On the Lord's Appearing in the Jordan

If you go here, you will learn a little bit about Nicholas Denysenko's superb book on the Theophany. And if you go here you will wonder, as I just did, "Can it be a full decade now since I interviewed him about this book? Where does the time go?" I cannot answer that question, but I can tell you that there is, even a decade later, still no finer book than his to fete this lovely feast.

Married Priests in the Catholic Church: the Families Speak

I have periodically drawn not nearly enough attention to my new book, released in April, on Married Priests in the Catholic Church. So let us continue to look at its many riches due to the many individual contributors from around the world. 

In previous commentaries on the book, I have noted, inter alia, Anglican contributions from the Catholic ordinariates, and discussed some of the pernicious myths which surround married priests. 

Today, let us pause to look at the voices of clergy families, who are represented in the book by such as Irene Galadza, Nicholas Denysenko, Julian Hayda, Andrew Jarmus, and William Mills. Of these five, truth be told, three are themselves clerics: Denysenko is a deacon while Jarmus and Mills join him as priests in the Orthodox Church of America. But Nick is a grandson of a long-time Ukrainian Orthodox priest, as is Jarmus; and Mills is married into a clerical family. So they have experienced both roles not just in the book but in their lives. 

I had sought many more voices from wives and children, but again and again was turned down by people who felt a sometimes understandable and sometimes puzzling reticence to talk about their experiences. Still, the few who contributed wrote worthy and important chapters. 

Irene has been married to her husband, the mitred archpriest Roman Galadza, for nearly half a century. So her experience is very long-standing indeed, and includes the rather rare experience of building a new parish from the ground up not once but twice! (The original St. Elias, where I was married, burned to the ground in a heart-breaking fire in 2014). She has also taught school for many years and has a fine theological mind. So her chapter in the book is very much a theological meditation on the role of the presbytera in light of the Theotokos. To borrow a phrase from antique Christological debates, Irene's view is a very "high" one, though she does note some of the "lower" or more "mundane" concerns and challenges that come to the wife of a priest and mother of (in her case) large family. But I think Irene would be the first to say that the wife of a priest should have the same freedom as others in the parish to discover her vocation for herself in all of its uniqueness. 

Nick Denysenko (a dear friend, I should note, and author of many fine books you should read, all of them noted here where you will also find interviews with him over the years about those books) is the grandson of an immigrant Orthodox priest from Ukraine about whom he writes with great and moving care, showing what sometimes hard lessons he learned from his grandfather, who had seen some of the horrors of wartime Europe and Soviet communism. His grandfather's wisdom about how, and how not, to fast have remained with me for some time. I wish I had met him. He sounds like a real mensch. Nick grew up serving in his parish in Minnesota and watching the dynamics between him and the parish. 

Similarly, Andrew Jarmus, also of Ukrainian background, grew up watching his father, also a priest in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (but this time in Canada). Jarmus moved to the US more than a decade ago now and has been the pastor here in Ft. Wayne at one of the OCA's larger parishes which I have attended on occasion for many years now. Jarmus's chapter is especially worthwhile for its pointing out some of the subtle psychodynamics that govern (and often distort) any relationship where one man is constantly addressed as "father" and treated as such. 

Julian Hayda's father was a Ukrainian Catholic priest in Chicago until he was killed in a bike accident in 2007, leaving his wife and young children. (Julian's grandparents befriended me about a decade ago through the Orientale Lumen conferences in Washington and afterwards we had a very lovely dinner over Christmas one year when I was visiting my in-laws just down the road in Connecticut. They were splendid people.) Julian writes with a different perspective on growing up in a rectory. He does not romanticize his experiences or gloss over the difficult dynamics of living in what he aptly calls the parish "fish bowl." He rightly raises such questions as why PKs (preacher's/priest's/pastor's) are often subjected to highly unfair and discriminatory attitudes and expectations when all they want is to be regular kids like everyone else in the parish. 

William Mills also writes with compelling honesty and charming humour about the challenges of parish ministry while married. His chapter is good, but his recent memoir even better, not least for it allows him to go into more depth and detail than he could in the chapter in my book, Married Priests in the Catholic Church.

Updated: Nicholas Denysenko on His Superb New and now Award-Winning Book

I learned last night that the author of this book, Nicholas Denysenko, has, for his labours herein, won honorable mention with the Omeljian Pritsak Book Prize in Ukrainian Studies from the prestigious academic Association for Slavic, East European, & Eurasian Studies. That gives me an occasion to re-post this interview I did with him in September 2018.

I am always delighted when good scholarship emerges just in time to help people understand the headlines. And that is certainly the case with Nicholas Denysenko's forthcoming book, The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation, set for release in a few short weeks from Northern Illinois University Press--the one academic press that arguably pays more attention to East-Slavic Orthodox realities than any other. For the debates and conflicts between Moscow and Constantinople over Ukraine have been getting mainstream press attention these past few weeks, and as always the attention is matched with a good deal of heated rhetoric and often deliberately politically motivated misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Those doing the misrepresentation often assume--correctly--that the media and its readers will not know enough history to detect the distortions, or may not in fact care.

Into such an overheated atmosphere steps the scholar doing what makes scholarship so crucial: giving a cool, serene, and comprehensive overview that surveys the scene in all of its complexity without regard for whose ox gets gored or whose agenda advanced--and without parachuting in from the outside to prescribe simplistic solutions, either. Nick Denysenko has done all that and more in this superb new book of his, which really must be read by everyone before presuming to comment further on the Moscow-Kyiv-Constantinople triangulation.

I have interviewed him several times in the past about his numerous books, and once again sent him some questions to talk about this forthcoming work of his. Here are this thoughts.

AD: When we spoke last, in August 2017, you were about to take a fellowship in Collegeville. Tell us about your work there, and then about the new position you moved into after that.

Nicholas Denysenko: I was a resident scholar at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library (HMML) during Fall 2017, and I also participated fully in the resident scholar program at the Collegeville Institute. HMML contains the digital files to hundreds of Slavonic manuscripts from Ukraine. I examined select manuscripts to learn more about the blessing of waters on Theophany. During my manuscript research, I found two late-19th/early-20th century hymnals from West Ukraine containing the texts for several feasts in the liturgical year. These are paraliturgical texts that belong, in general, to the type of hymnal Ukrainians adopted from Central Europe. The earliest hymnals lack musical notation and are handwritten in Slavonic texts, whereas the later hymnals have music. The paraliturgical hymnal was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was also adopted by Russians. I was interested in the hymnals because of the texts: they express a deep theology and piety of the faithful, one worthy of comparison with the appointed hymnography for the liturgical year. I also wrote draft chapters for my book, The People’s Faith, during my time there.  It was a lifegiving experience, to be in the place where liturgical renewal for the life of the world was such a priority.

AD: Your recent publications show an impressive range--architecture, Chrismation, Orthodox liturgical reform. And now a book on Ukraine. What led to this book in particular? 

ND: This book is a product of years of responding to requests for information on the background of the divisions among the Churches in Ukraine. After I learned about Patriarch Kirill’s Russkii Mir initiative and Ukrainian resistance to it – especially dismissal of the ideology within the UOC-MP – I began to follow events there more closely.

The Maidan and annexation of Crimea led to new opportunities to write, and I noticed a pattern in media coverage on the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Most journalists and experts referred to 1992 as the origin of the schism and to Patriarch Filaret (of the KP) as the author of autocephaly. I knew this was not the case since Filaret joined an existing Church, and the journey to autocephaly began in 1917, with the first schism taking place in 1921. Ignoring significant historical events for convenience is like an incomplete puzzle – you don’t see the whole picture. The only way to understand what’s happening in Ukraine is to come to terms with her history. I took an inventory of English-language literature and found several strong sources, but there was nothing available the demonstrated how the first schism of 1921 evolved into the current separation of Churches. I viewed this lacuna as an opportunity to tell the story, and it’s important for a number of reasons.

First, there are very few Eastern Christian readers who know anything about the schism, so there is a gap in literacy. Second, it’s important to encourage capable scholars to write from within their traditions. In other words, why should Ukrainians rely solely on non-Ukrainian scholars to write their Church history? This is not a matter of patriotism or nostalgia for me – it’s the priority of contributing to the reconfiguration of a narrative for the sake of the truth. I knew I was entering a new field: I’m really a trained liturgist, so this was a chance to widen my own lens while contributing literature with the capacity to truly inform the reader.

