I was
born and raised in Pasadena, California. I’m of English descent and one of my
ancestors actually did come over aboard the Mayflower. So you probably are
wondering why I became involved in the Greek Orthodox tradition. I was raised a
Presbyterian and when I was eight I had a friend who was Greek and who I played
baseball with. I used to spend the night at his house on the weekends and he
took me to his church in Pasadena. That was my first exposure to Orthodox
Christianity and I didn’t understand much because it was a heavily Greek
congregation and I didn’t speak any Greek at all.
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| Fr. Josiah Trenham |
When I
was 18 I had just gone to college and I met a woman there who became my wife,
Catherine (and who is in the background of the video standing next to Father
Josiah) and she was the youngest of six and was from Mount Shasta. Two of her
older brothers had become Orthodox Christians and before had been Methodist.
That was my second interaction with Orthodoxy and I began to court her. Her
brothers sent me books and they sent me letters and began to engage me about
religion because they didn’t want their sister to marry a Presbyterian. We
started corresponding and that was at a time when I was in college and I was
very interested in it. That began about a five year process of reading and at
first I tried to make them Presbyterian but they won. We now have 9 kids and
we’ve been married for almost 24 years.
I’ve been
at this church since the early 90’s and before that I spent a year in one of
our orphanages in Mexico. I was ordained in 93 and before that I was an
assistant priest at a wonderful parish up in Santa Barbara. I did my
undergraduate at a place called Westmont College which is up in Santa Barbara
and after that I went to what is called the Reform Theological Seminary which
is Presbyterian which was during the time I was going through the process of
becoming Orthodox.
As a
matter of fact when I went to the seminary I wrote out a list of all of the
difference between the Reform Faith and the Orthodox Faith. I then did independent
studies for a semester trying to solve these problems and I graduated from a
school called Westminster Theological Seminary, which is an old Presbyterian
seminary, and then I did a PHD with an Orthodox scholar in the northern part of
England. My thesis was on “Marriage and Virginity According to St. John
Chrysostom” who was the patriarch of Constantinople and the greatest preacher
in the history of the church. He died in 407 A.D. He was actually born in
Antioch but his name means “Golden Mouth”.
Then he
became a saint and became known as St. John Chrysostom. I learned everything
from him. He is everything to me. He taught me how to pray and he is very much
alive in Christ. Most people think that when a saint dies they are in some
other place and if you pray to them you are practicing a form of idolatry.
Presbyterians may think that but Orthodox never thinks of Christ as being apart
from the saints. The scriptures say that he is wonderful or wondrous and though
their bodies rest in the grave their souls are very much alive.
Chrysostom
was the most incredible bishop in the world at that time. We have volumes of
his writing and they are all very practical. There are homilies that he
preached where he teaches us how to live as a family and my dissertation was
pretty much on family life. What is it like to live as Christians in the home
and also in the monastery? Marriage and virginity both. I read him every day
and I will until I’m dead.
The
Church says St. Paul was the mouth of Christ and St. John Chrysostom is the
mouth of Paul He wrote commentaries on all of Paul’s letters and they are still
read. After I got my doctorate I’ve been a pastor and that is what I’ve been
doing here. This is a young community which was started in 1992 and the
previous pastor left to go back East. We started with about 12 people and we
had our original meetings at room at the Baptist University here in Riverside.
After
that we rented a store front on Indiana and Tyler and then we moved to an
industrial warehouse off of Van Buren and then in 1999 we purchased this
property which was owned by a wonderful retired botanist from UCR named Dr
Homer Chapman who was at that time 101 years old. We didn’t have enough money
to buy it but I wrote him a letter and said we really would like to buy it and
this is what we can offer. He wrote back and very graciously said that even
though our offer was 35% less than he wanted he told us fine build your church.
He died a few years later at 106 and he wrote letters in support of us when we
were going before the city. We bought it in 1999 and started building in 2001
and built the hall and occupied it in 2002. Two years later we purchased the
last vacant piece next door which was three acres and we designed our church
temple which we just finished which is our second phase. We got three phases
approved by the city which are the hall our offices are in and the church and
then next a school as an education center which we are hoping to do in the
future.
So what
did I find interesting about the Orthodox Religion? Well I’m tempted to say,
“Everything!” However I would say the immediate draw for me was the orthodox
liturgy. The actual worship service. It left me absolutely undone and done and
fulfilled. With the Presbyterians we had great preachers but the worship itself
sitting down and saying your prayers while on your rear and as a young man I
knew there was no example of that in the Bible. There are hundreds of
references to positions in prayer in the Bible but there is only one that is
about sitting down.
The
Orthodox take worship very seriously and it is not about entertainment. I most
of the liturgy the priest has his back to you and isn’t even looking at you.
There is however the sense of the grandeur of God and the majesty of the Holy
Trinity and this being something that the congregation was doing for him and
not for themselves. That deeply affected me. The beauty of the churches
themselves, the iconography and the writings of history really got to me.
The
Presbyterian Church was changing so rapidly and I knew enough to know that if
this was a matter of truth why is there so much change? As a young man it made
me feel like I was not confident in my church. I got married at twenty and I
remember as I was preparing to get married as a 19 year old asking myself: “I
wonder if I have kids will the church be anything like it was when I was
growing up?”
And I
answered that by saying that I doubted it so why would I invest in it? Why
would I invest in something I didn’t have any confidence in? With Orthodoxy
well someone told me a joke about it. How many Orthodox Bishops does it take to
change a light bulb? And the answer is “CHANGE?” I like that and it has been
almost 21 years now since I’ve been Orthodox.
