Second Terrace

Effective leadership: not something you'll hear on TED

Regents of the Old Men's Almshouse, by Frans Hals 1664

 

These days, questions about effective leadership are at the top of everyone's head. 

The Presidential Campaign -- despite its being called, gigglingly and quite rightly, the "Seinfeld Campaign" -- will make you think about leadership, or its absence in all directions.

Thank heaven, we're not going to wander, cognitively, in the miasma of secular political leadership. We will leave that swamp for another wetland.

Id est, ecclesial leadership.

Some of us are thinking about episcopal leadership in particular, and quite poignantly at that.

But our thoughts about ecclesial leadership should not be confined to the episcopacy. It has become laboriously clear that the leadership of a diocese is not limited to a bishop, nor is the leadership of a parish limited to a priest (if it ever was).

We've always suspected this, since the backwoods of my youth, when we wondered out loud how congruent theformal board meeting was with the real board meeting that convened, out on the parking lot, as soon as the the Amen was licked and stamped onto the end of the minutes-meeting in the musty basement.

Thinking about the qualities (and the ethics) of ecclesial leadership -- i.e., decision-making authority for the Church -- cannot be limited to the bishop. I have done my share of stacking up the moral, theological and corporate demands expected of a hierarch, and made it quite impossible-sounding in the process.

(As an aside, if I were an episcopal candidate, I would never read my own stuff about job descriptions. That is, of course, a meta-ironical remark, much as we like to play at the pomo game.)

No. Instead of heaping up expectations on our bishops or bishop-candidates, and thusly scaring the hell out of them and giving them the inexorable impression that we would be their underground/cyber/facebook bosses/reviewers (read "hieratic gossip" here), let us widen the focus.

Let us distribute the burden of expectation. If one is willing to engage in prophetic critique against those who labor under the apostolic burden -- for burden it most definitely is -- then one, too, must bare the cross-hairs target and thus bear the Cross.

So, let's just say that the critique of effective leadership should fall not only on the bishop, but on all decision-makers in a diocese: the Consistories, the Commissions, the Committees, the Apostolates, the Vicariates (if those things still exist in the Orthodox world), the Directors/Coordinators/Deans/Presidents of various associations/organizations/para-church administrations.

You know you're in one of these clubs, or breathing the rarefied air at these dizzy levels, if you ever receive minutes, long phone calls, longer email missives, and especially if you've had to take some vow of secrecy, formal or informal. "For everyone's sake, of course, sub rosa pro prudentia."

So now that you know you've got red buttons to push and all sorts of speed dial numbers ... and now that you've come to understand that it's not just the bishop, or that it's not just about electing a bishop ... now you know that it's all about the leadership culture of the Church.

So, what kind of family is this? Is it a nice house? Are people polite there? Does one feel safe there? Can a kid play there without looking over his shoulder? Are there any elephants sitting in the living room (and rhyming with "sitting"), with no one mentioning them?

I used to read family systems theory from the likes of Jay Haley and Salvador Minuchin et al. There is nothing wrong with clear authority and strong leadership. There is everything right about organization and boundaries and effective structures. It is right to be concerned about "functionality" if you mean by this just the ability of people to live together, to solve problems together, to love and to grow.

For us as a Church, that can be translated traditionally -- after St. Gregory of Nyssa -- as growing along the infinite lines of theosis, where "God being the infinite, creatures embrace it [i.e., the infinite] in an endless sequence of finite instances" (Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p194).

So, priests who stand close to the bishop, whether they are "kingmakers" or "policy-makers" or "movers and shakers," are responsible for diocesan conditions that facilitate theosis. 

Let that sentence hang there in the daylight for a while. I wrote it in as modern an idiom as I could stand.

The "facilitation of" -- or, rather, cooperation with -- theosis for a person must involve, necessarily, ascetical obedience. It involves, necessarily, the violent deliberate attack against the soul-destroying and intellect-distorting passions. It involves, necessarily, the constant refutation of evil logismoi. It involves, necessarily, the recognition of the logoi of creation, the residency of the Logos in the heart and the recognition of His Image in the eschaton.