AD: Your dedication and acknowledgments in The Orthodox Church in Ukraine: A Century of Separation tell the story of your grandparents and their influence on you growing up in a Ukrainian-American household. Tell us a bit about the role they played in giving you a "crash course" in the complexities of Ukrainian history and ecclesiology.

ND: They arrived in the early 1950’s having survived the Holodomor and the terror of World War II, my grandfather a priest of the UOC-USA. My brother and I spent most weekends of our childhood with them, and I recall my sense of curiosity in my grandfather’s rectory office in St. Paul. I can still smell the oak wood floor, and I would page through his books, glance at his stack of carefully handwritten sermons, and open and read the pages of a variety of Church newspapers. He also had unique photos, including one of the synod of bishops of the UAOC, on his desk.

I learned from his books and papers, but tradition is what is passed on to us, and I vividly recall community parish life. The parish passed on its core values to us, and these included learning the Ukrainian language and history, the fundamental liturgical songs, daily prayers. Immigrants strive to demonstrate that they have arrived and will remain stable communities, and this parish was among the many that never questioned their legitimacy – not that they had reason to. My grandfather’s ministry was that of a pastor – preaching, presiding, consoling, and being a companion to the community.

For him, legitimacy would be confirmed by his peers, and while that was not generally a problem within the Ukrainian community, he endured unpleasant encounters with other Orthodox. His parish choir was asked to sing the responses for a Lenten Vespers when a local priest quietly pleaded with the host parish to disinvite them because they were ‘uncanonical.’ I cannot describe the degree to which my grandfather was hurt by this, and his response was a determination to show his peers that his Church was indeed canonical because of its roots in the autocephalous Church of Poland.

Please believe me when I say that I understand why people invoke ‘uncanonical,’ but it got me to thinking: is preaching the kingdom of God, presiding, receiving with thanks, consoling, and healing ‘uncanonical’? Why is it so important to have a certificate signed by a bishop from a particular city that confirms your legitimacy? While I ask these questions of myself, he responded with vigor to show his peers that his church was both canonical and full of divine grace. At the time, with this particular priest, he did not succeed, but he persevered. This is how communities assume control of their own narrative. The burden of proof was not on his community: it was on the priest who accused them of being ‘uncanonical.’

Thus was an ugly truth exposed: we lacked the mechanism for an accused Orthodox community to plead its case, make an appeal, offer testimony on behalf of themselves. Watching his efforts and similar works of others inspired me to do what I can: to work within the academy to contribute to a narrative on Ukrainian Orthodoxy that is largely unknown. My grandparents inspired me in many other ways: their deep fidelity to God despite much suffering, their acceptance of poverty – it was worth it, for the freedom America offered – but their determination to share one’s story continues to shape me today.

AD: You tell us at the outset about the need to understand how both autocephaly and church reform "caused the Orthodox Church in Ukraine to splinter over the span of a hundred years." For those not sure what autocephaly means, tell us how you understand it. And what do you mean by church reform--what types of reform, and in which areas?

ND: Technically, autocephaly means “self-governing.” There are plenty of solid scholarly definitions of autocephaly – one of the most recent treatments is by Cyril Hovorun [interviewed here] in his book, Scaffolds of the Church. I would describe autocephaly as both the local Church and a Church that has consistently borne the fullness of the Holy Spirit and therefore does not need to depend on another Church for its existence. An autocephalous Church could be a cluster of churches around an ancient and venerable See (e.g., Alexandria, Antioch), a regional structure (Czech Republic and Slovakia), and for the most part, a local Church whose boundaries are in alignment with a nation-state (Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, etc.). The Moscow and Ecumenical Patriarchates are unique as multinational structures.

We have to learn to see the Ukrainian situation as stuck between empire and nation-state, especially given the specific circumstances surrounding the Kyivan Metropolia. An awakening of national consciousness stirred in Ukraine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the revolution, and discussion about the possibility of an autocephalous Church began to emerge at that time. When the tsarist regime ended, Ukraine experienced brief episodes of national sovereignty until the Soviets assumed control at the end of 1919. This was not a matter of establishing a national church; Ukrainians had complained about the eradication of native traditions of the Kyivan Metropolia, and originally, the impetus for autocephaly was to restore the Kyivan Metropolia, not to build a national Church. Of course there were nationalist figures within the larger movement, but the refrain of liberation from the tsarist regime was as much a desire to have a Church that truly represented the people, and not ruled by bishops who had sworn allegiance to the tsar.

This delicate period witnessed to public events that demonstrated a Ukrainian protest of tsarist repression, especially in a public panakhyda for Hetman Ivan Mazepa (18th c.) who had been anathematized by the Russian Church because he sided with Sweden in the war against Tsar Peter I. The autocephalists viewed the bishops as representatives who served the tsar first, and it was tsarist policies that symbolized oppression against the Ukrainian people. Their public proclamation of desire for autocephaly brought the entire picture into view: restoring the Kyivan Metropolia and its customs necessitated a permanent break from bishops loyal to the tsar. Russian clergy and leaders in Ukraine understood that this was a rejection of the idea and experience of Kyiv as the central religious cell of the Russian Empire. From the very beginning, then, autocephaly was a rejection of the Kyiv’s ecclesial union with Moscow in 1686 and it was a rejection of Russian imperialism, two of the core values of many of the Russian bishops and clergy in Ukraine, and of the narrative defining Russian Orthodox and imperial sovereignty.

As for reform, the emergence of an autocephalous Ukrainian Church took place during a time and context of modernization and renewal. While the Moscow Council of 1917-18 heard and endorsed proposals that updated the Church, especially with regards to conciliarity, other proposed reforms were either deferred or denied. We know that renovationism posed a direct threat to the survival of the Moscow Patriarchate in the early Soviet period, and the Ukrainian council of 1921 implemented many of the modernizations that have yet to permeate Orthodoxy: a married episcopate, strict limits on episcopal power, and the deliberate inclusion of the laity in Church life, not to mention liturgical Ukrainization and the audacity to establish an episcopate without bishop participating in the ordinations.

Traditional Orthodox dismissed these features as radical and innovationist, while the Ukrainians believed they were becoming a new local Church in the spirit of reforms that had been proposed in this time frame. The key point here is that Ukrainians themselves disagreed on these reforms: the 1942 UAOC arose from the Orthodox Church in Poland, a development made possible by the large number of Ukrainians who lived in Polish territory (especially Volyn’). They rejected most of the reforms adopted by the 1921 Church with the exception of liturgical Ukrainization, and their autocephalous movement fell squarely within mainstream Orthodoxy. But the 1921 UAOC created a stigma of illegitimacy that permeated each autocephlous cohort until the present day. So, the Church reforms adopted by the 1921 church challenged Ukrainian tradition, and in the final analysis, a more conservative approach prevailed among Ukrainian autocephalists.

AD: That term autocephaly, in regards to Ukraine, has often been in the news lately with developments coming out of Constantinople and then fierce reactions from Moscow. You quote (pp.127-28) a letter from Moscow to Constantinople in 1995 protesting the merger of the UOC in the USA with the Ecumenical Patriarch, noting that the Russian patriarch then fulminated and threatened a split--a frequent pattern whenever the EP seems to get involved in Ukrainian Orthodox affairs. You also note how, from 1995 to 1997, certain UOC bishops asked Patriarch Bartholomew to provide for the autocephaly of Ukraine, which he did not do then. What has changed over the last 23 years to prompt him to act now? In light of the research that went into your book, what do you expect to see happen in the coming months?

ND: I hope that at least some of the people who are jumping to crazy conclusions might look at the book. The conspiracy theories circulating online are fatuous because the theorists aren’t consulting history. Ukrainian autocephalists have reached out to Constantinople from the very beginning – this was the special mission of Oleksander Lotocky from 1919 to 1920, and Constantinople has occasionally acted, increasingly so in recent decades. For example, Constantinople established a Ukrainian diocese in the United States in 1932. This diocese eventually merged with the UOC-USA when Constantinople received them in 1995. Metropolitan Mstyslav led the UOC-USA for decades, and he was in constant communication with Constantinople, publicly declaring his support for the Phanar and calling upon the EP to convoke the Holy and Great Council. Constantinople exhibited warmth to the UOC-USA by responding to correspondence, and sent episcopal representatives who prayed (but did not concelebrate) with the Ukrainian community in South Bound Brook for the Millennium of the Baptism of Rus’-Ukraine in 1988 – hardly the action of a Church that regarded the Ukrainians as schismatics.

