The room is tiny, with a low ceiling. The stone is exposed, although most of the surface is covered up by life-sized icons lining the walls. A crack – it's not big enough to be called a window – in the wall behind the altar is the only source of natural light. The rest of the room is illuminated by a row of candles, some real and some electric, lined up on the floor next to the icons. The altar is partially obscured by a screen with two icons on either side – the Virgin Mary on the left, the Angel Gabriel on the right. In the middle is a crucifix, but unlike the physiologically vivid and occasionally gruesome Catholic crucifixes, this one is plain and two-dimensional, almost like a cardboard cutout.
Somebody comes in through the door behind me. They approach the altar, light a candle, perform a bizarre and theatrical bowing motion, and when they straighten back up, they kiss the icon on the left twice – once on the face of Mary, and once on the feet of baby Jesus. When this little ritual is complete, they take their place with the rest of the congregation. There are a handful of seats, presumably for the elderly and infirm, but everyone stands if they can. I feel too embarrassed to look at my watch, but the stillness is becoming unbearably heavy; the air thickens with anticipation like the suffocating humidity before a rainstorm. Eventually the priest appears from behind the screen. He’s not a small man to begin with, but the way the vestments fall around his body, adding a few inches here and there, together with the smallness of the room, makes him look monstrous, like a bear on its hind legs. He begins to chant.
Blessed is the kingdom of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
Amen.
In peace let us pray to the Lord.
Lord have mercy.
The fog of incense from his thurible rapidly fills up the room. He carries on the litany of petitions to which the response is soothing and repetitive.
For students
Lord have mercy.
For our Archbishops John and Gregorius
Lord have mercy.
For our First Minister and for all the civil authorities
Lord have mercy.
For those at work
Lord have mercy.
For those in prison
Lord have mercy.
For those who journey
Lord have mercy.
Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages.
Amen.
The chant fills the room like blood being pumped to and from the heart – it goes out to the peripheries with the priest’s call and comes back with the response of the congregation, pulsating and pulsating, daddum daddum daddum. The flames of candles on the floor tremble at their own rapid pace. The flickering lights they cast on the icons bring the figures to life, dead saints from a thousand years ago. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. Before coming here, I had a sense of how the Orthodox boast about their antiquity, that theirs is the faith delivered to the apostles, handed down to us, entirely preserved from adulteration or decay. As I watch the spectacle of what they call the Divine Liturgy unfold, my initial impression is that they must surely be correct. The location, in the crypt of Wellington Church, only adds to the illusion that I have been momentarily transported into the catacombs of ancient Rome, worshipping in secret, scrawling fishes, crosses, and Chi-rhos on the walls with chalk. The Orthodox community of St Gabriel’s in Glasgow is hosted by Wellington Church, a Church of Scotland property, on University Avenue. The exterior of Wellington Church is heavily inspired by Greek architecture, although this is pure coincidence as it was built over a hundred years before the foundation of what is the newest of only three Orthodox parishes in Glasgow.
After a seemingly never-ending stream of introductory rites, petitions, supplications, and litanies, we move into more familiar territory. There is a brief scripture reading from a member of the congregation, from one of St Paul’s epistles, chanted awkwardly. There are some more prayers, chants and litanies that point towards the Gospel reading. When they conclude, the priest processes into the room with an exquisitely ornate copy of the Bible, reads a short passage, chanting of course, and gives a sermon that is so brief it could be written down on a postcard. There are more prayers, including some that seem like an echo of the petitions from the beginning. There is a recitation of the Nicene Creed and I note the absence of the Filioque which I had read about - the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father”, and the silence where Catholics would add “and from the Son” is brief enough to make you wonder why the two tribes fought so bitterly over one stupid Latin word. And yet, the history of Christianity is littered with stupid words that got people killed – homoousios, prosopon, Theotokos, sola scriptura and sola fide.
By this point I have fully lost track of what is going on, although I sense that we must be nearing the climax. The priest is talking about cherubim and seraphim and something about a thrice-holy hymn, and before I have a chance to wonder what this means, the congregation sings in response, instantly answering my question:
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Now I am once again standing on something that feels like terra firma as the priest starts reciting the words of institution – this is my body, this is my blood. I feel awe and excitement although it’s slightly contrived because I already know from my research that unlike the communion services at Greenview, where the breaking of bread and the little plastic cups of grape juice are treated as symbolic, this moment, and these words, if taken in the spirit in which they are intended, are meant to be literally true. The bread is literally The Body; the wine is literally The Blood. I test my heart, and my still predominantly skeptic brain to see if I believe this, but I find no clear answer. I maintain the creed of any good rationalist, of openness to evidence. “I will believe,” I say to Him, “if you show me.” But what would that even look like? I can’t even see what’s on the altar because the priest has his back to us, but I know deep down that if I walked over there and took a closer look, I would see that the bread is still bread, and the wine is still wine.
