Victory of the Cross

  • O Lord, save Thy peo­ple and bless Thine inher­i­tance, grant­ing to Thy peo­ple vic­tory over all their ene­mies, and by Thy cross pro­tect Thy com­mu­nity.

    You can almost hear the melody when you see the words, can’t you? You do this song so often for the dif­fer­ent feasts of the cross dur­ing the year that it gets to occupy a per­ma­nent place in the Ortho­dox juke­box in your head.

    The whole thing seems a lit­tle poignant this year. Do we even know what we mean by “grant­ing Thy peo­ple vic­tory over all their ene­mies”? Sup­pose we went with the Nas­sar trans­la­tion of this tropar­ion and said, “grant­ing our believ­ing kings vic­tory over the Bar­bar­ians.” Kind of gives the sense of what Ortho­doxy might have been up against in past cen­turies. But talk about polit­i­cally incor­rect! Leav­ing aside the whole idea of ‘bar­bar­ians’ for a minute, do we really desire vic­tory? Do I want the cross to van­quish foes, erad­i­cate all false gods and false philoso­phies and reign supreme? Or do I only want it to win as long as nobody has to lose? Do I want the Idea of Chris­tian­ity to prove so irre­sistable to non-Christians that the bat­tle will be won for me with­out me ever hav­ing to take a stand?

    I sup­pose what I’m get­ting at is: what do we really think of Chris­t­ian activism? And what will we do if there’s a need for activism, in spite of whether it’s what we want or not?

    I ask because here we are a week or so into the brouhaha over the Pope’s remarks in a speech. As this arti­cle by Pro­fes­sor Bain­bridge sums up, …

    The sim­plis­tic view is to focus on the por­tion of the speech in which the Pope quotes Byzan­tine emperor Manuel II Pale­o­lo­gus’ com­ment that “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhu­man, such as his com­mand to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

    Pre­dictably, cer­tain Mus­lims lead­ers are whip­ping up out­rage over the quo­ta­tion (the same ones who whipped up the out­rage over the Dan­ish cartoons?).

    And so there’s an excuse to be offended, and a really weak excuse to react vio­lently, and the sav­age fac­tions of Islam are going for it. There’s been dam­age done to Angli­can and Ortho­dox churches in Pales­tine, and now a nun has been shot in the back (HERE).

    I’m not sure I know why Pope Bene­dict chose this time to throw down a gaunt­let. And I don’t believe he didn’t know that’s how it would be per­ceived. Con­sid­er­ing that the rad­i­cal Islamists are the peo­ple who were will­ing to riot over silly car­toons of Mohammed with a bomb for a head, hear­ing the Pope of all peo­ple tell them that spread­ing Islam at the point of a sword was evil and inhu­man must’ve seemed like blas­phemy beyond belief.

    And maybe it was even a cow­ardly thing to do. After all, the Pope has air­tight secu­rity. The East­ern areas that were the most likely to boil over in response to his speech weren’t exactly thick with Catholic churches that would be at risk.

    All the same, I’m inter­ested in the Ortho­dox response and, some­times, non-response. I won’t bother myself over the offi­cial response at the high­est lev­els, although at least one other Ortho-blogger has alluded to their lack of grit in this cur­rent cri­sis. I don’t feel that I can find fault, because I have no idea what polit­i­cal land­scape they’re look­ing at. Harsh words from bish­ops and met­ro­pol­i­tans in at-risk areas might cause ter­ri­ble revenge to be exacted on churches and peo­ple. That should be enough to make any­one think twice.

    But at the laity level and in this coun­try, we have no such fears. For a vari­ety of rea­sons (for which we should be truly thank­ful), Amer­ica right now is not a hotbed of Mus­lim rad­i­cal­ism. We don’t have to worry that we’d have to go into hid­ing, like the Dan­ish car­toon­ists, or be called to task by the craven inter­na­tional com­mu­nity, like the Pope. And yet it seems that there is still a wish amongst us for all this unpleas­ant­ness to just go away.

    Con­sider this arti­cle by George Strick­land at Direc­tions in Ortho­doxy. He had writ­ten an arti­cle about the Pope’s speech and got mixed responses from Ortho­dox readers.

