When the Homily is about Immunology

It's all in the Head

The night before last I got myself involved in an interesting discussion with a friend of my mother-in-law. She had attended Joseph's baptism and because she had been staying with us in our home, had also seen our icons, prayer books, vigil lamp, candles, etc etc etc. I could sense that she, as a "non-denominational" protestant converted from Roman Catholicism, was uncomfortable with some aspects of what we Orthodox do. She tried her best to be polite and respectful and for that I honor her, but eventually she had to say something.

In the wee hours of Sunday/Monday, she spilled her theological guts. And, in a nutshell, what I discerned from her lengthy and somewhat incoherent (she had drank a little too much at Joseph's party) soliloquy was that much of what we do is not so much wrong as unneccesary. To her, all that really mattered was prasiing Jesus and loving Him with your heart. It doesn't matter what you wear to church, the bowing and crossing doesn't matter either, the only thing that counts is apparently what happens internally. She told me emphatically: "James, all you have to do is praise God and love Jesus with all your heart, you have to accept Him into your heart as Lord and savior." I could almost hear the can opener whinning to a halt.

Sometimes I think we have turned Christianity into SPAM. We reduce it to its bare "essentials", package it nicely, market it, and then try to convince people that it still has some nutritional value. Then, when people open the can and find it empty we tell them that all you have to do is believe in your heart that you are being "fed."

ANYWAY, the main thing I mean to communicate here is not the content of our conversation, but rather what it has since brought to my mind. We've all heard the phrase: "Don't judge a book by its cover" and this is sound advice...for a book. Books, you see, are inanimate and unable to express internal realities and attitudes with external actions. We look highly upon ourselves, as human beings, for our intellectual capabilities but we must NOT forget the wonderful means by which we are able to manifest the unseen. In the end, I think how we externalize more accurately reflects what is going on internally. Of course anyone can stand before an Icon of Christ, bow, cross themselves, and kiss it. Indeed anyone can dress up in their finest linens to attend church. Hypocrisy is not the issue, however.

Do you realize that America is one of the few countries in the world that has virtually no physical means of showing respect or honor? A friend of mine suggested handshakes, but I poo-poo'ed him on that one - I don't buy it. I wonder if our high regard for "equality" has lead us to the point that you pretty much have to be a dead American to receive any honor! There is something to this, indeed this is part of what makes Orthodoxy seem so foreign to those of us in America (perhaps even in all of the western world.) We physically manifest our prayers, our respect, and our honor. We cross ourselves, we bow, we prostrate, we kiss, we externalize. They are all tools to manifest and actualize the internal reality. Sometimes, and this is very important, these physical manifestations actually CREATE internal realities that were not there to begin with. I have experienced this first-hand.

I was always taught that to worship "in spirit and truth" meant that worship took place in the head (heart). But it's not true. We humans are unique in that we occupy both the physical and spiritual realm and neither is better than the other and neither is MORE our "home" than the other.

And so when she says that the things we Orthodox do are uneccesary, I disagree. In our mad rush to curb the potential for hypocrisy or to reduce our Christianity to its so-called essentials, we cut our own noses off to spite our faces.