Part I of this series addressed a recent letter posted on the website of the Orthodox Church in America, calling out Father Peter Heers for reading a letter from an Athonite elder who spoke strongly against the complicity of Orthodox Christian hierarchs all over the world against the COVID-19 health restrictions placed on churchgoers and the Divine Services themselves, most notably the Divine Liturgy and the administering of Holy Communion. We showed how this letter actually revealed the stumbling block the Church has fallen over – its desire to comply with the government. We began to show how the Church’s present desire to comply with the government, ostensibly to prevent government interference with the Church, has actually caused such interference, and how, like the agreement reached in the Council of Florence, the obedience of one man to the will of God rather than the will of expedient hierarchs, saved the Orthodox Church.
We are in such a predicament now over the coronavirus. But now we need to quit talking about theological comparisons and historical comparisons and get down to the issue of how these changes are practically hurting believers and the Church in general. I have reported elsewhere ample evidence that this is indeed what has resulted.
Now we look at a very specific example, an account from a parent, a mother of two daughters, who made Orthodox Christianity the center of her life and did everything she could to instill this love for Christ and His Church in her daughters. Her story is her experience, and while one may think there are other more positive experiences, it is important to understand that this one is echoed by many people, and that the matter of right-ness or wrong-ness in following COVID regulations affects believers and their lives, often very deeply. We have done only minor editing and adding of emphasis to her account:
Not too long ago I read something written by an Orthodox mom about these new directives in our Church that stem from the pandemic. It really resonated with me, even though my circumstances are different from hers. I will borrow some of the poignant phrases she used in the following to tell my own story.
I am also an Orthodox mother, and I have been for nearly 30 years.
I also prayed for my children throughout the nine months before they were born. I also crossed my belly with the sign of the cross because they could not do it for themselves. They were with me as I stood in our icon corner praying aloud so that they could hear. Through me, they heard the prayers and the few times I was able to travel to a parish for confession and to attend the Liturgy, they partook of communion until they were born and then baptized.
For the first ten years of my children’s lives we lived without the Church because the parishes we could have attended were too far away, and because my children’s father was not Orthodox and was unwilling for us to make the expenditure of time and money it would have taken for us to go on a regular basis.
So for the first five years of their lives, I did the best I could to raise them in the Orthodox faith with an icon corner, a prayer book, and a couple of audio recordings of Orthodox worship services, which we listened to every Sunday morning with our candles lit and incense burning before we had breakfast.
Eventually I was able to organize an Orthodox fellowship of sorts with the help of a few Orthodox priests and deacons. So for the second five years of their lives, my children were able to attend a Typica service with the Eucharist that these faithful Orthodox clergy brought to us and a handful of others who lived within a 50-mile radius of our town on a monthly basis.
When an Orthodox mission was finally established in a city an hour away, my desire and determination to take the girls there every weekend ultimately created a crisis in my marriage, and eventually resulted in our divorce. I was able to rent a sleeping room in that city, and I took the girls to Great Vespers and Divine Liturgy every weekend. We slept on the floor in that sleeping room, and we ate our meals out of a cooler.
After awhile, the wife of the priest and I created an Orthodox homeschool cooperative that met every Monday, beginning with Matins and followed by various classes such as art, as well as a Greek class led by the priest.
Eventually I purchased a house less than a mile from the church, and for the next ten years the three of us attended Great Vespers, Divine Liturgy, and any and every service the priest was able to serve for various other feast days, which was possible for us because of homeschooling. We were able to go to Confession regularly, and we participated in scores of fundraising activities the parish held every month or so, such as an annual Greek festival, so that we could continue to pay our priest and hope to survive and thrive as a community. I served on the parish council for years, we sang in the choir, we participated in every aspect of that mission’s parish life; in short, our lives revolved around the Orthodox Church and our faith. In the years that followed, week after week, our little family would do the housework on Saturdays, and stop in time to prepare for Vespers. I took my daughters to the temple to venerate the icons, to sing and worship, and to receive Holy Communion every time the doors of that church opened. We got up early on Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, to be there to receive Communion week after week, year after year. Patiently, consistently, faithfully, because that was the only way I knew to pass the Orthodox faith onto them.
