Ortho = right, correct, true, straight, in alignment

Paradox = beyond expectation, seemingly contradictory

Ia = condition/state/realm of

I have always lived inside paradox, though I didn’t yet know to call it that. I was raised holding conviction and chaos side by side – two contradictory strands to pull from and untangle in the opposing images of my mother and father. Perhaps that’s why I learned early that life is rarely neat, and that the sacred and the broken often share the same space.

From the beginning, I felt like a fish out of water. I clung to the faith I had been given, yet I never seemed to fit inside the boxes it presented. In the church of my childhood, I felt I was not enough – never living up to the image required by a legalistic faith. In school, it wasn’t much different.  There, I felt like I was too much – too moralistic, too scrupulous, too “good.” Yet I was no cloistered soul.  I was a flutist, tap dancer, singer—even a cheerleader at one time. I liked hip hop as much as delicate teacups. Contradiction has always lived within me, and because of this I rarely felt understood or seen rightly.  At times, I felt like a failure. Though all I ever desired was to live in alignment with the Truth of myself and of God – to walk one straight, firm strand – untangling the contradictory strands of myself and the seemingly contradictory strands of Truth appeared to have no end in sight.

It is no surprise, then, that I would find my home in Orthodoxy—a faith that lives and breathes paradox; that proclaims death as victory, obedience as freedom, dogma as deliverance. Here, contradictions don’t cancel out; they reveal a deeper Truth. Paradox is not erased but blessed.

I became Orthodox in 2015, before anyone I knew had even heard of it. Another fish-out-of-water moment, another paradox. And yet—it fit. Not because it erased my contradictions, but because it sanctified them. It taught me that to live in tension is not failure. It is the very condition of faith. This is the condition Orthodox Christians have always found themselves in: an ancient faith lived in modern skin, a call to inhabit contradiction rightly.

This is what I mean by Orthoparadoxia: the state of right paradox. It is the holy tension that resists collapsing mystery into tidy answers. It is the strangeness of being a fish out of water, and yet discovering that awkwardness is the very place where God breathes new life. Orthoparadoxia is the realization that life is not about resolving paradoxes, but inhabiting them. That sometimes the most authentic life looks surprising from the outside. It is the place I have always lived, and the place I invite you into with me.

This blog is not a polished gallery, but a journal in progress—like me. Here I share what I notice: reflections, snapshots of my day-to-day life as a homeschooling mother, pieces of poetry, and occasional explorations of how spiritual practice, psychology, and theology meet and shape the soul—all the paradoxes inherent in this life.

Whatever your journey of faith and of life, please come and read with your heart ajar.

Collette (Mary)