Orthodox Reflections

Growing up Evangelical, Easter never seemed to live up to the hype. On Easter, we would show up at the usual time for church. Many ladies would have new outfits. A lot of the kids too. Hats seemed to be a big deal. There would be more flowers than usual. The Praise and Worship Band would usually kick us off with something “Resurrection” related such as:

Alive, alive, alive forevermore!
My Jesus is alive, alive forevermore!
Alive, alive, alive forevermore!
My Jesus is alive.
Sing hallelujah! Sing hallelujah!
My Jesus is alive forevermore!
Sing hallelujah! Sing hallelujah!
My Jesus is alive!

Besides the sing-alongs we did on repeat, there were always a lot of “special songs” performed by various church members. None of them was actually anything special. We sang all of them at Revival meetings throughout the year, not just on Easter. Sometimes we’d have a Passion Play telling the story of the crucifixion. That depended on the feelings of the “Minster of Music” at the time. Some liked putting on plays, some didn’t. One year we had a 45 minute video of Bible scholars talking about the Resurrection and its impact. Another time, the pastor used a cross as a prop to explain how Jesus died of asphyxiation. His performance included him simulating the sounds of strangling to death through his microphone. Many of the ladies were bawling by the end. So were most of the terrified kids.

One year we tried a kind of modified Passover meal. On a Sunday morning. In the pews. With Jewish prayer shawls. Half the sermon was about supporting Israel. I actually sat there wondering if I should convert to Judaism, because it sure seemed like God cared more about them than He did us. Also, maybe the sermons were better?

Of course, regardless of how we celebrated Easter in the service, we always hunted eggs and gorged on candy afterwards. That was appealing when I was really young, but kids knocking each other down over boiled, multi-colored eggs didn’t seem particularly “Christian” to me when I got older. Being Evangelicals, some crotchety members of the congregation would inevitably complain, quite loudly, that we shouldn’t be celebrating Easter at all because it was a “pagan” tradition.

That always put a festive spin on the occasion.  Especially when you were stuck eating dinner later with relatives who had that opinion. Pagan fertility goddess or not, they insisted on showing up every year for our ham and turkey.

Fun times.

When I could drive, I visited a few “Easter celebrations” at friends’ churches. Some of them did candle light services on Saturday night with communion. It was the same grape juice and stale bread you would serve yourself on any “communion” Sunday. The songs, sermons, and altar calls were also pretty much the same as any other church service. Only, this was at night with candles, so that made it super special! My best friend’s church had the great idea to do a sunrise Easter service our senior year in high school. On a local resort beach, with luxury condos towering behind us. We celebrated the Risen Christ with hymns played by a steel drum band, in a service led by a pastor dressed in shorts, sandals, and the tackiest Hawaiian shirt in the history of white people.

I almost died of pure cringe.

Growing up with such experiences, Easter just felt fake and shallow. It seemed to me, even as a teenager, that Easter should be a much bigger deal than just showing up one day a year to gorge on Marshmallow peeps. At first I thought it was just me. My faith had to be deficient. Maybe I just didn’t “get” Jesus. By the time I left for college, however, I had finally figured out what was wrong. And, it was definitely not me.

All these various “churches”, including my own, were just making all this up as they went along. I was a natural born conservative. Even as a child, I had been drawn to history and tradition. Most of the Evangelicals around me also thought of themselves as “conservatives”, which is self-delusion on an epic scale. Evangelicalism is the most radical “Christian” version available. Evangelicalism preserves almost no tradition, other than some “traditional” interpretations of scripture (many of which are of quite recent vintage). Evangelicalism is the ultimate experiment in “do-your-own-thing” religiosity. Its rootless nature means Evangelicalism is constantly morphing, lurching from one “next big thing” to another. Don’t like how “church” is being done, or how the pastor interprets certain scriptures? Stick around a bit, it’ll change. What you get on any given Sunday, or any given Easter, is totally at the whim of the senior paster and/or the minister of music.

A megachurch “Easter” rap show with pyrotechnics that also featured twerking. For Jesus, of course. 

