Tradition: A Personal Mode of Seeing

One of the more interesting insights offered by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon in his book Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, is his argument that tradition exists "enhypostatically." As near as I can tell what he means by this is that tradition—any tradition—does not exist in an abstract or pure sense, but only insofar as it is embodied in the life of concrete persons and communities.

While Zizioulas discusses the enhypostatic expression in terms of asceticism and liturgy, I want to reflect here, somewhat overly briefly I admit, on how tradition—and specifically the Christian Tradition—shapes how we see ourselves and the world of persons, events and things that constitute our lives.

Last Sunday (11/23) I sat with the catechumens in the parish I serve. We are reading together Clark Carlton's book The Way: What Every Protestant Should Know About the Orthodox Church. Carlton mentions that the NIV translates 2 Thessalonians 2.15 ("So then, brothers, stand firm and hold to the teachings [traditions in the KJV] we passed on to you, whether by word of mouth or by letter.") in a way that does violence to the text, but which supports the Evangelical dismissal of tradition in the life of the Church.

This isn't necessarily to fault the translators of the NIV, after all we never read Scripture in a vacuum, but always in light of certain (often unexamined) presuppositions. In a word, our reading of Scripture is always based on tradition, always.

As the discussion continued, we began wrestle with the place of the Tradition of the Orthodox Church in our own lives. For many, and especially many converts, Holy Tradition is a goal to be fulfilled. But over the course of 2,000 years, the tradition has been embodied in many ways by myriad people and communities in a variety of historical and social settings. This means that the Tradition of the Church is not only, old but deep and (within limits at least) varied.

No one can hope to do everything that was ever done and so, if I'm not careful, I will pick and choose the part of Church history that I prefer and confuse that with the whole of the tradition. One of the examples I used with the catechumens was monastic hairstyles. The "modern" practice is for monks to have long hair and untrimmed beards. But if we look at icons of early bishops—I used St John Chrysostom—we see that an earlier practice was for monks in the East to cut their hair in much the same way that one sees in traditional Western monastic life. Look sometime at the icon of Chrysostom and then look at picture of Frair Tuck. The hair styles are more than a little similar.

So if we are not to imitate the past, what value do we find in Holy Tradition?

Guided and guarded by the Church's dogmatic and moral teaching, our life of prayer (personal and liturgical) and asceticism (especially fasting and care for the poor), we become ever more sensitive to what is Good, True, Beautiful and Justice. We see these first in the Scriptures and the lives of the saints, especially as they are communicated to us in the Church's liturgical life. And then, building on this foundation, we become ever more aware of the presence of the Good, the True, the Beautiful and the Just in ourselves and in the world of persons, events and things that constitute our everyday life.

This discovery that these are not simply abstract notions but embodied realities is not the end of the adventure. As I come to recognize for example the Good, the force of that recognition confronts me with the presence of wickedness, falsehood, ugliness and injustice first of all in my own heart and then in the world around me. As I never tire of reminding my own spiritual children, I do not learn from my mistakes, I learn what is true and then come to see I am mistaken.

Goodness, Truthfulness, Beauty and Justice, as with the Tradition that sensitize us to them, are not abstract philosophical constructs or historical curiosities. They are rather embodied realities. If because of Adam's sin these they are only more or less embodied in me, if my life is still disordered, or if Beauty (for example) is marred, this in no way detracts from the reality that it is the Church, the Body of Christ, that most fully (though not exhaustively) embodies these in human history.

Where we have gone wrong, I think, is we have rarified Holy Tradition. We have made it a thing, an objective standard to be imitated. In doing so we have lost sight of Holy Tradition as, to borrow from Vladimir Lossky, the Presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church as it leads and guides the faithful throughout history.

And it is this same Spirit which inspired not only the writers of Sacred Scriptures, but those who preached the Word. It is this same Spirit Who inspires the Church at prayer in the Liturgy and in the secret places of the human heart. And it is this same Spirit Who sustains and guides the saints who have struggled to remain faithful to the Word.

