A Pilgrim’s Podvig
by Priest John Whiteford
One
of the more ironic moments of my life occurred on May 20th, 2007. I was
standing in front of the
Kremlin in Moscow. I was by then a priest, and
so was attired accordingly in the typical black riassa, pectoral cross,
and skufia
of a Russian Priest. A family from Mexico came up and asked,
in English, if they could take their picture with me – no doubt
assuming I was part of the native scenery – and I obliged. How did a
former Protestant from Texas end up a Russian Orthodox Priest? It’s a
long story, so let me start from the beginning.
St. Basil's Cathedral,
outside the Kremlin
Background
I
was raised in a very religious Protestant home, a fifth generation
Nazarene…
which means that my family (on my mother's side) has been in that
denomination
about as long as it has existed. In my home, my mother,
four brothers, and I,
with very rare exception, attended Sunday School, the Sunday morning
service, the Sunday evening service, Wednesday night prayer
meetings,
and we were there every night of the week when there was a “revival”
going on, which was not infrequently.
My father also came from
a very religious background – the
"Campbellite" Church of Christ. He was
born in Texas, grew up in Missouri, and then moved with his family to
California during the Dust Bowl
period. He was a
World War II veteran,
who made a very good living as a pipe-fitter
and insulator who worked
with asbestos.
He knew the contents of Scripture better than my mother
did, but by the time I was a child, he rarely went to Church, and when
he did, he went to the Nazarene Church with the rest of us. I
discovered later that he fit into a pattern I have observed in people
associated with that denomination – he had reached the point that he
decided that most churches were filled with hypocrites, and so felt no
need to have anything to do with them, but he maintained a faith of his
own. As a result, he did not have much of an impact on my religious
education, beyond telling some stories about some of the controversies
that raged in the Church of Christ (stories very similar to those I
later heard from other burnt out former members of that Church), and my
recollection of certain passages of Scripture he was fond of quoting.
My
parents divorced when I was about 6, and then when I was 9 my mother
moved me and my brothers from California to Murray,
Kentucky. She was a
good bit younger than my father, and was from Chicago, but decided to
move to Murray because her mother had retired there. Aside from that,
however, it was not a very practical decision, because there wasn’t
much work to be had there. The nearest “big city” was Paducah
(which is
right between Possum
Trot and Monkeys
Eyebrow), and we were about 50
miles further into the "boonies." Economically, this was a big step down
for us. We had literally lived on Country
Club Lane, in a suburban
Southern California town (Grand
Terrace),
and now we had moved to "Tobacco
Road." This small town in western Kentucky was not a very
welcoming place for outsiders... at least not ones who were in the
habit of negatively comparing Murray to California. We were considered
“furnurs”
(foreigners). In my first year there, the Fourth grade, I got
into
52 fights. I remember the number, because I kept score on my desk to
scare off challengers (49 wins, 3 losses). A year and a half later we moved to
Houston, where one of my uncles lived, and where work was much more
plentiful. Had I moved from California straight to Texas, I might not
have liked it nearly so much, but after my time in Murray, Kentucky,
I quickly came to love it. Later in my life, I came to have a better
appreciation for rural life, and wish I had been less hasty to look
down on the people of Murray than I was in the Fouth Grade.
From my earliest childhood, well into
my teens, my mother always read to us in the evening. When we were
younger, she read Bible stories. As we got older she read other books
that she thought would be edifying, such as stories
about missionaries
in Africa. In the eighth grade I began reading the Bible on
my own,
from cover to cover, and read it through several times before I was
half way through High School. However, I was curious about other
religions too, and began reading about them at an early age. One of the
things I did when I was bored as a child was to flip through the World
Book Encyclopedia, and read anything that caught my attention
(this was
in the days before video games, VHS, DVDs, DVRs, and the Internet). I
remember reading the article about the “Eastern Orthodox Church” before
I moved from California, so some time before I was ten. So I
knew
that such a Church existed, but didn’t think too much of it. I figured
it was a more exotic form of Roman Catholicism… and in my home, we were
pretty much taught that Roman Catholics were idolaters, and that when
they died they just took them down to the basement and put them into a
chute straight to hell.
At the age of twelve I became interested
in Islam,
because of some Iranian students who lived in an apartment complex we
had moved to. Then, I studied Judaism. In the eighth grade I
took a correspondence course from the Knights
of Columbus, and studied
Roman Catholicism. Despite what I had been taught, I found it
attractive on many levels, but could not square it in the end with what
I believed Scripture taught.
In the ninth grade, I got to know a United
Pentecostal girl who I had a crush on, and she invited me to
her
Church, and so I went. The first service I attended happened to be the
first Sunday of the new year, and when the pastor got up to speak he
said “I know most of us thought we would never see this day come… but
this year, something’s gonna happen… that’s a prophecy!” A few weeks
later, they had an “evangelist”
come and preach. It seems he was not getting the emotional reaction
that a
successful sermon was expected to have, when he began to declare
“Someone is gonna die tonight! God has told me that there is someone
here tonight that – if they don’t come down to this altar
[in
Evangelical circles, this is a kneeling rail] and repent, they are
gonna
die… tonight! You’ve been committing the same sins, over and over
again, and God is giving you just one more chance.” I was used to
sermons designed to scare the pants off of you, but this was on a whole
new level. So for a few months, I really got into this Church, sang in
the choir, and attended pretty much every service. However, as time
went on, and emotions began to fade… and nothing developed with the
girl who had gotten me to go there in the first place, I went back to
my old Nazarene Church.
Years later, my mother’s friend from work, who
happened to be a United Pentecostal asked me to go to Church with her
on a Sunday evening. By that time I was in college, studying to be a
Nazarene minister, but I went, mostly out of curiosity and a little bit
of nostalgia. It just so happened that this was the first Sunday of
another new year, and – I am not making this up – the pastor got up and
said “I know most of us thought we would never see this day…” and
before the night was through I heard another “Someone is gonna die
tonight” message that was remarkably similar to the one I had heard in
the Ninth grade.
Into
the Spiritual Abyss
Later
in high school, I got a job in a bookstore, and because it was my job
to check new books in, I acquired a number of new interests. For
example, I began studying Japanese, because of a book that I ran across
that explained how to read and write the Kanji
(which are the
characters borrowed from Chinese).
Since there were no Japanese people
around that I knew, but there were a number of Chinese students, I
switched my study to Chinese, and that is how I eventually met my wife
(though we did not begin dating until after I was out of high school).
I also became interested in the martial arts,
eastern mysticism
(Buddhism,
Taoism,
Hinduism),
and even the Occult.
I strayed very far
from God during that time, though I continued going to Church regularly
(because the idea of not going to Church was something that my mother’s
strict discipline had beaten out of me many years prior). I
should
point out that I never could bring myself to directly deny Christ.
During that time, when people would ask me what religion I was, I would
say that I was a Christ-zen
(kinda Christian… kinda Buddhist). And
though I had hypothesized that perhaps Christ was another incarnation
of Krishna,
or the Buddha,
I could never quite reconcile what I knew
about Christ from Scripture with these non-Christian ideas, but I chose
to simply shrug my shoulders, and leave that question unresolved,
because I knew that there had to be something more to the spiritual
life than I had yet experienced, and I hoped that maybe I was finding
it in these other religions. I had little idea of Biblical scholarship
at that time, but I had heard enough from those who raised doubts about
the reliability of the Scriptures, that I figured that maybe some of
the things in Scripture that did not fit with these other religions
were simply errors that had crept in over the centuries. Despite these
uncertainties, I had a sense that I was heading in the right direction,
and a confidence that I had not known before. I was the master of my
fate (I thought), but I was soon to learn differently… the hard way.
After
I graduated from high school, my plan was to become a police officer
(partly because I figured it would tie into my interest in martial
arts). However, it just so happened that the Houston
Police Department
decided to raise the age of entry into the police academy that year,
and so I was not able to go forward with that plan for the time being.
So I simply began working full time.
The three big things in
my life at that time were my girlfriend (not to be confused with my
wife, whom I knew at this time, but had not yet started dating), Kung
Fu, and the mix of Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, and Occult ideas
that I
found so fascinating. I was very much into a Taoist book of divination,
called the “I
Ching.” I used it regularly, and thought that its
predictions were remarkably accurate. One evening, however, all the
indications from the I Ching were that horrible things were about to
happen to me. Too much time has passed for me to remember all the
details, but I do remember that one of the predictions was that my
relationship with my girlfriend would end, though as of that point,
nothing else had led me to think that was likely. For the
first
time, I had a sense that I was dabbling with something evil. It was
almost as if I could feel the laughter of demons. I think that was the
last time I used that book. Not many days later, something unexpectedly
started a chain reaction in my life that seemed to fulfill the
predictions of that evening.
I would often walk to work, because
of the number of cars in the family, and sometimes just to save gas.
One day, as I was leaving work at around 5:00 p.m., I was jogging on my
way home, feeling really good, and was probably in the best shape of my
life. I ran across a foot-bridge over Greens Bayou,
and just on the
other side there was a tree. On a whim, I decided to do a jumping skip
kick on the tree. I had done it before, and so didn’t think anything of
it. It was not kicking the tree which was the problem, but the landing.
I landed on my left foot, with all my weight, and the root of the tree
caused my left ankle to twist, and I heard a loud “pop”. My ankle
swelled immediately to the size of a melon, and I had to remove my
shoe, and hop on my right foot to the nearest phone. I was unable to
walk without crutches for some time thereafter. Obviously, Kung Fu was
out of the picture for the time being. A few days later, my
girlfriend broke up with me, and I began to sink into a very deep
depression that went on for about six months. I could hardly
eat
during that time. I had thoughts of suicide on a regular basis, and
couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.
Back to Square One
Eventually,
it began to dawn on me that I was where I was because I had turned away
from God, and so I began to repent. I finally began to again feel a
peace and a joy that eventually overcame my depression, and got me out
of the spiritual pit that I thought I would never be free from again. I
burned all of my occult books, my rather complete collection of the
works of Bhagwan
Shree Rajneesh, and any other books that I felt were
not pleasing to God. I would reach a point where I had overcome the
“big sins” in my life, but then God always had more that I hadn’t
thought of that I began to repent of as well. I had a spiritual
reawakening, that was very much in line with the tradition I had been
raised in. And I began to feel a call to the ministry. In particular, I
felt a call to be a missionary, and began making plans to attend
Southern
Nazarene University, and to major in “Religion” (which in
Holiness-Movement-speak
was a word the meaning of which could range
from “Theology” to “spirituality” (thus the phrases “He got religion”
and “give me that old time religion”)… it was not a “world religions”
program). They have since changed the name of the program to “Theology
and Ministry."
Matushka Patricia, when
a baby in Guizhou,
China. She moved to Hong Kong
at the age of 6, and to the United States at the age of 16.
