(Word from Guatemala) - Led by their charismatic leader in Guatemala- the late Father Andres Giron (2014), the Mayan people found a champion to vigorously address their spiritual and material needs. The social movement began with his advocacy for land reform and their repatriation to lands forcibly taken from them. No longer having a spiritual home because of many dislocations brought about by a brutal civil war and the absence of pastoral care, these same people also asked Father Andres to assume responsibility for their spiritual lives. Village after village sought him out for sacraments — baptisms, weddings, confessions, the Holy Eucharist, health care and healing. Having been expelled from his mother church for his political activities, he was additionally threatened with death and nearly assassinated four times, even while accompanied by body guards. Fr. Andres, nonetheless, bravely traveled to remote places where the faithful yearned to hear the Gospel preached from a man who dearly loved them, even unto death. This true apostle of Christ, accompanied by a small cadre of dedicated priests that he had inspired and trained, led his long-suffering flock into the embrace of the Orthodox Christian Church in 2010. It was Archbishop Athenagoras of Mexico who wisely opened the door of Orthodoxy to the tens of thousands of Mayans who now call the Orthodox Church their true mother.
Since this time, the church has grown and can now be found in more than 150 villages throughout Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. The seeds of this movement have now been planted in the United States in places like Oakland, California and the state of Washington, where pockets of Guatemalans are seeking to establish their own distinctively Mayan Orthodox churches. On July 13 and 14, I joined Father Evangelos Pata, the Vicar for Guatemala, in Oakland to celebrate the Divine Liturgy for 300 people, as well as the rites of Baptism and Chrismation for 16 candidates. Fr. Tom Zafferes, priest of the nearby Ascension Church, with the blessing of his hierarch, Archbishop Gerasimos, desirous of meeting the pious members of the community, participated as well. Most of the Guatemalan faithful hailed from the region of Todos Los Santos in the state of Huehuetenango. Arrayed in their typical indigenous vesture, they honored the revered traditional dress of their Mayan ancestors.
A bright future is envisioned for these fledgling communities of Guatemalans. Following the example of their beloved founder, Father Andres, they hope one day to reach out to the greater Latino community in the United States. Evangelistic efforts like this one are happening throughout Guatemala every day. Our team of five OCMC missionaries serving in the field, led by the five indigenous clergy, are spreading the Good News with support from so many people of good will throughout the world. To date, we have established the Father Andres Giron Medical Clinic, fully operational since 2015, the St. Andres Seminary, housing and training 12 students, a sewing center for Orthodox vestments, a catechetical training center for the many catechists of the church, a medical scholarship fund to train doctors and nurses, a center to publish liturgical texts and the “Calendario Ortodoxo” of daily saints and Scripture readings. Besides this, there is an active program of church construction and renovation taking place, allowing us to bear witness to the unique character of the Orthodox church in icons, architecture and ritual. All of this is made possible with the help and encouragement of Archbishop Athenagoras, as well as visiting OCMC teams of medical professionals, construction workers, translators, teachers, and many generous foundations and donors. Working together, we can make the great mission legacy of Fr. Andres and his priests and people, a great witness that redounds to the glory of God.
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Mayan Orthodoxy comes to the USA
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I have actively participated in several Christian sects and observed numerous liturgics, laity, hierarchy, politics, administration, aesthetics, etc. over five decades. And there is a constant as unchanging as the Our Father:
ReplyDeleteEkklesia is downstream from culture which is downstream from ancestry.
It's a huge and potent phenomenon, but we don't really have a framework for dealing with it.
Fr. Andres loved the Lord and the Mayan people who have a strong cultural identity. When I look at the United States I see two of those three things missing: a strong cultural identity (individual consumer does not count) and a love of the peoples and history of this land.
ReplyDeleteA nation of immigrants must never be allowed to become a nation of natives. Thus ethnic Mayans are given a Church in the middle of a multitude of pre-existing jurisdictions. Anything but an American Church, because nobody can agree on what constitutes the American nation.
DeleteAs I commented elsewhere, it seems development of an American Orthodoxy is being retarded, even walked back, by diaspora mentality. But perhaps there's a deeper problem, which would be that there's no longer an integral American nation to which an Orthodox Church can be wed and form a feedback loop with culture and ancestry.
This is Orthodoxy as detached, incorporeal doctrine. Instead of an inter-generational institution growing itself in its pews, Orthodoxy becomes a convert book club.
"...perhaps there's a deeper problem, which would be that there's no longer an integral American nation to which an Orthodox Church can be wed and form a feedback loop with culture and ancestry"
ReplyDeleteYou and Michael are speaking to the same thing - is the consumerist and "safety first" self an actual basis for a culture, nation, and people? The evidence is rather overwhelming - America is not a nation or culture but a collection of Cartesian Selves whose purpose in life is too get "a good education" so that they can live comfortably and in relative safety. Their worst fear is someone coming into the stores they shop at with a military looking rifle and confronting them with their own mortality. If a 'diaspora mentality is a dead end, then it is equally true that an 'American Church' has no place to actually to begin - no soil where a sacramental culture can actually take root.
