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I was visiting an Orthodox site earlier today, and I have even more respect for you guys considering you actually reject the idea of one man being infallible, reject purgatory, and honor Mary at a level that is not above what she should be honored.

I also REALLY like the view that tradition and doctrine should not change and alter with the times and new papal pronouncements etc.

I like how you decide doctrines in councils, which is the Biblical manner.

I still have areas of disagreement I am sure: prescense of Jesus in Communion, praying to the saints (yes, you have a logical argument for it, but I just can't agree with it when when it isn't modeled in Scripture by Christ....though I have now discarded my argument against it based on the idea that Christ is our only mediator since you really don't violate that truth when you ask a saint to pray for you, just like you would a friend down here. The only problem I have is where is the evidence the dead in heaven hear your requests for prayer?). I also have problems with non-English liturgy if you have that, as well as icons of course. But, I am finding I have more areas that I admire than I disagree.

Do you believe in justification by faith alone or works also?

Waiting in Joyful Hope

They, the ones beneath the smooth, snowy mounds of graves, are the living. We, yet to be perfected, are the dead.
Mary Sawyer

I am making a grave. In my clean morning kitchen, I pour onto a platter the mix of boiled wheat berries, nuts, and dried fruits. I pat it into an oval mound, and it rises like a newly made grave. My grandfather died two years ago, and I am making this dish, called "kolliva," to bring to a memorial service.

In the Orthodox Church, at regular times of the year, we hold a group memorial service. Members of the church give the priest a list of the names they'd like remembered at the service, and each family brings a dish of kolliva as well. The wheat berries, small nut-like grains with a satisfying crunch, symbolize the hope of new life; as Jesus said, "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24). Once it has been mixed with fruits, nuts, and honey, the concoction is heaped on a platter and shaped into a mound. It is then covered with white powdered sugar to symbolize purity--the state of the soul newly received into Heaven. Candy and fruit decorations mark the kolliva with a cross.

Before the memorial service begins, all the plates of kolliva are placed on a table near the front of the church. Candles are plunked into each mound, one to represent each person you are remembering. The candles represent light and resurrection. At Christ's death on Holy and Great Friday, darkness covered the earth, but we know that he rose again; he is the Light that extinguishes all darkness.

At the end of the service, the sweet kolliva is served up for everyone to eat. When everyone has been served and there are still leftovers, women start going around with their platters, doling out extra helpings. Before long, there is an assortment of different kinds of homemade kolliva on your plate, representing several different families' prayers. Everyone's kolliva is mixed together, just like everybody's loved ones, who are now acquainted and "mixed" together in the Place of Eternal Rest.

After many, many years of waiting and hoping, I am now four months pregnant for the first time in my life. Early this morning as I patted my little mound of kolliva, layer after layer of patting, smoothing, feeling the curvature of its little grave-like mound, I could not help but notice that it feels exactly as my budding belly feels these days. I am just beginning to swell, and the shape, at the end of four months, is the same as my little kolliva. The firmness was like the strange firmness to my stomach. The curve of one imitated the curve of the other.

The kolliva beneath my hands was being offered for my grandfather, who passed from this life two years ago. For him, I was making the mound of the grave. The swell in my hands was the shape of death. But the swelling stomach beneath my nightgown early this morning was the swell of new life. And yet, as a friend pointed out last night while we were preparing the ingredients, "Your grandfather is alive. You are the one that is dead."

How very right he is. They, the ones beneath the smooth, snowy mounds of graves, are the living. We, yet to be perfected, are the dead.

In doing this we blur the boundary between the mortal and the immortal. We blend the physical and the spiritual. We dissolve the barrier between the living and the dead. How beautiful is this mixing of this life and the next life, of this world and the next world; of things visible and things invisible! Whether we know one another or not, we share, materially and spiritually, in our kolliva, our prayers, our loss of loved ones, our grief, our hope, our expectation of the resurrection, our light, our joy. This simple act of preparing food, attending church, and sharing what we have made resonates with profound meaning.

I am four months along, waiting for a birth that will change my life. But I look forward to another birth, one my grandfather has already undergone, that will change it for all eternity.

Faith and Works

"Orthodox Christianity teaches that belief in Jesus must be combined with putting that belief into action -- feeding the hungry, ministering to others, etc. Both essential. We read in the epistles: "Faith without works is dead." One can indeed "believe" in Christ and yet lead a life that betrays that belief. Hence belief alone is not sufficient. "Not all who say 'Lord, Lord' will have a place in my Kingdom."

Also see faith and works

You may also want to read this.

You have posed a number of good questions. We say that our Orthodox theology is "patristic" because we rely, in great measure, on the observations and explanations of the Scriptures handed down to us by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church. These were holy men who were dramatically advanced in theosis, in becoming like God, which, we believe in accordance with the beliefs of the early Church, is the reason God became Man. Theosis is a process, not a one time event, which is often likened to a ladder which we hope to ascend to God. On my about page you'll find the icon of the Ladder of Divine Ascent.

