Our Negative Inheritance The fallen nature of Adam and Eve, our proto-parents, manifest itself not only in the inherited fallen nature of all of humanity but also in a predilection towards amnesia of our own personal history, yea, those very forces and events that have shaped our individual personalities coupled with a lack of desire to know and understand familial, tribal, cultural, national, and especially our spiritual history. A Gratis Gift, But Undervalued         Many Orthodox Christians, having been born in a geographical context where Christian Eastern Orthodoxy is a cultural norm, assume that there is no need no to have an intellectual context for the Orthodox Faith because it is merely to be absorbed from day to day existence in an assumed, intact, Orthodox Culture. Homogeny Allows Apathy For Eastern Orthodoxy Societies who have enjoyed the great privilege of a homogenous society for centuries, there has been little or no perceived need for developing apologetics which contend for  the Faith, nor polemics for the refuting of extraneous ideas and customs which do infiltrate from influences exterior to Orthodox Christian Culture. Curtailed Orthodoxy Some of our Eastern Orthodox Christian cultures have survived, existing, at times, in lands which for centuries have been conquered by culturally hostile foreign or secular powers.  Generally such subjugation of Eastern Orthodox Cultures under foreign or secular authorities truncates the process of passing the fullness of the Orthopraxis and Spiritually to the Faithful.  Inculcation of the faithful is left to the often unobserved teaching and clandestine actions (such as secret baptisms, and liturgies in caves, forests and private homes) by the elderly faithful and incognito bishops and priests. Freedom Also Can Durtail Orthodoxy We, who by contrast, by the mercy of God, live now in a more relatively free and more democratic diaspora are confronted by a new set of different untoward influences of societies that place a premium upon individualism to the rejection of non-economic cooperative action. Such freedom, often times, is understood as license; materialism can lead to a workaholic culture; workaholic culture brings neglect of relationships:  familial, personal, fraternal and societal and the neglect of the spiritual relationship betwixt the faithful and Christ’s Holy Church (i.e. the gathered assembly of the Baptized-Chrismated Faithful in liturgical and ministerial action). 2000 Years of Incalculable Progress The history of the extraordinary fruit of the Church is incalculable.  The idea of universal literacy and an educated populous has its roots in the need of the Church to have literate clergy, readers, (dyak) and choir-singers. What began as liturgical tutorial, over centuries developed into universities and research facilities.  Most of the great institutions of higher learning in the Greek and Slavic Lands , European, and the New World had their beginnings in the teaching ministry of Christianity, such as the (Met.) Petro Mohila University in Kyiv, The Sorbonne in Paris, Oxford in England, Harvard in the USA. Hospitals as we know them today were initially places of hospitality for the injured, the sick and the dying.  The first Hospital in Kyiv still stands.  It is Sv. Nicholas Temple within the confines of the Percheska Lavra.  A working Temple where the faithful in attendance were the bed-fast, sick and dying, who were ministered unto in their bodies but also were comforted in their souls by hearing the monks sing the full round of daily services, i.e. Vespers, After-Supper-Prayer, The Hours and Midnight Service, Utrenya (morning prayers), The Diving Liturgy of the Eucharist and those services from the Book of Needs i.e. Trebnik not limited to, but certainly including Baptism- Chrismation, Confession, Unction of the Sick, Prayers at the time of the release of the soul from the body. The Great Corpus of Ecclesiastical Wisdom Gives Way to Private Opinion Especially in the diaspora, the influence from the “sola scriptura” perspective of the German heterodox teacher, Martin Luther has manifested itself in each individual divining from the pages of flawed translations such as the King James Bible, devoid of the knowledge of the culture underpinnings and values invoked in the original Greek New Testament writings (compiled at Laodicea c.402), who then promulgate such untutored personal opinion with the assumed but arrogant pseudo-infallibility of the modern individual which is rooted in current socio-cultural-political values. Such promulgations of untutored personal opinion presented as truth ignores and rejects the spiritual and intellectual history of Christianity, excluding all other sources of authentic teaching magisterium of the Church of Christ, i.e. the Charisma of the Episcopate (Last supper through the present), Holy Tradition (II Thess. 2:15), the liturgical life of the Holy Church (detailed as early as the first century Didichae of the Apostles), Holy Canonical Iconography (first practiced by St. Luke, who also wrote one of the Gospels), the writing of the Church Fathers, who were the disciples of the apostles and their students.   Religion vs. Science The presently perceived adversarial stance between religion and science is a post-medieval political construct where church authorities fail to view spiritual teaching in the light of new understandings of God’s creation; versus: the scientific community, who forgetting their ecclesiastical roots, eschew as false myth the poetic language of earlier recorded explanations of nature by a pre-scientific method culture.  The learnéd at the pinnacle of both religion and science see no unresolvable conflicts.   