Icon veneration

I think that icon veneration, as practiced and taught by the Orthodox and Catholic churches, is idolatry, it's a violation of the second commandment. Let's discuss in the comments.

Graven images

It's pretty common for inquirers into Orthodoxy to be troubled by icon veneration, it seems like idolatry to us. I heard some statements about the practice that provided color, like, "Some people kiss photographs of loved ones; they don't love the photograph, but their affection applies to the person in the picture."

The second commandment says that making and bowing before images is wrong. It is a clear condemnation of practices observed in the cultures around ancient Israel. What made Orthodox icon veneration different from idolatry? What does the second commandment mean?

The explanation that I got was that icon veneration is different from idol worship because in idol worship, the actual idol is being worshipped, while with icon veneration, the icon is just a focus, and that honor passes to the prototype through the icon. That's not true, though: this distinction between honoring an object and worshipping a god, this distinction is also made in many pagan religions. It's not like people were commonly trying to confound an image with its prototype. If the second commandment were limited to making this distinction, it would be near-irrelevant. What could the second commandment mean?

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In Chemosh is a god not an idol I write about this in more detail. This quote is relevant:

In Bible times, worshippers of Ba'al Hadad would make sacrifices in front of bull statues. No one ever thought that Ba'al Hadad was actually a bull; he obviously looks like a human being. However, everyone knew that Ba'al Hadad was powerful, and so are bulls, so by sacrificing to a bull statue, one might hope to manipulate Ba'al Hadad to access his power for one's own purposes.

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St John of Damascus wrote a famous defense of icon veneration, but he was mostly writing to address iconoclasts, people who thought we should make no images at all. (The second commandment obviously doesn't mean that we should have no images, because the priestly code has many instructions about making images.) He makes several arguments, but the one I find notable is that he says that honor ought to be paid to icons, not worship, so worshipping an icon would be wrong, but honoring an icon of Jesus would bring worship to Jesus himself. St John emphasizes that worship does not belong to icons, only honor.

I thought that this explanation was interesting because the difference between sin and piety would be a matter of degree, honor an icon, but don't worship it. However, it sounded to me just like what one would say to justify icon worship if one thought icons shouldn't be worshipped, but one wanted to worship them anyway. Orthodox Christians light candles for icons, they wave incense before them, they bow before icons, and heathens treat idols in this same way. There isn't much that non-Christians do before idols that Orthodox Christians don't do before icons. The difference between sin and piety would have to be one of subtle internal spiritual orientation. I wouldn't expect myself to have this right orientation consistently enough for icon veneration to be safe. Does the second commandment speak to having a certain internal spiritual orientation? How is it possible to violate the second commandment? What does the second commandment mean, anyway?

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I would wake up in the middle of the night, startled and sweating, and I would lie back down and try to sleep and I couldn't. I had bad dreams about the seventh ecumenical council, the one that affirmed icon veneration. In my dream, the bishops at the Seventh Ecumenical Council conspired to teach icon veneration, even though it's wrong. When I woke up, I didn't know if I should trust myself or the bishops. All of my reason told me that icon veneration is idolatry in disguise, but I also didn't want to trust my intuition. The bishops had studied theology, practiced intense spiritual disciplines, and had the support of the laity. Would you sooner listen to them or to me? On the other hand, Chico Marx said, "Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?" I felt insubordinate not trusting these wise people, affirmed by the church, with the weight of scholarship and diligent spiritual practice behind them. Yet, I myself couldn't believe that icon veneration is what God wants.

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I was comparing two stories about how icon veneration got to be accepted by the church. In the first story, icon veneration was always accepted by the church, just never mentioned in the Bible because it was so normal. However, this practice was uniformly supported by the tradition going back to the apostles; Luke, the gospel writer, painted icons also. The iconoclastic controversy was more about cultural responses to Islam than about any theological development. Icon veneration felt funny to me, but that was just because the Protestant Reformation left a strange aftertaste. I could trust that icon veneration is correct; it was accepted by the entire identifiable church at the end of the eighth century. If I could trust God to speak to me about little things, I could trust God to be clear to the whole church about something important.

