It has been my sincerest hope that these articles on Eastern Spirituality are helping my readers see that Eastern Christianity presents a different and equally authentic approach to spirituality. One of the problems, I believe, that we have as Eastern Catholic Christians is that too often people have an impression that there is a distinctly Catholic spirituality which is different from Orthodox spirituality. This is, in my humble estimation, truly unfortunate since one of the true sources of all true spirituality is the way that a person worships God. Our Eastern spirituality flows from our Divine Liturgy. It is that which forms and animates our spirituality. Therefore, since we use the same Liturgy as our Orthodox brothers and sisters, we would hopefully have a similar approach to spirituality.
Our Divine Liturgy, for example, very clearly suggests, through all the adjectives it uses in reference to God, that He is truly beyond our understanding and that all of His actions are beyond our knowledge. In fact, we do not dare to suggest we know when the bread and wine are changed into the Body and Blood of Christ. This is a very Eastern approach. All we know is that the gifts are changed when we truly prayer to the Father, remember the words of the Son, and invoke the power of the Holy Spirit to change the gifts. Further, we don’t even care to know when this exactly happens. We truly JUST BELIEVE it happens.
Further, our sense of sin is quite different. We ask, during the Liturgy, God to forgive our not only our voluntary but also our involuntary offenses. This again is an Eastern way of thinking about life.
There are many more examples in our Liturgy which clearly tell us that our Eastern spirituality, which is formed by our worship, is different from that which is found in Western Christianity.
As we become more immersed in our understanding of the Liturgy, our thoughts also change about our relationship with God. He is not a Supreme Power that commands us to keep rules! Rather, He is a God Who loves mankind and only calls us to experience His love and then live as His loving children.