Whitewashed Faith

It’s an amazing thing. I live near two Orthodox mega-churches. They’re even on the same side of town as the other mega-churches. And they actually work the same way. There are a gazillion programs for people 20-40, for teens, for feminists… you name it, there’ a committee or a program for it. I think they have well over 2 dozen committees alone. But matins, served once a week, draws 3 people, 2 of whom are the reader and most junior priest. At the 20-40 group meetings, they eat and have cocktails, but there is no prayer, none at all. And if anyone tries to talk about Faith, they either get nowhere or are greeted with such misunderstanding of the doctrines and attitudes of the Church, that it’s almost better not to bring it up. Vespers, and other such services are similarly unattended. On Sunday, everyone sits in pews and watches the service. The choir sings invisibly from the sides, but most people don’t pray with them, or realize that’s a tradition – they seem to think it would be interrupting, or that they would miss the singing if they prayed. There are no icons except on the iconostasis. Even in the gigantic eating hall, there was only recently a single icon installed. The interior is whitewashed – whitewashed of the Saints. There are numerous windows, but far fewer Windows to Heaven.

During the substantial meals/buffets served after sunday morning liturgy, an aged junior priest has to run over and quickly say a blessing, so that it can be done before most people have started eating, but no one pays him any mind. There’s a general sense of the absence of God as a daily reality in our lives. There’s little prayer. There’s every manner of religious or atheistic theory from the culture, from heterodoxy, but very little understanding of Orthodox thinking. Enquirers classes for prospective converts focus mainly on the externals of how one gets received (Chrismation, etc. Almost never baptism.). What holds it together is the activities and groups, which provide social interaction for the members, but certainly not the services and vigils of the Church. There’s no sense of the basics going on; one may easily be invited out for steak dinners during Lent, etc. Eventually, tho, despite continual well-attended inquirers classes, chrismations, and new members, they reach an apex of their maximum size, because likewise there’s a steady stream of people that can’t figure out why they’re there, and attend less and less, and eventually drop off. Somehow, it doesn’t sustain them. So despite the huge influx that their size, programs, and marketing creates, their size remains fairly constant. You can determine size, incidentally, either by attending, by reading the headcount figures, or by the number of cars in the parking lot being ushered in or out by security guards on Sunday.

Now typically, if someone were to say all the above, he’d be considered judgmental. We don’t want to hear it, to believe it, to consider it, or to think about it’s implications. But this only underscores how unacceptable it is to have such a thing as the Orthodox Church. Perhaps I’m judgmental, but this doesn’t mean what I’ve described isn’t exactly what’s happening. We like to re-focus on the critic rather than the things being critiqued. So I don’t say it. Not much. Like so many other things, I keep fairly quiet about it. But it is painful to watch hungry souls slowly starve to death. Again, that will seem judgmental. I can only say that they actually describe this, fairly often, and don’t seem to know why it’s happening, because, after all, this is the Orthodox Church, right? They are convinced it’s the right place, but can’t figure out why it’s not sustaining them. And how can anyone tell them, without criticizing the Church, or the people that run it? What can one do?

I can only save myself, and my family, and with me those around me who want to save themselves, and we’re not trying to create an ‘alternative’. But we can’t survive at the mega-church, so we go elsewhere. There are almost no programs, and maybe one committee, but the full range of services is held and are well-attended, prayer accompanies everything, and icons and the attitudes and pieties that go with them are everywhere. It’s a safe-haven. A place of refuge. But more than that. The less we look behind, the more it really is for us just the fullness of Faith, in the Church. Perhaps I’m judgmental, but I don’t think it’s just a matter of preference, like a buffet, or a matter of misunderstanding, or of personal character; I don’t think it’s all about me, or all about the others finding the same experience. I think there really is something objectively wrong in large sectors of Orthodoxy, perhaps the largest sectors. And to express it objectively, I seize upon the most obvious objective facet – the absence of prayer. Where we eat, learn, gather, or do anything without prayer, that’s an objective absence of something that all the fathers and the scriptures warn against. That then, is what I consider typical or symptomatic of the larger issues which might be more subjectively defined. When you venture into a Church that doesn’t pray, you don’t have to judge, but you can say (just as at a meal where there is no food, or a bath with no water) that I have noticed something very important missing – perhaps the most important thing.