So Constantinople did not just enter the scene now; they have always been on the periphery, and their reception of the Canadian and American churches set the stage for them to act with more deliberation later. With all of our political analysis, we also must consider the ministry of healing and reconciliation. The EP’s reception of these Churches released them from isolation and brought them into communion with the rest of the Orthodox Church. (There are still tensions between the Ukrainian diaspora churches and the ones in Ukraine, which is another topic to be pursued.) But when the Ecumenical Patriarch says that his ministry is to heal schisms and reconcile those separated from the Church to the Church, he has done so with the Ukrainians. Furthermore, there is the issue of how an appeal is heard. In this case, the ecumenical patriarch met with the Ukrainians and got to know them. We tend to speak about these Churches and their leaders as if they were inhuman, but these communities consist of flesh-and-blood people. By meeting with them, hearing their appeal, and restoring them to the Church, the EP honored their human dignity and restored a portion of the Church that had been broken. 

Here is why Constantinople is acting now to issue a Tomos of autocephaly to the Church in Ukraine: the movement for autocephaly never went away, and it is growing steadily. While bishops and clergy have not migrated from the UOC-MP to the KP or UAOC, the KP in particular has had a steady uptick in the number of adherents. The autocephalist movement has survived Soviet liquidation, Nazi oppression, the Cold War, Crimea, and Russian aggression in Donbas. It is not going to just disappear.

Look at it this way: after the pseudo-sobor of L’viv in 1946, the Moscow Patriarchate issued numerous public statements honoring the end of the Unia and the return of Greek Catholics to Orthodoxy. If this return was real, and not coerced, there would only be a UGCC outside of Ukraine today. The autocephalist renaissance mirrors that of the UGCC – as soon as the UAOC became legal again (in 1989), the movement reappeared and grew rapidly. The autocephalists have appealed to Constantinople to recognize them – not to establish them or create them, or bless them to consider starting an autocephalous church – but to recognize already existing churches. Constantinople is addressing the reality on the ground, one that takes into account geopolitical concerns (Russian aggression) and ecclesial ones (Russia’s withdrawal from the Holy and Great Council of Crete in 2016). There is a direct link between Constantinople’s patronage of the Canadian and American Ukrainian Churches and the promise of a Tomos today – it set the stage for concrete action in Ukraine. But Constantinople was only going to act if it became clear that the autocephalist movement was a permanent fixture in Ukraine: there is no longer any question that it is.

Now that the MP has immediately ceased commemorating the EP, and Metropolitan Hilarion continues to claim that the 1686 transfer of Kyiv to Moscow was a reunion, some people will wonder if this might stop the Tomos. We have to see how this will play out since the EP has presented its case for being the only mother Church of the Kyivan Metropolia. The intrigue does not really lie in the EP’s fear to move forward – refusing to grant the Tomos at this point would undo all the claims they have recently made, and these assertions seem to be well-documented in the history of the Kyivan Metropolia. What remains a mystery is the UOC-MP.

Ukrainian religious experts have exposed the degree to which the Russian oligarch and member of Ukrainian Parliament Vadym Novinsky controls the operations of the UOC-MP. The interference of oligarchs in the UOC-MP is a problem they have yet to address, and Novinsky has not concealed his involvement as the lay patron of opposition to autocephaly: all one needs is to watch the many interviews he has granted to Ukrainian media outlets to hear his staunch and aggressive stance. Will a critical mass of clergy and laity of the MP trust in the amnesty promised by a Tomos? We will know in the coming months. Here is what we know for certain: the official stance of the EP on the canonical question, which seems to unfold little-by-little on a daily basis, is a direct threat to the Russian narrative of Kyiv as the mother of Russia. Certainly the MP is fighting to retain its prominence by keeping the UOC-MP intact and sealing the door to canonical space so the KP and UAOC cannot enter. But the loss of Kyiv is also a direct threat to the ideology of the Russkii mir, a factor that fuels the ferocity of the MP’s resistance to Constantinople’s action.

As for what to expect, there is more conjecture and rumor circulating than there are facts. We should expect Constantinople to set the stage for a unification council in Kyiv that will elect a new primate – I think that will happen this Fall. A Tomos of autocephaly would be issued to that Church, which would exist alongside churches wishing to remain in the MP. The angry reaction of the MP to this situation raises questions about what happens next, though. The period that follows the Tomos will be one of adjustment, for sure – the question concerns conflict between the MP and the new church in Ukraine. I think it all depends on how many of the clergy and faithful of the MP in Ukraine migrate to the new church. We know that approximately ten bishops signed the request for autocephaly – could more follow? Some experts predict a small percentage to migrate (10%), others a large percentage (90%). I think about 50% is a reasonable expectation, with gradual migration continuing in the period following. The more serious issue concerns the split between Constantinople and the MP. There will be a period of separation of the two patriarchates and the Chfurches in their respective orbits. It is clear that Constantinople is determined to take concrete action in Ukraine. Given the public statements they have issued, and Moscow’s swift and angry rebuttal, there is no going back now.

AD: You squarely face the nexus of problems at the outset: the relationship between church, state, and nation, stating bluntly that "the national element of the Ukrainian Church movement has perhaps been the greatest obstacle to achieving recognition of ecclesial autocephaly." Tell us why that national element has been so problematic. 

ND: The autocephalous movement coincided with the initial attempt to establish a nation-state. In these situations, priorities and strategies align, and the original initiators of autocephaly exploited the recently established model of the post-imperial nation-state as defining the local Church. Intellectuals who contributed to the state-building project were also involved in the Church, and this was true for one of the primary ideologues of the 1921 UAOC, Volodymyr Chekhivsky. The fledgling Ukrainian Directory of 1919 established a law for an autocephalous Church, and the minister of cults (Lotocky) was sent to Constantinople to see the project through. In this case, governmental leadership in Ukraine changed hands no less than four times from 1917 to 1920, and always with terrifying violence. That said, the pattern of aligned priorities on the part of intellectuals for state and church repeated itself through the course of Ukrainian history. Certain political figures attained prominent positions in the Church, especially Stepan Skrypnyk (later metropolitan Mstyslav and patriarch), who did not conceal his patriotism during his civil service in Poland, and was often a thorn in the side of Russophile churchmen in the Church of Poland.

Assessing the influence of nationalism on the Church is especially problematic during the WWII era. Many Ukrainians openly welcomed their Nazi captors, initially believing that Hitler was a modern Cyrus who came to set them free from Soviet (Babylonian) captivity only to learn that the new tyrant was just as vicious as the old one. Church leaders met with Nazi officials in Ukraine, and this suggests collaboration, but it is possible that Church officials had to deal with their occupiers to attempt to rebuild church life. It is well-known that the OUN leaders attempting to liberate Ukraine were nationalistic, sometimes extremely so. Some scholars conclude that the autocephalists contributed to the murder of the autonomist Metropolitan Oleksii Hromadskii by cooperating with the OUN. I concluded that there was not enough evidence to support it, but it was widely believed among people who belonged to the autonomist Church, which only served to deepen their separation from the 1942 UAOC, and enhance their perception of the UAOC as nationalist.

After the war, Orthodox bishops in the MP’s Ukrainian Exarchate implicated the bishops of the UGCC as collaborators with the OUN. The Cold War narrative used the Great Patriotic War as an opportunity to pit autocephalists and “uniates” as a united camp, fascist and nationalist, who betrayed their fellow citizens who fought on the right side with the motherland. I think it is easy to see how the present narrative of the Moscow Patriarchate simply recycles the Cold War polemics, blaming the UGCC and the Orthodox ‘schismatics' (KP and UAOC) for Crimea and the war in Donbas.

In other words, people who have no previous knowledge of the situation connect Ukraine with ethnophyletism on the basis of a narrative that began to take shape before World War II even ended. I’m not saying that ethnophyletism is not a problem – it can be, and a good example of the Church addressing came from the earlier dialogue between Metropolitan Volodymyr Sabodan and the UAOC, when the latter explicitly disavowed ethnophyletism through the process of negotiation. But two crucial points are lost in the noise of Soviet-era propaganda: the Orthodox Churches seeking autocephaly consistently stated their desire to restore the Kyivan Metropolia as the basis for autocephaly, and Ukraine has been ravaged by wars started by outsiders in all of the historical periods we mention here, so discussion of autocephaly always coincides with elevated patriotism because of war. We need to cleanse our lenses to take account of the whole picture before arriving at hasty conclusions on nationalism and the Church.
       
