My Emmaus

Canada Geese take one last respite in the late Fall next to the willows at Furnace Dam Park, Emmaus, Pennsylvania

I remarked to my wife the other day that I now really don’t want to live anywhere but in Emmaus (we live in Allentown for the moment but hope that that will change in the next few years). I have started referring to this place occasionally as “my Emmaus.” (The genitive case is, of course, not merely the possessive.)

I’ve moved a good many times in my life and grown fairly suspicious (and sometimes cynical) at interactions with any sort of organization that might be deemed “official.” My assumption is typically that the Great Machine, whoever its local representatives might be, is not really interested in us. This is why it wants from us only what can fill out blanks on a form.

But one of the reasons I have begun referring to our new home as “mine”—that is, it is becoming “mine” in the manner that my wife is “mine” or my father is “mine”—is that a lot of “officialdom” hereabouts really does want more from persons than just fill-ins for blanks on a form. One example of this is that the local community event organizing bunch, the Emmaus Main Street program, will gladly advertise events happening at churches.

And when I say this, I mean that they’ll pass on word about more than just the latest secular self-help seminar that happens to be meeting in a church. They’ll actually put out the word about my lecture series comparing various theologies with one another or an upcoming outreach seminar we’re having on Orthodox Christianity and the created world (with a healthy dose of localism, sustainability, etc.). With my long-developed cynicism regarding any sort of officiality, this has me wallowing in just a bit of incredulity. But they do it. Really.

I really do love this little borough.

Images of Emmaus

The Emmaus Shelter House (Zuflucht Haus), built in 1734, is the oldest continuously inhabited structure in the Lehigh Valley. It remained occupied by private residents until the 1950s.

The 1803 House, the home of Jacob Ehrenhardt, Jr., the son of one of the founders of Emmaus. He was briefly expelled from the Moravian Church for joining the Pennsylvania militia during the Revolutionary War, but then welcomed back when the war was over. (Moravians are traditionally pacifists.) It remained occupied until 1975.

A traditional barn and home, now part of the Wildlands Conservancy

A trail at the Wildlands Conservancy

The Emmaus Moravian Church, founded in 1747

God's Acre is the site of the area's first multi-denominational community church, erected in 1742, and its original cemetery. The first burial here was in 1743. Simply-engraved flat stones mark the graves of Moravian Congregation original members, two Indian girls, and Emmaus men who served in the American Army in the Revolution. 'God's Acre' (Gottesacker, literally 'Field of God') is an ancient Germanic term for a burial ground and now is the traditional term used for Moravian cemeteries.

New Podcast: Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

“[He] didn’t see any God there.”

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.

On October 4, 1957, the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union made the following transmission: “As a result of great, intense work of scientific institutes and design bureaus the first artificial Earth satellite has been built.” Indeed, it had not only been built, but Sputnik 1, only 184.3 lbs. in weight, had, by the time of that transmission, orbited the Earth for the first time.

Four years later, Yuri Gagarin, a citizen of the Soviet Union, traveled into space and made the orbit himself. Later, in describing the flight of the first man beyond the atmosphere of the Earth, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev would say, “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see any God there.”

Though the Soviet Union now finds itself relegated to the historical dustbin, Khrushchev’s words still echo ominously in our world. Through the use of rockets, mankind has been to outer space—many times, in fact—and we didn’t see God out there. By using telescopes, we can see a staggering distance out into space, and yet the Face of God is not staring back at us. Through the use of microscopes, we have also traveled deep into biological cells and even into subatomic particles, and yet there is no obvious fingerprint of the divine.

Most people’s experience of life in this world is largely one which includes the absence of God. Even our whole political machinery, which seems to get vaster as the days go by, is predicated upon a kind of Pelagianism, which is an ancient heretical teaching that man is capable of saving himself without God’s help if only he tries hard enough. We’re just one or two legislative triumphs away from utopia, right?

