Sic Semper Tyrannis

A Month of Sundays Part V

So, Sunday morning turned out to be an experience EXACTLY like what I was looking for when I set off on this little experiment of mine. I went to a Divine Liturgy service at a Christian Orthodox church and it was something totally different!

I’m not going to even fake like I know the ins and outs of Orthodoxy and their theology and history and branches and all that hoohaw. Those kinds of academic minutiae become less significant to me with every passing year anyway.

Here’s what I can tell you. Yesterday was pretty much the exact opposite of what I witnessed the week before at the mega-church. When I walked in the door I was overwhelmed by the art in the sanctuary. It was all over the place—iconography. I did enough research on the internet beforehand to know that you are not supposed to talk upon entering the church. I saw a guy silently shush! some whispering people in the atrium area as I was getting my bearings.

Looking into the sanctuary I saw priests in robes, I heard what sounded like cantilation coming from one corner of the sanctuary, (cantilation: you know how in movies that take place in the middle east, there is that “foreign” sounding singing going on? Or in movies where a kid has to sing for his bar mitzvah? Kinda sounds like that…) a platform and then behind it another room containing an altar in a “holiest-of-holies” kind of configuration where the priests and altar boys hung out. On the left was a choir.

I found a place to sit just in time to stand up and this thing was off and running and I was pretty much lost in space and time for the next hour and a half or so, never knowing when to sit or stand or cross myself. I just watched a family in front of me who really seemed to know what was going on. The dad sprang up out of his seat when the time came to stand and we got quite a workout through the duration of the service.

The liturgy was printed out and it was in English, but here’s the thing—it was sung! And these weren’t strophic “songs” (i.e. verse, chorus, etc.) where you could catch on with the repeats. This was more like chant. So, even if I did know where we were in the service, which wasn’t guaranteed, I had no chance of participating, having not had the tunes ingrained in my head since childhood as I’m sure some people present had. (And even if I had grown up with the tunes I still would have struggled to participate since I somehow managed to sit in front of two of the most tone deaf women I’ve ever heard! It was like I had two devils sitting on my shoulders, each one determined to distract me from the beautiful sound of the choir leading the congregation!)

After the lengthy time of call and response type stuff, one of the official dudes in robes read an epistle, the Gospel text was sung (!) and then there was a short homily delivered by a guy looking like one of the Byzantine paintings come alive—lanky with a short beard…His message was about the unity of Christians—pretty abstract stuff about how all Christians are unified by the name of Christ, how it’s a symbol of God’s character and how to find God’s plan for your dating life (just kidding about that last part.)

Then, a really interesting thing happened at communion time. This is when I really lost track of what was going on. Basically all of the “official” guys in robes paraded from the altar with the bread and cup and banners and cross and went to the back of the room and then back to the altar, signifying (I hope) the love of God shed abroad to all the world.

In preparation for the communion, the choir was singing, priests were praying, there was incense slung, all these voices over one another. It’s funny to me that this was just as overwhelming to my senses as the loud drums and rock spectacle from the week before.

At this point I might as well talk about the music and other aesthetic matters. The music I heard in this service was probably many hundreds of years old and its models were probably close to a thousand years old. There were no instruments played, other than the human voice. I also noticed that there was no “us and them,” no musicians and an audience watching. It really felt more like one big choir, some people knowing the music better than others. The choir was more of a device to keep everybody in the same key. The melodies employed ancient modes (different from those used in the Catholic church) that bring to mind deserts of the Middle East and time. It is foreign to my musical experience and probably the experience of most Americans outside of the Orthodox community.

Which I found kind of cool.

This was not the sound of trying to make the Gospel hip or “relevant” through catchy pop music or emotional string pulling. People in some churches get up in arms about how out of date hymns are because they were written in the 1800s. Well, go back in time another, I don’t know, 400, 500 years? and place yourself in a non-Anglo Saxon culture. That’s the musical scene we’re talking about here. Its irrelevance to pop culture, and even to regular life was strangely attractive to me. To me it was the sound of people doing what they have done as a worship practice for centuries. That’s deep.

And then there were the paintings covering the entire, beautiful room. Icons of Bible stories and sad-eyed saints with circles behind their heads depicting halos and skinny, six-pack abs Jesus. Why do saints never smile? There was writing in both English and Greek? maybe Arabic? Visually, it was all quite beautiful to me, and I’m sure all of my head-tilting and golly-gee gawking at the ceiling and walls and stained glass made it clear I was a visitor.

Speaking of which, come communion time, I know enough to realize that when visiting a church it’s safest to assume that I am not invited to the Lord’s Supper. The guy to my left was invited and when he came back, he slipped me a piece of bread! Now, I don’t know how regular of a gesture that is in a church like this, but that small, silent act by a complete stranger was very meaningful to me. Here I was an outsider. Here he was- an insider, bringing me back a piece of the love of God as he knew it. I like that.

After all the rows had been served, there were a few announcements, just like at any church, and they moved to the ending bit, dismissed by rows to approach the altar, kiss a handheld cross and the priest’s hand and file out. Which I assumed was similar to how other churches shake hands with the pastor on the way out.

But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it! Mike Stutzman kisses the hand of no one, priestly garb or no! :-) I tried to summon the courage to do something so far out of my comfort zone, but failed. I watched each row file down there, hoping to see just one person merely pass by, or just kiss the cross, which would give me tacit permission to do likewise but wound up leaving into the hot, bright noon time sun, still curious about what I had just experienced.

posted by Mike @ 10:33 AM