When the Homily is about Immunology

Worship and the Church Building

Kevin Rains was touting the goodness of having church in a house and the badness of having it in a specialized building. Now I grant that Kevin is proceeding from a radically different paradigm than us Orthodox, and yet I felt the need to at least try (feeble though my little brain may be) and communicate the Orthodox perspective. It has alot to do with worship, which is a topic recently brought up by Wayne Olson and fits right in with what I have to offer below. Since I have no idea whether Kevin or anyone reading his blog ever ventures over to read my blog, I thought I might tempt being overly repetitive and share here what I wrote over there.

First I offered one of my old posts on the matter: HERE.

And then in reply to Kevin's gracious response, I wrote the following:

Eastern Orthodox theology and experience calls us to bring all the best of our creative beauty into our religion and specifically our worship...we want to see, smell, touch, and even taste our religion and worship - indeed this is, we believe, apart of our human nature to relate intimately with such things. It is how we experience our world and it is thus how we experience our prayer, worship, and God Himself in His energies.

Hence we bring to our community the incense, the Icons, the Chalice, and even the architecture of our building itself. All is intended to express and manifest the most profound beauty known to man - worship of his creator.

Indeed small can be beautiful but so also can be large.

Some say that Art for Art's sake is a wonderful thing, but how much more wonderful is art for God's sake. And I do not feel that I personally am in any position to judge the expense of any project of beauty when I see all of the money I waste on selfish and admittedly ugly things.

If we must tell the architects to put their pens (or CAD’s) down because we believe the resources are better utilized elsewhere, then we ought also to tell the musician to sell his instrument, the poet to put away his pen, the artist to sell his canvas, etc etc. Tell them all who create beauty that their time and money can be better spent helping the poor! If size is the issue then we must ask: How big of a canvas is too big? How long of a poem is too long? How much time “wasted” painting or writing is too much? Who could dare to draw such lines?

But do we really have to do all this? Isn’t there in truth enough money and resources in the world to feed everyone AND allow creative beauty to flourish – even expensive creative beauty as might be found in a magnificent Cathedral that will call to worship generations of believers?

In terms of best “developing” community…first off I’d say that Holy Scripture is fairly clear in that we as the Church are MUCH more than a family. Community from the Eastern perspective exists and is manifested in the sharing of the Body and Blood of the Eucharist and cannot properly be accomplished through sociological techniques such as small group dynamics. To think it can, reduces our gatherings to little more than a social club or AA meeting and ignores or at least downplays the mystical aspect of our mutual union with Christ in the Eucharist, which was so crucial in the opinion of the Fathers and the early church.