Orthodox Christians trace their beginnings to the disciples of Jesus Christ and to the Church, the ekklesia, established on the Day of Pentecost as told in the New Testament in the Acts of the Apostles. This history makes its way through the death of the Apostles; the persecutions by the Roman Empire; the legitimization and installation of Christian faith as the religion of the realm, under the rule of St. Constantine; the establishment of the canon of the New Testament; the hermits and ascetic monks known as the Desert Fathers; the several heresies or doctrinal distortions that led to the Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Church, in which was established, among others, the doctrine of the Trinity and the Nicene Creed; the con-version of Russia to Christianity in 988; the Great Schism in 1054; the Crusades; the fall of Constantinople in 1453; the occupation and persecutions at the hands of the Turks in the Middle East and Eastern Europe; the Communist persecutions in Russia and in the Soviet Republics in recent memory; and the present day. The Orthodox Church lives in vivid recollection of the past. In it, the past lives.

For the first 1,000 years, the Christian Church existed in virtual unity, albeit subject to many heresies which arose during the first 700 years of the Church’s life. The Church had weathered the storms of Gnosticism, Arianism, monophysitism, Nestorianism, iconoclasm, and other heresies by the early to mid 800s only to split in 1054 into the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. This schism had its roots in both political and theological differences that are linked. Politically, the Pope of what is now the Roman Catholic Church was one of the five patriarchs or bishops, and they held the chief positions of power politically. The other four were from Constantinople (New Rome, now Istanbul, Turkey), Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria (Egypt). Rome enjoyed the first place of honor because of its importance as the capital of the empire, and the eastern bishops saw the Pope as the first among equals.

During the 900s, the bishop of Rome added to the Nicene Creed, the central doctrinal statement of faith, a phrase, filioque, meaning in Latin, “from the Son.” This changed a sentence of the Creed that read, “and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, Who proceeds from the Father” to “Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” To the eastern bishops, this changed the Trinitarian structure by subjugating the Holy Spirit to the Son, a point with which they strongly disagreed.

Politically, the eastern bishops also felt that it was unacceptable that such a change be made without an ecumenical council of all bishops, which had been the practice and pattern to that point with regard to all major issues of faith. This change in the Creed, both in its content and in the process by which it was made, led to the schism between the bishop of Rome (the Pope), and the other bishops, that continues to this day. By the accounts of historians, the fault line had been widening for centuries before this time, with the western church and the Roman bishops themselves viewing the bishop of Rome as more powerful in the structure of the church than the eastern bishops. But the schism (called the Great Schism to differentiate it from the later schism of the Protestant churches) was unequivocal in 1054, with the mutual anathemas issued by the eastern bishops and the bishop of Rome. It produced what are now known as the Roman Catholic Church with the bishop of Rome, the Pope, and the Eastern Orthodox Church, with bishops representing the several national self-headed churches. In considering the Eastern Orthodox Church in America, it is important to keep in mind that originally it was united with the Roman Church and shares many of its core beliefs, sacraments, and rituals.

Orthodox Churches in America

Orthodox Christianity is the faith of about 250—350 million people worldwide (estimates vary). There are Orthodox Christians in every country of the world. Orthodoxy is the predominant faith in much of central and eastern Europe, Russia, and Greece, and is the predominant Christian faith in the Middle East and northern Africa. Recently, it has been the fastest growing faith in sub-Saharan Africa.

More than 4.5 million Americans are Orthodox Christians, among whom are nearly 2 million who attend Greek Orthodox churches. Other American Orthodox churches or jurisdictions include Antiochian, Russian, Serbian, and several others. The practice of Eastern Orthodox churches has been to grant jurisdiction in a newly evangelized geographical area or country, to the national church body that begins the missionary work in that area.

