A common question I get when I talk to people about Orthodoxy is, “Father, how do you know that yours is the right church? “ Well, let’s assume for the sake of argument that I am right: that the Orthodox Church is the only true Church, and that everyone else is in error and lacks the Grace of the Holy Spirit in their sacraments. Now, based upon that assumption, I would like to use a metaphor of physical hunger to describe spiritual hunger.

Our bodies are made to run off of food as a fuel. When we don’t eat we get the feeling of being hungry. If we don’t eat long enough we will eventually starve to death. I submit that likewise, all human beings are born with an innate hunger for spiritual food. This is evidenced by every culture on earth having had some sense of the supernatural. Let us further suppose that there is only one real God who supplies us with only one real spiritual food, and as we have already assumed, in this case, this food only comes from the Orthodox Church. This begs the question—what is everybody else doing then? Suppose that you were to sit down and eat a plate full of sawdust. You could eat spoonful after spoonful and you would fill your stomach, indeed your stomach would tell your brain that you are full. However, there is a problem—there is no nutritional value in sawdust! Eat as much of it as you’d like, but it will never have any nutrients in it.  Although day after day you could eat bellyful after bellyful of sawdust, eventually you will starve to death.  Likewise, based on our previous assumptions, anyone outside the Orthodox Church is eating spiritual sawdust.

There are thousands of religions in the world with millions of adherents who really think they are being fulfilled by their faith, but are in fact in spiritual malnutrition. Many people seek a spiritual feeling; something uplifting or inspiring. What they want is something that allows their mind to tell their heart that they are full. But like the sawdust, ultimately what they are filling themselves with is empty of any real spiritual nutrition. Now people could make sawdust seem very appetizing, it could be served on a silver platter and millions of people could agree that it is wonderful and delicious, but none of this changes the fact it is still just sawdust.

As Christ told His followers, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks my blood abides in Me, and I in him” (John 6:53-56).  So, how do I know that no one except the Orthodox Church has Christ’s body and blood? Again based on our assumption, everyone else is in error, that is, they are heretics.

Now, if we believe that our God is a loving God, then we would assume that wherever possible, without violating our freewill, He keeps us from making things worse on ourselves.  Saint Paul warns Christians, “For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body” (1 Cor. 11:29).  So, if everyone else is in error and they are still receiving the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, then they are making their situation worse and worse. Wouldn’t a loving and merciful God at least remove the Grace from their sacraments? God can’t violate their freewill and make them return from their error, but He can keep them from compounding that error by eating and drinking judgment onto their souls over and over again!

Based upon the original assumptions, it is conclusive that the Divine Grace of the Holy Trinity is not present in outside of the True Church, and that although there are other outlets of spirituality, the others are without spiritual nutrition.

Finally, my job would be to prove that the original assumptions are true. In this regard it is important to understand that there is only one Church and therefore only one Communion. There is no new church or new communion. To eat the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ is to join one’s self to the original Last Supper, and to be of one mind and faith with the Holy Apostles. That means that to be within the Church, the Body of Christ, that your faith must be exactly the same faith as the original Church without addition or subtraction across all space and time. For instance, if the Apostles did not believe in papal infallibility or sola scriptura, then you can’t either because you would immediately put yourself outside of that original faith—you would be a heretic and devoid of Divine Grace. But my challenge to you is this: prove that Orthodoxy doesn’t maintain the same faith today as the original Church, and prove that your church does. This means looking deep into history and really reading about what Christians have done a believed since the earliest times.

