St. Theodore the Commander
The Translation of His Relics
Dear Clergy, Faithful, and Friends of our Diocese,
With the blessing of His
Eminence, Bishop Auxentios, I am sending out a photograph of a Church in
Greece. It is a parish in the State (New Calendar) Orthodox Church of
Greece. It was shown to
me by Metropolitan Chrysostomos, who sent it to one of our clergy today.
If he was dismayed but not surprised, I was shocked beyond words at
seeing this. I asked to use it as a springboard for several comments
about what is happening in Orthodoxy today.
While of course we
traditionalist Old Calendarists are concerned about ecumenism, we often
forget that its main danger is that of a force that erodes the correct
practices and the ethos of the
Church. A wise clergyman once made a statement about the sin of
adultery, pointing out that the worst thing about it is that it eats
away at the traditional structure and function of the family. In the
family, commitment and love bind each member with the
others. Adultery breaks that bond. He compared the effects of adultery
on the family to those of ecumenism on the Church. The oneness,
sanctity, and bond of love lost in adultery afflict the Church in
exactly the same way: oneness, sanctity, and unifying love
are lost to the faithful.
If adultery occurs, how
does the Church correct it? It calls for a restoration of the love that
bonds all of the family members together: a recommitment to the oneness
of the family and its
values and ethos. It is overcome where love, forgiveness, and a
restoration of family traditions and the exclusivity of intimate
interrelationships are recovered and reinforced. The traditional family
is made whole again by a return to basic and essential
traditions that define the Christian family.
So it is with the Church.
If we wish to be traditionalists and preserve the Church and unite the
errant to it, we must look at those things that have made the Church
what its is. We must examine
its essential traditions. We must return the Orthodox Church to its
image: that of a sacred place, free from the things of the world, a
place where we achieve intimate communion with God in the exclusiveness
of those who share one Baptism, one Faith, and one
Confession.
A simple way to overcome
the effects of ecumenism is to restore our traditions from the basics
up. Call our Priests to dress and groom themselves as clergy. Require
the clergy to wear the cassock
and maintain uncut hair and beards. Remove pews and chairs from our
Churches, where we are required to pray standing, and replace them with
traditional
stasidia, where one can stand up with support when needed or, in the case of infirm faithful, sit on the small shelf provided on the
stasidia. Maintain the externals of worship from the moment we
enter the Church (men on the right, women on the left) and throughout
the services, and we will see a restoration of true Orthodoxy.
If there are those who
argue that externals have no meaning, then let us look carefully at the
New Calendarist Churches and how their abandonment of so many externals
of the Church have made
them and us blind to the loss that they have suffered. The sacred space
of their Churches is just a matter of the decoration of a religious
theatre, where people worship while seated and inattentive, praying with
their mind and words only, and not with their
bodies as well. And little by little the Mysteries and the Church are
defiled.
And now the proof. Here
is the Church, decorated by the family as allowed by the Priest, in
which the primacy of the event to take place lies not in the mosaic
Icons that adorn the Church, but
in the theme of the Mystery of Baptism for these poor souls: Bugs Bunny!
The ancient custom, a pious and holy one, of the parents not
attending the Baptismal service, but standing on the porch or in the
balcony, so as to affirm that their children are becoming members of the
Church community, dedicated to Christ, is both unknown
today and abhorrent to those for whom Baptism has become a social,
family, and cultural event. Orthodox even sometimes clap, at many
Baptisms, as though present at a theatrical event or concert, and not a
Divine Mystery. A true understanding of Baptism having
become rare, the next step follows logically: make Bugs Bunny the main
point of attention. Could anything be more clear in what this photograph
tells us? Baptism is a baby's introduction to something akin to a
child’s party!
We should, as
traditionalist Orthodox Christians, think long and hard about how one
ends up with the New Calendar and how one comes to believe that
Orthodoxy is “just another religion.” As I
said, it begins with a loss of tradition. So the next time that you are
sitting in a chair or pew as Heaven descends down to earth during the
services; and the next time that a shaved clergyman with short hair
named “Bill” or “Curtis” appears as your “leader,”
rather than a representative of the people clothed in the garb of the
Prophets at the door to the Holy of Holies; and the next time that you
see the services done in the style of a theatre performance instead of
as a path to mystical communion with God that
will determine the fate of your eternal soul, seriously ask yourself
this: “Is Bugs Bunny next?” And if you are asking this in a context that
you call traditional, think: I this tradition or something else?
Least Among Monks,
† Archimandrite Gregory
Secretary to Bishop Auxentios
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