AD: Following my friend Justin Tse's writings on ecclesial colonization, I'm wondering--and could be very wide of the mark, so please correct me--whether nationalism in Ukraine is evaluated according to a different standard than in other Orthodox countries. Ukraine, it seems to me, is somehow more heavily criticized by a lot of people--not just Russians but other outsiders, including those in the American government and the Vatican--for wanting things that others take for granted, including national and ecclesial independence. Is that a fair observation? 

ND: Yes. When Ukraine’s parliament petitioned the Holy and Great Council in Crete in 2016 to grant autocephaly to the Church, they employed this exact language: the MP in Ukraine is Russian colonization of Ukraine through the Church. You can hear echoes of this language in Poroshenko’s comments as well.

Two additional observations. First, we have to distinguish the nationalistic tendencies we encounter in émigré communities from those in the native country. Post-World War II Ukrainian immigrants bore with them the painful memory of the Holodomor and the terror of the Nazis. My grandfather told us the story of the arrest and permanent disappearance of his father – arrested because he was considered an intellectual, as a school teacher!

Arriving in democratic countries after such an upheaval is an experience of deliverance and liberation, a taste of freedom. Émigré communities work hard to sustain their traditions and pass them on to the next generation. And their politics migrate with them. I think encounters with émigré communities can be jarring when one is introduced to their politics, so this raises the specter of nationalism as a threat. But we need to be honest about our assessments. Here’s the truth, and I am an eyewitness: were there instances of politics influencing the Church and occasionally becoming ugly in the émigré Ukrainian church? Yes.

But let’s also take ROCOR as an example. Their immigrants also brought their historical memories with them. Can you disentangle the politics of striving for the restoration of the monarchy from the liturgical commemoration of the tsar and royal family as royal martyrs? No. We need to be sympathetic when communities express their identities with reference to their contexts, especially when these environments were experiences of persecution, terror, and colonialism. As long as autocephalous churches are aligned with the borders of nation-states, we’re going to encounter this phenomenon of nationalism – and I have seen it among Greeks and Serbs as well as Ukrainians.

I do think Ukrainians are held to a different standard, for one reason: the hegemony of Soviet propaganda depicting Ukrainians who fought for independence as fascists. On the one hand, Ukrainians have to come to terms with their own history, which means accepting the fact that nationalism has reared its ugly head in Ukrainian history, sometimes with violence.

On the other hand, those who accuse all Ukrainians – especially the Orthodox seeking autocephaly – have to substantiate their arguments. This is a time for Orthodox soul-searching. Those who condemn the autocephaly movement in Ukraine – they’re awfully noisy on social media – can they substantiate their claims beyond articles published on polemical web sites or recycling Soviet propaganda (see chapter 4 of my book for more on this issue)? The only way to truly deal with this issue is to dialogue with Ukrainian autocephalists, to meet them in community.

But as we know well, the preferential option for division drives a growing number of Orthodox from dialogue with their brothers and sisters. Withdrawal from dialogue perpetuates isolation, and isolation breeds fear. It is fundamentally and morally wrong to refuse dialogue with Ukrainian autocephalist communities because they have been labelled as ‘schismatics’. Those who adopt this strategy attempt to isolate the community with the hope that they will dissolve, or break, and then agree to the conditions demanded by the established Church. Obviously, this is a strategy employed everywhere to gain leverage and apply pressure, but in the Church, it is a matter of employing the vocabulary of sacramental theology to imprint an identity of delegitimization on the autocephalists to justify the refusal to dialogue.

This strategy violates the history of the schism: in the earliest stages, an agreement between the opposing parties almost occurred, first in 1922 when the patriarchal exarchate in Ukraine not only declared autocephaly and adopted sobornopravist’, but also called for immediate dialogue with the 1921 UAOC, and then again in October 1942 when representatives of the autonomous and autocephalous churches reached an agreement at the Pochaiv monastery. Both attempts to unify failed because Ukraine was occupied by Soviet and Nazi regimes hostile to both churches. But these events demonstrate a willingness to dialogue, to not only hear the concerns of the other party, but to actually come to know them. This is why the Orthodox who dismiss the autocephalous cohorts without trying to know them or hear them out today need to perform some soul-searching. Does this strategy fulfill the canon of the Gospel? Will this strategy contribute to the healing of the schism? History is our teacher: refusal to dialogue breeds isolation, fear, and hate.

AD: The two councils of 1918 and 1921 play important roles here, and proposed some very interesting reforms--e.g., the restoration of a married episcopate. Tell us a bit about those councils. 

The autocephalists requested the 1918 council against the wishes of Metropolitan Volodymyr (Bohoiavlenskii), but Patriarch Tikhon blessed the council. This council prohibited using vernacular Ukrainian for the liturgy, a pastoral initiative that had been long prepared and taken up (along with vernacular Russian) at the 1917-18 Moscow Council. Two additional controversies inflamed divisions: the unilateral removal of dozens of delegates from the council to shift the balance from pro-autocephaly to pro-autonomy, a move admitted by Russian historians, and the election of Metropolitan Antonii Khrapovitskii in May 1918, a gathering that limited the number of participating delegates. The council was contentious: a battle between the pro-autocephaly and pro-autonomy parties.

In his memoirs, Metropolitan Evlogy remarked that the movement for autocephaly was relentless and the autocephalists had a clear majority until the constituency of the delegates changed. The autocephalists were enraged, as they believed that the conciliar rules were violated by exchanging one set of delegates (pro-autocephaly) for another (pro-autonomy). From their perspective, this act made the 1918 council a robber council. The deciding vote for autonomy was a surprise, but not as much as the vote to retain Church Slavonic. The conciliar decision to reject liturgical Ukrainization was the blow that began the separation of the autocephalist cohorts from the patriarchal Church in Ukraine. For them, these decisions cemented a narrative about the patriarchal bishops on the synod in Ukraine: their loyalty was to the tsar (even though the tsarist regime had passed), and could not be trusted. They rejected the 1918 council as a robber council.

The 1918 council became important again in 1941, when the portion of Western Ukraine Hitler had ceded to the USSR in 1939 came under Nazi control. In a short period of time, the Soviets managed to disrupt Church life with violence, in a region where Orthodox had reasonable freedoms in Poland. The bishops who gathered in Pochaiv declared that they recognize the 1918 council as canonical and authoritative and therefore rejoined the Moscow Patriarchate, while acknowledging that autocephaly was possible with the convocation of a new All-Ukrainian council.

But not all of the bishops participated. Metropolitan Dionisii of Warsaw had cultivated Ukrainian bishops as pastors of the Ukrainian majority in the Orthodox Church of Poland, and he declared that the reversion to the 1918 Kyiv council was a violation of the Tomos of autocephaly Constantinople bestowed on the Church in Poland in 1924. That Tomos specifically identifies the Orthodox Church in Poland as the successor of the ancient Kyivan Metropolia. The Ukrainians themselves were never able to resolve their disagreement over the canonical supremacy of the 1918 council or the 1924 Tomos.

The autocephalist cohorts received permission from Soviet authorities to use temples for vernacular liturgies (soon after the Soviets assumed control in Ukraine), and the synodal bishops tolerated this until 1920, when they suspended and then deposed all of the clergy who served in Ukrainian from holy orders. The October 1921 council failed to obtain a bishop who could inaugurate a hierarchy, so they established their own hierarchy which has never been recognized in Orthodoxy. Chapter 2 of my book goes into great detail about the 1921 council, because the patriarchal exarch, Metropolitan Michael, actually appeared at the council in a last-ditch effort to mend fences with the autocephalists – a historical example of an attempt to dialogue. The encounter was tense and emotional – the secretary notes that delegates were weeping, including the metropolitan.

