Growing up poor in a Protestant Evangelical Pentecostal preacher's family, I learned at an early age the meaning of "hypocrisy" long before I knew how to spell the word itself.
I found it in the hard eyes of those self-styled super spiritual guides populating the church board, who would weekly dissect the doctrinal nuances of Dad's sermons, and Dad himself if they could, even as they insisted his paltry salary should be enough to live on.
That he drove a school bus part-time while Mom worked as a waitress or in sales at J.C. Penney was a scandal! After all, the drafty old parsonage with a coal furnace that tended to cough up black smoke through the vents in the heart of winter may not be perfect, but it was free.
The nerve! After all, with a crippled and retarded daughter in his family, the pastor was indeed blessed to get the pulpit in any church teaching faith healing! Girl's not healed, after all. Pastor's faith must be lacking.
So, I was surprised to find some painful, yet oddly inspiring similarities in the short stories penned by Fr. Stephen Sinari in his book "Big In Heaven." The tales of Fr. Naum and the all-too-human, sometimes saintly diamonds in the rough who comprise St. Alexander the Whirling Dervish Orthodox Church and the ethnic Philadelphia neighborhood it serves, are fictional. They are also true.
In the four years since I was baptized into the Eastern Orthodox faith, I've learned our Truth is not limited to history and dogma but shines forth in parables, allegories and the stylized stories that buoy the holiness and sacrifices of our those saints and martyrs populating our icon walls and temples. The same is true for the characters Fr. Stephen shares.
Still, I suspect that much in "Big In Heaven" borders on the autobiographical. After all, the author is an OCA priest whose nearly 40 years of ministry have spanned inner-city parish pastoral callings as well as extensive work on the streets serving the homeless, and at-risk and trafficked teens.
"Big In Heaven" makes anyone with faith, and particularly those raised in or converted into Orthodoxy, consider anew the unfathomable depths of God's mercy and grace to his soiled children, staggering toward personal Golgothas and the hope of salvation and theosis.
It was early in the book, where Fr. Stephen introduces Curtis, "an altar server who new the Liturgy in a way not even [Fr.] Naum could understand." Curtis "knew when to have the censer ready, how to cut the bread for the nafora, when to light the candles, how to ready the boys for the processions, when to boil the water for the chalice, even the best way to hold the cloth at Communion time."
Curtis, Naum's bishop had once remarked, was the best server he had ever seen. This same Curtis, a 35-year-old born with Down syndrome deemed unworthy of believer's baptism at a local Protestant church due to his handicaps, but welcomed into Orthodoxy.
Fr. Stephen's writes of a parishioner, seeing Curtis donning a hand-me-down cassock to enter the altar and serve, declaring: "Curtis is a genius over there, in heaven."
That declaration brought tears to my eyes, and I remembered the childlike, halting voice of my now 70-year-old sister, rocking and holding a doll while singing "Jesus loves me, this I know . . . ."
I highly recommend this book with one minor caveat: In future reprintings, how about some additiional parenthetical or by footnote definitions or context for the "inside Orthodoxy" and liturgical terms used from Greek or Slavonic languages?
