Receiving the Gospel in a Context of Religiously Organized Life
I like being “mechanically religious” a lot more than I like living for God, but I know which of the two is the correct way to do things. One could say that this uncomfortable self-consciousness concerning one’s religion is the unique contribution of Christianity. Roman pagans weren’t conscious of being “pagans”. That was a pejorative term given to them by Christians. They were just good Roman citizens, and that included devotion to the Roman gods and the Roman emperor. Their interaction with the gods was common and it was a major part of their lives, but it was mechanical and transactional in nature. I imagine that it was a part of their lives the way that paying income tax and going to the bank to cash our checks is a part of our lives. Seeing God the way Christians saw him must have been strange and very superstitious to them. When I first united myself to the Church (the Orthodox Catholic Church), one of the hardest things for me to accept was how my new home was not a “church of the converted” in the same way that my old church was. That is a big deal for an ex-evangelical. You see, in an evangelical church, the thrust of the message is concerned with one’s unique conversion experience. Everybody’s got a testimony, and if you ever stop that process of *changing*, of turning to God and of converting… well, at that point you are no longer having “a relationship with Jesus”. You are just a “religious” person. I have heard an evangelical discussing how a family member “goes to church, but they aren’t saved”- and the family member in question is a regular member of a Baptist congregation who lives an upright and moral life. In a limited sense, I agree with this. You even hear similar terminology used among some pious Russian Orthodox Christians. They will describe the majority of the people in Church as “Orthodox” but only some of them are “believers”. You have to convert every day. You have to choose to say your prayers. You have to choose to be like God. I do believe that people should feel like “converts” even when they’ve grown up in Christian households since our fallen will always struggles against us and we really do have to “convert” or turn towards God with every decision we make. I should point out that this is harder than it seems.
However, my reading of the Old Testament (and my understanding of the pious Jews in the New Testament such as our Lord and His Apostles) shows me the other side of the coin. Like it or not, we must receive God within a certain framework or context, and that context is religious tradition and ritual. Humans have needed it since we were created. God DID NOT tell Abel to lift his hands, think about God, and “just praise and worship” as his imagination told him to. He told him to sacrifice- to perform a ritual offering. “Charismatic”, excited, spontaneous, and ecstatic worship is pagan and belongs with the self-mutilating priests of Baal and the mystery cults that inspired it. I know that there might be charismatic Christians reading this blog, and I am sorry that this harsh truth has to be expressed. But I am not sorry for the statement itself. I gotta call ‘em like I see ‘em. Humans are made of matter, and by matter we are saved, so we must worship in a material and ritualized way that becomes part of life and informs the cycles and patterns of our existence. Only by doing so will we worship “in spirit and in truth”. We will see how matter is spiritualized and how spirit is made material for our salvation. And most importantly, we will see how the false dichotomy between “base matter” and “lofty spirit” is a satanic lie and the basis of all heresy and all false religion (i.e. all religion outside of the Truth we live out in the Church).
The sad and tragic part is how humans seeking truth will look in all the wrong places for ritual, tradition, and that earthy material context for their faith if none is offered to them. We can see this in the popularity of so-called messianic Judaism and of other Jewish rituals among evangelicals and low-church American Protestants of all stripes. They have the inborn human need for cycles of worship, for a liturgical life, a religious calendar, for deep ritual actions which conceal greater truths than what can be expressed in words, BUT they would rather get all of that from post-Messianic, anti-Messianic, Talmudic rabbinical Judaism (read: the Babylonian “traditions of men” of the Pharisees) than from the Worship of the New Israel. You have to laugh to keep from crying.
