What is the Parish?

Dear Parish Faithful,

I recently asked someone for some help on the Greek word for "parish," and in return received this substantial and impressive summary of the long history of the word as it has appeared in various languages in addition to the original Greek. I will assume that this will also be of interest to you and I am therefore sharing it with you this (cold) Monday morning:

The word "parish" has its origins both in scriptural use and from territorial references used in the Roman Empire. The word "parish" itself is derived from the Anglo-French parosse (about 1075), later as paroche (about 1292), then in Old French paroisse, and from Latin paroechia meaning a  diocese. 

In Greek, παρоικία (paroikia) meaning "district" or "diocese,"  is derived from the Greek παρά (beside), οίκος (house). The Greek term παρоικία, "district" or "diocese," originally meant "sojourn in a foreign land" (in the Septuagint) or "community of sojourners," with reference to the Jewish people in a foreign land, later with reference to earthly life as a temporary abode (1st century A.D.), and also in 1 Peter  1:17, 2:11); whence the term was applied to the "Christian community" as a whole (3rd century), then to the "diocese" (3rd century), and ultimately "parish" (4th century).

The English language word "parish" is derived from the alternate Latin spelling parochia (which came from the Greek: πάροχος = "riding in the same chariot as," "beside the chariot of"), a local official in the Roman provinces who furnished public officials with food and other supplies when they passed through the local area.

What I was particularly interested in  was the understanding of the Greek paroikia as used in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible made a couple of centuries before Christ).  There, the paroikia was understood to be a "community of sojourners;" something of a "pilgrim people" who are moving beyond the constraints and restrictions of  a purely historical  existence.  The paroikia, especially in its Christian manifestation, is moving toward the great Sabbath rest as envisioned in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Ch. 4). In that same Epistle, we hear:  "For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come" (13:14). This is beautifully expressed in the anonymous Epistle to Diognetus, probably from the early 2nd c. In this passage, the author is trying to explain the Christian perception and experience of life in this world, and he expressed this in words that are well-known to this day:

For instance, though they are residents at home in their own countries, their behavior is more like that of transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything and everything as if they were aliens.  For them, any foreign country is a motherland, and any motherland is a foreign country... Though destiny has placed them here in the flesh, they do not live after the flesh; their days are passed on the earth, but their citizenship is above in the heavens.

Thus, the very existence of the parish struck me as another meaningful Christian paradox.  On the one hand, we seek stability in our parish life.  The over-all structure of the parish as it is organized on a local level, with the presence of a parish priest who is not looking for an opportunity to "move on;" together with its various ministries and a sound financial basis, is meant to make the community stable for the present and hopefully into at least the foreseeable future.  This stability is the enduring sign of genuine commitment on the part of the faithful flock to the Gospel and it local manifestation in the parish.  Anyone visiting the parish will be able to  sense this, and for those who are further attracted to the Orthodox Faith, this is a very important factor. Without stability the parish may seem to be "floating along" and scrambling to survive from year to year - if not from day to day.

On the other hand, as we heard expressed in the texts cited above, the paroikia/parish may be stable, but it is actually moving toward a greater reality — the Kingdom of God in all of its fullness and beauty, when "God may be everything to every one" (I COR. 15:28).  Stability does not mean permanence and an unchanging static existence.  There is no permanence in "this world: "For the form of this world is passing away" (I COR. 7:31) We remain a pilgrim people, and we can never get too comfortable in this world.  The parish is stable; and yet the parish is dynamic.  Is there such a thing as "dynamic stability?"  As we all contribute to the stability of the parish - and as we hope to "hand it over" one day to our children and grandchildren - we also realize simultaneously that we are a "community of sojourners" with no permanent place in this world:  "For you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God" (COL. 3:3).

Atheist Delusions

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

A fairly recent book (2009) that stands out for its overall intellectual persuasiveness — based on a richness of content combined with a splendid and consistently rich prose — is entitled Atheist Delusions - The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. The author is David Bentley Hart, and in a fairly short span of time he is now considered one of the most trenchant and gifted Christian philosphers/theologians writing today.  He also happens to be an Orthodox Christian, but Hart hardly ever makes reference to that in his writings. 

The title of the book is openly polemical, as Hart's purpose is to respond to the well-known atheist Richard Dawkins, and his book entitled The God Delusion.  This short note is not meant to be a book review, but I would like to include a blurb extracted from a review by the scholar Geoffrey Wainwright of Duke Divinity School.  Wainwright's assessment of Atheist Delusions includes the following : 

Provoked by and responding to the standard-bearers of the "New Atheism," this original and intellectually impressive work deftly demolishes their mythical account of 'the rise of modernity.'  Hart argues instead that the genuinely humane values of modernity have their historic roots in Christianity.