The other story was that icon veneration is idolatry. It was alien to the apostles. Icon veneration was idolatry repackaged, brought into Christianity by converts keeping old practices, or Christians adopting non-Christian practices to be more accessible to outsiders. Culture can shift to make many wrong things seem acceptable, and Christian culture isn't exempt from this. Eventually, the whole church endorsed a wrong practice because the church is made out of human beings who are frail and prone to err.

If I believed the first story, I would have become Orthodox. It's internally consistent, but not the story I would expect if God were to intend icon veneration. It's suspicious that there's no mention of icon veneration being encouraged in the New Testament, there's minimal mention of the practice before the first Nicene council. Icon veneration seems so similar to idolatry, but the distinction between the two is not made clear in the scripture or in the writing of the early church fathers. If God really did intend icon veneration, I would expect him to assure me of this through scripture and consistent witness of leaders in the church, not just because a lot of people venerated icons for a long time. But if the second story were true, what would imply about the church, myself, and God?

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I started to look into Orthodoxy because I had given up on scripturalism and was looking for something more decisive. Scripture alone led to divergent interpretations, and I wanted a sound way to know what God wants that isn't just someone's opinion—opinions are cheap. I wasn't happy with just listening to my own opinion, either; if I can't rest with another person's opinions, I can't rest with my own. I didn't think that scripture was bad or wrong, it's just that using scripture alone led to inconsistent readings of the Bible about important things. On the other hand, traditionalism, in Orthodoxy, and in Catholicism, too, led to enforcement of wrong practices. I would like to hold a compromise position, but a person who believes the tradition except for when he doesn't isn't halfway in the middle of the two approaches, he's a well-read scripturalist.

I wanted a good understanding of revelation. I posed this in terms of knowing doctrine. Revelation isn't just about logic and information, it's about function. I don't care if proper doctrine can be deduced from scripture alone because scripture hasn't been consistently understood. I'm more concerned with how well people actually know God than I am about a theory of revelation, of how they ought to go about knowing God. I think it was helpful for me to think in terms of doctrine about important, concrete things, like who should be baptized, how should church government be structured, and whether icons should be venerated.

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I didn't care so much about these issues of doctrine, though, as I did about the world and myself. I didn't learn until I was 17 that a fifth of the world's population is malnourished. Poor people aren't just a few people in my neighborhood who need some canned goods, no, most human beings live in a state of physical hardship and suffering that I had never been close to being forced into. Also, I believed that to not know Jesus is to spend eternity in torment, and, because most humans aren't Christians, pain forever was what they would face, barring an intervention. On campus, I was seeing evangelism take no effect; I could count on one hand the number of conversions I saw in the college fellowship I was in for over five years.

I had to look to find a church where poverty and justice were spoken about regularly from the pulpit, and even then, it's rare for me to hear a Christian teacher speak with penitence for the role that Christians have played in injustice. Christians ought to teach with urgency and fear and hope about suffering and damnation that are imminent for most people, providing concrete advice on how to respond radically to crisis. I didn't just want a good understanding of revelation, I wanted to see what God was up to and know what he wanted me to do to help.

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Advocates of religious pluralism often make reference to the story of the blind men and the elephant. One might feel the side of the elephant and say that an elephant is like a wall. Another might feel its tail and say that it's like a rope. Another might feel its ear and say it's floppy. They're all right, they're just talking about different aspects of the elephant. This is a critically incomplete analogy, because elephants can't talk. Is God silent, only allowing us to know him by groping for him in the dark?

There are different kinds of disagreements. There are differences of perspective or emphasis or phrasing, and then there are flat contradictions: icons ought to be venerated or they ought not, the church should be led by bishops or the Pope or a number of elders or by a congregational vote, babies ought or ought not be baptized.

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Idolatry is a sin because people use idols to manipulate and misrepresent God. I started seeing other things that Christians do as idolatrous. People make up rules and say that God commands them—this is idolatrous. People cause harm to people and say that this is good because God wills it—this is idolatrous. People bargain with God, or they try to pray with a special technique, or they butter-up God with compliments that they don't mean, hoping to get what they want—this is idolatry. People say that scripture provides sufficient knowledge for salvation, but God didn't say that, the Bible didn't say that about itself, even; this is idolatry. When people give tradition the weight of divine revelation, this is idolatry, too.

