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Local parish gets props in New York Times
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Fr. Beck and a Deacon celebrate the Liturgy at
Sts. Peter and Paul, Ben Lomond, CA (date unknown,
photo from church website)
An October 3, 2009, article in the New York Times gave significant coverage to Saints Peter and Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church. The Ben Lomond, CA, parish unwittingly played a role in the Orthodox conversion experience of a Baltimore resident in the late 1990s.
The article (see link below) presents the narrative of Cal Oren, 55, who happened upon the chapel one evening in 1993.
As he entered, a vespers service was under way. Maybe two dozen worshipers stood, chanting psalms and hymns. Incense filled the dark air. Icons of apostles and saints hung on the walls. The ancientness and austerity stood at a time-warp remove from the evangelical circles in which Mr. Oren traveled, so modern, extroverted and assertively relevant.
The New York Times explains Oren's return home from California to the suburbs of Baltimore, and also his eventual involvement in Holy Cross, an Antiochian parish near Baltimore where Archpriest Gregory Mathewes-Green, 62, has been pastor for some years.
Mr. Oren continues a theme established verbally at least with the visit of Prince Vladimir's emissaries to Constantinople just before the year 1000. “This was a Christianity I had never encountered before,” he says. “I was frozen in my tracks. I felt like I was in the actual presence of God, almost as if I was in heaven. And I’m not the kind of person who gets all woo-hoo.”
(See "More Protestants Find a Home in the Orthodox Antioch Church," Samuel G. Freedman, New York Times, October 2, 2009.)
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