"I am the door. By me if any man enter in he shall be saved, and shall go in and out and find pasture." - John 10:9 At every parish where I have had the pleasure of attending services, there is always a small group of people who find their way all the way up to the church building but don't actually attend services. At one parish it was a group of male gypsies who talked on cellphones or smoked cigarettes. At another it was a few Protestant husbands who, though they never attended services, opened the parish doors for people as they filed in. At yet another parish the men stood in the narthex and chatted until it was time to receive and then got in line. Latin or Greek Catholic, Eastern or Oriental Orthodox I see the same small throng of men standing next to the front door, but not standing, sitting, or kneeling amongst the people. If it were me (and I can only speak for myself here) this option would be an unsavory one. The boredom would be immediate. The anxiety of som...
Some ethnicities carry their national Church with them wherever they go.
ReplyDeleteThis is either sinful when anybody does it or it's not sinful. Or our paradigm is off and we're not asking the right questions.
The universal tendency over two millenia of Christianity is for different peoples to craft distinctive liturgical forms and prefer them to others, to the point of some groups declining to out-marry and importing their own hierarchs. We are admonished repeatedly that this is a grave, schismatic sin, but the bishops, clergy and congregants continue to do it, over and over.
It's clearly an ethno-nationalist Church, but I'll defer on its theological standing. I don't get the sense these postings (and there are many of them) are to remind us that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek.
ReplyDeleteThe classic example to me is the "Carpatho-Russian" jurisdiction in the US. How many genetic Carpatho-Russians are even left? Are they shipping brides over from the Caucasus?
Like Jerry Seinfeld says, "Not that there's anything wrong with that." Again, the downstream effect of ethnicity and culture on liturgical practice is a universal and historic phenomenon that's outlasted the break-up of the Empire and trans-national migration. But nobody's hauling anybody in front of Councils over it and nobody's stopping Liturgies until we get it sorted out.
They separated early on by defining the Virgin Miriam as the christotolos and not the theotokos. Christ became divine at his baptism as such they are outside of the standard communion of churches. They do use Aramaic in their liturgy
ReplyDeleteWhy would Carpatho-Russians bring brides from the Caucasus? They're Carpatho-Russians, not Caucasian-Russians. Get your geography right before trying to make an argument.
ReplyDeleteHistorically, they were an extremely ethnically diverse church, stretching from Cyprus to China and from Soqotra to the Caucasus, until the Mongols and Tamerlane reduced them to populations in Kurdistan and Kerala. The 'Assyrian' was added under the influence of British missionaries who were trying their best to Anglicanize them, part of which involved making their identity ethnic rather than confessional. Their Indian dioceses don't use that part of the name.
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