Posted on Byzantine Texas. Oops. Now I’ve Gone and Done it.

I’ve been Western Rite Orthodox for ten years, and you raise a serious point. When you love your previous hertitage / church identity, it’s impossible to just give it up or get over it. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

I’m fortunate in that the Temple I worship at is a great blend of Gothic architecture, Icons, great music and well-done Liturgy.

However, we wouldn’t be allowed to build such a Temple from scratch today. Instead, we would be forced to build a Romanesque structure, because “later architectural styles are ‘not orthodox.’”

This is where it gets frustrating. The highest and most beautiful western church form is the Gothic or Neo-Gothic Cathedral style church building complete with high arches, ornate wood-carving, glorious stained glass and all the other things a person would expect in such structures: Pipe Organs, Choir Lofts, Rood Screens as opposed to an iconostasis, etc.

The Western Church Tradition has a complete high artistic form, and to lop off pieces of it here and there or to forbid some aspects ruins the whole tapestry, so to speak. It’s a form of Iconoclasm, IMO.

You can add icons to such architecture and these don’t subtract anything, but when you forbid the other elements, it doesn’t feel like home.  

The reason the WR stays a tiny group of people is that it ends up being smothered in the cradle. If you undercut deep enthusiasm and attachment, you end up with half-hearted devotion. The Western Rite is really an all or nothing thing, IMO. You can’t half-posterior it.

By all means, grant the Western Rite it’s own Patriarch and complete autocephalous freedom to build according to our most cherished forms and not architecture restricted to pre-1054 A.D. We’ll keep the Icons the right way, of course, but allow everything else, please!

You couldn’t build a Western Rite Chartres Cathedral or Washington D.C. National Cathedral because “‘Tis-Outrage / This is not Orthodox.” It’s ridiculous and it eventually gets old, indeed.

How would The Greeks or Russians respond if some pompous official said they couldn’t have Onion Domes or Iconostasis, and perhaps you can start to get an idea how any Western Christian might feel with the restrictions we still labor under.

And we should be able to worship in a traditional manner with well-done modern English Liturgies. The Greeks and the OCA have no compunction about using modern English. We should “spoil the Egyptians” by taking the best things the West has to offer and not set some arbitrary acceptable period or date.

Passing the Peace like the Anglicans, Catholics and Lutherans do would also be encouraging and is really no different than Easterners doing the same thing with “Christ is in our Midst.”

Too many good things are still unnecessarily forbidden, IMO. Until we’re trusted as responsible, we’ll-intentioned adult Christians with our own heritage, what real space do we have to grow or thrive? No one knows our own heritage better than we do, and how to conform it to Holy Orthodoxy. Outsiders just aren’t expert enough.

Perhaps many more Western Christians would have converted already if they weren’t influenced to be suspicious of and to reject their own culture and traditions.

In many ways, the powers that be keep the Western Rite convert feeling like they’ve taken a trip to a foreign country instead of like a new, permanent long-term home.

To expect “high church” converts to even want to give up their heritage is to ask them to be Iconoclasts with their own traditions and expressions.

Don’t muzzle the ox while it’s treading the grain!


Respectfully Submitted,

Columba Silouan