“May I ask why you are ‘sighing’?”
Because sometimes MD is still such an Anglican!
Among the Orthodox we almost all of us, individually and as families have a special saint or saints to whom we feel a particular kinship. For example, I have a particular devotion to +John Chrysostomos and +Aidan while my family has a familial devotion to +Nektarios of Aegina. We will pray that they intercede for us, we keep icons of them in our icon corners and down in Greece some families, mine for example, will have small free standing family chapels named after a saint to whom the builder of the chapel had a special devotion. Its something like in your family. I have several cients who are Indian and it is fascinating how many of our Orthodox customs, especially surrounding commemoration of the dead, seem to have a remarkable similarity to Indian practices.
Darn it.
Ah well, wait a minute here, is what I meant to say.
My immediate right here family, consisting of my wife and me, and Polly the cat and Clint, the new orphan kitty who has enough of an appetite that I think he will live, WE have favorite saints. Nancy and I are just cranking up to do a novena to Terese, in fact a couple of novenas.
But I didn't think of them kind of being handed down as a family tradition. And Nancy has her saintly homies and I have mine. It's a very open marriage, when it comes to Saints, that is.
AS far as religious similarities are concerned, I have this comment. It's like Ptolemy, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler. Many phenomena are the same, and around the world people understand in the most unexpected places that Love makes the world go round. It blows my mind that around the time of the Incarnation, the First great Buddhist conference took place. The vital part of Buddhism that came from that was the part which de-emphasizes enlightenment and emphasizes compassion and the Bodhisattva ideal of suffering for others. The Vajrayana, the Mahayana in general, and all the Chan/Zen schools came from the group that emphasizes compassion as supreme over enlightenment.
This is an example of how the universality of God and His self-disclosure in nature (including human nature) inevitably leads to sometimes quite remarkable similarities.
So Ptolemy and Tycho Brahe are very very similar in their "systems". But (Copernicus and) Brahe put the Sun at the center, and thus enable Kepler who lays the groundwork for Newton and all that.So yeah, the similarities are startling, but sooner or later it comes down to what's at the center. If it's not Christ and Him Crucified, the best we can hope for is unsatisfactory epicycle piled on unsatisfactory epicycle,
sez me. Death by epicycle.