Let me be blunt, most Orthodox priests have little or no training in pastoral counseling or psychotherapy. Much less do must of us have any substantial preparation as spiritual fathers.

This is important because, in the hands of an inexperienced or ill-prepared priest, obedience is a recipe for great and lasting harm for the layperson, the parish and the priest himself.

So if obedience isn’t a good idea, what do we owe to our priest?

I think we owe our priest–or at least I want as a priest–is not obedience but deference. What do I mean by deference?

In the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary, I think the priest should get his way in the day-to-day administration of the parish. Why is this?

Simply because when things go south, the priest is the one who has to deal with the mess. This doesn’t mean the parish council and the parishioner don’t have a role to play. It just means that, as a rule, it is the pastor who has to keep track of things.

And in our daily lives, in our spiritual lives, what do we owe the priest? We should give due consideration to what our priest tells us. By his education and his role in the community, the priest often has insights into the spiritual life that we don’t have. But this doesn’t mean he should have the last word in our lives.

Does this mean we shouldn’t be obedient? God forbid we think this!

We must be obedient but we owe our obedience first to God, then to conscience, and finally to the Tradition of Church. And priest? His vocation is to help guide us as we learn to be obedient Orthodox Christians. 

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Unfortunately, Orthodox Christians tend to overemphasize the therapeutic nature of salvation at the expense of our own moral and legal tradition. 

This is unfortunate because Holy Tradition is deeper, broader and richer than that can be captured in a slogan.

We have a rich, legal tradition. Not only canon law to govern the internal life of the Church but also of legal theory to guide the Church in its relationship with the State. We also have well-developed moral theology that offers Orthodox Christians objective moral standards on which to base our lives.  

To all this, we have an ascetical and liturgical tradition that seeks to heal the soul of the consequences of sin, foster a life of Christian virtue and deepen our relationship with God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But none of this makes any sense if we neglect our moral and legal tradition.

The other reasons these traditions matter is that as Orthodox Christians “therapeutic” means something very different than as we use the term today. Among other things, this means that priests are not psychotherapists in the same way as secular mental health professionals.

Finally, we need to remember that as important as it is, fidelity to the Tradition of the Church doesn’t exempt the person from the laws of human development or an evident need for psychological counseling.