    For­tu­nately, many read­ers responded well to it, while oth­ers took me to task for a defense of West­ern civ­i­liza­tion and the debt it owes to Chris­tian­ity. For var­i­ous and com­pli­cated rea­sons of his­tory and cul­ture, some read­ers equate West­ern civ­i­liza­tion with Latin Chris­tian­ity and all the alleged ills that this affin­ity has wrought. Put another way, East­ern Chris­tian­ity has noth­ing to do with the West. Really? I don’t think so. For at least a thou­sand years, there was one Chris­ten­dom which laid the the­o­log­i­cal and moral foun­da­tion for West­ern civ­i­liza­tional progress.

    Ortho­dox Chris­tians belong to the West and are design­ers of the great insti­tu­tional accom­plish­ments the West has pro­duced. A lot of Ortho­dox gain­say­ers equate the cat­a­strophic the­o­log­i­cal schism of 1054 with a repu­di­a­tion of the West. To do so they deny the role Chris­t­ian Ortho­doxy played in the tute­lage of the builders of the West.

    Another way of say­ing this is that we who are Chris­tians belong to the West regard­less of the social loca­tion of our forebears.

    Exactly. For a mild-mannered, non-confrontational Ortho­dox to hear the rabid crit­i­cism of West­ern val­ues from sec­u­lar lib­er­als on one hand and fun­da­men­tal­ist Mus­lims on the other and then wave them away as not being rel­e­vant to Ortho­doxy seems like a dan­ger­ously fool­ish game to play. At the very least, it per­mits the wrong kind of detach­ment — one that flat­ters itself with its supe­rior posi­tion and per­mits cow­ardice to wear an Ortho­dox cross.

    It may not be in the nature of Ortho­dox to want to make waves, but if a tsunami is head­ing your way, you ought to by-golly con­quer your qualms and get an oar in the water before it’s too late.

    If we don’t even have the nerve to back up accu­rate state­ments against the same Islamic oppres­sive tac­tics that enslaved Chris­t­ian and non-Christian nations (some of which are still enslaved) because we’re too busy fig­ur­ing out whether the speaker is “one of us” or not — or whether we would’ve used the same words or not — do we really mean it when we sing to the Lord to “save Thy peo­ple and bless Thine inher­i­tance” by the Cross?

    The present cri­sis may come to the moment of truth or not. Even bar­ring any­thing apoc­a­lyp­tic, which after all seems — all apolo­gies to the Left Behind read­er­ship — kind of far-fetched, things may get worse before they get bet­ter. Or else, this gaunt­let the Pope has thrown down may only serve to prove that in spite of a lot of tough pos­tur­ing (shoot­ing a nun in the back??? Lord, have mercy!), there’s no fist in that nasty-looking glove anymore.

    But even with­out the risk of a trial by fire, I think we need to know. The words that were penned cen­turies ago by our fore­fa­thers can just be the chant du jour if we never lis­ten to them, if we never actu­ally mean them.


    Related posts:

    1. ex-Patriarch of the West, cont.
    2. The name-dropping pope
    3. John Mark Reynolds set­ting it straight
    4. The Ortho­dox con­vert list
    5. The per­va­sive­ness of the Chris­t­ian idea

    September 17th, 2006 | Grace | 6 Comments |

6 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 09.17.2006

    A lot of good fod­der for thought, espe­cially from our insu­lated per­spec­tives. I won­der what that hymn means to the Ortho­dox Chris­t­ian liv­ing in Turkey today who has lived under Mus­lim rule for cen­turies and for hun­dreds of years has sur­vived in a ten­u­ous ham­mered out political/religious truce that per­mits them to live with­out (rel­a­tive) fear of atroc­i­ties against them. When you are raised with sto­ries of your mar­tyrs (like nuns who threw them­selves off cliffs to avoid being raped by a Mus­lim army) and they are com­mem­o­rated in your Churches year after year and you live in con­stant remem­brance of the fact that the Cross’s vic­tory is ulti­mately mar­tyr­dom and not win­ning an ide­alog­i­cal piss­ing match on paper in the press whether local or international…how DOES that shape your con­cious­ness and how you chose to con­front “an enemy in the name of the Cross”? I have no clue.

