Once More, With Feeling!

After the New Orleans adventure, I spent a very long time nibbling at the edges of Orthodoxy. I read a lot, had long talks with Jeff, floated some ideas with a couple of friends, wondered how my family and friends would react to us ditching Protestantism.

But I finally decided that I was never going to be satisfied just standing with my nose pressed up against the stained glass. So I took a deep breathe and walk into Holy Theophany Orthodox Church on Sunday morning for Divine Liturgy.  I was alone – Jeff was out of town, my teenagers were off at our “old” church. I was reconnoitering solo.

Ah, I thought, this is more like it. No pews, no wainscoting, no center-aisle carpet. Concrete floor (with a fabulous acid wash), covered in rugs. A few wooden folding chairs around the perimeter and right up front. And lots of people standing. All very Byzantine. There’s that tall screen at the front with all the pictures of Mary and Jesus and Bible guys and angels (the wings are a dead give-away). And I know there’s a dome, but I’d have to walk to the front of the church to see if it’s got a big picture of Jesus in it, too, and there is simply no way I’m walking down there.

I think I’m late, because things seem to be in full swing, although since I have no real idea of what ‘full swing’ might look like, I could be completely wrong. There are people walking around the front of the church. Some guy in a black cassock is reading something aloud. There appears to be a choir over to one side. Some folks are standing in line in front of framed pictures set on stands (icons, I guess), and going through complicated motions in front of them. Things seem to be happening with purpose but not much order.

I grab a scarf from the thoughtful supply in the foyer, because all the women I can see have their heads covered. There’s also a pile of beeswax tapers there, but I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a candle just now, and no one is holding one in the church. I save that particular mystery for another time.

I sidle nonchalantly into the sanctuary, find an empty patch of rug in the back, and stand alertly for cues. To no avail.  I am completely lost. For the next 90 minutes, I am immersed in an undifferentiated stream of incomprehensible words and music. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on. There’s lots of incense, which has the disconcerting effect of making church smell like my circa 1974 bedroom. All we need is a hanging chair, a blacklight, a little Blood, Sweat, and Tears, and I can relive my groovy teen years!

The priest (I think – he’s wearing a very ornate robe and a ponytail, but maybe there’s someone else back there wearing even more brocade who’s actually the head guy) and a troop of altar boys circle in and out of the doors in the iconostasis (I found out that that’s what the screen up front is called). He’s chanting in a kind of sing-song, but there’s no sound system other than the dome acoustics, and he usually has his back to the congregation (what’s that about?) and there certainly aren’t any giant video screens with the words projected, and since I can’t really hear much, I feel horrendously disoriented.

Now maybe a little disorientation is not a terrible thing. But I like being oriented. I like knowing what’s going on and what’s going to happen next. I like to be one of the cool people who are all self-possessed and “in”.

And I’ve got none of that. I don’t like being outside; I don’t like out of control, with a high potential to make a complete fool of myself by breaking protocol or stepping into some major faux pas. There is a lot of activity to keep up with, and I’m distracted from the words I can’t hear and the songs I can’t understand by the certainty that I’m not getting with the program.

People make the sign of the cross periodically, and bow from the waste to touch the ground, and bow their heads. But I can’t figure out what the cues are for all these responses, and I’m afraid that any feeble attempts I make at mimicry would be perceived more as sacrilegious than as earnest attempts to learn. So I just stand perfectly still and hope no one can see me. 

[I should make it clear here that, despite my self-consciousness, no one in that place gave two hoots about what I was doing or not doing. Amazingly, they weren’t there for me!]

And to make matters even more confused, not everyone does the same thing at the same time. The guy in front of me does the cross thing A LOT, but other people not so much; some folks bow deeply and touch the floor, others just bow. There’s lots of singing, but again – mostly unintelligible, and sometimes the choir is singing (all a capella) while someone else is chanting. 

So I just stand there, trying to feel God; I don’t even know how to start. Mainly I just feel awkward and uncomfortable, and spend most of the service trying to figure out a) how those women get their headscarves to stay on, because mine keeps slipping down, and I’m absolutely certain that my futzing around is deeply irritating to the people around me and b) how they all stand so still. I’m shifting foot to foot, trying to forestall the cramp that threatens my left calf, and cursing my fondness for pasta, because I’m sure if I were in better shape, this exercise would be easier.

Now let’s review: I have been a Christian since I was 7. I believe every word of the Nicene Creed. I have attended Bible-believing churches on a very regular basis for almost 50 years. I have taught the Bible to children and adults. I pray, fast, believe God for a lot of things in my life, and hear from Him on a regular basis.

And here, among these believers, I am lost.