That button she is
wearing is a Mao
button.
It was during this reawakening that I began to
date my future wife, and before I went off to SNU, we were formally
engaged to be married, though while I was at school we were separated
by a good 500 miles, long distance was much more expensive then, there
was no internet, and so we would talk for about 30 minutes a week, and
otherwise communicated by letter.
Studying for the Ministry
I
came to SNU with the convictions and zeal of a new convert, because I
had reconverted, and the experience was so deep and powerful, that
while I had many things I did not know, there were a few things that I
no longer doubted. I no longer doubted the truth of the Christian
Faith, the truth of Scripture, or who Christ was and is. But as I began
my first semester, I had a sense that some of my professors were very
anxious to pour cold water over their eager and zealous young students.
In one class, a professor began his first lecture by talking about how
the Jews had waited for centuries for the coming of Christ, but that
when He came, they missed Him, because they had built up walls around
their faith to protect it. And just like the Pharisees, he said, “you
too have
built up walls around your faith.” He then proceeded to explain that he
was going to tear down those walls, so that we could build our faith on
a surer foundation. In the coming months, I came to see what he had in
mind, and I can’t say that I was a very cooperative participant.
When
one of these professors would make a statement that I found
questionable, I would go and research the issue, and then when the
subject would come back up, I would mention what I had found. For the
most part, my professors at SNU were open to having their views
challenged, and the back and forth of these discussions spurred me to
dig deeper into many foundational questions of theology and Scripture –
questions that would probably have gone unexamined if my instructors
had been more conservative Nazarenes.
Many of my classmates
struck me as very passive, and seemed to just accept what they were
taught as a given, since the professors would be the ones to know best.
However, I had a few classmates that were more inclined to question
what we were taught, and we soon became friends. Two of these
classmates were from Nazarene backgrounds, and two were from
Charismatic
backgrounds, and were attending a Vineyard
Church (which
was sort of a non-denominational denomination which had services that
were very laid back, and music that was very much “Top-40”
worship
(rock band, “worship team”, etc). It was the “Un-Church”. People would
kick up their feet, and pop open a coke. With rare exceptions, you
would not see a suit and tie… but jeans, t-shirts, Bermuda shorts, and
Hawaiian shirts. They were focused on spiritual gifts, spiritual
warfare, casting out demons, healing the sick, and prophecy. I found a
lot of it very attractive, but I was never able to bring myself to join
it. There were elements of their doctrine that I could not accept. For
example they
believed in eternal
security (“once saved, always saved”), and Nazarenes
decidedly did not. Also, my previous experience with
Pentecostalism left me a little more skeptical of some of the excesses
that I saw.
While at school, my studies went on several
tracks at once: there was the material I had to read for class; there
was the material I read to counter the material I had to read for
class; there was the material I read because I became interested in a
particular topic; and then there was the material I read because I was
looking for something deeper. The third and fourth tracks evolved over
time. In the first year or so, I was especially focused on digging
deeper into the Holiness Movement that the Nazarene Church was a part
of. I read Charles
Finney’s works, almost completely. I also read many
other Holiness writers… John Wesley,
of course; William
and Catherine
Booth, founders of the Salvation
Army (which is a denomination, not
just a charity); Hannah
Whitall Smith; Samuel
Logan Brengle; Phineas
F. Bresee; “Uncle”
Bud Robinson; A.M.
Hills; H. Orton
Wiley; Watchman
Nee; and many other lesser known writers. I also studied the
history of
Methodism,
and the
Holiness Movement extensively, as well as the
connection between those movements and Pentecostalism.
I had hoped that
by digging into the roots of the Holiness tradition, I could discover
what was now missing in it. I did find many admirable historical
figures, and found their devotion to God and the seriousness with which
they approached the spiritual life to be impressive. The descriptions
of the old revivals made me think that maybe they had something back
then that had been
lost along the way.
The Pentecostal movement was originally an offshoot
of the Holiness Movement… in fact the birthplace of Pentecostalism is
generally considered to be the Azusa
Street Mission in Los Angeles,
which was founded by a
black Nazarene pastor who had started preaching
that you had to speak
in tongues to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and
was soon thereafter locked out of his Church by his congregation. At
that time the Nazarene Church was actually known as the "Pentecostal
Church of the Nazarene"… but the term “Pentecostal” was previously used
in reference to the “second blessing”, which was the work of
“entire
sanctification”, which was taught to be the result of the
Baptism of the Holy Spirit… which was generally believed to happen at
some point after justification,
i.e., when someone comes to a “saving
faith” in Christ. I discovered that the Pentecostal movement had in
fact hijacked a number of terms (such as “Full Gospel”) that had been
common in the Holiness Movement, but because the mainstream Holiness
Movement was so anxious to distance themselves from the “tongue
talkers”, they quickly abandoned terminology that might associate them
with this new movement, and in the process they also moved away from
much of the revivalist spirit that had characterized them. The Holiness
Movement is actually where the term “Holy Roller”
came from… because
people used to roll in the aisle, jump pews, run around the Church,
climb poles, shout, wave their hankies, etc. I worked for an old man
whose father had been an old time Nazarene Evangelist, and he told me
that when he was a kid, tour buses from Oklahoma
City use to take
people to Bethany
First Church of the Nazarene, so that they could see
these kinds of things for themselves. You wouldn’t know that from the
Bethany First Church of the Nazarene of the time that I was going to
school, or pretty much any other Nazarene Church. So I began to wonder
if maybe the fervor of the Holiness Movement had been lost due to an
overreaction to Pentecostalism, and so I began to see if I could find
something that was somewhere in between what the Nazarene Church was
that I had known, and the Pentecostal movement, which I knew had a
wacky side to it, that I wanted to avoid.
The Dead End of
Non-Denominationalism
In
the summer of 1988 my wife and I were married in the Chinese Baptist
Church that she had been attending in Houston. Due to the efforts of my
very frugal wife, we were able to have a nice wedding, a reception, a
honeymoon, and to move her stuff to Oklahoma, all for about $1,000.00.
That following school year, I thought I had found what I was looking
for. There was a non-denominational Church that had been started in the
Bethany
area, which consisted mostly of former Nazarenes with
charismatic tendencies, and the pastor had been a Nazarene music
evangelist (he and his wife would sing at revivals around the country).
He was even a graduate of Nazarene
Theological Seminary, but I
discovered that while he was a nice and sincere man, he was not very
theologically inclined. In fact, when I began attending there, he asked
me to take over their adult Sunday School class, and also to write up a
doctrinal statement for their Church. He had started a study of the
book of Hebrews, and so I continued where he had left off, and enjoyed
digging into the book of Hebrews and laying out what it meant for the
class.
I also took up the challenge to write a doctrinal statement, and
using the Nazarene
Articles of Faith as the starting point (which were
printed in what is known as “The
Nazarene Manual”, which originated out
of the Methodist
Book of Discipline, and was sort of a doctrinal
statement of the denomination, combined with the rules that govern the
Nazarene Church on its various levels, and also provided standards of
Christian behavior that Nazarenes were expected to adhere to),
supplementing that with a few things from the Salvation
Army Handbook
of Doctrine (which is similar in scope), and throwing in a
few things
about the
gifts of the Holy Spirit, I came up with a text, and
presented it to the pastor. His reaction was “Man… this is so negative!
There’s all this stuff about sin! It sounds like the Nazarene Manual!”
I responded that it was in fact based on the Nazarene Manual’s Articles
of Faith, and then we began discussing the question of whether doctrine
should be rooted in anything from the past. He told me “God has a “Now”
word for the Church,” and that basically we didn’t need to worry about
what a bunch of dead people thought about doctrine. I asked him whether
he thought God had spoken through men like John Wesley.
He said that he
believed He had. So I asked, if God did speak through men like John
Wesley, wouldn’t that message be something that we would want to know
and understand? He didn’t have a satisfying answer. But that text did
not become the doctrinal statement of that Church… nor did anything
else. I noticed over time that this pastor would preach based on
whatever he happened to be reading at the time. For a while he was
preaching sermons based on a Christian novel about spiritual warfare
entitled “This
Present Darkness.” Then he started preaching from
Watchman Nee’s book “Spiritual
Authority.” It began to seem like that
church’s doctrine hinged on what he had eaten the night before. I
increasingly began to see the folly of non-denominational Churches that
have no accountability to anyone or anything beyond the whim of the
pastors who head them.
Things came to a head one Sunday when,
because I was teaching on the book of Hebrews, I taught about the
question of whether or not one could lose their salvation (an issue
raised by Hebrews
6:4-6 and Hebrews
10:26-27). I had no reason to think
that this was going to be a controversial issue, because Nazarenes
believe that you can lose your salvation. However a
number of the people who had joined this church were from a Southern
Baptist background, where “Eternal
Security” is the prevailing
doctrine. While I was teaching this class, there was one guy I had not
seen
before who kept arguing with the points that I was making, but I
thought I was batting his objections out of the park pretty handily.
Then after the class, I had a women from a Baptist background,
who
was so upset that she was shaking. She had never heard eternal security
challenged before, and didn’t know how anyone could believe anyone
could be saved, if eternal security were not true. I tried my best to
calm her down. Then the main service began, and as it turned out, the
guest speaker that Sunday was the guy who had been taking shots at me
in the class. During the sermon, the tables were turned, but unlike a
Sunday school class, it is not generally accepted behavior to challenge
a man giving a sermon during the service. He didn’t call me out by name
in that sermon, but anyone in the class knew who he was talking about.
After the service, the pastor called me aside, because he had heard
that some people were upset by what I said in the Sunday School class.
He told me that I needed to “get off of that doctrine stuff”, because
doctrine “divides”. I pointed out to him that he was the one who had
picked the book of Hebrews to study, and asked him what I was supposed
to do when I came to passages that clearly taught that salvation was
not guaranteed, just because you had once made a profession of faith.
Again, I didn’t get a good answer, and that was my last Sunday at that
Church. I soon went back to one of the new Nazarene churches in the
area, and from that point forward had a new appreciation for doctrine,
Church authority, and Tradition.
An Associate Pastor and Pro-Life
Activist
The
new Nazarene Church, that I began attending seemed like the ideal I had
been looking for. It was started by the initiative of the District
Superintendent (who functions a bit like a diocesan bishop) with
the intention of attracting people who we inclined to a more
“charismatic”
environment. It didn’t even have “Nazarene” in its name – it was called
simply “The Sonlight Center” – although this had previously been a
requirement for every local Nazarene Church. It had a rock band, "Top
40"
worship, and an emphasis on the gifts of the Spirit – but it also
already had a doctrinal statement, and was accountable to a wider
church. Eventually I became the associate pastor of this church.
