Get Him to the Greek Orthodox Church
Getting Full at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
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Millennials get a bad rap about their religious life.
The news will worship topics like this. Headlines start with something like, “Millennials are vacating the church faster than a toupee in a hurricane”. <Insert a declining Pew Survey statistic here.> To add visual flair, include a stock photo with a teenager in saggy pants riding a skateboard. Lather, rinse, and repeat… and voila! Another trendy article for conservative belt-tightened Christians to freak out over, profiling millennials and everything wrong with our generation.
Well I was one of those statistics who escaped the church, a spiritual Fugitive, like a dapper Harrison Ford on the run from redundant liturgy and droning hymns. My pastors always seemed to know I was a congregant on the loose too. Probably because my mom told them. They’d pin-up Wanted posters with my church directory mugshot, equip themselves with holstered Catechisms, and begin the manhunt to bring me back to the “one true church”.
Remember the scene where Tommy Lee Jones traps Harrison Ford near the edge of a storm drain? That’s sorta what happened to me (except we were in the meat aisle at the local Target). When we bumped into each other, I was told a sermon on why I should come back to church. It felt like I needed to fold my hands up, turn around, and kneel on the ground to pray. Rather than return to a pew without parole, I’d look down at the dam’s raging waters as my only escape. My knees were trembling when I’d close my eyes, pulled up my saggy pants, and fell. Fell away from the church.
I can’t speak for every millennial who makes a break from the church, but what I can say is we don’t know the full movie script that God has written for us. We don’t know the ramifications of what we’re praying to God. And we sure as h, e, double hockey sticks don’t know the countless other factors that are intersecting and being disseminated inside the mind of God. We’re smart… and clueless… We’re scoping out before diving in, then sometimes say ‘screw it’ and dive in anyway. We’re walking contradictions. Juxtapositions in the flesh. We always know what we want. Sometimes. Except when we don’t. Then we make paragraphs like this where we don’t even know where we’re going with this. Unless you do make sense of this. Then great! If not, well, that’s my point. I’m not sure I know my point. Anyway, this is getting wordy. Moving on.
We’re taught that the only reason to do something is if we’re somehow rewarded for it. Social pressure of present life and professional pressures of young adulthood squeezes the passion out of us. We are constantly pushing away the unpleasurable experiences and seek the pleasurable until we get bored of something. Relationships. Jobs. Experiences. We seek hourly affirmation with Facebook likes, Instagram hearts, and Medium followers. To quasi-quote our social media forefathers, “give me notifications or, uh, give me death”. At the core, we’ve become a selfish generation that has centered on self-personalization, self-gratification, and selfies. We’re searching for the next high, a high that will never last, and have the tendency to lose touch to what really matters. As a result, spirituality falls away.
For many of us, the enemy is just old-fashioned complacency. We get into our routines. We distract ourselves. The couch is too comfortable. The Cheetos are too cheesy. Nothing new happens, and when Sunday morning arrives, we’ve silenced the alarm clocks and stopped in favor of the gravitational pull of our beds.
We’ve become cynical in everything ‘big’. We grew up when bigger was better. Go big or go home. Super size me. We have no trust in big institutions like the media, police, Congress, banks, big business, megachurches, even marriage. We see police beatdowns, government shutdowns, bank bailouts, crippling divorce rates, and Catholic altar boy scandals. Millennials have grown up on this since we were teething, and now social media has opened the floodgates to doom and gloom. When something ‘big’ isn’t authentic, we see right through it.
So why believe in an institution as big as the church?
July 12, 2015–9:30 am Divine Liturgy: Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
By reader request, going retro was the theme for visit #36. This experiment was to observe the ancient traditions of the Greek Orthodox Church. Admittedly, I was skeptical. The religion believes to be free from error and distortion, tracing it’s linage from the First Church founded by the Apostles. This type of perfectionist thinking is the exact thing that turns me off from organized big religion. Nevertheless, I tried to keep an open mind.
The church structure itself was the first thing that stood out, looking more like a retired UFO than a place of worship. Annunciation was one of the last works of Frank Lloyd Wright, considered by many as the greatest American architect of all-time. When he consulted his wife (who was brought up in the Greek Orthodox faith), her advice was to focus on the cross and the dome. On the outside, a golden cross dotted the top of the roof dome, symbolic of Christ’s unity of heaven and earth that is typical in Byzantine architecture. Inside, the floor plan was an equilateral Greek cross. Through simplification and abstraction of the forms, the church paid homage to tradition with a modern twist.
I walked in half-expecting to be greeted by all the Greek stereotypes you could think of, like smashing plates or kisses on the cheek from the family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Being a new visitor, who knew? Maybe I’d even get an occasional “Opa!”, given a gyro, and get lifetime supply of feta cheese. This didn’t happen… Instead, the pre-service Orthros was an immediate culture clash, consisting of litanies and psalms sang by a priest in traditional Koine Greek tongue, which was the original language of the New Testament. I was alien to it and didn’t understand a word. To me, it sounded like “ghdfgjegnehgehgejidvobjhioerhioerhiohe, a-a-a-a-men.” Only a lot better.
The church prided itself in its Divine Liturgy, a service that transcends time by dating back to the fourth century. It is comprised to bless, praise, and glorify God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Any time the Holy Trinity was echoed, celebrants used their fingers to mark the sign of the cross. This one service used the sign of the cross more than all Western Christianity services I had attended combined, using it at least 100 times during the service.
Annunciation was in the process of bouncing back after an alleged embezzlement. A former priest was accused of improperly spending thousands of dollars from a church trust fund, and then the priest who exposed the embezzling allegations was given the pink slip too. “Great”, I thought. Exactly the reason someone like me has grown to distrust church. This was the first service for the newest priest, who offered to bring reassurance to the parish and draw closer to Christ. He used Romans 5:3–5 as his base text.
“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.”
Actions speak louder than words, and I felt like the congregation had grown sick of the scandals over the past two years. To me, this felt like sugarcoating to maintain the church membership. But things changed during the Eucharist, an elaborate Communion sacrament that served as a reenactment of the Last Supper. This is where Eastern Orthodox Churches really separate themselves from any other church service I’ve seen.
The center of the church and means for spiritual development was expressed through the Eucharist, both for the members and church as a whole. It expressed in a unique way, the enhancing and deepening of faith. Everyone in the church held a Communion cloth carefully under their chin, and opened their mouths. The priest dabbed a spoon in the chalice, and would spoon feed the recipient like it was Gerber baby food. After receiving Communion, the receiver would wipe their lips, make the sign of the cross, and hand the Communion cloth to the next person. This went on for 30 minutes. At the end of the service, the church did it all over again with a cube of bread to represent Christ’s body.
Did I have an amazing spiritual experience? No. I was an outsider here, peek-a-booing over the balcony rail to see how this parish conducted traditions that were foreign to me. There was no deep authentic spiritual experience on my part. The code of conduct was too curious to me. I can’t always have an outstanding spiritual revelation, feeling a renewal of being blessed and anointed. Sometimes there still is confusion about my spirituality as I journal through this spiritual trek.
But the thing I appreciated was the appetite for God. Sin spoils our appetite, as evident with the accussed embezzling priest who went to the church’s cookie jar one too many times before dinner. But after witnessing how Communion was received, we must remember that we have become one with Christ with such a sacrament. The same Christ now lives in all of us. We are all living icons of Jesus.
God has come to live in all of us.
