The questions and controversies about more frequent communion, about the link between the sacrament of Communion and that of Penance (Confession), about the essence and the meaning of Confession, are in our Church today a sign not of weakness or spiritual decay but of life and awakening. That there appears among Orthodox people a growing concern for the essential, a thirst and hunger for a more spiritual life, can no longer be denied, and for this we must render thanks to God. If, as some people seem to think, there is a "crisis" —and all questioning, all deepening of spiritual awareness is always and inescapably a crisis— it is a good and timely crisis. And it would be wrong and indeed impossible to try to solve it by mere administrative measures, by decrees and interdicts. What we face today is a crucial spiritual question ultimately related to all aspects of our life and, I would add, to the very destiny of Orthodoxy in the deeply troubled "modern" world of ours.
Only a spiritually blind and totally insensitive person would deny that in spite of her relative success and achievements, mainly external and material, our Church is threatened from within with a formidable and growing danger: that of secularism. What is secularism? In an article published some years ago, I tried to define it as:
...a world view and consequently a way of life in which the basic aspects of human existence—such as family, education, science, profession, art, etc. —not only are not rooted in or related to religious faith, but in which the very necessity or possibility of such a connection is denied. The secular areas of life are thought of as autonomous, i.e., governed by their own values, principles, and motivations, different from the religious ones. Secularism is more or less common to modern civilizations everywhere, but the particularity of its American brand, the one which concerns us here, is that in America secularism is not at all anti-religious or atheistic, but, on the contrary, implies as its almost necessary element a definite view of religion, can be indeed termed "religious." It is a ‘philosophy of religion’ as much as a ‘philosophy of life.’ An openly anti-religious society, such as Soviet Russia or Red China, cannot even be called 'secularistic'! Religion there is an enemy to be liquidated and all compromises with it may at best be temporary ones. But the characteristic feature of the American culture and ‘way of life’ is that they simultaneously accept religion as something essential to man and deny it as an integrated world view shaping the totality of human existence.
An American ‘secularist’ may be a very ‘religious’ man, attached to his Church, regular in attending services, generous in his contributions, punctual in prayer. He will have his marriage 'solemnized' in Church, his home blessed, his religious obligations fulfilled—all this in perfectly good faith. But all this does not in the least alter the plain fact that his understanding of all these aspects of his life—marriage and family, home and profession, and ultimately his religious obligations themselves—is derived not from the creed he confesses in Church, not from his professed belief in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Christ, the Son of God become Son of Man, but from ‘philosophies of life,’ that is, ideas and convictions having virtually nothing to do with that creed, if not directly opposed to it. One has only to enumerate some of the key ‘values’ of our culture—success, security, status, competition, profit, prestige, ambition—to realize that they are at the opposite pole from the entire ethos and inspiration of the Gospel....
But does this mean that this religious secularist is a cynic, a hypocrite, or a schizophrenic? Not at all. It means only that his understanding of religion is rooted in his secularistic world view and not vice versa. In a non-secularistic society—the only type of society Orthodoxy knew in the past—it is religion and its values that constitute the ultimate criterion of one's whole life, a supreme ‘term of reference by which man, society, and culture evaluate themselves, even if they constantly deviate from it. They may live by the same worldly motivations, but they are constantly challenged by religion, be it only by its passive presence. Thus the ‘way of life’ may not be religious even though the ‘philosophy of life' certainly is. In the secularistic society it is exactly the opposite: the ‘way of life’ includes religion; the ‘philosophy of life’ excludes it.
Acceptance of secularism means, of course, a radical transformation of religion itself. It may keep all its external and traditional forms, yet inside it is simply a different religion. Secularism, when it ‘approves’ of religion and gives it a place of honor in social life, does so only inasmuch as religion itself accepts becoming a part of the secularistic world view, a sanction of its values and a help in the process of attaining them. And indeed no word is used more often by secularism in its dealing with religion than the word help. ‘It helps’ to belong to a religious group, to be identified with a religious tradition, to be active in the Church, to pray; ‘it helps,’ in short, to ‘have religion.’ And since religion helps, since it is such a useful factor in the personal and social life, it must in turn be helped. Hence the remarkable success of religion in America, attested to by all statistics. Secularism accepts religion but on its own terms; it assigns religion a function, and, provided religion accepts and fulfills that function, it covers religion with wealth, honor and prestige. ‘America,’ writes W. Herberg, 'seems to be at once the most religious and the most secular of nations. . . . Every aspect of contemporary religious life reflects this paradox: pervasive secularism amid mounting religiosity...'
