THE ORTHODOX FAITH
Made as we are in the image of the Triune God, none of us can realize his or her personhood in isolation. Because I believe in a God who is Trinity, therefore I need you in order to be myself.
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Metropolitan Kallistos Ware
Orthodox Christianity is, fundamentally, a religion of relationship, of communion.
Orthodoxy understands the human person as made for communion with God, with each other, and with the world. The Fall introduced sin into the world as a wound that broke these relationships and began the slow drift toward a life lived as if we were each our own, separate, self-contained. The path of the Orthodox life is to be healed of this wound and find our way back to true communion with Christ, ourselves, each other and His creation.
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This is the claim Orthodox Christianity has carried for two thousand years: If you are wounded—and we are all wounded—the Church can become the hospital where you will find healing in Christ, the Divine Physician. The healing happens slowly, through worship, through the sacraments, through fasting and prayer and confession, through the long companionship of saints and one another. It takes as long as it takes. Salvation is therefore not a change in legal status but the transformation of the human person, made whole in Christ.
This is what a parish is for. Sunday morning Divine Liturgy, Holy Sacraments, fasting seasons and feast days shared together, the prayers said alone to Christ and together as His Body, the people you sit beside year after year who eventually knit into your family: everything in our faith life is the practice of communion. Imperfectly, with each other and with God, we practice being in communion until the practice becomes the life.
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Theology, for the Orthodox, is not academic knowledge. It is a way of life and a path to be walked.