Orthodox Tribalism
by Fr. Stephen Headley
Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. -- Ephesians 4:15-16
What St. Paul has described as the need and willingness of the local churches to share their virtues and qualities (Eph 2-4) has, in the course of the twentieth century, to some extent been replaced by the tendency of some parts of the body of Christ to distance themselves from the infirmities of the limbs of the same and single body. This situation may have a long history. Perhaps the oppression of certain Orthodox patriarchates under Arab Caliphates, the Turkish sultanate, and most recently the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe favored an attitude where the weakness of "other" local churches not as healthy as "ours," compromised perforce for decades, has sometimes led to a segmentary tribalism where our solidarity and compassion for the weak and oppressed has been replaced by sentiments of moral superiority.
In any case, in the diaspora of Western Europe our Orthodox chapels are experiencing a double bind. They no longer feel they possess the total witness of the mother churches from which their families came, nor do they feel at home in the secular anti-Christian social fabric to which they de facto belong. In Europe, their faith is considered marginal and unrelated to the real issues of the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first. And where the need and desire for a unified, local, federated Orthodox Church has been felt, as in the United States, it has too often been discouraged by the ambitions of mother churches anxious to preserve the special witness of their own historical distress. Communion with the past, with its saints and its experience of God, seems here to prevent communion in the present. Tradition, that "gift from another," ceases to enliven.
There is something clearly blasphemous at work. Communion is no longer communion with the body of Christ in all its universality, but becomes communion within a jurisdiction. The fact that we don't usually say as much does not mean that we are above breaking communion or failing to recognize the validity of episcopates of certain other bodies. By using the word "other," we have already admitted that we are not ready to seek them out in order to participate in "our" common supper. In fact it is we who are dying. We are growing not outwards, but inwards, towards our shrunken past. This is involution. We fail to recognize our faith as having had much broader horizons than those we now project. The "slackness" of the Greeks, the "rigidity" of the Russians, the "irregularity" of the Serbs and Bulgarians, the "compromises" of the Arabs -- all these are in the forefront of our respective sensitivities which we astonishingly deem "spiritual." If communion with Christ Jesus is the life of the world, then it can only exist in the space outside ourselves, a "land of the living" that unites us through Christ to all the "others." By growing inwards our vision is reduced. This involution only brings us back to ourselves, not to all the others for whom Christ was crucified outside the city walls.
Why don't we need each other any more? Why in our respective emigrations have we scaled down our universal Christian calling to embrace God's creation and its creatures? Why have we let ourselves be assimilated to the societies of our adoption to which we now belong, instead of witnessing to them as the free men and women that Christ has made us? Having left our homelands, under whatever conditions, we lost so much. To later give up the only thing we have gained from that exodus, the freedom to be before God, to be Christians, seems such a waste.
Involution often brings with it the inability to see other Orthodox because of their differences. The failure of this facility for situating the "other" Orthodox in the whole rich fabric of church life with all the expressiveness of their cultures, leads to setting up quite parochial boundaries. The Orthodox are only us, those familiar to us. Although we never say as much, in fact this implies that we are the best, whatever that might mean. The omophore which the bishop puts on at every service with a prayer proposing God's grace so that he can leave his flock and go look for the ninety-ninth sheep lost in the hills, the joy of the father at the return of the prodigal son, and the self-emptying love of the only begotten Word of the Father seem to have lost their place in our hearts.
Who should we be able to recognize? First of all, Christ who is in our midst! Even the soldiers sent by the Sanhedrin came back saying that no one has ever spoken like this man. We are more than spell-bound, captivated by the quality of the Lord's voice. We are bound together into one new Israel by the grace and truth of the Lord's voice. If Christ had not brought us who were far off together, we would have no common meal. To break bread together on our knees, only Christ's voice can call us out of our own special darkness and make us sons of the dawn, children of the resurrection.
Our involution is the opposite of the eucharistic momentum. Christ set into motion a cosmic current. The universe is returning to its Creator. As the bishop enters the church, the deacon comes forward teaching him, incensing him saying, "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father who is in heaven." Then are this race of priests, prophets and martyrs, this Christian people, to hide their candles under the bushel in their own private darkness? Where is our confidence in one another? Where is our hope built up against all hope that God has placed in us by creating us? By dying for us on the cross?
We cannot be Greeks in England and we cannot be Russians in France. We have already been led out of the Egyptian bondage by Moses, and made free by traversing the desert while following the column of light. We are free to be Orthodox citizens of the world, to worship in the spirit and the truth in all our temples, to grow deep roots in the lands of mission where God has sent us.
If inculturation has taken place in the lands of our ancestors, it was through the ascetic virtues of humility, poverty, and obedience. We need to the two lungs of the mother churches and the local churches to breathe together one common faith. Tradition (paradôsis) will always be a "gift from another." Let us remember it is God who chooses, who gives us faith in Him. Where and how? Christ both spoke in the temple and on the sides of the road. The Spirit blows where He wills it. Let us open our eyes and hearts, waiting for these moments of truth to bring us towards Him, together.
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posted: January 27, 1998 / as published in the Theophany 1998 issue of In Communion