Tags: grace, mark templet, orthodox, roac, russian, sacraments, sawdust

As a priest in a mission parish, I pray for many things, not the least of which is that God will send a man who has the calling of a Reader/Cantor. Performing the many services of the Orthodox Church for any length of time as a solo priest you soon realize that the services were never intended to be done by a solo priest. The services were composed well over 1000 years ago, at a time when the great churches of the East would have employed a dozen priest, two dozen deacons, and scores of subdeacons and readers.  Those services must have not only been beautiful but more easily accomplished with so many people able to assist. However, in a tiny mission parish it is much harder to accomplish this goal, and unfortunately the beauty of the services can suffer. Now, don’t get me wrong; praising God is praising God; the lack of people is not a factor. However, it’s like the difference between painting a picture with Crayola watercolors versus using well-made artist oils; you can still make a handsome picture with either, but the oils add a richness that is not able to be duplicated by watercolors.

So, what does a Reader/Cantor do, and why is it so special? First of all, a reader’s main responsibility is to be able to chant well. This skill alone adds a beauty to the services that is beyond description. Not only does this add to the beauty of what’s going on in the church, it also gives the other clergy a break from having to keep so many plates spinning. Since the Reader has no specific liturgical function during the services, they  free up those members of the clergy who do. The Reader is concentrating on chanting without distraction while the priest is able to concentrate on his prayers and rubrics.  Secondly, the Reader leads the congregation in singing, and chanting the responses during the services. This action facilitates the glorious exchange between the clergy and the people.  If you totaled all of the words from all of the major services done regularly in the Church, I would bet, the Reader has more to say than the clergy. 

There are some perks to being a Reader too. For instance, Readers are given the dignity of wearing an inner cassock; they also wear a sticharion during the services.  They also can help out inside the Altar as well. They can even be blessed to act in place of subdeacons when a bishop comes to visit.

In my opinion, a well-trained, dedicated tonsured Reader is worth his weight in gold. I pray to God, that He sends our parish one soon!

Tags: louisiana, mark templet, orthodox, reader, roac
Current Mood: busy

I have no words to describe my respect and utter amazement of the wife of a priest, known in the Russian Orthodox Church as the matushka. The term, matushka, means “little mother”, and is a title of both endearment and respect. Let me just say that there is no rarer or precious gift a priest can receive from God than to be graced with a faithful matushka. It is hard being a priest; you spend many hours per week in prayer and preparation for services, not to mention the time spent in addressing the needs of your parishioners, but who is it that keeps the wind beneath the wings of such a busy lifestyle? It is the matushka who is the inner most strength behind our priests.

Furthermore, I can think of no harder type of matushka to be than a convert living in America. Can you imagine getting used to the Orthodox lifestyle as an adult with the added pressure of being the priest’s wife?  Let me put this into perspective for my reader, my matushka takes care of the majority of the house cleaning, cooking, taking care of our 2 year old daughter, and works a fulltime job. To add on top of all that, this is the person who gets few perks from being a priest’s wife. Instead of lazy Sunday mornings she gets up and prepares all of the things needed for trapeza after the Divine Liturgy, she feeds our child, and has to get herself ready for church. As the priest’s wife, she is expected to be in church unless she is sick as a dog. She doesn’t get to have weekends off; she can’t roll over and punch the snooze button or just skip church.  On top of all that we have the pressures of family and friends who we want to be involved with who neither understand Orthodoxy, nor try to plan around our various dietary requirements and obligation to attend services. It would be tough enough to be a matushka in an Orthodox country, but to be so in America in the post-modern age among families of Roman Catholics and Protestants is doubly hard.

It is funny, my wife often laments that her understanding of Orthodoxy is not a deep as mine, but she understands more than she imagines. She knows what it means to sacrifice. She knows what it means to be faithful with little thanks or rest. But consider this, not a drop of this goes unnoticed by God! Her soul is radiant in virtues that I sorely lack. I truly believe that for such faithfulness in the times of such distraction and yearning her crown in heaven will be great. She may not be as familiar with Orthodox theology and how the services are put together as I am, but she lives the faith. Her patience and caring for everyone are a pearl of great treasure.