Why am I stressing the context and ritualized aspect of living a life in Christ? Because once that context becomes familiar, it gets ingrained in the culture even among the un-churched of that culture. My greatest awareness of being an Orthodox Christian did not come when I first started coming to Church as a zealous convert with all the answers. It came when I saw those pious old Ukrainian and Slovak people who instinctively made the Sign of the Cross when they heard an ambulance siren or a bit of bad news. It is more real for them than it is for me because they don’t have to remind themselves to do it. For them it is life. And like it or not, the Western European and Northern European descendents of most Americans received Trinitarian, “little ‘c’” catholicism centuries ago. This cultural memory stays with them even if they are un-churched. Little girls in America dream of growing up, meeting a nice boy, and saying their vows at the altar. Read it again. They do not dream of and will never dream of exchanging their crowns at the wedding table. We may have a bunch of converts in N. America running around with a fetish for 19th century Russia, but we are deluded if we feel like we are going to uproot a cultural memory which stretches back, in some cases, to the point where the East and West were still in communion. After the recent convert has finished convincing himself that he is in the right Church, there comes a point where all those troparians, metanias, and sleepy Sunday mornings at Orthros seem, well, just a little forced. The West knows what Church is. In the West, Church has “Sunday Service” or “Mass”, not Orthros and Liturgy. It has steeples and stone bell towers, not onion domes. It has pews, kneelers, and hymnals or missals. It has King James English, not Slavonic or Greek. They both may be almost as hard to understand for the uneducated masses fed on MTV, but even they recognize that only ONE of those is our liturgical language. If our Orthodox Churches put Pope St. Gregory the Great on the calendar and commemorate him after Presanctified Liturgy, then they shouldn’t have a problem with Orthodox Christians praying the way that he prayed. If we say that praying the way that he prayed is not allowed, then I say we are hypocrites.
Reasons for Not Wanting a Western Rite
I noticed early on that the criticism of the Western Rite was a full of hooey. The reason why I noticed this was because the criticisms were very different and even contradictory depending on who they came from. One side says, “Western Rite Orthodox Christians are not really converting at all. Just look at them, at their prayers, their devotions, etc. They are a bunch of Anglicans and Catholics in communion with Antioch!” The other side insists, “They aren’t Western enough! They are just Byzantinized converts who have a self-loathing for their Western identity and are therefore hiding in this exotic Eastern home.” Well, which is it? Since they haven’t been around for a terribly long time, I have the feeling that these contradictory reports have less to do with what Western Rite people are and more to do with what the vast quantity of Eastern Orthodox “experts” want them to be. But what we want them to be is irrelevant. They have their bishops for that. They aren’t Anglicans trying to be Orthodox or Orthodox trying to be Anglicans. They are simply Orthodox Christians. Accept it and move on.
The belittling of the Western Rite is also an annoying occurrence. “They are simply an ‘experiment’ you see, something we don’t have to think about now but will require our approval later.” Hogwash- this experiment has added a number of new missions in just the last couple of years. The bigger and more vibrant Western Rite parishes have converts who have come from a variety of background including former agnostics and un-churched individuals. The Western Rite is alive, vibrant, growing, and under vigorous episcopal oversight. So much for being an “experiment”.
And what of those who don’t like the AWRV because it interferes with ecumenical relations and send a bad message to Anglicans and Roman Catholics? Personally I think it (the Western Rite) sets up a framework for future corporate reunion. It says, “If your church and our church was to ever get back together, it would look like this.” And in the meant time, what is preferable. Waiting for Anglicans to first fix their moral crisis, then fix their liturgical issues, then decide that it is a bad thing to have Calvinists and Catholics in communion with each other as long as they use the same Prayer Book... seriously, we could all be waiting here for a while. Western Rite Orthodox Christians should of course know their relationship to Anglicans and Roman Catholics (they obviously do have a relationship) and they shouldn’t pretend to be pre-schism Christians. That is just historical reenactment. We aren’t living in the 11th century. Orthodox Christians nowadays are to simply be Orthodox Christians and 21st century American citizens. We have to find out how to make both of those things work together or else we are all going to become extinct. And we can find ways to be Orthodox Christians living god-pleasing lives in this century whether we receive communion from a priest’s hand while kneeling at a rail or on the tip of a spoon while we stand. All Orthodox Christians in North America should get used to that idea.
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