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Church That’s Hard

The deacon who’s been staying with us for Holy Week posted that to his blog. If you’re Orthodox, and have been through the rigors of a Lenten fast (no meat, no dairy), and you’re celebrating the Resurrection at 2:30 a.m. after three or four hours of liturgy … this is what you’re having for breakfast. […]

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The deacon who’s been staying with us for Holy Week posted that to his blog. If you’re Orthodox, and have been through the rigors of a Lenten fast (no meat, no dairy), and you’re celebrating the Resurrection at 2:30 a.m. after three or four hours of liturgy … this is what you’re having for breakfast. Also meat, meat, meat, and meat, washed down perhaps with a couple of vodka shots.

We got back a short time ago from the home of some church friends, who hosted the parish for the Pascha feast. I was doing okay after eating two platefuls of pulled pork, and having two vodka drinks, but when I ate the blueberry cheesecake and cherry pie, it was time to go find a place to nap. They must be dosing blueberry cheesecake with something. Yes, that’s it: beware blueberry cheesecake.

Before I slept the sleep of the full-bellied, I was lolling with a friend in a porch swing, talking about the blessing of feasting after such a long and arduous fast. We got to talking about how much Orthodoxy means to us. I will have been Orthodox for eight years this summer. He’s only been Orthodox for just over one year. And we agreed that the Orthodox life kicks our butts hard — and that we need it to, like we need food and water and fresh air. We also agreed that as hard as Orthodoxy can be to live out at times, there’s no way we could be anything else now. It’s so intense, and so demanding, but even more rewarding — no doubt precisely because it demands so much of its faithful. It’s like, ask not what your God can do for you, but ask what you can do for your God. That’s how Orthodoxy is when you do it right. It asks more of you than you think you have to give, and it gives you in return more than you can imagine.

It is possible, of course, to be nominally Orthodox, or simply a cultural Orthodox, and many are. But if you seek a Christian faith that’s not just a pleasant add-on to your way of life, but that is a way of life, well, that’s Orthodox Christianity.

A Catholic reader e-mailed to wish me a happy Easter, and to say:

A lot of times we think that it’s the big stuff that keeps people from religion. People want to have all the sex. None of the consequences. All of the money and none of the responsibilities. Who has time for it, especially in this culture?

But I am just wondering. Is that it? Or is it the small stuff? And by that I mean the day-in, day-out responsibilities of a life of faith. Orthodoxy obviously requires a lot. Vespers and all that. But even regular old diocesan Catholicism and its weekly mass. I hear it all the time from people. EVERY WEEK? Who goes every week? Nobody can go every week. On vacation? What if my kid is on a travel team?

I was wondering why I didn’t get a seat at mass today. Who are all these people all of a sudden?


I am telling you that most of the lapsed Catholics I know are perfectly OK with monogamy in their married lives. And they would much rather sacrifice a good portion of their sex lives before they let their kids play even five seconds in last season’s cleats. I played baseball for 10 years and never had cleats even once.

To give up a Saturday AND a Sunday for vespers? Never happen.

But maybe that’s wrong. And maybe it can happen.

Well, to be perfectly honest about this, we only started going to Saturday vespers when we started our little mission church. When we lived in Philly, our Orthodox parish was 45 minutes away, and doing anything but Sunday liturgy seemed to us impossible. And when we lived in Dallas, though we were only about 10 minutes away from the cathedral, the idea of Saturday vespers seemed like too much for us to deal with. Hey, we’re already in Sunday liturgy for a couple of hours, right? That’s a lot! Nobody ever, ever made us feel bad about missing vespers — to have done so would have been un-Orthodox — but Julie and I now regret that we did not go. It would have helped us along the spiritual path. That’s the thing we didn’t really understand at first, but that every athlete in training knows: that it’s hard at first to get yourself into condition, but once you give yourself over to it, and stick with it, you don’t feel right without it. Orthodoxy trains us to be spiritual athletes.

The sociologist of religion Peter Berger has a somewhat rambling, but still thought-provoking blog post (hey, I specialize in rambling-but-thought-provoking blog posts!) about how pluralism forces members of all religions to think critically about what is critical to their own religion and religious identity, and what is not. This is not quite the same thing as whether or not one’s religion is right to require a lot of one in terms of practice, but it is related, I think. It calls to mind the work of the contemporary Reformed theologian James K.A. Smith, which I’m just starting to read. So much of it resonates with my experience in various churches. Here is a link to a 2013 interview with him. The gist is in this excerpt:

[M]y argument is that the form of worship matters. And it’s true that I think one of the best things the church can do in our postmodern context is remember past forms, not try to invent the “next best thing” that is going to be “relevant” to our culture. But like you, I don’t think this affirmation of the historic form of worship is antithetical to contextualization or even innovation. What we need, however, are some criteria for discerning what counts as a “faithful” innovation or contextualization of Christian worship.

