Ian Smith - Church Visit 1

Church name: St. Innocent of Moscow

Church address: 1N075 Woods Avenue, Carol Stream

Date attended: January 18

Church category: Different Liturgy

Describe the worship service you attended. How was it similar to or different from your regular context?

Although I did not grow up attending churches that closely observed a commitment to any particular liturgy, I've been attending an Anglican church through most of college. The idea of liturgy is something I've become very comfortable with and even prefer, and a lot of the elements of the Anglican liturgy were present in the Orthodox service, including the entry with the Gospel followed by a call to worship, the recitation of the Nicene Creed (sans filioque), the presentation of the Mass, and a concluding blessing. The Orthodox Mass I experienced was much longer than anything I've encountered in Anglican or Catholic churches in the past, though, and included sections I did not understand logistically (or even linguistically, since some of it was actually in Russian). Many of the rituals surrounding Holy Communion were especially unfamiliar to me. The physical and spatial environment of the service was different than what I usually see - I was not prepared to stand for the entire service, and I actually had to run outside for a minute after almost passing out. I was also not expecting to see men and women separated during the service, and would like to know if this is common in Russian Orthodox services.

What did you find most interesting or appealing about the worship service?

I'm very interested in the use of the iconostasis in the Orthodox service, and its theological meaning. In the past I've heard people complain that the separation of the sanctuary from the nave by the iconostasis is a sort of reinforcement of the veil that separated the people of God from the Holy of Holies in the temple - that the Orthodox service places God at a distance from humanity, whereas Christ came to remove barriers of fellowship between us and divinity. Having been introduced to John of Damascus by friends last year, I felt like I was in a better place to understand that the iconography mediating the nave and the sanctuary functions less like a veil and more like a window. It represents the merging of divine and material in Christ (and, in a way, any of the depicted saints via theosis), which is a beautiful and hopeful reality that actually draws us toward the altar rather than restricts our access. 

The symmetry of the presentation of the Gospel and the later presentation of the Sacrament from behind the iconostasis was also moving to me, because it demonstrates the various ways God has condescended and continues to do so, giving himself to humanity through the Word in Christ, the Scripture, and the Mass (depending on your understanding of the Eucharist).   

What did you find most disorienting or challenging about the worship service?

To be honest, I expected to be most challenged by the fact that I couldn't receive the Mass, and I was. I tend to see the Orthodox traditions as differing from my own more in terms of ecclesiastic structure and their emphasis on different (but still historical) models of justification rather than having a lot of actual severe disagreement with Anglo-Catholic theology. Over time I've become much more comfortable with practices that used to prevent me from embracing Orthodoxy, like iconography and prayers to the saints. If I actually did a deeper study of Orthodox theology, though, I'm sure I'd realize that we have less in common than I imagine, but right now, it's frustrating to me that a tradition I find to be such a good counterbalance to a lot of Protestant theologies is excluded to me. I also had to ask myself, Would I want to restrict an Orthodox from participating in communion at Church of the Resurrection? I wouldn't, but at the same time I want to respect the Orthodox Churches' desire to define and delineate themselves in very specific ways, even when that means keeping their distance from other churches at the Table.

What aspects of Scripture or theology did the worship service illuminate for you that you had not perceived as clearly in your regular context?

It's kind of a cliche to say this about liturgical services, but I felt privileged to participate in the Russian Orthodox Church's sense of the Holy Catholic Church extending both spatially and temporally. Many were very connected to Russia via dress and language, but the service straddled both Russian and English languages. The liturgy itself has its origins in the distant past both before and after the East-West Schism, and the prominence of relics and icons suggests that the holy things and people of the distant past have immediate presence and importance in 21st-century worship. In a modern Evangelicalism that feels the need to continually reinvent itself, I find these simple acknowledgments of the sufficiency of our parents' and the apostles' faith to be very powerful.