What is Orthodoxy and How Should We Approach it?

Fr. Peter Heers speaks to ROCOR Youth in Australia (December 2023).

QUESTION & ANSWER SESSION:
(52:39): How can we find a balance between wanting to excel in school, career, wanting to start a business, wanting to go out with friends, or watching a TV show, and doing all these things in life that take up so much of our time, versus praying, reading spiritual texts, going to additional Church services? I find myself trapped in past times and events that make me question “Am I really growing closer to God right now?” Sometimes I think what’s the point of putting all my effort and time into doing these activities when it has nothing to do with any spiritual progress?

(58:50): If you were to have an extremely vivid spiritual dream, should you tell someone about it, or be concerned about it, or just brush it off?

(1:02:58): My question has to do with your point of our things mostly coming down to pride. Is it a temptation for us, from the devil to say “Are we actually doing it as a religion, not actually doing it for the sense of being in the likeness of God”? I almost feel like it’s pride in my sense, but I want to just, in the end, like achieve salvation, I want to do it but it feels like I’m doing it wrong or am I doing it right?

(1:09:59): I’m curious following your successes on social media and YouTube if you find that young Christians rely solely on social media for information about theology, without looking for a spiritual father and a real-life community?

(1:13:02): I have recently left traditional Catholicism for Orthodoxy this year. I was wondering… I still got family members and even friends that are close to me and still Roman Catholic and even in other religions (they might be in Islam, they might practice yoga). If they tell me it is all the same that Orthodoxy is all the same to them, like Perennialism, should I admonish them, should I argue with them or should I do something else?

(1:17:21): Going back to the dream question, multiple priests say if the sign of the cross is in the dream, that means that it’s a message from God because because the demons can’t do the sign of the cross.

(1:18:04): I have found that there are people who are trying to provoke you and they are quite defensive about their religion, whether it’s Catholicism or being Mormon, or Islam. Sometimes I get mentally stuck and I don’t know how to answer and I go blank, even though you have read the Scripture and you read the Bible, and read x, y, z. What do you do when you feel like they’re giving a question you can’t give an answer to? How do you respond in a way that is Orthodox instead of just giving up? Because I feel I sometimes don’t have the answer. I don’t know how to respond because I’m being put on the stand.

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