Here is another worthless blog post from Romanós the sinner.
Pray for me, brethren.
Somewhere I’ve read (and it may have been in C. S. Lewis) that we are always to be found either arising out of (and repenting of) sin, or hastening into it. As for me, I am at this moment repenting of sin, but I can be no more tired of repenting than I am of being human, because to be a man is to be somehow trapped into a body of death, as holy apostle Paul says, and with him I echo, “who will deliver me from it?” and “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ,” who has mercifully hidden from us most of our sins, and who has ultimately nailed them to the Cross in His own body.
Being an Orthodox Christian, and not in name only, but by choice and by entering into the life of struggle, is really a great blessing, though it costs very dear. The cycles of the Church year are not for nothing, and not for show or adornment, as think some Evangelicals who like to borrow this and that from our “tradition,” to make their own worship more interesting. I was accused once by a well-known Pentecostal woman “evangelist” of being a religious tourist, from the pulpit, when she noticed me and my fifth grade Sunday School class, strangers in the congregation that we both were visiting, she as a guest speaker, we simply as guests. "Foolishness!" I said to myself, but kept mum, and hoped my students didn’t hear.
But being an Orthodox Christian means that you willingly let the Lord take you apart piece by piece and then reassemble you, very much like surgery while awake and at times (it may seem) without anesthetic. Only later, after each operation, do we look back and say, “No, it wasn’t that bad!” and then notice that another part of us has ceased being wooden and is now real flesh. This process, though, familiarizes us with our sins and with the nature of sin generally as it exists in other people, both Christians and unbelievers, to the extent that after many years of this surgery, we can often instantly tell what sin another person is struggling with, or giving in to. Neither clairvoyance nor magic, not practiced intentionally but permitted sometimes to us as discernment for the ministry of empathy, the Lord opens our eyes when and as He wills. He often takes us by surprise.
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
Ezekiel 36:26 KJV
Last night was Good Friday according to the Western calendar, and it came to me that I should attend the evening service at the Anglican parish where I started my Christian life while on the way back to Orthodoxy. It was at this church that over twenty years ago I was a lay minister, leading the Friday weekly vespers service, and doing impromptu street witnessing and ministry out of it in the local inner city neighborhood. I have gone back there on a very few occasions during the last two decades and have noticed, sadly, a diminishing of both the congregation and the spiritual climate there.
What met my senses, even knowing this, I was quite unprepared for. The church was barely a quarter full (in former days, this service was packed, sometimes with extra chairs brought in). Looking around, I saw not a single person I knew. The choir loft was full, as I noticed eventually. "Hmm, so about half the congregation is in the choir," I thought to myself. What I had heard from one of the brethren whose mother still attends there proved to be quite true, the congregation no longer sings; the choir takes over.
As I gradually began to remember the service, which I still have for the most part memorized, and joined in spiritually, I tried to pray and worship. The first part of the service is a sung version of the Passion. I couldn’t pray during that part, of course, but listened prayerfully. Stiff, very stiff and formal, and the choir making the responses, too loud, too operatic. Later I was to discover that the choir was indeed polished, so perfect and so loud that when they were singing, I could do nothing but listen as at a concert. Chanting and singing in church, whether Orthodox or Western, if it is too poor or careless, or if it is too loud and too perfect, it disturbs my ability to pray and worship. Simple, unadorned signing from hearts of faith, that’s what my spirit responds to.
When it came to the prayers, they were intoned beautifully and perfectly, but without any hint of human warmth, almost as if done on a voice synthesizer. Nonetheless, I joined in the prayer, prayed and said my amen’s. “Whatever it looks like, and even whatever it is they think they’re doing,” I said to myself, “it’s still prayer, and that’s my intention.”
What bothered me most about this service was that everything about the clergy costume and their liturgical movement was unremittingly mechanical and perfect, as if they were not human beings at all, but wooden statues with jointed limbs that followed prescribed paths along steel tracks hidden in the floor. Every one of them, from the oldest white hair, to the youngest pony tailed and ear ringed, displayed faces as static as carved wooden masks. When not carrying something, their hands were all held rigidly before them, together and pointed up and a little out. Their steps were mincing and hidden beneath their priestly robes or black cassocks and white lace tops, as they performed their choreography—though I hesitate to use that word, as it was nothing like a dance. Watching them put into mind those carved wooden clocks with mechanical figures that come in and out with predictable regularity.