"...This is Orthodoxy as detached, incorporeal doctrine. Instead of an inter-generational institution growing itself in its pews, Orthodoxy becomes a convert book club."
This is a good description of the status quo (exceptions exist) and is a truth that Orthodox intelligentsia and ordained hierarchy don't even seem to know exists, let alone have a strategy to deal with. Orthodoxy has come into our secular and consumerist circumstances with all the presuppositions of this Imperial Church of the East and simply overlaid its practices and habits on top. In a sense, they are on "a mission from God" (to borrow a line from the Blues Brothers) and seem incapable of distinguishing the Gospel and actual ascetical/Patristic Christianity from Eastern Church Christendom. In practice the two (related) failure paths that Fr. Schmemann warned us about end up being the actual pattern of Orthodoxy in America - ghettoized ethnic consciousness on the one hand, and compromised/secularized thinking and praxis on the other.
A few cry in the wilderness (e.g. Rod Dreher & Fr. Stephen Freeman) but the momentum of our current praxis/subculture & "the institution" work against any fundamental questioning of our assumptions and direction.
Lord have mercy
The good news is we really are still early in this experiment and have the opportunity to succeed. May the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon us and save us.
DeleteI don't disagree on a certain level. Yet there is a level where the truth is we really are out of time. Take my family for example. I have two daughters, aged 5 and 10. They are not an "experiment" - they are much more, and quite literally their eternal salvation is at stake. I only have a handful of years to do what I can do to ensure their proper human and Christian formation. Should I remain in what is fundamentally an "experiment" - a dysfunctional status quo of Orthodoxy trying to adapt and "work" in its circumstances? If the answer is yes, then how do I work successfully in what is currently a failed experiment? If the answer is no, where do I go? The "continuing Anglicans", the RC? Out of the frying pan and into the fire no matter how you slice it.
DeleteAs our host says, whatever we do on a personal, family, ecclesiastical, and even cultural level it has to bear fruit. What is the fruit of Orthodoxy's rather haphazard attempt to "be" the Church in secularized western civilization? Is it "ok" to whistle past the graveyard for a hypothetical Orthodox culture of future generations...somehow I don't think so.
Issues of an American Orthodox Church and the non-canonical situation in the U.S. aside, I am glad that there is a group of people interested in being missionaries to the hispanic population in America. There is such a divide in our country right now...I am half hispanic, but don't look it, and for the first time in my life, I am wary of telling people due to the political situation right now. Because our nation is so divided, a good thing that could come of a Guatemalan Orthodox church is that people from hispanic backgrounds might feel welcome/comfortable going to an Orthodox church and that more people would learn about Orthodoxy.
ReplyDelete"Hispanic" is a linguistic category. This wasn't started for Spanish-speakers, but for ethnic Meso-Americans. I don't think Iberian-descended would be comfortable in a Mayan Orthodox parish.
DeleteBlood, apparently, is thicker than water.
My mom is Mexican from East L.A., but we are very American. Mexicans have been in Los Angeles since the city was founded. With the rhetoric going on today, people seem to forget that there are places in America where hispanic people have always been and it makes sense for them to be there. I would feel comfortable in any loving, Orthodox Christian community. It seems like the Mayan Orthodox are missionaries that take action and if they want to spread the gospel to hispanic people in the U.S., I think its wonderful. For the record, I am conservative and not a liberal, however, the rhetoric against immigration is so strong right now some people seem to be generalizing their frustrations against all hispanic people.
DeleteA lament I hear often from Protestant converts is "I miss the fellowship I used to have in my old denomination."
ReplyDeleteFact is we have yet not learned how to build communities which rely on Jesus and the community members first.
There is still a remnant of that on the ethnic attachments, thus they persist.
However that remnant tends to freeze out people who do not share the ethnicity.
The work of Fr. Paul Abernathy in Pittsburg is quite hopeful.
I am tempted to think that we poor Europeans are too infected with the Cartesean virus to be much good at it. Plus we are too rich.
The Afro-American and Native Americans tend to understand the idea much better.
These comments all seem to be based on the attitudes and social issues facing educated comfortable middle class North American Orthodox who can leisurely ruminate over the jurisdictional mess facing the Orthodox diaspora in the western hemisphere. Things are different among the Mayans.
ReplyDeleteRegarding jurisdictions: Fr Giron of blessed memory had asked several Orthodox jurisdictions to accept the Mayans into the church. It was the Greek archdiocese that responded and accepted them. The Mayans want to be part of the worldwide Orthodox community; they have no pressing vanity to become a separate jurisdiction.
