It is time now that Orthodoxy should become more American and less identified with the old country.
We should be more affiliated with each other in this culture (no matter how shallow we think it is, or negative) than any other culture (e.g., Greek or Russian, Arab or anything else across the pond). The only other language (besides modern English) that we should be speaking/singing in church should be Spanish.
I love my adopted Rusyn culture and serving in our Carpathian version of Church Slavonic. But I'll drop that in a flash if it becomes an obstacle to any American communicability.
We should be more American and neighborly and civic-minded, even -- if it comes down to it -- at the expense of our old world cultural identity. Cultural identity may not be, and probably is never, a virtue.
We should be more theologically-minded than perspicacious about the Rudder canons, the separating and divisive boundaries, the supercilious rubrical differentials.
It is a horrible, melancholy thing that in American Orthodoxy, the canons have become cannons.
We should be more prayerful, more attuned to the realities of the one Heavenly Liturgy than to the fastidious and prettiest performance of liturgy.
We should be known by love, by the fruits of the Spirit, by true prophecy and wisdom. That is why real Orthodoxy (and Christianity in general) was given as a gift to the world in the first place.
It is not just for us, not an escape hatch, and certainly not a floating cloud from where we can watch the earth-bound suffer their us-less fate.
Because there is no "them." "They" belong to "we."
And we live in this place. It's time that Cyril and Methodius should finally arrive in America. Obviously, they have not made it here yet.
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