Far flung

Many years ago I saw a film where some people walking down a road were offered a lift from somebody they knew who was driving down the same road. Their response, cheerful enough, was, ‘Thanks, but no—we have feet!’

I have chosen to live as much as possible within walking or at least biking range of most of my needs, but I still drive almost everywhere.

One of the things I liked most when I was in Japan was that people still did a lot of walking, even though they have about one car for every two people.

As for ‘going to church’ and the distances involved, I have always tried to live close to my parish and can still walk there if I have to.

Part of the problem with ‘church’ is that houses of worship are no longer where people live. They were, up until the 1950's in most places, but after that, due to the mobility allowed by cars, church buildings began to be isolated from their congregations. This extremely unnatural development is, I believe, in large part responsible for the decay of the churches in America.

Churches are now, and have been for forty years, morphing into ‘Christian centers’ and ‘religious restaurant’ chains. No wonder, then, that people treat them as such, casually entering the sanctuary with mocha or Pepsi in hand, wearing baseball caps and shorts.

When I first became a Christian at the age of twenty-four I decided I wanted to live as close to church as possible. In fact, I lived three short blocks away from my first parish, Saint Andrew’s, when I first moved to Portland.

Where I chose to live was entirely driven by where I worshiped. At that time too I first heard about a pan-Christian movement in Lansing, Michigan, called The Work of Christ community.

People from all different denominations began to make proximity to their churches and to each other as Christians the highest priority in their lives. They even formally covenanted to stay together in neighborhoods of the inner city rather than escape to suburbia.

That community is still in existence, and it has grown over the years. Many of the members were and are Orthodox Christians, and in fact, I first read about it in an Orthodox publication, Theosis, A Journal of Orthodox Charismatic Renewal.

(The charismatic renewal movement in Orthodoxy has nearly died out, except for Fr Eusebius Stephanou in Florida, but that initial experiment in prioritizing our lives by our being in the Body of Christ is still with us.)

As part of the bigger picture, instead of having a ‘green patriarch’ like Patriarch Bart (forgive me, your all-holiness) sailing around in his ecology ship and holding symposia with the sparklers of the world system, we Orthodox would do well to avoid being caught by the looming energy crisis and do our part to really conserve, and not just look the part, by making where we live and worship and, if possible, work and shop, the same locality.

We should locate ourselves around our houses of worship, clustering there because we really believe that membership in the community of God’s people is more important than any worldly advantages. We evidently don’t do this because deep down, and not really very deep down, we don’t really believe in the importance of the Church.
We think of Church in terms of membership and of our responsibility in terms of our pledge, and let it go at that.

Now, as an Orthodox Christian and a cultural Asiatic, I am drawn to living in the country. In my young adulthood I was an incipient ‘back to the lander’ and lived on a rented acreage on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River, worked as the hired man on a dairy farm outside of Wetaskiwin, Alberta, and finally, when I moved to Portland, the first place I owned was an old farmhouse on a quarter acre on the edge of town in Saint Johns. Not much land, but it gave me a taste of living the life of a poor, small farmer.

I still think it’s great to live in the country and all, and I’d love to do that again too, but if I did, I’d build a chapel on my land, and try to grab any passing priest to come and say liturgy with us.

When that weren’t possible, I’d make the chapel a daily place of prayer and study and, eventually, sooner or later, if I was faithful, God would send more of His people to stay with me, and before you know it, we’d have a congregation! That’s how real churches have come into being all over the Christian world from day one.

Energy imperialism and its deceptive benefits have, in my opinion, diluted—and deluded—the Body of Christ, and we see its depredations daily. Far flung and fancy free, our culture has spread itself mighty thin, and what affects the culture affects the Church too, it affects all of us. Instead of talking ‘community,’ we just need to be it, and that doesn’t happen by accident.

These are just some thoughts which reading this post at Forty Days in the Desert brought to mind.

Lord, have mercy!