That said, the facilitation of theosis for a group involves the same. It involves a social application of the fight against the passions. It involves the recognition of demons (who are much more demotic than their maudlin appearances on screen), and fighting against the demons' persistent attempts to subvert conversations into denunciations. It involves the conscious disavowal of the familiar and luxurious comforts of pessimism and despair, and the manly search for logoi, and the avowal of hope. 

Practically, this involves, necessarily, the shelving of grudges. It involves, necessarily, the doubting of all negative impressions and characterizations, the agnostic review of all patterns of distrust. It involves, necessarily, the taking of risks, the shearing off of old habits of anger. It involves glasnost, and probably requires perestroika. It involves the recognition of the icon of Jesus in each of the brethren, and the careful veneration of this image.

It involves the acceptance that no one is a "good judge of character" -- nay, not even you.

It involves, necessarily, the renunciation of denunciation.

It involves, as the old song says, the guarding of each man's dignity, and the saving of each man's pride.

Then, when the world sees the Orthodox priesthood turn into a band of brothers, then, and only then, “they will know we are Christians by our love.”

We do not need a revival of bishops.

We need a revival, even more, of the men around them.

Modern friendship

 

So, which persona shall we dress today?

I just took in le Carre, so shall we play the Circus game?
Let us splay out our little squalid zone, mercator-like,
and move our friends and unfriends on a Risk display.

Let alone the fact that none of us are smart enough
for intelligence, disciplined enough
for the dark agenda we wish for and assay.

I know: we'll dally in Machiavelli, and resort to footnotes
of the Medici, the Borgia, the Renaissance ecclesiology that built
St. Peter's and gild our conversation with Cosimo's gold brocade. 

But we are neither hard enough nor cultured
even to take the proper fork at service a la russe,
even to stay sang froid in a small-minded repartee.

Shall we try psychology or history or anything but theology?
It is fun and fine to cast our passion in so much academe
and mark the mob's insanity, and diagnose the fey.

The Bible is merely fundamental and theology so personal:
why should we mention Jesus or the Cross?
He will ruin everything, not a table left unturned.
Unsophisticated, bumpkinesque, that plain provincial meekness,
and every word a toll, so short and hard, sharp and stone, eternal.
The infinite is so droll.
He makes me feel so cross. 

Let's not talk of God today:
we'll fix our mask and play the masque
and tongue our dreary weltanschauung,
you do not fit there after all,
except your value for the task.

We'll go our separate ways. 

Questions for an episcopacy

"The Good Shepherd" (in the Atlas Mountains), by Henry Ossawa Tanner

 

Will you take us into tomorrow?

Will you take our past into your present?

Will you join your future with ours?

Will you use the first person plural when you speak of us?

Will you, in a confusing environment of “countless guides in Christ,” be our father who “begets us in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (1 Co 4.15)?

Will you take our hearts, open to you (2 Co 7.2)?

Will you take us into your heart, “to die together and to live together”? (2 Co 7.3)

Will you be Carpatho-Russian with us?

Will you be American with us?

Will you show us how to love a modern America out of an old-fashioned Orthodoxy?

Will you walk into our ex-steel valleys, our second-class developments, our coal towns in abandoned lands, our northeastern empty pews?

Will you be jovial in a musty hall, with a lingering scent of a halupki supper last Thursday?

Will you show us that God’s Will is a Good Will? For that hard-to-come-by optimism can only come by personal proof.

Will you take up our plainchant and let the echoes of our fathers, in cloud-wreathed mountains far away and long ago, resonate through your voice?

Will your monasticism take you through weariness and toil, vigil and fasting, exposure to the elementals of time (2 Co 11.27)?

Will your deep concern be for all our churches, the big ones but even the little ones, kept alive by a few pirohi sales and raffles (2 Co 11.28)?

Will you be able to say, “Who is weak and I am not weak … Who is made to stumble and I do not burn” (2 Co 11.29)?

Will you know how much this thirsty post-industrial modernity needs us, keepers of the Spring, but would rather us fade into obsolescent disregard?

Will you teach us how to forgive?

Will you show us how to hope?

Will you reveal the causal reflexive relationship between those two verbs?

