Nick Abou-Assaly: Transcript

Lebanese/Eastern Orthodox chanting traditions, Cedar Rapids
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(Chanting)
I’m Nick AbouAssaly, and I live in Marion. The Lebanese community in Cedar Rapids or in the Cedar Rapids area has been here since the late 1800s. In the late 1800s, people started leaving Lebanon to escape the Ottoman oppression. But the civil war of the mid-seventies really escalated, accelerated the emigration and so a large group of people came to the United States and especially Cedar Rapids.

Most of the people in Cedar Rapids came from the same area of Lebanon, a small cluster of villages. And so they tend to be of the same religion, which is Orthodox Christian.

The word Orthodox means true belief or true faith, so Orthodox Christianity claims to be the continuously existing church that was founded by the Apostles.

(Chanting)
The Lebanese Orthodox belong to the Antiochian branch of the Orthodox church. And the Antiochian church was founded by Saints Peter and Paul in the year 34 A.D. Our church traditions are really unchanged from the time that the original church was set up. And you can see that in how we do things. For example, we chant everything.

(Chanting)
The chanting really teaches the theology because many people did not read in the early church, and so you learn the theology from the chanting.

(Chanting)
We have icons all over the walls, which tell the stories of the bible events, events of Christ’s life and the Saints. And by looking at those icons you learn the theology behind that icon. And again that’s because people didn’t read in the early church.

(Chanting)
As Orthodox Christianity grew into Eastern Europe and Russia and all over the world, it took on the language of the people. For a long time the church of Antioch was heavily influenced by the Greek presence and Greek Church. And so the liturgical language was Greek for quite a long time, until about a hundred years ago. And it’s still very heavily used in the liturgy in Lebanon. In the Middle East, you know, Greek is still heavily used in the liturgy, along with Arabic.

(Chanting)
As the immigrant populations have become more assimilated and more American, and additional generations have been born in America, I think those churches have transitioned from their original language to English.

I became interested in chanting—I think it’s just always been part of my life. Not only from church, but my father was a chanter, and is still today the Arabic chanter in our church. His father was a chanter in the village in Lebanon. And I’m sure that his father was and his father.

My father always chanted on long trips in the car, always chanted at home, so it was always part of our life. It was just a regular thing, whenever we went to visit family in Michigan or Ohio. Wherever we were going on long trips, we chanted almost all the time during the entire trip. Sometimes it would get old, but, you know, that’s where we learned it. And it just sort of became part of us.

The church is just a part of our life. It is our culture as much as it is our faith.