When we see Holy Tradition as something external to the person, to the traces of grace in the human and community, we miss all this and the Christian life, the life of the Church, becomes (to borrow from Christos Yannaras) yet one more source of division in the human heart and family, albeit now a religious division.

A blessed and Happy Thanksgiving to my American readers.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Thoughts on the New Metropolitan

My respect and affection for Metropolitan Jonah are both deep and sincere (we served together in northern CA for about 7 years--he was a frequent visitor to my home when I was in Redding and I a frequent visitor to St John's Monastery).

That said, I think that--whatever his many gifts, Metropolitan Jonah can't make things right in the OCA on his own. As I said at the beginning of the OCA mess, we are wrong to think the problems facing the Church are just the result of a few bad apples. Likewise, the road to spiritual, pastoral and financial health is one that requires we all take responsibility for the life of the Church and commit ourselves personally to Christ and the Gospel.

We run into problems when we forget that our calling, our vocation given to us in baptism, is to proclaim Christ and Him crucified--we are all of us apostles and evangelists of the Good News and not of Orthodoxy as such. The tradition of the Orthodox Church--Liturgy, theology, icons, and asceticism--is not an end in itself--rather it is the context out of which we proclaim the Gospel.

I think of late we have heard too much about Orthodoxy and too little of Christ and the Gospel. Kerygma and Dogma are not opposed, as St Basil the Great reminds us--but neither are they the same thing. For all the converts we've received and new churches and monasteries that we've built, our focus has been too inward--too much of dogma--and too little outward--preaching the kerygma:

"Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation" (Mk. 16:15).

"God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation to save those who believe" (1 Cor. 1:21).

"We proclaim Christ crucified" (1 Cor. 1:23).

"For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord" (2 Cor. 4:5).

We will undermine our own hope in His Beatitude, and worse we will betray Christ, if we fall back into our old habits of being focused on ourselves and our own needs. We should by all means root ourselves ever more firmly in the Tradition of the Church but only so we can move with boldness and proclaim the Gospel. Again, we have spent too much time preaching Orthodoxy and too little Christ and Him crucified.

We ought not to make the mistake of preaching Jonah and not Jesus.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

The Parish is for the Family

Recent comments in response to the post on the use of authority, and especially in response to the upcoming "Called & Gifted" Workshop my parish is hosting has got me thinking. It seems to me that the theme that underlies our discussion here (and really more generally in the Church) is a question: What is the purpose of the parish as that institution has come to exist in the Church?

The parish is about, I would suggest, fostering and sustaining marriage and family life.

Granted not every Orthodox Christian is, or will be, married. And not every married couple will be blessed with children. But it seems to me that we could do more to encourage healthy marriages and families. To take only one example, I find it worrisome that, unless there are canonical grounds, almost any couple who wants to be married in the Church is married. Among us, pre-marital preparation is often hit or miss at best. Granted not all priests have the time or talent to prepare couples for marriage, but this doesn't absolve us from providing more adequate preparation. Given the divorce rate in America, I find it hard to believe that everyone who wants to be married in the Church is called by Christ to be married or that all those who are called are fit for marriage.

What also got me thinking along these lines is a post on one of the blogs I follow, Pseudo-Polymath. The author of the blog quotes an essay by Wendell Barry in his "book (and eponymous essay) Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays Wendell Barry," in which Barry makes "impassioned" argument for "the importance of community." To illustrate the importance of community, and the harm down by its absence, "Barry notes the inability of public discourse to deal with sex and other issues is due to the failure of community":

Once it [a society or culture] has shrugged off the interests and claims of the community, the public language of sexuality comes directly under the influence of private lust, ambition, and greed and becomes inadequate to deal with the real issues and problems of sexuality. The public dialogue degenerates into a stupefying and useless contest between so-called liberation and so-called morality. The real issues and problems, as they are experienced and suffered in people's lives, cannot be talked about. The public language can deal, however awkwardly and perhaps uselessly, with pornography, sexual harassment, rape, and so on. But it cannot talk about respect, responsibility, sexual discipline, fidelity, or the practice of love. "Sexual education" carried on in this public language, is and can only be, a dispirited description of the working of a sort of anatomical machinery — and this is a sexuality that is neither erotic nor social nor sacramental but rather a cold-blooded, abstract procedure which is finally not even imaginable.

