A Millennial Goes to Church
I could’ve really used sleeping in on Sunday morning, but the sense of duty to keep my word and go to church won out in the end. After a couple of false starts and crashing back into bed, I finally stumbled out to the washroom, sat on the toilet and began browsing on my phone. I could still barley see, but checking social media updates is how I wake up.
I don’t remember the last time I went to church. I had texted with the priest because I needed my newborn son baptised, and after a few back-and-forth messages I realised that it’s quite rude to try to arrange everything through texting; I promised I would come to meet him in person.
Why do I need to baptise my son? I asked myself. I was baptised. Everyone in my family was baptised. It was the initiation ritual of my tribe. I also wanted the baptismal paper for a certain legal purpose. As for the soul of my infant, I’m not even going to go there. Let’s just say that his soul is fine the way it is, and that I’d drag my own soul and the souls of an entire congregation of judgemental pricks to Hell for him. Am I a Christian? Yes, but more in an amateur-theologian, anti-sacrificial style. I know - who isn’t that kind of Christian?
I came to the small, improvisational space that served as a makeshift Orthodox Church. We were in a foreign country, so this community of the faithful was spare and not well-funded. But the atmosphere was there: calming smell of frankincense, its smoke creating a misty, cloudy aura. I stood in the back with my hands respectfully on my crotch, and I observed. I could immediately tell my back will be cramped senseless by the time the service ends. In maybe an hour and a half?
There was a talented choir of two women and two men singing the liturgy right behind me. Good, I thought. Music alone can be worth the admission. Orthodox liturgical music is exceptionally soothing; it expresses a rare height of grace. It is art one could respect; one thought of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff. In fact, the choir was Russian, as was the priest.
The priest was the size of a basketball centre, towering above the congregation. He had a young, ruddy face and gentle eyes. Orthodox priests always had beards and long hair, but it just so happens that today that look aligns with the hipster fashion. The man’s beard and man-bun would fit perfectly into a local Starbucks Reserve. His layered vestments of rich design and lace made him look like an oversized Ancient Greek sculpture, maybe of some statesman like Pericles. Only rather than pagan rhetoric he wielded the Name of Jesus.
I next scanned the congregation and was sad that it looked in a way that supported some of Nietzsche’s vilest accusations against the religion. Why, the proportion of unattractive people in attendance was without a doubt greater than it would be in a random sample of the general population. One of the choir girls had horrid red blemishes on her face, the poor thing; another young woman, despite a slim figure and a closely tailored dress, was afflicted with severe adult acne and that big, bulbous type of nose that fells a small but distressing percentage of Slavic women. The male element was riddled with weak chins and puppy looks, often framed by thick glasses and thinning, grey hair. Heaven, I thought, is going to be full of ugly people.
We were in the midst of a melodic liturgy. A short, fat mother covered her shapeless body with an ankle-height dress featuring a flamboyant pattern of multicoloured leopards. The design struck me as very pagan, archaic. It reminded me of the leopard paintings at Chatal-Hoyuk (Çatalhöyük), the oldest known permanent human settlement built ten thousand years ago. I watched a Youtube video on it, in which it was explained that leopards represented conflictual violence (while buffalos represented unanimous violence against a single victim, which was the buffalo).
The mother held a big baby daughter, who was facing in my direction from over her mother’s shoulder. A young man walked in and stood near the child. He was very handsome, well groomed and dressed exquisitely. I was thankful and somewhat surprised at his presence. Why did he come? Is he feeling guilty about banging too many hot women?
The child of the homely mother ended up staring at the handsome man for a long while. There is a study that proved statistically that infants from the earliest age stare at better looking people longer. The study carried a big Darwinian import, trying to supply yet more proof that sexual selection among humans is hard-wired and not fundamentally different than that of animals.
My back was beginning to hurt. I looked at the framed icons laid all along three walls, including a makeshift iconostasis apparently built by tying images to foldable wooden window blinds. The style of Orthodox Icons is generally to draw the saints in the most miserable, exhausted, sunburned expression imaginable. Far from looking like they’ve been transfigured by grace into some state of joy, they looked like they were at the end of their wits, like they just about had it with earthly life and that’s why they quit the whole thing and went to Heaven.