One
of the ministries that this church began to get involved in was
pro-life activism. In fact, this church started the local chapter of
“Operation
Rescue”, which was leading protests at abortion clinics, and
whose favorite tactic was to blockade the entrance, using the methods
of passive resistance which had been used by the civil rights movement,
and try to shut the clinic down for as long as possible. At the first
meeting we held, Fr.
Anthony Nelson of St. Benedict
Orthodox Church
arrived in his riassa and pectoral cross, and I turned to my wife and
said facetiously, “Can you imagine me dressed like that?” After the
meeting, one of the ladies in the Church informed me that they had
intended to send an invitation to every church in the Oklahoma City
area, but that she didn’t have sufficient postage, and so prayed that
God would guide her in selecting which churches to send the invitations
to. So the fact that Fr. Anthony even got the invitation, not to
mention that he came, was an unlikely event to have happened, but one
that proved to be crucial in my journey to the Orthodox Church.
Discovering
Tradition
There
were several things that I studied in depth that began to open my eyes
to the fundamental flaws in Protestantism, and also to the importance
of Tradition: Textual
Criticism, Empiricism
and its role in Protestant
Biblical Scholarship, the question of the inspiration of Scripture, the
works of Thomas
Oden, books about Orthodoxy, and then the writings of
the Fathers themselves.
I began studying the question of textual
criticism as a result of studying New Testament Greek, and becoming
aware of textual variations. I read several books by John Burgon,
who was
an Anglican
scholar of the 19th Century, who was born in Smyrna, and so
grew up speaking Greek. He was an authority on Patristics, and wrote
extensively against the work of Wescott
and Hort
– two Anglican
scholars that popularized the approach to textual criticism that is
reflected in the Greek text used by most modern Protestant
translations, with the exception of the New
King James Version, and a few other
lesser known versions (and of course in the case of the King
James
Version, it was based on the Textus
Receptus which essentially is the
same as the text in most Greek Manuscripts, having predated Wescott and
Hort by a few centuries). I also read other more contemporary authors
on the subject, such as Zane C.
Hodges and Wilbur
Pickering, and read
debates in which Hodges and Pickering, advocates of what is now known
as “The
Majority Text” or the “Byzantine
Text”, debated those
advocating for the Wescott-Hort
approach. This is a complicated
subject, and it is too big of a topic to get into any depth here, but
suffice it to say that I found the arguments in favor of the
traditional Greek text more compelling, and those arguments depend in
large part on a belief that God has preserved the textual tradition of
the Church… which if you accept that, raises the broader question of
the reliability of Tradition.
In a graduate level course I was
taking on Scripture (which was tag-team taught by the two most liberal
professors that I had), I chose to do a paper on the role of Positivism
in Biblical scholarship. This is also a complex issue (though I go into
some detail on it in my
essay on Sola Scriptura) but I began to see the
rationalism that is at the heart of Protestantism and has been since
the days of Martin
Luther and John Calvin.
In that same
course, our final paper, which we were each in turn to present to the
class in the final days of the semester, was to be an exposition of our
personal theology of the inspiration of Scripture. I had noticed from
the beginning of the semester that it seemed as if the entire purpose
of that class was to convince the student that the Bible was full or
errors, but to somehow also affirm that it was nevertheless inspired. I
decided to actually put the “Wesleyan
Quadrilateral” to work, and so
analyzed the question by first asking what Scripture says about itself,
then what Tradition says about the nature of Scripture, and then look
at
the question from the perspective of reason and experience.
You
wouldn’t know it from attending most Nazarene Churches, but because the
Nazarenes historically traced their roots through the Methodist
movement to John Wesley, they
have a remote connection with
Anglican
Tradition.
I had some idea of that growing up in it, and
reading Nazarene publications… in fact as a teenager, I actually fasted
on Wednesdays and Fridays for about a year, because I had read that
John Wesley fasted on these days, based on the practice of the “Early
Church”. But if you didn't notice it as a laymen, you certainly get
introduced to these Anglican roots when you study to be a Nazarene
Minister. In Anglican theology, they have the concept of the
three-legged stool of Anglicanism: their theology is based on
Scripture, Tradition, and Reason. John Wesley added one more leg to the
stool (Experience), and so the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” was born. The
basic idea is that Wesleyan Theology is supposed to be based primarily
on Scripture, but Scripture interpreted by Tradition, Reason, and
Experience – in that order of importance. In actual practice, however,
you
rarely heard any talk of Tradition outside of discussions of the
doctrine of the Trinity, or Christology.
Most of my research on
the question of the inspiration of Scripture focused on the question of
what Tradition had to say about it, and since at that point I had more
or less a "branch-theory"
understanding of what constituted the
Church, I analyzed it in terms of what the “Early Church” had taught on
the question, then what the Roman Catholic Church, Orthodox Church, and
then the various major branches of Protestantism had historically
taught… with a special emphasis on the branch that I was on at the
time. What I found was that all Christians had affirmed the idea that
the Scriptures were fully inspired, and were in fact inerrant.
I had
good sources for most of those sections, but not for the Orthodox. But
I knew enough about the Orthodox Church to know that I needed to
adequately cover their perspective. Since I had met Fr. Anthony Nelson
and worked with him on several protests, I decided to call him up and
discuss it with him. When he explained the Orthodox understanding of
the
inerrancy of Scripture, it made so much sense that it
essentially
became the final conclusion of my paper. In short, his explanation was
similar to the one I later found in the writings of St. Augustine
(Letter
to St. Jerome, 1:3). We believe that the Scriptures are
inerrant because God, as the one who inspired them, is on one level the
author. If, however, we find something in Scripture that seems at odds
with reason, we conclude that either we have flawed reasoning, or we
have misunderstood the meaning of the Scriptures, or perhaps we have a
bad translation or a bad manuscript… but we know the Scriptures are
true… and if we don’t know for sure which of the above factors is the
cause for the apparent conflict with reason, we don’t spend too much
time worrying about it, because our understanding of the Scriptures as
individuals is not infallible, nor should we expect it to be. The
Church’s understanding of the Scriptures as a whole is infallible, and
if we remain under the guidance of the Church, we will not go too far
wrong.
As St.
Gregory the Theologian wrote:
“We
however, who extend the accuracy of the Spirit to the merest stroke and
tittle, will never admit the impious assertion that even the smallest
matters were dealt with haphazardly by those who have recorded them,
and
have thus been borne in mind down to the present day: on the contrary,
their purpose has been to supply memorials and instructions for our
consideration under similar circumstances, should such befall us, and
that the examples of the past might serve as rules and models, for our
warning and imitation” (
NPNF2-07
St.Gregory Nazianzen, Oration
II: In
Defence of His Flight to Pontus, and His Return, After His Ordination
to the Priesthood, with an Exposition of the Character of the Priestly
Office, ch. 105, NPNF2, p.225).
When the day came that I
presented my paper to the class, I presented the view which the Church
had always held regarding the Scriptures, and made the case that if the
Church has always taught something, it must be true, because it was not
possible for the whole Church to affirm something that was in fact
erroneous. The same professor that had lectured about tearing down the
walls around our faith (at the beginning of my studies at SNU) was the
one that most vocally challenged my thesis. At one point he made the
statement that if I was going to argue that position, I would have to
“become a Catholic, accept the Apocrypha,
the Pope,
and Purgatory”.
I
responded that if I could be convinced that the Church had always
taught those things, I would accept them… but that I didn’t think that
was the case [the Orthodox do accept the Deuterocanonical Books, but
not the notions of the Papacy, or Purgatory].
At this point I had no idea that I would be
making any radical shifts in my Church affiliation, but I did believe
that I had discovered a new theological method, which could settle
pretty much any theological controversy. No matter the question, one
needed only to ask “What has the Church always taught on the matter?”
Once you found the answer, the problem was solved; you just needed to
conform to the teachings of the Church. And to be clear, at this point
my idea of the Church was based on the branch theory of the Church, but
even if you see the Church as a tree with branches, you still end up
with the same trunk.
However, when I began to seriously study
the writings of the Methodist theologian Thomas Oden, I realized that
my new theological method wasn’t a new method at all – it was only new
to me. Much of the material I was assigned to read while at SNU was a
labor to be endured, nothing inspiring or
edifying – but
there were a few exceptions, and prominent among those exceptions
were the books by Thomas
Oden. Oden had been a student of the extremely
liberal
German biblical scholar Rudolph
Bultmann, and so was very much
a part of the skeptical intellectual environment that I found so
unattractive. However, at some point in the 70's he began to apply the
skeptical criteria of liberal scholarship back upon liberal
scholarship, and ended up affirming the idea that the "Ecumenical
Consensus" of the first millennium of Christian history was
"normative". I was introduced to his work in my Systematic
Theology
class. He had at that time written the first two volumes of a
systematic theology that followed the outline of the Nicene
Creed, and
was in many ways an introduction to the Fathers, and an index to point
you to where in their writings you could find what they had to say on
the questions covered by the texts. In that class, we used volume 2,
"The
Word of Life", which focused on those parts of the Creed that
related to Christ. That book was so refreshing that I got me a copy of
volume 1, "The
Living God", and read it as well. I also found that our
library had his book "Agenda
for Theology", which was I think then out
of print, but was his theological manifesto, and explained how he had
moved from being a Bultmannian to one who affirmed the authority of the
Tradition of the Church. That book was later reprinted in a
significantly revised form, under the title "After
Modernity... What?"
In one of my Pastoral Theology classes, they also used his "Pastoral
Theology" as a textbook, which went to the Tradition of the
Church for
guidance on how to deal with the practical issues of pastoral theology.
There was one chapter of “The Word of Life” (chapter 7, which
dealt with the question of the “Quest
for the Historical Jesus”) that
was such a thorough critique of Protestant liberalism that I put Batman
comic sound effects in the margin: “Boom!”, “Pow!”, “Smack!”,
etc.
“We
violate a primary ethical demand upon historical study if we impose
upon a set of documents presuppositions congenial to us and then borrow
from the canonical prestige of the documents by claiming that it
corresponds with our favored predisposition. That lacks honesty. The
modern attempt to study Christ has done this repeatedly. The text has
often become a mirror of ideological interest:
Kant’s
Christ becomes a
strained exposition of the
categorical
imperative;
Hegel’s
Christ looks
like a shadow-image of the
Hegelian
dialectic.
Schleiermacher’s
Christ
is a reflection of the awkward mating of
pietism
and
romanticism;
Strauss’s
Christ is neatly weeded of all supernatural referents.
Harnack’s
portrait of Christ looks exactly like that of a late
nineteenth-century
German
liberal idealist; and
Tillich’s
Christ is a
dehistorical
existential
idea of being that participates in
estrangement without being estranged…. The historical biblical critic
was “not nearly so interested in being changed by his reading of the
Bible, as in changing the way that the Bible was read in order to
confirm it to the modern spirit”” (
The
Word of Life: Systematic
Theology Volume Two, (New York: Harper & Row,
1989), 224f).