Will you teach our seminarians that the One Crucified is the Second Person of the Trinity?

Will you demonstrate to us all that the Trinity courses with an over-abundant co-inherence?

Will you invite us, in winsome soul, to deification, here and now?

Will you be cruciform? Will you interpret the Empty Tomb to us?

Will you lead us in paths of righteousness, beside the cool waters, so that we will follow you through the valley of shadow?

Will you knit us, by the skein of kenosis, into koinonia, sobernost, a fellowship?

Will you help us say, fearlessly, maranatha? Because right now, we, along with about everyone else, are too afraid to really mean it.

Will you guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride?

Will you make them know we are Christians by our love, by our love?

Will you sing, at the end of a long banquet, “zaspivajme mnohaja”? 

Over and over again?

 

Will see. 

Vote?

a 19th century painting by Jean Paul Laurens,
of a very cranky St. John Chrysostom "voting," or confronting
a very haughty Empress Aelia Eudoxia

 

I'm on a discussion list called "Theology." This name is comical, most of the time, because the discussion is usually anything but. 

A recent topic has formed under the rubrical question, "Who should we Christians vote for?" And the subsequent commentary is, as you might expect, replete with vocabulary like "nut job," "socialist," lame stream media," "wing nut," "muslim," "morman," "bloviator," "liberal," "conservative," etc., etc.

A certain preacher (prefacing himself with "Dr Archbishop," zeroing in from some very interesting sector of modern church history), advised that one needn't worry about how to vote, because "the Spirit of Discernment will surely tell you to vote the idiot out of the Whitehouse." Sic. Rather sic.

In all of these comments, there seemed to be held, as axiomatic, the belief that the Bible and Christian Tradition know all about voting in American elections.

This belief, it turns out, is unsubstantiated. It has no legs.

The idea of "voting" is a more difficult subject than one might expect. In the long history of the church, the vote given to every adult (i.e., universal suffrage) to choose an executive is a very recent thing.

The Church is certainly more used to dealing with Emperors, Kings, oligarchies and plutocracies (like the one we might be in, actually). No matter what form of government, or how intensely anti-Christian (or even "antichrist") the government was, the Church has been willing to articulate its prophetic voice about certain prevailing concerns.

I suggest that in the use of this new thing -- this "vote" -- that we follow the Church's longstanding prevailing concerns (or "values") when we make our political decisions.

These concerns can actually be tallied up in Scripture (from the pronouncements of our Lord Himself, and also from the Apostles) and in Church History from 90 AD on. What did the Church constantly "complain" about, in the face of the State?

The Church's "governmental" concern was firstly to be left alone to worship God through the celebration of the Eucharist, in accordance with the Apostles' teachings. This you can find in the writings of the Apologists, especially Justin Martyr. You might want to call this concern "religious liberty," but myself, I don't know -- that term, "religious liberty" is tied up inextricably with the concept of modern terms like "establishment" and "separation of church and state." I rather like some elements of establishment (like certain tax-free amenities) -- but this is not at all what the Apostolic Fathers were writing about. And I'm not at all sure whether the Church has evern been sanguine about "pluralism," either. If we ever get to a state of affairs where we lose our tax privileges, it is not difficult for me to imagine Justin or Clement or Ignatius saying something like "Well, at least now you don't have to accept the equal validity of other religions, n'est-ce pas?" (I mean, doesn't it make sense that if you accept at least a rudimentary form of establishmentism, then you must also accept a sort of neo-Roman syncretism, like what modern pluralism really is?)

Another concern was for the treatment of slaves, and the treatment of other disenfranchised people (like women, children -- born and unborn, and non-citizens). The Church worked to raise money for the manumission, or freeing, of slaves.

Another concern, especially before Constantine, was about the prosecution of war. For the first three centuries, the Church was largely pacifistic, actively doubting whether anything was worth the horrors of military conflict. Bishop Ambrose of Milan actually locked the door of the church to Emperor Theodosius for his having commanded his troops to massacre 7000 civilians  in Thessalonika.

Another concern was about the appetite for violent entertainment. It was the Church's complaints, over a few generations, that led the Roman Empire to put a stop to gladiatorial combat. And the Church continued to protest against entertainments that played on violent and sexual themes. The Church has always been more "puritanical" than we'd care to admit.

