The Very Real Danger of Indifference

 

It should go without saying -- and this isn't the first time I've talked about these issues -- that the Church can hurt you. Sometimes badly. I've witnessed it, my friends have witnessed it, and it has harmed us all in various ways that we are still sorting out to this day.

In nearly every instance where we've had conflict in the Church, someone's personal preference was more at issue than whatever "the thing" was that caused the conflict. Specifically, I am reminded of a former priest who wanted everything his way. Even where he was actively harming people with his insistence and self-will, and even when he was undermining his own bishop (who, obviously, was also our bishop back then), the fact that he wanted something was good enough reason to do it, and people who were in the way were treated as expendable. This behavior included dishonesty, active manipulation, and gaslighting. It included abuse involving reception into the Church and abuse in the confessional. It involved the priest actually instructing people to lie to others about what he was doing and what they had done.  It was really, really bad, and it went unchecked for far too long, mostly because this priest was willing to deceive his flock, his bishop, and his hierarchs and they naively took his word for it. I do not say this lightly. I'm not going to name names, but rest assured, we have the receipts in abundance.

What brings this to mind is I have recently become aware of more damage left in the wake of the very same situation we dealt with, continuing to this very day.  To put this in perspective, we left nearly four years ago, we wrote the bishop very shortly after that, and about a year later, the Metropolitan of that Archdiocese was informed of all of the issues by someone else. These things did not happen yesterday, but they continued long after we left and are still hurting people today. So I am reminded again of how the Church's failure to address real issues leaves good people floundering and wondering if the Church is for them. 

Part of the problem in these rare instances is that, in the Orthodox Church, we are patient, kind, and long-suffering, and we expect others to be as well. It puts us at a distinct disadvantage when someone instead is actively and intentionally manipulative, because they prey on the Church's weakness, take advantage of her kindness, and demand absolution from those they have harmed without any real repentance taking place. This sort of deception can irreparably harm souls. The Church's long-suffering and kindness become a shield for the wrongdoer and a sword for those being wronged. It feels like "forgive me, a sinner," but delivered with a smirk and crossed fingers.

I do want to be clear -- we have moved on, and I do not write any of this out of anger. We have a good priest and a good parish and we are well cared for. Mostly, I write out of sadness at the fact that four years later, people are still being hurt. And I don't have sufficient answers. I wish I did. Part of the problem is there just aren't that many truly deceptive priests, so this is not a common problem. But the other issue is, the Church takes a very honest view of suffering. We are to bear suffering, mistreatment, and criticism with grace. Ordinarily, this is a good thing, but the Church dare not sanction the cause of suffering, and dare not shield those who harm others within the Church. Spiritual deception and abuse are at least as bad as physical abuse, and the Church cannot afford to tolerate them. 

Of course, the Church cannot simply defrock priests and sanction bishops who either cause or ignore suffering, without first attempting to ensure that the priest and/or bishop actually did something wrong. Abusers in the ranks of the laity are as much a danger to good priests as abusive priests are to good laypeople. I have seen, in my Protestant days, good pastors run off by manipulative and abusive laypeople. So we can't simply swing the pendulum all the way to the other side. That's just keeping the abuse, but changing the identity of the abuser. In our situation, "attempting to ensure that the priest and/or bishop actually did something wrong" might have entailed actually speaking to those of us who alerted the Archdiocese. Still, I understand the Church cannot act on the bare word of anyone, clergy or laity, without attempting to sort out the facts.

All that said, the real problem strikes me as a communication problem. The Church reaching out to those who have been hurt, helping them process what happened, and attempting to reconcile the parties, could go a long way. Apparently, that was something that particular Archdiocese did not desire to do in our case, for whatever reason. I pray she begins to see the need for such a process. Indifference is cold. In many ways, it is worse than the abuse itself. 

Sometimes just hearing "I hear you, I see you, and I'm sorry that happened to you -- we will try to do better" is enough. I hope somebody is saying that to those who were hurt more recently than we were. If you know someone who is hurting in the present, please give them an ear, a shoulder, and some compassion. And encourage your clergy and hierarchs to do the same. They need it.

The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony, reprise

 

the wedding of Malachi and Hannah

It was 13 years ago, plus a couple of months, when I first wrote about my wife and I entering into the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Since that time we've left one parish and jurisdiction (Antiochian) to join another parish in another jurisdiction (OCA), we've begun a mission and left the second parish to become full-time members here, and that mission just celebrated its first wedding, both members having come to the Church through the mission. It was a joyous celebration, and warrants a return to the Church's teachings on matrimony.

As I wrote previously, the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony in the Orthodox Church is not the same as going to the Justice of the Peace, or even your typical Protestant wedding in a church. That is not to denigrate those things -- my wife and I were married in a little Baptist Church in Bremen, Georgia, one my father helped build with his bare hands. We certainly do not think God refused to bless our wedding because the parish and the pastor lacked the right credentials, or belonged to the "wrong" church body. We have never questioned our union, nor considered it lacking. Neither did the Church, our priest, or our bishop. We were accepted and treated as a married couple from the very beginning.