I can highlight two features of the 1921 council. First, the council elucidates internal disagreement among the Ukrainians attending on the path to be adopted, especially concerning the establishment of a hierarchy to restore the Kyivan Metropolia. Some delegates who fully supported autocephaly abandoned the council when it adopted Volodymyr Chekhivsky’s rationale for ordaining bishops through the innovative conciliar rite of ordination that did not include bishops. As you mentioned, this council issued numerous new canons, precious material on the rejection of the 1918 council and married bishops. Metropolitan Vasyl Lypkivsky’s homilies are published in Ukrainian and English – and he consistently identifies the 1921 UAOC as a new Church, a modernized Orthodox body that honors the laity and discards the ‘old’ episcopo-centric Church. The 1921 council attempted to inaugurate a new era of Orthodoxy in Ukraine, but history shows that the autocephalists returned to the foundations of traditional Orthodoxy very quickly. They are and were conservative.

AD: You note that one of the recurring issues coming out of the council of 1918 is ongoing controversy over the use of Church Slavonic vs. a vernacular Ukrainian. Here again I'm wondering whether there is an unacknowledged double standard at work here--a kind of linguistic snobbery redolent again of colonialism or imperialism? I well recall my Doktorvater  and dear mentor Fr. Andriy Chirovsky once saying that "Both Poles and Russians considered Ukrainian unfit to be called a language." Had that Polish-Russian snobbery infected these debates, leading to many refusing the use of a vernacular? 

ND: This issue is much more complicated than it seems because the preparations for the Moscow Council included proposals for translating liturgical and biblical texts into vernacular Russian and Ukrainian. Those proposals were defeated, both at the Moscow Council and at the 1918 Ukrainian council. Then-Metropolitan Tikhon resisted the introduction of the vernacular into the liturgy because he hoped to restore Communion with the Old Believers. There is a certain resistance to introducing the vernacular among all of the Churches that use Slavonic, and there were and are Ukrainians sympathetic to autocephaly who would prefer to retain Slavonic. The introduction of liturgical Ukrainization in Poland caused problems in multiple eparchies, a fact that demonstrates that the Ukrainianizers could be chauvinistic in imposing their agenda on the Church. This was not always a matter of Russians mocking Ukrainians for their language: one of the compromises agreed to but not realized at the Pochaiv meeting in October 1942 was to take the time to discuss a pastoral introduction of Ukrainization without forcing it on people who appreciated Slavonic.

On the other hand, the repression of Ukrainian long before the revolution elucidates a pattern of Russification that contributed to the autocephalist agenda. In the post-Soviet period, Metrpolitan Volodymyr Sabodan blessed mild Ukrainization within the UOC-MP. The issue has become controversial again under the leadership of Metropolitan Onufry, because he bitterly dismissed vernacular Ukrainian in remarks he made at the Kyivan eparchial assembly in December 2015, which seemed to inspire Metropolitan Oleksander Drabinko to write a series of essays demonstrating the evolution of liturgical language as a justification for using Ukrainian. It remains a hot-button issue within the UOC-MP, but the KP and UAOC are firmly rooted in Ukrainization. You essentially have multiple generations of faithful who have memorized prayers and liturgical texts in Ukrainian. I don’t think Ukrainians should abandon their Slavonic heritage, but there is no going back from Ukrainization. Aside from the mistakes of the past, which we cannot ignore, you could say that the Ukrainians are leading the rest of the Slavic Orthodox world when it comes to using the vernacular for liturgy.

AD: Your third chapter focuses on Ukrainian Orthodox in Canada and the US, and how churches in both became the bearers of a longing for national sovereignty and ecclesial independence. How did the North American context shape those longings? 

ND: The autocephaly initiative migrated to North America, and the core values of democracy and liberty provided fertile soil to keep the autocephaly initiative alive and well. The Ukrainian émigré communities took a leading role in fighting for the religious rights of Ukrainian citizens during the Cold War, and they contended against the injustice of the UGCC and UAOC in Soviet Ukraine as having no legal status. St. Andrew’s Center in South Bound Brook, New Jersey, became the primary center of Ukrainian autocephaly until the UAOC attained legal status in the USSR in 1989. The émigré community succeeded in preventing the initiative from dissolving, and they took full advantage of American anti-Soviet rhetoric throughout the Cold War period.

AD: I found utterly fascinating and in fact very exciting your discussions of the various manifestations of sobornopravnist’ in terms of church councils, revised rites of ordination, and much else. Tell us a bit about what that term means and some of the visions it gave rise to. 

ND: It means governance by council, and the idea is that the entire community participates in governing the Church. For Orthodox Ukrainians, this governance draws from the creative influence and patronage of lay brotherhoods in the early seventeenth century when the Orthodox Metropolia of Kyiv lacked bishops.

Sobornopravnist’ essentially rejects a mono-episcopal model of Church. In other words, bishops do not and cannot have absolute power. In a model of sobornopravnist’, you could have a synod, but it would not rule unilaterally – decisions would include substantial lay participation, not only in deliberation, but in the actual process of voting.

In the speeches delivered at the 1921 October council, eucharistic ecclesiology enters the scene: Chekhivsky asserted that the Eucharist is an offering of the entire people, and not just the bishops, and that history testifies to episodes where lay leaders correct bishops who had strayed from the truth. The conciliar ordination of Vasyl Lypkivsky entailed a chain of hands – all of the delegates of the council laid their hands on the ordinand, in order (presbyters, deacons, then laity). The problem, of course, was the absence of bishops. But I find something valuable in the core value of sobornopravnist’ – it is a reminder that the community is the Church, not just the clergy, and the Church should consider threading that core value through Church governance and liturgy.

AD: Equally fascinating were the various forms of "political theology" that emerge and change over the past century. Tell us a bit about the prominent features of some of those political theologies and how they change. 

ND: The two most prominent political theologies are the liberation theology underpinning the original autocephalist movement and the Russkii mir political theology that identifies Kyiv as a cell in a Russian Orthodox multinational civilization. I’ll say a bit more about the liberation theology: for the 1921 UAOC, Christ’s Gospel, his resurrection enables Christians to be liberated form the political powers of the world. Ukrainians would experience this liberation from the Russian bishops in Ukraine who imposed Tsarist policies on the people. Liberation from those bishops permitted the Church to embark on modernization. Chekhivsky wrote two liturgical dramas used at St. Sophia in Kyiv that exemplify this liberation theology. I translated most of that service in my article on liturgical innovations of the UAOC published in Studia Liturgica.

This liberation theology weaved its way through up until today. For the 1942 UAOC, “Red Moscow” was the tyrant from whom liberation was desired (and this was also the case for the autonomous Church). For the émigré Church, Red Moscow remained that tyrant, with the Moscow Patriarchate itself as the Soviet government’s assistant. And for today’s proponents of autocephaly, they seek liberation from Putin’s attempt to colonize Ukraine through the Moscow Patriarchate. In other words, political theologies migrate and develop over time – they also remain resilient.

AD: Your book tells an incredibly complex tale in great depth and detail while commendably eschewing, especially in your conclusion, any heavy-handed prescribing of solutions. Sum up what your hopes were for this book, and who should read it.

ND: In a nutshell, my goal was to inform readers for the purpose of attaining a better understanding of the Ukrainian Church situation. I also hope that my book might contribute to the demythologizing of prevailing stereotypes of the Ukrainian Church. Besides students and specialists, I hope that clergy and laity will read this book. I dream that in some small way, it could contribute to the healing of the schism.

I’ve been told that I should avoid advising patriarchs on how they should act, so heavy-handed prescribing is not included. I want to conclude with this:

Please consider the optics of current events in Ukraine. People who have lived their faith for 1,030 years – 1,030! – are instructed to defer to one or another patriarchate. Over the course of 97 years, all of them have appealed, at one time or another, to either Moscow or Constantinople for a resolution. When the response from patriarchates is silence, a people who practiced their faith for a millennium will decide their own fate. Readers will be tempted to respond by claiming that the “canonical territory” of Ukraine belongs to one patriarchate or another. Some will conclude that the canons require us to draw ecclesial boundaries in this exact way, and that they cannot be changed. Interpreting the canons to impose the will of one church on another is not only ecclesial colonization – it is morally dubious.

AD: Having finished this book, what are you at work on now?

ND: I have several article projects on my desk. I’ll be writing about Schmemann’s liturgical legacy, architecture in North America, and eucharistic theology and iconography. After a short break from book projects, I hope to return, with energy, to developing a manuscript on liturgical identity with an ecumenical landscape. And I hope to follow up on this book with a project that will feature Orthodox identity in Ukraine through parish history, which would entail spending some time in Ukraine, interviewing clergy and people, and reading their texts and contexts for clues on how they identify themselves and those around them. This could be a good opportunity to take an inventory of Church life in Ukraine after the Tomos.

