BOSTON, MA – Visiting professor of Dogmatic Theology Chrysostomos Stamoulis from the University of Thessaloniki to Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology delivered a thoughtful lecture at the Archbishop Iakovos Library on the topic “The Refugees and the Orthodox Church.”
The lecture was attended by students, professors, and also guests from the Boston area. Rev. Emmanuel Claps, professor of Dogmatic Theology at Holy Cross introduced Stamoulis.
At the beginning of the lecture, photographs of the refugees were shown arriving on the island of Lesbos where the locals showed them love, care, and support, despite their economic hardships due to the continuous economic crisis that has hit Greece the last six years.
Professor Stamoulis said that “in a place such as America, a place of such powerful migration, in a place which has experienced the turbulence of fierce racial disturbances and clashes, and coming, as I do from Greece, which today is Europe’s largest camp for migrants from the East as a whole, it would make sense to talk about the mystery of alterity. About the Other; about the migrant and migration, about the mystery of the stranger.
“That is because, if we are to be honest to God and other people, we have to say that the whole history of divine Dispensation, from the creation of the world until its eschatological destination, is a history of the migration of a people of pilgrims and strangers. This is why the great Gregory the Theologian states emphatically that the Church is made up, essentially, of a nation of migrants, who are waiting expectantly for the miracle.”
Stamoulis also said that “if we are to see the God of Orthodoxy, we have to look the people of Orthodoxy squarely in the face. Discourse about God and discourse about the Church require and, at the same time, seek, that is infer, discourse about people. Behold then, this land of the encounter of the large and little, of the important and the unimportant, this world of the great and the small, the human person. Whoever this person is and their God is, this is their Church, this is their world, this is their culture.
“A startling articulation of such a reality, scandalously challenging to the compromised intellect, can be found in the texts of the Fathers of the Church, whose restrained voice seems to be lost among the certainties and self-sufficiency – self-satisfaction, why not- of the authoritative and institutional patterns of the present. Where bombast and the virtual reality of life, which has been promoted in order to save the structure of the historical transgressions of the past, blatantly ignore that «the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.
“For some, of course, the Church is restricted to ritual actions, to some sort of consummation. Or to institutional activities which are, at the same time removed from the truth of real life. What their vision lacks is the liturgy before the liturgy, as well as the liturgy after the liturgy. We therefore often find ourselves faced with concepts and ways of thinking of purity, which introduce a kind of ‘Orthodox idolatry’ and ‘spirituality’ where it is impossible to identify God with the world and with people. In any case, how can He be identified with the profane and the inferior?
“And if, of course, this is the sickness of ecstatic, idealistic and, in the end, ideological Christianity, which ignores history, nature and even people themselves, then at the opposite pole we often encounter the sickness of sterile activism, which may at times be ascetic, and which ignores the sacramental dimension of the Church and identifies indiscriminately with whatever satisfies people’s psychological sense of propriety.
“In each case, the Other is entirely absent. Whether we recognize this or not is irrelevant. I say this because it is clear that ecstatic Christianity without its historical and natural flesh ignores its neighbor. The same is true, however, of active Christianity, when the Other is not a point of contact, the point at which you and I and we attend church, but the locus where the selfish contributions of the benefactor, the savior, can be made manifest, together with their superiority in the field of charitable works.
“Thoughts such as these, as well as a good number of suspicions redolent of reality as it exists, often make us seek the real difference between values which are entirely at variance or diametrically opposite. Such as, for example, mission and proselytism, love and obligation, freedom and necessity, parallel paths which sometimes, holding hands in an absurd milieu, hug each other in erotic embrace.”
Professor Chrysostomos Stamoulis with his professor at Durham University in England Rev. Dr. George and Presbytera Asimina Dragas