"Ichabod" kept coming to my mind, as what I was experiencing compared itself to my memory of how this church was when I attended there. Though the rudiments and rubrics of the service were of course the same back then and carried out with a perfectionism that would astonish the Orthodox (whose worship, though elaborate, is not perfectionist at all), there was a quietness and awe, and an environment of sensible faith and sympathy, and even a hint of humor, that permeated the place. There was no remnant of that now, as far as I could see. Just a little group of worshipful spectators watching a bunch of purply-clad marionettes scurrying around on their mysterious, little wooden feet.
"The reverse Pinocchio effect," I mused. "In the fairy tale, a wooden marionette eventually is transformed into a real boy. In this place, it looks like the opposite has happened. Is that what Christ came to bring, in His life, His life-giving death on the Cross, and His glorious third-day resurrection? Did He come to make us less human and more like the statues that are mounted across the top of the rood screen?"
No, of course not. He came to give us life, and that in abundance, and to transform us from being merely human to something more, not something less, to become sons and daughters of His Father, our Father in heaven.
I looked up at the majestic icon of the Ascension of Christ that completely fills the wall above the main altar (where in an Orthodox church would be the image of the Theotokos with Christ in her lap). As I have done many times in the past, I prayed to the Lord while gazing up at that huge painting. Strangely, I don’t usually pray with my eyes open before icons, but I have always felt different about this one, and always pray looking up, eyes open. “Lord, descend on this house of worship and restore it to the glory it had before, when You filled it with Your glory!” And the rest is between me and the Lord, but our God is faithful, and He will accomplish His purposes in us.
At the end of the service, the clergy and acolytes, taking all the holy things with them, filed out the side door and disappeared, and the lights suddenly went out. I knew this would happen, of course, and I lingered as long as I could in the dark church, praying and remembering to the Lord the great things He had done for me and my friends in this place. And the wonderful chant came to mind, that always seemed the “motto” of this special church…
Oh, how dreadful is this place,
this is the house of God and gate of heaven,
and men shall call it
the palace of God.
To the brethren who are celebrating the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ this Lord’s Day,
Pray for me, brethren.
Somewhere I’ve read (and it may have been in C. S. Lewis) that we are always to be found either arising out of (and repenting of) sin, or hastening into it. As for me, I am at this moment repenting of sin, but I can be no more tired of repenting than I am of being human, because to be a man is to be somehow trapped into a body of death, as holy apostle Paul says, and with him I echo, “who will deliver me from it?” and “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ,” who has mercifully hidden from us most of our sins, and who has ultimately nailed them to the Cross in His own body.
Being an Orthodox Christian, and not in name only, but by choice and by entering into the life of struggle, is really a great blessing, though it costs very dear. The cycles of the Church year are not for nothing, and not for show or adornment, as think some Evangelicals who like to borrow this and that from our “tradition,” to make their own worship more interesting. I was accused once by a well-known Pentecostal woman “evangelist” of being a religious tourist, from the pulpit, when she noticed me and my fifth grade Sunday School class, strangers in the congregation that we both were visiting, she as a guest speaker, we simply as guests. "Foolishness!" I said to myself, but kept mum, and hoped my students didn’t hear.
But being an Orthodox Christian means that you willingly let the Lord take you apart piece by piece and then reassemble you, very much like surgery while awake and at times (it may seem) without anesthetic. Only later, after each operation, do we look back and say, “No, it wasn’t that bad!” and then notice that another part of us has ceased being wooden and is now real flesh. This process, though, familiarizes us with our sins and with the nature of sin generally as it exists in other people, both Christians and unbelievers, to the extent that after many years of this surgery, we can often instantly tell what sin another person is struggling with, or giving in to. Neither clairvoyance nor magic, not practiced intentionally but permitted sometimes to us as discernment for the ministry of empathy, the Lord opens our eyes when and as He wills. He often takes us by surprise.
A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.
Ezekiel 36:26 KJV
Last night was Good Friday according to the Western calendar, and it came to me that I should attend the evening service at the Anglican parish where I started my Christian life while on the way back to Orthodoxy. It was at this church that over twenty years ago I was a lay minister, leading the Friday weekly vespers service, and doing impromptu street witnessing and ministry out of it in the local inner city neighborhood. I have gone back there on a very few occasions during the last two decades and have noticed, sadly, a diminishing of both the congregation and the spiritual climate there.