“The
hermeneutic
of
suspicion
has been safely applied to the history of
Jesus but not to the history of the historians. It is now time for the
tables to turn. The hermeneutic of suspicion must be fairly and
prudently applied to the critical movement itself. This is the most
certain next phase of biblical scholarship – the criticism of
criticism” (Ibid., p. 226).
“One
obvious neglected arena is the social location of the quasi-Marxist
critics of the social location of classic Christianity, who hold
comfortable chairs in rutted, tenured tracks. These writers have
focused upon the analysis of the social location of the writers and
interpreters of Scripture. Yet that principle awaits now to be turned
upon the social prejudices of the “knowledge elite” – a guild of
scholars asserting their interest in the privileged setting of the
modern university…. The motivation to discover unprecedented critical
findings increases as professional advancement is held out as a reward
for original research. This perennial habit of the German academic
tradition has led biblical criticism to new ecstasies of faddism, where
the actual history of Jesus vanishes in a pile of theories and
speculations as to the redactive transmission of the tradition of
testimony about him…. It is hardly probable that Holy Writ has been
inspired, provided, traditioned at high cost, and defended for twenty
centuries for no better purpose than to keep historians busy or advance
academic careers… Jesus had harsh words for such obstructionists: “Woe
to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to
knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those
who were entering” (Luke 11:52)” (Ibid., pp. 226-228).
The
third
volume of his "Systematic Theology" was not published until
1992,
and by that time I had been Orthodox awhile, and so was less eager to
purchase a copy, though I always had the intention of eventually doing
so, in order to complete the set. Twenty-two years later, I finally got
around to it, and reading it was a walk down memory lane. Reading the
preface freshly reminded me of what a radically different spirit I
found in his writings in comparison with most of the material I had
studied at SNU.
In the second paragraph of his preface, he wrote:
"At the end of this
journey I reaffirm solemn commitments made at its beginning:
• To make no new contribution to theology
•
To resist the temptation to quote modern writers less
schooled in
the whole counsel of God than the best ancient classic exegetes
•
To seek quite simply to express the one mind of the believing
church that has been ever attentive to the apostolic teaching to which
consent has been given by Christian believers everywhere, always, and
by all – this what I mean by the
Vincentian
method (
Vincent
of Lerins,
comm., LCC [Library of Christian Classics] VII, pp. 37-39,65-74; for an
accounting of this method see LG [
The
Living God (volume 1 of his
systematic theology)], pp. 322-25,341-51)
I am dedicated to unoriginality. I am pledged to irrelevance if
relevance means indebtedness to corrupt modernity. What is deemed
relevant in theology is likely to be moldy in a few days. I take to
heart Paul's admonition: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should
preach a gospel
other
than the one we preached to you, let him be
eternally condemned! As we [from the earliest apostolic kerygma] had
already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a
gospel other than what you accepted [
par o parelabete,
other than what
you received from the apostles], let him be eternally condemned
[
anathema esto]!"
(Gal. 1:8, 9, NIV, italics added) (
Life
in the
Spirit, Systematic
Theology Volume Three, (New York: Harper & Row,
1992) p vii).
I can't remember in which of his books he
said this, but I remember him echoing the above sentiments, and saying
that he wanted the epitaph on his tombstone to say: "He added nothing
new to theology."
Thomas Oden is still a Protestant, and so one
should not assume that I would agree with him entirely, but his
devastating critique of Protestant liberalism and modernity in general,
combined with his affirmation of the Tradition of the Church was an
oasis in a spiritual and intellectual desert.
Around the time I
began digging into Oden’s "Systematic Theology," I received 2 books
that
Fr. Anthony Nelson had suggested I read if I wanted to understand more
about the Orthodox Church: "Orthodox
Dogmatic Theology", by Fr. Michael
Pomazansky, and “Becoming
Orthodox”, by Fr. Peter
Gillquist. I was
struck by many of the parallels between "Orthodox Dogmatic Theology
"and
what I was reading in Oden’s books, but I was also struck by some of
the
differences. I often wrote notes in the margins, and in that book I
wrote comments like “No way!” out to the side, but after becoming
Orthodox I had to go back and scratch those comments out. “Way!”
“Becoming
Orthodox” was also an eye opener. I had heard about the “Evangelical
Orthodox” and their
journey from Campus Crusade for Christ to the
Orthodox Church. A guest lecturer mentioned it… and I don’t
remember
why he mentioned it, but I remember the puzzled look on the faces of
those who heard it… which no doubt mirrored my own expression. I think
there was even some audible responses to it, like “Huh?” or “What?” My
own reaction was to wonder what they could possibly be thinking.
Reading the book answered my question. It did not convert me, but I
think the main thing that was accomplished by reading that book was I
saw that converting to Orthodoxy was a real option, though at that time
I still didn’t consider it a very serious option.
I also began
reading the Fathers themselves, not just reading about them, with the
occasional quotation one might encounter. Coming from Protestant
assumptions, the earlier the Father was, the more trustworthy he was
likely to be. One of the earliest Fathers to be found outside of the
New Testament is St.
Ignatius of Antioch. He was a disciple of the
Apostle John,
was consecrated Bishop of Antioch
by St. John himself,
and martyred in the arena of Rome in 112 A.D. So I read his seven
epistles with great interest, and was again and again struck
by the
fact that he was not a Protestant:
“Similarly,
let everyone respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, just as they should
respect the bishop, who is a model of the Father, and the presbyters as
God’s council and as the band of the Apostles. Without these no group
can be called a church” (Trallians 3:13).
"Make no mistake
brethren, no one who follows another into a schism will inherit the
Kingdom of God, no one who follows heretical doctrines is on the side
of the passion" (Philadelphians 3:3).
“Be zealous, then, in the
observance of one Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and one chalice that brings union in His blood. There is one
altar, as there is one bishop, with the priest and the deacons, who are
my fellow workers” (Philadelphians 4:1).
“But consider those who
are of a different opinion with respect to the grace of Christ which
has come unto us, how they oppose the will of God…. They abstain from
the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist
to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our
sins, and which the Father, of His goodness raised up again. Those,
therefore, who speak against the gift of God, incur death in the midst
of their disputes. But it were better for them to treat it with
respect, that they also might rise again” (Smyrneaens 6:2-7:1).
“Flee
from divisions, as the beginning of evils. You must all follow the
bishop, as Jesus Christ followed the Father, and follow the presbyters
as you would the apostles; and respect the deacons as the commandment
of God. Let no one do anything that has to do with the Church without
the bishop. Only that Eucharist which is under the authority of the
bishop (or whomever he himself designates) is to be considered valid.
Wherever the bishop appears, there let the congregation be; just as
wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church. It is not
permissible either to baptize or to hold a love feast without the
bishop. But whatever he approves is also pleasing to God, in order that
everything you may do may be trustworthy and valid” (Smyrneans 8:1-2).
“Assemble
yourselves together in common, every one of you severally, man by man,
in grace, in one faith and one Jesus Christ, who after the flesh was of
David's race, who is Son of Man and Son of God, to the end that ye may
obey the bishop and presbytery without distraction of mind; breaking
one bread, which is the medicine of immortality and the antidote that
we should not die but live for ever in Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 20:2).
Here
we had a disciple of the Apostle John, teaching that the Eucharist was
truly the body and blood of Christ, that it was the medicine of
immortality, that it could be valid or invalid, depending on the
authority of the bishop, that no group that did not have bishops,
priests and deacons could be called a church, and that no one who went
into schism or heresy would inherit the Kingdom of God. When I read
these epistles for the first time, I was not sure where I would end up,
but I knew I could no longer remain a Protestant. For about 10 seconds,
the thought of Anglicanism occurred to me, and had I been born a
hundred years earlier, I might have settled for the option, but the
doctrinal decay of the Anglican Church had reached such a point by that
time, that I could not consider it a serious option.
Not the Hagia Sophia… but
nevertheless, heaven on earth
In
one of my practical theology courses (I think it was entitled “Theology
of Christian Worship”) one of our assignments was to visit a certain
number of worship services that were not the typical Evangelical
Protestant services that we were used to. I used this as an opportunity
to go to a service at Fr. Anthony Nelson’s parish. It was a Saturday
evening Vespers,
and though St. Benedict has a very beautiful Church
building today, it didn’t in January of 1990. They were in a storefront
that was small. The ceiling tiles had visible rust stains from
past leaks. The carpet looked like it had seen better days. The
congregation was not large. However, the singing was well done, and I
had a sense that this was the real thing when it came to worship. In
fact, I noticed elements that reminded me of things I had read about
Synagogue worship, and so could see that this kind of worship had to
have very ancient roots. And the Saturday evening Prokimenon,
sung in
Znamenny
Chant, “The Lord is King, He is clothed with majesty” (Psalm
92:1 lxx) struck me particularly. I later read about how the envoys of
St.
Vladimir reported back about a service they attended in the Hagia
Sophia in Constantinople,
“We didn’t know whether we were in heaven or
on earth.” I was not in the Hagia Sophia by any stretch, but I had a
similar experience.
My interest in Orthodoxy began as an academic
curiosity, but gradually it developed into something else. At first I
just thought it would be beneficial to know more about it. Then I
thought that there are a lot of cool things about it, but I still
couldn’t see myself accepting it. Then, over time, I began to think
that I could become Orthodox, if only I could answer about five
questions (the veneration
of Icons; the ever-virginity
of the Virgin
Mary; the veneration
of the saints; praying to the
saints; and prayers for
the dead), but I didn’t think it likely. Then I began to
study each of
those five questions, and gradually they were answered, one by one. I
would research the question of the moment, look through the earliest
writings of the Fathers on that subject, and in each case was
eventually satisfied that each of these Orthodox beliefs were
consistent with the earliest Traditions of the Church.
And light
bulbs would go off in unexpected ways. For example, one day I was
talking to a neighbor who was talking about the wife of a retired
professor at SNU. He said that this woman was such a woman of prayer
that if you ever needed an answer to prayer, she would be the one to go
to, because she “had a hotline to God.” Having known some very pious
Nazarenes over the years, I didn’t find his account hard to believe.
But then it dawned on me, if any woman ever had a hotline to God, that
would be first and foremost, the Virgin Mary, wouldn’t it? And didn’t
Christ say that God was the God of the living and not the dead (Matthew
22:23-33), and so
if I could ask this pious old Nazarene woman from Bethany,
Oklahoma to pray for me, couldn’t I also ask the Virgin Mary from
Nazareth of Galilee to pray for me?
Furthermore, when you come
to understand what the Church is, you reach a point at which you trust
the Church without needing further proof. From reading the writings of
St.
