An oddly busy last week leaves me a little short-handed today: just two items.
No room for racism
I didn’t know or didn’t remember this statement:
The Assembly of Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the United States of America stands with all people of good will in condemning the hateful violence and lamenting the loss of life that resulted from the shameful efforts to promote racial bigotry and white supremacist ideology in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Orthodox Church emphatically declares that it does not promote, protect or sanction participation in such reprehensible acts of hatred, racism, and discrimination, and proclaims that such beliefs and behaviors have no place in any community based in respect for the law and faith in a loving God.
The essence of the Christian Gospel and the spirit of the Orthodox Tradition are entirely and self-evidently incompatible with ideologies that declare the superiority of any race over another. Our God shows no partiality or favoritism (Deuteronomy 10:17, Romans 2:11). Our Lord Jesus Christ broke down the dividing wall of hostility that had separated God from humans and humans from each other (Ephesians 2:14). In Christ Jesus, the Church proclaims, there can be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, but all are one (Galatians 3:28). Furthermore, we call on one another to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather to expose them (Ephesians 5:11). And what is darkness if not hatred? The one who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness (1 John 2:11)!
Furthermore, in 1872, Hierarchs from around the world assembled in Constantinople and denounced all forms of xenophobia and chauvinism (phyletism). They agreed that the promotion of racial or national supremacy and ethnic bias or dissension in the Church of Christ is to be censured as contrary to the sacred teachings of the Christian Gospel and the holy canons of the Church. It is formally condemned as heresy, the strongest category of false teaching.
Finally, such actions as we have witnessed in recent days, by self-proclaimed white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and various racists and fascists, betray the core human values of love and solidarity. In this, we pray wholeheartedly for the families of those who lost their lives or suffered in these tragic events. In like manner, we cannot condone any form of revenge or retaliation by any group or individual. Therefore, we fervently appeal to every person of good will, and especially the leaders of our great nation, to consider and adopt ways of reconciling differences in order to rise above any and all discrimination in our history, our present, and our future.
My point in quoting this is that unrepentant racists do not have a natural home in the Orthodox Church. No Orthodox country was involved in the kidnapping of Africans, the slave trade, or the building of an American slave economy.
I’m old, firmly attached by clerical responsibilities to a single healthy parish, and out of first-hand touch with what’s happening elsewhere. But I read suggestions that some mostly-young mostly-men are flirting with or entering the Orthodox Church under the impression that its Holy Tradition is congruent with their unholy racial obsessions and with white nationalism.
I doubt that this is any true trend. But Orthodoxy is exploding in the U.S. (along with Roman Catholicism, I’m told), and I knew that when that happened, when Orthodoxy finally “got on America’s radar,” the calumnies would begin. Orthodoxy’s resistance to novelties (“stagnant” is what critics who knew about us tended to say) is a nice, big target for misrepresentation.
Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven.
There is no room for racism in Orthodoxy; there is always room for repentant sinners of all sorts, including repentant racists.
Transgressive Art
I’ve come to think of art that requires a willingness to transgress, not (to be clear) morality, or convention per se, but the limits of our understanding. And I think that one of the ways that art can bring us closer to ultimate Reality, or even to God, is by helping us see where our narratives of ourselves and of the world around us have become stale and rote … I think that engaging with art in this way requires a leap of faith. For things that break me open not to break me totally, I have to believe that not everything is broken.
The early Church had no Scripture of its own, and the Jews had no defined canon of Scripture; therefore, sola scriptura as the foundation for what Christians believed was absolutely impossible.
Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
