My observation, from a ROCOR parish, where women read almost everything except the epistle (though I’ve heard there was a woman, before I joined, who occasionally did), is that if you keep parishes tiny enough, it’s less about who *gets* to do X than about who *can* do X.

Also, I suspect that Orthodoxy’s glacial pace of change is more stable in the long run than 20th century Anglicanism’s faster changes. After all, someone who should be ordained but isn’t can still be a virtuous layperson, but if someone who shouldn’t be ordained is, you get bigger problems. (This being a excellent temporary excuse, but a lousy multi-century excuse.)

I’m kind of free-associating here, I admit it.

OK,

I guess that, again, I have just missed being at certain parishes. The two Antiochian parishes with which I have been involved have let women read the Epistle and chant. The local Greek Orthodox parish has, for the second year now, had a girl chanting paraklesis with the male chanter standing next to her and helping out every so often. (She is a minor, learning, so she is clearly a girl. GRIN.) I have met the woman choir director of a very large northeastern Antiochian parish. I have also heard Federica Matthews-Green clearly state (in front of a bishop and at a diocesan conference) that Orthodox women may do anything in front of the iconostasis.

So, I was surprised that this was supposed to be a major “gasp” problem. Am I missing something?

A jocular start: in the 1990s, a female Methodist friend of mine, who liked to frequent our OCA mission in a small college town, once asked my mother if she felt disenfranchised by her inability to be ordained to holy orders in her own church. “Honey,” my mother replied with good humor, “we’re just getting around to resolving whether or not we really have to have our heads covered in church — so we’re not even thinking about that now.”

In parishes I grew up in and attended, women sang, directed choir, read Bible readings, even served as cantor. Was it always so? Probably not, particularly in “the old country.” Did it have to do with, as Peter noted, who was on hand and knew how to do what needed to be done? Most likely. (Truth be told, the Orthodox Church in North America wouldn’t exist without its women, who, particularly in the immigrant era, kept it alive through thick and thin with their blood, sweat, toil, tears and prayers, despite poverty and cultural barriers vis-a-vis mainstream America, and against all odds.) But I never witnessed anybody make an issue over such things or recoil from them as something unnatural and out-of-place.

Yes, Orthodox Christianity makes changes at a glacial pace. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: it sure beats knee-jerk reactions or “keeping up with the Joneses” regarding whatever fad or trend blows in with the next change in the direction of the wind. But there may be other reasons, not quite obvious at first glance, for this slow pace, besides the natural tendency of orthodoxies to remain staid and make haste slowly.

The 20th century was neither easy nor kind to Orthodox Christianity: while Roman Catholicism and Protestantism were free to deal head-on with scientific, cultural and moral shifts in modern life, the Orthodox Church was shell-shocked by having to, quite literally, fight for its life under intense persecution, oppression and dislocation in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East, which spilt over to its American children. “If one part of the body suffers, every part suffers with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). Under such circumstances, the natural instinct was to hold tight to what one has and keep it exactly as it is, lest one lose it in the midst of the maelstrom. Survival, not change, was the immediate issue at hand; the threat of utter destruction was quite real, and life under the rubble and down in the bunker was daunting.

The pre-revolutionary Russian bishops, arguably the best educated and most conservative in the Orthodox Christian world at the time, were not shy about reform: they had quite substantial organizational, liturgical and catechetical changes in mind at the dawn of the 20th century. Unfortunately, by the time they had an opportunity to meet in council to move on them, the communists seized power and stalled their freedom to do so. Besides sudden, unexpected persecution of an unprecedented magnitude under atheistic Marxism, they also had to contend with the phenomenon of the “Living Church” or “renovationism” — a government-sponsored attempt to subvert the Church from within by “modernizing” it. This movement coopted some of the reforms the bishops had intended (and pushed for others that went far beyond them). Unhappily, the political association between this movement and the Soviet authorities tainted the very idea of reform in many people’s eyes. For this reason, one finds many even today for whom mere mention of fairly innocuous things, such as bringing the calendar back in sync with God’s creation a la Genesis 1:14, or changing the liturgical language from archaic Church Slavonic to more understandable Russian, provokes a virtually apoplectic response.

(True, many Russians, at least, never seem to have dealt with change well, if one considers things like the “Old Believer” schism in the 17th century — but, in all fairness, Patriarch Nikon of Moscow didn’t handle his introduction of reforms quite as pastorally as he ought to have, either.)

