Baptism/chrismation photos

The photos of my baptism have been posted. They can be found at the Holy Cross Orthodox Mission website, but I've re-posted the better ones here. In case there's any doubt, I'm the guy in the white shorts. Lydia, the little girl in the first photo, was baptized along with me. Her parents, Josh and Amelia, as well as her brother Judah, were chrismated. Also being chrismated with them were Benjamin and his fiancee Angie.

I took the name of Silouan at my baptism.

Rev. George Leyburn and the "Anatolic Church"

About a month ago I found an article in an 1872 edition of the Southern Presbyterian Review by George W. Leyburn on the Orthodox Church. Leyburn was a Presbyterian minister and missionary from Rockbridge, Virginia. He was a graduate of Princeton and was well versed in the Greek language. In 1836 he traveled to Greece to work as a missionary, but was prevented by the Greek government, which insisted he use the Orthodox catechism, or cease his activities. He returned to Virginia soon thereafter and resumed his pastoral duties in the vicinity of Appomattox Courthouse. During the the war, Leyburn served as a chaplain to the southern troops, although it is unclear whether or not he had a commission in the Confederate army. In 1875 he returned to Greece, at the insistence of the small group of evangelicals there, to continue his mission activity. After only living there a matter of weeks, Dr. Leyburn took ill and died. The work entrusted to him fell to his son, George L. Leyburn, and a Dr. Kalopothakes, a Greek convert and member of the Virginia Synod of the Southern Presbyterian Church.

I had to send away for a copy of the article since they have been archived by the Presbyterian Church in America, and no digital copies exist. I received a copy in the mail a few weeks ago, and though it was late when I returned home and picked up my mail (after midnight), I immediately sat down to read it, my eyes heavy with sleep. What I read did not please me. I mean, it did please me that I had a southern minister writing about Orthodoxy, but the content of that writing did not please me.

Leyburn, here referring to the Orthodox Church as the "Anatolic Church," writes: "Any Church that holds to tradition, and in the most gross and pernicious statement of it, as the Anatolic Church does, is radically degenerate, and even apostate." Leyburn scandalizes his readers with a litany of supposed heresies, ranging from the old hat - scripture versus tradition - to the worship of images and saints as gods and demigods. He calls the term "Theotokos," "dangerous" and "blasphemous," and takes language to mean that Mary is believed to have begotten God from before the ages. He takes the Synod of Jerusalem, held in 1672, as the definitive statement of what Orthodox Christians believe, although this synod was the product of a western influence within the Church, what Georges Florovsky has termed the "pseudomorphosis of Orthodoxy."

So we cannot blame Leyburn for the poor quality of his sources. He comes to the conclusion that the Orthodox are essentially pope-less Roman Catholics who lack the spiritual vitality of the same. He writes:

But as to vital, spiritual religion among the people of this great communion, there is a sad and terrible eclipse. The words are on the lips; the technology of piety is volubly used; - certainly so among the Greeks, and said to be so everywhere else in the communion; - you would think at first that you were talking with some of the most pious people in the world; and this has misled even missionaries at first. But alas! you soon find that, under this outward show, there is an utter want of true spiritual perception and understanding, - the shell without the kernel; - that every body is a Christian from baptism, and that repentance and faith, in their vocabulary, or rather, in their minds and hearts, have a meaning that falls far short, practically, of the true and saving one.

Emphasis mine. I found Leyburn's wording interesting; they lack the "true spiritual perception and understanding."

Leyburn rails against the tangible, visceral aspects of Orthodoxy; he praises the iconoclasts:

Leo and other "eikonoklast" emperors had made, through fifty years, one of the last struggles against this invasion of idolatry. But the Empress Irene, well styled by historians "the infamous," triumphed, in the calling of this council, which decreed every thing that she wanted. And, though the murderess of her husband, she is adored in the Greek Church as a saint, and her name constantly crowned with praises.

