Holy Myrrh-Bearers Orthodox Church is located in St Cloud, MN and I was blessed to spend a morning visiting with Father Nathan Kroll and his wife, Heidi.
If Tradition puts us in continuity with the past, eschatological expectation opens us to God's future. If Tradition teaches the Church fidelity to what gave birth to her, eschatological expectation urges her toward becoming what she has not yet fully become; what the Lord wants her to become. True Christian union is possible only through total respect for one other's dignity. We are hopeful that unity will be achieved how and when the Lord desires, and that it will require the contribution of love's sensitivity. Unity depends on improving our knowledge of one another; to know the liturgy of the Eastern Church; to deepen our knowledge of the spiritual traditions of the Fathers and Doctors of the Christian East, to follow the example of the Eastern Churches for the inculturation of the Gospel message: its entire liturgy is a commemoration of salvation and an invocation of the Lord's return.
The Orthodox understand everything in the Church to be sacramental. All of life becomes a sacrament in Christ who fills life itself with the Spirit of God.
Father Nathan’s wife, Heidi spoke of how Theophany continues to flows together through church life.
“To be Orthodox means to live the entire life integrated within the Liturgical Year. To define this way of life as “tradition” almost seems too insignificant a word. It is a way of life happening all around the world by people worshiping the same way, so it goes beyond tradition.”
The church is not one more encounter in the day. It is what makes our lives intelligible.
Heidi says,
“It goes beyond “remembering” because we are actually celebrating and worshipping with the faithful of the past.”
The human experience must be placed in God as in all truth and reality. God does not stand to the side watching our journey unfold. He is our journey.
“The Divine Liturgy sets the guidelines for how we live the rest of the day and how we plan for the next Liturgical day. We have a deep sense of unity with our universal church. For example, every single wedding is celebrated exactly the same. When a couple approaches the church for matrimony, they do not bring their personal preferences for ceremony to the church.”
Instead, they approach the church where she meets the couple at the Sacred Mystery of Marriage to enter into a new union within God’s Kingdom.
Heidi describes this universal tradition beautifully as “the art of the usual thing.”
As we tell the story of our lives we realize that it is only meaningful when we tell it from the perspective of God in those lives. It is then that it becomes an actual story. When we tell of the uniqueness that led us to him, we realize that without him, we would be just like every other pilgrim. Each one of us has a desire to be personally loved so, it is a great moment when we realize that our story is the story of how he has been there and loved us our entire lives. We realize that we want to be loved for the entirety of what brought us to the present, with all of our past experiences.
“The truth is always the truth and Christ is the truth. At the core, the Holy Spirit bears witness to the truth and sustains that truth in a way that lives and breathes because the truth will never change.”
While visiting about his journey to the Orthodox faith and ordination, I learned that the Orthodox do not typically attend daily liturgy nor would Father Kroll ever celebrate a liturgy alone. The reason for this lies within the teachings of the liturgy itself. The Divine Liturgy in the Eastern Orthodox Church requires a response.
“The priesthood is granted by God but needs to be affirmed by the people. The priest needs to be affirmed by the Body of Christ who responds with “Qxios”—Greek word, “He is worthy.” As the Orthodox priest stands before the Altar, he begins, “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever and unto ages of ages. And those words that form the blessing of God, which requires a response from the faithful, which is, “Amen.” Let it be so!”
We sat together in the nave, reflecting on our humanness and the attempt to describe our Divine God with limited words. We spoke of the frustration of trying to define the Divine with human vocabulary. Father Kroll gave me a term to look up: "Apophatic Theology." And here, I pause to chuckle as I realize that it was only me, for Father Kroll was then, and is now, rooted in the Eastern “theology that attempts to speak of God only in absolute certain terms and to avoid what may not be said.” (The sign of a good teacher: one who allows you discover the answer on your own to a question you didn't even realize you asked!)
Father Nathan said this:
“It’s wonderful to come to church to be spoken to, but to be washed over by the church is to experience God in a way that is given when there are no words.”
Looking back on the conversation, I can see how two pieces of the larger puzzle fit together. To worship in the Orthodox Church is to be surrounded by the beauty and immersed in the prayer of the icon whose purpose is to lift one up to the Divine; eyes and soul. To move the spirit, and to provide a place of meeting in this world on earth which enables us to touch divinity. The "internal gaze" of venerating the icon fills the soul with a pure joy in only the way that the spirit can when allowed to join with the divine through worship. It truly is a “washing over in a way that is given when there are no words.” Those two pieces, in turn, go a long way in attempting to understand the East and the West and in piecing together my own story.
Luke 22:32 Revised Standard Version (RSV) "but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren in the faith.”
Thank you, Heidi & Father Kroll, for your gift of time and sharing your faith with me!
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Visit to Holy Myrrh-Bearers Orthodox Church, 10, March 2017.
Summary:John Paul II, Apostolic Letter, Orientale Lumen, 2 May, 1995.
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