What became prominent as prevailing concern, stretching over the centuries, was the State's relationship with the poor. Many, many Church Fathers -- starting with James in his Epistle and including figures like the heroic St. John Chrysostom -- continually reproached the rich and powerful for their lack of concern about the economic and physical miseries of their fellow man. Chrysostom himself was sent to his certain death in exile because he dared to criticize the Empress for her luxurious aristocratic largesse (Aelia Eudoxia, in haute couture, was lucky to have, willing to join her, a lot of other people whose feelings were hurt by the Patriarch of Constantinople -- including the Patriarch of Alexandria and his imperial minions).

Later on, in the exceptional period of time known as the Byzantine Empire, the Church actually invented the idea of the hospital, as we know it today. St. Basil the Great constructed, in his town from his own funds, a vast complex that offered food and assistance to the poor, and healthcare for the sick and infirm. Healthcare and welfare have always been essentially Christian notions -- at least, "Christian" in the sense of Holy Tradition.

What is interesting here is to consider what is absent from these prevailing concerns of the Church over the centuries, and under various forms of governments.

Never once did the Church stand for the de-regulation of economic activity, especially usury. The Church has never been "on the side" of free market or business/corporate interests. You may counter that there Christian voices, starting with the Reformation, waxed lyrical about capital and complex interest, industrialism, and the protestant work ethic: if you were to say so, I would gently remind you that laissez-faire theories used to be called "liberal" in the olden days, and were produced by Reformation economic theory that severed the marketplace from the judgment of the Saints (cf. Revelation 20.4-6).

Never once has the Church opposed "Statism" per se, or "federalism" or the centralization of the State. This is hard for me to admit, because I harbor not a few libertarian notions. But the fact remains that the Church has always perceived a single, strong State as an aid to the promulgation of the Gospel. Witness, as an example, the early Church's very positive view of the pax Romana established by Caesar Augustus -- this despite the sporadic (but harsh) persecutions of the Church by Roman officials. The Church has never profited from the breakdown of civilization.

Never once did the Church oppose immigration. Americans, over the course of their short history, have repeatedly opposed immigration. But the Church, in her longer history, has not.

Never once did the Church protest against what we have grown to call today, inaccurately, "socialism." The Church, historically speaking over the centuries, has never discouraged any "dole" or "welfare" or governmental relief given to the poor. This sort of "Christian protest against relief" is a rather modern anomaly that is troubling, to say the least, and has nothing to do with real Christian values.

Real Christian values -- which one expects should constitute the benchmark for Christian voting -- has always been "conservative" when it comes to doctrine and belief. 

But it has always been quite "liberal," as it were, when it comes to economic legislation and political enfranchisement.

So if you are interested in voting, then plan your vote under the historic guidance of the Church. Listen to the Holy Spirit, Who not only speaks to you directly, but through Holy Tradition. No one can tell you, from Holy Tradition, that you "must" vote -- that is not at all an obvious Biblical or ecclesial command.

But voting is certainly a privilege -- and if you use that privilege, you are enrolling yourself in the franchise of this government, and you must answer to the hard criteria that the Church has laid down for government throughout the ages.

Because if you really take the theory of modern democracy seriously, in a strictly Christian sense, the Ruler of this nation will be neither Barak Obama nor Mitt Romney -- it is you.

And you will have to answer.

Diocesan muse

It rhymes with news.

Just heard that there is, finally, a viable candidate to succeed my late bishop, +Metropolitan Nicholas of Amissos.

The candidate is from the Metropolis of Atlanta in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese. He is American-born, well-educated. More importantly, he knows about prayer. He can even talk about the nous -- without any sarcasm, I must say that this fact alone distinguishes his candidacy.

You can imagine, I'm sure, that some cultural and ethnic questions have been asked. Isn't there any candidate from our own ranks, from our own "people"? Isn't there anyone from the old country?

