Orthodox Greekness vs. Greek Orthodoxy

I read yesterday something by the Orthodox priest Father Andrew Stephen Damick that brought together a couple of things I was talking about on the blog yesterday: specifically, the case of the gay Greek Orthodox man who is outraged that a priest wouldn’t give him communion, given that he, the layman, believes that he is a “good person,” and the most recent post I did on Paradiso, in which I discussed the importance of cultivating the right attitude towards learning truth — including working on the ability to abide patiently in love until things become apparent to you. Fr. Damick writes:

    Because Orthodoxy comes with a vast set of expressions of its tradition, you can never exhaust it all. There is always something new not just to learn but to become. While we don’t really “arrive” until the next life (and I’d argue even that is not an arrival; that is, it’s not the end of the road of salvation), there are many way-stations in this life that delight and grant joy. The difference between Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism in this regard is that I’m talking about not just growing in wisdom, which is common to all religious traditions, but that Orthodoxy tracks many stages of spiritual development throughout a whole lifetime.