Hey guys, it's Zach! Don't be fooled by the beard. It is me.
We're here at a Greek Orthodox Church.
Because this is a personal one for me. My grandma
is greek and I am ashamed to say I have never gone to church with her.
So I thought it would be kind of fun and also I want to sort of connect with
a part of my grandma's life that has been so important to her.
So Grandma, thank you for the three decades of
love and souvlaki and spanakopita
and bakalava and everything you've done. This ones for you.
What?!
This is the most ornate
place I have ever been in my life.
Hey, Jesus
This is, uh, quite the place.
-Welcome to St. Sophia Cathedral. -Thank you so much for having me. -Yeah
So I am NOT Greek Orthodox, but my grandma is.
-Really
So -Yeah, and I've never been to church with her before
Cause I- I- I didn't know- Are all Greek churches like this?
Uh, All greek churches are
ornate. All Orthodox churches are very ornate. We love
images, icons
-Ok, well
I guess like grab a chair that's not a throne
and we'll talk about Greek Orthodoxy.
-Sounds good.
-Awesome man
First of all
thanks for inviting me and I have to get this out of the way
Are you Greek?
*laughs* Not even a drop Greek.
I did not know that you could be Greek Orthodox and not be Greek.
Funny enough, that was my impression too.
Did you grow up in the church or...
-How did this happen?
Yeah, how did this happen?
-So I grew up in a black baptist church
the tambourine shakin' grandmothers dancing in the front and that was kinda my
experience.
-How old are you?
-I'm 26
You're 26. So
before you converted to Greek Orthodoxy
did you have any idea about it?
I had no idea about Orthodoxy
until my senior year of high school. I took a church history class.
This Orthodoxy thing just really interested me because I had never heard of it.
Even though my grandmother is
Greek I have no idea what being
Greek Orthodoxy actually means.
Orthodoxy claims to the like the Church of Christ. The Church which
Christ established with his apostles. Becoming Orthodox
isn't about being Greek it's not about being
more right or whatever it's about finding Christ
and more fully. The idea of fullness
is what I was seeking. I had come from what I felt was
a shallow understanding and a shallow experience. And orthodoxy claims to,
and I believe, holds the fullness of the faith.
And so we have this need for experiential faith. We
reverence icons. We speak of the lives of the saints.
It's a very organic faith.
Are all
Orthodox churches, are they so ornate?
The architecture is trying to communicate to us that God is bending the heavens. God is
bending the world to be- to be present with us.
When we come into the church we believe that we enter into the kingdom of heaven.
To the end times.
and so we have this really grand view
of what it means to be a Christian. What it means to worship in his presence.
-So this is almost what heaven is like?
-That's what we believe.
-That's the goal.
-The goal of any Orthodox Church is to give you a taste of what heaven is.
So how are you involved with the church and how does it affect your life?
-I serve in the altar on Sundays and other
feast days, holidays.
-But don't you actually...
You live here right? Not in this room in particular.
I live really close by. The church owns an apartment complex behind
here and I work also as the Events Coordinator
so I book the weddings and sacraments and baptisms.
I also teach in Sunday school. I teach the junior high kids.
-You run the youth group. Are we having a meeting
there tonight. Is that what's going on?
It's a young adults group
so the average age is probably about 30.
-What do you normally talk about at these meetings?
-We talk about being orthodox in American in the 21st century.
We try to talk about how do we connect this ancient faith
to the modern world.
I often wonder what
the difference is between
the prayers that God answers and the ones that he doesn't
-In Orthodoxy there's really only one prayer
like and its "Lord have mercy" and
we pray that prayer for every thing and everybody in the whole world.
The difficulty of faith is seeing mercy
through pain and seeing mercy through loss and seeing mercy through disappointment.
-If we think God's not answering our prayers...
He's answering that right prayer that "Lord have mercy"
and so we just need to like kind of quit thinking that we're the ones that are gonna
save the world.
And turn to the one who has saved the world and
who continues to save the world and just become a part of his purpose
and when we do that we find our prayers being answered more and more.
-For the converts in the room, when you
decided to start searching did you go other places as
well then arrive here or was this the first place you looked?
-I grew up a Protestant and there was a whole thing about getting
saved and that, you know, all you need to do is accept Jesus into your heart
to be saved and then you're saved. To build a relationship with God
is- it's a challenge. Takes a lot of
discipline. It takes understanding. It takes
that yearning to come into practice.
-There's something very appealing of
if you accept Jesus into your heart your saved and then you're just like "done!"
- Yeah, Game over
Orthodoxy is a path. It's a way of life
that offers that. That offers true spiritual growth. It offers a
means for spiritual growth. It doesn't say that the goal is unattainable.
It says it's hard, but it says like, when you do these things
you live this way, you love this way, you forgive this way
you pray this way, you'll reach this end.
I know there's probably a thousand more questions...
-Sorry
and it's okay, it's just
timewise we do start doing our prayer service. Would you wanna go and join us in the chapel?
-Absolutely
Thank you guys for being so open and sharing such wonderful stories.
[Hymn] Christ has risen from the dead
By death Jesus trampled death.
-What I really wanna get a sense of
is what made you decide to devote your entire life to the church?
I'm sure your yiayia, your grandma, talked to you about about Greece and
the struggles that the Greek culture went through, the people went through under
Turkish rule. Orthodoxy is a faith that has been suffered
for two thousand years and it comes out of suffering and
it's like up front with reality that life is hard.
Life is painful but we find salvation. We find Christ in suffering.
What would you say is the thing that you've most suffered with.
My parents split up when I was
younger and a lot of family drama growing up. My brother has
sickle cell anemia. The combination of my parents
breaking up and my brother's pain was like
really tough on me and it sometimes still is. I don't know there lots of- Everybody's life offers challenges.
How has orthodoxy
helped you through that?
It's given me...hope. It's given me the assurance that... that
pain isn't abandonment. That
trials aren't judgment.
That god is always calling out to people
in love. He's seeking people and
in his own love for us. God is love and
love is a creative force and so that's why orthodoxy is so
creative. There is such beautiful music and icons its
all poured out of love and love is painful.
Love hurts right?
-I'll agree with that.
-I think so.
So I just had a beautiful experience with a bunch of
Orthodox...Well they're not Greek!
Most of them are not Greek! Which has been very illuminating to me.
I can see why my grandma would want to come to a place like this and would feel
the presence of something bigger than herself.
My grandma is one of the most passionate people you will ever meet
and she's mainly passionate about cooking and making sure that you always
had more food to eat
but now I can see that maybe it started
in church and it might be not Christian but I'm
I might- I might steal some things.
Everything here looks nice.
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