The second commandment forbids making and bowing before graven images, and the Orthodox and the Catholics and anyone else who uses art as a proxy for God are guilty of this. We should be surprised if it weren't the case that many Christians are idolaters, if the church is anything like the ancient Israelite culture that it is supposed to be a continuation of. To judge by the Old Testament, the people of God live in cycles of idolatry, judgment, repentance, and deliverance. Why should God's people today be any less frail?

I don't think the Orthodox and the Catholics are the worst idolaters. Bowing in front of an image is a violation of the second commandment, but it doesn't seem to harm any human beings directly. When a sick person is told that she will get better if she has faith, she might falsely blame herself if she gets sicker. People with psychiatric conditions are told that God doesn't want them to take pills. Charlatans extort money from people who can't afford to give it, telling their marks that God will pay them back a hundredfold. It makes me angry when people give bad advice and false consolation, and support what they say with a "thus sayeth the Lord".

I like Orthodoxy. I like paintings. I like the icons of Jesus and the saints and the angels, they inspire me. I like the stories told in Orthodoxy. I've found ancient Christian spiritual practices to be helpful to me. My objection to Orthodoxy, and to Catholicism, is not to people bowing before marble or wood and paint, but it is to the establishment of the church as a proxy for Christ. The church is an image of Christ, but it isn't him. The church is imperfect, it makes mistakes, it is fallible—I'm convinced of this, and so I did not become Orthodox or Catholic.

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After I first learned about the extent of injustice in the world, and the church's insufficient response, I stopped calling myself a Christian—I called myself a Jesus-follower or something, instead. I felt like I knew better than the rest of the church, that I could see injustice and care about it in ways that the rest of the church couldn't, which is such an adolescent attitude to have. Fortunately, that phase only lasted for about a week.

Revelation doesn't work. Protestants can't come to agreement on basic, important things, and the Orthodox and Catholics have converged on bad conclusions. I could privilege my point of view, and say that I have the insight to see through a mistake made by the ancient church, or that I have the insight to get good-enough doctrine for myself from the Bible. I decided that it would be immature for me to think that I have some sense of spirituality that most people don't have. When I stopped assuming that I'm special, I didn't think I could do much better at figuring out God than most of the people that I disagree with.

God is supposed to be all-powerful. The Bible could have been a little more specific on important things. The history of Christian theology made me despair over whether I could figure out God in a meaningful way, myself. In evangelicalism, finding out God's will for one's life, listening for the Holy Spirit's direction, praying for guidance, these things are normal. Yet, if I couldn't trust God to be clear to the whole church about something important, like icon veneration, how could I trust God to speak to me about little things?

I wasn't just looking for something to cross-stitch and hang on my wall. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I was horrified by global injustice, and that people around me were satisfied with the meaning they found in living comfortable lives. What did God want me to do about war and hunger and disease? What did God want me to do about helping people know him? I had thought that God had been leading me, inspiring me, giving me understanding, but maybe that voice was just my own little idol.

Unreactionary

I had grown up Presbyterian, and my denomination placed a strong emphasis on the belief that God had power over absolutely everything. We were contrasted with, say, the Baptists, who emphasized our free will to choose to trust in God or not. The problem with the Presbyterians, the Baptists would say, is that they don't treat humans as beings who are capable of meaningful actions. The Presbyterians would criticize the Baptists for undermining the sovereignty of God. When I was discovering Orthodoxy, I wanted to learn the Orthodox stance on free will versus God's sovereignty. I found it very difficult to accept the Orthodox church's teaching on how free people are, but when I did, it didn't feel like I was rejecting belief in God's sovereignty at all. Not only that, but I didn't even understand why there was a conflict about the matter in the first place. It just seemed like the Baptists had gotten a little confused in one direction, and the Presbyterians had gotten a little confused in the other, and they went back and forth, arguing, and drifting apart.

Orthodoxy felt like the opposite of wild mood swings. I was used to either feeling smug when I did right, or guilty when I did wrong, but I was being taught in the Orthodox church to be more concerned with finding life than with judging myself one way or another. Whenever things get too busy for me and I have papers all over my desk, I gather them up in a pile. I pick the top paper off the pile and do what I need to with it: file it, note a to-do, throw it away, whatever. Then I pick up the next paper and deal with it. The feeling of sensibility that I get from doing that with paper, I felt that way, that simple single-mindedness, about Orthodox thought. Orthodoxy felt unreactionary to me.