Give Christianity Its Due on Human Rights The uninformed assume that social movements contending for human rights are the thrust of the modern age, without reference to the biblical citing of the Christian model, “in Christ there is no east, nor west, nor male, nor female.” Women’s suffrage first was evidenced in the autonomy of women’s monastic institutions in nations which identified as Christian.  Of late, the civil rights movement in the USA and the anti-apartheid struggles in South Africa lifted wholesale, the rhetoric of the Old Testament Exodus from Egypt to give immediate accessibility to an understanding  of human rights principles.  Church Teaching  has always proclaimed the church’s love for the “ stranger and other” while actually it is more the secular authorities in society that have curtailed the rights of the “stranger and the other,” viewing such as subversive.  Let us recall that the Saviour was first labeled “other and subversive”,  and should also be labeled as “inclusive and welcoming” owing to the examples He set before us in the Gospels. Physician Heal Thyself The Orthodox Culture in the Diaspora is fraught with its own, not insurmountable, but complex distractions: a) an unrealistic fear of an Orthodoxy which is not as remembered, either from pre-immigration recollections or childhood memories. Most often this is manifest by fear of anyone who does not have a shared personal history, not only language but often times manifests as a determination to “do church” only with those who are from the very same village.  This very quickly eliminates most of the rest of the world including one’s own children and grandchildren.  Hence many of our Temples have become venues almost exclusively for Funerals and Panakhidas (memorial services).   b) Rejection of an Orthodoxy which will interfere with one’s personal or secular agenda.  Workaholic and entertainment addicted individuals with family and wider circle of persons who are economically dependent and thus easily controlled, reserve not the time required for regular Church participation.  Often times disordered individuals fear “too much religious activity” will truncate social, fraternal, or political time, energy, efforts, and expend too much of the personal and financial resources of an increasing smaller (in the diaspora) ethno-national constituency.  We do see that the tension between the secularized and the pious constituencies can result in a struggle for control of tax-exempt Church properties because of conflicts over scheduling of Liturgical Observances most notably during Lenten periods and on Saturday evenings, which especially in pluralistic societies conflict with schedule of social activities enjoyed by the more dominate culture.  Disagreements touching the sacred nature of the Lord’s Day which begins at “sundown” i.e. with Vespers on Saturday evening are constant.  The secularized preferring social events with food, libation, entertainments and dancing, mirroring the Saturday night scheduling of the dominate culture rather than preserving the Orthodox schedule which mandates Saturday evening as reserved for liturgical prayer, personal recollection, reflection, confession and preparing one’s self to receive communion at the Sunday morning Divine Liturgy. In effect we have a struggle for control for the Lord’s Day:  Shall it be Holy according to Orthodox Values, or fun and expedient according to the values of assimilation. c) Fear of being perceived as “other” by the economically successful society to which many Orthodox Christians wish to become assimilated, thusly causing the uncritical  acceptance of assimilations’ untoward cultural habits, biases, prejudices, and patterns as axiomatically better than the “old country ways” i.e. Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy’s Equally Regrettable History Under Both Political Oppression and Personal Liberty We can note the results of over 600 years of domination of many Greek and some Slavic societies by the Ottoman Empire, causing the ossification of a previously dynamic Christian Orthodox Culture. Most readily accessible is the understanding of the near decimation of much of Slavic piety by atheistic Communist governments. Before Hlastnost, in Kyiv, a city of 3.5 million persons, there were only 14 functioning temples.  Analyst in the Diaspora noted that in Ukraina only the governmentally permitted jurisdiction, the Metropolia of the Russian Patriarchate was permitted to function.  Analyst also noted that for the 25 years previous to Hlastnost the Kyivan Metropolia, UOC-MP opened parishes, seminaries, men’s and women’s monasteries, while other Eparchies of the Moscovite Patriarchate were closing institutions and parishes. Laudable by comparison to other eparchies, from a merely statistical view this was not the level needed to serve the faithful in a culture and state that is 80% Byzantine Eastern Orthodox. Now in the 21^st century we see that the Istanbul dominated, Greek OEcumenical Patriarchate, looking for a means of political and economic survival, strives to copy the Roman pyramidal papal system, abrogating the principle of “first amoungst equals” and striving for universal and original jurisdiction in the Diaspora and an uber- monarchical, imperial status of over the other Apostolic and Modern Patriarchates, First-Hierarch-Metropolia of Autocephalous National Churches.  Moscow yearns, with a policy mirrored by Vladimir Putin, to re-establish the Third Rome status, at great historical, cultural, linguistic, political, and economic loss beginning the conquering of Eastern Georgia and continuing with coveted Ukraina. All of the posturing by the upper hierarchy over autocephaly and precedence is occurring whilst the local parochial situations in the (now) Arabic speaking world and diaspora continue to wane. Funerals outnumber baptisms. Fewer and fewer, increasingly elderly parishioners strive against incalculable odds to keep the temple doors open.  