“I need to publicly apologize to you.”
No you don’t.
“Please forgive me.”
Of course.
Next Sunday and for the next few months, look around the temple and watch the the older cradles as they pray and notice the little things they do and say depending on the liturgical season. Their Orthodoxy, Y, is definitional of who they are. It is as much part of them as the cells in their bodies. Quite literally everything about them is shaped by their Orthodox Christianity. You will learn The Faith from the Fathers and the liturgies and devotions of The Church, and, God willing, from a good and holy spiritual father. But you will learn to LIVE the Faith, the Faith upon which the Universe was founded, from the unsophisticated Orthodox Christians around you.
Let me say that my home parish, while led by convert clergy, is not what you described in your earlier post. There is no pretense, no airs.
And if Orthodox Sunday was any indication, all the jurisdictions get along here. WELL. It was held at the GOA parish this year (I didn’t care for the organ, by way of full disclosure), and my Antiochian Convert Priest gave the Homily.
There is an old Polish couple in our parish, the gentleman introduced himself to me yesterday. In a rather thick accent, he told me that he was cradle (I really had no doubt) and that the background of the diocese he’d grown up in had a traceable ancestry to Cyrill. Chills...
And there are obviously several cradle Arab families, after all it is the Antiochian Archdiocese. And they are wonderful, beautiful people.