Missionary Dating -- Convert Your Sweetie With a Kiss?

About the time I joined the Orthodox Church for theology, there was another tall fellow joining for marriage. He joined because the girl he was dating was Orthodox. His birth name, like mine, was Eric. He was an Army captain with rippling biceps. My guess is that he weighed 280 pounds, a solid 280, and he was 6 foot 3 inches tall. He is handsome, hardworking, and since his conversion, has really enjoyed going to church. Stop drooling, ladies.

He took the name of the Apostle James, and I took the name of the Apostle Thomas. (There was a St. Eric from Norway, but he was canonized half a century after the Great Schism. Sigh.) Because I was 6 foot 9, and he was 6 foot 3, people in my parish burdened him with the awful nickname "little Eric." I suppose this is partially my fault. When we say the pre-Communion prayer that includes, "...forgive my transgressions both voluntary and involuntary, of word and deed, committed in knowledge or in ignorance..." maybe it was this kind of "involuntary, ignorant" sin that St. John Chrysostom was getting at. Just by my being there, now Eric has a dreadful nickname.

This, I suppose, is Missionary Dating working well -- seeing someone who isn't Orthodox, and then your sweetie converts so he or she can marry you. How does this work? How did Natalie, James Eric's wife, manage to make this happen?

The truth is that she didn't do that much evangelizing of him. According to Natalie's version of the story, they had been casually seeing each other for a while, and Natalie told Eric that it probably they wouldn't be able to get serious because church was so important to her. She hadn't even thought of his becoming Orthodox, and she didn't want to take him to church for fear that he would frighten away the men that she was supposed to be thinking about marrying.

Then the Army transferred Eric to Tacoma, and he looked up our church and started attending services, and got to talking to our priest, and he called Natalie and said, "I think I could be Orthodox." And, some time later they did get married and had a son. James Eric is now a major who's been constantly deployed for the past five years, so pray for him.

In their case it worked out very well -- an Orthodox woman dated a non-Orthodox man, and he found out about the faith that way. But, I think it's a rare event that it works out that well.

My dear old Dad, who's never belonged to a church in his life, gave me some excellent advice about marriage as I got in to my 20s -- as you get closer and find out more about her, you have to accept her the way she is, and not try loving her for what you want her to be. A strategy in which future happiness requires someone else to change the way you want him or her to change is pretty risky. (This kind of thinking is also the foundation of our Iraq strategy.)

Mom and Dad are coming up on their 35th anniversary this year (yay!) and they're both pretty quirky, and neither has tried to change the other in a fundamental manner.

Being baptized into the Church is a fundamental change. It's dying with Christ to be reborn in Him, a voluntary acceptance of a lifelong struggle against the devil. It's being co-crucified with Him so that we can be co-resurrected with him, as St. Paul writes in the letter to the Romans. Making someone do that against his will is just a contradiction in terms. Making someone do that as a condition for married love is also a contradiction because when you're baptized, it's the love you express for Christ that then fills your whole life, including your marriage, with true love.

This love must be freely given, without condition. Bishop Benjamin of San Francisco uses an excellent metaphor for this: "If you think love can be compelled, try holding a cat that doesn't want to be held. You'll be wearing a box full of Band-Aids." I think that trying to convert someone who isn't interested is like trying to baptize a cat.

So Missionary Dating is kind of risky, kind of a recipe for heartbreak. If you do get serious with someone who doesn't share your beliefs, or with an Orthodox who is uninterested in the Life of the Church, it'll set up an odd division in your life. Part of your heart will be devoted to your boyfriend or girlfriend, and part of your heart will be your "religion shelf" in which you keep your beliefs about God. Most potential partners will respect your "religion shelf" and let you do what you want with it, but then you'll be loving God and your partner in different ways and different times -- you'll be managing two lives at once.

I have to say that I never actually tried Missionary Dating myself as I was too weird for any non-Orthodox girls to consider me. My idea of a "night out" was to go to bars in San Francisco and take a book by Fr. Alexander Schmemann to read. Every once in a while, a girl would try starting a conversation.

Girl: "What's that book about?"

Me: "It says that we are supposed to be doxological, eucharistic beings."

Girl: "Huh?"

This didn't get me any phone numbers. Later, I tried to be "cooler" and take a book about my other passion, bicycling. I'd take a copy of Miles From Nowhere by Barbara Savage.

Girl: "What's that book about?"

Me: "It's the true story of a woman who rode her bike around the world and all the cool people she met."

Girl: "Like a bike you pedal?"

Me: "Yeah!"

Girl: "Ow. Wouldn't your butt hurt after the first five miles?"

In short, this never became an issue for me. So I have to admit that I'm opining about something I don't really know that well myself. But I will give this basic piece of advice: If you do try to make a relationship work with someone who doesn't share your beliefs, you have to be willing to have two religions in the household. (And atheism or "I'm spiritual but not religious" are both religions in of themselves; it's just that those faiths get expressed at funny moments.)

Maybe you'll succeed, but...

