Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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@mariamenchristo
i'm so sorry to hear you are struggling to find a church home that is both safe and spiritually fulfilling. i pray that the warm light of God touches you wherever you are and that you are able to find a place where you feel like you belong and can be your authentic self
thank you
it really just feels like I'm in a lose-lose scenario. I've spent so many hours at this point crying about it because every time I try to think about my religious situation I just realise it's simply very bad.
I can't really be Orthodox even though that's my natural theological and practical home, I can only attend as a sort of second-class citizen due to my queerness and feel bad that despite how hard I tried to the point of detransition, I can never really be part of it, it's simply life or death. and the Catholic Church just presents the same problems (plus more, like the mess that is Novus Ordo) but kicks them further down the road. which leaves me pretty much only with the Episcopal Church. and the Episcopal Church feels like a big fat insult to me and my faith.
no offense to Episcopalians but to me the liturgy (I have trouble even calling it tha) is extremely shallow even in the most Anglo-Catholic parish in my area and there's basically nothing holding the church together; there's no dogmatic or doctrinal glue, no distinct theology of it's own, and no real believable claim to being a real church. I don't feel any connection, I actively disagree with the most common viewpoints, and I'm sharing pews with people who basically believe in a completely different Christianity from me. it's like the choice is trying to fit myself into Orthodoxy or Catholicism and actually dying there, or resigning to a permanently unsatisfying spiritual death in Anglicanism. I have no idea what to do or think and I hate just shaking and crying about it all the time. everything sucks
Could you please keep Mary M in your prayers? She is currently in hospital and close to death, please pray for her peace and her soul
I go crazy for the Incarnation.
can you imagine seeing Jesus smile? can you imagine the puff of air that would escape His nose when someone said something a little bit funny?? can you imagine watching Him tie His sandals??? Him brushing your shoulder by accident as you walk by???? falling to your knees cause you just touched God????? Him crouching down to face you and giving you the most loving look you've ever seen in your life?????? the way His voice would have sounded calling you by name???????! hearing God use His vocal cords and the air from His lungs and knowledge of the language He learned growing up to produce a sentence calling you by name?????!?!??!?!
His clothes feel just like anyone else's as they're made wet and cold with tears. He smells of skin and body odour and dust. His arms have hair. He's warm. you feel the calluses on His hands as they rub your back. your hands slowing come up and place themselves on His spine-
God has bones..
I have random followers I have an attachment to for no reason and whenever I see them in my notes I'm like "awww it's them :)" and it makes me happy. Listen to me....you never know the full enjoyment you bring to other people's lives
Икона Пресвятой Богородицы «Матерь Смирения» была создана в 2021 году в Грузии при храме Крестовоздвиженья в Тбилиси.
The icon of the Holy Mother of God "Mother of Humility" was created in 2021 in Georgia at the Church of the Exaltation of the Cross in Tbilisi.
I really dislike the label "progressive Christian." I dislike the label "progressive" itself for various reasons, but "progressive Christian" in particular is a label I find completely ridiculous. The label implies that the faith is formed around politics, rather than the other way around as it should be. Christianity will always be a political category of its own, owing allegiance to the Kingdom of God, not to any party or movement.
anyway y'all have some stuff from an imaginary soundtrack im working on
I don't think I will ever understand how the mainstream Orthodox opinion on gender dysphoria in regards to psychosomatic unity has come about. Even as I have attempted to detransition and obey it, it never makes any more sense. Yes, the soul and body are united and inseparable, but why do we have such faith that they will always 100% line up? We don't, elsewhere. The Church fully recognises that congenital conditions happen and have no implication for the soul. With intersexuality, there is a full recognition that the fallen world has produced a body that is incongruent with the soul. The main argument is that there is no gender for the soul independent of the body, in which case, why do we force intersex people into a specific gender even when their body is completely ambiguous? This itself implies that there is a dominant internal gender we're trying to search for and determine; if we actually applied the idea of the body itself representing gender consistently, we would have to throw the male-female binary out entirely because there are bodies that are born outside of it. The Church itself seems to implicitly accept in its behaviour that there is more to gender than simply being an emergent property of the body. "Biology determines gender" and "Gender is a male-female binary" are mutually exclusive. It is all so tragically confusing to me, because this one little thing out of the countless things I love about the Church is the thing that has exiled me. Even if it's right after all, we cannot just keep expecting people with gender dysphoria to "deal with it," because what if they can't? They either leave the Church like me or they die.
The empty and cold ways of the world are dependent on feeling hated and inadequate. Marketing for example, a beast of greed, works solely through lying by omission and selling you a version of yourself. The ways of Heaven are dependent on you feeling loved and accepted. Christ not only does not lie, but literally is Truth; Christ takes you as you are first before perfecting you as you live and participate in Him through His Energies. You cannot break the ways of the world without first loving yourself. After all, how can you love He who formed you, but not love His child and work of art? To insult the creation is to insult the abilities of the Creator.
crawling back to God only for Him to have already been carrying me
Based
What do you prefer in Eastern theology compared to Western theology and the Episcopal Church in particular?
