Real Live Preacher goes to Orthodox Liturgy on Pentecost

June 28, 4:05 PMSF Eastern Orthodoxy ExaminerJeffrey Holton

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the SF Eastern Orthodoxy Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

St. Anthony the Great Orthodox Church, Houston, TX

Validation shows up in a variety of forms. Technically, it's a sign of insecurity that we need others to be interested in our own opinions to verify their legitimacy, but that very thing has taken place in the past few weeks.

I want to tell you a little bit about a man I know. I've known him for a few years. He doesn't know me, but I know him real well. It's tough to avoid him. He's all over the internet and he talks about himself a lot, so some of us know him quite well indeed. Perhaps this leaves him at a disadvantage; I don't know. He used to think he was some sort of liberal Baptist Batman, hiding behind the "Real Live Preacher" nom de plume. Lately, he's taken the mask off. He is a real, live preacher, granted, but now we know that his name is Gordon Atkinson, and that he's a pastor in San Antonio, Texas.

Every once in a while, Atkinson gets this wacky idea to take a few months off and go visit some churches that aren't Baptist. Scandalous, I know. But that's how Atkinson rolls.

Of all the Sundays he could have chosen! He packs up the securely Baptist wife and daughters and drives down the street to the local Orthodox church for the Liturgy of Pentecost. Did I mention that the Atkinsons are Baptist?

Talk about culture shock! They might as well have walked into the Upper Room on the Pentecost itself (except, at least someone would have been speaking their language!). It's about that intense. We get up. We sit down. We kneel. Then we sit down again. Then we get up and kneel. And then we kneel again. And we kneel. And then we get up and sit down. I may have that a little out of order, but you get the gist.

You can read his own notes about his experience here.

Now, I gotta grant Rev. Atkinson the possessor of some serious spiritual balls. He found himself in an Orthodox church that's even more "Orthodox" than mine. "Pews?" he writes, "We don’t need no stinking pews! Providing seats for worshippers is SO 14th century."

He goes on to describe the complexity of a worship so rich that he can't soak it all in, and so involved that it took all they had.

His daughter Lillian (who was, incidentally, named for the lillies of the field) "was the first to go down. After half an hour of standing, she was done. ...She slumped against Jeanene’s shoulder and stared at me with this stunned, rather betrayed look on her face: How could you have brought us to this insane place?"

But, when all's said and done (and there's a lot that was said...and done!), when asked what he thought of his experience there, he responds, "I LOVED IT. Loved it loved it loved it loved it loved it."

There's a tendency for us Orthodox to stammer a bit when asked to describe what our worship services are like. "They're uh... I mean, it's... Well...like..." and that's about as far as we get, hands waving, eyes a bit vacant as we try to search for the right words. We do well to remember the emissaries of Prince Vladimir of Kiev, who returned from their visit to the Hagia Sophia in the late 10th century and reported, "We did not know if we were in heaven or on earth."

Orthodox worship is not articulated. It's experienced. It's something performed with the entire body, all your muscles and thoughts and heartbeats and sweat glands and...everything.

But perhaps Rev. Atkinson really did have some advance warning. In his raw, gritty autobiography of sorts, posted years ago on his blog, he writes, "Turns out Christianity is an Eastern religion. The earliest Christians were Hebrews. Semites. People of the East. They did not know how to separate mind from body. They were holistic before holistic was cool."

Wait. Did he just call me "cool?" That's cool!

What was my first experience in Orthodox Liturgy like?

Mostly incomprehensible. I didn't like it very much. Maybe I'll write about it someday.

Question: Have you been to an Orthodox Liturgy? If you didn't grow up in that tradition, let me know what you thought of it. For that matter, I'm curious to know about anyone's first time experience in any unfamiliar religious tradition. Leave a comment below, or email me.

Previous post: Orthodox podcasts instruct, entertain
Next post: Local monks set to be ordained to priesthood, diaconate