When we talk our usual Orthodox church language, a lot of people haven’t the vaguest idea what we’re talking about. This was brought home to me in a rather harsh way not long ago, when a lapsed Catholic monk visited our parish. He had heard reports of the beauty of Orthodox worship and the depths of Orthodox spiritual life, and he came to experience some of it for himself.
After he left the monastery and in effect left the Catholic Church, he began working with the disenfranchised: homeless people in particular, including some who had fallen on hard times after years of working in high profile dot-com jobs. Some were uneducated, but most had completed high school, and several had advanced degrees. He served them in a soup kitchen, but his real work consisted in preaching and pastoral counseling, attempting to bring the Gospel to them and vice versa.
The Sunday morning Liturgy over, he and I left the church and stopped for a while at coffee hour. When I asked how he felt about his first experience in an Orthodox parish, he scowled and shook his head.
“That’s nothing my people could ever relate to,” he said. Then he proceeded, in rather unkind terms, to criticize everything from the sermon (“too moralistic”) to the repetitious litanies (“Again and again in peace…”). His main complaint, however, was leveled against the vocabulary: “churchy jargon,” as he called it.
I felt offended and saddened, because I had hoped for a very different reaction. The sermon, delivered by a young and earnest priest who was substituting for the parish rector, was indeed stiff and a little moralizing. But beneath the awkwardness was a solid message that conveyed the Gospel to those with ears to hear. The language of the Liturgy itself was sublime, as it has been for centuries. What really was there to complain about?
His point was essentially that the Liturgy, from vestments to gestures to language, represents something wholly foreign to those who are not raised in Orthodoxy, and particularly those whose parishes and pastors had brought them up with an anti-Catholic and anti-liturgical bias.
When he focused on language as such, he referred to the common expressions we use, not only in liturgy, but also in books and articles whose intention is to impart something of the richness of Orthodox life and faith. The average people on the street, long alienated from any particular religious expression, he argued, can’t begin to wrap their minds around terms such as “eschatology,” “redemption,” “glorification,” “deification,” or even “sin.” To them the Bible has been reduced to a collection of stories for kids: Adam and Eve, the Flood, people walking on water, and so forth.
“If you Orthodox don’t learn to speak to people in the world around you,” he concluded, “you’ll stay a ghetto church, no matter how much you reorganize yourselves. You may attract a few converts who are looking for some esoteric brand of Christianity, but eventually you’ll disappear.”
He said all this in such a matter-of-fact way that it was hard to reply. And to my shame, I didn’t really try. It did make me think harder than I had before, though, about the way we have developed our own language and what that means for proclaiming Orthodox Christianity to everyone from “cradle” members of our parishes to catechumens and those we call “seekers.”
A great deal has already been done to recast traditional language and forms of thought into expressions that convey the essence of the Faith to the inquiring non-Orthodox. Again magazine and many other publications of Conciliar Press, for example, together with materials from our respective Christian education and youth departments, have gone far to close the language-gap between ourselves and the “outside world” of children and young people. And more is being done every day to speak to adults, both in our parishes and elsewhere, in a way that makes the Gospel accessible and conveys it with power.
My point here is simply that we Orthodox, as part of our vocational responsibility in this land, need to continue and intensify these efforts. It’s very easy for us to forget that we do in fact speak a particular language that in many ways is foreign to those around us, including non-Orthodox members of our families and close friends of other faith traditions. We should not change that language, at least not in any way that alters its meaning. But that meaning needs to be made clear and comprehensible: in liturgical translations, in church school and other catechetical materials, in sermons, and in publications addressed to the general public as evangelistic and apologetic tools.
The urgency for such labor was brought home to me a few days ago by another acquaintance, this time a person who teaches math at the college level. Somehow or other we got onto the subject of mathematical conundrums. The most elusive these days seems to be the “Riemann Hypothesis.” He quoted it, and I understood why: “All non-trivial zeros of the zeta function have real part one-half.”
Since I nearly flunked first year algebra and can’t tell a sine from a surd, his language was as incomprehensible to me as talk of “theosis” and “sacramental grace” is to my Catholic friend’s street people.
“Eschew bfuscation.” When it comes to proclaiming the Gospel, that ironic little admonition couldn’t be clearer or more important. It’s a goal we need to aim for, however hard it may be to attain. Because if the Son of God came as “the Word,” He did so to reveal and to enlighten: to make the Truth known, understandable and accessible to us all.