Cyprian of Carthage (who reposed in 258 A.D.), I learned that
it
was not possible that the whole Church could teach as true that which
is
erroneous (see especially his Treatise
on the Unity of the Church).
So
after all my research and study, I was fairly certain that I wanted to
become Orthodox, and so I decided that it was time to fill my wife in
on it – according to a journal that I was keeping at the time, I
reached this point on about April 28, 1990 (which was just
about a
month before I graduated from SNU). This came as quite a shock to her.
I had not talked to her, or anyone else except Fr. Anthony Nelson and
Anna Voellmecke (his choir director). The reason was simple. I figured
that if anyone thought that I was contemplating such a radical shift,
that they would question my stability (maybe even my sanity)… and if I
became convinced that this was the right way to go, I was prepared to
suffer whatever consequences that decision might bring. However, until
I was sure that I wanted to do that, I didn’t let even my wife and
closest friends know how serious my interest in Orthodoxy really was.
Unfortunately, this had the effect of leaving many of my classmates and
acquaintances thinking that one day I was a conservative Nazarene, and
then on a whim I one day became Orthodox, but in reality it was the
conclusion of a very long process and a great deal of intense study.
My wife and me, on our
wedding day
May 28, 1988
Transition
As
my doubts about Protestantism increased, I found myself in a very
unpleasant situation. As an associate pastor, I had certain
responsibilities, which included leading a small group on Sunday
nights, and also occasionally preaching on Sunday morning. I continued
to fulfill these duties, but was increasingly less convinced about the
things that I was expected to teach and preach. I also began attending
Saturday night vespers at St. Benedict on a regular basis, and then on
Sunday morning, I was back at the semi-charismatic Nazarene Church of
which I was the associate pastor. The contrast between these two very
different styles of worship on a weekly basis had the effect of
increasingly convincing me of the shallowness of Protestant worship in
general, but especially the “contemporary” style of worship that my
Nazarene Church was using. There were two “worship songs” that stood
out as being especially shallow. One was “As David did in Jehovah’s
sight, I will dance with all my might” – which had no meaning
other
than that we were going to jam to the tunes of the rock band that was
playing the music. Another was “Blow
the Trumpet in Zion,” which was
based on words from Joel,
chapter 2. However, this song twisted the
meaning of the words in that prophecy to suggest that it was talking
about what a powerful army the people of God were, when in fact the
prophecy is a prophecy of judgment on the people of God who have
sinned. The army that is talked about in that passage, that is about
to “run on the city” and “run on the walls” is an army that
is
coming to destroy Zion (Jerusalem) at God’s command. The trumpet is
blown in Zion to sound the alarm, because Jerusalem is under attack.
God is calling His people to repent, if they wish to avoid this
judgment… but this “contemporary worship” song is anything but a
penitential song. One Sunday, when I was asked to preach, I preached on
Joel 2, and explained why this song distorted the meaning of the
passage, and what it actually meant. Next Sunday, the “worship team”
sang it again, as usual.
The Sonlight Center had met with
moderate success in building up a congregation, but it was initially
underwritten by the District (which is similar to a Diocese), and had a
very expensive lease on a very nice and large storefront facility, but
the District only promised to provide financial backing for a period of
about a year, and the day came when that support ended. I was not much
involved in the business side of that Church, but a decision was made
that we needed to look for a new and more affordable location. While we
were in transition, our services were for a time held at a Messianic
Jewish Church, which obviously would not have services on
Sunday, since
it had its services on Saturday. But since they were hosting us, I
attended some of their services. Their services bore almost no
resemblance to a traditional Jewish Synagogue service. Essentially,
their worship was typical Charismatic worship, with some cheesy Jewish
stuff thrown in, and a lot of Fiddler-on-the-Roof
style music. I found
that the people in the Church were almost all Southern Baptist Okies
that were looking for something that had tradition. I thought it was
unfortunate that instead of looking into Christian Tradition, they had
gone down the path of Judaizing
Christianity. This was just further
evidence of the collapse of Evangelicalism,
which has only accelerated
in the years since.
The Final Break
Things
finally reached the point where I was more than ready to convert, and
my wife was also comfortable enough with the idea of attending St.
Benedicts, that I was ready to make a final break with the church I had
been raised in. On June 29th, 1990, I informed the head pastor of my
Church that I would be leaving the Church of the Nazarene. I didn’t
tell him where I was going to go, because I knew his church was in a
shaky financial state, and I thought that if the average person in that
Church knew why I left, it might cause him problems, and I didn’t want
to be the cause of that Church finally folding. I am not sure, in
retrospect if this was the best plan, but I knew most of the people in
that Church would not be able to understand my decision, and I didn’t
see the point in causing anyone to be scandalized. I figured I would
tell those that I was close to later, including the head pastor… and I
did several months later, but unfortunately, few of the friendships
that I had in that Church survived my conversion.
My
family also had a strong reaction. For example, when I informed my
mother about my conversion, she seemed to take it pretty well, but then
called me back about an hour later, and told me that I was going to
hell. She did later apologize, but was vocally critical of my decision
for many years thereafter.
I should point
out that I did not leave the Church of the Nazarene angry. I was
grateful for all that I had learned that was good and true, and the
many sincere and loving people I had encountered. At the time I left, I
thought of the Church of the Nazarene as a conservative denomination
with many good qualities, but after discovering the patristic view of
what constituted the Church, I simply became convinced that, as well
meaning as it was, it just wasn’t the Church of the Fathers.
Had
I never attended SNU, or had my professors at SNU been more in the
tradition of the Holiness movement, I probably would not have been
pressed to ask the kind of questions that led to my becoming Orthodox.
I had several of the same professors that my older brother had when he
attended SNU earlier in the 80’s, but the liberal
professors that my brother had, were the conservative professors that I
had, and they hadn’t become more conservative in the process. The older
conservatives had mostly retired, and were replaced by professors who
were even more liberal than the previous liberals had been. All of that
is of course relative to the Church of the Nazarene which was a fairly
conservative Evangelical denomination in those days (James Dobson
being
one of the most prominent examples of a Nazarene in America). Later,
after I graduated from SNU (and had converted to Orthodoxy), I had the
chance to attend Phillips
Theological Seminary with a full scholarship.
However, because it was then located in Enid,
Oklahoma (which is not
near a major city, in which employment would be more easily obtained),
I decided to dip my toe in the water and take a satellite course that
they taught in Oklahoma City. That course was taught by a professor who
made
even the most liberal professor I had at SNU look like a fundamentalist
by comparison… I am honestly not sure if he even believed in God, but
in that class he certainly gave no evidence of any faith. The
second half of my Sola Scriptura essay ("The Orthodox Approach
to Truth")
was actually originally written as a 10 page preface to a paper written
for this professor, which I wrote to
explain why I was not going to approach the Scriptures in the way that
his
assignment called for. Unlike my professors at SNU, it became clear
that disagreeing with his perspective was not welcomed, and so I made
the decision that it would not be worth my time to spend four more
years covering the same ground, but in an environment less opened to
engaging ideas that were not part of the dominant liberal perspective
of the school. So in
retrospect, I came to see the liberal professors I had at SNU in a more
charitable light. I suspect that they had been confronted with that
sort of dry liberalism at some point in their education, became
convinced that much of the scholarship was accurate, but still managed
to reconcile it with their own faith, and sincerely wanted to help
their students better prepare for the shocks that they were to face
along the path of their academic studies. So while I never came to
see things the way my professors did, I came to better appreciate many
of the good things I had learned from them, and sincerely appreciate
the fact that they made me ask the questions that led to my discovery
of
the Fathers of the Church.
Becoming
a Catechumen
Fr.
Anthony Nelson invited my wife and me to tag along with him on a trip
to
Holy
Trinity Monastery (the spiritual center of the Russian
Orthodox
Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR)), in Jordanville,
New York, and the
Synod
Headquarters in New York City, and so we did. While in
Jordanville, on July 24th (St. Olga’s day),
I was made a catechumen.
Fr. Anthony and I had talked about it, and my wife came to the point
where she was OK with it. So Fr. Anthony asked for, and received
permission to do the service in the monastery cathedral. Being made a
catechumen has many similarities with the betrothal
service, and this is intentional, because a catechumen is sort of
betrothing himself to the Church. The commitment is made; however, the
relationship is not yet consummated – but like a betrothal, it is a
very big step.
Seeing upstate
New York
was a surprise to me. I had expected all of New York to be a rusted
urban jungle, but upstate New York was very beautiful… nothing like the
stereotypes I had in my mind. From Jordanville, we traveled to New York
City, and in the pre-Giuliani
days, graffiti was everywhere, and I saw
where all those stereotypes about New York had come from. But when we
arrived at Synod, it looked like a very nice part of New York, City. We
went in, and there I got to meet for the first time the very kind and
loving Metropolitan
Hilarion, who was then the Bishop of Manhattan.
After about an hour, we came back outside, and discovered that in broad
daylight, our van had a window smashed out of it, and much of our
luggage had been stolen. Among the things that I lost was the Bible I
had purchased as a Freshman, and had marked up, and so familiarized
myself with that I knew what part of a page to look at to find a
particular text. In some ways, this was another connection with my
Protestant past that had been broken. On our way out of New York City,
we were told by a guy at a gas station, who saw the broken glass and
had been told about our stolen luggage, “That’s what you get for
parking in the city with out of state plates.”
To the
Shores of Tripoli
Because
I had come so far studying Orthodoxy on my own before I had filled my
wife in on it, she had a lot of catching up to do. She was not closed
minded on the subject of Orthodoxy, but she was also not going to
convert just because it would make me happy. Over the years I have
known
people who assume that Asian women are all
like the obedient and submissive Japanese wives they have seen in the
movies. I have not gotten to know many Japanese women, but I have
gotten to know many Chinese women, and they are not that way. I once
worked as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant, and the owner's wife, who
was
about five feet tall, and relatively thin, seriously offered to protect
me when I had to deal with some rowdy customers (and I was at the time
6’2”, 190 lbs., and had been studying martial arts for 2 years). So I
was under no illusions that my wife was going to convert for any
reasons other than her own. I had hoped that I might be able to
convince her over time with the arguments that had convinced me, but as
the fall of 1990 began, I began to think that she might never convert.
My wife said that on the day of judgment she would be the one who would
have to answer for her decision, not me… and I could not argue with
that.