Even before investigating Orthodoxy, I had felt despair about whether we could know right doctrine confidently. I was thinking of things like whether to baptize babies and how to get saved and what the ground rules are for church government; if God thought these things were important, why didn't he have the Bible written more clearly? I had always supposed that Christian truth was somewhere in a circle drawn around the Bible. I started asking, though, "Why would God leave only the Bible as authority if it can't be made sense of consistently?" and wondering why I hadn't asked that before.

In my discussions with Orthodox Christians, I was encouraged to ask that question. For God to be anything other than cruel, he would have to make doctrine, at least, the very important bits, clear to the church. Not only that, but it would have to be the same truth, for Christians in India and Egypt and Ireland and Bolivia now and in the Middle Ages and during the Roman Empire and through the Industrial Revolution. To me, that meant that Christianity had to look something like the Orthodox or the Catholic church, something like what the whole church looked in the first millennium, before the split.

There was a four-hundred-year-old oak tree in the back yard of my house I grew up in. When I was building forts or gathering acorns or spying, I felt safe near that tree, because it was big and old.

Armchair

I'm noticing as I'm writing this that I'm talking about my experience of Orthodoxy in a not-Orthodox sort of way. Prayer and fasting and worship weren't things that I just discovered, these were things that Christians had been practicing since the time of the apostles, and so I was connected with Christians throughout time and around the world. Before that, I had invented spiritual practices, like reading a chapter of the Bible and then writing something about it in a journal, or waking up early to study, or going for a lot of walks to pray, and these were all helpful, but I would do them for a couple of weeks or a couple of years, but intermittently. In Orthodoxy, I was doing old disciplines, I was trying things that people had already tried and refined; I also felt like I had moral support from those who had gone before me.

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One Friday afternoon in January, I went over to the home of Fr Gregory, the Orthodox priest, to have a chat. On my way there, I had gone to 7-Eleven for Pop-Tarts and coffee, I ate the Pop-Tarts on the way there, and struggled to finish the hot coffee during the 15 minute drive to Fr Gregory's house. I suppose I woke up around 11 that morning, and was to meet with Fr Gregory at around 2. Buying Pop-Tarts at Seven-11 is a bad deal; I must have forgotten to go to the grocery store for proper breakfast food. I would have gotten doughnuts or something at Seven-11, but it was a Friday, and Pop-Tarts are vegan. Then, I got worried because I was running late, and then, I felt ashamed, because who runs late to a 2 PM appointment because they overslept? I'm sure my disturbed sleep came from my psych issues, but I was blaming myself for being lazy rather than going to the doctor.

Anyway, I got to Fr Gregory's house, and I apologized for being late, I was maybe ten minutes late. Of course, he was forgiving. Most people don't mind if you're ten minutes late. There is a difference between saying, "It's not a problem" and "I forgive you" and I felt Fr Gregory warmly forgiving my tardiness. We sat in armchairs in the living room. I told him that I was interested in Orthodoxy, that I was almost certain that I was going to become Orthodox. He told me that it was good that I was so eager, but that it was important for me to not just have good reasons to become Orthodox, but to practice knowing God through the life of the church.

He also suggested that I pray the psalms, so I did. I'd gotten advice on spiritual discipline before, but I know that I took that tip—pray the psalms—differently than advice I'd gotten before: the advice came from a priest. I was used to the idea that pastors are the same as anyone else, but pastors and priests aren't just like anyone else, they've studied a lot about spirituality, they teach it, and they are noted by their communities for their diligence and perseverance and wisdom. By thinking of Fr Gregory as not just like everyone else, it helped me take his advice more seriously. Having grown up Protestant, I had been warned about priests causing harm, spiritually, leading people to compliance out of fear of their clerical authority. That's not what I felt that Friday afternoon. Fr Gregory wasn't inventing a new rule for me out of nowhere, he suggested that I pray the psalms because he knew it had helped people for thousands of years and thought it would be helpful for me.

