+Philip Dismisses Priest in Cassock

Actually, Happy, I would rather see America become Orthodox than see Orthodoxy become American. In any case, I'm about as Anglo as they come (Danish-English heritage), and I'm not sure I understand how "American culture" means "suit and collar," sorry.

Sorry, I missed the part where "towing (sic) the line with bishops" is "nutz"?

Funny you should mention the Greeks being "extremely ethnic". Every OCA parish I've ever been in has struck me as "extremely ethnic" as well -- the ethnicity is simply American. Well, a particular kind of American, anyway.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that Orthodoxy is not a set of abstractions that can simply be uprooted from their cultural context, transposed to an American Evangelical key, and *poof*, there's "American Orthodoxy". I believe we are going to better off in the long run drinking from wells that already exist rather than trying to synthesize hydrogen and oxygen on our own. I know, we're Americans, and we prefer to make our own water, but I'm just not at all persuaded that that's going to work the way we want it to on this one.

(Editor's note: If you have to become Greek, or Russian, or Serbian, or Arab, or whatever, to become fully "Orthodox", I doubt many Americans will ever be interested. Do you really think that people who have chosen to be "in exile" from countries they have never visited, who ape lost empires, and mroes abandoned in their own homelands, will speak to the heart of the megachurch society? We do not have to create our own water; like rain, grace falls from heaven for those who are willing to embrace it, and receive it. And its transforming power works in America too. Of course, you are welcome to raise your umbrella, and curse it. But why?)

I said nothing about "having to become ", and I'm uncertain why the poles of "Baptizing Evangelical Protestantism" and "Becoming Greco-Russo-Levantine" are always what seem to be presented as the only options. What I think has to happen is a thing more subtle and nuanced than having to "become an ethnicity". Rather, it's the realization that we have to accept cultural Orthodoxy on its own terms, and that there might even be something valuable we can learn from doing so, rather than reflexively writing it all off as being a "nominal ethnic thing" or a "little-t tradition thing". Somebody else mentioned that Russia took the Byzantine tradition and made it her own, and this is true -- but it took centuries of slow, organic historical movement.

Let me give you an example. A few years ago, my priest decided that he wanted to adopt the practice in our parish of strewing basil leaves around the church during the Liturgy of Great and Holy Saturday. All well and good -- except that people who showed up AFTER the Holy Saturday Liturgy to help cook and prepare the church for the Paschal Liturgy saw the basil leaves on the floor and said, "Why did Father throw salad all over the floor?" They picked up the basil and baked it in a lasagna. We don't do basil leaves on Holy Saturday anymore.

The problem here is twofold -- people don't know what's going on, but they're also not there when the explanation is given. We have three choices -- do it and explain everything at every step, simplify it and cut it down to something that casual attendees can digest without needing to hear the announcements from the night before, or just do it, and figure the people who get it, get it, and the people who don't, don't. (We also have to be ready to stop people when they're picking up the basil leaves.)

What I am arguing is that, rather than writing off everything we don't understand or that makes us uncomfortable as "little-t tradition" or "ethnic folk piety" or labeling it as one thing or another that makes it negotiable if not deletable, we have to be prepared to adopt a posture of humility, ask questions about what we don't understand, and be willing to accept what the answers are, rather than assuming we know what we're looking at and doing something quite premature as a result.

Of course, what that requires is for the people who need things explained to show up, but it also requires the explainers to show up. I have friends who were baptized together while they were dating, and they made it plain throughout their catechesis that they were planning on getting engaged and married in an Orthodox church once they were baptized. Well, they were baptized with the same godparents, and THEN they saw the sign at the Greek church where they were getting married that said, "Godchildren of the same godparents may not marry." The priest who baptized them had known but totally forgotten about this; the godparents had done some measure of due diligence and tried to research the matter, but the GOA website doesn't discuss this restriction beyond saying that godchildren and godparents may not marry. Baptismal certificates were very hastily reissued and all wound up being fine in the end, but it was a mess for a little while. A Greek friend of theirs told them, "This isn't your fault. It's our fault for not being more up front about explaining these things and why they're important."

I also didn't say anything about "cursing" anything. What I said is, I'm not convinced that Orthodoxy as an abstraction that we render in American Evangelical-speak, divorced from cultures that actually have a history of lived faith within the received tradition, is actually going to do anything to make America Orthodox. It may well generate something that we choose to call "American Orthodoxy," but I don't see how that's necessarily the same thing. Catering to and validating the assumptions of the "megachurch society" is not, in my view, actually going to convert anybody to Orthodox Christianity. What reached me about Orthodoxy was not the points of similarity between it and the megachurch I had attended with my mother as an adolescent; rather, it was the realization that the ROCOR cathedral I was standing in was about as different from said megachurch as it could possibly be and still be recognizably Christian, and I wanted to know how that could possibly be. Does that somehow make me less "American"?

Are there American characteristics that are usable? In the long run, sure, just like there were in Russia. On the other hand, as happened in Russia, I tend to think that it will be well to look to what folk culture as we might find here rather than to the consumer culture. Just three weeks ago I heard a Byzantine chant specialist -- and a Greek, no less -- say that he'd love to hear somebody try to do a bluegrass setting of the Divine Liturgy (minus instruments, of course). So... who knows.

"In Western society there is no need for clerics to 'play priest' in public."

That's a very interesting comment. Can you say some more about what you mean by that? What is different about, say, Greece (where I never once saw a priest with a collar and jacket -- priests in cassocks riding the metro, speaking in front of academic audiences, etc.) that there is a need for clerics to "play priest" in public that doesn't exist here? And what do you mean by "play priest"?

"Western street garb isn't Eastern street garb."

Also a very interesting statement. When I was in Greece I saw people wearing pants and shirts and shorts and dresses, pretty much exactly the same as here. "Western" and "Eastern" street garb were indistinguishable.

So what's the deal with making clergy exceptional?