The only reason an "Iberian" Spanish or "Ladino" person would be uncomfortable in a Mayan Orthodox church is guilt over the decades of organized genocide perpetrated against the Mayans. They were abandoned by Guatemalan society, government, and their former churches to a life of abject poverty, disease, and malnutrition. Their simple but intense love for Fr Giron, who fought in every way he could to lift them up, has been transferred to a very simple but very intense love for their new found Orthodox faith. Imagine if you can, a tiny remote mountain Mayan village of 3,000 people packing Sunday Liturgy with over 500 worshipers. They are a very warm and appreciative people, scratching out a meager existence from subsistence farming. They would probably be puzzled and confused to hear fellow Orthodox engage in such bantering as published in these comments. My observations are based on having spent several weeks working in a Mayan village clinic with the OCMC.
Your dismissiveness does not become you. It is easy to imagine 500 of 3000 villagers showing up. Indeed through most of (both eastern and western) Christendom and its normative village life, this was the norm. Indeed, the number seems too low...why were not 1000 or 2000 showing up? Honest question.
DeleteAlso, if they are "puzzled" by Orthodoxy as it actually is for many (most really: Greece, Romania, Ukraine, Russia - all very secularized) of its adherents, just what sort of " worldwide Orthodox community " do they think they are joining? What will happen to their "simple" faith when (not if) a certain prosperity and secular world view eventually becomes part of their daily life?
Why do they require a Mayan Orthodox jurisdiction in the US? And why isn't it "Guatemalan Orthodoxy?"
DeleteCan I start "Anglo Orthodoxy" and find a Greek bishop to validate it?
I'm told (over and over) that the Church is an ecumenical model, not an ethno-nationalist one, but we seem to be getting more ethnic nation-state Churches, not less. And in an interesting twist on ecumenicism, these jurisdictions seem to be multiplying under Constantinople, even as its actual See shrinks.
I'm being told one thing, and I'm watching the hierarchs act another.
And now I'm told well, you see, it's that the Indigenous and African-American appreciate that whole Orthodox community thing more (combined with an implicit accusation of Oppression). Okay, well let's right that wrong: do I need to start an Anglo community under the generic "American" umbrella like the Mayan/Guatemalans have done?
This is why I say we have no framework for dealing with this.
For the record, I simply like the idea of a group of people being Orthodox missionaries to the hispanic community here, but I don't support the EP.
DeleteAnd I agree with you, Orthodox mom. It's ironic that Catholic Guatemalans are becoming Orthodox, even as the EP seems to be closer to union with the Pope. I have heard the missionary priest, Fr. Chakos, speak about the mission. Too bad it IS under the EP.
DeleteWhat an awful, glorious mess Orthodoxy in the Americas is!
ReplyDeleteExcuse me, I thought Maya were an indigenous people and not Hispanic. They have their own language (though I do not know if Divine Services are being served in it) and autochthonous culture and are not mestizo to a large extent.
ReplyDeleteI laud the advent in Oakland and elsewhere of Mayan Orthodox communities and hope the churches they use serve as adequate refuge for them in this time of official persecution of just such immigrants by the regime in Washington that scapegoats refugee victims of violence in Central America. I hope their presence here among us awakens Orthodox people in this country to the gravity of our situation as a nation and of vulnerable people everywhere.
Sooo...."woke" (your term -"awakens") secular political morality is a justification and support for de facto ethnophyletistic ecclesiology in the Church?!?
DeleteYour working (i.e. thinking) exactly backwards...
Van..an interesting mix of progressive ideology)political correctness and the Church. Does not work.
DeleteIt is quite possible to make similar statements independent of any regime. Exactly why Solzhenitsyn warned us about ideology.
If it is pleasing to God that they are here is what is important.
If you expect the Orthodox Church to man the barricades, you will be disappointed. The Church does not have a revolutionary ethos. We are far more radical than that not being of the world.
Revolutionaries always miss that reality and so always end up in bloodshed and destruction. Nihilism at it's finest.
I see I touched a nerve. Your straw men do not withstand scrutiny and your intolerance of the mere mention of a nasty political and social reality just such people as Mayan immigrants face tells me utterly narrow is your own definition of Church.
ReplyDeleteThere is really no theological basis for carving out a unique ethno-national jurisdiction in the middle of the US, which already has three mature Orthodox jurisdictions operating at the margin of canonicity. It's bizarre that, after decades of insular Hellenism, the EP suddenly decides it's time to hand out ethnic-based jurisdictions. Do the African-Americans get one? How about the Anglos?
Delete+Bartholomew has unleashed centrifugal forces in the Communion.
He is not talking about any of that. He turned on his TV one day and now understands identity politics as the beginning and end of all morality and Christian things. He misses the irony of his use of "narrow" ;)
DeleteFr Andre, Mexico and Alaska show the power of defending the oppressed as a powerful ministry for Jesus Christ. Also exposes the sorry state of Hispanic orthodoxy that a priest had to come from Gautamela for this. You would think that they would use this as an opportunity to establish a local priest.
