Posts
Giorgi Lomsadze
June 26, 2012
A bearded Orthodox priest solemnly gliding by on rollerblades is not a usual sight in Georgia. Or elsewhere, for that matter. Yet along a bridge and into Tbilisi's downtown area a priest in flowing robes did glide the other day. Granted, the Bible chronicles stranger things, but several alarmed local priests promptly appeared on the scene and ordered the holy roller to give up his sinful ways.
In fact, the coasting reverend was an actor and the miraculous sight was part of a movie project, but the real clerics declared that the scene ridiculed the Georgian Orthodox Church and demanded a halt to production. Police had to intervene between the film crew and the priests, who were backed up by seminary students. In the end, the movie-makers beat a retreat, reported the Netgazeti.ge news site.
Back in the Soviet era, parodying priests in movies was frequent and keenly encouraged by the state. A confrontation between a rotund, gluttonous priest and a relentless anarchist ("Jesus was slim. What made you gain weight?") is a trademark of the 1970s classic, The Adventures of Lazarus. One of the best known Georgian movies from the same period, The Wishing Tree, features a frivolous village priest with a taste for the bottle.
But those days are long gone. Now, Georgia is in the midst of a cultural war between those who push for Western-European-style secularism, and those who view the 1,675-year-old Georgian Orthodox Church as the very essence of national identity.
The Georgian Orthodox Church, widely viewed as the country's most trusted institution, has taken on the Harry Potter series, Halloween celebrations and any sacrilegious work of fiction -- a tendency that liberal critics say amounts to encroachments on freedom of expression.
The confrontation between the faithful and the liberals mostly rages online, but sometimes it spills into the streets. In comments to Netgazeti, Levan Ghlonti, the director of the film with the skating priest, essentially reiterated the point made by The Adventures of Lazarus anarchist.
Georgian priests make no bones about driving fancy SUVs, but make a big deal out of rollerblades, he said.
I'm Georgian, Student of The Spiritual Academy & Seminary in Tbilisi, and I also agree that this is a cynicism against orthodox priests, because Christ's servants in Georgia respects the nation. This is a disrespect to Christ Faith.
ReplyDeleteI see many expressions by 'progressive elements' in Georgian society whose recourse to freedom of expression amounts to adolescent 'acting out' of profanation atavisms. I am frequently shocked by the puerility of attacks against traditional Georgian culture.
ReplyDeleteI have to say the Saakashvili administration has done much to encourage this. Often attacks originate from among his staff, such as the ad hominem smear of Patriarch Ilia. The discourse is marked by a perverse immaturity that mirrors the whole of political life in that country stunted by so much foreign and domestic tyranny.
The current regime offers no improvement over historical precedent. The fact that Saakashvili is a client of the US makes him vulnerable to internationalist social policies of neocon and whatever you want to call that Allbright-Clinton nexus (perhaps "Cleptonomic Replutocrat' might suit).
In no corner of US foreign policy is there any room for a society led by an Orthodox spiritual vision. The only vision tolerated will be client status as a 3rd-tier nation in a western-dominated economic sphere.
I didn't intend to make this a screed against Georgian and US gov't but it's inevitable when you connect the dots of political and economic influence.
Recently, my Georgian spouse and I, with our daughter, attended a banquet put on by the Georgian Embassy at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. The food was great, but Saakashvili was effusive in singing litanies of praise for St. Ronnie, making clear the neocon vision for Georgia.
My wife posed the only substantive and challenging question of the president, about the fate of Davit-Garedji monastery land at the Azerbaijan border. He was quick to belittle 'passionate' outcry over his cavalier giveaway of ancient ecclesiastic territory, and called and end to questions, obviously ruffled by Popodia's pointed query.
Saakashvili's callous dismissal of Church concerns shows his hand on cultural and religious matters. As president of an overwhelmingly Orthodox nation, he went out of his way rhetorically to emphasize his protean identity, as a Jew among Georgian Jews (all 5,000 of them?) Azeri Muslim amongst Azeri Georgians, Armenian amongst Armenian Georgians. No mention of the 95+% of Georgians who confess Orthodoxy. As though they were so strong in his administration's favor that it went without saying. Not.
His speech seems to come from Sec. Hilary Clinton's bulletin points about remaking Georgian society in defiance of its actual makeup, with a few tabs from the blotter that begot Reichschancellor Karlheinz Roverer's psychedelic vision of a reality a great empire's leaders make up as they will. Needless to say, I am not a great fan of this man who would help a foreign power dismantle the few remnants of a once great civilization.
Aw, I don't see what wrong with a priest rollerblading. I could see someone in the younger generation who may have a calling but who also likes to rollerblade or even skateboard. Since when is either a sin? I think the Georgians need to lighten up a little. The Soviet era is over and they need to stop living in the past and see what's happening today. It's stuff like this what inspires people to make fun of Christians :(
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