Following this pattern, the Russian Orthodox Church assumed jurisdiction on the North American continent because of its beginnings with missionaries from Russia who landed on Kodiak Island, Alaska, in 1794, and who evangelized the Aleut peoples. Churches were established there which remain to this day. With the fall of the Russian Czar, who was a protector of the Russian church, and the rise of the Soviet state with its severe antireligious stance, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch was unable to hold jurisdiction in America, and this led to jurisdictional proliferation and some confusion. There are now about 15 different jurisdictions in this country, principally from the various ethnic and national churches from the Old World. This situation of overlapping administrations and ethnic jurisdictions is in direct contradiction to church canons and is viewed as irregular by all Orthodox Churches (Stokoe, 1995). The Orthodox faithful in America look forward to the day when there is truly one Orthodox church in America. Despite the jurisdictional differences, there is often little to distinguish one church from another except perhaps the primary language used in the liturgy and the style of music. A person familiar with the Divine Liturgy, the central service of the church, from one jurisdiction would be able to participate meaningfully in the liturgy of any church of another jurisdiction.

To the western outsider, the Orthodox Church would appear to be very conservative and traditional, with the liturgy having remained virtually unchanged for 1,500 years and with little to mark a theological change through the years. Recently, sharp disagreement has arisen among the more traditionally minded Orthodox (the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and the American Exarchate of the True [Old Calendar] Orthodox Church of Greece) and virtually the rest of the American jurisdictions about the place and the effects of modernism or of westernizing in the churches. A central issue in this dispute, one that is symbolic, has to do with the acceptance and use by most American churches of the “new” calendar, the Gregorian calendar (which was imposed on the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Gregory in the 16^th century), rather than the Julian calendar (which was in effect at the time the Orthodox Church was established in 33 A.D.). The resolution of the conflict remains to be seen. Difficult words have passed among Orthodox faithful. Orthodox peoples did not come to American shores in any substantial numbers until the 1850s. The first Orthodox church in the contiguous states was established in New Orleans in 1864—Holy Trinity. Immigrants from Greece, Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East brought with them their Orthodox faith. Conversion to Orthodoxy in America has increased in recent years.

It may be important to note with Ware (1991) that Christians of the East have a very different past from that of Christians of the West, Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. The Eastern Christian background has no Middle Ages, no Reformation and Counterreformation, no Inquisition, and no Renaissance. Christians of the East and West start with different questions.

Central Beliefs

The Orthodox Church holds the Nicene Creed, a product of ecumenical councils in Nicaea in the year 325 and in Constantinople in 381, as its central doctrinal statement. The Creed occupies a central place in its recitation during many worship services of the Church, but most prominently in the Divine Liturgy, the central Eucharistic service of the Church.

For Orthodox, the Creed provides the theological boundary for the Church. Although diverse in many less important, less central practices, all Orthodox hold to the Creed.

The Nicene Creed

I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages: Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not created, of one essence with the Father through Whom all things were made. For us and for our salvation, He came down from heaven and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became man. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered, and was buried. On the third day, He rose according to the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. His kingdom will have no end. And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, Who proceeds from the Father, Who together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified, Who spoke through the prophets. (I believe) in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins. I expect the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. Amen.

Orthodox Distinctives

Although something may be lost in describing Orthodoxy in comparison with other Christian churches, because Orthodoxy is among the least known of Christian faiths in North America, definition by way of distinctiveness might be a good approach.

For Orthodox, God is always the Ultimate Mystery. The Fathers always point to the absolute unknowability of God. Many said that the God who would be comprehended was not God. At the same time, He is nearer to us than we are to ourselves (Ware, 1998). Orthodox theologians seldom have felt the need to explain further.

Dionysius the Areopagite (Luibheid, 1987) in his treatise The Divine Names lists and enumerates all the names of God used in Scripture and cautions us not to hold tightly as symbols the divinely given names, for all offer, at best, only a partial understanding of God. In his short work The Mystical Theology (in Luibheid, 1987, p. 141), he writes:

There is no speaking of It (God), nor name nor knowledge of It. Darkness and light, error and truth—It is none of these.

For Orthodox, the essence of the Creed is that God Himself is revealed in Jesus Christ and that human beings are redeemed by the Son. As Orthodox through the years have loved to quote, “God became man that man might become God” (St. Athanasius, 1975). Most of the words of the Creed have to do with the Son, Jesus Christ. Orthodox insist that Jesus was fully God and fully man. The early heresies were largely ways of mistakenly attempting to reduce this tension. Even the last of the great heresies, iconoclasm, resolved in the last of seven Ecumenical Councils, focused on the denial of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ. The Orthodox faithful reasoned that it was good to depict God as Jesus Christ visually because He had taken the form of a human.

