When I grew up ...

When I grew up paleteros carted around Mexican ice cream while jingling bells as they walked in weather reaching into triple digits. If you missed him the first time you knew you had time - an hour or so - to scrounge for change before he made his walk through the neighborhood again.

When I grew up small children took baths outside in buckets. Their mothers' sudded them up and let them splash around a bit while they laughed and got out, naked, to run around a bit before being put back in the buckets for a final dousing.

When I grew up most houses didn't have home theatre systems and so families instead opened their car doors to play Tejano music all day long. Sure, the music sometimes went into the wee hours, but I much prefer that to the silent walks I take where I live now - the stillness only occasionally broken up by the flicker of TVs seen through living room windows.

When I grew up every weekend was cause for a colorful celebration somewhere nearby. Whether it was visible in the form of a brightly colored piñata just perceptible over a fence as it flew this way and that or by the cars spilling out giggling girls and nervous boys to some girl's quinceañera.

When I grew up, every month without fail, a homeless man would knock on the door asking if he could do any yard work for a few dollars. We'd give him something to drink, the use of a few garden tools, and some money for his efforts.

Last week I was reading a post from Second Terrace and on reading his third point I was given pause.

3. The Orthodox Church, as a whole, has not even taken the first step to talk to a real, live, unchurched American. To our shame, we have jumped to too many foolish conclusions from our passive acceptance of post-protestant and post-catholic "converts" -- and we have paid for this foolhardiness. This complete disregard, coupled with an offensive faithfulness to dogma, should have been the first priority of study by all Orthodox seminaries together (and probably by all Orthodox theological societies -- if they exist). Sorry for this stridency, but some disclosure is appropriate here: I'm one of those converts, and I have failed at bringing Orthodoxy to the unchurched and feel rotten about it.

It got me thinking that the current route to evangelism we have taken is by way of books. Every year new books come out about wives being dragged into Orthodoxy only to love it somewhere along the way, about long journeys from church to church authors have had to take before they found their home in the Church, about "more approachable" or "more complete" denunciations of modern Roman or Protestant errors, etc. And yet we seem to have made little effort to step back from the printing press and actively engage people.

Podcasts are wonderful, lectures are great, and books certainly have their place, but they are not a replacement for actively engaging the culture. These people might be those of my youth described above (I also feel rotten for having failed to do my part for them), or our families when we return home for the holidays, or the complete stranger we smile at as we wait to pick up our lattes at Starbucks. The thing about secular culture is that it has no interest in filling perfectly good shopping time with profit neutral activities like religious observance. To quote C. S. Lewis, "...we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

Similarly, we keep writing books and expect people to know to search them out. Certainly I acknowledge the appetitive nature of the soul found in all men (constantly seeking after God to fill that empty space in his chest), but the average American is satiated with fast food, movies, television, and the Internet. Where in that brightly colored, MSG flavored world is there time or inclination for the ordinary person to feel any motivation to seek out God?

If American Orthodoxy is to grow it must do so by faithful people living as examples of piety and humility to everyone they encounter. It must vocally answer moral questions without apology. It must seek to grow in unchartered territory and not be content to constantly forage over the same ethnic brownfields it has lost over the years. "If only we could get our people to come back to church" is not a plan. Those people can no longer be differentiated from any other member of secular society. It must acknowledge the difficulty of the ascetic struggle without attempting to conform or call outdated central theotic precepts like fasting, almsgiving, and love for one's fellow man no matter how much he hates you and causes you grief.

We must look for opportunities to match the needs of the person to the gifts given to us. To quote Matthew 7:9, "Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent?" The solution to every evangelical dilemma is not the writing of a new book any more than feeding stones to your children will nourish them. When I grew up I knew very little about God and fed myself whatever was at hand, but now that I know Him I must acknowledge that it is not enough for me to be fed; I must find a way to bring food to the hungry as well.