My wife’s decision to convert or not to convert was a
question that would decide whether or not I could eventually pursue
becoming an Orthodox priest, because an Orthodox priest cannot be
married to a non-Orthodox woman. The wife of an
Orthodox priest is one
flesh with her husband, and so has a share in the priesthood. The
canonical requirements to be a priest’s wife are pretty much the same
as they are to be a priest, aside from the question of one’s sex. The
priest’s wife even has a similar title. In Greek custom, the priest’s
wife is called “Presbytera” which is the feminine form of “Presbyter”
(the Greek word for “Priest”). Arabs call a priest “Khoury” (which
means “Priest”), and his wife “Khouriah” (again, the feminine form for
Priest). Russians call a priest “Batiushka” (literally “little
father”),
and his wife is called “Matushka” ("little mother"). The Matushka of a
parish has no liturgical role in a parish, but she does have a motherly
role, and so this is why a priest cannot be married to someone who is
not Orthodox. So faced with the likelihood that my wife’s decision to
not convert would eliminate the possibility of becoming a Priest, I had
to consider what else I might do with my life.
As it happened,
the first
Gulf War was on the horizon, and so I decided to join the
military, for two reasons: 1) because, as the son of a World War II
veteran, I felt like it was my turn; and 2) because if I couldn’t be a
clergyman, I thought the next best thing would be to be a United States
Marine. No one knew beforehand that the war would be brief,
and as one
sided as it turned out to be. The media played up the strength and size
of the Iraqi army, and many predicted that we would end up in a
quagmire that would go one for many years. I was sworn in (in the same
building that Timothy
McVeigh would later blow up) in early November of
1990.
I
had moved slowly up to this point, hoping to be baptized with my wife,
but she was comfortable with my being baptized after I enlisted,
because she knew I would shortly be going to boot camp, and would
possibly be in a war soon thereafter. And so on November 10th, 1990, I
was at long last baptized. It was a great joy to be able to fully
participate in the services, and to receive communion for the first
time on the following day. I prayed that my wife would eventually
follow
me, but I decided that I would only answer questions she asked, and not
say anything that might seem like I was pushing her any further on the
subject.
I
had spent a great deal of time praying about my decision to enlist, and
had spent a good bit of time getting advice on it, and thinking about
it. But at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do, and I hoped
that this was God's will, but one of
the things I had learned from the writings of Charles
Finney was that
it was a good idea to pray that God would thwart whatever you were
doing, if it was not His will. So I prayed regularly that if it was not
God’s
will that I become a Marine, that He would not let it happen. While
I was waiting to ship to boot camp, every month I had to attend a
“poolee
meeting." In January of 1991, the air war phase of the war
was
well underway, and a patriotic fervor was sweeping the nation. All the
poolees gathered at the Marine recruiting station, and then we ran in
formation to a nearby park. As we ran, with flags flying, people
stopped to clap, to applaud, cars approvingly honked their horns. Once
at the park, we exercised, got a taste of what our drill instructors
would be dishing out at boot camp, and then played flag football. I had
just finished college, and so was a bit older than most of the other
guys, who were right out of high school. Many of them seemed intent on
impressing their recruiters, and so were playing flag football more
like regular football, but without the helmet and the pads. At one
point, someone hit me from behind and I felt a slight pop in my lower
back. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, but by the time we ran
back to the recruiting station, I was in a lot of pain. I didn't know
it at the time, but God had
answered my prayer.
The next day I could not sit, walk, or
stand up without intense pain, and it wasn’t all that much better when
I was lying down. I didn’t have health insurance – while in college I
was supposed to have had it, but simply put on my forms that my
insurance was covered by “YHWH,
Inc”, and my policy number was “MT0817”
(which was a reference to Matthew 8:17 “that it might be fulfilled
which
was spoken by
Isaiah the prophet, saying: “He Himself took our infirmities and bore
our sicknesses”). And although I had been sworn in, I was not active
duty military (because I had not gone to boot camp yet) and so had no
health benefits there either. So all I
could do was go to a general practitioner and pay out of pocket, and
unfortunately, he never had any idea what the problem was. He thought
it was a pulled muscle, and prescribed some anti-inflammatory
medications, and some pain killers… doses of 500 milligrams of
Ibuprofen.
One day it occurred to me that I normally took more than
that for a good headache, and so it was no wonder that it was of little
use. Days went into weeks, and weeks went into months, and there was
only mild improvement. My date to ship to boot camp, kept getting
reset, and in the meantime, the war ended.
At one point my wife
tried a Chinese remedy that involved putting an herbal plaster on my
lower back, and then placing boiled dog skin over it, to keep it there.
When it was time to remove it, I discovered that this remedy was not
designed for Caucasians with a lot of body hair. I ended up having to
shave it off, and howled like the dog whose skin I had stuck to my back.
Curiously,
one thing that did bring some relief was doing lots of prostrations.
I
found that if I did at least 50 prostrations a day, I had less pain,
but if I failed to do it, my pain increased.
After a while, it
seemed like the pain was becoming manageable, and I began to work on
getting back into shape. But then while working out one day, I felt
another pop, and then I was back to square one. Soon thereafter, I came
to the conclusion that I was not going to be able to go to boot camp,
and then, after having to get my congressman to press the question, I
was finally able to get the Military to release me from my enlistment.
It took about another year for my back problem to mostly go away
(though it still gives me some grief to this day). When I
finally
did get health insurance years later, I was told that I had
hyperextended a semi moveable joint in my lower back.
But all
of this turned out to be providential. The change in the direction of
my plans took the pressure off of my wife to make a decision. Also, my
mother moved in with me that summer, and her continued efforts to talk
me out of Orthodoxy helped talk my wife into it. And all the
while, she had continued to attend services with me, and after the
Service
of the Twelve Passion Gospels of Holy Friday, 1991, she was
so deeply moved,
that she informed me that she wanted to be baptized. She was baptized
on Bright
Saturday, the following week, which was another unexpected
answer to prayer.
Developing
an Orthodox Mind
Fortunately
for us, Fr. Anthony Nelson had prepared us for the fact that converting
to the Orthodox Faith was not the end of the road, but rather the end
of the beginning of a long spiritual journey. You never reach the end
of that journey in this life, but he especially impressed on us that it
took a couple of years before one really began to think in an Orthodox
manner. And so while I had been accustomed to teaching and preaching, I
did not so much as teach a children’s Sunday School class until I had
been Orthodox for 3 years. You could describe this process in terms of
a
worldview shift, or a paradigm shift.
A worldview
is a set
of mental paradigms with which we evaluate our experiences. Our
worldview is the way that we think. It is the way that we look at
things, process information; it is the paradigms in which we sort
things through. Our worldview determines our expectations of reality,
and our expectations largely determine our perception of reality. If we
are faced with something that does not fit into our paradigm, then we
are likely to be blind to it, or to try to make it fit artificially
into our worldview. For example, in some cultures they only distinguish
between two or three colors, bright and dark let's say – so to such a
person, blue and black are both just dark, the distinction is missed.
Or for an example that is more close to home: what our culture’s
predominant worldview would call an emotionally disturbed person,
another (such as that of the Bible) might call demonized (which is of
course not to suggest that all such cases would be). The expectations
of these worldviews will either open or blind a person to certain
possibilities. An animist would be blinded to the role that germs play
in sickness, or that a head wound or brain damage might play in mental
illness – an animist would see everything in terms of spiritual
forces. A modern Empiricist, on the other hand, would be completely
blind to the very possibility that spiritual forces could even play a
part in such things as sickness or mental illness.
When
people
come to Orthodox Christianity from a heathen background (a person from
an irreligious background, or from a religious background that
is neither Christian, Jewish, or Moslem), in many ways
they have an easier time accepting our Faith and practice without
distorting it, because what they are embracing is so radically
different from what they knew previously. They have a lot less to
unlearn before they can properly learn the Orthodox Tradition, and they
don't think that they already understand words or concepts that they
really don't, in the proper Orthodox Christian sense.
When
I was studying Martial Arts in High School, the style I studied was a
form of Chinese
Kung Fu. Now in my Martial Arts school we had a number
of “converts” from Tae Kwon Do,
who had for some reason decided that
they wanted to learn Kung Fu. What was interesting though, is a
neophyte could walk in off the street and they would have an easier
time learning to do the forms and stances correctly. The problem was
that many of the stances and forms, as well as punches and kicks were
very similar – but just different enough to make it very difficult to
learn to do it the Kung Fu way. But when it came time to put these
techniques into practice – when we sparred – this problem became even
more apparent. With time, many of these “converts” learned to do the
stances and forms correctly (though the Tae Kwon Do influence could
still be seen at times) but when they would spar – many of them would
spar as if they had never studied Kung Fu at all. The instructor would
often stop the action, and tell such people, "Look, Tae Kwon Do is
fine, if you want to learn Tae Kwon Do, but you're here to learn Kung
Fu. If you want to learn Kung Fu, you’re going to have to put what you
know about Tae Kwon Do aside and use the techniques that you've learned
here." The reason these people reverted back to Tae Kwon Do while
sparring is simple – when you're sparring, you've got to think and act
fast, and Tae Kwon Do was what came natural to them – in fact it was
preventing them from arriving at the point at which Kung Fu would
become natural, and so until they could come to the point at which they
would lay aside their Tae Kwon Do techniques – little progress in Kung
Fu could possibly be made.
Similarly, in the Orthodox Church
today there are many converts from Protestantism, who have
seen in
Orthodoxy that which they found lacking in their former Protestant
experience, but very often they speak and act in very Protestant ways
still. This doesn’t mean that a convert from Protestantism can never
really become authentically Orthodox, but it does mean that he has some
additional hurdles to overcome. I should also point out, however, that
many “cradle”
Orthodox who have grown up in America’s Protestant
culture, often think in Protestant ways, and so many of them
also
have to go through a conversion process of sorts, if they are to
acquire an authentically Orthodox mindset… and here, they can be even
more disadvantaged than a former Protestant, because at least a former
Protestant knows that he once was a Protestant. Too many of those born
into Orthodox families are completely oblivious to the influence that
Protestant thinking has had on them.
Former Protestants have the
advantage of being more familiar with the Scriptures, and knowing much
of Orthodox terminology, but often they do not move beyond their
Protestant understanding of these things to an Orthodox one, or else
they revert back to it at times in a pinch. A former
heathen convert,
doesn't think he has already understood something that he has not –
and so is more easily instructed. What I had to realize is that while I
may have been a black belt Protestant, I was a white belt in the
Orthodox Church, and so I had to learn the Faith from the beginning,
and not assume that I already understood things.
This was not a
comfortable transition. When people I knew would ask me about what the
Church taught, if I knew for sure what the Church taught I would tell
them. However, if they asked me about something that I was not sure of
the Orthodox answer, I had to learn to give tentative answers: “I think
the answer is such and such, but I am not sure. I’ll have to do some
digging on that.” The constant question I had to ask myself was whether
what I thought about something was really Orthodox, or whether this was
simply my previous Protestant learning filling in the gaps. And I
should say that after nearly 23 years in the Orthodox Church, I still
at times find myself asking that question, and still have to give that
same tentative answer, pending further study.
