A Brief Account of a Prodigal Son
My story is not so different from other young adults in our age. I was baptized into the Methodist church, but my family stopped going when I was still very young. I knew a few of the basic Sunday School stories: Jonah and the whale, David and Goliath, and of course Jesus dying for our sins. But why this is our cultural inheritance, why it was important that He died for our sins, and why exactly I should care about all this and why I have to, “be good,” according to someone else’s opinion and not mine, was not something I understood. Considering how little I understood, and how young I was when I stopped attending church, I count myself among those with little to no religious background at all.
I decided in my teens that God was not real, and, if He was, I didn’t care because I was the master of my fate. Nobody can tell me what to do, not even God. This persisted through college.
After I graduated college, my heart slowly began to soften. I eventually found my way back to a Methodist church which I attended once a month at best. In mid-2019 I decided that God actually was real, and that I was glad about that, but I still had no compulsion to follow Him. Then, one night in late January 2020, I accepted that not following Him would be a betrayal of both Him, and my own conscience. I even vaguely remember saying in prayer that I would follow Him wherever He was, even if He was outside the bounds of Methodism and Protestantism in general.
Then came the pandemic. I can’t say I felt alienated from church, as many churchgoers at the time did, because I rarely attended in the first place, and I never stayed to talk after the service. During the lockdowns, I read the Gospels and much of the Epistles for the first time. The Parable of the Prodigal Son stood out the most. I was astounded that something so ancient could describe my experience nearly word for word. Simultaneously, I discovered what I call the, “Peterson-Pageau Pipeline.” In which one (especially a young man like myself) discovers Jordan Peterson, then through him finds Jonathan Pageau, a friend of Peterson and an Orthodox Christian who isn’t afraid to talk about the very strange and mysterious things about Christianity. Then from there, to visiting the nearest Orthodox church.
By late 2021, I had discovered that in order to keep the promise I made to Christ, I would have to leave not only Methodist Protestantism, but all of Western Christianity. The Eastern Orthodox Church was the True Church, the full version of Christianity. I suspected that if I went to Saint Mary Magdalene’s in Fenton (The closest parish to my house as revealed by Google Maps), I would probably end up converting. In February 2022, I finally visited.
If I still believed in coincidences, that belief died when I witnessed my first Divine Liturgy. It was the Sunday of the Prodigal Son. I became a catechumen a month later. I was received into the Church a year after that (April 2023) and God named me Ephraim, after Saint Ephraim the Syrian.
I know some converts struggle to accept or understand Orthodox teachings because it’s so different from what Western theology teaches. As for me, it’s so far been easy for me to accept Orthodox teachings because I have only marginally known any other Christian confession.
No, for me, the struggle comes from rejecting the secular life I once lived and accepting an entirely new way of life. There are times when I feel like some kind of liar or imposter. Despite the struggle, I simply cannot go back. I have seen that being, “my own man,” is impossible, and is nothing but a dead end.
How does one escape the salt plain that is secular life? Through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and through the prayers of the most holy Theotokos, the softener of evil hearts.
“Then Jesus said to His disciples, ‘If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what profit is it to a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?’”