A Visit to Saint Nicholas
I’ve driven by Saint Nicholas a thousand times. My kids go to high school maybe a quarter of a mile away. Saint Nicholas sits just off Southern Avenue in a little wedge off the warehouse district just off of downtown Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the shadow of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Expressway and the Rockfish & Aberdeen Railroad. We are in one of those parts of town some folks might call “transitional,” right on the edge of an area called Massey Hill, a historic neighborhood born over a century ago as a textile mill village. Over time, the mill village gave way to a now-historically Black neighborhood that’s several decades old. There’s a barely-hanging-on old Episcopal church in the same area, less than a mile away, called Good Shepherd. They might as well be a million miles apart.
I spent the morning setting up for some festivities related to my own church’s celebration of Saint Francis. As our resident person-of-a-Franciscan lens, I negotiated some bonus activities this year – beyond our customary Blessing of the Animals. The additional activities included a contemplative, creation-themed service where the band from my theatre company, Sweet Tea Shakespeare, was to play, and then an outdoor, plant-forward picnic. It did not make sense to me to bless animals and then eat their friends. This was either a good impulse or the work of the Holy Spirit. Whatever it was, I ended my setup early in between Holy Trinity’s morning services and had some extra time. I’d been planning to jaunt over to Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church, while is much closer to Holy Trinity in almost all senses: same neighborhood, same broad suburban profile, similar budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, similar influential parishioners, similar community impact, similar social standing in the community. As I looked at my watch and remembered that Saint Nicholas started earlier than the Greeks, I headed there instead. That was either the Holy Spirit or my desire to maximize my time on a busy day or a little nudge by Francis’s Lady Poverty that I should experience what church might have to be when it has to be more resourceful than the annual budgets of both Holy Trinity and Saints Constantine and Helen. Just a guess, but I’d put Saint Nicholas at an operation of maybe a tenth of said budgets. Maybe a little more. Maybe.
This was not my first experience with Orthodoxy exactly. I’ve walked into some Orthodox churches before. San Giorgio dei Greci in Venice. Holy Virgin Cathedral, a Russian Orthodox joint in San Francisco. Over the summer while at a seminary intensive, I also made it to The Episcopal Church’s Saint Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, which is a kind of liturgical playground heavily influenced by Orthodox worship. Years ago at Holy Trinity, we had a large art exhibition of modern-day icons and an accompanying icon writing workshop. I like me an icon.
The Saint Nicholas building is unimposing, a modestly composed cinder block building that is easy to imagine was once something else. Maybe a storefront for auto parts or widgets. I pulled open the sticky door to a room with white walls and a low ceiling. Red carpet that was well-kept but probably as old as the building. And life. So much life. The first thing I see are three men in green and gold vestments standing behind metal music stands. One is chanting. There’s a prayer station with an icon of Saint Nicholas just in front of me, a votive station. Another station just by the door with a crucifix adorned by a crown of thorns. There’s another station just past that with an icon of Mary holding a young Jesus. The walls are covered in icons, all roughly at eye level. There’s a family of parishioners standing together on a woven rug. Other parishioners are moving among other stations. I can’t tell what the first one is about, even after I check it later, but it’s on a side table that has a gold tasseled canopy over the icon there, and another icon on wall behind it. Then there are three icon stations across the front: Jesus, Mary with infant Jesus, and another saint. These three stations correspond with three other icons a few feet behind them on the stage. Parishioners cross themselves (with a deeper cross than we Episcopalians would make), bow, and start the process over. They do this three times at each station, with the second cross and bow usually accompanied by a three-fold kiss of whatever icon they’re in front of. Most parishioners also plant a votive candle at either the icon of Christ or the icon of the Theotokos. I see and greet a fellow professor of mine from Fayetteville State. We don’t know each other well, but she recognizes me. “I didn’t realize you were Orthodox,” she says. I say I’m exploring.
Over the course of the half hour, the vested men continue chanting the prayers, with occasional interjections from what I take to be the priest, who chimes in from an inner sanctuary where we can make out more icons and an altar behind a screen. Parishioners continue to file in, with older folks standing in front of pews that are up against the wall and families and younger parishioners standing in the middle of the room on the various rugs. Perhaps three of the forty or so people gathered come over to the corner where I stationed myself to grab either a liturgy book or a three-ring binder of the service music or a service leaflet. The vast majority of those gathered do not have anything: they’re working from memory throughout. Only the vested men, who move into other liturgical roles once the service proper begins, and the (lay?) song leaders are really using anything like music or text. The room fills with women in calf-length-or-longer dresses and headscarves (except for my professor friend) and what I think is an inordinate number of young men with fantastic haircuts and facial hair.
After the prayers are over, the service proper begins with a liturgy whose parts I largely recognize. Okay, like the architecture of it broadly – this Orthodox liturgy has a lot more components than most of ours in the Book of Common Prayer. There's the Liturgy of the Word and a Liturgy of the Table. There’s what seems like a Prayers of the People that’s repeated throughout the service, asking to bless the Metropolitan, Archbishop, all clergy, the President, civic leaders, armed forces, the sick, and so on. Thanks are also offered to Saint Nicholas and Saint Innocent – the saint of the day. There’s a Gospel procession – two, sort of. First, the priest presents a book he refers to as “Wisdom.” It is gold-plated with a colorful image on it. The priest presents it, faces the altar from the outer stage, kisses each post of the door to the inner sanctuary, and says things. Later, one of the men in green and gold vestments walks a different book around, a brown one, and reads from an Epistle. A while after that, the priest returns to the golden book and reads from the Gospel of Luke. There are Psalms. There’s the Lord’s Prayer. There’s the Gloria Patri. There’s a version of “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight.” There are lots of Alleluias. Everything is sung or chanted. The congregation knows the tunes deeply, especially the Black man who stands next to me in the corner, who sings beautifully. Though we pass through a lot of Psalms and antiphons and other texts – and we repeat many of them enough that I lose count over the hour and forty minute service, this only becomes a test of fortitude and stamina late in the service. Until then, it is nearly a constant flow of activity and participation.