Sanctuary

I had a roommate who had depression. Sometimes, it was so bad, he would just hit a wall. He would literally hit a wall, he was so wound up. Sometimes, he would feel washed out, as if he'd just gotten over a 24 hour stomach bug. His mom ran a gym, so she knew some things about health, I guess. She recommended that he try Red Bull, because it has a lot of vitamin B, which, she says, gets burned off by depression. My roommate let me try a Red Bull, and it made me feel better, too. I'd had problems with anxiety for a year at that point, and the vitamin B might have rounded off some of the jitters. This might sound counter-intuitive, it might not even be right, but the caffeine helped me with the anxiety because it helped me focus, to get a grip on reality.

My anxiety was worst while I was sleeping. I would wake up in the middle of the night in panic. I would look out the window, just in case something was coming. I only ever saw the tree, the parking lot, and the dumpster.

Red Bull is pretty expensive, but I found Red Thunder at Aldi for 75 cents a can, so I drank a lot of that. I would pop a Red Thunder first thing in the morning. Sometimes I'd mix it with orange juice, a Red Thunder screwdriver. The caffeine would jolt me awake. You know how, when you wake up in the morning, and you've been dreaming, you sometimes think that parts of the dream are real? The Red Thunder would help me wake up past that.

The first times that I went to Orthodox services, I was mostly confused. I started going to Vespers services regularly, and I found them therapeutic; I could feel the anxiety dripping off my elbows and down through my shoes. My favorite words in the service were in this part that was a call-and-response for intercession. The priest would sing, "For travelers, by sea, by land, and by air," and "For this city and all the people who dwell therein" and "Help us; save us; have mercy on us; and keep us, O God, by thy grace", and we would sing, "Lord have mercy".

That line, "Lord have mercy" is peppered throughout the prayers and songs. To some people, at first, it sounds like the Orthodox are perpetually afraid of a bloodthirsty God, that they need always to be asking obsequiously for a stay of execution. That's not how the "Lord have mercy"'s felt to me, though. Whenever I sang, "Lord have mercy", it wasn't with an attitude that I needed to plead God for mercy, that he would give it to me begrudgingly, but with the faith that that was exactly what he wanted to give me, and that I was praying the prayer he wanted me to pray. There is a prayer, the Jesus prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." I had a prayer rope, and I would count knots on it, one for each prayer; I was encouraged to pray the Jesus prayer a lot. In this praying for mercy I felt safe; the discipline was apt.

I started fasting, too, which wasn't too difficult for me. Fasting, for the Orthodox, means being vegan on Wednesdays and Fridays and during a few fasting seasons. I was already vegetarian, so being vegan a couple of days a week didn't seem difficult. In the protestant church, I had only ever fasted for the 30 Hour Famine, as a sort of publicity stunt for world hunger. There was one time when I had a crisis and needed divine insight, so I fasted, but I got very hungry, so I took a break and went to KFC, and then got back to fasting. Fasting was the sort of thing that was done as a last resort, or I knew some guys who fasted before they proposed to their girlfriends.

I think it's good that we have to sleep, and that we get colds sometimes. We're limited, but we're so used to being limited, that we don't notice it. Fasting dropped the ceiling on me, and it made me feel my human limitation more deeply and I felt ready to be filled by God.

Heirloom furniture

I heard many stories about protestants becoming Orthodox; a common event in these stories is a realization of the beauty of the church's expressions. Some people are overwhelmed by the smell of the incense or the ornate robes worn by the priest or the icons or the chandelier. The Orthodox have great chandeliers, and in some services, the lights on the chandelier get turned on when the divine light is mentioned in the chant. The chants sounded familiar to me; I realized that much of the services are directly drawn from scripture. I suppose some westerners are put off by how alien the Orthodox services are. The music is in different keys than we're used to. The paintings don't show perspective properly, they feel like pop-up books.

In an Orthodox service, every sense is affected. The atmosphere is benevolently strange, not strange like being alone-in-the-woods-at-night; the space feels fantastic, as in fantasy. Halfway into Divine Liturgy, one would expect talking animals to appear and join in. Maybe they would wear clothes, like Peter Rabbit in Beatrix Potter's stories. I was running a Dungeons and Dragons game at the time, and looked to Orthodox services for inspiration.

Badgers were an inside joke in my D&D group; at one point, I and a few other players made it our characters' ultimate goal to get pet badgers. I heard that the Orthodox believe that the Bible isn't the only authority, but that there is authority in tradition. I Googled for the words "saint" and "badger"; if anything came up, Orthodoxy was not to be taken seriously.