It is this American secularism which so many Orthodox naively and wrongly identify with the "American way of life" that is the root of the deep spiritual crisis of Orthodoxy. And nowhere is this crisis more visible than in the strange religionless religion" which seems to permeate our Church life. The reduction of the Church to material, organizational, and legalistic preoccupations and concerns at the expense of religious and spiritual ones; the obsession with "property," money, and the defense of "parish rights" against bishops and clergy viewed as an external "threat;" the indifference to the missionary, educational, and charitable needs of the Church; the passive, and sometimes even active, resistance to all efforts to deepen the spiritual and liturgical life, to make it less "nominal" and more authentic; the identification of religion with ethnic folklore and ethnic customs; the self-centeredness and virtual isolation of so many of our parishes, their lack of interest in the vital needs of the Church-at-large, to her mission in America—all this reveals such a deep secularization of Church consciousness that one becomes truly apprehensive about the future of our Church, whose leadership and members alike do not seem to realize the scope and depth of this crisis.
And yet it is precisely this secularization of the Church itself that causes so many people, especially among the youth, simply to leave the Church in which no one reveals to them what is her real essence and life, what it means to be her member; in which one hardly hears the appeal to deepen the inner spiritual effort; in which, indeed, the spiritual is reduced to a "formal" minimum (attendance, a once-a-year Communion, some fasting, some abstention from entertainment), while the material and the external are developed to a maximum.
And all this happens and develops at a time when we Orthodox are called to begin a new life, when the possibility— denied to so many of our brothers and sisters of our "mother Churches"—is given to us to grow, to be free not in words alone but in reality, to fill our Church with spiritual content, to achieve all that which, alas, cannot be achieved by the Orthodox living in the horrible conditions of openly atheistic and totalitarian regimes. Is it not tragic, therefore, that all these gifts, challenges, and possibilities are little, if at all, acknowledged, accepted, met; that the very structure of our churches, the spirit and the interests prevailing in them, make it virtually impossible truly to feed and to sustain genuine religious life?
I began these remarks with some general considerations of the present situation of the Church because of my deep conviction that the new interest in the Sacraments, in sacramental practice and discipline, stems from this crisis and is directly related to it. I am convinced that the question of lay participation in the Divine Mysteries is indeed the key question of our Church life. It is upon the solution of that question that the future of the Church—her genuine renewal or her inevitable decay—ultimately depends.
I am convinced that where Eucharist and Communion have again become, in the words of the late Father Sergius Cetverikov, "the center of Christian life," the tragic "reductions" and defects mentioned above begin to be overcome and healed. And this, of course, is not accidental; for if Church life is not founded above all on Christ—and this means on a constant and living communion with Him in the Sacrament of His Presence—then unavoidably something else emerges and dominates as the "focus" of a parish's preoccupation and activities. It may be "property" or superficial cultural "ethnicism," or simply material success as the only goal.... If it is not Christ, then something else—worldly and even sinful—will of necessity shape but also disintegrate the life of the Church.
Until quite recently it may have been possible not to realize the urgency of this "either/or" proposition. Indeed, throughout the long immigrant period of the history of Orthodoxy in America, our parishes, in addition to their purely religious functions, had a kind of self-evident "secular" function and foundation: ethnic, national, linguistic. They were the necessary form and means of uniting the immigrants in need of corporate identity for mere survival within American society which at first was alien and sometimes even inimical to them. Now, however, this immigrant period is rapidly approaching its end. The "natural —ethnic and linguistic— foundation of our Church is simply fading away; more and more of the Orthodox people understand no other language but English, and in some of our parishes nearly half of the parishioners are converts to Orthodoxy. But then the question is: what shall replace that foundation? Is it not abundantly clear that if it is not replaced with the central belief and also the experience of the Church as unity, life, and growth in Christ, i.e, with the genuine religious content of Orthodoxy, then inevitably the parish and the Church herself will begin their slow but inevitable decay and disintegration. Then, not united in and for something, people will unite against something. And herein lies the tragic urgency and depth of our present situation.