[…]

The public discussion of sexual issues has thus degenerated into a poor attempt to equivocate between private lusts and public emergencies. Nowhere in public life (that is, in the public life that counts: the discussions of political and corporate leaders) is there an attempt to respond to community needs in the language of community interest.

While are Catholic brothers and sisters (and especially the late Pope John Paul II) are often accused of being obsessed with matter of sexual morality and intruding into the bedrooms of married people and consenting adults, such criticism reflect precisely the rhetorical lack that Berry highlights. Much like the larger society, Orthodox Christians have retreated from a public discourse about sexuality. If Berry is right in his analysis, this retreat points to an underlying deficiency in our own community life. Or, more on point, a lack of community in our parishes. More often than not, and again as with the larger society, we have privatized conversations about sexuality even while we formally affirm the sacramental nature of marriage and family life.

But the rhetoric of Christian community, whether biblical or patristic, parochial or monastic, liturgical or administrative, is by and large rhetoric about the family and so necessarily assumes a certain, public, sexual ethic that most be taught, and defended, publically. We are, for example, brothers and sisters in Christ, with a common Father in Heaven. The parish and the monastery are under the presidency of a father (or in the case of women's monastery, mother). The clergy are all called father whether he is a patriarch, a bishop, a priest or deacon.

But for this rhetoric to be effective, it must be more than simply formal—it is not enough to use the rhetoric of the family, we must actually be a family and here's where our practice fall short of our ideals.

Reading through the various responses to the use of authority in the Church, it seems to me that there is a fair amount of distrust in the Church for those in positions of authority. My own view (admitted idiosyncratic and unsubstantiated by rigorous research in either the social sciences or the Church fathers), is that the response to this distrust is not administrative reform (though that is no doubt needed) but an explicit commitment in our parishes to the good of the family.

I do not think that we can foster trust among us apart from repentance. The character of that repentance, I would argue, is a shared commitment to supporting and defending marriage and family life according to the tradition of the Church. As I alluded to above, marriage and family life are not the only concern of the parish. As a practical matter though, I think we can begin to renew our communities by focusing, among other things, on the needs of the married couples and families in our parishes.

The question become now this, how can our parishes foster marriage and family life even as our monasteries foster a commitment to a life of public prayer and private repentance?

Your thoughts are actively sought.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

The Benefits of a Familial/Cultural Basis of Faith

As I argued in an earlier post, we need to exercise caution in our interpretation and application of the statistical findings of the Pew Charitable Trust, The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. What the findings suggest to me is that for many, and indeed most, the locus of one's identity as an Orthodox Christian is found more in family and culture than in one's participation in the liturgical life of the Church. This is not, I hesitant to add, to invalidate, much less reject, a familial/cultural rather than a liturgical basis and expression of the faith. To do so is not only to go beyond the empirical evidence, it also I think fails to appreciate the unique strengths of a familial/cultural basis and expression of the faith. It also fails to recognize the weaknesses inherent in a more liturgically based and expressed faith. Finally, it causes us to overlook the paradox that often what we assume is a liturgical faith is markedly individualistic in nature contrary to what those who stress the primacy of liturgy would have us believe, and what in fact they believe about their own praxis. In this post, however, I will focus primarily on the strengths and weakness of a familial/cultural basis and expression of faith.

Reflecting on his own initial experience of the uniquely American approach to Christianity that the PCT suggests is now very much the approach of American Orthodox Christians, Berger writes "I encountered this world of the mainline almost immediately upon coming to America not long after World War II. I was young, very poor, European and Lutheran, and wartime desperations had shaped my social and religious sensibilities. America constituted an immense liberation from all this, a deeply satisfying experience of normality. The Protestant world I met fully represented the same normality. It was thoroughly identified with American culture, sensible, tolerant, far removed from the Kierkegaardian extremism that had up to then defined Christianity for me." But for all his relief, nevertheless, he concludes, "It is hardly surprising that I had difficulties coming to terms with it."

