Don't Be a Weirdo/Touch Grass

 

One of the best pieces of advice I got early on as a would-be Orthodox Christian was "don't be a weirdo."  I forgot who wrote it -- it was on one of the blogs I frequented back in those days (2010-ish).  But it was instructive.  As the kids say these days, it was an imperative to "touch grass."

Both of these sayings lead to the same place.  The Orthodox Church is already weird by American Christian standards.  Since 2012 I have been blessed to wear the cassock as a reader.  So I dress like the picture above for Church every Sunday (I'm the one reading the Epistle and, well, wearing the cassock).  There isn't much need to be any weirder than that.

As I wrote a while back, there is a tendency among a handful of folks to put on Orthodoxy like a costume.  Orthodox LARPing as it were.  There is a healthy expression of this, in that the outward things of the Church -- crosses, prayer ropes, head coverings, etc. -- are all good things.  The misuse of a thing does not negate its proper use.  But it is in fact a misuse of these things to treat them as accessories.  As I wrote then, wear your prayer rope, but use it.

But more than that, the potential for misuse goes way up when we forget that the outward things are connected to spiritual things. It does little good to dress up in Orthodoxy and then fail to live it out.  We fail to live it out both when we reject our neighbor and when we scare him off from the Church because we are so bizarre that he figures our parish must be as well.  

We are fortunate at St. Patrick to have a community of real people, with real lives, who live out the Christian faith within their normal lives.  That is, we don't gather a lot of weirdos, at least not any weirder than you'll find in any other place in the country.  Our priest is pretty normal.  His wife (also pictured above) is pretty normal.  Our people, as you can see above, are pretty normal.  We are neither monastic fetishists nor ethnic and cultural appropriators.  We aren't trying to remake Holy Rus in this little storefront church.  We have actual Russian people who attend our parish, so our nods to the old country are authentic, not pretentious. Then again, our Russian friends are from the present, so that's what you'd expect.

I don't say all this to come down on those who are new to the faith and still discovering all the shiny new exotic toys the Russian, Greek and Arabic worlds have to offer through our parishes. Our food would be poorer if we didn't absorb some of that (then again, theirs would be too if not for our fried chicken and banana pudding).  I don't mean to criticize those who are serious about maintaining a prayer rule or are diligent about reading about the faith.  Those are all good things.  But remember to get out and touch grass.  Orthodoxy is lived right where we are.  I tell our catechumens frequently, "salvation starts right now -- God isn't waiting for you to die."  That's the Orthodox faith.  We take it into the world, and in so doing transform the world.  That is not bound up in monastic and cultural trappings.  It happens wherever you may be.  Bloom where you're planted.

It is notable that there would be no Russian Orthodox culture if St. Vladimir hadn't Christianized Russia. The Arabic and Greek-speaking worlds were Christianized early on, as was the Latin world, but the Russian Church is evidence that Orthodoxy takes the culture as it is and transforms it into itself.  The reason OCA and ROCOR parishes look and sound different than Greek and Antiochian parishes is the Russians took their own music, culture, tradition, and piety and made the faith their own.  Not by changing the faith, but by being authentically Russian in their practice of the Orthodox faith.  You only need to note the four-part harmony in any Russian-descendent parish to understand this.

We are called to do the same here. Which is not to say we should eradicate Russian (or Greek, or Arabic) language or music from our liturgies, or stop enjoying their food or venerating their saints.  The Church is One, for sure, and our forefathers have left us a blessed and beautiful inheritance.  I absolutely adore Russian chant and Byzantine chant alike.  But the Church is also not bound up in a previous time, when it was supposedly "more authentic" or "purer."  The Church is for our time just as much as the high water mark of the Byzantine Empire or the full glory of Holy Rus.  We aren't called to recover those moments in the past.  We are called to recreate them right where we are, in a way that works in our culture and our country and among our people today.  We can no more recreate the 7th century Hagia Sophia than we can recreate 1st Century Palestine.  We live in the 21st Century.  The Church is relevant here and now.

So yes, please, more Obikhod chant and Kievan chant.  More Pascha cheese and chotkis.  We love that stuff too.  Just don't forget the burgers and dogs, and don't make it weird.