Young People Have Found Something to Rebel Against; Modernity

Yesterday was a very long day.

As has been the case week after week over the past couple years, our Parish received quite a few inquirers into the ancient faith yesterday, many of whom had never walked into an Orthodox Church before.

Thus, being Sunday, by the time we left the church after Divine Liturgy, having finally finished sitting and talking one-on-one with the many different visitors, it was after 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and we had to be back at church by 6 o’clock for the evening Paraklesis service.

We rushed off to get a quick bite to eat, returned to church at 5:45 in time for the evening Paraklesis Service, and then didn’t get out of church till nearly 10 PM because there were so many young adults who lingered afterwards wanting to talk with us about a great many things related to all they are learning and experiencing through our ancient form of worship and the spiritual life.

All in all, we were at church yesterday from 9 AM to 10 PM with only an hour and a half break wedged in between. The entire day was spent either standing during the services, praying, worshipping, and meditating upon our Lord Jesus Christ, or standing with scores of young adults who were like teapots boiling over with excitement over the newfound love they were experiencing for Christ, through the rhythm of spiritual life via the Orthodox Church.

For someone who generally goes to bed at 8 PM each night, and whose body has changed remarkably for the worse in recent years due to injuries and the curse of simply growing older and more frail, Sundays have taken a lot out of me the last couple years.

But I wouldn’t trade this wave of inquiry into our ancient faith for anything.

I always wondered if I would experience something like this in my life, and here we are. I’m humbled more than I can express, to be a simple history teacher and church catechist, that gets to play even the very small role I do in helping connect with these young adults and helping guide them in building a relationship with a spiritual father: namely our priest who leads our parish, who himself never seems to sleep and has the energy of ten men. He is awake at all hours of the day and night. I have never seen anything like it. It is a testament to the reality of the Holy Spirit who gives him the energy to be there for the hundreds of people who have been baptized into our faith the last couple years.

After Pascha this past year, he had just spent leading our congregation in worship day and night for an entire week, and the Pascha service itself didn’t finish until around 2 AM Sunday morning, yet there he was in the sanctuary until 4 AM sitting with a visitor who had never been to an Orthodox Church before. By 4:15 AM I could barely stand, I was so exhausted, and I left our priest ministering to that young man. The next day I said to him, “Father, you just spent a week of practically living at the church, and it was 4 AM! You’re allowed to go home and sleep.”

His response was simple and pointed, “I can’t know if I will ever get to sit and talk with that young man ever again, and God brought him to us last night, so I’m responsible to love him, and be present with him, as though he is my own spiritual child.”

That is the kind of love and time our priest gives to people who are merely visitors, so you can imagine how much of his life he sacrifices for our parishioners.

As I’m nearing a half a century having lived on this earth, it is quite remarkable to have scores of young adults in their late teens, twenties, and early thirties stand with us for hours on end at our church services, and then spend entire days and long into the evenings talking with us after Liturgy and after Vesper services.

We’re told by the media that young people en masse are addicted to screens; the Internet, YouTube, and the like.

And I realize that in many ways there is truth in that cultural observation. Yet, for the untold number of young adults who’ve either been baptized into our faith through our parish, or who have come to visit our church and inquire into Orthodox Christianity, at least for the time they are with us at the sanctuary, their screens are far from them. And instead, they are entirely immersed in experiencing Christ through our ancient form of worship.

I was born shortly after the end of the 1960s hippie movement. For a couple decades of the twentieth century, the Western World saw young adults intentionally become countercultural both politically, philosophically, musically, and sexually.

All across Europe and the Americas in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, young adults first labeled “Beatniks,” then “Hippies,” protested, joined communes, attended rock concerts, and lived lives that were expressly opposite of the largely straight-laced suburbanism of their parents and grandparents.

I’ve read more books than I can remember and original source materials on these countercultural movements. From the pages of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, to watching the documentaries on Woodstock and the like, it is a fascinating era of Western Culture, and even more amazing that so many of these countercultural young adults ended up becoming the political elite of Europe and the Americas all these years later. Those same people who rule over us politically.

What is so striking to me about this amazing wave of interest into Orthodox Christianity the last couple years is that the young people who are coming to our faith are in many ways the very countercultural figures of this era.

You see, to be an Orthodox Christian is about as opposite of modern Western Culture as one can get.

American Christianity for some time has been mainly about being entertained.

• It is about listening to someone talk at you for a half hour on Sunday.

• It is about listening to people with microphones stand on stage as they sing to you.

• It is about being served a well-put-together package presented to the attendees as Modern Christianity with all the bells and whistles of good lighting, sound systems, smoke machines, and more.

People in the Western World are accustomed to getting things immediately. They go to a fast food restaurant, and if their meal isn’t served within a few minutes, they grow testy and furious.

Orthodox Christianity couldn’t be more opposite of that.

If you want to join the Orthodox Church, you can’t merely fill out a piece of paper, attend a single class, and then be given what you want. In Orthodoxy, we view the spiritual life as a marathon, not a sprint.

