I was first moved aesthetically, spiritually and emotionally by the beauty in the Eastern Churches; the art and the music; the iconography was something I hadn’t encountered before and the polyphony and chants are sublime and calming. I have never studied music but the voice and the rhythm of the chants made me want to learn.
I had no idea how legalistic, partisan, inhospitable and ugly the Eastern Ontario Roman Catholic churches would turn out to be, but more on that on other pages and posts.
For posterity’s sake, below are some of the voices and songs that I loved. Psalm 140 is one of the first Psalms I found, and I still recall being struck by the words and how they seemed to suit how I felt at the time, even though they were thousands of years old. I knew the Psalms were old poems (I couldn’t have told you the difference between Proverbs and the Psalms at that time) being chanted ~ with emotionally powerful accompanying music ~ and words that could easily be spoken by people living today.
I know the pious sentiments in the music below isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but it resonated with me a lot back in 2014, 2015. When I lived in South Korea, Korean people were fond of English pop cultural things that I was not impressed with, so I have no hesitation expressing appreciation for Eastern European cultural assets that young, cool, secular Russians or Serbians might be embarrassed about or dislike.
I didn’t start out wanting to tell the world about why and how I became intrigued by Christianity and ‘God’ – that was actually private and personal. But the suspicion and hesitation of the priests to baptize me caused me to start to explain my journey into faith, and it became an ugly and ultimately dangerous power struggle and mimetic conflict. I have shared and said more than I ever intended. Anyhow, I hope more dedicated RCC loyalists discover the beauty of the Eastern Church; the art, music, devotional writings, theology. Roman Catholics seems to me to be military, legalistic and attempts to analyze and argue and rationalize itself to God through theology. It is possible to intuit one’s way to God through beauty, aesthetics, and emotion. Thoughts float by but feelings are body-based. Music and art and literature ~ the spoken and written word ~ are where our bodies (w/ all our generational trauma in need of healing) speak to our minds, and then we recognize universal truths about each other in artistic creation and performance.
Fayrouz Agni Parthene | Reema Rahbany
St. John the Baptist Monastery – Douma, April 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th4a6FozNlw