Then again, you might successfully flirt to convert someone, but be careful with that, too. It might be kind of a topical conversion in which your girlfriend decides her favorite service is vespers because liturgy doesn't allow you to sleep in until noon after partying all night. Or, maybe when you ask her to be "more involved" in church, she'll start a fundraising campaign to install a video screen with the anaphora lyrics displayed and a little ball bouncing over the words so that you can sing along with the Greek.

One of my readers (I'm so amazed that I actually have readers!) told me of a couple of things that boys she brought to church said:

"So they're eating Jesus? Doesn't that make you guys cannibals?"

Another came in to church and asked how far the service had gone. A church lady let him have a service book that included vespers, matins and liturgy. And, the church lady opened it to the beginning of Liturgy, which was at the middle of the book. He exclaimed, "Great, we're halfway through!"

With Missionary Dating, there's another more extreme kind of conversion that has the possibility of driving you up the wall -- your boyfriend gets really excited about the faith and suddenly becomes an Orthodoxer-than-thou crazy convert. While you're trying to build an adult relationship with him, he's in spiritual infancy, stubbornly demanding everything be exactly the way it's supposed to be. Imagine going out to a romantic dinner on a Friday night, and he's interrogating the waiter about whether the shrimp primavera is cooked in olive oil or canola oil. He'll probably try writing you love notes in Slavonic. When you're doing your taxes the first year you're married, he'll try asserting his religious rights by doing his taxes on the Old Calendar. (Don't worry, I'm sure the IRS will understand.)

And then, Missionary Dating raises yet another question for you: So you succeed in getting this girl or boy to accept the faith, and then what? Maybe it turns out you don't really get along as well as you thought you did. I know one priest who, while a seminarian at St. Vladimir's, got his girlfriend to convert, and then broke up with her a few months later. I'm told that she's still Orthodox. I don't know if this seminarian was going for the title "Ladies' Apostle" or what, but Missionary Dumping is a pretty harsh means of evangelizing the unchurched.

One specific problem that Missionary Dating raises...

As I've been organizing this article, a few women have told me there's one very specific problem that Missionary Dating raises: sex. It's a pervasive myth that a "serious relationship" has to get sexual, and that having sex is what will make true love happen. It's easy to say no to that while sitting at your computer, but if you spend a year or two dating a guy who's continuously trying to convince you that it's true, you begin to wear down. You probably like the other qualities this guy has, he's just messed up when it comes to sex. It stinks.

I can suggest a few ways of dealing with this problem:

1. Make it clear that we Christians have to live our beliefs. Sex is a very defining act for us. It's when we say whether we are souls or whether we are hormones. We believe that Jesus Christ was perfect God and perfect Man, and that His person is a marriage, and that marriage is what sanctifies us, frees us from sin and allows us to go to heaven. This marriage of His person is the model for our marriages, and if we want to go to heaven, we have to bear witness to Christ in our own lives. Jesus did not fool around -- there was only one incarnation, one marriage, which was literal and physical. The connection between Jesus' person and our beliefs about marriage is also literal and physical. Fooling around sexually is an insult to person of Jesus.
2. Tell him that he's insulting your religion. Seriously, stupid as that sounds, it's true. My guess is that'll open up a new argument in which you find out that he really doesn't respect your religious beliefs. Most non-believers can put up with you until the teachings of your faith keep them from having something that they want.
   
3. Terrorize him with Scripture. Make him read Psalm 3, especially the part, "Thou hast broken the teeth of the wicked," and tell him that you'll whack him in the jaw with a frying pan if he tries anything. See, we Orthodox can be Scriptural literalists.
4. Flee. This is what St. Paul told the Corinthians about sexual immorality. He was really ticked off with the Corinthians, too. You're unlikely to win an argument with lust.
5. Use the above four tactics on naughty Orthodox boys, too. Yes, they exist... nothing about being Orthodox exempts you from hormones.
   

If you are currently in a Missionary Dating relationship...

I've been pretty negative about Missionary Dating, but I should stop to say that I don't mean to slam anyone who is trying to make such a relationship work. I think your chances are pretty limited in getting the relationship you want with someone who doesn't share your beliefs. But, as I hope the previous posts in this blog have shown, shared religious beliefs are not a free ticket to bliss, either.

If you do have someone in your life who looks promising but doesn't go to church, try to make it work. But when I say "try to make it work," don't talk her into sharing your beliefs, show her how much your faith means to you. Don't just go to Confession, be a better person, and treat her better after you've been to Confession. Hum your favorite church hymn often and wait for him to ask you why it makes you happy. Put an icon of your favorite saint on the wall, and put a copy of the saint's troparion underneath it.

Christ tells us in the Sermon on the Mount to let His light shine through us:

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid. Nor do men light a lamp and put it under a bushel, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven. (Matthew 5:14-16).

One last story I can tell is one that a priest told my wife before she met me. Father Peter had known an interfaith couple in which the wife was Orthodox and the husband was not. The husband said to Fr. Peter that he didn't understand any of the religion, but he always noticed that his wife was more beautiful just after she had received Communion. My wife took that story to mean that at a very minimum, as a very start, you need to have someone who can see that there is something more going on than the ritual and rules.