Even professed Christians often act in public as if God is absent, perhaps out of concern for being impolite to our unbelieving neighbors or out of fear of being ridiculed by a world who has traveled into space and didn’t see any God there. Or maybe even it’s just because there are so many Christians who can’t recall ever having encountered Him. They believe, but they do not have any experience of what they believe in.

But today, St. Paul quotes these words from God: “I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” It’s not clear where exactly Paul is quoting from, because God says this to His people again and again, recorded in the books of Leviticus, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

“I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” These are not the words of the God Who is absent. These words were not spoken from the vast emptiness of outer space, nor from the hidden secret places within the cell or within the atom. These words are from the God Who is there, the God Whose presence is closer to us than our blood, and more profoundly filling us than breathing.

So why is it that Nikita Khrushchev did not see God through the eyes of Yuri Gagarin? Why do we not see His undebatable signature when we peer at our DNA through microscopes? Why do we not see His almighty hand through the lens of our telescopes? It is because these are the wrong tools for this job. We cannot see or experience the presence of God through these means. Yet there have always been people who use them and then conclude, having seen nothing, that God is not there.

But for a people so dedicated to scientific investigation, for a nation and culture who thirst for true knowledge of reality, we have a curious hesitation when it comes to using the tools that God has provided us in order to encounter His presence within us. St. Paul tells us that “we are the temple of the living God,” yet for so many of us, that temple sees the coming and going of priests and worshipers, but no requisite presence of the divine. If we are temples, then we are temples to unknown gods, hoping that someday the god we worship will make a stop to visit our altar.

So how do we overcome this absence? How do we get in touch with the God Who is our God, so that we may be His people? Sending radio signals out into space will not do it. Shouting into the wind will not accomplish it. Trying to find the Creator hidden in some crevice of His creation will not yield any testable or repeatable results. But God has given us the means not only to seek Him, but to find Him.

Paul also quotes for us these words from God: “Therefore, come out from them, and be separate from them…. And touch nothing unclean.” So much of our lives is spent in imitating the world. Whether we are buying into “the American dream,” some “way of life,” or whatever it might be, most of us spend the overwhelming majority of our time not “[coming] out from them” or being “separate from them.” And we too often touch many unclean things, whether physically, mentally, emotionally or spiritually.

I sometimes believe that one of the worst things ever to happen to Christianity was that it became “acceptable.” Yet it is not so much Christ and the Gospel which became “acceptable,” but rather that Christians bought into the world’s way of life and continued to call themselves Christians.

But here is a radical truth: If you truly try to live the Christian life as the Lord Jesus told us in the Gospel, then you will have no choice but to be very different from the world around you. People will think you’re nuts for giving up 10% or more of your income. People will call you crazy for wanting to worship the Holy Trinity more than just once a week. People will not begin to understand as you give of your time, love and substance to a bum whom they suspect of just looking for more booze. People will not know why you should want to confess your sins with another person and truly repent of them. People will be baffled when they hear that you’re not always trying to “trade up” on your possessions. People will never be able to accept your desire to put Jesus Christ first in everything you say, everything you do, everything you are.

The kind of ardent desire that it really takes to be a Christian will always seem insane to the world. We don’t have to try to separate ourselves from the world in order to follow God’s command. All we have to do is follow Him, to be serious about becoming holy men and women of God, and we will find that the world will separate itself from us. All we have to do to “come out from them” is to love Jesus Christ with all our hearts, souls, minds and strength.

Take an honest look at yourself sometime. Would it be right for people to say these things about you? “Here’s one who’s obsessed with Jesus. Here’s one who would gladly suffer and die for his faith. Here’s one who spends every moment he can looking for ways to deepen his connection with God.” If people can’t say those things about you, then it’s time to do some serious thinking. It’s time to take stock of who you are and what you are doing with yourself, to see what order your priorities are in, to see whether you really are worthy of the name of “Orthodox Christian.” With that name come some very serious expectations.

But with these expectations, God also gives a promise. He says that if we do what He says, “then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters.”

Is your experience of Christ real? Do you have any experience of Him? Or is what we do here opaque to you, such that you cannot see through the words and the music and the ritual to the God Whose hand touches the altar?