It is a mistake often made in the west of supposing Irene to be a saint, since Theodore the Studite praised her as a saint for restoring the icons. But she was never recognized as a saint by the Church, nor does she appear anywhere in the Menaion.

This section of the article was the most interesting to me because I'm fascinated with how southerners viewed Islam. The iconoclastic controversy was an outgrowth of the Byzantine Empire's contact with Islam, which was (and is) strongly iconoclastic. One common thread that appears in almost all of the writings I've read from southern intellectuals on Islam is their praise of Mohammed for bringing about the decline of an idolatrous nominal Eastern Christianity. Islam was often praised for being a more "pure" faith than Eastern Christianity, and for having a salutary effect on the benighted "barbarian" peoples of Africa and Asia. Leyburn, ignorant of the Orthodox evangelization of the native peoples of North America, finds no effort among the Orthodox to raise the "barbarians" from their, well, barbarism:

...if the body now spoken of be a true Church, even one of the parts of the true body of Christ, we might expect to find something of a gospel influence emanating from it upon the non-Christian races - at least those in immediate contact with it. But where has the "Greek" Church done the least particle of such work for ages upon ages past? What good and saving influence has she thrown out upon Mohammedanism?

I think it would have surprised Leyburn - and probably worried him - to know that for nearly 80 years, Orthodox missionaries had been converting the "non-Christian races" of Alaska.

Leyburn continues on the subject of saints and icons:

In the Catechesis of Darbares, already cited from, and the most mild, guarded and apologetic of all the published statements of Anatolic faith ever published, unless we except that of Bishop Plato, we find, in the exposition of the first commandment, even where he is defining the violation of it, such language as this: "That person sins inexcusably and greatly against this commandment who offers to the ministers of God almost the same honor that he offers to God himself; who prays more and oftener to them than to God; who celebrates their memory or their [festival] days with more reverence than that of our Lord; who honors their pictures more than that of our savior," etc. The indirect intimations of this language are sadly significant.

I can sympathize with Leyburn. There was a time when I would have been shocked by such language. Yet, here we have a catechism warning against idolatry. However, note that even when the Orthodox catechism warns believers against making saints equal to God, he still labels it as "creature worship:"

And, bad, in these things, as are her symbols of doctrine, the prescribed worship of the Anatolic Church is even worse. It is a dreadful fact that the larger part of the forms of worship found in the numerous collections of her church services, are addresssed to the Virgin and the canonized saints. And a large part of this vast accumulation may, without exaggeration, be called a compound of puerility with what a properly enlightened mind feels to be not only creature-worship, but even blasphemy and sacrilege of the most revolting kind....

Emphasis mine again. Honoring the saints and asking for their intercession is puerile. Only the "properly enlightened mind" can grasp that it is idolatry, blasphemy, and creature worship. I would love to see Leyburn's reaction to St. John Damascene's "Against Those Who Decry The Holy Images." And what's this business about the "larger part of the forms of worship" being addressed to the Virgin?

Had Leyburn not died so early into his mission efforts, I wonder to what extent he would have been successful. He did not have a clear understanding of Orthodoxy, of the development of Church dogma, or of its history. In part, he can't be blamed, since the sources that were available to him weren't the most accurate. The picture of Orthodoxy he was able to assemble was filtered through western sources - whether they were the "confessions" and catechisms of individual Patriarchs influenced by the West or English clergymen living in Russia who lent their "disinterested" and "objective" testimony to Leyburn's assertion that the Orthodox were idolatrous.

But there is also the anti-Catholic bias, which Leyburn could not help but betray (I should say he was happy to betray it), and that rubs off on Orthodoxy. Unfortunately, this is what many evangelicals today believe regarding the Orthodox.

It's what I used to believe.

Finally, Leyburn's dismissiveness and self assurance simply annoyed me: "We need not take much time for the evidence," he writes, with all of the assurance of a man who knows that he's right.

