Fr. David Khorey
OCAN Spiritual Advisor

Once people you meet learn you are a lawyer, you know what typically happens next. There’s usually a joke or maybe a snide comment, delivered perhaps as a nervous reaction. Telling someone you're a lawyer doesn't naturally put most people at ease, after all.

Then after the ice is broken comes step two -- the request for advice.  Maybe for them, maybe for a “friend,” but not for a fee (and usually not privileged, either). And if it turns out you are easier to talk to than the person initially thought, you will often get repeat “business” from them, typically on the same terms. We've all dealt with these interactions countless times throughout our careers.

But what about in the parish, especially as it grows or reaches out to others in the Orthodox and broader community?  How do we present and interact, as it becomes inevitably known that we are lawyers?  Is there a unique role that we play in these circumstances?  Is that role something that can and should be “pleasing to God, and edifying to our brothers and sisters?”

An Orthodox parish is a unique place.  In the shared chalice that is parish life, on one hand, profession or status or other markers of social identity are no longer of any utility or meaning. We are all brothers and sisters in Christ, one body.  On the other hand, each of us brings our own particular gifts, our own incarnate reality, to that chalice.  Looked at another way, we may all sin the same sins, but we each sin in our own particular and personal way.  All confessions are about the same topics, but no two are alike.

So as members of the parish we lose our identities as lawyers even as we keep them.  The priest hears our confessions, visits us when we are sick, preaches to us, ministers to us, and then asks for our advice.  Our brothers and sisters forgive us as we forgive them, receive the sacraments with us, work in the vineyard in countless ways side by side with us, and then seek our help.

Maybe we are annoyed by this.  Maybe we feel pressured by it.  Maybe we welcome it.

That last response is the one we should embrace, because whether you are “the” lawyer in the parish, or one of many, here is the truth -- this is the plan God had for you, and it is the grounds on which your salvation is to be experienced in faith.  For some of us, this is not an easy response. It involves putting people at ease.  It means we cannot forget others see us as lawyers, even as we seek refuge in the church from earthly cares. It means sacrifice. It means trying to counsel or advocate, with love.

As challenging as these efforts may seem, in the Church, through Christ our Lord and Savior, all things are possible.  And if we can be lawyers in this way—taking on the problems and burdens of those in the parish and addressing them in love and with love—then we can go into the world and practice law in that same way, bringing Christ to all we meet who find out we are lawyers.

7/11/2025