Orthodox Reflections

By Fr. James Krueger, Saint Herman of Alaska Orthodox Church, Cloud-Bearing Mountain Christian Retreat & Training Center

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple; and whosoever does not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.

Luke 14:26–27.

I am not often on Facebook, and neither should you be. Today, however, I was posting for our Saturday Vespers service and saw a graphic consisting of four cartoons idealizing what looked to me like 1950’s American suburban life. Dad, clad in white shirt and slacks and bearing his brown briefcase, arriving home on a lovely summer evening. At the front door an aproned mom smiles admiringly as the children rush out to welcome him home after a hard day at the office. The yard is perfectly trimmed, the rose bush in full bloom, and one can imagine the pleasant savor of supper wafting from the perfectly painted house. Another depicted the same aproned mom, every hair in place, busily at work in the bright kitchen as she whips up some good vittles for the family. The other cartoons were of the same sort. The post said, “This is what they are afraid of,” and went on to encourage innocent viewers to follow the poster’s page who promised to keep them well-informed about “the truth.” I saw that the page had many thousands of followers.

Of course, I think I understand what this person is getting at. Maybe I even understand who “they” are. But I have to admit that idealized cartoons of 1950’s suburban life hardly strike me as “truth.” While for some, depictions like this may inflame the warm embers of nostalgia, others will not recognize it at all except perhaps as a reminder of old-fashioned television shows and Hollywood movies aired on obscure cable channels. Not that contemporary TV and Hollywood is in any way better than the old-fashioned kind. Still, call me a killjoy, but this family’s life is nice until mom and dad get old and their children have moved away in pursuit of good jobs like dad’s, mom starts feeling her isolation because dad is away at work too much, dad gets laid off and his mood sinks as his consumption of alcohol rises, little Suzy gets cancer because the town sprayed DDT to rid the neighborhood of mosquitos, and/or Jack, Jr. gets drafted. 1950’s America was not, is not, and never will be truth—if, that is, we agree that truth is the kingdom that Jesus proclaimed.

Nostalgia for the old days when America was “great” infects a good deal of Christian teaching, most especially among the various Protestant groups. As in the 1950’s, the risk here is creating a civil religion in Christian garb but hardly Christian at all in substance.

Of course, the Orthodox faith, as we know, is the true Christian faith in all of its fullness. Not only does it preserve the sacramental, sacrificial worship that God himself made the center of the life of his people, but it also teaches and encourages the asceticism requisite for authentic union with God. Still, we Orthodox are not by any means immune from the debilitating disease of Christian nostalgia.

Nostalgia seems a natural reflex stimulated especially by the threat of overwhelming change. Overwhelming change has been and continues to be the very substance of modern liberalism, by which I do not mean what we call “liberals” in common political jargon, but the liberalism upon which America is founded and in which both Democrats and Republicans are steeped.

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Orthodox immigrants have come here seeking liberty and economic advancement but now find themselves in a lion’s den. Everywhere they look are the bared teeth of the unholy techno-scientific juggernaut of modern, liberal, industrial consumerism ready ruthlessly to shred their every tie to tradition and cultural heritage. It is natural that one would want to circle the wagons and protect the old ways. Of course, one might wonder why these communities have seemed unrestrained in their embrace of modern, liberal, industrial consumerism in all other aspects of their lives save religion. Instead of trying to remain as Russian or as Greek as possible while here in North America, might it not be better to remain as Christian as possible and speak out prophetically against this destructive, exploitative, de-humanizing free-for-all that we justify by calling an “economy?”

Nevertheless, here is the difference between merely being nostalgic and being a missionary: a missionary cannot achieve what he sets out to achieve by setting up a wall of defense. He must instead go out as a sheep among wolves, armed and provisioned only with the Word of God, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the prophetic Word of truth. He must learn to love his enemy, to speak the truth to him in love, and by this love that is the truth make converts to true Christianity. Easier said than done, I know.

Because the roots of all that is good in western European culture draw their best nourishment from the West’s thousand years of Orthodoxy, Orthodoxy is the only medicine that will heal its ills and restore this culture to health. But we Orthodox fail in this mission to the West when our concern to protect national and cultural identity overrides our concern for the places and people we find ourselves among.

Can we imagine Saint Herman of Alaska in his hut on Spruce Island spending hours in reverie about his youth in Russia? If such thoughts entered his head he might have considered them a distraction at best, but more likely a demonic temptation. Was he trying to make the tribes (the nations) to whom he ministered into little Russians? It seems to me that he, along with his compatriots who were true to their calling, rather sought to redeem the good and purify the evil within these nations through participation in Holy Orthodoxy. This meant translating services and scriptures into native languages and making allowance for the customs and ways of these tribes when they could be directed toward union with Christ.

There is little room for nostalgia in the mission field. One has to press on and work with the material that presents itself. A missionary is an artist: just as he must work within himself to carve away all that is not of God and allow what God has made to shine through in all of its purity and splendor, so he must do the same with culture. What he cannot do successfully is try merely to impose one cultural standard upon another. This is how the Protestant missionaries tried to deal with the Native Americans in this country and Christianity to our day suffers a bad reputation for the abuses and hubris inherent in such a program. A missionary’s desire is not that his converts should become copies of him but rather that the unique human persons that God created them to be should shine forth. Saint Paul has much to say about this in his discussions about the gifts of the Spirit. The nations also have their unique gifts which, according to the prophets, will be made pure and holy as they are brought into the temple (the Church) and presented to the living God.

Saint Herman, of course, was here as part of Russia’s colonial effort. Colonialism, as we know, is not really an effort to settle a land but rather to exploit it. It is an effort of extraction: to take the resources and wealth of foreign lands to fatten the mother country. Saint Herman saw this and not only spoke against it but bowed out of it more or less altogether. As for the current situation in North America, foreign Orthodox jurisdictions may tend to funnel wealth back to the old country, while the priests serving in parishes and mission churches have to work secular jobs to make ends meet. Could the alluring shimmer of North American gold be a motive against Orthodox unity despite the debilitating effects the current confusion of jurisdictions has on missionary activity, not to mention its obvious disregard for canonical standards?

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I do not wish to be taken in the wrong way. Human culture is inherently good so far as it orders and uplifts human life. It should be defended against the powerful solvent that modern liberal industrial consumerism is, which in many ways is an anti-culture. But culture is a sum of its parts, and this solvent gnaws at all the parts. It eats away at human dignity; it eats away at family ties; it eats away at community ties and local economies (that is, neighborly relationship of reciprocity); it removes people from rural life and deposits them in the cities and suburbs; it eats away at faith in God and one another; it eats away at the Creation itself. We must protect our Orthodox heritage against this not as a museum piece, but rather as the medicine that can heal the very human nature (and so all of nature) that liberalism has defaced, or at least heal many who are currently stuck and lost in it.

Immigrant communities should cherish their national heritage, though a mature and honest assessment of their situation here should tell them that they must expect change. But we also have to see clearly that God has brought Orthodoxy to these shores for a purpose, for mission. Holy Orthodoxy, when not merely a complex set of outward observances and postures but as a life- and soul-transforming divine therapy taken seriously in the heart of each man, has the very and only medicine that can heal the West, that can return the West to her best and most fertile ground.

Will we step up to this calling, or will we instead be found out in the backyard, wagons circled around us, burying our talent in the ground for fear of losing a miter or two or a national identity, including many of the things that make up a typical American identity?

Who knows what “they” are afraid of, but perhaps this is what we are afraid of.