For many of us, seeking imagination and broadening our ideas is something we do daily in a modern world focused on productivity and infotainment. We have conversations, absorb media, and read endlessly. A primary guide to broadening and enriching my imagination and connection with the world has been through my genealogical investigation. My story is like many of yours. I discovered my Rusyn roots during college, when my mind was expanding to so many new experiences. After learning about my own Rusynness, it unlocked a new wave of interest in history, family connections, and the exploration of religious mysteries. I want to focus on the last of these topics. When we consider our ancestors, our Rusynness, we can open up a new life for ourselves and rekindle our imagination, especially when disconnected by generations.
My grandfather and great-grandparents attended St.Peter & Paul Russian Orthodox Church in Passaic, NJ and earlier the original Three Saints Church. I discovered that in the magisterial expressions of liturgy, exists peace, connection, and conversation that attempts to reach beyond the material. Orthodox worship and the emphasis on an ascetic lifestyle of contemplation are a powerful evocation for emotion and imagination. Living life as a prayer, however you may interpret that, is to live a live an examined life. To let the full human experience and the experience of our ancestors flourish and yet live, we should experience orthodoxy and glean what we can from it; we each can take some piece – even non-believers – with us and secure in ourselves a piece of our history.
As you might expect, a major topic of intrigue for me is religion. More broadly, I spend so much of my time thinking and learning about the questions of meaning in life. My Rusynness led me to discover the beautiful depths of Orthodox Christianity, which is so far removed from any experience of Christianity I’ve encountered. Even from my non-believing perspective, I told myself during and after my first Sunday liturgy that if God was anywhere, he was in the Orthodox Church. The total experience of sight, sound, smell; the complete change of scenery from the outside world made me feel like I was back in the early centuries. The intention behind it all was to see a union with God on earth. I have such strong desires to keep at least an essence of these religious fibers between my roots connected before they’re completely lost.
Religion has been one of the most evocative ways for humanity to reach at some nearly ungraspable essence that distinguishes us. We have such a capacity to seek meaning in all things. The conversation between meaning and religion has always been with me. Coming from a non-denominational Christian background, I understood the core concepts of Christianity in my life. I worshiped as a teenager as I was taught, singing the musically bland contemporary church songs, and I preached from Timothy to my youth group; teaching the young followers they were molded from clay by Christ. As I became more aware of the allures of religion, I began to investigate the claims of this grandeur. I’d explore topics with pastors, my parents, my brother and friends – and of course the internet. I’d read the bible, textbooks, pop-science books and any material that would help me discover a key concept: truth. I was completely swept away in the rising tides of the “New Atheism” movement. Figures like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens were my new saints, and, with a little less fervor and more open-mindedness, I still follow them today. My leap into this robotic logic-is-all mentality as a young man was all in an attempt to understand. It sufficed for many years, but the questions and allure of these huge questions has come back to me, and now I am back wrestling with God.
Most of us in the United States are rooted in some form of Christianity, whether practitioners or not. From very modern, white-shoe, khaki short non-denominational college-campus types to more conservative dress-bound Southern Baptists, we’ve all been exposed to a similar range of “Pop Christianity.” A Christianity that’s lost all of its poetry, traditional aesthetic, and beauty. Many of the current practitioners are essentially milquetoast Christian Deists at most, with no real, deeper thought of the magic that a classical Christianity can convey. Around all campuses or modern non-denominational churches, they have become so secularized as to completely blend in with contemporary culture. The pop Christians have commoditized their religion to be salesmen for Christ and not open to another avenue of investigation. This Anglo-American take on Christianity is a foreign concept to our ancestral culture.
When I think about my Lemko great-grandparents, I’m filled with an ineffable awe of gratitude, love, and frustration for what I can’t know about them. What I can know has bolstered my connection with my Rusynness. I know they were of the faithful, having been regular attendees and members of the Saint Peter and Paul’s Orthodox Church and the Three Saints Russian (initially Rusyn) Orthodox Church for decades. I know my great-grandfather smoked a pipe and repaired shoes as he worked for over 40 years at a steel factory. My great-grandmother raised a huge set of children, and they both experienced the grief of outliving many of their own – including my grandfather.
I think of myself as someone who has the luxury in my life, built upon the hard-working shoulders of the Rusyn line before me, to sit and think about grand topics – to attempt to understand myself and where and who I’ve come from. I’d like to think my great-grandfather did the same ponderings on a different scale. Maybe he’d think – in the beautiful Lemko dialect of Rusyn that he spoke – about the essence of liturgy while smoking a pipe, or he’d daydream about his family history while cobbling. I’d like to believe some of him is with me when I seek these ideas. His devoutness to Orthodoxy has broadened my scope of intrigue into Christianity and what else it has to offer. I’ve found what the other pop-Christians lack. What many Americans in general lack. A true core of beauty in religious experience guided by the past and driven by connection and conversation to something higher.
I experience an Orthodox service from a viewpoint of a non-believer in core tenets of divinity; however, in no other Christian context have I been reached so profoundly. The singing of the liturgy, the worship, the scene of incense ascending into heaven; the flow of the traditional experience, and the obvious linkages to the past. It’s intentionally intoxicating to your sense of belonging no matter your background. Listening to a divine liturgy as a calming and restorative practice of peace has, in some way, brought me back into the old fold of my teenage Christian self. It’s broadened my life to more of an openness to the importance of imaginative living and has kindled a love for a more expressive way of spirituality. Rusynness was my true guide to connecting with the ungraspable essence that it is to be human: wrestling with God.