Orthodox hold God to be the Creator as stated in the first line of the Creed. They also believe that He is in and throughout all of His creation. Also, and paradoxically, all things are within Him, and He is beyond and above all things. The theological term that seems to fit best this notion of God’s relationship to creation is “panentheism” (see Ware, 1996. This is not to be confused with pantheism, which suggests that creation itself is God). Orthodox hold very tightly to the notion of God being the Trinity, that is, one in essence but three in persons. God, the Father, is seen as the source of both the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Son is seen as the Redeemer Who became a human being, and the Holy Spirit is the person proceeding from the Father. Orthodox say little else beyond this formulation and feel little need to explain this mystery further.

Humans are believed to be essentially good by the Orthodox. Holding to the Genesis account, it is asserted that all things made by God are “very good.” With the rebellion of Adam and Eve, death entered the world. Orthodox understand the fall of humanity as the loss of the likeness of God. The image of God, in which humans were made by God, is never lost in any human. One Church Father has said that at the core of the core, the heart of the heart of every person, there is that which is eternally, inalterably divine. The work of humanity consists of uncovering the image of God and developing the likeness of God in themselves.

In Orthodoxy, the fundamental witness to Christian Tradition is considered to be Holy Scripture. Orthodox rely heavily on the liturgical texts of the Church and on the divinely inspired Fathers of the Church and their interpretation of Scripture and Tradition. The Fathers of the Church are considered to have known better than we the meaning of Scripture, both because of their nearness in time to the events of Scripture and to their having led lives approaching perfection and having gained a full understanding of the Christian gospel. The books of the Old Testament and New Testament are believed to be inspired Scripture, as are several “deutero-canonical” books.

Many of the Sundays of the Church’s liturgical year are named for the gospel passage read on that day. For example, as I write this on a Sunday morning, I am aware that today is the Sunday of the Samaritan Woman. The Gospel reading on this day tells of the interaction between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well of Sychar, in which He offers to her living water and tells her about her own life, then she goes to the village and tells her friends.

Orthodox do not see Scripture as standing alone in authority. The Orthodox view is that the Scripture comes from the Church, not vice versa, because the canon of Scripture came to exist, as we know it today, only in the 4^th century. The Church wrote and formed the New Testament. The Church believes Herself alone to be rightly able to interpret Scripture (Whiteford, 1997). Orthodox do not view Scripture as inerrant but as a reliable guide to the knowledge of God and His plan for humanity. The Orthodox Church holds Herself to be infallible and incapable of error. Orthodox do not trust the strength of words to fully convey ideas about God. The belief that God is ultimately mysterious and not containable with words weighs against the Church trusting fully any formulation of words.

Orthodox hold the entire church—all the bishops, all the priests, and all the people—Herself to be infallible. The Ecumenical Patriarch, the Patriarch of Constantinople, is sometimes mistakenly spoken of as the Orthodox pope. He is perceived only to have a privacy of honor or to be the “first among equals."

Father Michael Azkoul (1994) has written of other, less obvious, distinctives. He points first to the role of human reason in faith. The Orthodox Church makes little or no effort to reconcile faith and reason. Orthodoxy accepts support from the sciences but feels no need to justify Herself to the findings of science. Orthodoxy recognizes external changes in the expression of Her faith but does not endorse the view that the teachings of Jesus Christ have changed from time to time. She holds that the faith delivered to the Apostles of Jesus is now as it was in the first century.

The writings of the Church Fathers also are held to be authoritative. Often, modern-day Orthodox quote the writings of these persons who wrote 1,500 years or more ago. The writers are deemed to be Fathers of the Church, sometimes after hundreds of years, by the consensus of the entire Church.

Another distinctive feature of Orthodoxy pertains to its understanding of the process of salvation for human beings. Orthodox soteriology is oriented around the incarnation, the coming in the flesh, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Other Christian faiths hold to a more legal or propitiational view. The legal view is that Jesus, by His dying, paid the debt of sin owed by all humans to satisfy the justice of God. For Orthodox, by His coming in the flesh and His victory over death in His resurrection, Jesus Christ provided a way for humans to defeat death. This salvation is accomplished by a synergy of the gift of God’s grace and man’s effort. Orthodox do not speak of having been saved but of being in the process of being saved. Salvation is never spoken of in the past tense with regard to living human beings. (See Bishop Kallistos Ware’s book, How We Are Saved [1996], for a fuller presentation of these ideas.)