I shouldn't have been surprised at Leyburn's opinions regarding Orthodoxy. As I have found, almost without exception, southerners tended to take a low view of the Orthodox Church. The only real exception so far is the redoubtable George Fitzhugh, ever one of my southern heroes, despite his unfortunate racial notions (which, in his defense, he shared with pretty much everyone else at the time). How I wish I could transport myself back to that time and challenge Leyburn to a debate, but alas it can never happen.

Baptism

"Breathe and spit upon him."

I spat in church. On the devil.

I did a lot of things during Holy Week I'd never done in a church before. Spitting was just the beginning.

I didn't know until a few months ago that I'd never been baptized. I'd always assumed that it had happened when I was a baby, but no. So when I told my priest that I'd never been baptized he started scratching his chin - he'd never baptized an adult before. In fact, I was to be the first adult baptized in our little mission church.

A horse trough was purchased for this purpose. On Holy Saturday, I stood barefoot before the baptismal font in my hastily assembled white baptismal outfit (white Dickie shorts and a white Guayabera - I resembled a Central American drug lord more so than a candidate for baptism). The trough had been dressed up with a burgundy skirt borrowed from a nearby hotel - such is common in a little mission church. How fitting it was, I thought, that I was to be baptized in this horse trough, since Christ himself was laid in a feeding trough.

There is a mysterious connection between man's salvation and barns full of beasts.

I was trembling through the rite of exorcism, and was so nervous that I could barely produce the required saliva. And I was still trembling as I approached the trough and watched Father make the sign of the cross over the waters, which seemed forbiddingly dark to me from where I stood....

Then I climbed into the trough, kneeled down because it was too short and shallow for me to stand, and Father dunked me three times in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As I came up the first time I gasped for breath. People later remarked on this. A friend said that I had drowned in the water. It was the last gasp of a dying man. Or perhaps it was like the first in-drawn breath of a child as he is brought forth from his mother's womb.

Or the water was just cold.

But when I came up the third time something changed. I felt it almost immediately after being baptized and felt it quite acutely all that day. It was an almost tangible grace. A serenity descended upon me. An inquirer at our church who will soon be made a catechumen told me that I looked very peaceful and serene, and that he found it "very moving." It was a naked and unashamed state of being. "They looked to Him and were radiant, And their faces will never be ashamed."

How can anyone experience this illumination and say that baptism is a mere "ordinance," or a "testimony?"

As we were lead in procession around the tomb singing "As many as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ..." I had to fight back the tears of joy and gratitude.

How blessed I am to have been baptized Orthodox!

Pascha

As many as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.

On Saturday I was received by baptism into the Orthodox Church. I cannot even begin to describe all of it now, as I am still quite exhausted. But I will jot some things down in the coming week when I get some time.

Christ is Risen! Χριστός Ανέστη! Христос Воскресе!

Innocents Abroad

I'm highly fascinated by travelogues, particularly the travelogues of Americans - and especially those of southerners - in the Near East. On my reading list right now are two - first, the brilliant travelogue of Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, and the memoirs of James Morris Morgan (Recollections of a Rebel Reefer), a Confederate Naval officer who after the war accepted a commission in the Egyptian Army.

I wanted to post an interesting passage from Twain here because it betrays so much of the American mentality during the 19th century, and even today, with regard to what constitutes a "good" society, and how that affected American perceptions of the rest of the world. Twain heaped all manner of scorn on the filth and backwardness he witnessed in Constantinople. He described St. Sophia as the "rustiest old barn in heathendom," and the street scenes of Constantinople as something which ought to be seen once - not oftener. But shortly thereafter, while visiting Odessa, Twain noted that the city was just like America; everything was "new," bustling, bourgeois, and business-like, until his party walked a ways and came across a queer onion-domed church:

