Rule
One: Hang Loose,
But Communicate
If
you think you can benefit from some contact with other Orthodox Christian
students of all ethnic backgrounds at your school who are engaged in a spiritual
search similar to your own, there are all sorts of paths you may follow.
Don't
start off by trying to organize an organization.
You might not
Get
some idea of the resources available: you've got to work with what
If
there are hundreds of you (statistically,
at least)
at some large, urban campus,
you'll need some discipline. Learn
to set priorities and form some creative links with parishes around you.
If you commute to campus, use this opportunity to enrich your Pan-Orthodox
experiences while remaining active in your home parish and its organizations.
If
there are only a handful of you at some campus far away from an Orthodox parish,
you've got each other, and that's a lot.
There are many creative things you can do together to build an Orthodox
community. As in other areas, your "organization" should reflect
your needs and resources.
Rule
Two: Get Help
Search
out all other Orthodox Christians on campus - students, teachers, and workers
- to get acquainted and see of they are interested in getting together.
To accomplish this, you might ask at the admission's or registrar's
office to check if information on religious backgrounds is available; put
up a poster or notice on an appropriate bulletin board, asking Orthodox students
and faculty to meet with you or
to contact you; check departments that might be inclined to have Orthodox
professors or students, i.e. foreign languages, religion; make contact by
word of mouth.
Check
out the scene at the local parishes.
Speak to the priest. Chances
are he wants to help, but is
often afraid to make the first gesture.
If he is young and dynamic,
O.K., but don't confuse youth and dynamism with spirituality.
If
your campus is
in an area with many nearby Orthodox resources from which to choose,
by all means do things on a Pan-Orthodox
level. If a Pan-Orthodox clergy
association exists, it should be an ideal place to begin.
If the local inter-jurisdictional conflicts are very much apparent,
find quiet ways to bring people together.
Push when necessary. Remember,
the Church is always mystically united, even if some of its members occasionally
exhibit some disuniting tendencies.
There are always good people in quiet places.
The trick is to find them.
Rule
Three: Pay Attention
to Content
Every
place has its own historical experience, and every group its own unique reality.
There are many paths to the same end.
The important thing is to do it.
Many
colleges require that an "Orthodox Christian Fellowship" (whether
or not you call yourself "OCF" really isn't important) must be officially
constituted, complete with by-laws, before it will be permitted to exist on
that campus and to use its facilities.
Fine. Get that silly constitution
written and out of the way so you can get to work.
Nothing will bore potential members as quickly as a group which is
hung up on maintaining itself. When
we study some foreign language, it isn't our purpose to continuously conjugate
some stupidly irregular verb, but to understand and speak.
So get moving. How can
two people grow to love one another if they're always analyzing the precise
nature of their interpersonal relationship?
If
your group is so tiny as to have
neither the ways nor the means to organize according to some preconceived
pattern, don't drop the whole thing. Create!
Just eating together occasionally can be done in a liturgical and community-building
sort of way. You can talk together
under a tree or beside some babbling brook just as intently (if not more so)
as in an official meeting room. "Organize"
around tasks, not around organization.
Do what you need to do; you can worry about what to call
it later.
Rule
Four: Pay Attention
to Form
The
magic word here is "continuity."
Typically, a campus-based OCF will be active for a while under the
dedicated leadership of a handful of students or a sympathetic parish priest,
only to fall apart when those students graduate or when that priest is transferred.
This is a classic example where the content of the activities were
sufficiently well-formulated to hold the interest of the general membership,
but the form or method in which those activities were carried out did not
provide for the development of new leaders.
It
is not our purpose to create managerial elite.
A constant and genuine effort to bring new blood into positions of
increasing authority and responsibility is the best way to discourage the
formation of cliques of old-timers who, upon their departure from the campus
scene, leave no one prepared to take their places.
This holds true whether a particular OCF is a hierarchical bureaucracy
with constitutions and by-laws, or whether it is a loosey-goosey coming together
of a handful of friends. Be sure that the paths to leadership, formal or informal,
articulated or implied, are kept genuinely open. Incidentally, the blind reliance on charismatic leadership can be the shortest
path to various forms of dead-ended tyranny.
Others would love to get involved.
So give love a chance.
Rule
Five: "Let a
Hundred Flowers Bloom..."
We
all manifest our own spirituality in our own ways.
Some of us are deep green. Others
are soft yellow or rich brown. Some
of us need more water, others need more sunlight.
Each of us is a unique creation incapable of being cast in the mold
of another. We have all grown
from the same soil, but somehow, the seeds and nutrients have been different.
We
are also at different stages in our growth.
Some of us are beginning to blossom into the sunlight, while others
are still in the sheltering shade.
Some are ready for a profound touch with a Saint Gregory Palamas.
Others still don't understand what the Eucharist is.
How,
then, can one program be developed that will satisfy us all?
It can't. If we must be
all things to all people because all people are all things, then we must try
to be these things together. Let
us pray for a while, then let us dance for a while.
Let us study and talk, work and eat, struggle and laugh.
And if we are moving in the direction that we should be, wonder of
wonders, the dance becomes an extension of the liturgy, The idea becomes internalized,
the labor becomes nourishing, the effort becomes a joy.
In growing to become more of what we already are, we help others grow
to become more of themselves.
Peter
Mikuliak is
the former
Executive Secretary of
the SCOBA
Campus Commission. He
is presently administering
an alcoholism treatment program
in Tyonek,
Alaska.
Taken from the OCA Resource Handbook for Lay Ministries
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Department
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