Catholics, on the other hand, face-lifted their imagery a long time ago. Back during the Renaissance, they started drawing paintings of Saint John the Baptist with luscious hair and toned muscles bared underneath a loose sheepskin. They started making marble sculptures of Saint Peter with a six-pack. He would have a strong chin, manly beard, and thick forearms, and he would be hauling his cross like he was in a strongman contest. The Orthodox Saint Peter, on the other hand, remained a hunchbacked dotard with a silver beard and balding head, looking like a destitute street sweeper. It’s no wonder that with such a miserable religious pathos Byzantium ended up getting their asses stomped by the Turks. Why, the Orthodox still get their asses stomped, by their own thugs, who run a lot of Orthodox-majority countries.
A high point in the liturgy was ruined by a blond four-year-old boy who threw a wild tantrum right in the front row. The kid began screaming violently on someone’s shoulder; his insolence was palpable; he was then let go only to rush and stumble among the legs of adult congregants until he suddenly decided to collapse on the ground and remain laying there perfectly still. His face was glued to the dirty stone tiles right next to my feet. An old lady who may have been his nanny tried to put a shawl between his cheek and the floor, but then she backed off for fear that the kid will begin screaming again if she so much as touches him. I become judgemental: this kid is a spoiled brat and I want to know why his parents don’t discipline him. But then I wonder if he doesn’t have some sort of a condition like ADHD; I mean, all kids throw tantrums, but the shocking lack of inhibition of this particular child seemed to make him an outlier. In the old days, people would think that a kid like that was possessed.
They read a part of the scriptures in several languages, including English. I don’t understand Russian, but I could nevertheless tell that in that language, the reader assumes the most authoritative tone. He reads the scripture with a voice of an impassioned god. Or, he sounds like a Soviet Secretary of State confidently commanding the proletariat in the struggle against the capitalists.
As I child I was used to listening to liturgy in Old Church Slavonic, a language that I associate with the sacred, like old Catholics associate Latin with it. One thing I especially liked about that language was that it allowed me not to understand most of what was being said, thus relieving me of considerable dogmatic burden and allowing a freedom of creative interpretation. In that way, Church Slavonic is like jazz.
A couple of spots in the narrative mention Jews, obviously in a vaguely negative role. It’s been two thousand years and we still drag Jews into it. Why, none of us in attendance are Jews. But then I look again over the icons and realise that most of the characters depicted on them are Jews. Jews wrote the scriptures, too. Quite a twisted relationship towards the Jews; quite a Jewy undercurrent. Thinking back about the archaic religion, I thought how the Jew here fits the role of an ambivalent archaic deity, like the Scandinavian Loki: capable of levelling both curse and blessing upon the community. Jews the Chosen People; Jews the crucifiers of Christ. But not all the icons featured Jews. Archangel Michael, technically, is not a Jew; he’s not even human. There were also a few starting-lineup Greeks like Saint Nicholas and Saint George, and then there were a few sainted Slavs, blond geezers who looked vaguely like bikers. The latter are the latecomers and copycats who unlike the Jews, can only produce goody-two-shoes saintliness. No chutzpah with them.
The last language to read from the scriptures sounded like Latin; very swords-and-sandals, very badass. Then I realised it must be Romanian. I thought how even though we don’t have Latin in the Orthodox Church, Romanian is an excellent second-best.
The confessions start. Many of the congregants line up to a corner where they kneel down and bow their heads. The priest covers the back of their head with an embroidered cloth and murmurs something in their ear. I’ve done that once or twice. The priest simply asks you if you have sinned, and you say yes. Then he tells you not to sin any more. That’s it. The orthodox don’t have the whole confessional box dynamic. That would be bending the proud, stoic Eastern European spirit way too far.
The girl with the big nose confesses, and on her way back she crosses herself and kisses a lineup of icons. What is she hoping for? Afterlife? A better nose? I suddenly feel compassion for her. If she had a pretty nose, she probably wouldn’t feel so much need to beg the saints for help. I wonder if she ever considered that in the modern times, the cosmic injustice perpetrated upon her face didn’t need a miracle to be cured. We have plastic surgery.
I then wonder if I should line up for confession. If I recall, I’m supposed to fast for a week leading up to it, live a clean lifestyle, and this certainly had not happened. I decide to do it anyway - no one will know. The priest covers my head and asks me in English if I have sinned. I answer in the affirmative. He asks me if I repent for my sins, and I say that I do. He then said something about how I’m absolved from my sins. I wasn’t sure about that, but if it was true, it sure would be a good deal. God indeed would be merciful, at least in my particular case.
The confession then qualifies me for communion, and I line up for that too. Once it’s my turn in front of the priest, he needs to know my name to say it while offering the Eucharist. It consists of a wine-soaked piece of bread - leavened - out of a golden chalice and from a golden spoon. I take it, kiss the hand holding the stem of the chalice, and walk away respectfully. The ingestion produces a calming effect.