A Toe in the Water

This has been a long twisty journey, as I guess most spiritual journeys are. It seems like the Spirit has a flow and a path, but we are constantly putting obstacles in His way – sometimes pebbles that ruffle the waters and sometimes stream-diverting boulders that send life into uncharted side streams. It takes a while to get back on track after those kinds of diversion.

My first official Orthodox service was in pre-Katrina New Orleans. I had passed “Gender” around to several friends, who had passed it on again. They loved it, too. We had a running conversation about how generally fabulous we found the collection of essays (subtitled: Men, Women, Sex, Feminism) and how clearly it spoke to our own searching questions on how we might be women of God when the world was working furiously to erase both God and gender distinctions. So when I heard that the author would be speaking at a New Orleans church, on the Saturday after several of us were to be in town for a work conference, we decided to stay over and attend.

Before the talk, there was a service. I went, along with my nominally-Catholic-and-always-searching friend Claire. We sat in the back and just watched, trying to follow the lead of the rest of the congregants in standing and sitting, so as not to be too conspicuous. From the wainscoting down, this looked like every church I’d ever been in. Pews with Bible racks on the backs, carpeted center aisle, stained-glass windows – pretty standard fare. It was the front of the church that was eye-catching. A screen stood across the stage, in the position I generally associate with the choir-loft modesty rail that exists in a million small Protestant churches across the country. But this didn’t look like a choir stood behind it. It looked like a serious partition – something to separate and protect what went on behind it – something I never glimpsed from my back-row vantage point. The screen was covered in ornate carving and portraits. And above it the ceiling was domed and similarly decorated with a giant portrait of Christ peering down on us, surrounded by all sorts of people and angels and Biblical scenes. Now I’ve sat through thousands of hours of Sunday School and church and Bible study in my life, and I did learn a few things. So I recognized some of the scenes, and some of the characters. But it felt like I was missing a lot more than I was getting.

And the service was – in the most literal way – Greek to me. I mean -- it was in Greek. Completely in a foreign language. Greek. Turns out this was a Greek Orthodox Church. And they did the entire service in Greek. Who knew?!

Again, my life in church served me well. There were probably 3 words of Greek that I recognized! Agape (love), Christos (not that hard to figure out), Kyrie Eleison (actually – I knew that one from high school choir). That was it. I really didn’t know what was being said until we got to the Lord’s Prayer – the rhythm of those words is unmistakable.  But for the rest of it, I was just clueless.

I chalked my cluelessness up to the language barrier, and went on my merry, clueless way. I had no real idea at that point that the language of Orthodoxy would continue to be a barrier, even when everyone in the service was speaking plain English. 

A Little Biography, Part II

In Colorado, our family – Jeff’s brothers and their wives and kids – attended a mega-church. It was mega in every possible way, from the big-box-store-sized sanctuary to the personality of the senior pastor. It had a big choir and a rock band with big speakers. It had big screens above the big stage and a big worship service that involved a good deal of dancing in the aisles and occasional speaking in tongues. The church was charismatic, non-denominational, Bible-believing, Holy Spirit-welcoming, and growing like crazy. The energy of the place was just unbelievable. I’m a do-er by nature, and here there was lots and lots to do. Cell groups on topics from mountain biking to spiritual warfare abounded and soon enough I was singing in the big choir and then teaching a women’s Bible study and a children’s Sunday school class.

The truly wonderful Bible study was called “Five Aspects of Woman” and focused on Biblical femininity. It’s not Orthodox, but it is certainly orthodox in its understanding of Scripture and the deep truths that God reveals about women. I loved every minute of the time I spent with the women who went through the study with me. And while looking for more to read on Biblical femininity, I stumbled on Frederica Mathewes-Green’s “Gender”.
What a read! I packed it for a business trip, along with a murder mystery for backup, in case it turned out to be boring. I never got to that murder. Instead, I sat on a plane alternately laughing out loud and sobbing (not so out-loud, I hope) at the life Frederica relates. It was just the kind of writing that hooks me. So I picked up the next one of her books that I could find – “The Illumined Heart” – and found that it synced perfectly with the Five Aspects study.

“The Illumined Heart” asks “What did ancient Christians understand about being transformed by Christ?” The ancient word for that complete transformation is “theosis”, and some form of this idea appears in Christian practice of all sorts. Transformation is what we were looking for in our little Bible study. And it was what drove the church we were all in. We worked hard to be open to the moving of the Spirit, to understand Scripture deeply, to fast, to pray intently, to press into God; we wanted to be more like God – to have more of God -- to be like Jesus. And lo and behold, ancient Christians had settled on a few keys that unlocked the door to that transformation.

Prayer was to be a deeply embedded discipline, and the Jesus Prayer ("Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.") rightly practiced could train the mind and heart. Fasting was supposed to be a way of life, so that at each meal believers were mindful of the work of God in the earth and adjusted their eating (eschewing certain foods at certain meals) accordingly. Repentance was an absolutely necessary condition of the Christian life, and it had to become a habit of any Christian seeking transformation.

