I was improperly attired. I guess if you dress like Jesus, in sandals, they get rather cross.
I’ll give them or some other Orthodox church another try in a future week. And I will dress better.
I do intend to go to another church that’s nearby later this morning.
Doubting Mark 
Wow – that elicits a number of questions for me! Who was it that asked you to leave? They said it was because you were wearing sandals? I know there are some churches where people tend to dress up more – and others where people are not so dressy. At my church you would not have been kicked out for wearing sandals. Was this a church or a monastery?
To be fair, I was also wearing shorts. The person who told me to leave was the Father himself. There was a lesser minion who saw me and apparently didn’t want to break the news himself, so he went and got the boss.
I am sorry 😦 Orthodox generally feel that if we would dress up for an interview or a special occasion or to meet with the president, then we should give the same consideration for going to meet God for worship – it’s a special occasion. But from parish to parish, what that style of dress should be, or how strictly it would be enforced, really differs. So there are some parishes were people dress to the nines, others where people may be business casual at least – there are others where modesty is what is important, so the women may not be dressed up, but simply and covered….and some places they will ask you to leave, I suppose, if you aren’t dressed by their “code”, and other places, like my church, where there is no official dress code. I have certainly seen men, particularly young men sometimes come in shorts – I have gone in jeans sometimes. At my parish we have people coming from a wide variety of background, so there’s a lot of diversity in dress. Generally speaking, the more American converts in the parish, I feel the dress isn’t as fancy – whereas if I have gone to a church that is more heavily Greek or Arab, the people are dressed more formally. I dislike using broad brushstrokes, but there – that may be useful for perspective 🙂
This also makes me laugh a little – because in Eastern cultures, you would be asked to *remove* your shoes for being somewhere holy, as in how Moses was told to remove his shoes because he was standing on holy ground. My understanding is that the Ethiopian Orthodox still remove their shoes in church. There is an Ethiopian woman I saw once at our church who was just wearing her socks 🙂 I have heard some Westerners pondering why Moses was asked to remove his shoes – and they come up with all these other reasons – like, well, the shoes were made from leather, and that’s from a dead animal, so that’s unclean – but for myself, I think it was just because all over the East, since ancient times, this is what we do. Shoes get dirty, you wear them outside – so you don’t bring them into the house or the temple. Feet – being on the ground, are less clean then the rest of your body – so you mind them, you don’t touch holy things, or even other people or anything you respect, with your feet. This was also why it was considered such a huge insult for that Iraqi guy to throw a shoe – of all things – at George Bush. Okay, that’s enough rambling from me about feet 🙂 I’m genuinely sorry that you were not allowed to be at church this morning. I myself was sad I couldn’t go, I was didn’t feel well – so that makes two of us who wanted to go but couldn’t. Better luck for both of us next week!
I look forward to eventually sitting in on a service 🙂
This is so cool! I remember the first time I went to visit – I had asked a non-denominational pastor about how the ancient church worshiped, and he told me to check out an Orthodox church. It was neat to learn about the various ways you could still hear and see things that reflected times of persecution and even elements of the Jewish temple itself. Our khouria wrote a short guide that some may find useful about a first visit to an Orthodox church:
http://www.holycrossonline.org/our_ministries/parish_ministries/adult_education/12_things/
Enjoy the rest of your day!
I admire the fact that you refuse to be put off by this incident, but rather, persist in your search for a faith community you can call home. No doubt your soul is properly attired. God bless you with even more graces!
It will surprise me greatly (and probably Mark too) if Mark finds a faith community he can call home. Unless it’s the Sunday Assembly. I am looking forward to that review.
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it too, but also kind of dreading it. What if I give it a bad score?
Surely it won’t earn a bad score. If anything you might overcorrect and give it a worse score than it earns, in an effort to be scrupulously fair. Maybe you should take a believer with you on that one. Hm. Actually, that would be interesting. If the timing worked out I’d volunteer for that. If they’d let me in. 🙂
Well, I did go back, and I did give it the fairest score I could, given the criteria. I don’t blame them for keeping me from attending, and if anything, it gave me something interesting to write about.
Er, sorry, I meant that the Sunday Assembly surely won’t earn (i.e. deserve) a bad score. I get the impression you have been very fair and respectful everywhere you’ve been. (I also get the impression the wordpress.com comments are oddly threaded, so it’s hard to follow who’s responding to what.)
Thanks!
“I guess if you dress like Jesus, in sandals, they get rather cross.”
I see what you did there.
Guilty as charged.