The fact remains -- despite some bloggerisms to the contrary from the usual sources (the sort that read like a monongahela brown-land on a rainy day in grey November) -- that our chancellor, vice-chancellor and consistory priests worked hard in the last 15 months, looking for and praying for a worthy candidate. Some were identified -- and for one reason or another, these "some" did not work out. That kind of process must be allowed for, given the complexity of this world, and the free moral agency of every man.

There has been no contact from the old places in Europe. A few intemperate notions (on blogs and facebook pages and twitterisms -- I can't wait for the inevitable anonymous letters) suggest that there is some geo-political contretemps between the Patriarchate and some Eastern Europeans, and consequently the former quashed any consideration of the latter.

No -- the reason for the absence of an old world candidate is far less interesting (and much more despondent): the old world simply hasn't said a word or made contact or demonstrated one iota of interest, in these last 15 months, in showing up for the continued pastorate of its children in America.

I should note here that one can always expect intemperateness in transitional moments, such as the one we're in. To us who are still afflicted by old family memories of the Habsburgs or the Tsars (or their red successors), any and every regime change brings out predictable anxieties. We whisper. We project. We speculate. We are sure that large forces are at work, working against our interests. We are positive that choices are foisted upon us, and that all we do is to "rubber stamp" decisions that have been already made.

I get that way myself, and my grandparents and great-grandparents did not come from the starij criju. Switzerland, yes, and Aberdeen. Thuringenwald and Brementown, too. But I suggest that these worries are not confined to any single sort of people. When I get that way -- i.e., intemperate and anxious -- I pray, and remember that the Holy Trinity disposes a Good Economy, and that Christ Jesus is our one and only High Priest and Pastor. I also listen to the Sons of the Pioneers on my porch in the evening.

To the "old world" voices who harbor strong notions of ethnic continuity, I would like to remind them, gently, that I have bent over backwards (to use an old cliche) personally defending the ethnicity of this particular Orthodox community. I have suggested, not too gently, to converts that they should quit complaining about the occasional appearance of Church Slavonic in the services, and that the Carpatho-Russian recension of the typicon is just as valid as is the Russian, Greek, Ukrainian or Antiochian recensions. We converts can be a wild-western lot, I know, having been one and, I guess, continuing to be so. I have also helped Vladyka prepare presentations on the Rusyn (see? I can use that spelling, too) heritage, and its continuing value for the Orthodox evangel to America -- and I believed in those presentations. He always laughed about my monoglottism, and my complete inability to translate the simplest phrases into po-nashemu (this means "our language" to us ex-anabaptists). He said, on several occasions (and even as a joke at one of our interminable banquets) that I said Slava Isusu Christu with an Oklahoman accent.

Now (and please excuse this post-modern meta-self-referential idiom), that last paragraph was rhetorically positioned in just the same way as St. Paul's remark in Philippians 3.5: Circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews; as touching the law, a Pharisee. 

You see? Despite my Heinz 57 pedigree, I should get some credit for having tried to be Carpatho-Russian -- or at least, to act in the best Carpatho-Russian interest.

Having lodged this credential, in an admittedly pathetic manner (and you must pardon that rhetorical pun there, because it was so irresistable), I suggest that the pastoral care given us by the Ecumenical Patriarchate since 1938 hasn't been so bad. The Phanar has let us be (and continue to be) who we are. We have made necessary adjustments. We have not been folded, willy-nilly, into another diocese and into another culture -- a sad state of affairs that would be manifestly non-Chalcedonian, and very much at our particular expense. Oddly -- and "oddly" in a tragic sense -- the ethnic voices who might actually work politically for such a "folding" would, if they got their way, produce the very extinction of Carpatho-Russian values that one would expect they'd rather avoid.

I like this Carpatho-Russian culture, this idiom of Orthodoxy in the wild west. Once in a while I understand parts of it. 

At this point, I still know little of this new candidate for the episcopacy of our diocese. But I pray fervently for him and this process nonetheless.

But as an ingrafted convertski Carpatho-Russian priest, I have nothing to fear. For God is sovreign, and we serve a timeless apostolic church. Metropolitan Nicholas is praying for us in Paradise -- of that I am sure.

We should trust God. We should worry less, and stop thinking so politically.

Because historically, politics is manifestly not "our thing."