Our mega-church practice looked like a pale imitation of that ancient practice. It was like we knew in our hearts that there was a path that could take us deeper into God, but we just weren’t exactly sure where it was. So we just blazed a new path – one based on a map that we had to work out on our own. We worked really, really hard at chopping our way through the jungle. But we didn’t feel any particular need to call up ancient wisdom (except for those cell groups that were blowing the shofar on Friday nights), and we declared that each one of us could interpret Scripture in a fully truth-revealing way all on our own. But in practice, we listened to our leadership, and hoped they could teach us something, well, transformative.

We fasted hard (no food, 3 days at a time!), but the fasting was all self-defined and self-initiated. It was unconnected to any coherent, proven strategy to “draw near to God”. We prayed a lot – in all-night sessions at times. But Paul’s “pray without ceasing” direction seemed basically impossible. We repented occasionally, but we weren’t supposed to beat ourselves up too much over our completely human failings, and too much repentance indicated a lack of understanding of the all-accepting love of God.

So the transformation we so desperately wanted was very hard to see, at least for me. I wanted to know more about that Ancient Path.

A Little Biography, part I

This is who I am. I was born in 1960, in Austin, Texas. My mother was a legal secretary (think Mad Men with a drawl), my father a salesman (half the buildings in downtown are held together by his products). In between assorted child-rearing, work, and church obligations, she shopped and he hunted. So the pickup had a gun rack full of rifles and their closet had a shoe-rack full of Ferragamos. I was on the cradle roll in a mid-sized Southern Baptist church, where mother sang in the choir, daddy joined the deacons for a smoke between church and Sunday School, and my grandmother played the piano. Services Sunday morning and night, Wednesday night prayer meeting, and (eventually) Thursday night youth group, summer camp, Vacation Bible School, youth choir trips -- this was full-immersion Southern Baptism. I learned to read by standing in the seat beside my mother during the song service, and following her finger under the words of The Old Rugged Cross and At Calvary. I learned the importance of fellowship with believers, as daddy rose early on Saturday mornings to cook for the Men's Prayer Breakfast. I learned a lot of Bible, and a lot of American frontier theology. I learned that God is personal, that Jesus died for our sins, and that church is important. I came to Christ when I was 7, and I stayed.

So after my first year at UT, when a traveling singing ministry did a gig at our church, I signed up, and spent the next 3 years in the US and Canada singing, leading Bible studies, running summer camps, doing skits and puppet shows, and finding a husband. Jeff and I married, and while he worked, I had our first baby and finished undergrad, started grad school, dropped out of grad school, and had two more babies. Jeff ran the youth ministries at several Baptist and "Bible" churches in town, building an orphanage in Mexico with his charges. I sang in the choirs, and taught in the Sunday Schools. We were active and busy and I was bored in my faith.

The Christians we associated with were earnest and faithful; they studied and prayed and sang and taught. But it didn't seem like any of us were being transformed by God. It felt like we were hitting the marks laid out for us, but getting little that distinguished us from those folks who spent their Sunday mornings reading the paper and tending their gardens rather than pulling on pantyhose and heading to church. I despaired.

And then we moved to Colorado...

Where to start...

So let me tell you why I'm doing this (other than an inordinate fondness for the sound of my own typing). Well over a year ago I was having lunch with my friend Shannon. We aren't often in the same city, so it took a while to work our way through the family-and-friends news. When we moved onto more random subjects, we started talking about Art Bell -- you know, that guy that has the amazing late-night talk show that features UFO aficionados, alien abductees, and callers enamored of various extra-terrestrial forces. We marveled at the wide variety of psychologically suspect belief systems that crop up on that show.
And then she said, "So what's new in your world? I answered, "Well, I don't think I can be Protestant anymore." And then I gave her the highly condensed version of my rather haphazard study of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It went something like, "So there's a priest, lots of fasting, a liturgy that's 1500 years old, and incense, and etc.etc.etc., and icons, the Theotokos, saints, etc.etc.etc., and more fasting, Roman Catholicism splits off in 1054, standing during the entire service, etc.etc.etc., mystical transformation of the elements during communion, etc.etc.etc., and did I mention kissing those icons?"
When I finally ran out of steam, she said, "Hmmm. So, if I google this 'orthodoxy' thing, am I going to find that this isn't much different from the stuff those Art Bell callers come up with?"

Ouch.

So it occurs to me that over the last couple of years, as I've been talking with friends about this little journey, that there's way too much information and contemplation to dump onto someone in one sitting. And I do confess to a good deal of convert enthusiasm, that can make my exposition a bit incoherent for the uninitiated. So I hope this blog can be a space to explore and consider, and trace the path Jeff and I have taken to this point.