What met my senses, even knowing this, I was quite unprepared for. The church was barely a quarter full (in former days, this service was packed, sometimes with extra chairs brought in). Looking around, I saw not a single person I knew. The choir loft was full, as I noticed eventually. "Hmm, so about half the congregation is in the choir," I thought to myself. What I had heard from one of the brethren whose mother still attends there proved to be quite true, the congregation no longer sings; the choir takes over.
As I gradually began to remember the service, which I still have for the most part memorized, and joined in spiritually, I tried to pray and worship. The first part of the service is a sung version of the Passion. I couldn’t pray during that part, of course, but listened prayerfully. Stiff, very stiff and formal, and the choir making the responses, too loud, too operatic. Later I was to discover that the choir was indeed polished, so perfect and so loud that when they were singing, I could do nothing but listen as at a concert. Chanting and singing in church, whether Orthodox or Western, if it is too poor or careless, or if it is too loud and too perfect, it disturbs my ability to pray and worship. Simple, unadorned signing from hearts of faith, that’s what my spirit responds to.
When it came to the prayers, they were intoned beautifully and perfectly, but without any hint of human warmth, almost as if done on a voice synthesizer. Nonetheless, I joined in the prayer, prayed and said my amen’s. “Whatever it looks like, and even whatever it is they think they’re doing,” I said to myself, “it’s still prayer, and that’s my intention.”
What bothered me most about this service was that everything about the clergy costume and their liturgical movement was unremittingly mechanical and perfect, as if they were not human beings at all, but wooden statues with jointed limbs that followed prescribed paths along steel tracks hidden in the floor. Every one of them, from the oldest white hair, to the youngest pony tailed and ear ringed, displayed faces as static as carved wooden masks. When not carrying something, their hands were all held rigidly before them, together and pointed up and a little out. Their steps were mincing and hidden beneath their priestly robes or black cassocks and white lace tops, as they performed their choreography—though I hesitate to use that word, as it was nothing like a dance. Watching them put into mind those carved wooden clocks with mechanical figures that come in and out with predictable regularity.
"Ichabod" kept coming to my mind, as what I was experiencing compared itself to my memory of how this church was when I attended there. Though the rudiments and rubrics of the service were of course the same back then and carried out with a perfectionism that would astonish the Orthodox (whose worship, though elaborate, is not perfectionist at all), there was a quietness and awe, and an environment of sensible faith and sympathy, and even a hint of humor, that permeated the place. There was no remnant of that now, as far as I could see. Just a little group of worshipful spectators watching a bunch of purply-clad marionettes scurrying around on their mysterious, little wooden feet.
"The reverse Pinocchio effect," I mused. "In the fairy tale, a wooden marionette eventually is transformed into a real boy. In this place, it looks like the opposite has happened. Is that what Christ came to bring, in His life, His life-giving death on the Cross, and His glorious third-day resurrection? Did He come to make us less human and more like the statues that are mounted across the top of the rood screen?"
No, of course not. He came to give us life, and that in abundance, and to transform us from being merely human to something more, not something less, to become sons and daughters of His Father, our Father in heaven.
I looked up at the majestic icon of the Ascension of Christ that completely fills the wall above the main altar (where in an Orthodox church would be the image of the Theotokos with Christ in her lap). As I have done many times in the past, I prayed to the Lord while gazing up at that huge painting. Strangely, I don’t usually pray with my eyes open before icons, but I have always felt different about this one, and always pray looking up, eyes open. “Lord, descend on this house of worship and restore it to the glory it had before, when You filled it with Your glory!” And the rest is between me and the Lord, but our God is faithful, and He will accomplish His purposes in us.At the end of the service, the clergy and acolytes, taking all the holy things with them, filed out the side door and disappeared, and the lights suddenly went out. I knew this would happen, of course, and I lingered as long as I could in the dark church, praying and remembering to the Lord the great things He had done for me and my friends in this place. And the wonderful chant came to mind, that always seemed the “motto” of this special church…
Oh, how dreadful is this place,
this is the house of God and gate of heaven,
and men shall call it
the palace of God.
To the brethren who are celebrating the resurrection of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ this Lord’s Day,
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
1 comment:
Again, brother, thank you for your words. The sense of Ichabod--the glory departed--seems to apply to much of the church in the US, Canada and western Europe. Yet each person who trusts and obeys the Lord brings His glory into the church.
Sensing the Lord's presence--or the lack of it--is something He gives. May the risen Christ continue to shine through you.
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