Our culture has bombarded me with a definition of a beautiful woman for over thirty years. Our culture says that beauty revolves around physical sex appeal. Constantly, we see images of women who flaunt their bodies and their physically tantalizing features to sell everything from the latest fashions to mop-buckets. But they have failed; I have seen through all of it. It finally sank into me what real beauty is.  I once looked out of the Sanctuary one Sunday morning when we were about to begin the Divine Liturgy and I saw my wife standing there with rays of sunlight striking her from a nearby window. There she stood, in a modest dress with her head covered, yet again ready to be my everything. She was soft and lovely with a radiance that was greater than the mere sun rays upon her. The beauty of that moment made me gasp for breath and still brings a tear to my eye. I couldn’t even tell her about it because I knew not how to express it in words. It was the most beautiful sight I have ever beheld. I am just shamed when I think about how much the world would have us believe that this was not the truest definition of womanhood. Love doesn’t even begin to describe what I feel.

The Church may not ever hang an icon of her on the wall, but there is definitely one in my heart.

Tags: matushka, orthodox

 have to admit, I feel sorry for the youth of today and the role models that they grow up with and see as inspiration. At least I had Superman, Luke Skywalker, and yes… Knight Rider. When I was young I loved that show and watched it with enthusiasm. I looked up to these people who were honest, moral, courageous, and over-all good guys. Today, we have many travesties in the heroes of TV and movies.

            I had the misfortune to witness the new Knight Rider Pilot on NBC last night. I was hoping for some inkling of the classic moral courage that the original series had. The original Michael Knight was the mysterious lone-wolf good guy who always seemed to help the “little guy”. I mean what better thing could you do with that character and that car than rescue little kidnapped children? What little kid, seeing that, did not day-dream of driving around in KITT and fighting crime? Now, what the viewing audience was subjected to was a glorified two-hour-long Ford commercial loaded with the agenda of modern liberal culture.

            It starts with having to have a tacked-on homosexual scene just to prove a point and shove the homosexual putrid view of morality down our throats. Then instead of a former police officer injured in the line of duty, we get a disenfranchised former Army Ranger (a veteran of the evil Bush War) who is a washed up gambler in debt to the mafia. I suppose I can understand the commercialization of the show on Ford’s part. They sponsored the show to sell cars. But I can tell you this, I will not buy another Ford or watch this show if it becomes a series, and I suggest that everyone else boycott them as well. It is time we stop passively accepting the glorification of immorality. They want to make a new Knight Rider series… fine … great, but stop having to make everything be driven buy some underlying social agenda. Homosexuality is not acceptable to most of us and it never will be. Do they only want to sell cars and have viewers who are gay or think that sort of thing is okay? I cannot for the life of me figure out how they think this is a good move, to alienate a good chunk of the public. And if you don’t think Ford had high level meetings in regards to the homosexuality portrayed in the movie, wake up! You better believe they did, and some idiot executive said yes, go with it. Well my last Ford was just that—my last. Want to know why American car companied are getting their behinds kicked all over the world—because they would rather promote the homosexual agenda than sell me a new vehicle. Fine, I can do much more profitable things with my time and I will buy a superior import next time from a company that keeps to its business of engineering better vehicles, rather than social engineering.

            On the outside chance that anyone connected with the show or Ford sees this, I hope you go back to the drawing-board and realize what really made the first Knight Rider a success, it wasn’t homosexuality!

Tags: ford, homosexual, knight rider, vomit
Current Mood: aggravated

ecently I had a bout of stomach flu or food poisoning; it hit me the night before I had to serve a Divine Liturgy (Feast of Theophany with the Great Blessing of the Waters). By that morning I felt sluggish and still had an upset stomach, but I soldered on and started serving. About half way through I began to fell really ill, I began to sweat and feel dizzy and as I stood trying to read my prayers I could see stars and I knew the feeling of an approaching faint. I had to stop and sit down and drink some water. I recovered enough to finish but I spent the rest of the day in bed.