The Fathers wrote and taught often on the question of Faith and Works. One of the most profound of all the Fathers was St. Symeon the New Theologian, who wrote in his monastic lecture On the Mystical Life:

"And just as tools without the workmen and the workmen without tools are unable to do anything, just so neither is faith without the fulfillment of the commandments, nor the fulfillment of the commandments without faith able to renew and re-create us, nor make us new men from the old. But, whenever we do possess both within a heart free of doubt, then we shall become the Master's vessels, be made fit for the reception of the spiritual myrrh. Then, too, will He Who makes darkness His hiding-place renew us by the gift of the Holy Spirit and raise us up new instead of old, and part the veil of His darkness and carry our mind away and allow it to peek as through some narrow opening, and grant it to see Him, still somehow dimly, and one might look on the disk of the sun or moon. It is then that the mind is taught -- or, put better -- knows and is initiated, and is assumed that that truly in no other way does one arrive at even partial participation in the ineffable good things of God except by way of the heart's humility, unwavering faith, and the resolve of the whole soul to renounce all the world and everything in it, together with one's own will, in order to keep all of God's commandments."

You write that you have trouble believing in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. I understand that many Protestants have this problem but have never understood why. This belief is just about the oldest dogma of the Church and indeed is definitional of our Faith as Christians. St. Ignatius of Antioch, among the earliest of the Fathers, a disciple of +John, friend of Panagia, by pious tradition the child who sat on Christ's lap and successor to St. Peter as bishop of Antioch wrote, about the year 100:

"But look at the men who have those perverted notions about the grace of Jesus Christ…They will not admit the Eucharist is the self same body of our Savior Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins, and which the Father in His goodness afterwards raised up again." Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 7:1.

Indeed, much of the theology of The Church regarding the Eucharist and the fact that The Church is defined as a Eucharistic community made up of a bishop surrounded by his priests and laity under the lordship of Christ celebrating the Eucharist comes from his writings, from the writings of a man who walked with Christ as a child and learned The Faith at the feet of +John and +Peter. This ancient definition, by the way, preserved in the ecclesiology of the Orthodox Churches, marks a major difference between Orthodoxy and Roman Catholic theology. For us in the East, the fullness of the Church is to be found in a single diocese whereas in the theology of the Roman Church as it developed over the centuries, the fullness of The Church is defined as all the dioceses in communion with the Pope of Rome. I suspect you can see the implications of these two notions of what The Church is for jurisdictional claims across the entire Church. I can't resist quoting +Symeon again (he's one of my favorites though sometimes he ties my mind in knots!):

"I say that the ineffable speech which Paul heard spoken in Paradise were the eternal good things which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived.

These things, which God has prepared for those who love Him, are not protected by heights, nor enclosed in some secret place, nor hidden in the depths, nor kept at the ends of the earth or sea.

They are right in front of you, before your very eyes. So, what are they?

Together with the good things stored up in heaven, these are the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which we see every day, and eat and drink. These, we avow, are those good things.

Outside of these you will not be able to find one of the things spoken of, even if you were to traverse the whole of creation.

If you do want to know the truth of my words, become holy by practicing God's commandments and then partake of the holy things, and you will know precisely the force of what I am telling you."

As for the dead hearing our prayers for intercession or interacting with us, I can tell you that for us the dead are with us always. As Marmema wrote in her post to you, it is the holy "dead" who are truly alive, not us. Many of us have experienced the presence of the saints quite literally at our sides, so real that one could reach out and almost touch them. In Orthodox cultures, this isn't seen as odd or even dramatically unusual. My great grandmother, of blessed memory, couldn't spell "canon" or "ecumenical council" but her best friend throughout her life was the Mother of God. The ancient theology of The Church is quite clear that the "dead" do quite consciously exist after physical death. Indeed it is part of the Incarnational theology of The Church that Christ, after His death on the Cross, descended into Hades, broke down the gates of Hell and released the Righteous Dead as is shown on the icon of the Resurrection. As my tagline says, "Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!" And as The Church chants at Pascha, "Christ is Risen from the dead! By dying he has trampled down death and bestows life to those in the tombs!"

The Fathers wrote extensively on the state of the Righteous Dead. As Orthodox Christians, we have for 1800 odd years held a special reverence for the Desert Fathers, holy monastics who went off into the desert to attempt to gain theosis. Among the greatest was Abba Sisoes. In an ancient collection of stories about those Desert Fathers called The Paradise of the Holy Fathers, there is this about the death of Abba Sisoes:

"When Abba Sisoes was about to die, and the fathers were sitting with him, they saw that his face was shining like the sun. He said unto them, "Behold, Abba Anthony has come." After a little while he said again, "Behold, the company of prophets has come," and his face shone twice as bright. Suddenly, he became as one speaking with someone else, and the fathers sitting there asked him, "Show us with whom you are speaking, father."

Immediately, Abba Sisoes said to them, "Behold, the angels came to take me away and I asked them to leave me so that I might tarry here a little longer and repent." And the old men said unto him, "You have no need to repent, father." And Abba Sisoes said to the fathers, "I do not know in my soul if I have rightly begun to repent," and they all realized that the old man was perfect.

Then, suddenly, his face beamed like the sun and all who sat there were afraid and he said to them, "Look! Look! Behold, the Lord has come and he says, 'Bring unto me the chosen vessel which is in the desert,'" and he at once delivered up his spirit and became like lightning and the whole place was filled with a sweet fragrance."

Sorry for being so long in this but I wanted you to have just a taste of why we believe what we believe on the subjects you mentioned.