Our Holy Fathers, Radiant Stars!

O Christ our God, you are above all glory, for you have established our Holy Fathers as radiant stars on earth, and through them you have guided us all to the true faith.—Troparion of the Council Fathers.

This past Sunday at St. George Romanian Catholic Church, we recognized the decades of service offered by George Todos, who began cantoring as a boy and has now, in his eighties, retired from full-time cantoring duties. Pastor Fr. Fred Peterson presented George with an engraved plaque and other tokens of the parish’s gratitude. After Liturgy, we celebrated with a meal in the church basement.

This was an especially appropriate Sunday for such an event, being the Sunday of the Fathers of the First Council of Nicea—a time when we revere those by through whose tireless efforts the faith was handed down to us intact. In his comments honoring George, Fr. Fred spoke of the sacred duty that George had performed in preserving and handing on the distinctive chant and traditions of the Romanian Catholic Church.

Fr. Fred noted that those duties are now being passed on to a new generation. I am one of those to whom they are passing. I have been helping with the cantoring as St. George for some months now, even cantoring solo on a few occassions.

It was moving to see this old man retiring with such grace, showered such gratitude and to think that one day I may be in the same place. Humbling. The whole experience filled me with tremendous appreciation not only for “Old George” (as we call him, for there is a younger George who cantors as well), Fr. Fred and St. George parish, but for the Church as a whole, bearer of such treasures worth guarding, nurturing, passing on.

I think this is one of the things that I love most about the Byzantine Church—the sense of profound connection to both the particular and the universal. One feels a deep sense of belonging to one’s parish community, of sharing an urgent mission, right here in this time and place, with these very brothers and sisters; and at the same time, one feels linked with battleship chains to the deep, ancient past of the faith.

And so we celebrate labors of the God-bearing Fathers in the fourth century in far away Nicea, even as we celebrate the labors of Cantor Emeritus George Todos right here in Aurora in the twentieth century. Guided by the light of these “radiant stars” we carry the Faith forward into the third millenium.