Even when relatively young, this chaotic anti-culture had always bothered me in so many ways. Easter, however, was the last straw.  The Death and Resurrection of Christ are the heart of the Gospel. The words of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians troubled me, “and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.” How could we simply show up, in a new hat, with no preparation, no forethought, sing songs straight off the radio, and do justice to the awesome mystery of Christ conquering death?

During college, I completely left Evangelicalism, never to really return. I went to church sporadically to make the family happy, but my heart was never in it. I knew there had to be more to life, and to faith, than a weekly pep rally for Jesus followed by a TED talk.

My first experience, of anything close to what I was looking for, was my first Lent, Holy Week, and Easter in a predominantly Roman Catholic Eastern European country. I was fluent in the language, was dating a Catholic girl, and so kind of “tagged along” for it all. I was absolutely entranced. Here was everything I had felt intuitively was missing in Evangelicalism, but on a level I could never have imagined. How does a man blind since birth imagine a rainbow?

However, Roman Catholicism was not to be my future home. After returning to America, I was blessed to find the Orthodox Church – the true fullness of the Christian Faith.

Specifically concerning Easter (Pascha), what did I find in the Roman Church, and to a much fuller extent in the Orthodox Church? I found community. For 40 days prior to Holy Week, the Orthodox fast to aid in their spiritual preparation to greet the Risen Christ. We abstain from meat, eat fewer calories, and have fewer meals. In our homes, we are fasting together with our families. In our parishes, we are fasting with our communities. Across the world, we are fasting with all the other Orthodox Christians. Across time, we are fasting with all the Orthodox Christians who came before us. We are all in this together. We are reminded of our common faith in Christ each time we sit down to a vegetarian meal, and each time we abstain from a meal altogether. Orthodoxy lived in community is the furthest one can get from “do-your-own-thing”.

Lent is a time set aside each year to focus on building, and rebuilding, our life in Christ. We focus on repentance to open our souls to God’s cleansing grace. We read more scriptures and lives of saints to strengthen and guide our faith. We pray more to get closer to Him. We try to better manifest the fruits of the spirit. We strive to be kinder, to serve others, to give more alms.  In the 16th Chapter of Matthew, Christ says to his Disciples, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. 25” During Lent, we consciously pick up our crosses, deny ourselves, and follow Christ.

In Orthodoxy, I also found the Tradition I had been craving. The Orthodox Church is not a “do-it-yourself” project. We follow what has been handed down to us in an unbroken chain leading back to the Apostles. We are united across time with all those who came before us, the Church Triumphant who have earned their reward in a place of refreshment and light.

The 40 Days of Lent prepare us for Holy Week. We begin the journey to Christ’s Glorious Death and Resurrection in a spiritually renewed state. During Holy Week, we will attend services that are held no other time during the year. We will sing hymns that are sung no other time during the year. In Church, we will read the Passion stories from each of the Gospels, during more than 30 hours of worship services offered during Holy Week. We will gather together, on more than one occasion, and follow the cross in a procession around the Church, through the city streets where possible. By the time we arrive at the Pascal (Easter) Service, we are well and truly ready to receive the Risen God who has trampled down death by death.

If you have never attended an Orthodox Paschal service, you can scarcely imagine the joy of Christians shouting triumphantly, “CHRIST IS RISEN!”

Following a service during one Holy Week, I had a conversation with a young man from a local college with a keen interest in Theology. He had attended the service because he was intrigued by Orthodoxy. He was, however, having difficultly dealing with Orthodoxy because of how alien it was to his Baptist background. He said to me, “I read Justin Martyr and some of the other early Christian writers, and can clearly see that Orthodoxy is much closer to the 2nd Century Church than the Baptist Church is. But, do we still really need all that today?”

I looked him squarely in the eyes and said, “Well, now you know what happens when you take ‘all that’ away.”

He smiled and said, “Yeah. It’s really bad. I guess that’s why I’m here.”

In his sheepish look, I saw an echo of my own struggles when I was his age.

I smiled back at him and said, “Welcome home.”

Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America