Worship for Orthodox is a distinctive feature and is central to the Church’s ethos. Orthodox services have changed little for hundreds of years. The Church sees Herself first as a worshipping community. Orthodox people worship together in prayers and hymns, most of which are sung or chanted. Incense is used at several points of the Divine Liturgy. Orthodox hold that the way in which people worship is nearer to their true faith than what they believe or think about God. The word Orthodox itself means “right worship” and “right belief.” When the Prince of Kiev, Vla-dimir, sent his emissaries to investigate the religions of the world in the 980s, they went to various countries to observe the faiths of the world. Reaching Constantinople and attending the Divine Liturgy at Agia Sophia, the Church of Holy Wisdom, they wrote to Prince Vladimir:

We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth, for surely there is no such splendor or beauty anywhere upon the earth. We cannot describe it to you: only this we know, that God dwells there among them, for we cannot forget that beauty. (Ware, 1991)

The full liturgical cycle of the Church is accomplished only in monasteries. Monastery churches spend 6—8 hours in worship daily. The structure is elaborate and moves in cycles of hours, days, seasons, and years. The Church year is centered on Pascha, or Easter, which is both a Sunday in the spring and a season of the Church year. The rest of the year revolves around it. It is said that the full cycle of worship in the Orthodox Church repeats itself only once in over 500 years.

For Orthodox people, the church is the ekklesia, or the gathering of persons called out, who believe in the living God as revealed in Jesus. The Church is governed by the Holy Spirit for it is viewed as a community of persons who are in the process of being purified and reformed through its mysteries or sacraments and communion with God (Constantelos, 1982). The Orthodox Church sees itself to be in direct lineage to the Church instituted by the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The Mysteries of the Church are services and rites in which gifts of God are given to man. The Mysteries transmit a supernatural grace by physical means. The chief of the mysteries is the Eucharist or, as the Orthodox say, the Body and Blood of Christ. Orthodox have always asserted that the Eucharist was the very Body and the very Blood of Jesus, not merely symbolic, but a sacrament that actually delivers the grace of God. Other sacraments of the Church include baptism, chrismation (similar to confirmation, the believer being anointed with a special holy oil, the chrism), repentance or confession, holy orders, marriage, and the anointing of the sick. All of the mysteries are personal. God’s grace is given to every Christian individually.

Life in The Church

Orthodox are accepted into the church by way of baptism and chrismation. Orthodox see the Christian way of life as one of continuous effort and spiritual growth in moral perfection. The goal of life in the Church and of life itself for the Orthodox is to achieve theosis or divinization, that is, becoming by grace what God is in His nature. This idea is found in the Sermon on the Mount by Jesus Christ in Matthew 5:48, “Be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” The Church has taught that it is a hospital for sinners who seek spiritual health. She offers her cure in full to all. For Orthodox, repentance, or metanoia, is the way to keep from allowing sin to become a permanent state of being and is a change of mind—a turning about of one’s mind and behavior. The Church sees Herself as composed of persons who are continually repenting.

For Orthodox, repentance is not only continuous internally but finds an externalization in confession to a priest. The Orthodox Church sees itself as having the authority to accept repentance and to forgive. Confession is practiced in the Orthodox Church, and the church’s representative, the priest, is not the source of forgiveness, but the instrument of forgiveness.

Contemporary Social/Moral Issues in the Church

Generally, the Orthodox Church maintains a very conservative or traditional moral system. Orthodox believe that a life of holiness is required to please God. The moral standards are high; however, in practice a great deal of flexibility is found. The interpretation and implementation of rules may be strict or lenient, depending on the situation. Human weakness is recognized.

The Orthodox Church holds marriage to be sacramental. By this is meant that marriage is an event through which God imparts His grace to two people. Orthodox consider marriage to be sacred. For Orthodox, the outcomes or goals of marriage include procreation and the comfort to individuals who link themselves together to work out their own salvation. One of the canons of the Church forbids divorce and remarriage. However, through the economia (accommodation of the rules according to circumstances or needs and the frailty of humanity) of the Church, divorces are granted on several grounds including abandonment, incompatibility, and abusiveness by one partner to the other. A person who is divorced is asked to go through a time of repentance and reflection by the Church before being admitted to a full communion status with the Church again. Generally, a person may be re-married only twice more.