Undoubtedly, it will take some time before the caution and suspicion of such a justifiably “siege mentality” are overcome. Deep wounds heal slowly. A wife beaten everyday for years and years is not likely to be in shape to run a marathon a day or week or month after finally escaping her abuser. God had the Hebrews wander the desert for 40 years after their liberation from Egypt before leading them to the Promised Land, so one generation and its mindset, formed under slavery and oppression, could die off and give birth to something new. I suspect it will be no different for the Orthodox Church in its recovery after what the 20th century dealt it. Recoveries can be so messy, complicated and unpredictable; they require patience and take time.

Converts aren’t the only ones alarmed at how much Orthodox Christianity contradicts the term “organized religion.” A great many of us “cradle” types are equally alarmed at how disorganized it is today, particularly here in North America — and not only because it makes us less attractive or effective, but because it is a human failure to live up to our own canons, ethos and ideals. Yet, on the other hand, church life goes on — in spite of history, in spite of dysfunction, in spite of ourselves, in spite of everything. The Lord really hit the nail on the head when he told Saint Paul the Apostle, and through him, all of us: “My grace is enough for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). In the end, he trumps everything.

As for “converty traditionalist” parishes, your experience points out a risk with “all-convert” parishes. “Cradle” and “convert” need each other, to balance each other out between the two poles of lethargy and rigorism. Tradition is not merely a static deposit, but a living process — a literal “handing down” from one generation to another. It can’t be a reconstruction worked up from a book. But how can that transmission take place unless there are “old-timers” to receive it from? Some of the parish “old-timers” in my life might strike some converts as too lukewarm and timid, but what I got from them was, beyond doctrine and worship and discipline, insight into an attitude, a psychology, a “lived-in” faith — very human and truly Christian simplicity, humility, kindness, common sense, forbearance with others and their frailties — too easy lost in the maximalism of “getting it right” and “taking it to the nth degree.”

Finally, at the risk of being too wordy (too late, eh?) and straining our host’s hospitality (I hope not!), a bit more humor in closing: some years ago, when my mother went to attend the funeral of an elderly family friend whose days ended in a very emigre ROCOR parish, to which we had not been in years, I reminded her not to forget to bring a “khustka” (head scarf) along, as that parish was known to be very strict and easily scandalized over such things. It turned out “was” was the operative term there — for most of the women were in pantsuits with uncovered heads, even in that bastion of ultra-conservative traditionalism!

I guess some things do change, eventually, after all… ;-)

Thanks for your hospitality and forbearance, friend.

Here’s two online texts that will give you at least a glimpse into the slice of history I touched upon:

“Russian Church Reform and the Pre-Revolutionary Episcopate” by Nicholas Zernov:

http://www.holy-trinity.org/ecclesiology/zernov-reform.html

“Liturgical Study and Reform in Russia in the late 19th-early 20th Centuries” in “The Liturgical Path of Orthodoxy in America” by Paul Meyendorff:

http://www.svots.edu/Faculty/Paul-Meyendorff/Articles/liturgical-path.html/

There’s also a book out that covers the subject:

“A Vanquished Hope: The Movement for Church Renewal in Russia, 1905-1906″ by James Cunningham:

http://www.amazon.com/Vanquished-Hope-Movement-Renewal-1905-1906/dp/0913836702/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217993923&sr=8-2

The Church in Russia wasn’t able to act on this momentum for renewal and reform until after the February 1917 Revolution, when it called the Moscow Council of 1917-1918. Unfortunately, its work was interrupted by the Bolshevik bombardment of the Kremlin during their October 1918 coup d’etat. It wasn’t able to get much farther than the restoration of the patriarchate and some other organizational reforms, though it had so much more on its agenda. It’s one of the great “what if’s” of history as to how the Orthodox Christian world might be shaped today had the council been able to complete its work.

Some of the council’s ideals survived and were applied, in varying degrees, in the Russian emigration, where the Church was freer (if poorer) to act. But in Russia, communist persecution made it impossible to follow suit, and the government-sponsored subterfuge of “Living Church renovationism” left a bad taste in many Russians’ mouths for even the idea of reform. I say that not to justify that ambivalence, but at least explain it, tragic as it is. Throughout most of the 20th century, the Orthodox Church was, by necessity, having to expend all its energies living in “survival mode” and nothing else, which, at least in part, explains why it seems so slow to address modernity and explain itself in its contemporary context, as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware rightly said we are going to have to do. Come to think of it, so did Saint Peter (1 Peter 3:15). But, in many ways, I think we’re just starting to get over that shell-shock.