The number of liturgical occasions are necessarily minimalized owing to inability of our elderly faithful to venture out at night and because choirs are diminished in size and strenght owing to increased age of singers, all of this under the grieving eye of a priest, mostly serving without deacons even though he, himself perhaps is years well past the usual age of retirement for worldly functionaries. Love Thy Neighbor Except When… The efforts to make irrelevant the message of God’s love and ministry in love by the Holy Ark i.e. the Holy Eastern Orthodox Church, to a world inundated with cares and dilemmas of its own making, is a process which dates back to Adam and Eve, practiced by the brothers of Joseph who sold him, motivated by jealousy into slavery, raised to a new level by the Pharaoh of Egypt, evidenced on a grand scale by the Babylonian captivity, and exhibited in its ultimate degradation in the betrayal of Christ by the normal salutation of the time and culture, a simple kiss given to Christ as the person of rank to be greeted first upon arrival by the money-loving Judas. Yea, the Judas factor has been duplicated by kings, queens, princes, and princesses, by Patriarchs, Metropolitans, Archbishops, Bishops, priests, deacons, parish presidents and scrarbniki (treasurers) often with cooperative rada (church board) members, and even the faithful as well as by the neglectful, the other-wise-occupied, and myriads of gentle folk throughout the ages even unto today who could be best described as “luke-warm”. The Winter of Orthodoxy Is Upon Us While history shows that most of what is constructive, most of that which is just, most of which is philanthropic, and most of which is progressive about today’s world owes its beginnings with the church.  Since governments have commandeered so many of the ministries of the church with governmental tax-supported efforts, how then shall the Orthodox Church contribute to the society’s future?    This is a question which every devoted Orthodox Christian must now ponder.  Neither inflated optimism, nor despair is the answer.    The answer to what shall Christ’s Holy Church contribute next is indeed clouded in the mist of the future, perhaps to be proffered by the generations yet to come.  But this is known from history: the means of preparation by which new future accomplishments for the betterment of mankind and the Glory of God has not changed. How Can We Prepare for Spring? The tools of Christian-prompted progress and betterment of society are invisible to those with little or no faith; invisible to those who accept the values of the material world, invisible to those who have not invested their time in the labors of the Church before God. Christ himself set forth for us the model when he fulfilled the injunction to eat the Passover supper, but he gave unto Passover a new, significant dimension.  This is not fully understood by the untutored for the ritual of the Passover supper is not recorded in the Gospel accounts, but rather only those enrichments given by the Messiah.   Two millennia later, the Bride of Christ daily (in larger monasteries) follows this model.  Let us therefore, fully embrace the Church’s Liturgical Life and therein minister to the nature of humanity and its need for Theosis (the process where one’s human nature recedes as the Divine nature is given increasing operation within the personality).  The process of Theosis begins with the rites of initiation, i.e. Baptism and Chrismation, where in we are made sons of God by adoption. These rites do place an indelible mark upon the soul, yet their power needs be renewed in the discarding of our sin and short-comings in Confession and the recharging of our spiritual powers by receiving Holy Communion.  The spiritual novice (not a factor of age but one of struggles) cites the burden of fasting to receive communion not realizing that fasting is the easy and obvious requirement.  The injunction to fast from all sin and to “pray without ceasing” must find residency within the soul of each of the faithful. While it is impossible for an individual person to “pray without ceasing”, yet all things are possible for God.  That is why Holy Mother Church in Her wisdom has adorned our spiritual struggles with the services of the Church.  Many Eastern Orthodox Christians have seldom attended Saturday evening Vespers much less the aggregate required by the Church which is 9^th hour, Vespers, Utrenya and 1^st hour.  How often do parishioners complain about “extra services” when a Hierarch visits?  Then follow additional complaints over the meeting and vesting of the Hierarch at the Liturgy, and all of the “extra” ceremonies.  The complainers do not comprehend that the liturgical work of the Church is the genesis of the more tangible fruits of Christianity. Modern science now has the technology to comprehend that singing is the most complex process of which the human brain is capable.  Many different parts of the brain are utilized simultaneously in the process as one produces melody, harmony, musical movement (rhythm), rendering text, coupled with textual comprehension and self- identification, invoking emotions, sparking memories, and the plying of artistic performance values to the whole of what is a group (choral and liturgical team) process, demanding awareness of other’s efforts and sharing, reinforcing, their process without disrupting other participants.  When one adds physical movement, liturgical acts and actions to the communal singing, God is indeed glorified and the participants have shared in an event which hones incalculable skills.  Mental and physical skills practiced in the liturgical life of the Church may then be carried over into survival endeavours, augmenting so many other functions of life and contributing to the increase of knowledge and progress of society. The literature of the Liturgical Life of the Church is almost totally unknown in the Diaspora.  