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The United States of America, being a relatively new world superpower, has been viewed as a symbol of religious freedom and economic opportunity for generations of immigrants seeking a new life from their troubled homelands.
America held the promise that all walks of life could prosper with the unalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” American values for these waves of immigrants – albeit influenced by Anglo-Saxon principles of monarchist Great Britain – forced naturalized citizens to make a personal decision on whether passing down their heritage and history to their American-born offspring is a priority.
I myself am a product of immigrant families that have settled in the country the past four generations. My mother comes from a Greek Orthodox immigrant family that settled in California from the 1910s through the 1970s. My father comes from a Polish and Italian Catholic family that settled in New Jersey and Pennsylvania in the late 1800s. After meeting through a fluke in the late 1980s, my mother took the chance to move across the country to wed my father, leaving her family behind to start a new life.
As you might imagine, my mother grew up in a tight-knit Greek family where Greek was her first language at home. She was also taught the traditions of cooking, baking, and dancing from my Yiayia, Pro-Yiayia, Great-Uncles and Great-Aunts.
Although self-described as defiant toward my Yiayia, she regularly attended church with her brother and mother at the local Orthodox Church (Annunciation GOC, Sacramento, CA) and held faith in God. Spanning many treasured memories spent with her family, she knew that carrying over her culture and Orthodoxy needed to be instilled in her interfaith marriage.
When it came time to move to New Jersey after the wedding in her hometown parish, her priorities came into full focus. She was informed by new neighbors of the nearby Orthodox Church, Saint Barbara GOC in Toms River, NJ, which enabled her to start establishing relationships in the community. By God’s grace, my father permitted my brother and I to be baptized in the Orthodox Church, since he respected my mother’s yearning to raise us in her faith.
Meanwhile, my paternal grandmother, a lovely yet staunch Catholic woman, wasn’t too keen on this at first, but eventually accepted (and respected) that her grandsons would be Orthodox Christians.
My childhood was blessed by being close with my father’s side of the family with frequent visits, family vacations, and many parties throughout the year; similar to my mother’s family bond. I appreciated Italian cuisine from an early age and enjoyed listening to my grandparents’s family histories. The only odd feeling was that my mother, brother and I were the only Greeks and Orthodox Christians, so we didn’t have the rest of our family with us to worship together and embrace the culture as a whole like most of the other peers I grew up with at Saint Barbara.
Nonetheless, my mother was adamant to bring us to Liturgy, Greek Dancing, and GOYA. Coincidentally, the more we chose to give ourselves to trust in God in times of adversity, the more we grew together as a family unit in Orthodoxy. Indeed, realizing that we were born into the treasure that is the True Faith and that Greek culture is enlivened by the Faith.
My father, feeling the grace that the Church provided, chose on his own accord to convert to Orthodox Christianity. We organically made familial ties with people, eventually having koumbaroi (spiritual family). I also became very inspired by Folk and Laika music in Greece, embraced meeting Greek Americans at events, and am finally learning Greek in my early 30s. I have felt such a sense of honor for my Greek heritage that I can feel full-blooded in spirit.
The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America has done an excellent job for simultaneously accessing the Faith to all Americans and being a hub for the Diaspora Greek communities to continue their traditions. Even with the tools provided, it is from that point up to the Greek Americans to “choose it or lose it.”
Speaking as an ethnically half-Greek, and even knowing people in the Diaspora that are less in percentage, the traditions can still live on strong and we can share it with our friends outside the community. We need to remind ourselves that the Church cannot be taken for granted in America, as it can be in Greece where the Church is accessible in every neighborhood in the cities and villages.
If we don’t make a conscientious choice to teach the next generations our roots, we will risk a complete lack of recognition of where we come from as a diaspora. We honor our American nationality for the opportunities and securities it has provided us, but we should also recognize our responsibility to preserve our ethnic roots and live the Orthodox Way of Life.