 

Mistakes were made

I think, in the inimitable words of Richard Nixon and most recently Jamie Dimon (and also the infamous one-eared bunny from Groening’s oeuvre), that in this last expansion of the American Orthodox constituency, “mistakes were made.”

One of them, oddly enough, was the embrace of an American nationalism. I say “oddly” because this embrace is suspiciously consistent with a pre-world-war European nationalism -- a nationalism that motivates odd things like the hieratic blessing of machine guns and nuclear arms. It is a nationalism, too, that produces the unpleasant fractures of phyletism -- the parceling out of the holographic Church into historicist tribes (each of which are associated -- undeservedly -- with terms like “ethnicity” or “culture”).

I oppose nationalism with a simple neighborly and land-loving patriotism. There is nothing wrong with the latter. Indeed, I think a Christian really ought to be a patriot like this, an American with a small “a,” or at least an American without all the boldface and italic emphases (as in the souped-up “love it or leave it,” or “right or wrong”). 

In fact, American nationalism is not only opposed to a decent patriotism: it also violates a decent America. 

A nice “thought experiment” that demonstrates this principle is a brief consideration of this fact. We all know that a Baptist minister composed the Pledge of Allegiance. But did we know that the Pledge-writer was also a Socialist? An additional fact that should be considered is the likelihood that the very people on stage at political rallies who lead, lustily, the Pledge, would deny to their death the possibility that a Socialist could be patriotic at all, much less as patriotic as they.

Just as capitalism cannot be denied a place at the American pageant, so also cannot socialism. To acknowledge this should be a commonplace -- but the fact that today it is not an accepted historical truth, and to say so is rather un-expedient, proves the proposition that nationalism violates a decent America. The flag-waving denouncers of socialism turn out to be, ironically, patently un-American.

An American patriotism -- a truly Christian American patriotism -- will love the people and the land. It will recognize that both substances -- land and people -- compose this symbolic place-name. It will comprise its history with all its limitations and moments of beauty. It will not deny wrongheaded decisions. Any Christian who holds the Bible at least somewhat important will have to follow the lead of the prophets, and foster a healthy political critique. 

A critique is frowned upon, at the least, in the loud, wide bowels of nationalism. Not so with patriotism true and blue. 

There is a word bandied about nowadays, upon which the moral notion of proper patriotism especially turns. Not surprisingly, it shows up in two very different idioms, and its name is “American exceptionalism.”

A Christian patriotism will renounce any exceptionalism that predicates a prideful imperium -- such an errant exceptionalism runs rampant in the unfortunate extra verses of the national anthem, and it inflates the gaseous mikes of media hosts only when they’re “on the air.” 

It is always good to count our blessings. God gave America the Grand Canyon and every single unborn child, every heterosexual marriage that thrives and every protected species that survives (unstained by Monsanto). These are all miraculous exceptions indeed -- and that is the sort of “exceptionalism” to which I hold.

But it is never good to count ourselves blessed at the expense of other nations. The Church -- not the nation -- is the city set upon a hill. Jesus preached to all the nations, not to the ten lost tribes of Israel running around in pre-Columbian America (one is inclined to suspect that the main reason why Mormons are getting along so chummily in the right circles of American Christianity is because so many hope the tale might be true). America needs Christ because America, like all countries, needs assimilated into the economy of the Holy Trinity. 

But it doesn’t follow from this that Jesus is American. You may think that remark funny (it does sound comic) -- but sadly, such a thought lurks as the unspoken second premise underlying too much “Christian” political speech.

Jesus is not going to use America to shape an end-times narrative. He is not using it now to defeat Islam and other religions. He is not utilizing America to fend off trends of immorality and secularization. Current experience presents something of a conundrum for nationalists who believe fervently in such divine fending-off, because they would like to wave their civil religion flags against Muslims and gay pride parades at the same time: at even a cursory level of comparative theology and ethics, such simultaneous flag-waving comes off as at least mildly inconsistent. Jesus is not using America as an instrument of safeguarding a Biblical faith: preachers can throw up the American flag behind the pulpits and powerpoints all they want, but America is not the hope for the nations. The Rapture is just as much part of the American dream as is the hope of building so many new barns for rich fools -- who, when they discover the reality of the soul only at the late moment when it is “required” of them, find that the Rapture and the Dream were mere spectral fantasies indeed.