Obviously
reading about Orthodox doctrine and Tradition is an important part of
the process, though back when I converted there was a lot less
available in English then there is today. Now, if you know which sites
to go to, you can find a wealth of information with a few clicks of a
mouse, but back then there were only the books that were in print
(which you couldn’t generally find at your local library, and so had to
purchase), and there were a number of Orthodox periodicals that I
subscribed to. One thing that I found particularly helpful was reading
the novels of Feodor Dostoyevsky. His novels conveyed the spirit of
Orthodoxy in a way that a dry text about Orthodoxy generally cannot.
But one body of Orthodox literature that inquirers into Orthodoxy and
new converts often overlook is the reading of the lives of the Saints,
and this is one of the most crucial things that we should devote our
time and attention to. Bishop
Peter (Loukianoff) says that St.
John of
Shanghai greatly stressed the importance of the lives of the
saints,
and often when asked a question about some matter of faith or practice,
he would answer by citing something from these lives, which he had
extensive knowledge of. And all the reading about Orthodoxy in the
world will be of little help if you do not regularly attend the
services, fast, pray, and live out the Orthodox Tradition in your daily
life. St.
Maximus the Confessor said “Theology without practice is
the
theology of the demons” [For
more on this see the text of a talk I gave
on this subject in 1995].
A Rabbit with Three Holes
My
wife and I stayed in Oklahoma until January of 1992, when I went to
Jordanville with the intention of getting a job, getting housing that
would be suitable, and then having my wife come to join me, and then I
would attend Holy
Trinity Seminary there. However, there is a Chinese
proverb that says a wise rabbit has three holes, and so at that same
time, my wife went back to Houston to get a job there, and we left most
of our belongings in Oklahoma. Plan “B” was that if it did not work out
in Jordanville, I would join my wife in Houston. We also had the option
of returning to Oklahoma.
In Jordanville, I got to see the
monastic life and live its rhythms, I learned a lot about the services,
and I also experienced true culture shock for the first time – and it
was a double whammy. In the monastery, I was surrounded by Russian and
Slavonic.
There was a lot about Russian culture and Orthodox etiquette
that I had to learn. And then when I would travel to town, I was
surrounded by Yankees.
I was not much of a country music fan, but I had
to buy some country records while up there.
However, after a few
months it became clear that I had picked the wrong time of year to go
looking for work in upstate New York, and the economy was such that I
was doubtful that spring or summer would be much better. Holy Trinity
Seminary was a great deal for a single student – you could basically
work off your tuition, room and board. But there wasn’t much in the way
of housing for married students, and nothing that was available or
would likely be available any time soon. So toward the end of Lent, I
decided that we had to revert to Plan “B”. I continued to take
correspondence courses from Jordanville, but I was disappointed that I
could not remain there.
Coming
Home
My
wife had found a good job in Houston, and had started attending the
Russian parish in Houston, St. Vladimir. Unlike St. Benedict
in
Oklahoma, this parish was not a convert parish. Most of the services
were in Slavonic (which is sort of like King James Russian), and most
of the people there were either from Russia, or their parents were from
Russia or Ukraine. My Chinese wife stood out among the
congregation, and did not immediately feel welcomed – with the
exceptions of the priest, Fr. George Lardas, his family, and also the
elderly choir director, Anastasia
Titov – who told her that she was a
fellow compatriot, because she was a “white Chinese”, who was a Russian
from Harbin,
China. We later learned that she had worked as a clerical
assistant to St.
John of Shanghai.
When I joined her, we began
attending the Saturday evening Vigil,
and there were a handful of
elderly Russians (including Anastasia) who had been “holding down the
fort” at the kliros, but when they saw that my wife and I were
attending regularly, it was as if they said “Lord,
now lettest Thou Thy
servant depart in peace,” and from then on we were normally
the choir…
which meant that I had to memorize the tones and learn the rubrics. We
had been in the choir at St. Benedict’s, but being in the choir and
following along is quite different from doing it on your own. I also
had to learn how to read the Russian in the Jordanville liturgical
calendar, because they didn’t have any rubric
guides in English, and we
had to learn to sing in Slavonic (though I never became very good at
singing hymns that were not done regularly).
Fr. George Lardas
agreed to mentor me, and we would meet on Saturday afternoon and he
would teach me Slavonic, and the Typikon.
Fr. George literally is a
rocket scientist (he worked for a NASA
contractor, at the time), in
addition to being a linguistic and liturgical genius, and so most of
what I know about the Typikon I learned from him, and from the on the
job training of the kliros.
I was tonsured
a reader
in 1994,
which was also the year that my first daughter (Elizabeth) was born, as
well as the year that I first had access to the Internet, and the year
that we were able to attend the glorification
of St. John of Shanghai
in San Francisco. I was ordained
a deacon
on March 4th, 1995, by Bishop
Hilarion (now Metropolitan), and served at St. Vladimir until 1998. It
was difficult to be in a situation where the services were mostly in
Slavonic (though the vigils were mostly in English, except on major
feasts), but the experience of being in a very Russian parish taught me
a great deal about Orthodox piety. I especially learned from the older
people, like Anastasia that had such a deep personal piety, and had so
much wisdom and experience.
There
are many aspects of Orthodox piety that are subtle, and not the sort of
thing you are likely to read about in a book on Orthodoxy, and it is
these subtleties that a convert can pick up from being around those who
are more deeply rooted in the Faith. One example of this was at the
Vigil of the feast of the Dormition.
We were singing the sticheron of
the feast, which is sung after Psalm 50, and we were singing it in
Slavonic. My Slavonic being far more limited, I was not emphasizing the
right words, and so since there is a long prayer immediately after this
hymn, Anastasia Titov took the opportunity of the pause in singing to
explain to me the meaning of the hymn in order to explain what words
should be emphasized. She then did an on the fly translation from
Slavonic into English which was remarkably accurate (which I knew
because I had the Festal
Menaion
in English opened to this text, and
was glancing over at it as she explained. As she read the words of the
hymn, and got to the part in which it says “And Peter cried aloud to
thee, weeping: “O Virgin, I behold thee clearly stretched out, the life
of all, and I am amazed, for in thy body the Delight of the life to
come, made His abode! O all-pure one, earnestly entreat thy Son and
God, that thy flock be saved unharmed,”” she read it with such warmth
and piety that I was almost moved to tears. Her point was that the awe
of St. Peter should be reflected in how we sing the hymn, but in making
her point she expressed a love and reverence for God, the
saints, and the services in a way that a book cannot. My
ability
to sing that hymn in Slavonic had not improved, but my ability to
appreciate hymns on a spiritual level had. I was fortunate to have had
such instructors.
Catherine, myself,
Matushka, and
Elizabeth
Some converts actually try to adopt
the ethnic identity of whatever Orthodox Jurisdiction they convert
into, sometimes with comical
results. I was never under any illusions
that I could become a Russian, nor did I have any great desire to do
so. Once I had a conversation with Fr. Damian
(of blessed memory) who
was the abbot of the Monastery
of the Glorious Ascension in
Resaca,
Georgia. We had discussed a convert who was from a particular
state, who had said that converts in the Russian Church should try to
become Russian. The next day, he reminded me of that conversation, and
said (with his aristocratic North Carolinian accent that those who knew
him well remember) “I am grateful to the Russians for bringing us the
Faith, but I am a southern white man, and I am happy with
that. However, if I was from [the state this
convert was from], I think I would want to be a Russian too.” On the
other hand, Orthodoxy does not exist in some abstract form that is
devoid of cultural content. When you embrace Orthodoxy, you do to some
extent have to embrace the cultural packaging of the particular
expression of the Orthodox Church that you find yourself in. When the
Orthodox Faith was brought to the Slavs, they embraced many aspects of
the Orthodox Byzantine culture that brought them the Faith. But with
time, they in turn made it their own, and a new Orthodox culture
developed. You could go back one step further and talk about the Jewish
culture of the Apostles, and the interaction that the Greek converts
had with it, which ultimately developed into the Byzantine Greek
culture. So while I am not a Russian, nor could I ever become a
Russian, my experience of Orthodoxy is Russian, and so I am Russian
Orthodox, and love and appreciate the best aspects of Russian culture.
Someday, God willing, we will see an American Orthodox culture, but
attempts to force that into existence prematurely have met with bad
results, and I think this fails to understand how Orthodoxy changes a
culture. The Russians did not decide one day that they were going to
toss out Greek culture, and concoct a Russian version of it. It
happened naturally, as their national Church matured. The American
Church has a very long way to go.
However, being Russian
Orthodox does not mean that you cannot have the services in a language
you understand. There are dozens of different languages in use in the
Russian Orthodox Church in Russia alone, not to mention in the Russian
Diaspora. English is especially in wide use, and all the
services have
been translated into English at this point, and so many parishes use
English exclusively. And as I saw that so many of the young people who
had grown up in St. Vladimir’s, stopped coming when they reached their
teen years, I could not help but conclude that the lack of English,
particularly in the
Liturgy, was a large factor. My Slavonic had
reached a point to which I could follow the services in Slavonic
without any great difficulty, but I was concerned for my own children.
My second daughter was born in 1996 (Catherine), and while my daughters
were very young, I knew Slavonic services would not be so much of an
issue, but that it would become an issue. So I was determined that they
would be in an English speaking parish long before they reached the
point that they would not want to go to Church anymore, because they
didn’t understand the services. In 1998, Bishop
Gabriel (now Archbishop
of Canada) gave us a blessing to start an English language mission.
Bishop Gabriel had said that he would prefer that we name the parish
after a recently glorified saint, and so we selected three names, and
asked Fr. Anthony to place them under the Antimins before a liturgy.
After the Liturgy, the name that he pulled out was that of St. Jonah of
Manchuria – who had been glorified in 1996, and whose
photograph Fr.
Luke (Murianka) had just recently mailed to us out of the
blue (since
leaving Jordanville in 1992 I had only communicated with him a handful
of times).
Starting from Scratch
Having
an English language mission, without having a permanent priest, was
difficult, but we did regular reader services, and were able to get
priests to travel to serve the liturgy on a somewhat regular basis. It
was when we began St. Jonah’s that I began posting liturgical rubrics
online, as well as texts
for Reader Services.
When it comes to
starting missions in ROCOR, one of the advantages is that our bishops
are willing to start missions even when they have meager financial
means. The disadvantage is that there is not much in the way of outside
help for such missions, and so those who start a mission have to be
prepared to struggle, and need to be patient enough to allow the
mission to reach a critical mass that allows them to get over the next
hurdle. For us, the first hurdle was not being able to do the Liturgy
regularly in an area in which there were other Orthodox Churches that
did have the Liturgy. We finally overcame that hurdle, when on January
14th, 2001 (n.s.) I was ordained a priest by Bishop Gabriel.
