Dear Administrator,
That the Ukies have lost many to assimilation and other Churches - that is a fact, of course. This fact of assimilation and loss of "our people" from our institutions (and to mixed marriages) is the grist for the Ukrainian mill of conferences, congresses, banquets et al.
From your point of view, which is a legitimate one, this loss indicates that the "ethnic Church" is slowly collapsing and that ethnicity as a cultural enterprise needs to be reexamined as the integral aspect of church membership that it has been until now.
As I said, that is one, perfectly legitimate interpretation of the statistics of loss.
It is not that I, and others like me, deny the statistics. It is that statistics are always open to more than one interpretation.
And it is our interpretations that give meaning to statistics, not the numbers themselves.
And our interpretations are always grounded on what we already subjectively believe to be true.
Statistics don't really change the way we already think about the relation of culture to religion or church.
Statistics do give shape to agendas of action, but these agendas very in accordance with our world-views that remain the same even before we come to the statistics.
And you know what my view of religion and culture is.
For me and many like me, culture is not only integrally united with religion and our Church - it is something that characterizes its shape, its theology, canonical traditions and even the way we pray and think of God.
Culture cannot therefore be easily removed from the equation here without, at the same time, doing damage to the very nature of our Eastern spirituality.
Our East Slavic ancestors not only accepted Byzantine Christianity (also the result of an amalgam of Greco-Latin spiritual culture), but they also, and in some respects more importantly, put the stamp of their own East Slavic world-view and spiritual values on it. So much so, in fact, that they created a new "blend" so to speak of Byzantine Christianity that is different from other "blends." (O.K., I'll wait for you to go and get your coffee now . . .
).
In fact, the East Slavic Christian tradition, that I will call "Kyivan," (without implying "Ukrainian only"), did adapt to other cultures, especially in Asia and Siberia, but without losing its unique perspective and spirituality that is a composite of a number of different historical traditions.
In time, the Kyivan tradition became dissected into a number of East Slavic national churches that we all know and love!
And even these national traditions have left their stamp on the further development of Kyivan Christianity.
On the level of language, there is no threat to the Kyivan tradition of having different languages in its liturgy, any more than it was threatened by the use of Ukrainian rather than Church Slavonic.
The Kyivan Church as part and parcel of the Ukrainian Church today constitute a Particular tradition that can be lived - or discarded.
People are free to choose to follow the tradition they have inherited by virtue of their birth in a particular community, or to choose another, or to choose to follow none.
That cannot be ultimately controlled.
The fact that our Church has lost this or that many people to other faith communities or to agnosticism does NOT mean, to us, that somehow our Church itself, the Kyivan tradition as contained within the contemporary Ukrainian Church, needs to "adapt" or lose its historic religious-cultural character in this point or that - or to become part of a larger "Byzantine jurisdiction."
You see, Sir, for us to do that would be to truly commit spiritual-cutlural suicide, to do real damage to our own Church.
The lessened numbers merely means, for us, that there are fewer adherents of our Kyivan-Ukrainian Church in the diaspora.
And we've ultimately know that this would happen.
But it is perhaps because of the fact that our Church is integrally (and now since 1991 even moreso) related to the Church in Ukraine and Europe that we see these losses as "local casualties on a given front" rather than as a herald of ecclesial collapse.
The Ukrainian Catholic Church is not only expanding into Kyiv, southern and eastern Ukraine. There are today UGCC parishes in Kazakhstan and Siberia (of course!).
And we are on better terms with our maligned Orthodox brothers in the UOC-KP and the UAOC than ever before in history. We take part in processions and services with them, they have nothing against working with us (the UOC-MP notwithstanding) and we walk as brothers and sisters hand in hand.
Before I thought of the Ukrainian Church as the Eparchy of Eastern Canada. Today, I have a much more "Catholic" understanding of the Kyivan Church of Ukraine that includes our brothers and sisters in the Ukrainian homeland and in Siberia, Australia and other places.
We, as Kyivan Christians of Ukraine, are called to witness to Christ from within the particular perspective that our ancestors have developed and handed down to us.
This can be expressed in different languages, and our Patriarch is encouraging that.
We truly do need to be open to this and to North Americans of other backgrounds and to make them feel welcome in the Kyivan Church - that they are called to become members of just as much as we.
I see this happening already even in the seat of Ukrainian national exclusivism that is Toronto.
The fact that we can adapt in different ways to North America does NOT have to mean that we will stop losing our members to other communities.
Perhaps it will slow it down - but I sincerely doubt it. The dynamics of assimilation come from within the cultural community involved, just as the dynamics that lead mainstream people to choose to become a member of a unique cultural community come from the greater society itself.
So we will not compound the loss of our members by trying to dilute the Kyivan tradition of our Church.
We do need to become more creative in other ways to keep them and to draw others in.
Our forebears faced the same sort of challenge successfully.
I'm sure we can do the same.
After all, their blood flows through our veins!
Alex
