This is a true story about a new calendar Greek priest who visited America sometime around the early '90's. The story was told to me [Joanna] by an OCA priest who heard it directly from the visiting Greek priest.
During his stay in America, the visiting Greek priest wanted to visit churches of the heterodox denominations. Such a proliferation of denominations was not found in Greece. Whether this Greek priest had a blessing from his bishop to make these visits, is not known.
The Greek priest did visit many of the denominations, and then finally he got around to visiting a "spirit-filled" pentecostal-type church. He said that the "service" started out with some nice singing, but each song was a little more peppy [and less reverent, in his mind]. The people started clapping to the beat as the songs increased in tempo. Then the people stood and were swaying to the music, but not dancing. Suddenly many people broke into trance-like utterings of nonsense ["speaking-in-tongues"]. Some shouted. Some of the people were alone, but others formed into small groups.
The priest just stood there and observed all this. Eventually he thought he recognized a few words coming from a small group across the room. He made his way closer to that group to hear them better. He recognized the language as Greek – but it was a "street" Greek, similar to how the English language is spoken in the inner city slums. Everybody was speaking at once and this group was no different. It took a few moments for the priest to separate the voices. But, as he was able to separate the voices, he realized that they were each cursing God! in Greek!
That was the end of his visit. He ran out of there in fear.
Posts