Nicholas Denysenko on The People's Faith

It is always a joy and delight to be able to talk to my friend Nicholas Denysenko, as I have on here several times over the years about his many books. Today we have a chance to hear from him about his new book The People's Faith: The Liturgy of the Faithful in Orthodoxy (Fortress Press, 2018), 240pp.

AAJD: Tell us about your background and what led to the writing of The People's Faith. 

ND: I’m trained in the sciences of liturgiology, having taken my Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America in 2008. I studied liturgy with Paul Meyendorff (as a student at St. Vladimir’s Seminary), Dominic Serra, Kevin Irwin, and Mark Morozowich. My doctoral coursework at CUA immersed me in liturgical history (esp. Serra and Morozowich), and liturgical theology (Serra, Morozowich, and esp. Irwin).

My interest in liturgical reform increased with the fiftieth anniversary of Sacrosanctum Concilium in 2013. Alexander Schmemann’s legacy among Western Christians piqued my interest, and I learned a lot about the contributions of liturgiology to liturgical practice during the course of researching and writing Liturgical Reform After Vatican II: The Impact on Eastern Orthodoxy (Fortress Press, 2015).

I reflected on the existence of numerous liturgical practices that are not recorded in official liturgical texts, a thought process that yielded new questions. Since liturgy is an event enacted by God and a local assembly, what is the real authority of official liturgical texts? Are official texts anything more than patterns communities should adopt – with the freedom to subtract and add, as needed, but without disrupting the essential ore of the ordo, to accommodate the particularities of parish life?

Acknowledging the gaps between official liturgical texts and local liturgical practices, are there also gaps between official liturgical theologies and the liturgical theology of the ordinary laity?

I consider the identification of the ordinary person in the pew as the true practitioner of theologia prima to be one of the great recoveries of twentieth-century sacramental theology. Aidan Kavanagh and David Fagerberg identified “Mrs. Murphy” as this theologian, but the idea hearkens back to a saying attributed to Evagrius Pontus – the theologian is the one who prays.

It’s not absurd to say that we’re all theologians, and the scholarship of sociologists of religion like Nancy Ammerman and experts in ritual studies like Nathan Mitchell remind us that the non-expert testimony on the encounter with God in and through prayer is no less real than oft-quoted sayings of the desert fathers. To paraphrase Mitchell – theological tradition is handed down from to grandchildren from the knees of their grandparents with great authority.

Having taken these lessons to heart, I sought to attempt to begin the process of recording a sampling of the liturgical theology of ordinary laity in this study, and then to bring that theology into dialogue with official liturgical theology.

AAJD: Are there connections between this new book and your 2015 book Liturgical Reform After Vatican II: The Impact on Eastern Orthodoxy?

ND: Yes. My study of liturgical reform in Orthodoxy yielded dozens of questions that are not easily answered. The process of introducing reform is the fundamental issue here. Scholars have contributed to the codification of a process of liturgical reform that has become a popular myth in the academy and the Church. The basic idea is that a group of experts studies liturgical history and writes a paper proposing a change or modification on the basis of research. At some point, a synod will hear the committee’s report and make a decision to be implemented through a revision to the liturgical books. All of this sounds clean, and good, and quite bureaucratic, but it is often incompatible with reality. Parishes introduce liturgical reforms on a regular basis, to meet the needs of their people. Some of these are so modest that one would have to observe a local parish liturgy with meticulous attention to detail to notice a change. But some changes to the official pattern of liturgy printed in liturgical texts are substantial. I have served in parishes where an official liturgical book is replaced by a local publication, especially if there is a preference for another translation of a text circulating among clergy.

Other changes are even more noticeable. Some parishes have applied the principle of which Fr. Taft (of blessed memory) reminds us: “the Eucharist is a gift to be received,” meaning that everyone received communion from the hand of another – including the presider. Taft’s principle was based on his research, so this is not surprising, but what catches my attention is the innate ecclesiology of the rite – the true presider is Christ, and the rite forms the leader – a bishop or priest – into a recipient of communion, like everyone else. (Now we should also consider the next step by re-introducing the reception of communion in both kinds by first eating and then drinking – but that is a topic for another time).

A much more controversial local tradition takes place when the Liturgy of Holy Saturday (Paschal Vigil) is celebrated on the shroud (epitaphios, plashchanitsa). I do not know how widespread this practice is, but I understand its DNA, driven by popular piety surrounding Christ’s shroud, a piety that influenced the historical development of the Divine Liturgy itself. The parishes that introduced this practice were responding to a local, community-driven phenomenon, and it caused controversy when multiple bishops issued edicts prohibiting the practice.

All of this leads to a fundamental question we should engage: do we sell liturgical theology short when we limit it to the musings of experts and official texts? I’m not calling for the dismissal of the official, not at all, because the official texts provide a pattern rooted in a traditional ordo. Nevertheless, we need to seriously consider the depth of meaning one can glean from non-expert, unofficial practices and observations. We learn a lot from official sources, authoritative teachings, homilies from bishops, hymns composed by famous saints. But all of these are not ‘the’ Church. Everyone constitutes the Church, and we have a lot to learn by consulting non-experts, popular practices, and interpretations of liturgy. I have tried to capture a sampling of this unofficial, non-expert reflection on liturgy in this study to get a sense of what we might learn if we consider the testimony of the whole body of Christ. 

AAJD: As you know, a lot of work in Byzantine liturgiology has been driven by history and texts and written by experts. But here you adopt a very different approach, reading and listening to the responses of people in selected parishes. Tell us about your methods of field research in this book.

ND: My objective was to gain insights into ordinary lay perspectives on the liturgy. A number of extant studies influenced my approach. From the perspective of the larger field of religion and sociology, Nancy Ammerman’s studies were influential, and really set the pace and the bar for ethnographic research into religious and devotional practices of communities and individuals. Ricky Manalo’s study that brings prayer and devotional practices into dialogue with Vatican II’s teaching on the liturgy was likewise inspiring. Amy Slagle is one of the best researchers on North American Orthodoxy, and I suspect that her study of converts to the Eastern Church will remain the seminal work in this field for decades to come (together with D. Oliver Herbel’s).

I drew from the principles articulated by these researchers and decided to organize focus groups of volunteers from diverse parishes who would be willing to share their perspectives on the liturgy. I received permission from the Institutional Review Board at Loyola Marymount University (my employer at the time), and organized focus groups with laity from four Orthodox parishes. The focus group sessions required discipline and restraint. In all instances, some of the participants asked me to share my thoughts on the questions I posed, so it took effort and energy to remain still, listen and record dispassionately, and reflect on the sessions afterwards. It’s essential to note the limits of the methodology, especially since I did not have the resources to devote time and space to frequent meetings over a period of time in these communities. Despite this limitation, the sessions themselves were eye-opening. On the one hand, one might glean more in a private meeting. On the other hand, the focus group environment stimulated responses – participants often spoke to one another and elaborated their thoughts on my questions, occasionally even forgetting that I was in the room. I recorded the sessions and studied them repeatedly as I developed the project. I also interviewed the pastors of each parish to obtain a sense of the parish’s history and liturgical practices.

AAJD: How did you select the four parishes you worked with?

ND: My objectives included regional and jurisdictional diversity, and I wanted to have one small parish included in the study. Three of the four parishes are in urban environments, and one is in the desert. I selected two Greek parishes because the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese constitutes about 50% of Orthodox Christianity in America. Ideally, I would have included Antiochian, ROCOR, and Serbian parishes, too. But obstacles presented themselves – the Antiochian focus group was cancelled because of a scheduling issue, and I was unable to connect with the Serbian and ROCOR parishes I had in mind. So, there is room for more research in this area, and there is a need for it as well. It would be of great benefit to include Eastern Catholic and Oriental Orthodox communities in such studies. I’m pleased with the outcome, though, because the four parish focus groups provided a plethora of material for this study – more than enough for a solid monograph.

AAJD: You note in your conclusion to chapter two that "parish liturgy is constantly evolving and changing." Tell us a bit more about that because it seems to run counter to certain narratives one sometimes hears about how "conservative" the East is, and how resistant to liturgical change it is imagined to be.

