No Other Foundation

Recently I read a copy of the alumni magazine from a mainline Protestant seminary. It was very well done and showcased a number of people, both faculty and students, all fervent in their faith and zealous to serve the Lord. It presented the seminary, as it intended to do, as a place of thriving faith, burgeoning mission, and robust spiritual health, which I’m sure it is. Reading it you would never know that the seminary was part of a denomination (which I will not identify) that is on its deathbed.

In a post-Liturgy Q & A held by a wonderful and learned priest, Fr. Justin Hewlett, someone present (a Baptist, if memory serves) asked a question about the Eucharist. He had been reading some anti-Catholic literature which had denounced the supposedly Catholic teaching that Christ was re-sacrificed at every Mass and he wondered, since the Orthodox use the same kind of sacrificial language about the Eucharist that the Catholics do, if we also believe that Christ is re-sacrificed at every Divine Liturgy. He pointed out that Bible texts like Hebrews 9:25-28 make the notion of Christ being re-sacrificed every week untenable.

With the expected influx of ordinations to the priesthood hoping to keep up with the recent surge of new converts coming into Orthodox parishes, many new priests will be stepping into pulpits (metaphorical or otherwise) to preach. Given the importance of preaching in the life of a parish (St. John Chrysostom knows what I mean), I am surprised at how comparatively little importance it is given in some places. When I was in seminary back in the Jurassic period we had many, many classes on the Old and New Testament each year, many offerings of Church History, many classes in Theology, but only one class on Homiletics. One asks: what’s the point of learning all that other stuff if you can’t effectively share it?

The term “the donation of Constantine” refers to a medieval forgery, long used to support the claims and authority of the medieval papacy. According to the document, the emperor Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, transferred as a gift the city of Rome and the western part of the Roman empire to the bishop of Rome. The story goes like this.

Lately, through the kindness of a friend, I watched recently an old 1961 British film starring a very young Hayley Mills entitled Whistle Down the Wind, dating from before her Disney days. I saw it as a young child when it was first released in movie theatres and re-watching it as an old man I found it had lost none of its magic.

One doesn’t think of stars immersed in Hollywood or British theatre and who attend All The Best Parties sitting in an arena and listening to an address by Billy Graham, but so it was.

In my experience it’s a safe bet that most Protestants are not enthused about the veneration of relics— i.e. bits of a saint’s bone or bits of things they once used, such as pieces of their clothing (these are called “secondary relics”). That would apply even to Protestant “saints”: if I came to a Lutheran carrying a fragment of Martin Luther’s shinbone in a fancy reliquary box and asked him if he would like to venerate it, he would probably take a pass and reply, “Thanks anyway.” If I came to a Calvinist with a similar fragment of Calvin’s shinbone in a reliquary and made the same offer, he would probably knock the box from my hand with a stern Genevan rebuke.

It was during the 1988 All-American Council of the OCA that I overheard Fr. Daniel Donlick (then Dean of St. Tikhon’s Seminary) comment to a group of worker priests (i.e. clergy who supported themselves and their families by working at secular jobs while serving parishes) “We must bow low before you worker priests for your dedication and the work that you do.” It was the kind and generous acknowledgment of a great and humble man. In like spirit, I would also like to bow low before Fr. John Scratch (inset above) at the twentieth anniversary of his repose on January 15 for his dedication and the work that he did— him and others like him in his generation.

During the exchange of the Peace in the Orthodox Divine Liturgy it had been my custom to greet those around me by saying, “Christ is in our midst!”, expecting the reply (and giving as the reply when the greeting was given to me) “He is and ever shall be!” I was therefore quite surprised when the (now late) Fr. Michael Oleksa commented to me, “Actually, that’s not the correct reply: we should reply by saying, ‘He is and shall be”. I immediately looked it up in the service book and found (unsurprisingly, given Fr. Michael’s learning) that he was correct. But what’s the difference? And does it really matter? Isn’t it saying the same thing?

At the ordination of a priest or deacon the following ritual is observed: some of the serving clergy take the candidate to be ordained into the nave (in the case of a diaconal candidate, two subdeacons; in the case of the priestly candidate, two deacons), assist him in making a prostration toward the assembled congregation and they then say “Command!” They then raise up the candidate, turn him around so that he is facing the altar, have him make another prostration and again say “Command!” Having raised him up again, they take him through the Royal Doors into the altar. The candidate is then received by another clergyman (a deacon if the candidate is to be ordained deacon; a priest if the candidate is to be ordained priest) and then brought to the bishop who is seated by the altar table. He is then helped to make a prostration to the bishop as the assisting clergy say, “Command, right reverend Master!” No response is given to these words; the requests for a command are met with silence.

On October 31 parts of the western world celebrated Reformation Day, giving thanks for the Protestant Reformation. (I am tempted to observe that on the old Julian calendar, Reformation Day was on Thursday November 13.) Here I would like to look back and make a few observations about the accomplishments of the Reformation. For the Reformation resulted in a number of things we now too easily take for granted.

Tucked well away in the Divine Liturgy in a prayer that the priest says silently for himself we find a significant title of Christ. The priest offers the prayer as the people sing the cherubic hymn but because it is not a prayer of the Church but a private prayer of the priest there is no reason for the people to hear it and seal it with their “Amen”. Nonetheless, I sometimes feel that it is a shame the people cannot overhear it, for it is very beautiful.

As a baby boomer child of the 1950s, I was taught to hate war. For my generation, war was an unmitigated evil (though, happily, this notion did not spill over into hating or disrespecting our soldiers—later described as “peace-keepers”). Our generation’s hatred of war was well expressed in the 1969 heart-felt anti-war song popularized by Edwin Starr, some of the lyrics of which were, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!...War I despise, ‘cause it means destruction of innocent lives…It ain’t nothing but a heart-breaker, friend only to the under-taker!”

When I was young, I read a famous poem that I now regard as one of the strangest poems ever written. It is the one entitled “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas with its repeated refrain “do not go gentle into that good night…rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

When I was a child in grade five, I was given a New Testament by the Gideon Society, like everyone else in my grade. Note: the New Testament, not the entire Bible. I suspect that the decision to confine the gift to the New Testament Scriptures was dictated more by economics than by theology—after all, there were a lot of kids in the schools in those days and giving an entire Bible to each one of them would have cost a lot. Nonetheless the decision tended to give the impression that it was only the New Testament that mattered and that the Old Testament didn’t count for much for Christians.

I am often asked by catechumens questions of basic liturgical etiquette, such as how to enter the church, how to venerate an icon, and when to make the sign of the cross. I am always happy to explain and (if in church) to demonstrate, since these are things that Orthodox people should know and do instinctively. They are part of forming an Orthodox mind and approach to life and worship. But there is a danger in answering such questions without first placing them in a wider context, because answering them without context might give the erroneous impression that Orthodoxy is all about rules.

There are, I suggest, two ways to experience the world. The first is that of the materialist: the world is all that exists. The physical world that we see and experience has no real or intrinsic meaning; it just is. We can, if we like, endow it with meaning from our own heads, but such meaning would be entirely subjective. Religion or philosophy, they say, might imagine that meaning can be discerned in world, but this is an illusion.