Every July our small parish along the Maine coast holds its annual Greek Heritage Festival. Events of this type are standard fare throughout Greek America, serving a dual role. On the one hand, helping to fund in part, the pressing financial requirements of sustaining a viable church community and on the other, showcasing its religious and cultural roots. This year, like years past, I have had a ringside seat watching the substantial efforts of the members of this small but dynamic community of two hundred or so families.
Our church community, named after its patron Saint, St. Demetrios, is celebrating its one hundredth anniversary. It was first founded in 1909 by the first Greek immigrant settlers to what was then a thriving industrial center in a mostly rural state of fisherman, farmers and lumberjacks. The changes since then have been deep seated and widespread yet the area retains its small town roots and traditional character in many respects. Like an island of calm in a tumultuous sea, our community has weathered the history of the twentieth century and the tectonic changes of the twenty first.
Anyone who has ever been involved in the effort that goes into one of these festivals knows full well the incredible amount of planning, organization and downright hard back-breaking work that is required to achieve even a modicum of success. The women of our community start baking months before it takes place and they produce tray upon tray of all manner of delicious Greek pastries. Then there is the cooking that must be done to feed the hundreds of people who come in droves to eat and enjoy the family atmosphere that only a close knit extended family can create. Parishoners donate most of the food and over the years the equipment that is used. Brochures, posters and signs are created and distributed. Tables, chairs and two huge tents are erected, displays are set up, and people are drafted to do the countless tasks involved. There are people directing traffic, welcoming guests and providing information, selling tickets and collecting money, serving food, cooking food in the kitchen and grilling meat outside, selling pastries and drinks, brewing and serving coffee, washing dishes and collecting trash, manning food stands, a bookstore, people acting as guides and answering questions within the church itself. I could go on and on. That the young and old members of our community can give so willingly and selflessly of themselves makes me proud. What amazes me however, is the way they go about their business, always with a smile on their face without arguments or recriminations when things go wrong as they invariably do in such an undertaking.
All of this is not lost on the larger community we live in. Guests come to these festivals I think as much to partake of the sense of family and closeness as they do the food, music and dancing. As one guest remarked to me: "What you have here is very special." You can see it in their eyes as the watch our kids dance the Greek folk dances, as they wander through our church staring at the iconography and as they celebrate life with food and music.
The face of Greek Orthodox communities is changing. Their immigrant character altered by inter-marriage, the influx of converts, and the emergence of third and fourth generations. Yet, surprisingly from my limited perspective I find that these very same people are giving our community a new vitality and being changed in turn. Rather than rejecting the ethnic context in which Orthodoxy was introduced to a new land they are in many ways adopting, preserving and building on it. Some misguided people lament that ethnicity is irrelevant to the Orthodox experience while completely missing the fact that it is the cup in which that experience is offered. It is the content of the cup that we hope to drink from but it is the cup that makes it possible for us to drink the contents.
Festivals ultimately represent not only an important outreach to the greater community, a way of exposing the non-Orthodox to Orthodoxy and its eternal message, they also serve to bring our religious communities together working toward a common goal and thus creating islands of stability, love and faith. Many of our neighbors have come to believe that the best way to live a Christian life is in isolation from any parish or church, figuring out for themselves how they should pray, act, and understand their faith. Lost in all of this is that we can only truly understand ourselves, we can only lay claim to the image of God within us, when we recognize that God is shared love, not self-love. God is openness, exchange, solidarity, self-giving. The essential truth of our very nature demands that we fully embrace our relationships with others. In order to live with God in our lives, we must learn to live with others in koinonia and not isolation. May our children, and their children and their children's children never forget that importnat lesson.
More photos in the Photo Album link on the Left Margin
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