The anonymous 8th c. Anglo Saxon poem called The Ruin describes the Roman structures left in the city of Bath. It goes:
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it, courtyard pavements were smashed, the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age.The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed.Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed. Still the masonry endures.
Like this poetic description of these structural walls weathering hardships and finally giving out, the Church continues building literal temples, without lament for past ruins of Byzantium. We are continually being trampled and yet we continue in faithfulness by the power of the Cross of Christ. The masonry of Holy Trinity’s faithfulness, so to speak, will always endure even when it seems the world has torn it all down.The whole of the Church’s history, structure, and canons that have survived are revolving around the divine services. Many people nowadays in the third millennium like many before us hold to a philosophy that presupposes that meaning is created from ourselves, from our own choices, from our own will. No need to find it inside a church. The Church is a place where we discover that self-denial is a life-giving philosophy, not a life negating one. Persecution, insults, mockery, misfortunes, false accusations, rejections are what Christ warned us that we will confront. Extreme humility experienced in these circumstances has the miraculous potential to solidify the faith in a person and community, and it could wall up our hearts for protection. But to reject religion and the Church sounds like a courageous commitment to finding truth for yourself and one’s self development. It’s unpopular and against the common opinion to believe that meaning and life come from the Church where inside of a building, at an altar, we are given unique access to the mysteries of life and death. After centuries of persecution by a variety of religious and atheistic groups from the east to the west, Orthodoxy worldwide is rebounding in terms of churches being restored, built, and believers entering the Church. Orthodoxy in western cultures could be described as a missionary effort on the scale of converting large portions of the pagan Roman empire and widespread Hellenism comparable to today’s atheism.
A common ground and ethos that is broken between western Christians and Orthodoxy is the reading of eastern patristics, or its interpretation. It isn’t due to a lack of resources or technology that we are often ignorant of them. But because we haven’t become interested in what the eastern fathers have to say to us, we don’t make space and time for a silence to hear them and their wisdom, which is Orthodox. Their examples and icons are the antidotes to our public mental health crisis, as our own iconographers and writers have observed. They are largely absent in feast days, structural features, pastoral applications, icons, books, homilies, catechetical materials and education in non-Orthodox western places of worship. The mysteries in the divine services, the patristic writings, saints’ lives, icons, monks and nuns, ordinary parish life have never stopped inspiring new generations of Orthodox Christians. Is there a noticeable difference between the health of western Christianity and Orthodoxy? Metropolitan Hilarion argues that there is as it is evident in the Church’s historical and miraculous survival and recent growth like a reed shooting up out of the mud. Scholarship and theological books as well as iconography and temple structures have been ways that Orthodoxy has clearly witnessed to the world the good news, and not only to non-religious individuals but also importantly to other Christian denominations. Bishop Kallistos from England and Jean-Claude Larchet from France, for instance, have been doing this kind of witnessing work of renewal. The next chapter discusses how world Orthodoxy is organized canonically.