Met. Saba: The Church Offers Authentic Masculinity and Femininity

Met. Saba. Photo: svots.edu

ENGLEWOOD, NJ — Met. Saba of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America says recent media portrayals of Orthodoxy as either a “feminine” or newly “masculine” religion miss the pastoral reality seen across parishes nationwide.

Reports highlighting an influx of young men entering the Church do not reflect the full picture, the metropolitan notes in a recent reflection titled, "Male and Female He Created Them, in Complementarity." While some congregations are receiving more single men, priests across the Archdiocese consistently observe entire families — fathers, mothers, and children — embracing the Orthodox faith in equal or greater numbers.

“The Church does not view man and woman in terms of dominance or control, but in terms of complementarity,” His Eminence writes, emphasizing that both men and women find in Orthodoxy “a deep spiritual environment, an integrated way of life, and a peace they desire to offer to their children.”

Met. Saba cautions against interpreting demographic changes through cultural or ideological lenses. Different eras, countries, and political contexts shape church attendance differently, he says, noting that in communist-dominated contexts, the elderly predominated in church life. "Is it reasonable," he asks, "to rely on that observation alone to claim that Christianity is a religion 'for the old'?"

His Eminence also stresses that Orthodox anthropology maintains the dignity of both sexes. He highlights families who exhibit “a mature awareness of complementarity between man and woman — not conflict, not competition,” and points to Scripture’s command that husbands love their wives “as Christ loved the Church.”

Authentic spiritual life, he writes, requires both men and women to struggle against the passions that distort their identities: “A man does not gain his freedom by dominating a woman, nor by feminizing himself… A woman does not gain her freedom by becoming a second man.”

In pastoral experience, he says, both sexes seek forms of reassurance often lacking in contemporary society. “A man seeks in his wife the tenderness of the mother he misses,” he observes, while many women seek in their husbands “the reassurance of the father she misses.”

Many young adults raised in a culture “of comfort, softness, and an inability to face life’s hardships,” he writes, are drawn to the Church’s ascetic life — fasting, prostrations, confession, and an unsoftened reading of the Gospel. Above all, they find a spiritual fatherhood society often fails to provide.

Even if certain parishes attract more men than women, Met. Saba insists such trends should neither alarm nor define the Church. “The Holy Spirit bloweth where it will,” he says. The Church’s task is to welcome all who come and to care for them faithfully.

The hierarch concludes by urging scholars to study this phenomenon with “professional and in-depth” rigor, saying solid research “would benefit current and future generations — as well as the entire Church.”

Previously, UOJ reported on another reflection of Met. Saba's in which he wrote about the topic of self-criticism.

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