  • Grace

    Bingo! I’m glad it’s com­ing through that I’m not ask­ing a bunch of ques­tions because I think I know the answers. The more time I spend in this multi-cultural Church, the more I real­ize that sim­ple answers are hard to come by.

    It occurs to me some­times when I read accounts of the mar­tyrs that there is another side of that story that is prob­a­bly harder for us to per­ceive rightly. Namely, that there may be some­thing to be said for those who weren’t called to die glo­ri­ously for the faith, but to live humbly for it.

    Some­how, on the backs of both mar­tyrs and sur­vivors, the Ortho­dox Church is still around when the Byzan­tine and Russ­ian empires have fallen to their ene­mies. God be praised!

  • Mimi

    Amen. And, thank you.

  • Bar­bara

    As a Catholic, I can’t let pass one state­ment: that the Pope threw down the gaunt­let from the safety of the Vat­i­can, while oth­ers in the East would pay the price. Remem­ber that JP II was almost assas­si­nated back in the 1980s at the Vat­i­can. Years ago I heard a Bap­tist preacher make the com­ment that the Pope for­giv­ing his attacker didn’t really count because he was a “pro­fes­sional forgiver!”

    There is already so much suf­fer­ing, per­se­cu­tion, and oppres­sion toward Jews and Chris­tians in a wide swath of the Islamic world, that I doubt the Pope’s word made a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in the body count. The rad­i­cal Islamists have filled their air­waves with hatred for years, bent on rais­ing a crop of brain­washed indi­vid­u­als who see the glory of Allah cel­e­brated in the behead­ing of infi­dels. I freely admit that the Church has been guilty of per­se­cu­tion and other mis­deeds. But over the years, we have sought to acknowl­edge the wrongs done in the name of the Faith and seek rec­on­cil­i­a­tion. The Men­non­ites, who form a sig­nif­i­cant seg­ment of my local pop­u­la­tion were killed in the 1600s in Switzer­land for deny­ing infant bap­tism. Over the years, it has become quite com­mon for around here to for­mally and infor­mally rec­og­nize the ties between the two Churches. A lot of heal­ing has taken place.

    But I have lit­tle expec­ta­tion that the same rec­on­cil­i­a­tion will ever take hap­pen between the rad­i­cal Islamists and those they have per­se­cuted. They are dri­ven to kill to express their idea of faith. It can only be called madness.

  • Grace

    You’re right. I didn’t mean to take an unfair swipe; my intent was to defuse that sort of crit­i­cism by set­ting it up in order to argue against it out­weigh­ing the good that was done by the Pope hav­ing the guts to say some­thing hon­est about the dam­age that rad­i­cal Islam has done. (It really is too ironic for words that their response, as oth­ers have noted, could be para­phrased as “Don’t tell us we’re vio­lent or we’ll kill you!”

    I’m sorry that the Pope has issued another apol­ogy. I’m sure the pres­sure on him was unbe­liev­able, but I’m sick of these thugs call­ing the shots.

  • Bar­bara

    I too, am sorry that the Pope thinks he has to say he does not hold the views he cited in his talk. These extrem­ists are bul­lies . I read a com­men­ta­tor say that Pope Pius XII was climbed all over (after he died, of course) for not speak­ing out more force­fully against the Nazi evil. This Pope is being crit­i­cized for call­ing vio­lence incom­pat­i­ble with God.

    There are many brave Mus­lims who are speak­ing out against the hijack­ing of their Faith. How coura­geous they are — but they almost stand alone. Ori­ana Fal­laci, a well known jour­nal­ist who was an athe­ist, was pros­e­cuted in Italy for “hate speech” for say­ing some of the same things the Pope said. She died within the last week, but even at the end, stood for the Jews against the Islamic fas­cists. She took their threats most seri­ously — some­thing that I think most peo­ple still do not do.

    BTW — sorry for the typos in the ear­lier post. I was quite tired when I wrote and revised it. I am usu­ally more careful.

Leave a Reply

* Name, Email, and Comment are Required