Journey to Orthodoxy, part 4

Between 1987 and 2002, there were a few changes that took place in my life:

- Terrie and I got married;

-we became actively involved in the parish, and I became a cantor;

- we had four children;

- we moved to Newark (Ohio), then to Cincinnati, and finally to Mason (Ohio).

Despite the difficulties involved in being Byzantine Catholic, we were true to our faith. The difficulties were, in many ways, unavoidable:

(1) The rest of the family, on both sides, was and is Latin-Rite Catholic. This made our wedding at St. John Chrysostom interesting, to say the least. Of course we knew what to expect, and courtesy of the rehearsal so did the people in the wedding party (well, sort of at least), but everyone else was in for a ride. The ceremony itself, being the marriage ceremony embedded in a Divine Liturgy, takes about 1 hour 45 minutes. Couple that with the fact that we had an icon blessed during the ceremony and the whole thing took close to two hours. To be clear, this is two hours of completely unfamiliar territory for everyone else in the church; they weren’t familiar with the Divine Liturgy itself, let alone the extra parts that are included in the wedding ceremony. For starters, the couple walk into the church together in the Byzantine Rite ceremony. The father giving the bride away is left over from the days of dowries, and since the Eastern Churches never knew this practice, the tradition of giving the bride away has never existed. If Terrie’s dad was saddened about not being able to “give away” the youngest of his 11 children (and I’d imagine he was), he never said a word. Then there is the crowning, which is the climax of the wedding service. The crowns are signs of the glory and honor with which God crowns the couple during the Mystery. The bride and groom are crowned as the king and queen of their home, of their domestic church, which they will rule with fear of God, wisdom, justice and integrity. There is no parallel to this in the Latin Rite.

(2) All of our children were baptized, chrismated (confirmed), and received the Eucharist for the first time at St. John Chrysostom. These were also completely different experiences for our Latin-Rite relatives. First and foremost, all three of the sacraments are administered by the priest on the same day when the child is an infant (as opposed to baptism for infants, “First Communion” around age 7 and confirmation around age 14 administered by the bishop). Baptism is by triple-immersion in a font large enough to accommodate this. The Eucharist is both the Body and Blood together in one chalice and is distributed to the faithful by means of a spoon which the priest uses to place the Eucharist in the mouth of the communicant, and the “bread” used is leavened. Those of you who are Latin-Rite Catholic are probably asking, “This is Catholic?” Yep, it is. I won’t get into all of the theological details here that explain the differences (first because I don’t have all the answers and second because that in and of itself could fill at least one large book), but if you’re interested please ask and I’ll do my best.

(3) There is not a Byzantine Catholic church in Newark, Ohio, nor is there one in Cincinnati. When we lived in Newark, we drove back to St. John Chrysostom in Columbus (about a 35-minute drive one way), and after moving to Southwest Ohio we drove to St. Barbara, a mission parish in Dayton, Ohio (a 55-minute drive one way from Cincinnati and a 35-minute drive one way from Mason). No, it wasn’t easy, especially with the kids. But it was worth it.

That is, it was worth it until a new priest was assigned to St. Barbara’s. The priest in Columbus had often joked that a lot of people, including a lot of priests, told him he was “too Orthodox”. The first priest in Dayton was a priest that had visited St. John Chrysostom several times before we moved to Cincinnati, so in going to St. Barbara we were dealing with a “known entity”…one who got along with the priest at St. John Chrysostom and one who made the same joke about being “too Orthodox”. (As an aside, the priest at St. Barbara has since converted and is an Orthodox priest. I guess he finally got tired of the joke and decided to make it the truth instead.) We really didn’t appreciate the fact that these two priests were so Orthodox until we had to deal with one that wasn’t. Granted, when we went on vacation to Lake Erie and went to a Byzantine-Rite church there, it was decidedly “less Orthodox”, meaning that some of the prayers were shortened or skipped and that other shortcuts were taken to make the Liturgy about an hour long instead of the usual 90 minutes, so we knew we had been blessed at our home parishes. But when the new priest arrived at St. Barbara, more than just the length of the Liturgy changed. There was a change in the atmosphere. It’s sort of one of those intangible things that you can’t really describe, but along with the changes in the Liturgy, the life of the parish changed. The homilies were no longer focused on the Scriptures, theology, and daily living. I lost count on how many times the new priest mentioned Vietnam in his sermons (keep in mind, this around the year 2000 we’re talking about here).

Finally, during Liturgy one Saturday afternoon, I reached the end. During a homily in which the priest stated that soldiers were the same as abortionists, I walked out. I was the cantor…the only cantor…and I walked out, never to return. Having had many discussions about the priest with Terrie, she knew that things had been building for a while, and was aware that when I had said, “Someday, I may just walk out,” that I meant it.

So there we were, with no place to call home. It took a while for things to settle down to the point that we could look rationally at the situation. When we finally did, we quickly realized that there were only two viable options:

(1) return to the Latin Rite;

(2) look at Orthodoxy

Neither met with Terrie’s approval. The Latin Rite was still as empty as it ever was; we knew this from visiting our relatives and going to their churches over the years. If anything, it had gotten worse, and resembled Protestantism more than ever. The bad experience at the Greek Orthodox Church back in the late 80’s still lingered in Terrie’s mind. For me, there was only one option: look at Orthodoxy. Knowing from experience that reading about it was not enough, I knew that I needed to visit another Orthodox church, or possibly several, and get a feel for it. I knew I needed to talk to the priests and start finding out first-hand about it. With Terrie’s permission, I began the next stage of “the journey” alone. I hadn’t been to church by myself in a very long time, realistically since my freshman year at Ohio State. Unsettled doesn’t even really begin to describe how I felt. I didn’t know if Orthodoxy was the answer, but I knew that just not going to church was not the answer. So, in 2002, I went, alone, to Christ the Savior/Holy Spirit Orthodox Church for the first time.