I have not felt so much at home for a long time as I did when I "raised the hill" and stood in Odessa for the first time. It looked just like an American city; fine, broad streets, and straight as well; low houses (two or three stories,) wide, neat, and free from any quaintness of architectural ornamentation; locust trees bordering the sidewalks (they call them acacias;) a stirring, business-look about the streets and the stores; fast walkers; a familiar new look about the houses and everything; yea, and a driving and smothering cloud of dust that was so like a message from our own dear native land that we could hardly refrain from shedding a few grateful tears and execrations in the old time-honored American way. Look up the street or down the street, this way or that way, we saw only America! There was no one thing to remind us that we were in Russia. We walked for some little distance, reveling in this home vision, and then we came upon a church and a hack-driver, and presto! the illusion vanished! The church had a slender-spired dome that rounded inward at its base, and looked like a turnip turned upside-down, and the hackman seemed to be dressed in a long petticoat without any hoops. These things were essentially foreign....

Folks who have been to this part of the world can sympathize with Twain. I visited Greece and Israel in 2007, and there were times when I was struck by the meanness and poverty of certain areas. I remember experiencing a feeling of relief when I spied a KFC on the streets of Tel-Aviv, not far from the old Ottoman quarter; here was something familiar and clean, something southern amidst a sea of run-down oriental architecture. I later repented of this feeling, though. There is nothing like sitting on the balcony of an old Turkish bathhouse/hostel, and looking out over the city in the late evening - narghila in hand - while someone plays a baglama somewhere off in the distance.

But I digress.

Twain later visited Ephesus. His party had its share of trophy hunters and many of them came away from the ancient city carrying bits and pieces of ruins and sculptures. Twain writes of the aftermath:

We [Twain means himself] brought not a relic from Ephesus! After gathering up fragments of sculptured marbles and breaking ornaments from the interior work of Mosques; and after bringing them at a cost of infinite trouble and fatigue, five miles on mule back to the railway depot, a government officer compelled all who had such things to disgorge! He had an order from Constantinople to look out for our party, and see that we carried nothing off. It was a wise, a just, and a well-deserved rebuke, but it created a sensation. I never resist a temptation to plunder a stranger's premises without feeling insufferably vain about it.

This passage struck a nerve. While I was in Israel and Greece, everywhere I went, I took little stones and potsherds. As Twain writes, "travelers are such notorious scorners of honest behavior." From Masada a tiny piece of the casemate wall - 'twas already cracked and barely attached; 'twas waiting for a gust of wind to blow it loose, so I merely helped it and pocketed it. At Megiddo, the ground is littered with potsherds, so I took a few of the miserable things, being very circumpsect about the whole matter. At Caesarea, old walls have been eroded by the ocean, exposing the waste the Romans used as filler. I picked through them and pulled out the handles to several amphorae, as well as some potsherds that had traces of ornamentation on them. It became a sort of mania - it was all so very old! It was like finding an arrowhead in a cornfield back home; only cooler. And these things were legion, so it appeared no one really cared about them. In Israel or Greece, unless it's old (2,000 years or more), it's not considered valuable. And if it's old, it can't be the equivalent of 1st century recycled waste. There are ancient columns in the Old City of Jerusalem - Byzantine and older - that are covered in graffiti. The ancient ruins of Tel Beit-Shemesh are exposed to the air, and covered in inumerable little potsherds. You can walk down into the excavated bits of the city and no one bats an eye. Some perspective - for a time, the Ark of the Covenant was kept there.

At the airport, on the way home from Israel, I was terrified that security would dig through my bag and find the ill-gotten potsherds. I had no idea how protective the Israeli authorities would be over a few miserable bits of pottery. When it came time for my bags to be checked, a young security guy in latex gloves tore into my bag; in addition to the potsherds, I had several containers of spices that my girlfriend had bought at the markets in Jerusalem and Akko. I should have been more concerned about these, for once the bag was returned to me, I found the spices had been opened - and presumably tested for their volatility (or illicit nature), and in the process had been spilled all over the interior of my bag. The "relics" were still there, unmolested, unnoticed, but all of my clothes reeked of saffron.

