My Prediction

    I used to write essays and poetry, which I would send out to a list of folks for critique. Sometimes I would change them, based on that critique. (The only one that got zero  criticism and only praise was “Heretic’s Testament” in case you’re interested).

    It was my friend Laura Shaw who suggested I make it a blog. And that allowed me to be a lot more passive-aggressive in the face of my critics than usual, which I appreciated.  I also thank Laura for putting this whole thing together for me, and for putting on the Hans Hofmann art that I like a lot.

    What I did not expect was for this blog to become such a debate site with essays primarily about homosexuality and the Orthodox Church, but it has become that, and here I go again.  But, I hope anyway, for the last time.

    Later, I will say my predictions, but first I have to say that the Orthodox Church in America is required to deal with the separation of sex from reproduction in general, and the fact that it has not, does not bode well.

    The first issue is the place of women. Sex has mostly been removed from procreation for them at this point. Allowing us to see that women are not the evil daughters of Eve they were once thought to be, and letting us see that they are often ordinarily intelligent beings. The lack-of-discussion of this matter is most apparent during a service. Girls can’t even serve in the altar, so the services are always led by a sometimes large group of men. The fact that the world is very much different just outside the Church doors is not discussed like it has been everywhere else, and one gets the impression that this is the way it should be. Women subservient, even though their place in the world has been reconsidered.

    The other non-discussion is the related one about homosexuality.  One doesn’t need to look very far into the Bible or the services to see that marriage has changed a lot.  It was mostly polygamy (in the Old Testament—and that was the kind with one man and his multiple wives and concubines—not the other way around). Most of the great figures on the top two tiers of a traditional iconostasis were polygamists. 

      Marriage was mainly a way for two families to get together and to ensure the legitimacy of children. And to save us all from female sexually, which was thought to be predatory if women were not kept under control.  Marriage was not even a sacrament until about 1,000 A.D.  And the modern nuclear family did not arise until the twentieth century. Clearly it is the most changeable of institutions.

    The “falling in love” thing and sex as a way of communion between people is pretty modern.

    But in the Orthodox Church, the people who find themselves in marriages that “work” continue to clutch their pearls, and say how anxious they are to discuss the plight of their poor inferiors, as though that were important. But not right now, you understand.

    Here’s my prediction:  the aspect of the Orthodox Church that is about manifesting ethnic identity will just go away. This may have already happened in the Slavic Churches. It has yet to be completed among the Greeks. The Orthodox Church in America will be completely taken over by the Evangelical heresy. It will become the religious component (there has to be one) of their conservatism. The “Industrial Strength” version of Christianity (As they are already calling it).

  Then there will be people like me, who will look to Isaac of Syria, Mark of Ephesus, Gregory Palamas, and Mother Maria Skobstova, as models, but from a place way outside the institutional Church.