Here, we undertake something very serious. Here, we plunge ourselves into the intensity of mystical connection and communion with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Here is a place for real men and real women and real children to meet with and know the present and powerful warmth of the real God. This is not spirituality for the faint-hearted. This is where warriors are made, where people cast off all that will not put them in touch with God and push forward to find Him.

To our ever-present God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, be all glory, honor and worship, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

The Voice

Today’s saintly commemoration is the conception of John the Forerunner, known to most English speakers as John the Baptist, which is narrated for us, along with his birth, in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel.

A major thematic element for today is the Voice. Zachariah, not believing the archangel, is made bereft of his voice until such time as he participates in the naming of his son. Some might see in this a curiously arbitrary punishment, but for one who is a priest, as Zachariah was, losing one’s voice is no small thing. And this was not merely laryngitis, either. Zachariah could not function as a priest without his voice, and so for nine months, he is made to fast from his priestly office, and his voice is held fast and in check until his wife Elizabeth should give birth.

And then the one to whom Elizabeth gives birth is the Voice par excellence. He is the Voice crying in the wilderness, prophesied by Isaiah so many centuries before. And this Voice speaks only one Word, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, the Word of God.

Yes, we may say that Zachariah was “punished” for his lack of faith when the archangel spoke to him, but may we not also look deeper? Was it not appropriate that the priesthood of the Old Covenant, the Aaronic priesthood, should fall silent at the coming of the one who introduces us to the true, fulfilled priesthood of the New Covenant? Before, there was a priesthood of the flesh, a priesthood of Levites, but now there is a priesthood into which all mankind may be initiated, the priesthood of Christ, which lasts forever, after the order of Melchizedek. Zachariah himself was ordained in this new priesthood when he named his son.

And so we too must all lift our voices with the Voice, proclaiming that same Word.

For us, there is only the trying

The remains of St. Ninian's Chapel, Whithorn

Among other saintly commemorations today, we remember Ninian, the Enlightener of Scotland. From all apparent worldly analyses, St. Ninian was something of a failure. He’s called the Enlightener of Scotland, because he first brought the Christian faith there in the final years of the 4th century, but he wasn’t terribly successful. He never saw the astounding conversions the way Columba did nearly 200 years later.

Yet what drove Ninian was never a desire for numbers. Out there working among the savage Picts, quite past what everyone else at the time would have considered civilization, Ninian was unlikely to be receiving any Lifetime Achievement Awards. Indeed, he left so little evidence of his passing that some secular scholars even doubt his existence (but Bede didn’t, and that is, to be frank, quite good enough for me). If Ninian had wanted recognition or even the satisfaction of a job well and fruitfully done, he was in the wrong place.

St. Ninian, like all the saints and like all true Christians, was motivated not by any of these things, but rather by what we might call a “holy selfishness.” It is said that monks are permitted only one addictive passion—books. Likewise, Christians are permitted only one selfishness, only one consuming desire which they may seek to sate at any cost—the love of Christ.

What Ninian knew was that he had to try to missionize these impossible people, these nasty Picts. Why? Because in doing so, it brought him closer and closer to Christ. This might sound a bit shocking. Surely a saint is more altruistic! Surely he is driven by unselfish love for his fellow man! Surely he cannot have undertaken this almost monstrous effort just to satisfy his own spiritual pursuits!

But really, it is impossible to love one’s fellow man, truly love him with real unselfishness, if one does not love Christ. And the awful (that is, awesome to the point of inducing reverence which can be painful if not borne and practiced aright, i.e., to be awe-full) secret of Christian life is that in seeking to slake our thirst for the God-man, we find ourselves pouring out ourselves as drink for the God-man’s brothers and sisters. To love God is to love men, women and children. And likewise, to lose one’s life is to gain it. This is the meaning of the Apostle’s words: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.”