Birth control has been a controversial topic in the Orthodox Church. Birth control has been condemned by Church canons, but it is not a matter of dogma. It appears that in America most Orthodox of child-bearing age practice some form of birth control. Generally, the decision about birth control is left to the married couple itself. Several bishops and even the Ecumenical Patriarch have suggested that this was a matter to be decided between husband and wife, rather than to involve their priest.

The Church, though rather lenient with regard to divorce and birth control, is without question against abortion. Respect for life underlies the Church’s response to abortion. Orthodox believe that even when the mother’s life is in danger, consideration must be given to the two lives involved.

Death and Immortality

It must be remembered that Christianity was born into and nurtured in the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world. Though the fishermen, the Apostles of Christ, were probably unschooled, they inherited a world view that though steeped in Judaism, was nevertheless influenced by the lofty philosophical developments of classical Greece. There is no doubt that the “Fathers of the Church” as the Orthodox call the great teachers of the first dozen centuries, were educated by way of studying the classical philosophers as well as sacred Christian and Hebrew scripture. They doubtless read Plato and were aware of his notion that death is the soul’s release from captivity and in human death, the soul reaches its ultimate destiny. Christianity, while rejecting that man is a spirit imprisoned in a body, taught that man is made up of human and divine natures and that the salvation brought by Christ reconciles the two. In the words of St. Athanasius, “God became man that man may become God.” (Meyendorff, The Orthodox Church, p. 195). These echoes of classical Greece may be found throughout the writings of the Church Fathers, and they reflect a Greek/Semitic belief in the reality of the soul.

The Orthodox Christian view of Creation is that God created man to be in eternal communion with Him. In the Fall of Adam through disobedience, mankind (Adam’s descendants) were cut off from God, and thus came under the domination of sin and the devil. Humans are born into a world in which it is easier to do evil than good, with man’s will compromised by “desire.” The Orthodox do not hold to the Catholic view that man inherits Adam’s original “guilt”, only his corruption and mortality. After the Fall, Grace, the gift of God, acts on man not from within as it did before, but from without. The image of God may be distorted by sin, but it is not destroyed. In words from the Orthodox funeral service, “I am the image of Thine inexpressible glory, even though I bear the wounds of sin.” (Ware, The Orthodox Church, pp. 258-259). There is thus less of a body-spirit conflict in the Christian East than there is in the West, since man’s state is not one of guilt, but of imperfection, to be restored by Grace, which is given by God.

The death of the body is a consequence of man’s ancestral sin, and Christ’s atoning acts of crucifixion and resurrection abolished the domination of Satan over man, overcoming death and granting man’s soul eternal life. The principal celebration of the Orthodox liturgical cycle is Easter (“Pascha” in Orthodox terminology). While not overlooking the suffering and atonement of Christ’s Crucifixion, Orthodox Christians concentrate on His resurrection. Its spirit fills the life of the Church—each Sunday is a “little Easter” a re-creation of the resurrection, not just a remembrance, but a participation, made present again to all who are present (Coniaris, Introducing the Orthodox Church, p. 41).

The Role of the Church

The Church is considered by the Orthodox as the living instrument of God’s continuing presence in the world. It gives man the most perfect path to salvation through participation in its sacramental life. Since its earliest days, the Orthodox Church has been an integral part of the life of her people. In the place of its origin, the Mediterranean world, it became after the fourth century, the peoples’ dominant cultural and spiritual force. It permeated their lives, from birth to death, with rites and services for every occasion, however humble. It is no surprise therefore to see in the Efchologion, the priest’s book of prayers, services for all occasions of human experience: the birth of a child, the blessing of a home, the planting of crops, the launching of a ship, for the hallowing of icons, laying the foundation of a church, and the significant events of peoples lives, their baptism, marriage, and death. (Vaporis, Mikron Efchologion ). Particularly in countries where the Orthodox Church is culturally dominant, the marking of time, the calendar itself, is dominated by the liturgical cycle of the Church. It is the Church, therefore, that the Orthodox Christian trusts to carry him through all events of his life, even his death.

