We were afraid too. There was a time when we were indignant over things which seemed “absurd”, “ignorant” or “outdated” in the life of the Orthodox Church. We (or, perhaps, most of us who were born in atheist families and in atheist times) looked at orthodox temples from the outside thinking that we had outstripped them and that we knew more than the “grandmothers” did. We were afraid that the Orthodoxy with its “dogmata and canons” would deprive us of our freedom. We were afraid of getting into a caserne and of being torn out of the modern world and thrown into the “darkness of the Middle Ages”. We were afraid that as soon as we let an Orthodox sermon reach our souls, it would drive all the joys of life out of them.
Now we are afraid too. But of other things. We are afraid of our former sultriness overtaking us again. What if some twist happens in our souls, in our lives — and we become slaves again.
Indeed, a slave in not only someone literally put into irons. The strongest irons are those we do not see. The most terrible bounds are those that are inside us. Contact lenses are hardest to find in one’s own eye. So as long as we were in the world of impiety we did not even know that, right from the cradle, we had “contact lenses” implanted in our eyes (or, to be correct, in our hearts and minds) and substantially distorting the perception of the world’s colors. Those lenses had been showing emptiness where there was something important as it turned out later. Sometimes they miniaturized really important things, but because of them something really miniature inflated so as to cover the sky.
It continues here:
http://www.pravmir.com/article_76.html
