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.