It is not uncommon, either in person or via social media, for me to be asked how I went from Point A to B to C and so forth with respect to what I’ll call half-jokingly my “religious alignment.” Over the years I picked up quite a few dodgy answers, all of which are meant to indicate that I don’t feel like talking about it. I still don’t. Conversion stories are typically (though not always) a bore and the only one which people should spend any time meditating upon happened almost 2,000 years ago on a road to Damascus. The whole idea of conversion at this point in history strikes me as a bit silly, especially when it involves people going from, say, Catholicism to Orthodoxy (or vice versa) or, at the intra-ecclesial level, from “Novus Ordo Catholicism” to “Traditional Catholicism” or “New Calendar Orthodoxy” to “Old Calendar Orthodoxy,” etc. Never before have Christians had so many “options” (there’s that word again), and any “option” that is exercised typically comes from movements of the soul that have little, if anything, to do with “discovering the true Church” or “the truest part of the truest Church.” That’s not a new observation. Owen White—if I recall correctly—made it many moons ago and formulated it in terms far more powerful than any I have to offer. Not every movement of the soul is good, mind you. Some of mine certainly have not been. A lack of resolve coupled with a very personal—and highly subjective if not selfish—desire to live beyond the horizon of inter-ecclesial barking has driven more than a few of my choices over the years. A choice for Catholicism, in my estimation, should not be a choice against Orthodoxy, though anyone who has read my blogs and occasional articles over the years knows full well that I haven’t exactly lived that belief out day to day. Frankly, I struggle to live out my belief in the Credo (with or without filioque) day to day, which makes me the absolutely worst candidate to start-in about some epic ecclesiastical odyssey shot through with contradictions and missteps.