St Piran was a missionary to Cornwall in the sixth century. Upon arriving there, he started building a cell. Animals helped him, so his first converts were a fox, a bear, and a badger.

I asked about this; is it necessary to believe that St Piran evangelized a badger for one to be properly Orthodox? An Orthodox friend told me, no, the tradition can't be taken like that. Just because someone, somewhere, is telling a story doesn't mean that the whole church backs that story. There are some stories that are wrong and false, there are some stories that are fun and helpful but of dubious veracity, there are some stories that probably happened and are good to remember, and then there are the things that the whole church affirms and has always affirmed and that are essential to fellowship with God. Having grown up a biblical literalist, I found this nuanced understanding of truth to be helpful. I don't think that St Piran actually baptized and taught a badger and a fox and a bear, but I think it's a nice story that makes me smile, and it reminds me that you can tell a lot about someone's heart based on how they and animals get along.

I was then beginning to appreciate how mature Orthodoxy is in its approach to truth, and to see that maturity in other things, too. At some church fellowship meals, wine would be served—that's classy. It was understood that everyone would be reading good spiritual books. People kept in their homes hand-painted icons.

I have a particular attachment to the booklets that were given away for free in the lobby. I remember that the booklets were printed by Conciliar Press, I appreciated them so; I would pick them up and hold them and look at them. In evangelicalism, I had seen shoddy gospel tracts, like Chick tracts, that seemed to do good only to the people handing them out. These Conciliar Press booklets, though, are well-written, sensible, regarding things that inquirers into Orthodoxy would like to know about. They are excellent examples of writing that is suited to its audience, but they're also notably well-printed booklets, cleanly designed, and printed on sturdy bright white paper. I'm agnostic now, it's been three years, and I still can't throw away my Conciliar Press booklets.

Around this time, I remember sitting in my church and thinking that it wasn't as classy as an Orthodox church, but there were some good things that were in common. I looked around the sanctuary and saw a cross at the front of the room and paintings on the wall. Our cross was probably made out of a bannister, our paintings aren't on wood, our music was nice but not as mysterious as chant. I wanted to make sure that I was becoming Orthodox for important reasons, not just because I wanted to be classy. And then, looking around my church, I saw a praise banner being waved; it had four arcs: red, white, blue, and camouflage.

Inquirer

One Saturday afternoon in November I went to see a murder mystery play alone. I went because I had a friend who was acting in it, but I didn't know anyone else to go with. The seating was at tables and hot dogs and salad were for sale for maybe a dollar each. I didn't want anything. I had just become a vegetarian that summer. The play was in a middle school cafeteria or gym or something; I sat at a big round cafeteria table with some old people that I didn't know. The play let out at four or so.

I figured that I might as well drive by the Holy Cross Antiochian Orthodox Church; the priest and his wife had talked on campus at UMBC a week or two before. I wandered in, and found some people up near the front of the temple, puzzling over a chalice. It turned out that there was a special class on Saturdays for inquirers. Fr Gregory was giving a tour of the building and explaining the significance of different parts of the art and architecture. It was fine that I had moseyed in. There was some time between that class and Vespers, and I talked with Peter, a middle-aged man with a beard who wore a cap and glasses. Peter had been a protestant, a Presbyterian (PCA, the same denomination I'd grown up in), and he had become Orthodox some time before. He told me a little more about Orthodoxy. He mentioned that back in the 80's 2,000 evangelicals had converted to Orthodoxy, all-at-once, under the leadership of some people from Campus Crusade for Christ.

I had just planned on showing up for Vespers, and was glad that I'd accidentally showed up early. Before the service, I asked if there was anything I needed to know. Peter told me that, no matter what, I wouldn't be able to keep up, but that's expected so I should enjoy myself. There were books with the words from the chants, but I was told that it's better to listen at the first few services one goes to and just absorb. The only tips that I got were how to make the sign of the cross and that most people stand for the whole service. There aren't even chairs, except for a few on each side, for the people who can't stand for an hour or two. The temple had a lot of thick oriental rugs with good cushioning.