The last act on the program was a sermon, also read in multiple languages by randomly positioned congregants. It asked: why is there disease in the world? It did not ask why there is physical ugliness in the world, or aging for that matter, but I interpreted “disease” as an umbrella term that encompassed the latter two problems. It explained how some people choose to be sick by abusing their bodies with alcohol, tobacco, and heroin, for example. But then it conceded that some diseases happen for no reason and are undeserved. As an example of that, it mentioned one of the members of the flock by name, and revealed how she was sick with some cancer or whatnot, a disease that had made her an invalid for life, even if she survives it. It explained that undeserved sickness comes through the original sin of Adam and Eve. But, it said, the answer to unfair sickness was also to be found in the scriptures. The answer was Jesus. And to be healed by Jesus, one needed to want to be healed; this argument was supported by a story in the Gospel in which Jesus, before healing a paralytic, first asks him if he wants to be healed.
I wasn’t satisfied with that argument. The amount of unfairness in this world is so overwhelming that any attempt to rationalise it seems to me as unforgivably trivialising, insolent. It must be conceded that victims themselves often seek and find consolation in God, but still. My old man didn’t buy it either. He had loved his mom, and his mom was gradually paralysed and then killed by a series of strokes spanning twenty-five years. It was my mom who used to take me to church as a child, as did her mom, my grandmother, a doormat wife who probably prayed that the asshole who abused her would stop doing it. It didn’t really work, though he did die early. I didn’t hate my grandfather, though I was somewhat scared of him; he too was someone’s victim. When he died, everyone said how he was very hardworking despite his rampant alcoholism. And that’s just my family; on any given day I run into several people who have horrible jobs or are crushed by life in so many other ways. Trying to trace cosmic purpose in all that seems like a very, very long shot.
Besides, making such a big deal out of it all only makes it hurt more. I don’t mind dying; I want to die like a man, without complaining. I hope it happens after I’ve taken care of my family for a while. Though to be fair, a slow death marked by a debilitating illness - I don’t know how I would handle that. I think I would start praying to God to cure me, too.
As for common vices, the church definitely makes it worse by getting all neurotic about it. Take lust for example. Talk to a believer, and they talk about lust with idiotic, cowardly fear. I’ve been there and let me tell you: lust is not all fire and sulphur; it is merely stupid. You don’t get cured by fleeing the devil in terror and running scared into the arms of God; you get cured because one day you realise that the whole game is a joke, that you are a superficial schmuck getting separated from your money by bimbos, and that once you start getting grey hair, it’s embarrassing to chase skirts. You get cured not by fearing the Devil - you are supposed to fear God instead, right? - but by becoming wise to his stupid little tricks. I then wish some miracle could reverse my grey hairs. Other than hair dye; the hair dye would take a lot out of my dignity.
In its conclusion, the sermon asked a series of reproachful question addressed to unspecified evildoers. Why do they seek war instead of peace? Why do they insist on wreaking misery on their neighbours through unbridled greed? Don’t they understand the truth behind their actions? They don’t understand, I thought, and they don’t care. Have they met these people? What I didn’t understand was how the sermon was going to change them, or how it was going to change anything else. Just - buy a gun. Besides, it seems that a little bit of naughtiness helps the world spin. What exactly is the ideal endgame in the eyes of the church? Everyone just does the right thing all the time? Sounds horribly boring. No one wants that. No one finds goody-goodies attractive or interesting.
The service wrapped up. The priest stood at the altar and gave a short speech in Russian while holding a large turquoise-studded crucifix over his chest. He seemed to be talking philosophy - a couple of times he stuttered and smiled in mild embarrassment, as though he was stumbling over a complex concept.
I dragged my numb body out of the room and sat on a marble stair in the hallway to regain walking ability. When I returned, the people somehow looked more regular. The charm of the liturgy was gone and now I was merely in the midst of a group of everyday mortals. A group of guys was packing the liturgical props into a couple of massive suitcases of a Swiss brand (it had the cross on the logo?). I chatted with the girl with the big nose. She told me that the boy who threw the tantrum was the priest’s son. The reason he acted so uninhibited was because he’s at the service every Sunday. The place might as well be his living room.
I donated a good amount of money when they passed the basket. The priest’s gotta eat too, I figured. I talked to him briefly as he was packing up and trying to handle a series of phone calls. He was sweating bullets. He told me that for a baptism I need a bathtub big enough to submerge the baby, and a godfather who is a good Orthodox Christian and someone who can recite some scriptural verses from the heart. The girl with the big nose added that the child takes his faith from the godfather, and that’s why it was important that the godfather is a true believer. Okay, she’s an idiot too, I thought. I had no sure way to gauge a good Orthodox Christian, but the second requirement can be arranged. The priest would come to my house, and we should have a celebratory meal afterwards.