In a religious milieu of “sola scriptura”, which rejects all other sources of information except a (badly translated) Bible, Eastern Orthodox Liturgical text are a source of ancient perspective on the events in the Life of the Saviour, the apostles and their followers and the saints of every generation. This great body of Literature should sung in and for a world that hungers for new spiritual insight. Disputation by evangelicals over jots and tittles in a so called “inerrant” bible cannot provide the insight that the cohesive treatise of each feast day’s liturgical prose details surrounding specific events in the history of salvation and the subsequent flowering of Christianity with an Apostolic understanding of such events. Pragmatically, what is needed is to again bring to flower and fruition the spiritual wisdom of the Trinity, resident in the liturgical life of the Church to a world that is presently lacking spiritual direction.     Is the following not the receipt? 1) every altar should be surrounded by a dedicated cadre of devoted clergy (the bishop’s representative i.e. the priestly pastor,  the deacon and the Readers) and church servitors (altar servers, ushers and community liaisons from the lay brotherhood and sisterhood of the congregation) and singers of every age who offer the very best that they can give of themselves for the realization of the fullness of the prescribed Liturgical Life of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Parishes should offer all of the various services appointed for each Sunday and Feast of the Lord, fully served in aggregate. For parishes in non-Orthodox locales, owing to factors of work and school,  time and distance to be traveled, perhaps the Feasts of the Theotokos and Major Saints might be served, combing such sung prose, readings, and Gospel periscopes with those of the Sunday  Observances. 2) Church Choirs should endeavor to recruit all within the greater community who can sing at all, taking special attention to invite any youngsters of school or college age.  How often have the best Church singers related that they began standing in the Choir Stalls on a box or chair because of being so young and short.  Services should include many levels of difficulty of musical composition thereby providing interest for the more expert singers and goals for those with less expertise.  Usual Tradition Chants with parts doubled both for lower notes and higher notes provide a rich and secure singing experience for the untrained choir participants and the congregation. 3)  The attending to the needs within the vivtar (behind the iconostasis) and for the entrances and crucessions on Great Holy Days should not be left to the youngsters who are vested as altar servers but should be augmented by gentlemen standing amoungst the faithful who should respectfully enter the vivtar in time to take a blessing and assist in the carrying of lampada, Cross, kadilo (incense burner), incense container, rapidia, banners and if a bishop is serving then dikirion and trikirion, tray with omofor and miter, orletz and any other items as directed. These gentlemen from the assembly upon completion of the entrance or procession may retire to their previous place amoungst the faithful. 4) Those who do not actively participate in the actualization of the Liturgical Services should still arrive in a timely fashion to greet visitors and make them comfortable, providing them with bi-lingual (or perhaps polyglot) documentation.  None of the faithful should be shy about tending to burning candles, moving portable analogion, opening and closing windows, managing air-conditioning and heat, assisting parents with small children or aiding the less-abled or handicapped or any other service that might be needed to facilitate order and comfort. 5) Certainly, everyone who arrives to the  Temple by private transport will want to arrive with a full car, full of family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and even strangers and enemies.  What a lack of good stewardship (management of resources) it is to come in a mostly empty private car and then to sit in a mostly empty temple. No one should let advanced age and diminished physical capacity nor youth nor inexperience inhibit the offering of oneself, both soul and body as a living sacrifice in the staffing and realizing of the Liturgical Life of our Holy Church. The renewed and more fully actualized singing of the prescribed services and Liturgies of the Church is indeed the recipe for the preparation of the next flowering of the Church.  In our humanity we cannot know the mind of the Trinity and the next great ministry that God plans for His Church to offer humankind.  We do know from history that the preparation for whatever the great gift of God might be is a fully realized liturgical life in the Church. We understand that our preparations to receive such ministries in the fullness of time is our fidelity to that Worship by the Church.  Regardless of what our personal pursuits might be, we are informed by modern neurological science that music, beauty, and shared constructive efforts cause all participants to be wiser, more capable, more competent, more gracious individuals.  When the believers of the Orthodox Church offer these efforts together in the Holy Temple, God is glorified and the faithful are spiritually enriched and those who sing and serve have all of their human capacities increased as well, including the enriching of personal relationships and facility with which their more mundane labours are accomplished. Faith, With  or Without Works? Finally permit me to remind that inaction is effectively a decision.  Holy Writ advises us; Now faith, being alone without works in dead. Will you, by doing nothing, allow the closing of Orthodox Temples and disappearing of God’s Grace from our native and adopted lands?   Or will you help to prepare for the next flowering and bearing of great fruit by the one, Holy Catholic, Eastern Church of Christ?