There was a lot of chanting, and some of it sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. The walls were covered with icons, but I couldn't see them very well, because the lights were out. The deacon came out with a metal shakey thing and shook it around; it made clangy bell sounds and smoke came out. We all bowed and he shook the incense shaker at us. Fr Gregory was in a robe, doing something at the front of the room, but I couldn't quite tell what he was doing, because he was behind a wall. The wall had a doorway with a low gate in the middle, so whenever he was near the doorway, I could see him, but he was mumbling things I couldn't hear. The gate reminded me of the door to a cowboy saloon. I figured out why the chanting sounded familiar; the psalms were being chanted. I hadn't read the psalms, just a few of them, but I suppose that a church kid like me would have heard a lot of bits growing up.

All of a sudden, everyone made the sign of the cross and bent over, touching the floor. I was the only one standing for a moment and I felt embarrassed. I tried to mimic everyone; they bent down again, and once more. I felt the same way that I do when I'm doing the electric slide at weddings; I know the general direction to go in, but I'm always a couple of steps behind.

After the service, Peter invited me out to coffee so we could talk some more, but it turned out that there was free food in the church basement; the kids were watching Veggie Tales. I had grown up watching Veggie Tales; they seemed so un-Orthodox. I had thought the kids would watch special Orthodox kids' videos about thirteenth century Russians or icons or something. So we ate supper, spaghetti and peas (it was Advent). Someone there invited some of us to her house to hang out and talk; she lived just a couple of blocks from the church so we walked.

I felt like I was getting some special attention. There were half-a-dozen of us at Catherine's, and not all were properly Orthodox, but I was the least Orthodox there, so I had a lot of questions. Peter told me his story. He and his wife had been having problems, back when he was Presbyterian, so they went to the elders for advice. The elders gave them a Bible study to do on the first chapters of Genesis to learn about gender roles. Peter and his wife wound up divorcing. Peter told me that, in retrospect, it should have been clear that a worksheet on how to analyze a couple of chapters of the Bible wasn't going to save his marriage; their problems had gone far past that point.

Some time later, Peter wandered into a Divine Liturgy. Peter said that he's not the sort of guy to cry easily, but he burst into tears, right in the middle of the service, because the Divine Liturgy was so beautiful, it felt like what church should be like.

I was trying to figure out what the Orthodox believed, or, rather, how they went about believing. I had gotten tired of denominationalism and trying to figure out what was real doctrine and what was a reaction against a reaction against someone chopping up a pipe organ with a hatchet in the fifteen hundreds. Some people say that the Bible can be made to say everything, and I didn't think that, but I was still concerned by how far the Bible could be stretched. Sola scriptura, scripture alone, seemed like a good idea, it would be nice if God had given us a book with all the answers that we could generally make sense of, but the number of points of view, the dozens of denominations, was proof to me that the Bible wasn't quite clear enough.

Peter told me about the Commonitory of St Vincent of Lerins. The Orthodox interpret scripture using tradition, and St Vincent had a good way of putting how they do that; they believe that "which has been believed everywhere, always, by all." I had grown up Presbyterian, and we placed a strong emphasis on our heritage in the Reformation; that by studying the Bible, people like Martin Luther and John Calvin were able to return the church to right practice. The whole idea was to not believe what everyone had always believed, but to believe what the Bible said. I decided to read more about this later.

Catherine's living room was full of books; some were in cardboard boxes, I forget if she was moving, or if she just had so many books. She made tea for us. I drink a few cups of tea every day. I liked talking with smart people who read a lot and cared enough about believing and doing the right thing to start going to a church where the traditions were strange and different, where it was easy to be embarrassed just by being new and not knowing any better, going through that change for the sake of finding truth. I drank a cup of lemon ginger tea with them.

One holy catholic and apostolic

The day after I saw Stranger than Fiction, the priest of a local Orthodox church and his wife came to UMBC to tell us about Orthodoxy.

Father Gregory talked about the Nicene Creed, or, really, one phrase in it, we believe in "one holy catholic and apostolic church."

My eighth grade Sunday school teacher, Miss Cathy, taught us about how in church, it's important not to say something you don't actually believe. The example that she gave was that she used to omit the word "catholic" when she would recite the Nicene creed. She then talked to a pastor or elder or wise person, one day, when it bothered her enough, and found out that it means "catholic" as in universal, not as in "Roman Catholic". I wonder if Miss Cathy ever would have found out what the word, catholic, means in the Nicene creed if she'd not held her breath when everyone else in church said it.