Basically, from what he told me I realised didn’t really need to have come to church; I simply needed to text the guy when I want to do the baptism, he comes over, and most of the details aren’t really part of some strict rules, but simply suggestions that will ensure I avoid awkwardness and pull off a proper baptismal party. With that figured out, I said a cordial goodbye to everyone - the priest even hugged me - and I left the premises.
I was in the beautiful part of the city, surrounded by elegant classical architecture. I felt a sense of relief. I should be happy to live in such a beautiful city, I thought. I’m not a bad person. In a way, the church people have a point - it’s quite easy to get sucked into urban temptations and get carried off by the devil into some sort of hellhole, be it chemical addiction, gambling, sex. Look up at the ritzy condominiums above you, glassed off and stuffed with phantom ambition - inside them you’ll often discover dazzling empirical proofs that hell does exist.
I too needed to slow down a bit with the beers and cigarettes. Not because I fear damnation; the cigarettes were probably accelerating my grey hair. After all the hell I’ve been through, and all the work and responsibility I carry, I feel that self-flagellating myself with guilt would be pointless and perversely masochistic. Out in the real world, people don’t respect you unless you bare your teeth, and if you don’t, you become a victim. And unless you have the powers of resurrection, that’s bad news for you and yours. Hell hath no fury like the fate of a nice guy, let me tell you.
Besides, I feel good. I am happily married. My mother-in-law is staying with us and she’s an absolute saint of a woman (and she’s not even Christian). Nevertheless I remember finding God as a great defining event in my life, though it was so many years ago. Back in the days when I struggled mightily. Since then, my attitude to avoiding trouble has changed; nowadays I mock it rather than to fear it; I think I learned that from Protestants. This is what repels me about the church – the fear. Yet, it must be admitted that I’m not completely safe from danger, if not of damnation, at least of derailing this earthly life. One never is.
Modern communication technology is creating visions of transcendence of unprecedented power. How’s a church with sad-looking icons to compete with the glitz and glamour of the city, with Instagram models, with informational highs and visions of consumerist bliss? I didn’t know, but I knew this: I was going to take a cab and go to my favourite coffee shop. It would be crowded on a late Sunday morning with beautiful, trendy people partaking of urban modernity, women showing off their fashion and their bodies, people ogling each other. It is an exalting communion. Yet, most people keep cool about it, including myself. Most importantly for me, I was going to get a strong black coffee and read a book. These simple pleasures, my friend, is what life is really about.
The cab ride back drove us by a science museum. Outside of the building, a complex, nondescript sculpture sprawled in all directions, rising above a bustling crowd of several hundred high school and middle school students. Here, I thought, was an alternative vision of transcendence. And it was in some way a beautiful vision, I remember; the story of the scientific revolution was inspiring and heroic. I devoured that narrative as a child. It was science that convinced me of the existence of a wise Creator, and then for the human element I filled in with Christian theology. But where does the scientific vision end up in today’s day and age? I abandoned it in university, and those I knew who didn’t ended up dreaming of Singularity, of brain implants, humans as asexual, even disembodied cognitive processors. These types now say they are on the spectrum; in any case, I find their vision exceedingly ugly. The church may still have something going for it.
I don’t know what to think. Changing my church is out of the question. The habit is too Western, too gay for the lack of a better word, and most importantly, where I’m from it constitutes treason. That might be a bit too sacrificial, but the world needs a minimum dose of katechon, or political differentiation, after all. It would be much more acceptable in the eyes of the mother church if I simply became an atheist. And that may even include communism, which interestingly enough never fails to end up an even more irrational and bloodier religion.
Besides, as much as I like some Western theologians, I always felt that Western churches are guilty of certain idolatry of intellectualism. They had put too much store in arguing - they call it reason - and they don’t respect people who are too decent to argue, and not necessarily too stupid. This has led them into bleak and harsh extremes of moralising. Obsessing over the production of ideas, they’ve become sterile in procreation. And who knows how many other demons exclusive to the West were unleashed by the faults of their churches? Now, it’s true that our side has some of that too, though moralising here is tempered by ignorance - and arrogance - fueled in no small part by oblivious yet blatant pagan syncretism. But better the Devil you know, I suppose. When the priest comes over for the baptism, I finally decided, I will try to get him drunk on wine. Then we may end up having a real talk.