I didn’t do it because it was easy. No parent does. It is too much work. It is hard, relentless, diligent work that requires making many sacrifices.
By the time the mission ultimately collapsed after ten years, my daughters had both completed their educations, and so we began to drive over an hour each Sunday to attend Divine Liturgy in a parish in another city. Eventually we moved to a suburb nearby, and have now spent the last seven years attending that parish and participating in as many aspects of parish life as we could.
In the last several months, my adult children, not to mention all the children in our parish, have been deprived of the very Church that we made the center of our lives together for the past three decades. As was the other mother who wrote about this, I am also deeply grieved by this and, yes, angry. I have struggled and done the hard work, week after week, year after year, for three decades now, to take my children to church and teach them our faith.
And suddenly overnight, due to a virus that we have learned is not nearly as deadly as it was reported to be, our clergy have pulled the thread out of the decades of work and thousands of years of work combined, by all Orthodox parents, all diligently working to pass on our precious and unique faith to our children.
Both of my daughters are adults now, chronologically speaking, but one of them is autistic and will always be as a child intellectually. I watch both of them and hear them praying every evening in our icon corner as we always have. One of my daughters faithfully reads the readings every morning, reads Orthodox books, and has immersed herself in our church summer camp for years. My daughter who has autism prays and wholeheartedly reads aloud whatever I give her to read when we are praying on Sunday mornings now in our home icon corner since we have not been able go to Divine Liturgy.
To have our bishops across so many jurisdictions establish such contradictory protocols to what I have tried to teach my daughters is, as the other mother put it, catastrophic. Not just for my children, but for all of the children in our parish. And in every parish.
- They now want us to sign up to come to church, where all the adults will be wearing masks, which to a child is very scary. My adult daughter can understand this, although I wish she didn’t have to. But my daughter with autism cannot.
- When and if we are finally able to go to church, we will be required to sanitize our hands, as will the children in our parish because they are seen as walking germ factories where, God forbid, they should cough or sneeze.
- As far as I understand it, none of the children in our parish will be permitted to kiss the icons or get a hug from their godparents or grandparents or friends, who perhaps are so scared that they might literally retreat if children were to approach them.
- As far as I understand it, when they go up to to receive Holy Communion, the priest will change spoons after they consume it, after dipping it into the Body and Blood of Christ, which is the most purifying thing we have access to in this world.
My adult daughter will be participating, as we open our parish, in the sparsely populated services scheduled, as a reader. I will not be attending because my adult daughter who is autistic is not able to volunteer in any way, and would not wear a mask even if I wanted her to. She doesn’t understand them.
Recently I took her to visit the staff of the transitional program she attended after high school. She remembers them so fondly and wanted to go and see them again. We met in a park. One of them insisted on wearing a mask. I could see on my daughter’s face how hurt she was that this woman who loves her and who is beloved by my daughter would not touch her, and kept her face covered. Thank God the other two ladies did not wear masks and responded warmly to my daughter’s overtures for a hug.
Our Synod’s directives regarding reception of the Eucharist are that two metal spoons may be alternated. After giving communion, the spoon is to be placed into a glass of Everclear alcohol, or an equivalent grain alcohol, then into a glass of hot water to be then wiped on a towel, and the same procedure will be followed with the second spoon. The use of the communion cloth and servers to hold it will be discontinued. A good quality paper towel should be given to each communicant to receive and wipe his or her mouth. The paper towels will be disposed and then burnt. Great care needs to be taken to prevent any spillage of the sacrament. A glass of new alcohol should be used at the following service.
May God have mercy on all those making these devastating decisions. There is something so not right about these things the bishops have decreed. The damage they are doing to the faith of our children is immeasurable. Especially because these decisions are so arbitrary. For now at least, there can be no exception for anyone to attend without a mask — except of course, for clergy and singers.
??? If they can be exempted from that requirement, what is the sense of requiring it of everyone else?
None. There is no sense to it. If we are working to protect our physically vulnerable, then why not work toward the same for those who are mentally or emotionally vulnerable?
We have taught my daughter with autism, who has something of an obsession with bathrooms, that she cannot go downstairs into the bathroom when she arrives at church; that she must go directly into the nave to venerate the icons.
