One of my most formative experiences of the Eastern liturgy was at Christ the Savior Orthodox Church in Chicago. I grew up attending a Byzantine Catholic church when my family was on vacation in Virginia. I had also haunted Greek Orthodox churches while visiting Greece, wandered through stores that sold endless glimmering images of saints, lit the tiny, thin candles that the elderly Greek ladies would take up in their hands like handfuls of flower stems and dip into the flames.
Many Byzantine Catholic church buildings, though, are reinterpreted Western churches, often with pews and even stained glass windows. I had vague memories of my English teacher impressing upon our class that Greek Orthodox believers dressed stood for their entire three- or four-hour liturgy, so we shouldn’t complain about our Easter Vigil. But I hadn’t attended any liturgies in a space designed for Eastern practice, and so I did not know what to expect when I ducked inside the door, already running late.
We had tuned into the radio to listen to the liturgy while trapped in Chicago traffic. My Orthodox friend did not have any of my abashment at our lateness, and no one seemed to notice us arriving. The space was dark even on a Sunday morning, lit with candles, the air heavy and full of incense. There were huge rugs all over the floor and people stood while their children ran around or leaned on their parents or made commentary, a subplot to the main narrative.
But, in a way, there wasn’t a main narrative. My friend was wandering off to the side and along the perimeter of the church to greet various icons. Other people were doing the same. People seemed aware of what was happening at the front of the church, but they were also looking up, like me, at the walls of icons, pursuing their own prayer lives in rabbit trails across the rugs, lighting candles like those Greek ladies. I wasn’t sure where to look, but that seemed to be part of the point. Everyone was pursuing something together (and they would all focus on the priest and the altar at certain points), but the exposed beams of the arching ceiling provided shelter for a variety of very different relationships with God, including mine, a visitor from a different religious practice.
Some people talk about football as if it, too, is a spiritual experience, but when I attended my first college football game, I wasn’t expecting one. Like the liturgy, there are parts to the football game. It begins, like so many things used to when I was a child, with the singing of the national anthem. Similar to certain iterations of the Orthodox faith, shows of patriotism contain a now-unpopular sentiment: that we prefer our own country to other countries, as if our country is itself a kind of sports team. “Nationalism” is a dirty word on Twitter, but not at a football game, where I watched two fighter planes cross the sky, simultaneously heartwarming and alarming.
The game was in honor of veterans, and when the band started striking up the anthems for the different branches of the military, almost to my own surprise I knew most of the words—relics of a fifth-grade music class at a school where we started every school assembly with a pledge to the flag and an “American song.” (I learned a lot of the classics that way, but we occasionally had to scrape the bottom of the barrel and sing “God Bless the USA”—picture a gang of middle schoolers singing “I had to start again with just my children and my wife” with a slight southern twang and great gusto. )
The Air Force anthem begins “Off we go into the wild blue yonder”—the song of wild freedom, the simple go-west-young-man momentum of the American spirit. It could be the motto of Star Trek. The song was part of my heritage like the chants and hymns of the Eastern tradition are—or were—for the children of Greece and Russia. Of course, some of our relationships with our cultural hymns are beginning to fade. But I still knew them, somewhere in the back of my mind, as I’m sure many grown atheists still know their Catholic school hymns to Mary.
For a day when a blizzard was descending on the stadium, there was a decent turnout, and plenty of camaraderie among the fans. At one point I looked over to the other side of the stadium and saw snow piling on the heads of the people across from us like they were a mountainside stand of pines. But the pauses in the game were not rushed for weather concerns. We were here for fun, sure, but we were also here for something bigger than ourselves. If it wasn’t fun the whole time, as with a liturgy, that didn’t matter.
An essential part of college football seems to be pausing the whole event to ask the veterans to stand, to bring a club or two out onto the field, to introduce us to key players. As with icons on the walls of a church, we were introduced to the major and the minor characters of the battle taking place before us. At one point an announcer invited everyone there to Mass after the game. The constant stopping and starting, against all meteorological indications, confused me at first.
But as the game went on, I realized that the traditions—the cheerleaders, the “third down” jingle, throwing marshmallows across the stands—were all essential, because it was only by putting all of them together that what was happening really happened. You could take out one piece or another, perhaps, but if you got carried away you would end up with a Tin Man of a football game, without a heart. So everyone clings to these tiny details with a certain kind of fierceness.
Maybe that’s how nationalism and liturgy and all of these things are supposed to work, too. Maybe what draws you to your country or your liturgy or your college football game is not the expectation that you will get enjoyment out of it, or even a bland, brainwashed loyalty, but rather the sense that there are many little things that you love and would hate to see disappear, a flourishing crowd under one arching roof, and you want to be among them.
Come back in two weeks: for a patron-only post on why the aurora borealis are like earbuds.
In honor of: the US’s honorable defeat in the World Cup last weekend, here’s a podcast series about the downfall of an entire game.
In my recipe queue: sourdough chocolate chip cookies.