Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

In light of some very recent events, I thought it might not be the worst idea in the world to repost this, albeit with some introductory matter; it does seem to me that there is more to say, six years after it was published. For five of those years I’ve been a fairly regular reader of several blogs. For four of those years I have been a minor contributor to “Orthoblogdom”. There have been some, in their own way, high-profile (let’s agree that there’s an asterisk there) conversions to and high-profile departures from Orthodox Christianity that seem to have happened within the blogosphere (even within the last couple of weeks), as though their actual baptisms and chrismations and communion and living out of the Christian life were themselves more or less irrelevant — rather, what was important was how it was going to validate or invalidate what they blogged about. In the last couple of days, it looks like perhaps Orthodoxy in America has developed, at least on a very small scale (although, considering what I expect some of the consequences will be for at least one of the players, perhaps not so small to that person) it’s own version of WikiLeaks-style problems. There are attempts out there, generally bad, to create an Orthodox version of Facebook; to some extent, Orthodox blogging is Orthodox Facebook. It’s looser, less structured, less organized, but would we expect any less — or, perhaps, any more?

I said that there was an asterisk next to “high-profile” earlier. You want reality? Reality is that there is a group on Facebook called “I Bet I Can Find 1,000,000 Orthodox Christians on Facebook” that, three years after it got started, has just over 25,000 members. Reality is that a few months ago, statistics were publicly released for an Orthodox outreach website that was touted as a huge success. When I did the math, I found that the site in question had had less traffic in its entire two years of existence than this very blog had in its first year — a blog that something like five people read on a regular basis. The Internet has a way of papering over this state of affairs. One can start a group blog and call it an “institute”. One can have an individual blog and call themselves a “journalist”. Perspective is important, particularly as regards self-selection and the signal-to-noise ratio. If you’re a blogger, you’re part of a self-selected bunch. If you’re Orthodox, you’re part of a smaller self-selected bunch. If you’re an Orthodox convert, you’re part of a self-selected bunch that’s even smaller than that. If you’re an Orthodox convert who blogs, you’re part of an unbelievably tiny self-selected bunch. You can call yourself whatever you want and you can style yourself as representative of whatever you want, but don’t kid yourself about what you actually are just because you’ve got a premium theme on WordPress and a word in a dead language in your blog title (something I have been in a small way sticking my elbow into the ribs of since day one here, even if I don’t call a lot of attention to it) or because you’ve got a group blog with some pretend organizational name. Some of the self-appointed heroes and prophets of Internet Orthodoxy would do well to remember that a blog that nobody’s paying you to write doesn’t make you CNN, or Meet the Press, or Edward R. Murrow for the twenty-first century. It doesn’t even make you the Drudge Report. It makes you freaking public access, folks. The way some people smugly pat themselves on the back for whatever change they think they’ve effected, or are effecting, by virtue of a self-important blog, and use it to justify some pretty nasty actions (like, say, posting e-mails that aren’t yours that were sent to you by yet another person to whom they didn’t belong knowing full well that somebody else is likely going to lose their job over it — something like that) — how can we call this any form of Christianity with a straight face, let alone Orthodox Christianity? Really? I call it public backstabbing.

Besides the wannabe Woodwardopouloi and Bernsteinevskies, there are the Orthodox bloggers (or ex-Orthodox bloggers, I might also say) who are, plain and simple, cranks who just get crankier with every post. This is a phenomenon that I suspect would be unnecessary in an Orthodox culture; cranks have a social function after all, it’s just that Orthodox cranks don’t have a social function in American culture. What they do have are broadband connections and/or library cards. They may be entertaining from time to time, they may be thought-provoking, they may be outrageous, but what the Internet also teaches them to be is narcissistic and arrogant.