Now, if and when she will be allowed to attend without wearing a mask, she will be required to do exactly the opposite: either to stop and squirt sanitizer on her hands, which will be difficult to explain to her without scaring her to death, or to go directly into the basement to the bathroom to wash her hands before she goes into the nave — when we have worked so hard to teach her to go directly into the nave and venerate the icons. Which now she will not be permitted to do.
I have no idea how that will be enforced.
She may be required to submit to her temperature being taken, according to the directives issued by our Synod.
Why is having faith suddenly so unreasonable? Or considered lacking in compassion? Why are they scolding those of us who question these decisions and actions, calling us overly pious in a derogatory way, implying we have no care for our fellow parishioners if we do not embrace their new directives?
My own faith, and the faith of my children, is now rendered negotiable and dismissible. Indeed, now anyone who questions their directives are the ones scolded for being unloving.
If those that fear the practice of our faith want to partake, our parishes should make accommodations for them so our priests can minister to them where they are comfortable. But they should not rewrite the faith due to a passing virus. This is not love. I don’t know what this is, but it is not love.
I am fearful of taking my adult child to church where she will see adults in face masks, where she will not be allowed to kiss icons, where she will see different spoons used for communion. I have no way to explain this to her. She knows what she has been taught to do, and because of her disability, she does it as a matter of fact now. To forbid her to do what she has been taught she ought to do would not make any sense to her.
Nor does it to me.
What has been expressed is that our clergy’s most important concern is to “minimize the risk of bringing harm to others”.
I recognize that this is a matter of life or death for some; that it is incumbent on us not to jettison parishioners or clergy who are vulnerable to this virus and in jeopardy of possibly losing their lives if they are exposed to it.
But what of the harm being done that does not take physical form?
There seems to be, between these various jurisdictions, little to no concern or even the consideration for the reality that there is profound harm being brought to some that is not physical harm. A priest can explain this to adults, and perhaps even to children. But is there no consideration for the harm being brought to innocents who are not in much danger of physical harm? Is the harm being done to them of no matter to our bishops?
No priest or mother can explain this to an adult child who does not have the capacity to understand why everything she has been taught is how it should be but is now inexplicably optional.
What of the harm to her?
There are a few points from our friend’s story that deserve to be re-emphasized:
- The “one-size-fits-all” restrictions on services clearly did not make sense for parishes in places where the virus was not hitting very hard – this was most of the United States. By comparison, in Russia the restrictions places on churches applied only to Moscow, since that city was having the worst of the outbreak. The rest of the nation continued normally.
- The pastoral approach across many jurisdictions, perhaps one agreed to by the Episcopal Assembly of Orthodox Bishops in North America, was woefully disconnected from the people. It created a sense that “some people are worthy to go to church and the rest of you are not.” It laid out a very lame explanation for what was going on (part of reason #1 above), and then just went on, apparently with little or no sorrow. While this is an interpretation, my own, it seems to be strongly reflected in my friend’s experience.
- There was little information to support this move, either theologically, pastorally, or scientifically. Most of COVID-19 fear is based on a constantly-shifting assessment of the virus with zero honesty – even if the authorities had strictly said “we do not know enough about this” instead of talking about contradictory study after contradictory study, the situation might have been better understood. In Moscow, there was a context on several levels: the virus was spreading in the city as fast as the entire rest of Russia put together. In our own parish, a hospital worker came to tell us about how rapid and aggressive the virus is, and related personally about someone who was in the hospital he works in who got the virus.
These issues do not mean that I think shutting down churches even in Moscow was justified. I have yet to be convinced that it was. But it did at least make a lot more sense to selectively target the hotspot rather than issue a blanket order for the entire nation. One wonders if the faith our clergy holds is so weak that perhaps everyone just wanted a break? Surely others have thought this way. It is evident in the fact that at least one parish, open for ten people during the worst of the quarantine, had no one in attendance at a service save two people and the priest and servers.
There is a part III to this series, where we bring in an interview with Dr. Jean-Claude Larchet, a leading French Orthodox patristic theologian. His interview is as thorough as it should be for a matter like this, and we want to offer as much balance as possible to this issue. This is a situation that ought to have the whole Church in deep reflection in the present and near future – for we all sacrificed our faith to secularist controls for a time, and this suggests a major problem with who we believe God is.
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