pat loughery

Day 8: October 27, 2008

If today is Monday, this must be Bucharest.

Having arrived at our hotel at 4:30AM after a 22-hour bus ride from western Turkey, we got a few hours’ sleep and were awake again too soon.

During most hotel visits on this trip I have showered in the evening before bedtime so that I had a simpler time getting ready in the morning, but I was too tired to shower on arrival. Instead I planned to shower briefly in the morning, but was dismayed to see that the cold water flow in both the faucet and the shower were dark brown, and running for several minutes didn’t clear up the flow. So I skipped a shower, brushed my teeth without water, and headed downstairs for breakfast.

My breakfast order was never taken before it was time for us to leave, so I grabbed a few slices of bread from fellow students’ tables and had a pear from the previous day’s magnificent market find in a truck stop in northern Turkey.

After 45 minutes on the bus with our group sorting out the final details of payment for the last night’s stay, we finally made our way to the city square where we would join in a worship ceremony for the city’s patron saint, Demitrius. Because we were traveling with Mihai, we were treated to special guest access, sitting on a platform beside the main one and observing the liturgy already underway.

It was my first time worshipping the Orthodox way, after reading, conversations with the Romanian priests and monks with us, and getting glimpses of the beauty of their worship as they sang brief songs at points along the way. Having grown up in the Roman Catholic Church, I still have an appreciation for high church and liturgy. I felt at once at home and yet foreign as we walked in front of the platform with bishops, priests and seminarians all performing liturgy.

The entire service was performed in Romanian, which is of course helpful for the Romanian people but less helpful for those of us who speak no Romanian. Romanian, being a Latin language, shares much with Spanish. I have some Spanish experience so I caught a few words here and there as well as being able to sing along with the Kyrie Eleison round.

My attention was divided between the beauty of the liturgy happening on the stage and the faces of the people in the crowd. Some of those in the crowd had been waiting in line for up to two days before this celebration. Although I realize the risk of romanticizing what I saw, there did seem to be a deep reverence among the older women and a transcendent sense of worship on many of their faces.

I took many pictures, but wished that I had brought a longer lens to capture faces more closely. I also wished I was more able to move around and take pictures from different perspectives, both closer to the crowd and also closer to the men celebrating worship. This was difficult to do mostly because of my foot, brace and cane (and still being in pain when I didn’t have my foot elevated), but also because it was difficult to know whether it was appropriate to stand or to move around during the ceremony.

Mihai, across the platform from me, encouraged Gea Gort to move closer and feel free to take pictures, so I’m looking forward to seeing her results. She shoots with the trained eye of a photojournalist who also knows the images she needs to accompany the stories she writes, and the photos that I’ve seen from earlier rip days have been excellent.

I noticed that most of those in attendance were in their 50s or older, and with a large number of nuns dressed in black with a small black hat. There were a few children in the crowd, some of whom were playing past the crowd barrier and on the steps up to our platform, and the security and other priests who were keeping order didn’t seem to mind this at all. Some of the nuns appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, but I saw few young adults other than the nuns. When discussing this with Shirley in the bus afterward she noted the same thing, and said that she had asked Mihai about it. He said that this is an issue in the Romanian Orthodox church. While the church is thriving after the fall of communism, it isn’t thriving in that age group.

I wonder whether contemporary evangelical church planting movements would be helpful in this environment by offering an alternative worship form while I also recognize that evangelical missionaries were sent into the former communist nations after the fall of communism and did much damage to the faith as they didn’t appreciate Orthodoxy’s survival as a true Christianity.

When the ceremony ended, those of us on the platform as guests were given a path through the crowd by a wall of police to the back of the square, where a small platform ornately decorated contained a special experience. On the top of the platform were three boxes – first, a small casket that contained the relics (full skeleton) of St. Demitrius, the subject of this ceremony. Next to this was an octagonal box, the lid of which contained a small bone – a relic of St. Paul. Next to this was a rectangular box containing relics of Constantine and his mother Helene.