For Americans—and this includes Orthodox Christians—their religious life is characterized by pragmaticism and tolerance on the one hand, and a suspicion of extremisms of any sort. So we see in the survey that as with the majority of Americans (68%) the majority of Orthodox Christians (68%) would say that there is MORE than one true way to interpret the teachings of the Orthodox faith. Likewise, and again like most Americans (70%), the majority of Orthodox Christians (72%) believe that many religions, and not just the Orthodox faith, can lead to eternal life. For all that Orthodox Christian argue among ourselves about the Americanization of the Church, statistically it would seem that this has already happened. In our beliefs and practices, Orthodox Christians are as American as any other religious group.

Adaption to American culture has not only been in the general adoption of tolerance for other religions. Educationally and economically, Orthodoxy has also done quite well in America. For example, the Orthodox Church is a young church in terms of the age of faithful. The majority of the Church (54%) is under 50 (17% are between 18-29 years old, 38% are between 30-49, 27% are between 50-64 and 17% are over 65 years old). Educational, most of the Orthodox Church have gone to college (Some college: 28%; College graduate: 18%; Post-graduate: 18%). In fact on average. Orthodox Christians graduate college and go on to post-graduate education in greater numbers than most of those surveyed (Some college: 23%; College graduate: 16%; Post-graduate: 11% ). Unsurprisingly given our relative educational accomplishments, we do as well, if not better economically than most of those surveyed:

Income Distribution
	Orthodox Christian	National Average
Less than $30,000	20%	31%
$30,000-$49,999	24%	22%
$50,000-$74,999	16%	17%
$75,000-$99,000	13%	13%
100,000+	28%	18%

By a number of measures, the Orthodox Church has successfully adapted to the American context. In large part, I would suggest, that success reflects the familial/cultural basis and expression of the faith. That said it is important to remember that successful adaption is always only relative. Adaption is never absolute and so Orthodox success in an American context means that—as with mainline Protestants—this success carries with it risks as well as rewards.

Again Berger: "America, despite its many faults, has been a remarkable moral experiment in human history; but America is not and never can be the kingdom of God. In other words, the key issue here is the transcendence of Christian faith: the kingdom of God is not of this world, and any attempt to make it so undermines the very foundation of the gospel." He continues:

What has changed is not the symbiotic church-society relationship of mainline Protestantism; rather, what has changed is the character of the society, more specifically of the middle-class society and culture that is the natural habitat of the Protestant churches. This change is, more or less accurately, formulated by the so-called New Class hypothesis. In America (and, incidentally, in all other advanced capitalist societies) the middle class has split. Whereas previously there was one (though internally stratified) middle class, there now are two middle classes (also internally stratified). There is the old middle class, the traditional bourgeoisie, centered in the business community and the old professions. But there is also a new middle class, based on the production and distribution of symbolic knowledge, whose members are the increasingly large number of people occupied with education, the media of mass communication; therapy in all its forms, the advocacy and administration of well-being, social justice and personal lifestyles. Many of these people are on the public payroll, employed in all the bureaucracies of the modern welfare, redistributive and regulatory state; many others, while working in private-sector institutions, are heavily dependent on state subsidies. This new middle class, inevitably, has strong, vested interests; equally inevitably, it has developed its own subculture. In. other words, as is the case with every rising class (Marx has taught this well), what is at work here is a combination of class interest and class culture.

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Mark Twain in "Chapters from My Autobiography," popularized the saying that serves as the title for this post: "Figures often beguile me particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" Twain's comments come to my mind as I thought about the recent report on religious observance in America published by the Pew Charitable Trust, The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey.