There is a perplexing paradox here. If we try to emphasize one side of this curious image—”altruism” or “piety” (however you might define them)—then we destroy the other. Ninian was not dedicated to “social change.” Nor was he some sort of sectarian, happy to live in cultic bliss without contact with creation. He was a priest, which means both those things and neither of them. Anyway, we know from experience that the pietist and the activist both lack true piety and true action. (And, if I may presume to say it, they usually lack true imagination, as well.)

Thus, as Mr. Eliot told us some years ago:

…And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

The rest, indeed, is no business of ours. We are called to have faith and to be faithful. We are not called to be successful, not even with what is ostensibly God’s work. After all, it is God’s work. What holy Ninian found was not, in the end, work at all. It was God.

And that is what he was after.

Barton Decker, barber

USS Lenawee (APA-195)

This past Friday, I made another assay into the streets of and around Emmaus to find myself a decent barber shop. My first haircut experience in Emmaus, to put it frankly, hurt. I have no idea exactly why that gent had such a need to dig the clippers with such fervor into my neck, but, suffice it to say, once I did my fiduciary duty to the gentleman, I resolved not to darken his establishment’s door again. I’ve had many haircuts in my day, and, despite the ancient connection between barbers and dentists, I believe that association has now been firmly and properly severed. It does not have to hurt. (I won’t mention the establishment’s name, lest I turn away custom from a man who may simply have been having a bad day.)

Thus, when it came time this month for my haircut, I first decided to check out a shop on my usual route home, just outside Emmaus, titled simply “The Barber Shop.” I pulled up in my car and peered inside the window. I saw rows of shampoo bottles on shelves and immediately began to suspect I was in the wrong place. Then I saw a sign with the prices on it and was confirmed in my suspicions. This was not the old-school, small-time barbershop I’d come to trust on sight. This, despite the name, was some sort of “salon.” I did not go in but immediately got back in my car.

I turned back toward Emmaus proper and decided to try a place I’d seen on Chestnut Street not too far past the Emmaus Triangle. (We don’t have a town square. We have a triangle.) Barty’s Barber Shop was small, not very impressive on the outside, and thus, probably just right on the inside. Even the sign emblazoned with the proprietor’s name, Barton Decker, was not awfully visible from the street. There is, however, a barber pole, and that is quite enough. And one cannot go wrong with a name like Barton Decker. It is hard to imagine a more “barberly” name.

As I glanced into the window at Barty’s, I saw walls smothered in photographs, many black and white. Opening the door, there was a faint whiff of pipe smoke. I was in the right place.

Mr. Decker was clipping the hair of a customer in his chair, pipe snugly in the corner of his mouth. The two—barber and, ah, barbed—were jocularly trading mild jibes. I was most definitely in the right place.

Eventually, the gentleman left, satisfied with his haircut, and I took the chair. I removed my clerical collar and unfastened the neck button of my shirt. Mr. Decker and I introduced ourselves to one another. He told me he’d lived in the house which included his barber shop since the 1930s. To let him know what I wanted for my haircut, I told him, “I’d like to keep what I’ve got. Just less of it, please!” My standard line, which always gets a smile out of a good barber. This time was not an exception.

I spied a prominent painting on the wall amidst all the photographs, itself adorned with a few snapshots embedded asymmetrically in the edges of its frame. It was the USS Lenawee, a USN amphibious attack transport used in the Pacific at the tail end of World War II, as well as in the Korean and Vietnam wars. I asked Barton about it. He then regaled me with a fountain of tales of his time in the U.S. Navy. Was he an engineer, gunner, etc.? No, he was a U.S. Navy barber. Never fired a gun. Just clipped sailors’ hair. And he loved it.

He almost single-handedly raised morale aboard the Lenawee, stemming from a conversation he had with the captain. The captain, it seemed, liked to have a little more hair on his head than was the Navy custom in the early ’50s, because his wife liked it that way. But of course the men on board the Lenawee had wives, too. And Decker was the man for the job. He gave them a little something to run a comb through. Not a Hollywood haircut. Just a good, clear haircut. And it was one of the happiest ships in the whole of Uncle Sam’s Navy.