I recognize that somebody criticizing people who blog by means of a blog is problematic, and I don’t have an easy way around that one. What I can say is that as somebody who keeps a blog, even one that virtually nobody cares about (I get 60-70 hits on a busy day, and most of my hits come from people looking for Greek answer keys), I have always tried to be mindful that I published an article called “Becoming Orthodox in Spite of the Internet”. I don’t blog about theology, I’ve never made this about my conversion experience, and in general I don’t get into the various online cockfights (which is why, I think, I’m generally ignored). It’s a wannabe academic’s notebook of random things. I’ve spent more time writing about not getting into (and then getting into) grad school and why I think Christopher Nolan is influenced by The Prisoner than I have about this or that theological position. I’ve written about places I’ve been and things I’ve learned and the things I’m interested in, but I don’t use this blog to try to style myself as an Orthodox Prophet for the Digital Wilderness. The point is, I still think the things that concerned me about Internet Orthodoxy six years ago are legitimate points of concern today, if not vastly moreso, and I’ve tried to not contribute to the problem — probably unsuccessfully, but that’s the reality of being a human being.

Anyway, here it is:

Becoming Orthodox in Spite of the Internet

The Internet provides an unprecedented amount of information on virtually any topic, all at the click of a mouse. Fly-fishing, comic book collecting, the history of woodcarving, how to knit sweaters for your dog–it’s all out there. Some of it’s even useful. Not only that, it so happens that there are a huge number of websites out there devoted entirely to Orthodox Christianity. Sounds like a wonderful thing, doesn’t it? Well, maybe not. The Internet has the potential to be the biggest stumbling block over which an inquirer might trip. As somebody who was recently received into the Church after a two-year period of inquiry and instruction, I certainly found this to be the case.

I still recall my first time in an Orthodox church, and my reaction to it. It was St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Seattle, Washington–it’s a seventy year-old building, with a very tall and ornate iconostasis, candles and icons covering virtually every space on the walls, and decades’ worth of incense permeating everything. As a liturgical environment, it was like nothing I had ever experienced before, and it all added up to a very tangible awareness of the presence of God. You could have knocked me over with a feather. My reaction came in three stages: first, while still in the nave, I felt compelled to light candles. Second, before leaving the premises, I dropped about $50 at their book counter. Third, as soon as I got home, I did a Google search on “Orthodox Christianity” and browsed through the hits.

Sound familiar? And why not? That’s how we’ve been trained, in this age of the Information Superhighway. When I was a little kid, if a new topic of interest made itself known to me, the first thing I would do was to go to the library and look it up there, but the Internet makes it so that you don’t even have to leave your home. Googling “Orthodox Christianity” gives you lots of interesting-looking web pages right off the bat: the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese home page, the Orthodox Church in America home page, something called “orthodoxinfo.com”, the Orthodox Christian Fellowship site, another page called “Orthodox Ireland”, a document called “Celtic Orthodoxy–the Celtic Orthodox Christian Revival”… hm. And here’s a site run by something called “The American Orthodox Church” that claims to be the “Voice of American Orthodox Catholic Christianity”. A note on the page says “The American Orthodox Church was originally established in 1927 with the blessings of the Holy Patriarchate of Moscow. No Other so-called ‘Mother Church’ or jurisdiction has been in existence until 1971-1972 and this is why we are the true Mother Church in the USA and Canada.”

And herein lies the problem with the phenomenon of “Internet Orthodoxy”. There is no barrier to entry with respect to posting pages on the World Wide Web; anybody with a computer and a phone jack can publish anything they want and make it accessible to anyone using a search engine. (Or, as UC Berkeley computer science professor Robert Wilensky puts it, “We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”) There is a lot out there that the wide-eyed inquirer can easily encounter, for which they simply will not have the spiritual maturity to deal with. At least two of the sites listed above are going to be controversial for people within the Church; how in the world is an inquirer who might not even have attended a service yet going to make any sense of it?

Which brings us to another issue–no amount of information and no amount of reading is going to make one Orthodox. Knowledge will not bring one into the Church; the Holy Spirit has to do that. That’s sounds like a horrible thing to say in our rational day and age, but the books and websites are, plainly, no substitute for prayer, going to services, establishing a relationship with and receiving instruction from a priest. I truly wonder how today’s inquirers would do with the early practice of catechumens knowing nothing of the Mysteries of the Church until after their baptism–and not even being told exactly what was happening to them in their baptism until after it was already done! The Church at that time held that knowledge wasn’t going to do one a lot of good until they were already part of the family and could put that knowledge in context. Perhaps, in this time of unrestricted, instantly available information, there’s something we can learn from that.