The congregation now walks up to receive communion, fed from the chalice by a spoon. I know that however taken in I may have been with the spectacle until this point, I must hold back – this a barrier I cannot cross yet. Nevertheless, something strange happens at the end. After everyone has taken their spoonful of wine-soaked bread, there is a final ritual to be performed. The priest recites the concluding prayers and then holds up a wooden cross, about a foot-and-half in length, and invites everyone to kiss it. The realisation enters my mind at this moment that this is not a sacrament and my non-membership in this church does not forbid me from joining in. I had taken communion in Greenview a handful of times previously, only after having reassured myself that the act was symbolic, therefore it couldn’t be sacrilege, and that I wasn’t committing myself to anything by doing it. Is this any different? Before I have the chance to interrogate this intrusive thought and convince myself to abandon it, my lips are touching the wood of the cross.
Against all reason, the kiss is as tender as it is spontaneous. Was it this moment that called Him out of His great silence towards me? Was I like an anxious teenage lover making the first move – a courageous leap of faith, allowing us both to reveal our feelings for each other? I have read that You exist, in dry and boring apologetic texts, and I have heard about Your great love from those who follow You, but I need more. If You are really there, let me see You. If You really love me, let me touch You. If You created me to know You, why are You hiding from me?
Years later Anna would kiss me with an analogous kiss, one that conjured something out of nothing – as in the Aristotelian sense, when a love between two people creates a transcendent third, which can be understood as the relationship itself. Standing in the doorway of her flat in Novar Drive, in a moment that I thought would be our farewell forever, she created us out of nothing, when, driven to desperation by my prudishness, she threw herself upon me. This kiss, just like that one, set in motion a chain of events that could never be undone, and eventually I would fall hopelessly in love. This is not a mawkish or sentimental perversion of dogma – it is the very mystery expressed countless times in the Scriptures, from Isaiah, through the Gospels, to Revelations, and summed up so beautifully in the Easter liturgy when we renew our baptismal vows:
Do you believe in God the Father, maker of heaven and earth?
I do.
Do you believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord?
I do.
Do you believe in the Holy Spirit?
I do.
My head is still spinning from the kiss when I leave the chapel into the tiny and brightly lit corridor which serves as the common room. The ceiling here is much, much higher, making the whole space liminal and uncanny, even dreamlike. The congregation is so small that they instantly recognise me as a newcomer and begin making conversation before I can run away. As they introduce themselves, all half dozen of them, I learn that they are almost exclusively Slavic, and the deacon is Greek, which is no surprise at all. On future visits I would meet a few more members, including a few Scottish converts. As I listen to the chit chat, the Greek deacon hands me a cup of boiling tea. My instinct is to drink it as a sort of social crutch, to fill the gaps where I have nothing to say, but I cannot do this without burning my tongue. After a few minutes the priest appears, liturgical vestments now removed, and stripped down to only his black cassock. He is still as tall as he seemed inside the room, but now I can see his face more clearly. He is Scottish, which would be revealed if not by his conversation, then by his accent, and if not by his accent, then by his features, which are dominated by a very stereotypical thick, ginger beard. Not a bright Irn Bru kind of ginger - that would take away far too much of his priestly dignity - but something darker and more subdued, like a Highland cow kind of ginger. His head is covered by a durag which makes him look far more Eastern than necessary, as if he got his religions mixed up. However, the most striking thing of all about Father Gabriel is how young he is – probably on the near side of 30.
“So how did you end up here?” he asks me.
“I’m...” I pause here, knowing exactly what I want to say, but not entirely sure if it would be right or tactful, “...a recovering atheist.”
“I see,” he nods solemnly, before going on to tell me his story. “I was a Catholic priest before this.”
Now he adds his own pause and looks truly contrite as he adds the punchline.
“I was a Jesuit.”
And so the Jesuits have entered the story again, this time as the butt of a joke. The figure of Fr. James Martin SJ looms large over the fraternity that once may have well been described as the Pope’s Schutzstaffel, and to many he and his order are now a symbol of lukewarmness, modernism and the general decline of tradition since the evil, communist, and homosexual Vatican II council. No doubt Father Gabriel here left the Church for precisely this reason, seeking something more rigid and conservative, and finding it, as many Catholic and Protestant dissidents nowadays do, in Orthodoxy. I instantly understood his little joke about the Jesuits, because I related to this mindset at the time, being also impressed and enthralled by the firmness and solidity of Orthodoxy. It was not until sometime later that I realised this was really rigor mortis.
My new infatuation with Eastern Christianity goes hand in hand with my new job at The Hotel, since both started approximately at the same time. In the same way that you fantasise about your love and sing wee songs that remind you of them, I spend my spare moments at work humming the chants I remembered from the liturgy while I polish my cutlery. Through the prayers of the mother of God... This takes me through to Christmas, where the previous chapter also ended. These last few months are like a strange little honeymoon, where everything is new and exciting – coming home at 2am after a wedding shift, then waking up a few hours later, Proud Mary and Loch Lomond still ringing in my ears, to go to Divine Liturgy in the Wellington Crypt at 7am. This is not what I had envisaged I would be doing 6 months after finishing my degree, but I am so swept up in it, and I let it happen. This is my life now, until my PhD starts next autumn.
This is part of a serial fiction project published in tandem with Ross Anderson at The Broken Quill.