I told Barton about my painful experience at the other barber shop. He didn’t comment directly, but mentioned that he’d been cutting hair in Emmaus for 55 years (as if, perhaps, to suggest that the other fellow was “new” and thus, well, suspect). I asked him if he thought there was a future for him there in Emmaus. He laughed. He said he’d wanted to be a barber since he was in 6th grade. I asked him if it had been a family business. “Nope. I just knew that, ’cause I wasn’t too smart, a barber was a pretty good thing to be!”

By the end of the haircut, he’d done a fine job. (How could he not? He’d been doing this since before my father was born.) I thanked him. We both smiled. I tried to pay him. Nope. He’d have none of it.

Ancient History meets American History

St. Paul Orthodox Church at the 250th Anniversary of the Borough of Emmaus

On Saturday the 15th of August, after we completed services for the Dormition, members of the Orthodox Church of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, manned a booth at the festival marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Borough of Emmaus. One could say that we are a church obsessed with history, and so it is only fitting that we should make one small footprint into the history of the borough which has been the home of our parish for 25 years (22 since our official founding).

We’re contemplating putting something into the next time capsule.

A time capsule is rather a curious thing—an archive buried in the ground. I suppose it helps to keep those things archived from growing stale in a museum somewhere.

History is peculiarly significant for the Orthodox, who prize the Incarnation so very highly and make it the touchstone of all theology. That the immaterial, trans-temporal God should become material and temporally bound is still a contradiction the human mind cannot grasp, despite its familiar feel by means of the Christian tradition.

We sometimes need to be scandalized anew by this reality, much as the woman who visited the aforesaid booth and was scandalized by all the “stuff”-ness of our church life. Surely the God Who stepped into history and made crude matter capable of carrying divinity could not have meant to be worshiped by liturgy! Certainly, our visitor probably did not think of herself as a spirit-matter dualist, but that is of course the assumption underlying all suspicion and rejection of history, liturgy, virginity, asceticism, and—what is more—all that kissing of stuff that I didn’t get a chance to describe to her.

“This ancient and honorable name”

The Knauss Homestead, Emmaus, Pennsylvania (1777)

The image above is of the Knauss Homestead, one of the founding family homes in Emmaus, established in 1777. It was the patriarch of the clan, Sebastian Knauss, who first donated land in 1759 on which Emmaus was to be built. The Homestead property borders directly on that of St. Paul Orthodox Church, where I am pastor. It’s probably a decent assumption that we now worship on what used to be Knauss land.

I ran across the following passage today which both amused and comforted in a curious way. It is from The Guardian: A Monthly Magazine for Young Men and Ladies, published by the Reformed Church in America. This particular issue was printed in 1881, and this text figures on page 88:

NAMES OF PLACES MISPRONOUNCED.

It is curious to observe how frequently the names of places are miscalled by railroad officials. On the North Pennsylvania railroad there is, for instance, a station called Bingen. The name is beautiful; derived from the old town in Germany which furnished the title for Mrs. Norton’s noble ballad, “Bingen on the Rhine.” Of course, it ought to be pronounced with the g hard: Bingen. Travelling that way, some years ago, we repeatedly heard the name announced: “Bin-jen! Bin-jen!” It put us in mind of “Old John Brown, who had a little Injun” It is, however, but just to say that this error has since been corrected.

On the East Pennsylvania railroad, near Allentown, there is a thriving town which was named by its Moravian founders after the village of Emmaus, to which the two disciples were going, on the day of the resurrection, when they saw the Lord. It should be pronounced in three syllables—Em-ma-us. We would like to know by what authority it is now spelled Emaus, and pronounced by railroad conductors, with an indescribable drawl, “Ee-maws.” Somewhere in that region there was once a guide-board, at a cross-road, which directed the traveler to “Amouse.” That was bad enough, but the modern form is hardly an improvement. We think the citizens of Emmaus should protest against the corruption of this ancient and honorable name.