Liturgiologists have delivered profound gifts to the academy and Church with the historical studies produced over the last 100-plus years. We continue to learn more about our history, and the method of comparative liturgy – one thriving in large part because of the pioneering work of scholars like Juan Mateos, S.J., Robert Taft (S.J.), and sustained by the likes of Gabriele Winkler and Michael Zheltov – this method is not limited to presenting the history of a rite, but it also shows us what is possible. During the course of the IOTA conference in Iasi, Symeon Stig Froyshov presented a paper suggesting that the Horologion – our Liturgy of the Hours – has cathedral roots. His paper exemplified the relevance of good liturgical history since he is essentially challenging the longstanding assumption of monastic dominance in the “fusion” of cathedral and monastic liturgy.

In our scrupulous attention to liturgical texts, one can involuntarily neglect a fundamental fact about liturgy: it is a local rite, enacted by people together with God, in a community. Let us not assume that we have diocese or eparchy in mind when we say “local.” Certainly, there is a common core of Byzantine liturgy that unites all local celebrations. We all sing the Cherubikon, receive communion with a spoon from a chalice, and know that Holy Week and Pascha will be a veritable feast of Scripture with seemingly endless prostrations and venerations of the epitaphios (or plashchanitsa).

Local, parish traditions create some healthy variation in the liturgy. I have been in two parishes where a censing occurs during the Trisagion hymn – in one case, the presider censed at this point because it was part of his particular Serbian legacy. In two parishes I know of, the resurrection hymns recited by the deacon as he places the Lord’s body into the cup before consumption are instead sung by the people. These local practices accentuate Sunday as the day of resurrection.

I could describe dozens of examples in this space of local variations of liturgy, along with abbreviations, rites, customs, censing patterns, melodies, and even translations of the liturgy. These examples verify liturgy as an event of encounter between God and the community, and it’s important for us to honor these variations because liturgy itself originated as observance of rituals that were not dependent on codified texts. The late antique evidence of the extemporaneous orations of the Eucharistic prayer reminds us that Liturgy is filled with the Holy Spirit and is therefore not circumscribed – even to texts we would like to define as canonical. It has to be this way, to respect the fact that a single culture does not hold privilege over all the others in the rites, gestures, and words we use for worship. The Church is always a Church in a specific place and location, hence the local or particular quality of the Church – our unity comes from our one Lord, and our one baptism.

Throughout history, certain clergy have attempted to impose uniformity through the liturgy. To this day, you will hear clergy complain that father so-and-so doesn’t celebrate the Liturgy “correctly,” or that the Greeks “innovated” in their nineteenth century revisions. If corrections that come from Church authorities are designed to correct errors that are leading people away from Christ, then they are needed. But if these corrections and directives are motivated by the demands of a compliance seeking to eradicate local differences, they are more often than not actually attempts to assert authority and establish control of clergy and people through the liturgy. Appeals to authorities like this one are misapplications of authority because they do not honor the tradition of the local community.

They also attempt to circumscribe liturgy – you can’t control it, because liturgy is not a text, nor is it merely human: God is the presider at each assembly. A serious examination of parish liturgical practice would illustrate that the vast majority of parishes observe the common liturgical core quite faithfully. The tendency to opt for variation here and there is a necessity. It is a well-established tradition of both East and West that was compromised by the invention of the printing press that enabled authorities to distribute a single liturgy and define it as the only correct one. We shouldn’t mess with local parish variations unless they are creating divisions in the parish or leading people away from Christ. I honestly believe that those who seek to eradicate healthy local practices that are not printed in the service books have way too much time on their hands and should find something more useful to do.

AAJD: Your third chapter notes some generational shifts in both preparation to receive the Eucharist, and the frequency of doing so. Did your research uncover any commonalities here in the 21st century? E.g., I've often heard it said that since Schmemann's work on liturgy, a lot more people receive a lot more frequently than they once did. Is that a generalization your research could support?

Yes, at least in the parishes of my study. I was particularly intrigued by the stories shared by people who were raised with rigorous preparation for Communion and continue to feel self-conscious about frequently receiving communion now, even if they have been receiving more often for a number of years. Many older respondents of my study wondered if other parishioners were observing them with disapproval. It is certainly normal, and healthy to take stock of one’s readiness and worthiness to receive Christ.

But there is another dimension to this question, and that concerns the formative aspect of ritual and how that affects the introduction of a major change. Receiving communion more frequently requires a permanent change of habit, adopting a whole new perspective on the meaning of Communion, and learning a new way of preparing for it. The respondents’ sustained questioning of their worthiness and their sensitivity to the way others perceived them demonstrates that receiving liturgical change and establishing it as a permanent new practice is a complicated process that requires time, patience, and continued instruction. Scholars and students of the Church should consider how the process of reception works outside of the Liturgy as well – it tells us a lot about how much sustained ministry is required to implement any process, even if it is designed to do good in the Church. 

AAJD: You note (p.91) that a "primary objective" of your work is to strengthen the connection between "academic liturgical theology" and people's experience of liturgy. Are there particular areas where that connection is very attenuated? Are there areas where it may be relatively strong?

There are both gaps and areas of intense relationship between academic liturgical theology and the people’s experience of liturgy. One of the gaps is somewhat paradoxical, as many of the people expressed gratitude for the liturgical experience of sharing in a journey. I remain somewhat awestruck by the people’s gratitude for being a part of a community that receives communion together, a sense that one is not alone in this journey of receiving divine grace through communion, despite being unworthy. Without prompting, a number of adults idealized their view of the children who line up to drink from the fountain of immortality. They admire the children’s gravitas in simply obeying the command to approach, to draw near, without overanalyzing all of the social, spiritual, and theological dimensions.

Certainly, Orthodox academics have a lot of work to do in deconstructing the hierarchy that has been idealized and falsely affixed as an ecclesial structure. A view of an assembly of all receiving the same communion, together, from the ages of a few months up to one-hundred, is truly unique, an authentic representation of what we pray – the communion of the Holy Spirit, including all, without discrimination. Again, because it is worth repeating – the youngest infant and the highest ranking patriarch are all recipients of the same gift of our Lord. My sense was the people were deeply grateful for this experience of the fullness of community, in the ritual of receiving God’s gift. The next step for us Byzantines is to revise the ritual in such a way so that all truly receive in the same way – by eating the bread and drinking from the cup, and receiving from the hands of another (which will require bishops – yes, even bishops! – to actually receive communion from the hands of another, to which I referred earlier in this interview).

Let me refer to communion as a portal through which to view an attenuated connection between academic theology and the people’s perception. Many of the same people who expressed gratitude for experiencing communion together also lamented the exclusivity of the liturgical event, shedding tears over those who would like to partake of the cup but cannot because of ecclesial divisions.

No patriarch will hasten to restore Eucharistic communion with non-Orthodox Christians because some people are sad that other Christians cannot partake.

But the study reminds us that the privilege of partaking of the Eucharist is one that was originally open to all. I view the perceptions of the people here as a reminder that excluding other Christians after inviting all to “approach” is scandalous, and that the Eucharist should be the source of renewing the urgency to heal divisions, not to enhance them. This is an invitation for the academics to revisit the Eucharist as a symbol of true unity – not of exclusivity and division.

AAJD: You note how many participants in your study commented on a "fissure between the Lenten cycle and the rest of the year on account of the sheer weight and demand of the requirement for Orthodox Lenten worship" (p.111). You also note how often the topic of fatigue is raised by participants during Lent. Did your participants have any thoughts as to how to overcome these challenges? Do you?

Most of the parishioners in the study viewed the rigors of Holy Week and Pascha as ideals laity should attempt to meet, to the best of one’s ability. Many respondents expressed admiration for clergy who participate in the entirety of Holy Week and Pascha. One elderly respondent noted the repetition of Gospel passages throughout the Holy Week offices and suggested that the clergy could review the lectionary for Holy Week and revise it to eliminate repetition. The lectionary is an amalgamation of Constantinopolitan and hagiopolite traditions, so the respondent’s observation is true, and it would be healthy for the Church to examine the lectionary, and also the times appointed for the services to suggest a revised pattern that eliminates at least some of the repetition and makes the transition from Holy Saturday to Pascha more sensible.