What is
the foundation of my beliefs? It is the entire church built upon the belief in
the Man who is Jesus Christ! We call him a word in Greek Theanthro which is a
combination words in Greek which means “The God Man.” He is the person upon
which the whole church is built. His life and his death and resurrection are
everything to us. It is what we celebrate constantly year round and every
Sunday we have the celebration of the feast and the Church is what he
established. He said in the New Testament that He would build His Church and he
has. The Church is intimately connected to him.
As a
matter of fact we call it a “Body” because it is a living organism within which
he dwells. It is a temple for his birth as well as his father and the Holy
Spirit. That is the foundation of the church. We view the Church as something
that is human because otherwise we wouldn’t be in it and also imperfect in that
sense allowing there to be sinners like me. At the same time it is not just
human but also divine as something that God had invested in and has promised to
uphold as a beacon of light. Jesus called his disciples a city set up on a hill
as a light of the world. That certainly is what it has been for me in my life.
This
spiritual life is not just about experiences so much as it is an encounter with
the Living God. The heart of what an Orthodox things of salvation is not about
forgiveness or a courtroom idea of God declaring us OK. It is much more of an
organic interaction between God and man which takes place in the church through
what we call the Holy Mystery where we actually believe we mesh with God and he
meshes with us and we are transformed by that. That is at the heart of every
liturgy which looking at it from an objective view point is what it is and what
it says it is which is full of miracles.
Often
Pentecostals come and visit here. I tell them that while speaking in tongues
may be one thing but what we have in the liturgy is so mind blowing and beyond
anything the Pentecostal experience may have that it is also a very personal
thing. There is a beautiful historical account of something that took place at
the end of the tenth century around 988. The great prince of Kiev at the time
was Vladimir. His grandmother Olga had become Christian and had gone to
Constantinople to be baptized and she was living among the Slavs who were all
pagan at that time. She had become Christian and she tried to convince her son
to become Christian but he never did. Her Grandson Vladimir did.
The way
that he did was he sent out delegates al over the world to Rome, Baghdad, and
he wanted to explore Catholicism and Islam and also sent them to
Constantinople. They wrote him a letter in which they said that when they
entered the great church of Santa Sophia, which was the queen of Christian
churches in the world, that they did not know if they were in Heaven or on
earth and that they were overwhelmed by the beauty and that the only thing that
they knew was that their God dwelt amongst men. That was enough for him and he
told them OK to send Bishops and priests and and that is how Russia ended up
being converted to Christianity in 988. That experiences that the ambassadors
had really resonated with me and I said that what really hit me was the
service.
St. Paul
even mentions it and he says in I Corinthians 14 That the worship of the early
church was such that an unbeliever who entered into the middle of a service
would be pierced through the heart and their conscience would be quickened and
that they would fall down on their faces and declare that God is certainly in
your midst. This is the effect that the services have and what he experienced
in the First Century I experienced in the Twentieth and the ambassadors
experienced in the Tenth Century.
That is
because that is what the liturgy actually is because the church is an outgrowth
but after it is concentrated it becomes a beacon and an outpost of Heaven and
that the liturgy is actually an ascent. St. Paul describes it as an ascent to
Mount Zion and a Heavenly Jerusalem where there is an intermingling of angels
and me, saints and sinners and where God comes to dwell amongst us at the call
of the priest the Holy Spirit descends. The gifts that we offer to God he takes
and transforms. He gives us grapes and wheat and the ground and we take it and
we make the best things we can such as bread and wine and give them to him and
he takes them back and transforms them to be the body and blood of his son and
feeds us the divine. That is incredible. That happens in every single liturgy.
That is a lot better than speaking in tongues.
We have a
lot of pleasant people here in the sense of constituency. We have about 450
active and about half of them are from about 15 different countries. They are
first and second generation immigrants and the other half of the parish are
persons who have become orthodox and their children from this area. There is a
real mix and we use predominantly English at about 95% and I can speak some
Spanish since I spoke a year in Mexico and can actually do the whole service in
Spanish. We do a little Spanish and a little Arabic and I can read in the Greek
language so we use a little Greek and a little Arabic and some Slavonic which
is the old Russian and a little bit of Spanish just just for people whom
English is a difficulty. Not enough to make it difficult for English speakers
but enough to cheer up those who are just here.
This is a
unique moment in American history. It has really only been in the last twenty
years that Orthodox Christianity has become an option for Americans. Prior to
that it was for foreigners very much like it still is in England and I go back
to England every year and have for 15 years. There is a lot of Orthodox in
England but still the English people will view Orthodox Christianity as
something for Cypriots because there are so many Cypriots there or that’s for
Russians. They like it in general and they probably know more about Orthodox
Christianity than Americans do. In America Orthodoxy is not viewed just as a
foreign faith. It is viewed really as part of the religious collage and there
are a million Orthodox here now. We’ve had enough American converts now that
people who want traditional Christianity without faddism and without change it
is a very attractive feature. I think that is what is most important for
Americans, to see Orthodox Christianity as something that they could consider
and has now become accessible to them.
A Church
with a 2,000 year history of worship and faith and martyrs and saints that
hasn’t blown with the wind.
An interview with Fr. Josiah Trenham
Source: http://journeytoorthodoxy.com/2011/09/in-the-shadow-of-st-john-chrysostom/
CONVERSATION