In 1859, twenty-two years before this issue was published, Emmaus was incorporated as a borough of Pennsylvania (having been founded in 1759). Its original name was indeed spelled Emmaus, but one of the M’s was dropped in 1830 and the borough incorporated as Emaus (the Pennsylvania Dutch spelling), but petitions circulated in 1938 via the local Rotary Club, and the spelling was reverted back to double-M status.

I find it doubtful that The Guardian in 1881 knew the circumstances of the change which had occurred more than half a century before its publication. One might well also read some Anglophonic snobbery in the text above, especially since it is quite possible that Emmaus’s first hundred years or so probably heard a lot of German being spoken in her streets and fields on the north slope of South Mountain.

All that said, one has to take some small delight at citizens being encouraged (in a magazine for “Young Men and Ladies,” no less!) to mount up a protest against the “corruption” of their town’s “ancient and honorable name.” There is a certain honor that attaches to a name, and if you’ve ever had your own name mispronounced, you know what I mean. Names are something shared in a community. They not only mean something to individual people, but they also convey a common understanding and are an element of the economy of the place, the commerce of personhood that flows between persons.

Religion’s Changing Face in Emmaus

My koumbaro (fancy Greek term for “ecclesiastical relative,” in this case, my daughter’s godfather) is visiting with us here for a few days, and this afternoon, he and I visited my favorite local coffeehouse to get a little caffeination and chat in. While we were there, we talked a bit with the proprietor, as well as with a fellow who stopped in and was distributing posters and pamphlets for a new church in Emmaus.

We learned that apparently there has been a decent amount of new religious exploration going on in Emmaus, often in terms of “alternatives” to the more established religious types in the area. This actually tells me a couple of useful things:

• People are becoming more open to religious experiences that might otherwise be new to them.
• Some of the church-growth-marketing types have probably researched, identified and targeted Emmaus as a potential growth area.

No doubt most of the targeting folks are probably looking into introducing Emmaus religion to the mega-church and/or “postmodern”/”emerging” types of religious practice. Orthodoxy has a major leg up on these types, mainly because it’s built for staying power. While the mega-churches and their spin-off ilk are often intriguing and exciting to people, they have no real roots to, well, root people. They are inherently non-local sorts of phenomena, connecting people mainly to an ephemeral sort of spirituality that interests but fails to transform. Folks may “have an experience,” but even the statistics produced by these kinds of groups show that those experiences usually are not enough to keep people in the congregation for more than a few years. Indeed, one demographic report that made its rounds in the Evangelical mega-church world admitted that the people most likely to be discontented in their churches were those who were regarded by those churches’ standards as the most spiritually advanced and mature in the congregation.

The upshot to all this is that there is likely a high potential in Emmaus for introducing people to Orthodoxy. On the one hand, it is something probably “new” and “exotic” to them—this is by no means a good reason to choose or stay in a faith (because the newness wears off), but it may well be enough to get people to give the introduction a chance. On the other hand, we offer something that these other groups by their very nature lack—an ancient tradition, deeply informed and comprehending of human nature, which is capable of powerful and lasting transformation. Orthodoxy is also the very stuff of true civilization, because it is built for staying power. Orthodoxy builds and transforms people and whole cultures, not target markets.

In our chat at the coffeehouse, I mentioned that while Emmaus was celebrating its 250th anniversary this year, the Church of Antioch (of which St. Paul’s is a part) is celebrating its 1,975th anniversary this year. The response from one of the baristas: “You win.”

We’re looking forward to raising the parish’s level of engagement here in Emmaus. A number of ideas are in the process of being implemented. The first will be something simple: hosting a booth at the 250th anniversary celebration of our borough. Another possibility might be a “theology on tap” series of events, where local religious leaders publicly talk about the differences between their faiths.

Whatever we end up doing, our hope is that we’re soon going to inaugurate a new period of real outreach and witness in our home. This is Christianity like most of these folks have never seen before, something they’ve never heard of, and it’s just down the street.

Like the saying goes: We’re not Jewish, but we are Orthodox. We’re not Roman, but we are Catholic. We’re not Protestant, but the Bible came from us. We’re not Denominational [or Non-Denominational, I might add], we’re Pre-Denominational.