In this “do-it-yourself” world, the truth of the matter is that you cannot teach yourself to be Orthodox, regardless of how good the instructional materials seem to be. A close family member of mine is undergoing her own inquiry right now; we recently had a conversation where she told me about having spent three-quarters of her day reading things on the Internet, but she hadn’t yet been to a service. I gently suggested that the next thing she needed to do was to go to a Divine Liturgy, and that perhaps she had better not read anything more until she had done so. If you want to learn more about the Church, go to church. It’s that easy, and that difficult.

Something else that one is likely to encounter on the Internet: chat rooms, discussion groups, mailing lists, newsgroups, whatever you want to call them, proclaiming to be places where one can discuss Orthodoxy. I spent a lot of time in these early on in my inquiry, and for my part, I found the tone of most of these to be as un-Christian as one could get–petty, contentious, often with the overall message of “my jurisdiction is holier than your jurisdiction”, and frequently becoming dominated by arguments over secular politics. What also would inevitably occur is the appearance of non-Orthodox and sometimes non-Christian posters who weren’t truly interested in honest discussion, but rather just being gadflies. Even in some of the milder of these groups, where in theory jurisdictional discussions were off-limits, it seemed that folks had a tendency to be on a fairly short fuse, and exchanges could turn into yelling matches rather quickly. I reached a point where I realized that these groups were distracting my catechesis; they were in no way contributing to it. It was so much “godless chatter”, of which St. Paul counseled avoidance (1 Timothy 6:20).

Are there good uses of the Internet for the inquirer and catechumen? Of course. The home pages for the canonical Orthodox jurisdictions, as well as for most individual parishes, provide a lot of wonderful information, and the outside links they provide are in general quite trustworthy. There are excellent resources out there with respect to the Orthodox approach to prayer, liturgical texts, setting up the home icon corner, as well as a wonderful database of the writings of the Church Fathers. Other websites have made the acquisition of previously not-so-easy-to-find liturgical items a fairly simple matter–prayer books, icons, prayer ropes, incense, home censers, candles, recordings of the music of the Church, and so on. At the same time, it is also true that many of the suppliers of these items are themselves of a questionable status; that’s not to say they’re off-limits, but the inquirer visiting some of these online establishments must exercise caution and discernment about where they venture on these sites. Perhaps, if a local parish has an ordering relationship with a supplier like Light and Life, the inquirer is better off going that route–and that way, the parish will benefit. Ask your priest, once you have a relationship with one.

For my part, I can honestly say that I became Orthodox in spite of the Internet, rather than because of it. It wasn’t until I decided that I would limit my exposure to those sites run by a canonical jurisdiction or to online shops, and avoid pretty much everything else, that a lot of things became clearer for me on my road to conversion. At most, an inquirer’s Orthosurfing needs to judiciously supplement, rather than supplant, their attendance at services, prayer, and talking to a priest. If you want to know more about the various historical and doctrinal issues, your local parish has either a good library, a well-stocked book counter, or both, and the priest can suggest which books to read. Books are still no substitute for going to church, but at least it is more likely that a book by a reputable author and publisher will have been carefully vetted in a way that a website probably will not have been.

Unfortunately, the signal-to-noise ratio with respect to what’s out there on the Net is so low, the wheat will sit right next to the chaff and most inquirers–and frankly, most Orthodox laity–won’t be able to tell the difference. If you still want to attempt to use the Internet as a resource, a search engine is only going to give you a list of hits that will be, at best, confusing once you start working your way through all of them. Better to start out with the home pages of the canonical jurisdictions, and take note of the pages to which they’ve linked.

But hey, a Google search is still great for figuring out how to spin thread from cat hair.