America did not bless Christianity. Christianity did not improve when it got to these shores.

God, as Creator and freely distinct from His Creation, does not need America.

America, surely, needs God, and the reality of His Church.

And permit me to suggest this possibility, against some prevailing notions:

Orthodox Christianity did not improve, either, when it got here. Over the space of only a few generations, it did become “American” in a lesser, regressive sense. We are more than competent at having imitated the mainline penchant for seminary accreditation (a bourgeois and secularist predilection if I ever saw one), for the professionalization (and concomitant secularization) of clergy, and for political hobnobbing (“we should unify because we can set up an important office in DC, so the Big People will pay attention to us”). Or, on the other hand (and schizophrenically doing so at the same time), just as competently aping the fundamentalist metier for commercializing spirituality and entertaining the buff elite.

But Orthodoxy still has the better (or, if you will, more authentic) America to reach and to attain: the “genius” of this land (whether you want to translate that term in its classical meaning, or its more current usage a la the newly-departed Walter Wink) still eludes ecclesial grasp and comprehension. Then and only then (along with the more important priorities of ascetical development and charismatic grace) will it become substantially (i.e., “spiritually”) autocephalous and united. Not before.

But I have uttered this point before, earlier in these pages.

Back to the mistakes made. 

I wonder if Orthodoxy was ever really ready for America. Indeed, I doubt it very much. Clearly, the hierarchy back in the old world was unprepared for the expanse of the land, the melange of cultures, the superficial egalitarianism of blue-collar workers on their days off, the incongruency between the prima facie appearance of democracy and the a fortiori plutocracy, the utter commodification of all goods in the first truly bourgeois civilization -- a society with no real need for history and, conversely, a certain need to deny metaphysics.

I am note sure whether America ever occurred to Orthodox prophecy. If there is a place for America in a real eschatology, it will be that in this civilization, America is where history goes to die.

No, the old bishops and consistories and synods hadn’t a clue: whether they have one today is up for debate.

Consequently, American Orthodox parishes began to adopt American ways -- “trustees” instead of “councilors,” “dues” instead of “offerings,” “bingo” instead of “canonical hours,” “Rush and Glenn” instead of the prophets. American Orthodox priests began to practice American political speech -- including, especially, the odd conflation of “conservatism” with the “right wing” fandom of the military-industrial complex, and of “social concern” with the “left wing” desacralization of the academy and power. American Orthodox intellectuals (i.e., theologians, ethicists, historians) began to accept the American instrumentalization of intellect, and a patent pragmaticism began to infect all levels of ecclesiology and sacramentology. Ethics was removed from theology. History was subjugated under the rubrics of nineteenth century historicism. Christology was taken away from biblical exegesis -- and biblical exegesis was captured by romanticist literary criticism.

America said it wanted a respectable and successful religion.

Orthodoxy tried too much to give America what it wanted, and in doing so, it failed to give America what it needed.

“Need” is the only business of true religion. 

“Want” is ever the stuff of the imperial cult, throughout the ages.

Let me utter a simple prophecy here. In this decade and the next, Orthodoxy will become more and more solitary. The coalitions may or may not survive, depending on whether the other groups become more or less Orthodox.

And Orthodoxy will move from its uncomfortable associations with imperial religiosity and become more like it was before Constantine. The Constantinian age is drawing to a close, with the complete rise of this a-historical and anti-sacral civilization. The eschaton, as it draws closer, will scour away the unrealities that are now clogging and burdening the church.

And you will see, as clear evidence of this scouring, the signs of clearer proclamation from the Church. Its language will become more Christological and Trinitarian and less the marketing speech of the agora. Its critique will become more continuous with the prophets about justice, in defense of the poor and the powerless. Its leaders will lead to deification largely through their own experience of deification: as in “imitate me, as I imitate Christ.”

In the light of that day, the Orthodox American may patriotically and faithfully say “God bless America,” and know in his heart that He has, surely, through the presence of his Church.