Wednesday, May 27, 2009

It’s Greek to Me

This Monday I visited the annual Valley Greek Festival, held at St. Nicholas’ Greek Orthodox Church in Northridge. Even though I’ve lived in the area for most of my life, I’ve never been to this fair, and since I didn’t have plans until the evening, I dropped by to grab some lunch and to hear their church choir. The festival lasted for all 3 days of Memorial Day weekend, but there were still hundreds of people on Monday afternoon. I started with the church tour, and listened to the young priest describe not only the church’s art and architecture, but also Orthodox worship.

Outside, tents were all around selling Greek food, pastries, alcohol, and crafts. The food and live music were great, but the thing that stood out to me, haunted me in fact, was the dance. Being a dancer myself, I was delighted that the dance floor was the geographic center of the outside activities. I’ve seen all kinds of dances, but the Greeks are unique in that they seem to always dance in lines, everyone holding hands, weaving in and out of serpentine swirls with certain set patterns of footwork. There was a group of adolescents in the center, dancing around a flagpole, who were particularly fun to watch. It was refreshing to watch young men who were unafraid to dance, adding their own athletic touches and improvisations, dancing in these lines with their friends, guys and girls alike. Around them were chains of people of different ages, Greeks and others who have either studied the dances or just decided to jump in and pick them up as they went along. Among them all, the haunting, kinetic refrain of the dances themselves were saying, “Life is not to be lived alone, but together.”

This church’s openness to others, their comfort with their cultural self-identity, their celebration of faith, food, and drink, family, music, and dance in an intergenerational expression follows Craig Van Gelder’s model of the missional church (and Norma Cook Everist’s work, The Church As Learning Community), and this impresses me. But as I reflected on the event, and certain expressions I saw of how things “are supposed to be,” I also found myself asking painful, personal, “Why, God?” questions when I compared what I experienced there with my own cultural environment, one that I never seemed to fully fit in growing up. I asked God why He chose to make me a dancer and yet place me in a culture where guys supposedly don’t do that. I ask Him why I wasn’t raised in a family that went to church, where a whole support network of people could have embraced me—the family of God. I told Him I sometimes wonder if it’s too late for me to find some of the connections and experiences I truly long for, and that I’m angry that He sometimes seems to be so slow and forgetful towards me. I wasn’t expecting any of this to come from attending this event, but visible expressions of the Kingdom can do that to you.

Theologian Walter Brueggemann described the Church as being in exile. If the Church’s desire is to be one-and-the-same with the mainstream culture, I guess you could describe our current status like that. But after reflecting on this congregation’s festival and my interactions with it, I believe that in our American context, it is primarily individuals who are exiled from one another.

No comments: