A spiritual journey

Michele Marr

Last weekend the congregation of St. Barnabas Orthodox Church

completed a long, arduous journey -- a spiritual journey through Great

Lent to Pascha, the day their church calls the Feast of Feasts, the true

Revelation -- a feast more commonly known in the U.S. as Easter.

Whether Easter in the West, or Pascha in the East, this Christian

feast is a movable feast. It’s not fixed to a particular calendar day

like Christmas.

“Pascha, Easter, must fall on the Sunday after the first full moon

after the vernal equinox,” said Father. Wayne Wilson, pastor of St.

Barnabas.

The rules for calculating the date of the feast are essentially the

same throughout Christendom, but the calendars used for the calculation

are different.

Western churches -- Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant -- use the

reformed Gregorian calendar to arrive at the date for Easter. The East,

however, still figures the date based on the Julian calendar.

“In some years, like last year, the feast falls on the same day, but

in other years the dates are much farther apart, like this year,” Wilson

said. “Easter in the West was on March 31.”

Great Lent, a nearly seven-week difficult pilgrimage of prayer and

fasting that paves the way to Pascha, is sometimes described as a “bright

sadness.” It is a journey from sorrow and repentance to the bright,

transcendent joy of Easter.

It has been more than 20 years since Wilson and many of the early

members of St. Barnabas embarked on a journey of another sort that

brought them to where they are today.

“In the 60s and 70s many of us were involved in Christian work and

evangelism. I was involved with Campus Crusade for Christ,” said Wilson.

He and the others were fervent about their faith, yet they began to

wonder if there was something more to it than they knew. Their questions

set them on a quest that ultimately led them from their evangelical and

Protestant roots to Orthodoxy.

In the 1970s the congregation joined a larger, loose federation of

like-minded churches called, at the time, the Evangelical Orthodox

Church. The small group of about 15 met for home-based Bible studies in

Huntington Beach. They took the name of St. Barnabas early on.

“We would get visitors from everywhere,” Wilson explained.

People began tell him the church was an encouraging place to be. When

it came time to pick a patron saint for the congregation, St. Barnabas,

whose name means “son of encouragement,” seemed natural.

“We hoped that through his prayers and intercessions we would maintain

that same spirit,” said Wilson.

In February of 1987 Wilson and the others were among nearly 2,000

people across the U.S. and Canada, most associated with the Evangelical

Orthodox Church, who were received into the Eastern Orthodox Church under

the Antiochian Archdiocese by his Eminence Metropolitan Philip.

The congregation grew. They met for a time at the YMCA in Huntington

Beach.

Then they met for nearly seven years at a old school building on

Lighthouse Lane.

When the congregation swelled to more than 100 members it began to

look for a larger place to meet and to worship. The search took them to

Costa Mesa, where the congregation bought its current home on Cadillac

Avenue.

Last year, the church celebrated 15 years in the Antiochian Orthodox

Christian Archdiocese of North America. It is now one of more than a

dozen Antiochian parishes in Southern California and the closest parish

to Huntington Beach.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

[email protected]