“There is one God who revealed Himself through Jesus Christ His Son, who is His Word which came forth from silence.” — St. Ignatius of Antioch, disciple of the Apostle John, Letter to the Magnesians, First Century
Central to the Orthodox Christian understanding of God is God’s silence. This silence, however, is not an absence, but the infinite presence of the uncreated God, from whom springs the being of all things, and yet is wholly other than all things.
Coming forth from the unfathomable silence of the Father, expressing the very mind of the uncreated God, is the Word of the Father, His Son, who shares His Divine Being. And this Word is spoken with the breath of the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father. The Father in His love brings creation into existence by the power of His Word and through the lifegiving breath of His Holy Spirit.
When creation is spoken into existence by the Word, the Logos, of God, He imparts to every created being its own logos, its own word: the imprint of meaning and God’s intention in His creation. These are the words spoken by the Word, that the silence of God may be heard. God strikes up a conversation with His creation, and it is in this conversation that we come to know God and come to know and be ourselves.
Following upon this is the inherent value of every created thing, every human person, and every human culture, when it lives in harmony with God’s words in His creation. No single human culture has pride of place; and all human language, spoken with integrity, is creation’s conversation with the ineffable divine word hidden at the core of every created thing.
This respect for culture and language as the locale in which the Word becomes incarnate is inherent within Holy Orthodoxy. It is also something of which one is reminded upon every visit to St. Nicholas Orthodox Church here in Juneau.
Greeting you there on the deacon doors leading back into the holy altar are the icons of Saints Cyril and Methodius. In the 800s, at the request of the Slavic people, these brothers traveled from Constantinople, and immersed themselves in Slavic culture and language. St. Cyril developed an alphabet for the language, which later became the Cyrillic alphabet (named for him by his successors), so that the Gospels and prayers could be translated into the language of the people, that the good news of the Word
Who took flesh in Jesus Christ could be given voice in the language and culture of that people and place.
Saints Cyril and Methodius stand on our iconostas as emblems of Holy Orthodoxy’s ethos, as this is exactly what took place between the Russian Orthodox missionaries and the First Peoples of Alaska. When St. Herman and his companions arrived in Kodiak, when St. Innokenty was with the peoples of the Aleutian Chain, and the Tlingit and Haida in the Southeast, they patiently listened for God’s Word expressed in the words and culture of the native people. They learned their languages and immersed themselves in their cultures. St. Innokenty developed the first Aleut alphabet. St. Yakov Netsvetov expanded upon his labors in the Atkan dialect. St. Innokenty began work on the first grammar of the Tlingit language and recorded several Tlingit stories in writing for the first time. Bilingual schools were opened in which the First Peoples were taught in their own languages, as well as Russian. From the earliest days of the Orthodox Church in Alaska, hymns of the Church were translated and sung in the language of the people, as they are to this day.
The Orthodox missionaries did not seek to make the Native peoples into Russians. Rather, they sought to bring them into conversation with the God who dwells in silence, and to show how this God had already begun the conversation in their own languages and cultures.
In the late 19th and 20th centuries, as Native languages in Alaska were silenced in American society, these languages were still being sung in the Holy Orthodox Church. As expressed by an elder of the Tlingit, it was in the Orthodox Church “where we could come and be ourselves.” God invites us all into this conversation, where we may come to be ourselves, as He made us to be.
• Maxim Gibson is the rector at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Juneau. “Living and Growing” is a weekly column written by different authors and submitted by local clergy and spiritual leaders. It appears every Saturday on the Juneau Empire’s Faith page.
