Metanoia

A most remarkable story of conversion, "conversion" both in that universally necessary sense, a continuing process of turning toward the Lord that we must all, or should all, commit to; and in that personal history way of bouncing, if not to formal membership in one denomination to another, at least to one pattern of practice from another.

I sometimes step back and try to remember, how did I get from here to there as I realize that I have lost all track of the clock in the 2nd greatest timesuck known to man -- from discussion of the CMAA hymnal to the Cherubic Hymn to the necessity or otherwise of professional church musicians to Orthodox liturgical music to one man's tale of finding God.

But I digress.

Although there is scarcely a concrete detail of our respective journeys we have in common, I read this and recognized myself:

Part of that experience was intellectual: We who mystically represent the Cherubim sing the thrice holy hymn to the life giving Trinity . . .

That’s when I “got it,” when my head began to follow my heart, then led my heart into even deeper transformation. I knew then, why we were there, and why we were not. I understood what worship truly meant.

We who mystically represent the Cherubim sing the thrice holy hymn to the life giving Trinity . . .

I had then such a deep understanding of worship that I didn’t need to inquire or wonder, because here was what I had been so shaken by at Mass, what had been so painfully absent after Vatican II, what I had been seeking for decades. And that understanding gave birth to what I can only describe as waves of awe and wonder at the power and majesty of God as I continued to hang onto ever word I heard.

Although my moment of comprehension did not occur at Divine Liturgy, it wasn't even at liturgy, it wasn't even while at prayer.
But that sudden moment of knowing why -- and why what else you might have been doing or experiencing isn't just different, but wrong?
Amazingly, beautifully painful.