For Eric Hilbun, an aspiring convert to the Orthodox faith, the stimulus of the five senses drew him in at the small Greek church on Grandview Avenue, St. Elias the Prophet.“All the senses are involved in worship,” Hilbun explained. “This is a soul, a completeness, and I hadn’t felt that before.”

The Orthodox service has chanting verse for the ears, the art of the iconography and the tall ceiling of the sanctuary for the eyes, the sweet pungent smell of burning incense for the nose. With the hands, believers touch the vestments of Father Adrian Letz’s blue robe as he walks past — mimicking a Gospel story of a woman healed with the touch of Christ’s robes.

For the mouth, the culmination of the service is the Eucharist, where full members consume bread and wine, partaking in the body and blood of Christ.

Hilbun isn’t ready for that sacrament yet — he’s a catechumen, a pupil learning church doctrine on a path to baptism and chrismation.

The liturgy follows a stricter pattern than Protestant or even Roman Catholic services. Congregants are asked to stand almost the entire service. The call and response of prayers and hymns with the priest and the cantor is expressed in a monotonic chant, even the Scripture readings. Only the sermon is spoken in plain prose.

The chanting songs are mainly in the English vernacular, with some Greek mixed in. The Lord’s Prayer is spoken in several languages: English, Romanian, Ukrainian and Greek. The liturgy can be hard to follow, jumping from page to page while the longtime parishioners know it by heart. The byzantine rituals of the church were part of the allure to Hilbun, though, as if it forced him to work harder to seek God than the evangelical services with which the Texas native had been more familiar.

“Standing through the whole thing is its own form of worship,” Hilbun said. “Was it easy for Christ on the cross? No.”

The liturgy, while repetitive, closely resembled what believers had recited for nearly 2,000 years. “You hear it, it becomes a part of you.” The service closes with a fellowship lunch in an annex to the church. The meal itself is a fasting ritual that focuses members on sacrifice with God. Orthodox churches have fasting periods where meat is forbidden throughout the year, including in August.

But while the Orthodox faithful forgo even fish in their fasting time, with a fellowship of shrimp, watermelons, hummus dip, mushrooms and grape-leaf wrapped dolmades, the sacrifice of the fasting is not an ascetic meal of bread and water.

Immigrant church

After gathering in an apartment building downtown, the first St. Elias the Prophet Greek Orthodox Church was consecrated in 1957 on Rockdale Road. Many of the congregants were recent immigrantswho found work in factories such as the Dubuque Packing Co. Services were in Greek, a tradition that still held when Mantea Kapatanakas Schmid joined the church in 1989.

“I moved to Dubuque and most of the people here were from Greece,” said Schmid, a second-generation Greek American who had lived in assimilated communities in Indiana and Illinois. “I’m the only one in my family who can speak Greek still, and it’s because I went to a church where everyone spoke Greek.” As many of the older parishioners passed away, Schmid said she noticed a new wave of young men coming to St. Elias for services and joining the church. These new parishioners didn’t have a Greek or an Orthodox background; instead they were searching for deeper meaning in the ancient rituals of the Orthodox faith.

She said this was a phenomenon coming to other Orthodox congregations. “As a cradle Orthodox, you’re born into it and you just accept it,” Schmid said. “They’re looking for something more traditional. We’re as traditional as it gets. We’re pretty much unchanged from the original church.”

One of the first young men joining the church was Eric’s son — Jesse Hilbun, who as a teenager searched his faith and pored through religious texts he found while working at the Carnegie-Stout Public Library. Now he assists Father Letz on Sundays as an altar server or acolyte.

“I stumbled upon some books that sparked my curiosity,” Jesse said. “I wanted to stay a Christian but I was skeptical of the evangelical church. Orthodoxy is more deeply rooted in Christian history and tradition. There were a lot deeper roots to draw from, spiritually.”