I am simply attaching what I found to be a passage characteristic of what I have called the author's intellectual persuasiveness; and that it proves to be a magnificent summation of Hart's over-all thesis that Christianity was the greatest movement in the entire history of Western culture — at least since it appeared — and that its appearance effected a "revolution" in human culture and values.  We may have forgotten this, if we are even aware of the profound impact the Christian Gospel made when it entered the world during the time of pagan Rome's ascendency over the world of late antiquity.  Since a good deal of Christianity today seems tired and lifeless, we need such a reminder to perhaps inject a bit of life into our own commitment to the Christian Gospel. I shared this yesterday evening with our Fall Adult Education Class as a positive assessment of the early Church's accomplishment as that was the subject of this year's class.  I find the passage so impressive, that I wanted to share it with everyone else.  This particular paragraph was meant by Hart to offer a summary of  the book's over-all content and purpose.

The Christian “Revolution”
From Atheist Delusions – The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies
By David Bentley Hart

This book chiefly – or at least centrally – concerns the history of the early church, of roughly the first four centuries, and the story of how Christendom was born out of the culture of late antiquity. My chief ambition in writing is to call attention to the peculiar and radical nature of the new faith in that setting:  how enormous a transformation Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral communities where none had existed before; and it elevation  of active charity above all other virtues.  Stated in its most elementary and most buoyantly positive form, my argument is, first of all, that among all the many great transitions that have marked the evolution of Western civilization, whether convulsive or gradual, political or philosophical, social or scientific, material or spiritual, there has been only one – the triumph of Christianity – that can be called in the fullest sense a “revolution:” a truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’s  prevailing vision of reality, so pervasive in its influence and so vast in its consequences as actually to have created a new conception of the world, of history, of human nature, of time, and of the moral good.  To my mind, I should add, it was an event immeasurably more impressive in its cultural creativity and more ennobling in its moral power than any other movement of spirit, will, imagination, inspiration or accomplishment than any other movement in the history of the West.  And I am convinced that, given how radically at variance Christianity was with the culture it slowly and relentlessly displaced, its eventual victory was an event of such implausibility as to strain the very limits of our understanding of  historical causality.

Atheist Delusions, p. x-xi

Available from Amazon.com.

Preparing for Theophany 2014

In anticipation of the Great Feast of Theophany,

here are some Meditations by Fr Steven Kostoff from previous years:

• I Believe in One Baptism for the Remission of Sins
• He was cleansed for All Mens' Sins
• St Gregory of Nyssa on Baptism: 'Make It Clear Who Your Father Is!'
• Rebuking the Tempter and Following Jesus

Visit our Theophany Resource Page for more on the Feast...

30th Anniversary of Fr Alexander Schmemann's Repose

Dear Parish Faithful & Friends in Christ,

Today is the 30th anniversary of the repose of Fr. Alexander Schmemann, who died on this date in 1983.  The OCA website has as its lead article today a nice summary of Fr. Alexander's life and accomplishments.  Fr. Alexander was both a brilliant mind and a charismatic personality.  

I had the honor of studying at St. Vladimir's Seminary in New York while he was the dean and still a healthy and dynamic presence on campus.  (I graduated in 1981 and Fr. Alexander became sick with the cancer that would take his life in 1982).  I studied Liturgical Theology with Fr. Alexander for,  I believe, two years, and I had other courses with him.  

My approach toward liturgical theology and the Liturgy more specifically has once and for all been shaped by Fr. Alexander. He was a very great presence in the chapel as he loved to serve as the chief celebrant often during Saturday night vigils, the Liturgy and many of the Feast Days. Serving the paschal Liturgy with Fr. Alexander my last Pascha at the seminary while I was a deacon, was one of the great "highlights" of my three years at St. Vladimir's.  

When Sophia was born, he made a point of visiting our modest apartment in Yonkers that was off campus, spending some time with us and giving Sophia his blessing.  

Regardless of his flaws and faults, I consider him to have been a great man who had a profound vision of the potential of Orthodox Christianity in North America, and who imparted that vision to his students in a lively and inspiring fashion.  

I have never met a person who seemed to enjoy life to the extent that Fr. Alexander did.  But this was always in the context of an Orthodox worldview that he grasped organically and intuitively. He may have been the key figure behind the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in America in 1970.  