ReplyDeleteExactly. Typical contemporary Orthodox lay responses to issues of ministry to oppressed communities seems to leave outnthenrolenof Church as liberator and civilizer. Reading about the history of Cluny monastery in the chaos of X-XI c. Burgundy one can see how the very notion of civility often comes from no place other than the Church.
DeleteTo pretend that the adventnof full-blown Guatemalan Mayan Orthodox communities in the midst of a very sick American scene does not portend opportunities for repentance - especially from ideologies of hatred - shows real spiritual blindness.
There is Orthodox Ecology, so sure Orthodox Liberation Theology...why not? All that in the Gospel's and the rest of the NT about not wetting your finger and sticking it up in the air just has to be wrong ;)
DeleteHello Jake, there is the example of Christ coming and preaching and eating with the unclean groups. Then there is the early church giving care to anyone and challenging the bread monopoly of the state. This isn't exactly liberation theology, but rather speaking truth to power and preaching to those who feel unvalued that the kingdom of God is in them. While the church respected authority it demanded some pretty radical changes. Would suggest book of on Social Justice by St Basil the great. Key difference is that in orthodoxy Christ is central and justice comes from a logical step of our transfiguration, (love can't bear it), versus what I think you are reacting to where social issues become the law....
DeleteWell I haven't read the book you mentioned, I would hope that Papanikolaou’s theory that modern Democratic political systems have some strong compatibility with the Gospel (I agree) would also mention the bad (secularism, anti religion that the system seems to create)
DeleteMichael,
DeleteThe current climate/culture - which means our thinking and strongly felt emotional "reaction's" - is not immoral or amoral, it is too moral. As Chesterton explained 100 years ago, the Christian virtues of the past are now unmoored to the center (i.e. Church, Christ, the Cross) and are now running amuck causing as much if not more damage than good. Every virtue, such as Justice, is *related* in a monarchical hierarchy of the Christian worldview (which is more than a worldview - it is reality itself). There is of course (social and every other kind of) Justice, but Justice alone is an absolute horror without Sacrifice and suffering (for example), and all the other virtues in a proper relation.
So something called "Mayan Orthodoxy" comes to America, and a discussion ensues. In walks VanOldenPhatt, who is simply not interested the how and what of it ecclesiologicaly speaking, or even really what it means for Justice in a Christian sense (see above) in North America. Rather he speaks in exulted terms (e.g. "advent") by which he means their very presence is somehow a thumb in the eye of Trump and the Deplorables who voted for him (I did not, but I will be the next time around fer sur).
His is a small justice that is no bigger than the evening news (which is not "informing" him, but manipulating him). He is emotionally and morally booted around like a ball as a matter of course, and he wants the Church to bless what he really believes is an enlightenment and liberation but is nothing more than a clever way to get him to buy more stuff.
He should shoot his TV. He can borrow my assault rifle to do so if he wishes... ;)
This is my favorite version of this thinking:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.com/Mystical-as-Political-Aristotle-Papanikolaou/dp/0268038961
Turns out the Gospel leads straight to....wait for it....Liberal Democracy and secular "rights"! All that Cross business just has to be a mistake...
Well I already cited the straw man fallacy... like a pit bull aren’t you? Obviously you don’t have a mongering heart...
ReplyDeleteThat's right, I am a meany weeny Christian pacini. "Woke" folks have nothing good to say about me... ;)
DeleteLighten up fellas. It doesn’t become you to impose your fetishes into this blog post.
ReplyDeleteWhether she has the appearance of a mosaic or a melting pot, our holy Church will like a loving mother surely lead her good children to the throne of God. And if in her human side she is not perfect, then lets correct ourselves first and show patience until God brings about the solution.
For the missionary minded, know that holiness draws far more fruitful members into the Church than do language, politics or any other idol.
Revealed preferences are that ekklesia is downstream from culture which is downstream from ancestry, QED, "Mayan Orthodoxy." Not, apparently, that there's anything wrong with that. But why do the Greek hierarchs tell us that the Church is ecumenical and hence one bishop for one territory, even as they discover yet another ethnic nation that requires its distinct exarchate on American soil? The cynical answer is that it buttresses the Ecumenical Patriarch's interpretation of Canon 28.
DeleteJust as an example of an non-cynical answer, the reason could simply be that a GOA bishop was moved in his heart to provide canonical (not that *anyone* in NA is canonical by the letter of the law) basis. As you note, despite historical, canonical, and theological intent, ethnophyletism is the de facto ecclesiological ontology of this Imperial Church of the East and has been since the fall of the Empire. What's a little more here or there? The double speak however is of course a scandal.
Delete