A friend of mine recently had coffee with a catechumen who hasn’t been to church in a couple months. The catechumen expressed to my friend the main reason they are upset is that they aren’t allowed to receive the Eucharist, “why can’t I receive communion with everyone now!” lamented the catechumen to my friend, “I’ve been a believer in Jesus longer than you have, and you get to receive the Eucharist but I don’t?” they said in great frustration.

Things take time in Orthodox Christianity, because we know the spiritual life, takes time.

We stand for hours and hours, repeatedly praying many of the same prayers, again and again.

We don’t merely pray for our loved ones at Liturgy, we pray for the entire world; the nation we reside in, the city we live, the countryside, the political leaders over us, we pray for everything under the sun, and I quite literally mean that.

And once we’ve gone through and prayed for everything once, essentially beginning our prayers in the narthex, outside of the sanctuary, we then find ourselves inside the sanctuary of our churches, and we pray all those prayers again, moving them closer to the altar, the throne of God.

And then the ancient Saints in their wisdom, knowing that the entire world needs us to not merely pray twice, we then, once we are now moved before the Altar, pray for the needs of the entire world a third time during our Sunday service.

This kind of devotion in prayer can have a couple different effects. For some people, who are looking at their watch because the football game has already started, it can be the kind of prayer and worship that is bothersome, and invades their personal routine.

Yet for those who stick it out, who come Sunday after Sunday, and simply stay. For those who linger long after the last incense and candle is burned. They begin to experience something that changes in them.

You see, the Orthodox Liturgy, with its long prayers and chanting, forms us. It calms us. It quiets us.

Everything outside of church seems to do the opposite. Driving in traffic, going to work, listening to the television. Everything around us seems to be filled with passionate chaos.

This ancient form of Orthodox worship that, for a certain sizable group of young adults who are visiting our parishes across the country, instead of entertaining them, or stirring up their passions, has the opposite effect; it produces a type of dispassion. What I call a “calming of the soul.”

After nearly a hundred years of various counterculture movements in Western Society that roused young adults up to being politically motivated, the current counterculture movement that has led this generation of young people into ancient Orthodox churches, the experience of Ancient Eastern Worship challenges them to speak less, argue less, and meditate on Jesus more.

Sure, there are your online “ortho-bro’s,” people I’ve mentioned in previous essays who have a misunderstanding about Orthodox Christianity, thinking it is a faith they are supposed to argue about. But they are merely faceless entities online. I don’t even know who most of them are, because for the vast majority of people I’ve watched the last few years become transformed in their spirituality through the rhythm of the ancient Church, instead of arguing with their families and friends, I’ve watched as they have learned how to be more long-suffering, better listeners, more peaceful, and more present when they are with others.

Isn’t this the kind of counterculture movement most older people have been praying for?

~ Kenneth

As Eastern Orthodox churches continue to see this interest among young people (and old alike), a number of people produced videos and essays in recent years excoriating Orthodox worship as not being “western”. These people have suggested it is regrettable that anyone would exchange their western cultural heritage for Eastern forms of worship and spiritual life.

I watched a couple of these videos that were sent to me with curious amusement, here were men who were trying to convince people that the problem with Eastern Orthodox worship is that it left them feeling less “American”.

It is an odd thing, since our ancient faith, thousands of years older than America, was birthed amongst a people who went against the very eastern culture they were surrounded in. The pagan idolatry, temple practices, and way of life of their neighbors was the very thing that God called them away from; to instead worship as God commanded, holy, set apart, unlike the culture of their era.

Orthodox worship is not easy, and the Orthodox way of life is very likely not for everyone. Learning how to give one’s entire life to prayerful meditation upon Christ, is a life long process, and it's not something one can master in a minute or a few short weeks or even years.

For older folks, who’ve spent decades of their lives in other Western Christian traditions, it can perhaps be jarring to find themselves at the beginning of the spiritual life in an Orthodox church, since they’ve never been taught that Saint Paul truly meant it when he told us we should “pray without ceasing”.

Coming to Orthodox Christianity is a humbling experience. Quite literally, humility is the core of our faith. And humility is something that Western Culture, both secular and the Christian variety know very little about.

Saint Paul could say, “I am the worst of sinners”, but for many people reared in various Western Churches, to come to an Orthodox church, having spent decades living a “Christian life”, only to now be faced with the idea that they too are the worst of sinners, is something they simply can’t accept.

That is okay, nobody is saying that everyone MUST become an Orthodox Christian. As I said in today’s longer than normal essay, we as Orthodox Christians pray for everyone, the entire world, because we know that not all will come to our churches; and so we pray for you where you are. Because we love you as much as we love those who do come to our churches.

Just as our priest stayed long in the night with that visitor; our love does not extend to others only if they want to become Orthodox. But rather, we are called to love you with every fiber of our being, and to be there for you, in any way that we can, regardless of what church you attend, or regardless of whether you are even a Christian.

And that my gentle reader, is how I approach these essays, and my relationship with each of you. I pray, that however I am able, I can attend to you in a spirit of love, if only through the simple scribblings and weekly musings I offer to you here on Becoming Orthodox.

For those who have the financial means, thank you for your support. I know I've said this a thousand times over, but I am forever thankful to God for you, because without you, I don’t know how we would have made it through some of these difficult times the past couple years.

Peace and blessings to all of you.