"Peace between the ears. That's why I come."

Today I had to begin an assignment for my Religion junior seminar. It consists of attending a religious ritual, talking to people who attended, and then writing a paper. I originally wanted to go to a mosque, but the best time to go was during class on Fridays. I decided, instead, to go to a Greek Orthodox church. That's been on my agenda for a long time, so this paper was a nice reason to go.

When you walk into the temple, which is shaped like a cross, you immediately leave the material world and enter into a more transcendent place. There are icons in the front and back, candles being lit, and the faint smell of incense.

The liturgy is very engaging, very participatory. It alternates between Greek and English (at this particular parish), which gives it a bit of an otherworldly feeling. One of my favorite lines, which is said often in the liturgy, is: "Let us commit ourselves and one another, and our whole life to Christ our God."

The whole liturgy is building up towards the Eucharist, the mystery of the body and blood of Christ. Several people I talked to said that this was the purpose of the Sunday morning experience (I was cautioned by several people not to call it a service). "It's a celebration of the resurrection," said a few people, and the celebration has its climax during Holy Communion.

I talked to a few people about what their faith expressed on Sunday mornings mean to them. Most could not give me an answer. One person said it best: "If I could explain to you what it means to me, then it would be worthless." Another man gave it his best shot, though. He had grown up in the Orthodox church, and eventually made it his own faith. He said that what kept him coming back was the feeling of peace - "not peace in the world, peace between the ears" - that he felt.

There seems, in Orthodoxy, to be a continual theme of the sacred permeating life, but not mixing with it. "Orthodoxy never stops," said one man. Prayers, fasting, and vespers (a service in the middle of the week) all contribute to the constant devotion to the sacred that culminates on Sunday mornings with the Eucharist, union with Christ. Do Protestants feel like this? There's been a lot of talk over the past few years in American Protestant Christianity about not being a "Sunday morning Christian," about "Jesus wanting all of our life," about "God not being put in a box." But what does that actually mean in a tangible sense to a Protestant? To an Orthodox Christian, it means tangible, real things - like a prayer rope, or the smell of incense, or an icon. What do we Protestants have?

I enjoyed going, and I enjoyed talking to people. I'd like to make this a habit - going to different religious experiences and talking to people about them. It always helps me learn a bit more about myself, about my religion.

Recently I've been feeling like my personal faith is too rational. It's too intellectual. This, I suppose, springs from Presbyterianism being quite rational and intellectual. What I specifically mean is that I rarely feel like anything is sacred. Evangelical Protestantism tries it's best to affirm the value of all parts of life. It attempts to blur the lines between the sacred and profane (profane meaning secular, not religious) so that we see that all of life is sacred in some way. All things were created by God, therefore all things have some element of sacredness. "The holiness of the ordinary," as Walker Percy (a Catholic) once said. I fear, though, that in doing this we've actually lost any grasp of the sacred. The lines have blurred too much, and the profane has penetrated too deeply into the lives of American Protestants.

There is a part of the Divine Liturgy of Orthodoxy that says that we ought to lay aside the cares of this world. One man told me this is when he feels like he moves into the sacred. He feels that we have entered a different world, one where supernatural beings reside. Indeed, I felt like time had stopped, like I was hidden away in a new world.

How can I feel like I'm in a different world when I go to a church that meets in an elementary school? How can I feel like I'm in a different world when a laptop has to be used to run the service?

Thoughts?

Sam