Sunday of Orthodoxy

My son and I went to the Vespers service for the Sunday of Orthodoxy last night. I love this service. It's guaranteed that I'll cry.

The Sunday of Orthodoxy is the first Sunday in Lent, even though it doesn't directly have anything to do with the Lenten season of preparing for the death, burial and Resurrection of Christ. It does have everything to do with Orthodoxy, though. It is the day we remember the end of the official controversy over those pesky, troublemaking icons. I say official, since I don't think that argument will ever actually end.

When I converted, I didn't have a difficult time accepting icons, but I didn't instantly fall in love, either. I didn't get the big deal. My art history minor told me that those poor Byzantines were just a little behind the times. The Renaissance thankfully came along to save us from the flat severeness of the icons, replacing them with more visually pleasing chubby cherubs and buxom virgins.

As my priest said in the sermon yesterday, though, if you understand icons, you understand pretty much everything we believe. We don't worship the wood and the paint. We look through the icon, passing on our love and respect to the person the picture represents. And everytime we do that, it becomes just a little bit easier to look past the flesh and externals of those around us to see the image of Christ in them. If we see Christ, then we can truly love. Icons are Orthodoxy. We touch, we kiss, we prostrate, we fast, we feast, we cross ourselves A LOT, we use our entire bodies to worship God. The icon is all of those in one. The closest earthly thing to capture the sweet portrait of a prayer.

So, to watch the procession of priests and children carrying icons brought a tear to my eye. I thought of all those who died defending the icons. I thought of my three year old, who shows the same level of excitement when she sees a picture of a beloved family member as when she sees a new icon...really just pictures of our extended family. I thought of the deep richness of the Faith, and I was overwhelmed by that depth and in awe of that richness.

My city has a Pan-Orthodox service for the Sunday of Orthodoxy. I don't even know how many Orthodox churches there are here. I'm OCA, Orthodox Church in America, and there's over a dozen of those in this region. I don't know where to begin counting the Greek, Russian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Romanian and all the rest. Point is, there's a lot. The service was in several languages. You could read the ethnic diversity in the faces of the crowd, as we sat in the Serbian cathedral. So many different traditions. One unanimous declaration:

This is the Faith of the Apostles.
This is the Faith of the Fathers.
This is the Faith of the Orthodox.
This is the Faith which has established the Universe.

When I was Protestant, I read about the early martyrs for the Faith, and they seemed so distant. That was another place; another time. Very few seemed to die for the faith now. Missionaries in the jungle. The occasional freak incident. All separate from the bouncy, upbeat newness of my Sunday morning church service. A worship of indivuality rather than community. A worship of the modern rather than the ancient. Not much to defend or die for.

Last night, I felt differently I thought of the Orthodox under Communism. The millions who died very recently for the Faith I now share. Orthodoxy is a faith with a history, and Orthodoxy is a faith with a present. As I sang, I felt connected with all of them in the past 2000 years. The Russian peasants, the early martyrs, the Greek next to me and the Serb across the aisle. Above all, I am Christian. That is my religion. But I worship God in the Orthodox manner, and for that, I am truly thankful.

In all my joy, I was saddened by one thing. Among all those people, there was only one other woman with her head covered. Actually, there were several older ladies with hats, but that could have been a covering, a desire to dress up, or a more pressing desire to protect their hair from the pouring rain outside. I apply no religious significance to their head gear. No, it was just me in my snood and the lady in the babushka in the back. I don't fully understand why no one covers here. They just don't.

It's hard to feel out of place in the group where I'm supposed to fit in more than anywhere, but it always happens to me at these gatherings. Covering is extremely rare in my neck of the woods, and that makes me sad if I think about it too much. So, I decided not to think about it. I turned my eyes from my neighbors and gazed at the iconostasis. There were the icons. The cloud of witnesses. And there, ALL the ladies were covered.