“Once I am sure there’s nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut….
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Yet stop I did; in fact, I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for, wondering too,
When churches fall completely out of use” (Church Going, Philip Larken)
He was biking and stopped to peer into an empty church. It’s England, and it often happens that churches become obsolete. Yet he does stop and wonders about what it was used for, why it is empty and who may have gained any benefit from it. Americans in general are not yet so empty of spiritual searching, heading off in all sorts of directions to find whatever the soul of a human being feels compelled to explore. Some parts of England have come alive through the Holy Spirit. Thanks to the humble yet charismatic Metropolitan Anthony Bloom among others, blessings to Bishop Kallistos (Timothy) Ware and other exciting converts from Anglicanism, revivals have happened among so many who found their way to the Orthodox Christian faith. But sadly many more like the poet Larkin live and die without a confrontation with the living Christ preserved and proclaimed, alas all so ineptly by the Orthodox Church.
In my teens I stepped so often into the city library built by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Since my community existed beyond the pale of that city I had no right to take books from its shelves; however, I could on my days of trumpet lessons spend a few hours in the stacks enjoying myself among the books. I looked up “Orthodox Christian” and found nothing. Then, “Eastern Orthodox” and discovered one lone book, a rather slim hardback entitled Candlelight Kingdom, written by Ruth Korper. I was able to read it in its entirety within an hour and was astounded to learn about a church that was nothing like my home parish.
Miss Korper revealed a wonder that she came upon somehow just by wandering into an odd-shaped temple with strange bulbs of a sort topped with crosses. Once inside she was enveloped in darkness except for various golden stands scattered at places at the periphery of the nave. These held slim brown candles upon which the inhabitants of the church would approach now and again in no set order to light new candles and stand for a moment of silence. There was a wall of sorts ahead where in most churches the altar would be, but it was covered with what seemed to be an ancient style of paintings, and behind the wall came sounds in some foreign language difficult to make out. Some stood and faced the painted wall in rapt attention, others just drifted around from one painting to another, new persons arrived, a few left. A small choir off to the right of the front sang what must have been responses to the sounds from the center of the painted wall.
She was pleased to have come. It soothed her in a way, with the strange singing and the interesting aroma wafting up from candles and some incense out of the area behind the front wall.
I’ve always been interested in learning the earliest impressions our church makes on the newcomers, but I am more concerned that the visitors find something in our appearance, sounds and smells that will intrigue them enough to want to discover more about who we are and what we are about. I doubt that the Candlelight Kingdom would do much to pique anybody’s interest or cause them to want to learn about these people we love and call our own.