I think it was from Miss Cathy that I learned what the word catholic means; that no matter what we call ourselves, no matter how much we botch theology and mangle worship and abuse the pulpit, no matter how much we ignore and separate ourselves from the Christians we disagree with, all of us who are saved by Jesus are the church. Some Roman Catholics might be Christians, but probably not the ones who think that they're saved by works.

Father Gregory wrote a list of five cities on the markerboard in that meeting room: Rome, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. He talked about how, for the first millennium of Christianity, the leaders in the churches in these five cities represented all of Christendom, how every Christian in the world was connected especially to one of these five cities. Except for Constantinople, these been centers of Christianity since the apostles, with Peter and Paul leading the church in Rome, James growing the church in Jerusalem, and so on.

I forget the structure of what he said, but hearing him made me feel like I should find the wholeness and the oneness of the church in its roots. I had been bothered a lot, around then, by denominationalism, and it seemed to me that the Orthodox way of thinking about things would help me make sense of confusing doctrinal controversies.

Father Gregory's wife, Frederica then got to talk. In the Orthodox church, the wife of the priest often gets a special title, typically meaning either "priestess" or "mother". I had grown up in churches where women weren't allowed to be pastors or elders, but the only jobs that seemed like they were made especially for women were cooking at potlucks and changing diapers and teaching Sunday school for kids. Adult Sunday school classes had to be taught by men if they had male members. I'm impressed by how the Orthodox church has developed special, strong roles for women who are good teachers and leaders.

Frederica told us that she had been thinking about how to best express Orthodoxy in the fifteen or twenty minutes that she had to talk with us. She had decided to talk about the idea that the church is a hospital. This idea grabbed me. I had been suffering from problems with anxiety for the past year, I was overwhelmed and unfocused and had had an existential crisis and became a vegetarian and I was still anxious. I wanted to lie in a bed with white sheets and recuperate. Healing is a strong theme in Orthodox theology; I suppose there is a greater emphasis on the idea that Christ heals us from being soul-sick, from sin, than on the idea that Christ paid for our sin by dying on the cross in our place.

One day, as I was walking to the library on campus, a man came up behind me and invited me to study the Bible with him; he introduced himself as Peter. At the time, I was leading a Bible study, and was in other Bible studies as well, I didn't need one more Bible study, and, even if I did, I would know where to look. Peter was insistent that there was something special about his Bible study, and that I would be missing out on something important if I didn't join him. I didn't believe him, because so many Bible study leaders had made a hard sell like that to me, claiming that they had some special method.

Frederica talked about how patients in a hospital can tell people outside the hospital about how they're getting better, but that it's not like they have anything to brag about. This was an important idea to me, as I was coming to understand that the Orthodox church was something that I wasn't in but maybe should be. I shouldn't be obsessed with figuring out the absolute truth about God for myself, but I should look for where I could be made whole, in myself and with the church.

Church Tradition Story 1: Dismissal of the Catechumens

There is a part in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy called the Dismissal of the Catechumens, in which the priest chants, "All ye catechumens, depart! Depart, ye catechumens! All ye that are catechumens, depart! Let no catechumens remain!" and this used to be important, because it would have been terrible for an outsider to see and misunderstand the meaning of the eucharist, when the early church was undergoing persecution. Now, the words remain, but it's understood that no one is expected to actually leave--it's just a tradition. However, some Orthodox churches today have problems with visitors leaving halfway through the service, not knowing that the Dismissal of the Catechumens is vestigial.

As Orthodox churches assimilate into American culture, the services shift from using the congregation's heart language to the English language, with some parts in one language, and some in the other. I've heard of a Romanian Orthodox church in DC that has its services entirely in English, except the Dismissal of the Catechumens is in Romanian, so no one leaves by mistake.

A story about a monk and Satan

This is a story I read in a book of quirky Orthodox stories.

One time, Satan disguised himself as a beautiful angel, and went to visit a monk, to tempt him. He came to visit this monk during his evening prayers, who looked up at the apparition, and said, "Oh, you must have made a mistake. I'm not holy enough to be visited by an angel. Perhaps you should try the next cell over." And Satan's plan was thwarted.