But we still went ahead and got crowned in the Orthodox Church. Why? Because, as our friends Malachi and Hannah learned this weekend, an Orthodox wedding is something God does to and for us, not something primarily we do before God. We submit, but God joins. We assent, but God unites. This is why in the Orthodox wedding service, there are no vows. We are not focused on what we say. We focus on what God says. My wife and I are what God says we are. And now Malachi and Hannah are what God says they are.

The focus of married life in Orthodoxy is leading one's spouse and children to salvation. Children are an expected part of marital union, though one ought not get too tightly wound about the parameters of that. Metropolitan Saba wrote a lovely piece on marriage and childbearing recently. In it, he wrote:

As implied by the petitions for childbearing in the marriage service, Orthodoxy does not teach that sexual marital intimacy is in any way sinful. Neither does the Church teach that intercourse in matrimony is merely tolerated for the sake of conceiving children, as does the Augustinian tradition of western Christianity. Nowhere in the New Testament does one find a denigration of sex in marriage or the view that it requires justification through procreation. St. Paul does warn, however, against excessive abstinence from marital relations: “Do not deprive each other, except by mutual consent and for a time, so you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again, so that Satan will not tempt you through your lack of self-control” (1 Cor. 7:5).

The discipline of marital fasting in Orthodoxy should be embraced freely by mutual agreement between the spouses in light of their current state of spiritual maturity, not as a matter of rigid law. Especially in this most intimate dimension of married life, misguided ascetical strictness may have disastrous consequences that are counterproductive to the healing and wellbeing of all concerned.

While children are certainly one of the great blessings of marriage and the Church encourages couples to “be fruitful and multiply,” there are no canons in the Church that forbid the use of non-abortifacient means of birth control by married couples—and some barrier method contraception was known in antiquity. The canons of the Church have detailed descriptions of sexual offences, but none limiting births apart from the condemnation of abortion. What some identify as the rare patristic condemnations of contraception reflect the identification of them with abortion considering the limited medical knowledge of those times.

As ever, the Church's focus in the marital union is not on mere childbearing, but a life in Christ, the giving of one's self to the other, and to the children born of the union.  We are not trying to breed more Christians, like livestock. We are trying to fill and subdue the earth by uniting ourselves, one another, and our children to Christ. So yes, we value and expect children in an Orthodox marriage, and we ought to have as many as God will bless us with. But the Church has no per se prohibition on contraception, nor does the Church endorse the novel idea that once a married couple is past childbearing age they should "live together as brother and sister." The marital union is a mirror of the love of the Holy Trinity. Withdrawing from that love to pursue man-made "rules" is folly. As His Eminence reminded us above, and as St. Paul says explicitly in the Holy Scriptures, husband and wife ought to deny one another only by mutual consent, and only for a short time. Thus, marital fasts (where the couple refrains from normal relations, for example, during fasting periods, on fast days or the night before communion) are fully appropriate in the Church, with the blessing and guidance of your parish priest. "Living together as brother and sister" is anomalous and ought be undertaken carefully, and rarely. The neo-monastic, Orthodox cosplay influence is not a pattern for normal married life in the Church.

Father David Bibeau once spoke at St. Elias in Atlanta, to a men's group. He said "you men are the priests of your households," and then he started talking about something of which I was previously unaware. He said that a startling percentage of families where the children continue to go to church as adults are families where the father goes to church weekly. The mother's influence is strong too, but not nearly as strong as the father's. Statistically, if you want your children to go to church, their father is going to have to take them and set the example and expectation. I'm not sure why that is, but I trust Fr. David and thus I believe it to be true. This means a huge part of the success of the marriage, if success is defined as leading one's spouse and children to salvation, hinges on the husband being willing to take on this role, being willing to die to himself and his desires, and take his family to Church regularly. It does not mean the wife cannot make up for that -- for sure if your husband will not go to Church, you go anyway, and take as many kids as you can. It does mean that if the husband is on board, the kids are far more likely to stick around into adulthood. Husbands should take this role seriously.

And yet, while we Orthodox do believe that the husband is the head of the household, it is in a priestly role, not a position of power, much less coercion or manipulation. The husband offers himself on behalf of the family.  He isn't the "boss" so much as he is the head servant. At Malachi and Hannah's wedding, Father Seth said God took Eve from Adam's side, not from his head, nor from his feet, but from his side. Not to Lord over him, and not to be under his feet, but to stand beside him. This is a good image.

One of our former (Lutheran) pastors once told his flock (including us) that we are too quick to pay attention to what God says to our spouse and too slow to listen to what God says to us.  And so, when St. Paul admonishes the wife to submit to her husband as to the Lord, that is not something for men to enforce, but for women to aspire to. Likewise, when St. Paul admonishes the husband to love his wife as Christ loved the Church, even being willing to die for her, that is not something for the wife to insist upon, but for the husband to attempt to live out daily. The roles of husband and wife, in a God-pleasing marriage, are not competing for power and glory, but are complimentary, designed to enrich the union at the expense of the pride and selfishness of the individuals. In marriage, we learn to put ourselves aside and live for others. That is the way of salvation.