In her sacraments, such as confession and communion, the Church guides man to his goal of theosis or union with God. In her teachings, particularly on prayer, she opens the way to communication with the eternal world of God and those who are with Him, that is the “saints.” These are people who have lived an exemplary life, perhaps suffered martyrdom for their faith, and are believed to be especially close to God. Together with all those who have died in the Christian faith, they constitute that part of the Church apart from the living, the “Triumphant Church,” so to speak. This commonality of experience and of sacredness is illustrated by a practice observed at every Orthodox service: when the priest offers incense at the altar (“Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as incense…”, Psalm 140), he then censes the icons, and then, he censes the people. The symbolism is clear: prayer and honor to God, prayer and honor to the saints, and then to their brothers, the living members gathered together in prayer.

The church teaches that all members of the faith, living and departed, are in constant communion with each other through prayer. The love of the living for the departed is expressed by communion in prayer with them (Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, p. 315). Thus, while prayer to God is most desirable and preferred, prayer to the saints is an ancient teaching of the Church, prominent in the writings of the Fathers and in all of the ancient Liturgies (Pomazansky, p. 317) . Just as the living ask the saints to pray before God for them, the living also pray for the departed, that God will receive and keep them in His presence.

Specifically in the case of an Orthodox Christian who is dying, the Church asks the family to invite the priest to the person’s bedside for the sacraments of confession and communion. (Elements of consecrated communion are held in every church for such occasions). The Orthodox offer anointing with holy oil as a sacrament, though this is considered a healing sacrament and is offered on any necessary occasion. It is not connected with the dying. The Church recognizes that not all circumstances of dying are ideal, and does not prescribe sacramental participation as an absolute necessity, relying on God’s mercy and love to care for those who may die without immediate benefit of the sacraments.

In the case of dying infants, the Orthodox Church, which practices infant baptism, allows for baptism by a layman in such an emergency, but is otherwise silent about the status of infants who might die before receiving baptism. Here, too, it takes comfort that a merciful God must take into account the innocence of the short life of the child and receive its soul into His presence.

Prayers for the Departed

The Orthodox Church teaches that worship (latria) is reserved for God alone. It does, however, implore its faithful to honor with veneration “paid to all those endowed with some dignity” (St. John Chrysostom, Homilies, III, 40). In the early Church, worship was often took place at the location of a martyr’s burial, over his/her relics. Even today, small pieces of saints’ relics are always placed into the altar of newly consecrated churches. Together with icons which adorn the interiors of their churches, the presence of these relics serve as a constant reminder of the Kingdom of God inhabited by these exemplary Christians .

That prayer may be offered to the departed saints has ample old and new testament basis (see for example II Macabees 12:39-46: when Jews found (sinful) idols in the garments of their fallen comrades, “…they turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out"; Romans 14:8-9: “…that He (Christ) might be Lord of both dead and living"; James 5:16: “pray for one another"; Romans 8:38: “neither death nor life…shall be able to separate us from the love of God;” and most explicitly in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the poor man, (Luke16: 19-31), in which the just-dead rich man asks the still-living Lazarus to intercede for him).

In like manner, those loved ones who are not saints but whose memory is more current among the living, such as parents, spouses, siblings, and children, are thought to continue in their bond of love with those still alive. The Church’s practice of holding memorial services for the recently departed (see below) underscores this bond and the necessity of prayer for and with them. So that asking for the prayer of a saint (his intercession before God) differs little from asking for the prayer of a deceased, beloved parent. This does not defy logic; it is rather a very human expression of love.

Prayer for the departed follows a somewhat different line of thinking. In the words of theologian Father Michael Pomazansky, “the departed need only one kind of help from their brethren: prayer and petition for the remission of their sins (Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, p. 311)." This idea is rooted in Orthodox teaching about eternity: that in a domain where time is not present, our notion about when we may expect God’s judgement is only speculation. Thus, the Orthodox believe that between death and the common Christian expectation of the Final Judgement, souls experience a “foretaste” of their eternity, the righteous savor bliss, while the unrighteous suffer torment (Bishop Maximos Aghiorgoussis, writing in A Companion to the Orthodox Church, “The Dogmatic Tradition of the Orthodox Church,” p. 166).