Let me first say that I think that statistical studies can be of great value in helping researchers see patterns in human behavior, for example, that are not immediately apparent. As with ever tool, however, statistical research can only do what it can do. One of the limitations of something like the recent Pew Charitable Trust survey (PCTS) is that while it allows us to compare different religious groups in some areas (specifically behavioral), it does a rather spotty job in helping us understand the thinking that may, or may not, underlie and motivate that behavior.

So, for example, according to the PCTS roughly one third (34%) of Orthodox Christians report attend church on an at least weekly basis. Looking at the survey this is less than the national average of all religions (39%) and indeed less than Evangelical Christians (58%), members of historic black churches (59%), Catholics (42%), Jehovah Witnesses (82%) and Mormons (75%). At least in terms of weekly church attendance Orthodox Christians are on a par with mainline Protestants (also 34%). The only people less active on a weekly basis in their religious tradition are "Other Christians" (27%), Jews (16%), Buddhist (17%), Hindus (24%), Other Faiths (14%) and the religious unaffiliated (5%).

To understand what these statistics mean for the pastoral life of the Orthodox Church we would need to know whether or not Orthodox weekly participation in services has increased or decreased over long term. Given the similarity between Orthodox Christian and Mainline Protestant attendance, I would suspect that our attendance rates have in fact gone done as they have for most Mainline Protestant communities.

Even with historical information we would next have to ask why Orthodox Christians participate at the levels that they do.

The survey question that sought to determine the importance of religion in a person's life tells us that 87% of Orthodox Christians surveyed report that religion (and here I am assuming this means the Orthodox faith) is very important (56%) or somewhat important (31%) in their lives. There first thing that should be apparent is the huge gap between the percentage of Orthodox Christians who say that their faith is important to them (87%) and the number of Orthodox Christians who attend Liturgy on at least a weekly basis (34%). Whatever else their faith might mean to them, it does not necessarily embrace the regular participation in the liturgical life of the Church.

Based on my own pastoral experience (which until fairly recently was primarily within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America) I would be hesitant to conclude that for most, or even many, Orthodox Christians religion is a private or individual matter. Rather I would wonder if the locus of religious life rather than being the Church's liturgical worship is not rather the nuclear and extended families and culture. In such a social context, a context I hasten to add the PCTS does not explore, religious commitment is less a matter of What I Do and more Who We Are. My own pastoral experience seems to bear this out. Based on my admittedly more limited experience with non-Greek Orthodox Christians as well as my conversations with Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic clergy and faithful, what I would term a familial/cultural orientation is more common in Eastern Christianity than among most Evangelical Christians.

The work of sociologist Peter Berger offers us some insight here to what this data might mean for the pastoral life of the Orthodox Church. Berger argues that society—be it a religious society such as the Church, or a secular society, such as US culture, is both an objective and a subjective reality. Together with Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner The Homeless Mind, Berger is interested in the explication of "the relationships between certain institutional processes . . . and certain constellations of consciousness" (p. 97). To accomplish this task they introduce two constructs, package and carrier. A "package" is a specific mode of consciousness. For example, "it is probably safe to assume that people working on complicated machinery in a factory should not go into trances." Consequently, training people to work in a factory demands that one cultivate in them "an anti-trance attitude [while] on the job." To do this, one must structure the work situation so that not going into a trance is both possible and desirable. For this to happen one needs a very specific "carrier," of consciousness; carriers lend credibility to various "packages" of consciousness. "Put differently, any kind of consciousness is plausible only in particular social circumstances." (pp. 16, 17)

Looked at in terms of packages and carriers, I would suggest that, at least in America, many Orthodox Christians are more similar to mainline Protestants than Evangelical Christians in their approach to religion. It is not liturgy, and the participation in liturgy, that lends credibility to one's identity or self-awareness as an Orthodox Christian. Rather, for many, indeed most, it is family and culture that lends credibility to one's identity as an Orthodox Christian.

In my next few posts I want to draw out more fully the implications of family and culture rather than liturgy as the carrier of a person's self-image as an Orthodox Christian.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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