Posted by from Fr. Ted Bobosh (dcalvert) on 5/6/2008, 7:07 pm
The Orthodox Church in America in being given autocephaly by the
Russian Orthodox Church received a gift of freedom – the freedom to
bring to life on the North American Continent an indigenous Orthodox
Church. Our task is not to make present in North America Russian or
Greek or Romanian or Serbian or Arab or Albanian Orthodoxy, though as
an immigrant church we have done all of those things. The task
given to the OCA in its creation is to find a way to speak to America
about the Orthodox Faith and to incarnate Orthodoxy in America as
Orthodoxy has uniquely been incarnate in other cultures where it has
taken root, such as in Russia, Greece, Serbia, Romania, Syria,
Lebanon and many other places in Africa, the Mideast, the Balkans and
Europe.
The freedom to embody Orthodoxy in America, to make incarnate the
Orthodox Church on the North American continent, has proven to be a
very challenging task. Having a document which says we are
autocephalous is not the same as having bishops and leaders who are
prepared for autocephaly or who have embraced that bold vision which
is necessary for bringing Orthodoxy to a new culture.
St. Maria Skobtsova, being part of an émigré church (rather than a
missionary church), did have some insight into the awesomeness of the
task facing Orthodoxy in Western Europe in the 1940's. Orthodoxy
had been displaced to Western Europe by the rise of atheist communism
in Russia, and found itself living in the darkness of atheist Fascism
which was blitzkrieging across Europe. Mother Maria recognized that
Orthodoxy separated from its motherland favored status is given a
freedom to be the Body of Christ and not merely a state-church. She
saw clearly that freedom places great demands on the membership who
can no longer rely on the cultural/state support to maintain the
church or its status in society. These struggles also are rife with
temptations to avoid the difficulties by trying to live in some
golden age past or by trying to recreate and maintain the culture
from which one is exiled instead of trying to live the faith in the
soil in which one is newly planted. She wrote:
"Freedom obliges, freedom calls for sacrificial self-giving, freedom
determines one's honesty and strictness with oneself and one's path.
And if we want to be strict and honest, worthy of the freedom given
to us, we must first of all test our own attitude toward our
spiritual world. We have no right to wax tenderhearted over all our
past indiscriminately – much of that past is far loftier and purer
than we are, but much of it is sinful and criminal. We should aspire
to the lofty and combat the sinful. We cannot stylize everything as
some sweet ringing of Moscow bells – religion dies of stylization.
We cannot cultivate dead customs – only authentic spiritual fire has
weight in religious life. We cannot freeze a living soul with rules
and orders – once, in their own time, they were the expression of
other living souls, but new souls demand a corresponding expression.
We cannot see the Church as a sort of aesthetic perfection and limit
ourselves to aesthetic swooning – our God given freedom calls us to
activity and struggle. And it would be a great lie to tell
searching souls: `Go to church, because there you will find peace.'
The opposite is true. She tells those who are at peace and
asleep: `Go to church, because there you will feel real alarm about
your sins, about your perdition, about the world's sins and
perdition. There you will feel an unappeasable hunger for Christ's
truth. There instead of lukewarm you will become ardent, instead of
pacified you will become alarmed, instead of learning the wisdom of
this world you will become foolish for Christ. It is to this
foolishness, this folly in Christ, that our freedom calls us … And
we will become fools for Christ, because we know not only the
difficulty of this path but also the immense happiness of feeling
God's hand upon what we do." (p. 114-115. MOTHER MARIA SKOBTSOVA:
ESSENTIAL WRITINGS)
That hand of God which now rests on the OCA is heavy indeed.
In 1 Samuel 5:11, we read about what happened to some people when
they received the Ark of the Covenant in their presence. When God
lays His hand upon a people, it is sometimes a discomforting
thing: "For there was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. The
hand of God was very heavy there…" Autocephaly like the Ark of
the Covenant is a two edged blessing, as the Israelites and the
Philistines discovered. In the hands of the wrong people, it is a
curse. We are familiar with the adage, "It is a fearful thing to
fall into the hands of the living God" (Hebrews 10:31). And though
these warnings are dire, and may cause our hearts to tremble, we in
the OCA are also given reason to hope and take courage. For the hand
of God may at times be heavy, we can humble ourselves beneath that
almighty hand and receive the blessing it can bestow:
"Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that in
due time he may exalt you. Cast all your anxieties on him, for he
cares about you. Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil
prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour. Resist
him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experience of
suffering is required of your brotherhood throughout the world. And
after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has
called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore,
establish, and strengthen you. To him be the dominion for ever and
ever. Amen" (1 Peter 5:6-11).
The question which remains for us to answer is: are we going to take
autocephaly seriously or not? It is our behavior which determines
whether we receive it as Philistines or as God's chosen people.
Fr. Ted
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