Perhaps the most moving moment for me comes during the singing of Psalm 103. I know the words from before my days in The Episcopal Church: playing the soundtrack to the musical Godspell on repeat after seeing a production as a freshman in high school. Like then, but this time with a lovingly earnest and stirringly harmonized setting of these gathered singers in this tiny little postage stamp of a building, I believe what I am hearing and I know the people around me believe it, too. Forget not all his benefits. I think a liturgy is good if it reminds us we’re alive in the presence of God. I don’t need an emotional experience. I don’t need to think deeply. I don’t need to approve. But I do think liturgy ought to have aims sometimes like recovering joy. This rendering of Psalm 103 does that in a way I think I’ll remember.
For all the words in this text-heavy liturgy, the homily given by Hieromonk Andrew, the priest, was maybe – maybe – three minutes long. It might have been half that. He used the text from Luke 7 about Jesus raising the young man from the dead. Father Andrew offers a little history from Chalcedon and how important it was “back then” for the dead man’s mother to have either a husband or male children to keep her from becoming destitute. And that just as Jesus raised this man from the dead, we have a responsibility for raising up the two new catechumens he then introduced, a young couple. And just as Saint Innocent served on a mission to raise up the Aleut people. After his brief homily, he guided the couple to the back of the church and led an equally brief ritual of admission to the Catechumenate.
The Liturgy of the Table continued with liturgical pieces and moves I recognized as components of our Eucharistic prayer. Variations on words of institution. Lord’s Prayer (a few times). More Prayers for the Metropolitan, the Archbishop, Saint Innocent, the President, and so on. Dozens and dozens of instances of parishioners crossing themselves, sometimes with deep bows all the way to touching their feet. Children, noisy, moving in and out of the space. Sometimes adults. A line of people going up to the priest for the Host being served by spoon. Kiss the chalice. A special cloth for collecting crumbs. During the line-up, communicants crossed themselves if they wanted to receive the Host – exactly what we encourage people to do when they want a blessing instead of to receive Communion. My professor friend brought around unblessed bread to eat and I took it at her urging.
After the Liturgy of the Table, there was a rather lengthy sprinkling of a gold cross. This, like so many things in the service, occurred with a three-fold repetition of the same text. After this, there were announcements from Father Andrew and a parishioner named Olga. Olga talked about gathering supplies to take to a larger congregation in Cary, an hour away, so that they could be taken to Orthodox Churches affected by Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina. Father Andrew, in his thick New York accent, shared a story about how he lost his home in Hurricane Andrew back in the 1990s. Both Father Andrew and Hurricane Andrew require wind. These people, trained on a wordy liturgy, like to talk. The priest uses the gold cross later to bless someone whose birthday is this week. The man’s children take part with Father Andrew in moving the cross in the shape of a cross.
It took me a while to put together that Saint Nicholas is part of a denomination, the Orthodox Church of America, that claims descent from the Russian Orthodox church by way of those very missions to the Aleut in Alaska. I could have put priest together some of the clothing patterns in the room, the haircuts and beards here and there, and perhaps the waft of an accent here or there that some of these people came from far other places. I read up on the details a bit later – autocephaly and all that. The Russian thing was not overriding in any way I could detect. Probably the opposite. In the prayer I can claim to have heard only once in the lead up to the Eucharist, the priest prayed for the Archbishop and church and people of Ukraine, who faced an unnamed, evil, oppressive adversary. There’s a story there, I’m sure.
Squinting, I can see very much how the Book of Common Prayer leans on Orthodox liturgical moves in meaningful ways. We are, in a lot of cases, speaking the same language – in all senses of that word. We’re making many of the same moves. I never thought I’d accuse the Anglican tradition of being less than verbose, but by comparison, the English have a tidy economy to their liturgy that this Orthodox expression could not begin to comprehend. That is a gain and a loss: the simplicity of the Anglican approach is laudable, but perhaps just as frequently linguistic and liturgical ornament is worth the adventuring.
Perhaps because of the dozens of icons around the space, or because of the active veneration of the icons throughout the service, or maybe because of the constant motion of the service and its people in and out of the space, or maybe because of the blessed chaos of this liturgy on this little corner of this hybrid neighborhood on a Franciscan weekend where we are induced to see God in all possible expressions, I found the experience to be a true communion of saints. Some are static, frozen in images on the walls, a community of the past gazing at and participating with the community of the present. All alive, all mirrors of each other, each parishioner now a living icon.
Later in the day, we welcomed animals and my theatre company’s band for blessings and songs and we had our little salad picnic on the lawn at Holy Trinity. There are icons there, too. Different ones. But I think the communion likely was the same. His lovingkindess crowns thy days.