This marked the second time on this trip that we have been in close contact with relics, the first being in Istanbul at the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

At the time, I had mixed feelings about the experience. I knew there were relics in those boxes, but didn’t know whose. This meant that the experience was more confusing than I would have liked. Also, the crowds who had gathered for this celebration had put far more energy into their arrival than I had, and they understood both the worship experience and the nature of those relics, and for us to be given the VIP treatment but not have much context or connection with that expression of faith gave me feelings both of deep honor and also of unworthiness.

After our time passing by the relics, we were taken to a small courtyard in front of the monastery where Patriarch Daniel, the monk who is the Patriarch of Romania, lives. We met him briefly as well as the person who is responsible for ecumenical outreach, whom Ray and Robert had met ten years before.

I was impressed, as we spent a few moments with people like these with a high level of importance in the Orthodox Church, that they exhibited such a sense of joy, even mirth. Smiles and laughter came easily and deeply. In my reading, this theme had arisen more than once: that the Orthodox leaders and saints carried with them a deep joy in life and a whimsical nature in their flavor of holiness. I didn’t ever feel as though I needed to “straighten up and be serious” in their presence, and for that model of Christian leadership and soul nature I am deeply grateful. I continued to remember this reality from the trip.

We left this area and went to lunch near the World Vision headquarters in Romania. Four women who serve on the staff of World Vision joined us. I was pleased to sit next to Magda, who is the director of communications for this group. She shared her experiences and spoke at length about her work, and her love of her job and of the people she serves was easy to recognize. Even though Magda’s role as a director has her working in the office a great deal of the time, she loves her field work and was a wonderful representative for World Vision.

During this lunch one of the World Vision staff members handed out the World Vision Romania pamphlet. It’s an excellent quality product, even though it was written in Romanian and I was therefore reduced to looking at pictures and graphs only. But this experience reminded me of recent work that I had seen from a phenomenal photojournalist from Vancouver, British Columbia named David duChemin. David occasionally shoots for World Vision, and the quality of his work is world-class. Even though I know that my skill set isn’t anywhere near David’s, I do think that I could be of help in photo documenting the work in the field. I want to contact both Mihai and Magda when I return home to ask if there is a way that I could help with their publications.

Back on the bus I spoke with Ray Bakke, getting more historical details to help fill in some missing pieces. I asked him to tell me more about the split between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Orthodox churches in northern Africa and eastern Asia. He described the north-south split as largely between the dominant Greeks and the pillaged Africans in some detail, and then the growth of Islam in northern Africa before it came to southern Europe. He also described some historical events that pulled apart the Latin Orthodox and the eastern Asian Orthodox churches, including differences in language and worldview.

This led into another question I had for Ray about the Celtic theologian Pelagius, who I studied to some extent on Orthodox Trail but want to learn about more fully. Pelagius shows up again in this course in a couple of spots – first, there is a mention of him as a heretic who was redeemed in Cappadocia. There are also a few hints of his work in the Asian Orthodox understanding of the nature of man’s sinfulness. In (very) short summary, Pelagius’ understanding of humanity is that while we are broken and tend to sin, we are not sinful at birth by nature. This is a contrast to Augustine’s understanding of man wherein we are born with inherited sin from Adam and eve. Pelagius is also accused of believing that we can do good works that work us closer and closer to Godlikeness, to the extent that we can be come perfected by enough good works.

It is unclear whether Pelagius was labeled a heretic and excommunicated because of these beliefs, or if his theology was a misrepresentation of him by his rival Augustine who had more political power.

I’d like to read Pelagius more thoroughly, and as a primary source. I asked Robert Calvert if he knew of a way to read Pelagius, but he hasn’t found one yet. He encouraged me to try academic paper searches. I will try ProQuest and the other search methods I’ve found in my Research Bridge course.

Ray and I then spoke about how the relic of St. Paul, which was certified as Paul by the Roman Catholic Church, came to be in the Greek Orthodox Church’s caretaking. Ray spoke of Pope Benedict’s work behind the scenes in recent months showing great pastoral care for those outside the Roman church, and we spoke more about our understanding of Pope Benedict’s papacy as it has been developing.

It’s truly a gift to have Ray on a trip like this, being able to just sit and talk to him and listen to his great understanding of church history. Ray’s presence was a high point of the trip for me.