            It is interesting what thoughts went through my mind when I had to stop in the middle of the liturgy like that. As a recently ordained priest, I find that the Evil One never wastes and opportunity to make me feel inadequate for the priesthood. I recall the thought that raced through my heart, “What if God is angered by my serving at the Altar being as sinful and loathsome as I am. What if he is causing me to be so sick that I can’t even stand up to finish the service.” It was frankly more frightening that the illness I felt. The truth is that I am woefully unworthy to serve as a priest. I constantly fail to show the love and compassion toward others that I should. I am frequently short-tempered and not very understanding of others. I felt this surge of my own sinfulness wash over me along with the fever and chills of my ailment. That is our great fear isn’t it; that our sinfulness will be exposed and we will be shown to be the terrible people we are; full of envy, hate, vengeance, lust, dishonesty, and immorality. We have very elaborate social systems in place to shield us as much as we can from these feelings of exposure. We pretend that most of our sins are a private matter. We convince ourselves that we are not hurting anyone but ourselves when we sin. In America we have the individualist humanistic paradigm that refuses to see the interconnectedness of all of humanity. It is as if we believe that we live and move in a vacuum.

            But then I remember that my feelings had nothing to do with the fact that God has called me to be a priest. Of course, He wants me to live a righteous life, but even when I sin I am still a priest, and as such the services a performed and the parishioners receive the Holy Mysteries. Beside that, many of the Holy Fathers suffered with bodily illness their entire lives. I am sure I am by no means the first priest who ever had to stop in the middle of a service because of illness. Like me the Holy Fathers were human beings and they felt sickness and pain. I thanked God that mine was but temporary. Sometimes a stomach bug is just a stomach bug.

Tags: altar, orthodox, priest, roac

s we are preparing for the Feast of the Incarnation (Nativity) I am reminded how mind-blowing the incarnation is in all aspects of what it means for mankind’s relationship to his Creator. Often we think of the Incarnation as a far off event; somewhere in Jerusalem over two thousand years ago God came down from heaven and was born in a manger, then everyone started shopping the day after Thanksgiving and the Feast of the Incarnation became the salvation for the retail industry every year. This is what it is supposed to be about… right?

The Incarnation was not a foreign experience for God. As St. Anthanasios the Great stated:

…the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entered the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us. He saw the reasonable race, the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father's Mind, wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption. He saw that corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression; He saw, too, how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled. He saw how unseemly it was that the very things of which He Himself was the Artificer should be disappearing. He saw how the surpassing wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to naught, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own.

The incarnation is about so many things that were needed for our salvation. A great gulf of rebellion and sin had developed between man and God; this was not God’s doing but our own. There was the need of a bridge to cross the gap and return to God, but in our own corruption and death we were unable to bridge the God-man gap. It was through the Incarnation that God became man, and therefore becomes the perfect bridge over the gap. The Incarnation is God literally stretching out His hand to us in a form that we would recognize. God was no longer a diaphanous cloud on a mountain that no one could behold, on the contrary, everyone saw Jesus Christ even the blind! He, who is beyond time and space, became matter composed of atoms. He got hungry, tired, sad, happy, scared, and even tempted, yet although Christ shared all these common human experiences with us, He remained without sin. This was necessary for us to receive the God-man Bridge, who provides us the ability to return to relationship with the Godhead. As in the parable of the prodigal son, where the son returns to the father, mankind returns to our Heavenly Father along the path of His Son.

As one of our many hymns regarding the Incarnation states, “Gabriel stood amazed…” It send chills up my spine every time I hear it, can you image what it must have taken to have the Archangel Gabriel to stand with his noetical eyes wide and his mouth open as he sees the Theotokos receive within her virgin womb God made flesh. It is unimaginable to visualize the radiant light that shown in her womb like the burning bush that is not consumed, and that it amazed even an archangel!

My hope is that whoever reads this will ponder these things in their preparation for the Nativity (Incarnation) of our Lord, rather than visions of sugarplums and candy canes. Let us worry about the salvation of our souls rather than that of the retail industry.