I made a point of returning to New York for Fr. Alexander's funeral at St. Vladimir's.  This, too, was an extraordinary and unique experience.   When I said good-bye to one of his daughters before leaving for my return trip home, and commenting to her on the over-all effect of the funeral service, she smiled as she said that it was just like Pascha!  There is a fourteen-minute youtube video of his funeral, and many more resources that can be accessed from the OCA website.

I would highly recommend his books to you, if you have yet to read anything  that he has written.  The starting point would be his classic For the Life of the World...

-- Fr Steven

• OCA Article for the 30th Anniversary of Fr Alexander Schmemann's Repose.
  
• For a wealth of additional information and links please visit www.schmemann.org.

Eucharistic Beings, in a Eucharistic Society, centered on the Eucharist

Dear Parish Faithful  & Friends in Christ,

We recently heard the Gospel reading from St. Luke in which Christ healed ten lepers, but only one  leper - and a Samaritan at that - returned to Him to offer thanksgiving:

Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed,  turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face as Jesus' feet, giving him thanks.  Now he was a Samaritan.

This prompted Jesus to ask out loud:   

"Were not ten cleansed?  Where are the nine?  Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" ( LK. 17:11-19)  

Therefore, in addition to the healing of the ten lepers that occurred instantaneously — "And as they went they were cleansed" — and which demonstrated that Jesus was not made unclean by close proximity to these lepers; we encounter what is perhaps an even deeper meaning to this narrative, and that would be the centrality of thanksgiving in one's relationship with God. 

The nine lepers who were healed, but who failed to return before Christ to praise God and offer thanksgiving for their healing, may have rejoiced in their new-found good health; but perhaps they remained in a self-absorbed preoccupation that blinded them to the real nature of their healing, and thus made that healing not as thorough, complete, and "holistic" as it was meant to be.

Perhaps we should add that in no way was Jesus being petulant or even petty in demanding thanksgiving from those who He had helped (unlike us when we are offended when we do not receive our "deserved" thanksgiving when we render someone a favor or good deed).  To state the obvious, Jesus does not need such a response to satisfy any interior motivations or hidden agendas!  The Lord's sole concern is that His heavenly Father be glorified for His great mercy and acknowledged as the source of all that is "good."  Christ wants us to manifest our "eucharistic" nature often obscured by a self-generated sinfulness that leaves us "missing the mark" (the meaning of the Gk. word for sin - amartia).

To be thankful  (from the Gk. eucharistia or thanksgiving) is a profound biblical reality and practice:  "O give thanks unto the Lord for He is good ..."  This is just as dominant a theme in the New Testament as in the Old:  "I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth ..."  This brings to mind just how thoroughly we stress the role of thanksgiving in our lives as Christians. 

I would stress three inter-related themes that hopefully characterize our lives and of which we are quite conscious:

1) We are "Eucharistic beings."  Created according to the image and likeness of God we receive our lives and all that is in the world around us as a gift from our Creator.  We are not self-sufficient beings, but dependent upon God for all things.  We are fully human when we are eucharistic, offering thanksgiving to God in a spirit of humility and gratitude.  Thus, it belongs to our deepest human nature - our very interior structure - to be eucharistic.  A non-eucharistic person is dehumanized in the process.

2)  We belong to a "Eucharistic society."  This is one more way of describing the Church.  It is as members of the Body of Christ that we fulfill our role as eucharistic beings by a constant sense of thanksgiving and gratitude.  The Church supports the world and is the "place" within the world where the eucharistic dimension of our humanity is expressed on behalf of the entire world and creation:  "Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee on behalf of all, and for all."  And that offering is made with a deep sense of thanksgiving.  For within the Church we respond with faith to the ultimate Gift of God, and that is Christ, the Savior of the world.  If the world fails in its vocation to be eucharistic, we continue to uphold the world by precisely being eucharistic.

3)  We receive the Eucharist.  Here, the term Eucharist refers to the very Body and Blood of Christ, or Holy Communion as we also call it.  The Divine Liturgy can be called the Eucharistic service of the Church in and during which we receive the Eucharist after we thank God for the entire economy of our salvation:  "And we thank Thee for this Liturgy which Thou hast deigned to accept at our hands ..."  Ideally, at least, we want to arrive at church for the Liturgy not with a sense of fulfilling a "religious obligation," but imbued with a deep sense of thanksgiving before our "awesome God" Who has done everything possible to endow us with His Kingdom which is to come.  Unworthy though we may be, God has made us worthy to receive the Eucharist as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet in His eternal Kingdom.

We have a common vocation as "Eucharistic beings," that belong to a "Eucharistic society," and who receive as a free gift of grace the Eucharist.  For this we are profoundly thankful to God!