Christian Hedonism and Orthodoxy

This is not a force easily reckoned with, in the early church or today. The danger that we face in the midst of such a rich set of liturgical and cultural traditions is that the pursuit of pleasure too often eclipse the donation of life – to the point that the gospel itself is embraced on the basis of the joy and peace that it maintains. The life received is then absorbed by the believer, not put to use through good works.

In the west, this issue of Christian Hedonism has come under heavy fire – primarily because it transforms the Church into something designed to please the congregation, rather than something which gives praise to God.

In the eastern orthodox traditions we are only now beginning to see the impact this has on our own social and spiritual lives. We seek things that bring us pleasure, and when applied to liturgical functions this leads to enormous levels of discord – like any other fruit of the spirit, when pursued for its own sake, pleasure dissolves in your hands.

It begins innocently enough with the claim that eastern orthodoxy is unique because it encourages participation in the services with all five senses. You smell the lovely incense. You hear the beautiful chanting. You see the gilded and majestically written icons and feel the warmth of the candles. You taste the body of Christ. You are engulfed in a dazzling sensory communion experience.

When we were first developing marketing campaigns for the Orthodox Marketplace, we ran into this awkward conundrum – how do we advertise the beauty of the faith without making it sound like a commercial for fudge brownies or a double-stack cheeseburger?

The danger is that our pleasures are not always for Christ – a friend once said to me, “I just believe that if you follow your heart no matter what you will be okay. What do you think?” Thinking about my own pleasure centers I know that the human ‘heart’ can take people places where Christ would never want them to go. It’s a life that leads to excessive substances abuse, sexual promiscuity, blurred boundaries in interpersonal relationships, clouding of judgment and discernment and above all a false or nonexistent sense of purpose and security. The pursuit of pleasure does not lead to a stable life, let alone a productive one – it leads to what some call ‘existential crisis.’

Just about every sensitive issue that orthodox, especially ethnic Orthodox, have about their church is rooted in the desire to relive and regenerate the pleasurable sensations that were accompanied with their past experience. If you remove or change certain elements, the pleasure decreases and many will do whatever they have to do in order to bring it back. Perhaps all the building campaigns, sanitizing of texts and music to astringent standards and occasional triumphal outbursts are evidence that this pursuit of pleasure is not unlike the pursuit of pleasure from any substance – that the more you use it, the more stimulation you need to achieve the same level of euphoria as before.

And it’s not entirely unnatural, which makes combating the urge difficult. There is an entire spectrum of valid emotions tied to village life, to the centrality and stabilizing network of the church in the homeland. Trying to detach the pleasure of church from the comfort of being at home in your native village is like smelling your mother’s cookies baking while trying not to reminisce about how much your mother loved you.

Orthodox converts often pleasure seek their way to the orthodox church, being attracted to the rich liturgical heritage that their own protestant or non-denominational services were lacking. We don’t know if the gospel was being preached there – I personally seem to meet more converts who are attracted to the beauty of orthodox services than I do those who believed that the Orthodox Church retains the authentic truth of the gospel and decided to switch. In any case, the newfound pleasure is difficult to avoid – and why should we not enjoy it, after all? It’s been around for centuries, right?

The danger that exists here is one that I personally experienced repercussions of in seminary and still do feel many times – it has been strong enough to make me question why I even bother continuing my pursuit of theology and my hope of becoming an ordained priest. The danger is one of codependency in the church between those who create life in the church and those who consume life for personal pleasure.

Trying to please a pleasure seeker/addict is like trying to help a homeless methadone addict find a place to sleep by giving them $50. The problem is, you really want to help – and the imperative one follow as a gospel abiding Christian is to give to those in ‘need.’ I put need in quotes because it is a topic that often gets distorted. For example, hunger is as natural a response within the human body as satisfaction, and yet there are people who fear hunger pangs. While food is the legitimate need for the hungry, the feeling of satisfaction is not. And yet there too often we eat, not for nourishment of body, but because we fear being in a state of hunger.

If a person knows the gospel and believes in its principles, they assume a stance of giving – they are easily recognizable as giving people – they give freely of their time, sometimes even disobeying St. Paul by giving until they are in debt themselves – but they do it because it is what is asked of them – not because they receive joy. And I can guarantee they attract pleasure seekers, who either see them as easy targets or ‘good friends.’

When I look back on my own life, I have had to pray for people who I have felt were my greatest enemies, but because I recognize a need in their soul for God’s life to touch them I have to pray for them, give them time and if God wills it, give of myself to bring balance to the situation. I doubt there is one person alive who calls themselves a Christian who doesn’t have a similar story. By the same token, there are many stories of failures as well – moments when we recognize a need, recognize we have just the thing to solve it, and yet for fear of discomfort or lack of happy returns we withhold life until a more ‘opportune’ moment arises.

I don’t mean to pick on the orthodox churches, but I have to because interlaced with the tradition as it has developed in the United States is evidence of all sorts of tensions between the pursuit of pleasure and the fear of God – yet these two attitudes cannot coexist together. You cannot serve God and mammon, for you will love the one and despise the other. In the early centuries the controversies over this topic related to the proper use and placement of icons and relics. The fear was always of pursuit of the aesthetic – would we arrive at worship of the beauty of our symbolic surroundings rather than the divine truth they were meant to praise and glorify? Was there anything ‘wrong’ with that? The Lord did command that the sanctuary be built with richness and extravagance.

We were not far from the generations of statue worshippers back then, but beyond the simplistic notion of idol worship we should be concerned of our personal pursuit of the psychological effects that the church can have on us. The liturgical life of the church invites the full sensory spectrum of our human existence, and yet we should be able and willing to praise God without the use of sensory enhancing devices.

In many cases, our inability to do this – to take the liturgical function of worship and abiding in God outside of the church and into the rest of our worldly lives – is directly linked to the psychological dependency and association that many people make between their sensory experiences in church and the relationship that is supposed to be occurring there. The question, though, is whether our relationship with God is supposed to provide us with pleasure or life. From a scriptural point of view, we are to receive life, and receive it abundantly – i.e. receive enough for ourselves and to multiply its benefits in order to heal the world we live in and the people we are with. We are responsible for the outpouring, not merely the reception, of the life given to us in grace through the love of God the Father.

If we do not have all the stimuli of the church in front of us, are we unable to maintain a solid consistent relationship with God? And if so, what it is we feel so close to in services? Do we need devices to activate our faith? If so, we have a serious problem with dependency on wood and stone.

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