Tags: christ, christmas, feast, incarnation, jesus, nativity, orthodox, orthodoxy, roac

f you have been Orthodox  for very long, and especially if you are in the priesthood, then you will be very familiar with the situation I am about to describe. I am standing in line at the check out stand of the grocery store, in my priestly garb, when the person behind me asks, “Are you a priest or something?” I politely answer in the affirmative, “Yes. I am a Russian Orthodox Priest.” That is when it happens— they ask “The Question”, “What is the Orthodox Church?”

            If you’re like me, a shiver runs through your mind when “The Question” is popped. I have not met a person yet that can answer that question with any efficacy in the amount if time it takes the questioner to walk away from you. I often wonder if even Saint John Chrysostom himself could answer that question in the grocery store. Obviously, we don’t have time to delve into the intricacies of Orthodoxy while we wait to pay for our groceries (not that I am aware of them myself). Some people spend years trying to understand Orthodoxy in what we call catechism. Even when we become Orthodox, even priests, there are times when we come across concepts that blow our minds and remind us just how much more there is of what we don’t know than what we do know. The real question is why people ask such an unfair question, especially in a place that virtually prohibits any meaningful response? What they are actually trying to accomplish is to pigeon-hole us into the conceptual framework that they have. If I told them that Orthodoxy was similar to Roman Catholicism, then they could look up Roman Catholicism in the filing cabinet of their mind and have some understanding of it. If I said that it is a form of Protestantism, then they could fit that into some assumptions that they have about Protestants. But neither the questioner nor I have the time in the grocery store to completely revamp their contextual framework of Christianity.

            I am sure that these people are not intending “The Question” to be unfair, but as human beings we want to categorize things and know who people are and what things and concepts are surrounding us. Undoubtedly, many people, from layman to bishop, have found that there is no adequate answer to “The Question” that can be given in the space of about thirty seconds. What should we say to these folks? How do we even hope to shed the faintest light on the treasure of Orthodoxy in just a sentence or two?

            The answer is… we don’t! When I am faced with this situation I make no attempt to say anything about the Orthodox Church at all. Why am I prepared to have this person walk away still ignorant about the Orthodox Church? It’s simple; I would rather them remain ignorant than to walk away with Orthodoxy pigeon-holed as similar to Roman Catholicism or Protestantism. We have all heard the old saying, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression.” I would rather have postponed that first impression in the grocery store than have allowed the person to draw incorrect conclusions about the Orthodox Church. Some people have an aversion to Roman Catholicism which could unduly be transferred onto the Orthodox Church by such false conclusions. Worse yet, they could consider us merely another denomination of Christians that make up the whole Christian Church. In other words, when I don’t have time to make the distinction in their minds I prefer to leave them with none.

            What is my solution? I put the onus back on the questioner! I carry my cards in my front pocket so that they are very handy. When “The Question” is loosed, I smoothly pull one of my cards out of my pocket and hand it to them saying something like, “If you really want to know the answer to that question, here is my card. Call me sometime and I can explain it to you over a cup of coffee or something.” Now, realize that sometimes people have refused to take my card. However, most of the time, they simply smile and take it politely and pitch it in the next available garbage can. I waste a few dollars worth of cards per year on people who were asking about Orthodoxy as a passing curiosity—so what! Perhaps one out of every fifty cards I hand out in this manner results in the person calling me to find out more about Orthodoxy. There are many other forms of advertisement that would love to see that kind of return on investment.

            The main point is that I avoid answering the riddle of “The Question”. This saves me loads of wasted breath on people who are not even listening to my response, much less interested in the true faith. If they are seeking the truth and God has seen fit to intersect our paths, then they need my phone number worse than they need a shabby two sentence answer to “The Question”.

Tags: orthodoxy, questions, russian
Current Mood: cheerful