I argue that the form of worship matters, not because it is “traditional,” but rather because the form of worship carries the gospel story in the very form of the practices. It’s true that Christian worship practices do not fall from heaven as pristine a-cultural rituals. The practices of Christian worship have a heritage: there is a Jewish inheritance of the church; there are those practices instituted by Christ himself (which grow out of our inheritance from Israel); there are practices cultivated by the apostles in the book of Acts; and then there are practices that the body of Christ, led by the Spirit, continued to cultivate and develop over time—and, in some cases, these were “recontextualizations” of other cultural practices.

Think of the rich repertoire of spiritual disciplines that we inherit from the historic church. All of these practices constitute the accrued wisdom of the body of Christ, led by the Spirit, who discerned that these practices were formative precisely because they had a God-ward, kingdom-oriented telos.

And that’s the point of discernment: we have to “read” practices in order to discern the telos or goal that is implicit in the practices. Practices are not neutral “containers” into which you can pour just any old “content” that you want. Practices are already loaded. For example, I think a lot of the cultural practices of our consumer culture are pretty much essentially defined by an egoism that puts “me” at the center. So even if you “Jesus-fy” these practices—take them up and insert Christian “content” as it were—the very form of the practice “says” almost the exact opposite (and it “says” this, I argue, to your body, to your imagination, at a gut-level). How ironic to package the God-centric vision of Jonathan Edwards in the entirely me-centric practices of the mall!

However (and here’s why I appreciate your question): this need not be a scorched-earth approach to culture. Instead, it calls for ad hoc discernment. We need to consider cultural practices and “read” the telos that is implicit in them. We might find cultural practices that are ripe for “kingdom co‑option,” you might say. For example, I think we might be surprised how certain practices of community we associate with “bohemian” culture actually resonate with the concerns of the kingdom. Folks who are much more creative and insightful than I could no doubt think of other examples.

My problem is that I’m just not convinced that innovation is our most pressing issue right now. I don’t think it’s precluded, I just think we might be surprised how much the “strangeness” of historic, ancient practices might capture the imagination of our secular age. So I tend to spend my energy convincing people to recover ancient practices, but obviously that is happening in a contemporary context and can’t fail to change how we inherit them and put them into practice.

On Holy Saturday afternoon, as we drove out to yet another service (the last one before the Paschal liturgy), I thought about how much time we had spent as a family in church during Holy Week, how unusual the services are compared to most American Christianity, and how my kids don’t know anything else. To them, this is Christianity. There is no way to guarantee that one’s children will practice the faith in adulthood, but if I find it hard to imagine being another kind of Christian now, simply because all the Orthodox liturgies and practices have seeped into my bones, how much more will that be the case for my children, who will have known nothing else?

This is not about pride, understand. It is entirely possible to keep all the fasts, show up for all the services, and so forth, and to still bust Hell wide open. And hey, for all I know, one or more of them will grow into adulthood and be glad to be done with all that church, and those fasts, and the crossing and genuflecting. But I think that it will be a lot more difficult for them to arrive at this conclusion, not only because they will have seen their parents living it out, but because Orthodoxy is such a total experience, it’s hard to shake. To give yourself over to this ancient church, with its ancient practices, and to allow them to shape your way of life — well, it changes you. When Jamie Smith says, “I just think we might be surprised how much the ‘strangeness’ of historic, ancient practices might capture the imagination of our secular age,” I know exactly what he means, because I’m living it. On Good Friday evening, we ritually processed around the outside of our church with the epitaphios  the cloth representing the burial shroud of Jesus, with all the faithful entering back into the nave by walking under the epitaphios, which another parishioner and I held high. Today, a new church member, who was baptized on the Saturday before Pascha, told me that the thrill of that moment — of coming into the church under the (symbolic) shroud of Christ, covered with rose petals — was staggering to her.

Yes, it’s strange, and yes, it’s wonderful, and yes, it is a sign of contradiction to our modern age. That makes it more dear, at least to me, and pushes me farther than I want to go. Which is how it should be. I know, I know: rituals like this do not save one’s soul. You can walk under the epitaphios and have a heart of stone if you are determined to resist grace, and you will be judged on that. The point is, though, that if you do these things faithfully, with an open heart and a sense of humility, you will be changed. It’s like when the pilgrim Dante entered onto each new terrace on the mountain of Purgatory. He encountered artistic expressions of the virtue he was to learn on that terrace. They entered into his heart through his senses, and plowed the hard ground of his understanding, making it ready to receive seeds of contemplation. This is what Orthodoxy does: plows the ground. This is not always easy, but if you persist, it will bear good fruit, over time.

It will not bear fruit, though, if you routinely put anything else first. Everybody wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.

(Incidentally, for those who would like a fuller explanation of James K.A. Smith’s ideas, here’s a video of a lecture in which he speaks of culture-as-liturgy; it runs just shy of an hour):

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