don’t have to keep coming back to this site just to see if other people have posted anything new!

Guilty as charged

From the always-provocative, always-frank Fearsome Comrade, whom I read just to get woken up with a poke in the eye punch in the gut. Having been about the conversion business several times now, I cannot but feel found out.

Stages of Conversion

It doesn’t seem to matter what version of the Christian faith you join, because this seems to be a near-universal process:

Phase 1: The Cage Phase
So you’ve found your new tradition, and you’ve finally discovered all the answers to life’s problems encompassed within it. You’ve also read a few books that explain how every other Christian tradition (especially the one you just left) has absolutely ruined the piss out of the Christian faith as a whole. As God’s apostle to the unconverted, it now falls upon you to save the world (especially your friends and family in the old tradition) by enlightening them as to just how perfect everything is about your new tradition and how stupid and wrong everything about their current tradition is. It is very important for you to have a blog during this time so that you can enlighten as many people as possible.

Phase 2: Addiction
After having ruined all your relationships from your past life, you are now disillusioned with the willful ignorance and impiety of all those outside your new church. Let the heretics stew in their heresy. It is now time to busy yourself with drinking as much religious Kool-Ade as you possibly can, preferably until your skin becomes the same color as Purplesaurus Rex and your body’s pH levels are completely thrown off. You need to read every theological or devotional book you can, buy lots of the assorted trinkets associated with your tradition, and make lots of pilgrimages to either theology conferences or monasteries, depending on how your church rolls.

Phase 3: Apostle of Renewal
You’ve recently noticed that most of the other people in your church are not nearly as obsessed with it as you are. They aren’t reading those books, and they aren’t buying all that crap you’ve strewn your house with. They’re more concerned with paying the bills than why those awful sectarians are wrong. They even have friends outside the church! Many of them are not aware just how right and perfect their church is, or how great their lives would be if they would just fling themselves with total abandon into the kind of obsession you yourself have. This is clearly a problem that must be fixed, for it threatens to destroy the purity of the faith. As God’s chosen agent of change, you busy yourself with trying to whip up everyone in the congregation into the same frothing devotion you yourself exhibit.

Phase 4: Beaten by Reality
You’ve finally faced the harsh truth: The people in your new tradition are, at their core, a whole lot like all those people from your old tradition that you despised so much, with all the same foibles and failings. You give up on saving the world, on restoring your tradition to its purity, and have lost your confidence that God himself has appointed you to fix everything. You’ve discovered that your new church in fact has a lot of ugliness in its history, has a lot of jerks in its power structure, can’t solve all of life’s problems, and isn’t always all that consistent or believable in what it teaches or what it does.

Phase 5, Option 1: The Rat Leaves the Ship
Clearly, you were had. You thought you had found the One True Perfect Tradition, but you were deceived. You know what you must do–find the tradition that really does get it all right, because it must be out there. Back to Phase 1 for you!

Phase 5, Option 2: Complete Disillusionment
You have realized, perhaps after going through this cycle several times, that you are perhaps the only sincere, thinking Christian in the world. Everyone else is a hypocrite or a dunce, and all these corrupt denominations and hierarchies have ever accomplished is completely screwing up everything. Completely embittered at the idea of organized religion, you isolate yourself in order to go be a true follower of Christ without all those awful other people screwing things up. If you meet some like-minded folk, you start meeting up with them in order to transcend organized religion by organizing a religion. It’s very likely that you eventually realize that all religious people are deluded fools and become an atheist or agnostic.

Phase 5, Option 3: Partial Disillusionment and Accommodation
After facing the harsh reality in Phase 4, you’ve further realized that phases 1 through 3 ought to be renamed “Jackass,” “Nutjob,” and “Know-it-All,” respectively, which suggests that you are, for the most part, much worse at being a decent human being than all those people too stupid and impious to realize how awesome your new religion is. While many of the reasons that you had for joining your current tradition remain, and thus so do you, you decide it’s time to cut yourself, your church, everyone else’s churches, and rest of the world some slack.

Freer.

Children playing, Ndebele Village (http://www.ndebelevillage.co.za)

It’s been three months since I was received into the Orthodox Church last October 4th, and seven since I began attending St. Mary’s. When I look at the journey that’s begun, the best way I can sum it up is this: it leads to greater and greater freedom.

I told Fr. Philip yesterday that I feel freer than I ever have before. I can’t articulate exactly the how and why of this freedom. All I know is this: it’s there, I experience it in particular ways, and it is happiness.

I feel free to explore and embrace the whole Tradition of the Church, the ways of living and praying and speaking about God which the Fathers and Mothers have taught us. I feel free to learn at the feet of St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Ephrem and Amma Theodora and St. Silouan the Athonite and Paulos Mar Gregorios.

I feel free to read and study the Bible in the spaciousness of the Patristic tradition, with its chorus of voices that agree and disagree, provoking an argument here and resolving a tension there. I feel free to enjoy the harmony of these voices when they converge as well as the dissonance when they diverge.

I feel free to worship God in the full-bodied diversity of the Church’s liturgy and spirituality even as I am primarily taught and formed in one of its many apostolic schools. As I learn from the Syriac tradition, I feel free to treasure and ponder what I’ve experienced in and received from the Byzantine and Roman traditions. As I learn to sing the Manisa of St. Severus, I feel free to benefit from the catechetical methodology of St. Augustine and the poetry of St. Symeon the New Theologian.

I feel free to embrace, albeit slowly and weakly, the ascetical tradition of the Faith: to fast on the days appointed by the Fathers of the Church, to pray as the ancient teachers taught us, to work for peace and justice as St. Basil showed us by word and example.

I feel free to own the entire history of the Church—to acknowledge that mistakes and failures of my particular Church and those of the other Churches; to not justify them in the name of Christian apologetics; to nevertheless be a proud heir of the heritage that my spiritual forefathers and foremothers have left behind and to receive these as my true ancestors in the faith, without whom it wouldn’t be possible for me to be an Orthodox Christian.

But above all, I feel free to follow Christ—free to fail and be forgiven; free to receive His unrelenting, undeserved, unconditional love.

I feel free to encounter Him in the mystery of the liturgy and the Scriptures, and in that mystery to taste something of the immensity of the Father revealed in the Son.

I feel free to acknowledge and give thanks for the work of the Spirit in my life and the lives of others—especially those who belong to other religions.

Greater and greater freedom. That’s the best way I can put it. And when this “convert high” fades as it always does, I look forward to being a more sober Orthodox Christian!