The Orthodox teach that there can be no moral progress of the soul after death, no repentance. But believing in a just and compassionate God, they ask Him “for the forgiveness of his (the departed’s) every transgression, voluntary or involuntary” (from the Orthodox funeral service and the memorial services (Mikron Efchologion, N.M. Vaporis, ed.).

The Orthodox Church rejects the Roman belief of Purgatory, a formalized intermediate state in which the living can “purchase” excess merit in behalf of the dead. It relies instead on the mercy of God to loosen the burden of transgression, without telling Him how or when or to what degree He must exercise this mercy.

This touches on a prominent theological “method” in Orthodoxy, that of “apophatic theology”, briefly explained as describing the nature of God in terms of what He is not. In other words, the Orthodox do not attempt to explain God, the essential nature of His Being. (Meyendorff, The Orthodox Church, p. 196) This transcendence, of course, is shared by all the Persons of the Trinity, and is visually expressed in the icon of Christ, in whose halo are the Greek letters, omicron, omega, nu, forming the Greek phrase, “The One Who is”. Orthodox are therefore perfectly comfortable with the answer, “we do not know” to many theological questions. This might explain further their reluctance to speculate about the nature and degree of judgement and forgiveness after death.

To put a personal perspective on how an Orthodox Christian might think of his departed brothers, we can quote the late Dr. Charles Malik, a Lebanese scholar and diplomat, a former President of the United Nations General Assembly, and an eloquent spokesman of his beliefs. In an essay published in Christianity Today, he wrote these words in enumerating the one of several influences on his faith:

…the witness of the saints, and I can name twenty of them, in whose intellectual and spiritual company I crave to live more than in the company of any other crowd of men, including the greatest non-religious philosophers, whom I also love.

And in another essay, “One Man’s Debt to the Bible”, he wrote: "I always read His saints…I live in participation with this cloud of witnesses which surrounds me." (copyright permission granted by Light and Life Publications, Minneapolis, MN, 2002).

Funeral and Memorial Practices

While funeral practices among the Orthodox in America have tended to adopt some of the physical attributes of the rest of contemporary American society, it might be instructive to look at customary practices in traditional Orthodox cultures. These will reflect the normative circumstances of Orthodox rites and beliefs.

In the cultures of Eastern Europe and the Middle East where Orthodox traditions are the most dominant, public expression of grief at the death of a loved one is considered normal, in opposition to many western European and certainly American notions where failure to exhibit grief is thought to be a virtue. Thus in traditional Orthodox countries we find such practices as an open casket, both before the funeral and during it; touching and kissing the deceased person is seen as a natural expression of love. The elaborate preparation of the deceased, display in funeral parlors, makeup, and even embalming are seldom encountered in these settings (though they have become common in American practice). While professional morticians in old world settings may prepare the body, particularly in urban environments, the visitation and the wake before the funeral are conducted at the home of the one who has just died.

The Church offers a short prayer service at such occasions, but the funeral is always conducted in the church edifice. The casket is brought into the church preceded by the priest holding a censer and chanting, “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.” The casket is placed before the altar, and is open for the remainder of the funeral. An icon is often displayed in the casket, perhaps depicting the patron saint of the departed person. Prayers are offered for the repose of the soul of the deceased as well as for the comfort of those left behind.

A striking feature of the religious poetry in the funeral service is that much of its context is placed in the “voice” of the deceased individual:

“Blessed are You, O Lord, teach me your commandments.”

“ Your hands have made and fashioned me; give me understanding, and I will learn your commandments. Have mercy on me, O Lord.”

“Image am I of Your unutterable glory, though I bear the scars of my stumblings. Have compassion on me, the work of Your hands, O Sovereign Lord, and cleanse me through Your loving kindness; and the homeland of my heart’s desire bestow on me by making me a citizen of Paradise.”

In the eloquent Canon of the service, composed by St. John of Damascus (7^th Century), we hear expressions of the reality of leaving behind the material tokens of this life:

“Where is now our affection for earthly things? Where is now the alluring pomp of transient questing? Where is now our gold, and our silver? Where is now the surging crowd of domestics and their busy cries? All is dust, all is ashes, all is shadow. Wherefore draw near that we may cry to our immortal King, ‘Lord, Your everlasting blessings vouchsafe unto him (her) to repose in that blessedness which never grows old.”