The explanations for the existing Holy Week pattern are spurious, at best. For example, the obsession with Judas as the antagonist throughout the week displaces Jesus as the suffering servant – Jesus should be our focus, not Judas. And the most glaring thematic problem is the continued appointment of anti-Semitic texts in the hymnography of Good Friday Matins (and elsewhere). The most popular pastoral justification for retaining these texts is that we need to learn how to hear them correctly. Similarly, many pastors try to diminish the paschal character of the Vigil (Holy Saturday Vesperal liturgy) by reducing it to a “breaking through” of the resurrection, in “anticipation” of the real vigil to come at midnight.

Such justifications are both unfortunate and absurd. The liturgical scholar Bert Groen has published an essay exposing the anti-Semitic tropes throughout Byzantine Holy Week, and has stated the problem directly: no one wants to reform the ordo of Holy Week on their own because of its solemnity. This is the reason we retain the multiple overlaps of Gospels and popularize the false teaching that the Paschal Vigil is not really Pascha, at least not yet.

I would not call for a complete overhaul of Holy Week, in deference to the reception issue I mentioned above. As a Church, we have the responsibility to fine-tune it, though. The solution will come from a bolder initiative: to invite poets, linguists, artists, theologians, and musicians to engage the creative process and compose new hymns, new music, and new art that could be adopted for the services. Holy Week is an invitation to enter into the bridal chamber of Christ, to die and rise with him. Our services should proclaim this invitation in word, rite, and gesture. And they make this proclamation with unfathomable profundity! But the proclamation is often paused by the obsession with Judas, the condemnation of the Jews, the schizophrenic celebration of resurrection only to resume lamentation at the tomb.

A more general comment from a number of respondents will break open the larger point here, one with serious consequences for liturgical vitality: too much of the liturgy is concealed from the people because the clergy are performing it in private. A plea for the clergy to make their prayers the people’s prayers was a refrain among respondents. A desire for assurance that the living God is truly with them as they journey through the rigors of life was another refrain.

We appeal to the antiquity of our liturgical tradition to demonstrate our connection with the apostles. But we tend to forget that all of the prayers, rites, and songs we cling to with such fervor were once quite new and innovative. Our collective refusal to compose new hymns, prayers, and to rethink our order violates the spirit of the Byzantine tradition. We should be alarmed by our aversion to the brilliant creativity in liturgical composition that was the very hallmark of the patristic tradition we claim. The time for us to reclaim that creative energy of the Holy Spirit is now.   

AAJD: You note the dangers of "the canonization of a particular theological interpretation of a rite" as leading in part to rigidity (p.135) and this brings me back to your admirable opening comment about your "ascetical" approach in the interviews to being the one who listens rather than the expert correcting every idea and answering every question. How strong was the urge among people you talked to for there to be a "correct" or, dare one say, "orthodox" view of what liturgy is and does? Or were people more generally comfortable with a certain polyvalence here?

For the most part, respondents approached the sessions with openness. On several occasions, they asked me to elaborate an issue, and I declined, reminding them that my task was to take account of their observations. I was struck by their hunger to learn more, though. When Christians have questions, they do what everyone else does in the attempt to find a quick answer: perform an Internet search. My exchanges with the respondents heightened my own awareness of the information illiteracy afflicting the general public. We have a golden opportunity to identify opportunities to teach people the meaning of the various liturgies. Considering the shifting demographics of the Byzantine Churches, a more earthy, hands-on approach to teaching the Liturgy would be suitable for our times, alongside the creation of updated catechetical texts that present the fundamentals of the Liturgy. For example, it could be beneficial to spend some time reflecting on the Eucharistic Prayers in small groups in an extraliturgical context to consider the deeper meanings of offering, anamnesis, epiclesis, and commemoration.

AAJD: Your participants having raised, often in painful terms, the problem of eucharistic hospitality with their family and friends who are not Orthodox, you later return to this issue in the context of "the anti-ecumenical turn in Orthodoxy" (pp.147-49), noting that it's not even possible to have a "public discussion on allowing non-Orthodox to receive Communion" (151). What lies behind all this do you think? Why is even a discussion of the problem--never mind a change in practice--off limits?

I think, my friend, that your recent scholarship on the Catholic sexual abuse crisis discloses what lies behind all of this. It is psychological, a mindset cultivated by the continuous formation of communities on the basis of what distinguishes us from other Christians as opposed to how we are all one in Christ.

For most of the history of Orthodoxy in North America, the institutional Church has exploited encouragement of cultural pluralism to show how we are different. Greek immigrants hosted food festivals to demonstrate their legitimacy as good citizens of this land, a symbol of émigré arrival. Communities emphasized sustenance of their core values to ensure multigenerational longevity. We believed that there were two keys to keeping young people in the Church: through the unique beauty of Orthodoxy, and by making it accessible through English-language liturgies. Since Eastern Churches have always emphasized the local nature of the Church, it was easy enough to pass on a sense of fidelity to the covenant – to remain within the covenant of an exclusive community, be it Greek, Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian. Orthodox ecclesiology was and is also exclusive – there is no “subsistit in” in our conciliar theology, we claim to be THE one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. (See paragraph no. 1 of “Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World,” from the Holy and Great Council in Crete, 2016).

My sense is that Orthodoxy has turned inwards during the post-Soviet period in an effort to reclaim a legacy that was paused during the Soviet period and the Cold War. The raging of the cultural wars in the North American religious context eased the enhancement of an anti-ecumenical turn inwards among Orthodox here. All of these factors combined are like ingredients thrown into a pot for a dinner at which discussion of the possibility of healing divisions with other Christians is discouraged at best, and often prohibited. These factors have combined to form a collective mindset of sectarianism, a disposition in which communities are content with the status quo of mutual exclusivity – even if our children attend the same schools and the parents fraternize at basketball practices.

Ecumenical urgency resurfaces with global catastrophes, when the faces of victims of genocide beckon us to stop looking inwards. God forbid that a global human catastrophe is the only reason for re-igniting the sense of urgency for serious ecumenical dialogue among Christians. 

AAJD: The vast majority of your participants seem to have confined their reflections to Sunday Divine Liturgy--though many also spoke of the Lenten-Paschal cycle. Do you have any plans for more narrowly focused further research into, say, people's experience of funeral liturgies, or baptisms?

I think two studies are necessary, and I may or may not pursue them. First, a study of children’s perceptions of liturgy. A tightly-conceived and careful methodological approach to the study is needed. It would be particularly insightful to work with children in the same parishes. Such a study could teach us a lot about the process of learning through experience, of the whole community partaking of the liturgy together.

An appropriate follow-up would be a study of people’s engagement in all aspects of Church life – reading the Bible, daily prayer, confession, fasting, domestic observance of feasts, and personal behavior. Ammerman’s studies in particular demonstrate the value of non-expert observance of religious practices outside of official worship – and Manalo’s study, especially his engagement with Peter Phan, reminds us that the point of Liturgy is not its celebration, but communal union with God – an aspiration that is not exclusive to liturgy alone.

AAJD: Were there any big surprises in each of the parishes you worked with?

This is not so much a surprise, but an observation that deserves attention, reflection, and prayer. The people I interviewed viewed the Liturgy as an invitation that should not be taken for granted. They consistently expressed frustration at their failure to achieve the ideal established by the liturgy itself. Many of them expressed frustration at preoccupations with the details of life during Liturgy. This was the most important insight, that they were able to identify the Liturgy as a divine gift for us, and found diverse ways to express their desire to engage it as people at their very best, devoting full attention to laying aside the cares of everyday life and being present to God. The tension of confession of unworthiness and gratitude for God’s gift was thick – and beautiful in its thickness.

AAJD: Having finished this book, what are you at work on now?

Ever since the publication of The Orthodox Church in Ukraine last year, I have been cranking out essay after essay of in-depth analysis of the religious scene in Ukraine. I am in the slow process of developing a sequel. The sequel will discuss the tomos and the birth of the OCU, but there is a desperate need for a sophisticated look at the intersection of religion and politics in Ukraine, to cut through the unfortunate post-truth propaganda and regurgitation of Soviet-era narratives popularized by confessional media sites. To that end, the study will address the problem of political religion in Ukraine, and will also discuss the role of the media, both in Ukraine and elsewhere.

I am also developing essays on sacramental reconciliation, Eucharistic theology, iconography, and liturgical idolatry. Watch for information about a one-day symposium to be held at Valparaiso University on April 24, 2020: “Religion, State, and Nationalism: Problems and Possibilities.” We are honored to host a number of theologians and experts such as Antoine Arjakovsky, Dorian Llywelyn, and Atalia Omer.