A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY
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| Volume 6 Number 26 - Tuesday, June 29th, 2004 |
A Publication of the ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LAITY |
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The Orthodox Christian News Service |
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Gulags, Seminary, and Anger Dear Editor, Being both a convert and a former Holy Cross seminarian (class of 1998), I felt much of the same frustration during my time there as the anonymous seminarian who wrote “Letter from inside the Greek Gulag” does. Yet being a priest who has very recently moved from the Antiochian to the Greek archdiocese, and being married to a Greek from Greece, I have come to see the problem from both sides. Just as the Patriarchate of Constantinople has jurisdiction over many lands with a variety of cultures, Holy Cross welcomes under its wings not only Greeks but students of other jurisdictions and traditions. When I attended school we had Greeks, Antiochians, Ukranians, Ethiopians, etc. as well as converts from nations like America, Korea, Kenya, Uganda, and the like. At the same time, the ethnically Greek character of the school was extremely strong, and many non-Greeks felt threatened. I think that I and others initially rebelled against Greek culture because it was pushed so hard onto us. When people are pushed, they push back. Too strong an emphasis on ethnicity makes one want to uproot ethnicity from the church. However, it also happens the other way around: rejecting ethnicity in the church often creates fundamentalism in those whose ethnicity is threatened. If an ethnically Greek parish were assigned a priest who only performed English in the liturgy, they might rebel against him because he would be pushing them to assimilate. Radical Hellenism and the American melting pot are two sides of the same coin, two facets of the same extremism. Greeks tend to underestimate just how alienating a foreign language in a liturgical or social setting can be, and converts and/or non-Greeks tend to underestimate how threatened Greeks can feel if they think their culture is being taken away from them. Words like “gulag” only exacerbate the situation. Such words spring from genuine pain and genuine wounds, but they also create genuine pain and wounds. The gulag, of course, is the Russian acronym for the infamous prison system instituted by Lenin, used especially by Stalin to kill millions through starvation and maltreatment, and which was the template of the Nazi concentration camps. There is quite a difference between a strong emphasis on ethnicity in a school and a prison system designed to work people until they die, and it trivializes the deaths of millions to use the term as a rhetorical tool to attack a seminary whose name is a symbol of voluntary suffering and pacifist death, the Holy Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. In any case, I attended seminary as an Antiochian, and we were not required to take any Modern Greek. At that time, as is probably the case now, only those in the Greek Archdiocese were required to take Modern Greek; I had to take Arabic, and those from other jurisdictions probably had comparable ethnic requirements. The Master of Divinity degree offered by Holy Cross is a program one generally takes to prepare for ordained ministry. Modern Greek is a necessary tool for communicating with the flock, because not everyone coming to this country will speak English right away, and some people may not feel they are able to learn it. When you visit your first 80-year old woman in a retirement home who speaks no English, this lesson is pounded in. If you’re going to minister in El Paso, you should know English and Spanish, if you’re going to minister in Montreal, you should know English and French, and if you’re going to be a priest in the GOA, you must know both English and Greek because some of the laity will only know one or the other. I think that when people enter into this debate on either side, they generally do not know what St. Basil the Great wrote in his Address to Young Men on the Proper Use of Greek Literature. He counseled us to embrace literature (and culture) selectively, like a bee flitting from flower to flower and only extracting what is useful, discarding the rest. St. Basil did not say to step on the flower, or carry off the entire flower, which is the approach usually taken by one side or the other. St. Basil encourages us to read authors like Homer from a Christian perspective, not discard them or worship their writings. Consider the Parthenon in Athens: what did the ancient church do with it? They did not level it, nor did they keep it as a pagan shrine, but transformed it into a church in the 6th or 7th century dedicated to the Holy Wisdom (Agia Sophia) of God, and later rededicated it to the All-Holy Theotokos. That church no longer exists, but the thing was done, the perfect way of redefining the past in terms of a Christian vision. A priest of Indonesian extraction, Fr. Daniel Byontoro, once told an audience I was in to allow people their cultural space. That means not allowing one ethnicity to eclipse all others, and it also means not draining ethnicity out of the church. I agree that the social environment of Holy Cross does not find this balance very well, but seminary is an ideological battleground that is subject to a multitude of political forces that try to pull it this way or that. It is a bit of a social fishbowl as well, since it is nestled in a residential area far from the nearest subway line, so one can get a bit of cabin fever there that makes the issues of seminary the size of the world. I hope that I have not spoken too strongly, because I feel for the young person, but when dealing with difficult issues in the public sphere one must regrettably be more direct than tender, though the latter is my preferred approach. There is only one way that will find the balance between cradle and convert, Greek and non-Greek, and it cannot be dictated by a bishop, canon, council, or priest. It certainly cannot be accomplished through strife. It is a way springing from love, patience, and a willingness to see through the eyes of the other. You can only get people to do that by example. The battle for ethnicity is not a battle worth fighting either way. The only strife worth going the distance over is teaching a people to love those who hate us and pray for those who persecute us. That in itself will take a lifetime. Anything else is incidental.
Fr. Matthew J. Streett
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