But I will say this: Israeli security, for all of their intrusiveness, are infinitely more polite about the matter than any American airport security I've dealt with - saffron notwithstanding.

Blind Willie Johnson

I was reading about Blind Willie Johnson today and came across an article on Wikipedia about blind musicians. There I read about the Kobzars of Ukraine, itinerant musicians who sang folk ballads, epics, and religious music. Kobzars were almost universally blind and formed together into guilds for mutual support. The Kobzar guilds were apparently associated with certain churches, using funds they'd raise during their performances for the upkeep of certain icons or for the purchase of items for the Church - in this respect the Kobzar guilds were modeled after the Orthodox brotherhoods which sprang up throughout Ukraine. The Kobzars were wiped out by the Soviets, but a few artists continue to preserve the art form today - although almost none of them are blind.

There is also a "tradition" of sorts in the South of blind singers. I've already mentioned Blind Willie Johnson, but there's also Sonny Terry, Blind Boy Fuller (both from my homestate of NC), Blind Blake, Willie McTell, Ray Charles, Arizona Dranes, and Blind Lemon Jefferson to name a few. There weren't any associations of blind musicians who helped the churches, but there were blind musicians who sang religious songs and proselytized. Among the blind performers of Gospel-Blues, Blind Willie Johnson stands out. Johnson performed some of the most haunting religious songs I've ever heard, particularly his "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground," which is a mournful moan over the crucifixion of Christ. The title is derived from a hymn written by Thomas Haweis, an 18th century Anglican priest and composer.



I've been thinking about the Fool-for-Christ figure that is so prominent in Eastern Christianity and its manifestation in the West. Asceticism, monasticism, and living like a hermit are not celebrated in Protestantism, especially when faith and election are associated with worldly success. But there are figures who are "crazy for God," individuals like Johnson, who lived in poverty and obscurity, preaching and singing.

Johnson also recorded "John The Revelator," a song about Saint John and the Apocalypse. I particularly like the line, "John the Revelator, great advocator." Johnson is referring to Christ as our advocate, but it's almost as if he's referring to John as our advocate, or intercessor. It's like a Blues troparion:



[call] Well who's that writin'? [response] John the Revelator

Who's that writin'? John the Revelator
Who's that writin'? John the Revelator
A book of the seven seals

[call] Tell me what's John writin'? [response] Ask the Revelator
What's John writin'? Ask the Revelator
What's John writin'? Ask the Revelator
A book of the seven seals

Well ooh ooh why me, thousands cried holy
Bound for some, Son of our God
Daughter of Zion, Judah the Lion
He redeemeth, and bought us with his blood

[Repeat verses 1 & 2]

John the Revelator, great advocator
Get's 'em on the battle of Zion
Lord, tellin' the story, risin' in glory
Cried, "Lord, don't you love some I(?)"
[Repeat verses 1 & 2]

Well Moses to Moses, watchin' the flock
Saw the bush where they had to stop
God told Moses, "Pull off your shoes"
Out of the flock, well you I choose

[Repeat verses 1 & 2]

Johnson's life was akin to something out of the life of a Fool For Christ, although more tragic. His mother died when he was very young. At the age of 5 he told his father he wanted to become a preacher. He was not born blind, but was blinded by his vengeful stepmother, who threw lye into his eyes. His death was also miserable and tragic:

Johnson remained poor until the end of his life, preaching and singing in the streets of Beaumont, Texas to anyone who would listen. A city directory shows that in 1944, a Rev W J Johnson, undoubtedly Blind Willie, operated the House of Prayer at 1440 Forrest Street, Beaumont, Texas. This is the same address listed on Blind Willie's death certificate. In 1945, his home burned to the ground. With nowhere else to go, Johnson lived in the burned ruins of his home, sleeping on a wet bed. He lived like this until he contracted pneumonia two weeks later, and died.

Johnson's song "Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground," was later sent into space with other songs on the probe Voyager.