What else can you say? Only prayer…

 Protopresbyter Vasilios Thermos

What else can you say? Only prayer…

Copied from https://orthodoxia.info/news/vasileios-thermos/

Bulgarian translation here.

We stopped living an existential Christianity a long time ago, but we only project an institutional Christianity, bound by acquired habit and the past. And (I say this with great sadness), we have no excuse for this.

I was not a child; I knew how to exploit illusions. (Louise Glück, 1943-2023)

When you speak with politicians, you understand why Greece is not moving forward. You have in mind the problems of the country, and they the interest of their party. You are asking yourself what the appropriate solutions are and how they will be implemented, and at the same time they are considering how their party will emerge alive from whatever specific ‘warlike’ condition of public life. Citizens who love and feel pain for their homeland, in a few words, find themselves facing some who focus only on their political survival. Incompatible trajectories.

Selfishness, Fear, Irresponsibility. These, in my opinion, make up the triptych of our ecclesiastical culture.

My long experience with church affairs has made me acutely aware that the same dynamics play out at an individual level. When I speak with archimandrites about changes that I believe are necessary, they fear that supporting such initiatives will cost them any chance of becoming bishops. When I discuss essential steps of renewal with metropolitans, they hesitate, because their unspoken ambition is to become the next archbishop. We are on different paths, each standing in a different place. What has struck me most is the extent to which a person’s life plan shapes his way of thinking. (This, of course, is also true of married clergy, albeit for other petty reasons: how to gain or retain the bishop’s favour, how to avoid conflict with the parish priest, and so on.)

Is individual self‑interest the sole reason nothing changes in our Church? No. There is another, equally powerful factor: fear. Since the rise of the internet, fundamentalists have been running rampant, shouting abuse and hurling accusations of betrayal of Orthodoxy. Their networks transmit a kind of terrorising psychopathology at lightning speed, from the living room of a well‑intentioned Christian family to the deserts of Mount Athos.

I am firmly convinced that our bishops are afraid—not that most of them harbour intentions of renewal themselves (with very few exceptions), but that they might not actively obstruct renewal efforts by clergy were it not for their desperate desire to avoid becoming targets of ecclesiastical extremists. Yet they were elected to be leaders, not frightened followers dragging along at the rear.

Quite literally, as I have written many times, our Church has become a hostage of fundamentalism. Over recent decades especially, we have moved backwards rather than forwards. And the more clearly fear is communicated, the more emboldened these groups become. It really is that simple.

Look around you. The local Orthodox Churches are divided because they prefer to engage in geopolitics rather than re‑evangelisation.

Ecclesiastical statements are issued in a ‘wooden’, bureaucratic style, from which both truth and compassion are absent.

Synodal decisions and encyclicals are produced ‘on the hoof’, without study, without consultation, without the opinion of specialists.

The election of metropolitans even today (we are already twenty‑five years into the twenty‑first century!) is conducted through secret dealings, favours, obligations, balances, etc., that is to say, through lack of merit. (Note that, in general, lack of merit constitutes an endemic wound of Greek society, the principal reason why scientists working abroad do not return, according to their own statements.)

Moreover, we choose and ordain clergy at random, without criteria, without psychological assessment of maturity. And when later they err and cause scandal, we content ourselves with punishing them, without learning the slightest thing from our mistakes.

The language of worship continues to function as a fossil, at a time when all other Orthodox Christians use its contemporary form – it does not matter that no one understands anything, so long as our supposed duty to our past is observed! (In my book Synesis and Madness I develop this issue at length.)

Many good things are happening in our Church, of course. But they are isolated, owing to specific individuals. Any notion of strategy is absent. And thus a third cause is added: irresponsibility and superficiality.

Self‑interest, Fear, Irresponsibility. These, in my view, make up the triptych of our ecclesiastical culture. Any one of them on its own would be sufficient to paralyse the mechanisms of change. With all three together, our presence in today’s world has been brought to a standstill.

„Proposals and ideas exist and are being put forward constantly. What is lacking is the willingness to engage.“

I wrote some years ago that, as a Church, we missed the opportunity to reach the generation of the Metapolitefsi. Now we are watching in slow motion as contact is being lost—not only with their children, but with their grandchildren. This is the postmodern generation. If, for those in their 40‑ and 50‑year‑olds, the Church is instinctively associated with medieval fixations and financial scandals, for today’s adolescents and young people it is simply an ‘UFO’: something irrelevant and incomprehensible, not worth even a few seconds of attention.

Why? Because long ago we ceased to live an existential Christianity, and instead merely project an institutional Christianity, captive to inherited habit and the past. And (I say this with great sorrow) we have no excuse for it. In earlier times, when I myself was a child, we truly did not possess either an appropriate theology or the right people. Back then, our stagnation was the result of genuine poverty.

But since then, a veritable upheaval has taken place. The theological renewal with which we have been blessed—now assimilated through the work of contemporary theologians, both clerical and lay—has offered us abundant possibilities for reorientation.

Proposals and ideas exist and are being put forward constantly. What is lacking is the willingness to engage. The triptych of vested interests, fear, and irresponsibility governs our actions and our aims. Consequently, my response to these questions cannot be one‑dimensional. We need a package of measures and decisive interventions, but ones inspired by an overarching strategy.

History does not wait. Generations are being lost while we concern ourselves with priestly and episcopal vestments, chant rumours, practise flattery, and collect windfalls. And we take comfort among those who agree with us. For this reason, dialogue with theologian‑teachers will be of great value here—they are the very people who daily bear the pressures of our age, embodied in real persons.