The Canon ends with the repetition of the promise of Christ’s atoning sacrifice:

"The death which You have endured, O Lord, is become the harbinger of deathlessness; if You had not been laid in your tomb, then would not the gates of paradise have been opened. Wherefore, unto him (her) now gone from us give rest, for you are the Friend of Mankind.”

(All quotations from the Funeral Service, Mikron Efchologion, N.M. Vaporis, ed.)

The epistle and gospel readings (I Thess. 4: 13-18 and John 5: 24-30, respectively) allude to the Final Judgement, the promise of the recompense of eternal salvation for the righteous. The Church then prays to “God of all spirits and of all flesh” to give His departed servant rest “in a place of light, a place of green pasture, in a place of refreshment…” And the service concludes with the final prayer, “may his (her) memory be eternal…” expressing the hope that the individual who has lived a righteous life may be forever remembered by God and men.

The “texture” of the funeral service seems carefully calculated to counterpoint each heavily somber passage of repentance with one of hope. Even the musical settings vary with the more grave ones followed immediately by ones of a more allegro lightness. At the conclusion of the funeral service, a eulogy is usually offered by the priest, but may be spoken by a layman as well.

The burial itself takes place immediately after the funeral, with a short graveside service being conducted (Cremation is discouraged by the Church since it is seen as disrespectful to the body, the temple of the soul). The time from death to burial is short, usually no longer than three days. There is an old tradition (not a Church dogma) that the soul remains near the body for a three-day period, perhaps in remembrance of Christ’s three-day entombment before His resurrection. A mercy meal often follows the burial, and the common mood is much more relaxed and sometimes even jovial as the secular life of the departed person is recalled.

Perhaps unique among Christian confessions, the Orthodox remember the dead in a formalized manner. The church prescribes that memorial services be held, sometimes at graveside, but more often in the church itself with the entire worshipping community present. These services echo some of the themes of the funeral, are rather short, and call to mind the deceased by his or her Christian name. They are offered at fixed intervals: the first one coming 40 days after the death, then at 90 days, then one year, and they may be repeated on the annual anniversary of the death. Modern psychological studies have discovered that these periods coincide with the peaks of the grieving period, so that the Church can offer the bereaved solace when it is most needed. In modern parlance, the Church long ago discovered support for “letting go.”

The Orthodox, ever mindful of the importance of the physical symbol, are not content to let words and emotions alone carry the memorial theme of remembrance and the promise of resurrection. At the memorial service an ancient sweet confection is prepared, blessed, and distributed to the people. This is the koliva, boiled wheat kernels, prepared and embellished. This confection (which is so typically eastern Mediterranean) is prepared by the family of the deceased (or by others skilled in its preparation) and brought into the church. It consists of wheat kernels which are boiled and partially dried, to which is added raisins, chopped nuts, pulverized sweet bread, spices such as cinnamon and cumin, and pomegranate seeds. The whole dry mixture is mounded in a tray and topped with a smooth coating of powdered sugar, whose surface is often decorated with a cross, the initials of the deceased, or other embellishments.

The symbolism of the koliva is that the wheat represents the “staff of life” but specifically the notion of death and resurrection. The sugar and spices remind us of the sweetness of life, both temporal and in eternity, and the pomegranate, being the only “fresh” item in the mixture representing the “place of refreshment” to which the hymnology of the funeral and memorial services allude.

The very act of preparation of the koliva by the family is itself a healing process (it takes three days to properly boil and dry the wheat). Their offering it to the church and its subsequent blessing and sharing with the assembled friends echoes the mercy meal and is a satisfying element of hospitality by the family in behalf of their departed loved one.

While these ritualized practices seem to leave little room for spontaneity in bereavement, they do, in fact, recognize and attempt to address the commonality of the human experience of loss of a loved one. Witness that Christian Orthodoxy is a religion that while Mediterranean in origin crosses all nationalities and has found a place in many cultures.

This ancient Faith, which has endured and whose practices have remained virtually unchanged for two millennia, continues to address the needs of its communicants, equipping them to face the challenges of their temporal life, guiding them on their spiritual journey through it, and assuring them of the reality of eternity and their place in it .