In the Altar of Christ
the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, May 17, 2007
The
next hurdle was to get into a more suitable facility. We had our first
Liturgy in my home. Then we had a family that hosted our services for
some time, but then that family made the decision to return to St.
Vladimir, and so we were back at my house, and were having services in
a
135-square-foot room, which made for cozy services. When people would
call and ask about our services, they would often sound very
interested, until I gave them directions, and explained that we were
having services in a house… usually such people never showed up even
once. However, over time we had built up a small but
relatively
committed group of people. Our income was rather meager at this point,
and so it was difficult to find a storefront rental that would be
within our budget… and though we looked and made many inquiries,
nothing panned out. Then one day, Providence took matters into hand. I
came home from work, and much of my home was flooded, because a pipe
had cracked, and this particularly affected the room we used for a
chapel. We had no choice but to find another location, or not have
services until repairs could be completed, and that was going to be
several weeks at least. However, a few days later, Matushka happened to
look at the Greensheet (a paper mostly consisting of want ads and sale
ads), and found a storefront location on the feeder
road of I-45, and
they only wanted about $300 a month. This space was only 600
square feet, but compared to what we had, that was incredibly spacious.
The downside was that we shared a wall with a black Pentecostal church
that had a very loud band, and a loud preacher – so we had to time our
services to have our service coincide with the least noisy parts of
theirs. The highway noise was also quite loud, even with the door shut.
But it was a big step in the right direction, and our parish began to
grow more rapidly. And while it was a step of faith to move
into
this storefront, and have a monthly rent payment, a light bill, and
insurance to pay, we never had any difficulty paying our bills. God
provided.
The next hurdle was to get into a larger
storefront
location, and again we had to reach a critical mass. Finally,
we found
a location that was a about 2400 square feet, and would cost us over a
$1,000.00 a month – and once again, we shared a wall with another black
Pentecostal church, though because they had classrooms along that wall,
it was less noisy. Again, it was a leap of faith to take on such a
lease, but again we grew, and never had any difficulty paying our
bills. This location had the space to allow us to do our first big
outreach, which was an Icon
Exhibit. We had a parishioner with a large
collection of 18th and 19th century Russian Icons, and so we first held
a one day exhibit, which was very successful, and had the effect of
letting people know we were there, and brought new people into the
parish, both Orthodox and inquirers.
Even a sizable storefront
facility, no matter how nice it might be, does not appeal to many
people who are used to going to a nice, freestanding Church, and so the
next hurdle was for us to buy our own property. We had several generous
parishioners that donated $20,000.00 each, which put us in a position
to hunt for property. We found several potential locations, but always
there were a number of families that did not like the location because
it was too far for them. We didn’t think that there was anything
affordable close to where we were, but finally we engaged a local real
estate agent, and ask him to try to find something as close to our
current location as possible, and preferably with a building already on
it that would be suitable for services, at least initially. In a short
period of time, he found what turned out to be far better than any of
the other properties we had looked at. It was walking distance from our
current facility, it had a large house and a barn on it, and it was big
enough to allow for further expansion. So we closed
the deal in March
of 2008, and moved
onto the property in May, after knocking out walls,
and remodeling the home to make it suitable for services.
This was just
a little bit shy of our
tenth anniversary of the founding of our parish.
In
2009 we received a very sizable donation from a generous parishioner
that put us in the position of being able to begin plans for our
“phase
II” Church. As the project developed, more donations from
outside and
inside the parish came in, and when we finished the construction of the
new Church, it had cost about a quarter of a million dollars, but we
were able to pay for it all in cash.
Our "Phase II" Church,
shortly after construction
Our parish began as a
mostly convert parish. It developed into a mixed parish, with about
half of the adults being converts, and the other half cradle Orthodox,
from Russian, Polish, Arab, Serbian, and Greek backgrounds. This has
been a healthy mix, because it is good to have the zeal of the
converts, but it is also good to have that zeal tempered by the
grounding of those who have grown up in the Church.
Epilogue
One
of the highlights of my life was in 2007, when I was chosen to be one
of
the delegates from the Diocese
of Chicago and Mid-America to go to
Russia for the signing of the Act of Canonical Communion,
when the
Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia was finally reconciled with
the Church inside Russia, which had been administratively separate
since the late 1920’s, due to Soviet interference in Church affairs.
This was signed
on May 17, 2007, in Christ
the Savior Cathedral – a
Church that had been destroyed by Stalin, but rebuilt after the
collapse of the Soviet Union.
The Church of the New
Martyrs at Butovo
One of the most moving aspects
of that trip was to participate in the
consecration of a Church at
Butovo, which was a Soviet killing field, where tens of
thousands of
Orthodox Christians were martyred. Before the service, the clergy who
would serve went into the lower Church to vest. I noticed that the
walls had very nice icons all the way around the Church, but didn't pay
attention to what they depicted, assuming that it would be the usual
mix of icons you see in a Church – but then Fr. Vladimir Boikov
(a good humored
Chinese-Mongolian-Russian priest I had met many years before in
Australia) pointed out that these icons were all icons of the various
known martyrs
of Butovo, who had been killed at this very place by the
Communists. When the Church was being constructed, family members of
the martyrs of Butovo commissioned these icons. This realization
brought home the full impact of where we were, and what we were there
to
do. These were not just any icons, this was not just any Church, and
this would not be just any service either.
The Martyrs of Butovo
We went up to the
main Church, which has three altars, all of which would be consecrated
on this day, and stood there, waiting for the Patriarch to arrive.
After the greeting of the
Patriarch, we began the service of the Great
Consecration of the Church. The altars were just wooden
frames, with
the table top set aside. At the beginning of the service, the first
thing that is done is that the bishops put on white carpenters' aprons,
and the Holy
table is constructed. My one part in this service was to
help lift
the top of the holy table, and hold
it so that the Patriarch
could bless the top and bottom of it with holy water, and
then to place
it onto the frame. While the Patriarch was doing this with
the main
altar, other bishops, including Metropolitan
Laurus, were doing the same
things with the two side altars. The table top was nailed to the frame,
and wax was poured over the nails to seal it. The top of the table was
washed with hot water, then with wine, and then anointed with holy
chrism. Then the holy table was vested with its cover. Then a
bishop
went around the Church and anointed the four walls with chrism.
There
was a Moscow Patriarchal priest standing nearby, who was one of the
ones whose job it was to make sure that the services went off smoothly.
At one point he was telling me to do something, but I can't now
remember what it was. Fr. Vladimir explained that I did not speak
Russian, and that I was from Texas – he seemed to take a particular
delight in pointing that out to people. This priest commented to Fr.
Vladimir that it must be difficult for me to be in a service that was
all in Slavonic. Fr. Vladimir explained that I knew what was going on,
and was happy to be there. In any case, I thought it was nice that he
expressed such concern.
Towards the end of the service of the
consecration, we went in a procession around the Church, being preceded
by the relics that would be finally placed in the altars. Once back
inside the Church, the service of the Great Consecration ended, and the
Liturgy began.
Generally, I tried to stay out of the way. I was
used to being in services that were all or mostly in Slavonic, however,
back in the US, most everyone speaks English and the directions given
to the clergy in the altar are usually in English, or if not, when it
is clear you didn't get it the first time in Russian, you get it the
second time in English. But it was all in Russian here, and so I tried
to stay close to Fr. Vladimir.
I remembered, as a relatively new
convert when communism in Russia finally collapsed
on the feast of the
Transfiguration in 1991, and being struck by the fact that
this was the
answer to all of our prayers for the salvation of Russia, and that it
would be delivered from the yoke of the Soviets. Of course, all was not
made right in a day, but from that time on, we witnessed how God has
been restoring the Russian Church to health and strength, and on this
day the contrast between the Soviet past and the present were
undeniable.
After the clergy had communed, Fr. Vladimir turned
to me and said with his Aussie accent, "So have you met the Patriarch
yet?" I responded that I had received communion from him twice now, but
that I couldn't say we had been properly introduced. So he grabbed me
by the sleeve, and said, "Come on, mate." He had threatened earlier
that he would introduce me to the Patriarch and lift up my sticharion
to show him my cowboy boots as he did so. I was fairly certain that he
was about to make good on that threat, but he didn't. After we both had
received his blessing, Fr. Vladimir told him who I was, that I was from
Texas, and that although I could not speak Russian I had been a vocal
advocate for the reconciliation of the Russian Church. The patriarch
thanked me, and said that he hoped I would continue to be an advocate
for unity in the Church. It was a brief exchange, but he had a very
warm expression on his face. I was already impressed by him, but I came
away all the more impressed.
After the service, we all headed
for a large tent in which there was another banquet. Fr. Vladimir and I
sat across from some Russian dignitaries. One of them was Sergei
Baburin, who was a member of the Russian Duma – I
wouldn't remember
that, except that we exchanged cards. Next to him was a man whose name
I can't remember, but he was wearing a medal which indicated that he
was a
hero of the Soviet Union, which is something like the
Congressional Medal of Honor. Fr. Vladimir introduced me, and again
explained my inability to converse in Russian, and that I had been an
advocate of the reconciliation of the Russian Church. The man with the
medal commented that I had been spending so much time defending the
unity of the Russian Church that I had acquired the face of a Russian.
It
was interesting to ponder that there was a time when the only thing I
knew about Russia was that they were the enemy, and I thought that the
only way I would ever have visited Russia was the way Slim Pickens
did
in Dr.
Strangelove... riding
a hydrogen bomb.
It was on this trip that I happened to be standing in front of the
Kremlin and bumped into that family from Mexico.
When
I first converted to the Orthodox Faith, my mother predicted that it
would not be long before I moved on to something else. Given the
winding nature of my spiritual journey up to that point, I can hardly
blame her, but as the years went on, she came to see that this time it
was for real. Eventually, she even came to respect my decision, though
she never came to fully understand it herself.
My mother, on her
birthday, not long before her repose
Being in the
Orthodox Church has not been a journey through a spiritual
Never-Never
land – there have also been many painful trials and
tribulations. I also do not pretend to have attained all that I
should have or hope to spiritually, but I have never
regretted
the decision, and have a deep sense that I have “seen the True Light”
and “found the True Faith.” There is always more to discover, but I at
long last know where the treasure is to be found.
When
I was a boy, I remember riding in the bed of my father's truck, and
noticing that as I sat, with my back to the cab of the
truck, looking backwards,
I could only see where we had been, but could only guess where
we
were going next from where we had been... but of course a boy
doesn't
worry too much about that when his father is the one doing the driving.
As I look back on my life up to this point, I can see how
God has
guided me – sometimes gently, and sometimes
with a slap upside the head – but usually I was only aware of it
as I looked back in retrospect. One can't be sure what will come next,
but
my Father is doing the driving.
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