Copying what I said before in response to this question when I was Orthodox: "The primary attraction of Orthodoxy to me was and is the theology. While I love the aesthetics and the liturgy, what truly makes it beautiful to me is the theology around the Divine Liturgy and why beauty in our faith is so important. And in general I have a strong love for Patristic theology and the Church Fathers, while Western theology to me has always felt devoid of the same level of mysticism and mystery. Most importantly, I love the Orthodox (and broader Eastern Christian) view of sin as a wound to be healed by the Divine Physician rather than a legal offence to be punished, as well as the Christus Victor model and all that jazz. In general, it feels more compassionate while still committed enough to the Truth that it doesn't simply conform to the whims of the world."
Please ignore this if you thing doing this will worsen your mental well-being in anyway
As someone who was in the Orthodox Church was a queer woman, left, and has come back to to Christianity as an exile of sorts from Orthodoxy, can you speak about what your was like in the Orthodox Church? I’m also a queer person transitioning to Orthodoxy and I just would like gain more insight on what to expect and such.
Thank you 🙏🏾
Hello, I remember interacting with you before my hiatus! I won't speak much on my experiences in the Church, but I can tell you what to expect. What you can expect is highly dependent on your parish, the parish's priest, and that priest's bishop. The doctrine is clear, of course, that homosexuality and gender transition are both sinful, but the Orthodox Church gives bishops and priests immense authority in the pastoral application of doctrine, known as oikonomia. It also depends on the exact nature of your queerness; for example if you are gay but celibate the effects on your relationship with the Church are much lesser compared to if you are openly in same-sex relationships. For me, I am asexual and even if I weren't, I date women and the Church sees me as a man, so the problem with me in the Church's eyes was mostly if not entirely me being transgender. The immediate barrier for a convert is that it is entirely possible that the priest will simply refuse to baptise you at all if you are "unrepentant" in their words. This is because Baptism involves forsaking all sin and everything to do with the Devil, as well as a promise to adhere to Orthodox doctrine, and if you are consistently committing what they deem a sin while insisting it is not sinful, you are failing both of those prerequisites. For example, in 2022, His Eminence Elpidophoros (the Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America) was reprimanded by both the Holy Synod and the EP's Synod for baptising not even a gay couple but the children of a gay couple. For some parishes, being baptised may require nothing short of celibacy or detransitioning. If you are baptised, you face the issue of whether or not you will be allowed to take communion. Generally, if a parish will baptise you despite you being openly queer, they will also let you take communion, and if a parish won't baptise someone due to queerness, they will certainly deny communion due to queerness as well. If everything fits together perfectly - your priest is sympathetic, your parish doesn't fall into scandal, and your bishop is sympathetic - you can be openly queer and live a good life in the Church like any other layperson. Worst case scenario, you don't get into the Church at all. Then, there is the area which was the dealbreaker for me. In almost every case except celibate gay men, you are forever locked to the laity and nothing more. It's quite unlikely that you will be allowed to serve behind the ikonostasis and it's impossible for you to ever be ordained. If you are fine with this, great. If you aren't, then you have three options: deal with it, suppress your queerness to try to adhere to doctrine (like me), or exile yourself to a more accepting church even if you aren't entirely on board with them (also like me). This all assumes that you are upfront and honest about your queerness with your priest, as I morally cannot condone lying to a priest, even by omission. I hope this helps a little.
Hello to any who may read. After taking the past three or four months to simply think everything over as much as I believe is needed, as well as dealing with the anger and resentment I felt over the personal circumstances that led to my abandonment of this blog (resentment that for a brief time fermented into rather childish anti-Christian behaviour elsewhere), I have decided that I will revive it. @romiosyni will likely stay inactive. However, I am no longer Eastern Orthodox in a traditional sense; I have found that as much as it pains me to admit it, the eastern Church does not have a place for me as a trans woman at this time. The failure of detransitioning forced me to confront that truth which I was too scared to recognise for a long time, because I truthfully do love the eastern Church and it would be my ideal home if only it had more room for queer faithful. It took a good while of psychological agony to pull me away from it, after all. Instead, I am in a rather unsatisfying middle ground. I suppose my "main" church will be the Episcopal Church where I can continue to discern priesthood; I'll still attend my Orthodox parish frequently and maybe sometimes a Catholic mass or adoration. Always was jealous of Eucharistic Adoration, I think it's beautiful. If you don't care what church I go to, you likely won't notice much of a change in my posts and theology. I still have my misgivings with Western theology and my love for Eastern theology, I just happen to be effectively exiled from the East itself. You may however notice me being less harsh on the West and more open in general. I hope that I'm less rigid and more compassionate, anyway. Such things are not for me to judge.
Pretty much gone from Tumblr for now. Thanks to all who discussed things with me, supported me, and simply listened to my ramblings every now and then. If you want to contact me, I'm active on Discord as "bloothexe" (at least, that's my username as of writing). I also have an Instagram for my music.
