Mood: Not happy for many reasons.
Warning: Long entry full of ranting and raving.
Firstly, Saturday night. As Andrew has included in his blog, our Church is in the middle of some problems, mainly over some of the elder Greeks having issue with some (really minor amounts) of English coming into the services, which apparently came to a head with the recent Holy Week.
Fr's sermon on Saturday night, coincidently but appropriately falling on the Sunday of the Blind Man, addressed this, describing those being selfishly spiritually 'blind', who could not see nor care about the the future of the Church, nor the youth of it.
I feel very strongly about this, and not least because although I am of Greek descent I am not fluent in Greek. If it wasn't for the Saturday Night English Liturgies at St George I most likely would not be involved in the Church as I am today, and I am a strong advocate of having more English in the other services outside of the weekly Liturgies.
I as well as most other people see this as essential toward the future survival of our Church. Please don't get me wrong, Greek has its place in the services, after all we are the Greek Orthodox Church.
But as more and more young people of both Greek and non-Greek descent are attempting and considering becoming actively involved in the life of the Church, they are encountering this quite unnecessary obstacle that prevents them from fully participating in the wonderful services of our Church. Just because they aren't fluent in modern Greek, let alone the Greek that is actually used in the services (being significantly distinct from the modern Greek spoken today), should not be a reason why they cannot participate significantly in services without a translation.
The bottom line is this: we are in Australia, not Greece or Cyprus, and the language here is English. I see no reason why some services attended by both elder Greeks and younger Australians cannot be half-English and half-Greek. If this is the case we have the best of both worlds: the understanding of the English, which also leads to the understanding of the Greek parts that are still included as part of the wonderful tradition, not to mention the elder Greeks having the opportunity to learn some English that most have neglected to do for the many decades they have been here.
Granted, I may be a bit bitter and more than naive, but if younger people cannot relate to their religion (or a religion they are considering adopting) on the most basic of levels that is the language, then the Church has a very bleak future indeed.
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Start Rant 2
Sunday was Fr S's last liturgy at the Southside parish. It was quite emotional, Fr C even coming to tears during the dismissal. It was quite touching. Without going into too much detail why he is leaving, I felt a little angry that no doubt more than a few people who are chiefly responsible for his transfer were also there 'mourning' his departure. But I should not judge.
As Andrew also stated in his aforementioned entry, those receiving Fr in Adelaide "should feel extremely blessed that we in Brisbane did not treat him with the reverence that he deserves".
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Start Rant 3
I had originally planned to do this entry last night after a few expectedly minor changes to how this blog is displayed. Well, in accordance with my 'computer time' theory, i ended up staying up to about 1 am doing these 'minor changes'.
All I had wanted to do was put a padded border around pictures and photos posted on this blog. It was working fine in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer (IE). After a lot of trial and error it turned out that all IE didn't like was that I hadn't set the doctype for the pages. Not happy.
After I subsequently did that, both IE and Firefox had a domino-effect of other problems (in that when I fixed one thing, that would break another in the other browser, and when that was fixed it caused another problem, etc etc.) that I spent the majority of the night fixing. Serves me right for not making this blog valid xhtml.
Quite frustrating indeed. Hopefully everything looks close to good now, please let me know of any discrepancies.
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One other fault that I have noticed though, and haven't figured out how to fix on this blog, is that if someone tries to make a comment and gets the verification code wrong, and their comment includes apostrophes ('s), quotes ("s) or other other characters that need to be escaped for entry into the database, for some reason a lot of the escape slashes are displayed in the un-submitted comment.
Anyway, I must be off to bed. Apologies for all the rants, and please don't take all of them too literally or seriously. (see the disclaimer at the bottom of the page :))
Dude, I'm with you on the language thing, even if I'm not a Church-goin' lass myself. I definitely see your point! And the half-half service (English-Greek) would be such a benefit to both parties. Why can't people get along, even in Church?!
At least there is precedence for not getting along in parishes, especially on racial issues: Acts 6:1 sees the Greek-speaking seeing themselves as neglected in charity compared to the Jews, and behold, seven deacons are created to serve them...
This is the sad consequence of fallen people, living in a fallen world, and all of their mistakes are so much greater, not because they are worse, but because they are compared to God...
Nota Bene: That others have done wrong things doesn't make wrong things right, merely that this is a long-standing problem.
Hold on a sec - we're 'fallen people'? That's a bit harsh!
Yah. Adam and Eve kinda blotted the copybook, and with not notable exception, no one's been able to do the whole 'not sinning' bit right since.
But this can be seen just by observing people in the world. Question, are people doing bad things; answer, yes.
(nb. 'fallen' is just another way of describing 'not sinless'. It's a high standard, but there it is.)
a/s
oops: that was "and with one notable exception".
it's late. and i'm tired. and i'm procrastinating an assignment. and i'm a/s.
Well life would be a bit dull if there weren't any sinners in the world!:D Besides which, whether we're sinners or not it's irrelevant, we all sin to some extent. I like to break the world into three types - Jerks, Occasional Jerks, and Non-Jerks. Human nature at its finest!:D
would it be?
Life as being boring without sin is so oft used that it has almost reached cliche-like proportions; but, I don't think it's entirely true.
This is obviously true in the Orthodox worldview - where being away from God is the cause of deep-seated unhappiness and other environment-caused mental ailments (e.g. depression)
But this is can also be seen outside of that particular worldview, best exemplified by historically astronomical rates of depression and youth suicide, especially in Australia, and also in other "Western" countries. It should be obvious that something is amiss (what it is may vary, but something is definitely amiss).
Regarding the jerk thing, though, I think you may be onto something - though you may like to include a category for those who act like jerks due to overcompensation...
a/s.