Published with the blessing of His Eminence, The Most Reverend Michael, Archbishop of New York and the Diocese of New York & New Jersey
Editor-in-Chief
Presbyter Matthew Brown
Acting Editor-in-Chief
Nick Tabor
Assistant Editor
Amelia Antzoulatos
Copy Editor
Deacon David Maliniak
Art Direction & Design
Sophie Ries
Assistant Designer & Digital
Publications Manager
Daniel Pana
Publication Office
33 Hewitt Avenue, Bronxville, NY 10708
Website www.jacobsmag.org
For digital subscriptions and to connect with us on social media, please visit our website.
Jacob's Well
Fall/Winter 2025: "Growth"
Opportunities
Want to be a part of Jacob's Well? We are looking for experienced individuals to fill the following positions: Printing Manager and Director of Digital Publications. We are also always looking for writers and artists who want to contribute their work. If you are interested and possess the necessary skills, or if you would like more details about sponsoring an issue, contact us at priestmatthewbrown@gmail.com.
Materials published in Jacob's Well are solicited from its readers voluntarily, without remuneration or royalty payment. The publishers and the staff of Jacob's Well assume no responsibility for the content of articles submitted on this basis.
Material herein may be reprinted with acknowledgement.
Send comments, corrections, or suggestions for potential articles to priestmatthewbrown@gmail.com.
Front Cover Growth (2025)
Sophie Ries
Frontispiece
Meadow in Bloom (1913) Egbert Rubertus Derk Schaap
Back Cover
Silver Chalice (ca. 547-550) Byzantine, silver, traces of silver sulfide inlay Walters Art Museum
This issue was sponsored by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University.
Crossing Cultures
A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
In the late-1930s, Robert Royster (whom we now remember as Archbishop Dmitri) and his older sister, Virginia, visited a Greek Orthodox parish for the first time. They were teenagers, raised as Baptists; and this was in Dallas, their hometown—a place where Eastern Christianity did not have a major presence. They had learned about the faith from a coffee-table book on world religions.
There’s no record of what that visit was like, but the pair must have gotten strange looks. At the time it was nearly unheard for Americans to join the Orthodox Church, except in the context of marriage. Even so, the siblings kept attending. They had to wait two years for a chance to speak with the bishop, when he visited from New York, and ask to be received into the Church. He probed them about why they wanted to join, but ultimately gave permission. They were received in 1941.
In the 1950s, the siblings established a mission parish in Dallas with services in English. Royster became a priest, then a bishop. And over the decades that followed, he played a key role in the OCA’s development, working with Rev. George Gladky and others to build up the Diocese of the South.
Now, almost a century after that first visit, the Orthodox situation in the U.S. is unimaginably different. Not only is it fairly normal for Americans to convert, but during these last few years, parishes have been experiencing a growth spurt unlike anything we’ve ever seen. It has become normal to hear about communities receiving 20 or 30 new converts at a time. The available data is spotty, but one recent survey (conducted by the recently founded St. Constantine College, in Houston), involving 20 parishes and spanning half a dozen jurisdictions and 15 states, found that conversion numbers in 2022 were up 78% from 2019. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they haven’t gone down since then.
The mainstream press has taken notice. The Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and NPR have all published or broadcast recent stories on this explosion of interest in our faith.
What we should make of all this growth, and how we ought to respond, are not necessarily simple questions. For this issue of Jacob’s Well, we invited our contributors to reflect on them from a range of perspectives.
For some of us, the obvious reaction is to celebrate. After all, if thousands of people are being received, by baptism or chrismation, it means they’re encountering Christ in the Eucharist and other sacraments. They’re also participating in the broader liturgical life of the Church, which has the ability to transform us, however slowly—to help us overcome our egos and our selfish instincts.
This growth we’re seeing also does honor to the Roysters and others from their generation. Here we could also mention clerics like Kallistos Ware, Anthony Bloom, and Alexander Schmemann, and lay scholars like Elisabeth Behr-Siegel, Olivier Clement, and Al Raboteau. Each devoted part of their careers to bringing Orthodoxy more fully into the world of the Christian West. This surge in conversions would be hard to imagine without the work they did together.
Moreover, growth in the church is sure to bring benefits to our existing Orthodox community. Already for the past decade or so, Orthodox liturgical music in the U.S. has been flourishing in a new way, and many of our best composers, including Benedict Sheehan and nazo zakkak, are either converts or children of converts. For this issue, Mother Katherine Weston, who has written exquisite settings of many Orthodox hymns, imbuing them with the musical influence of African American spirituals, joined us for an interview, where she reflected on the state of American Orthodox music. Parishioners are “looking for authentic cultural roots here,” she said, “so we can make a cultural offering to Christ from the collective heritage He has given us.” We could point to similar examples in iconography, architecture, and scholarship.
On the other hand, many of us who have been in this world for years can’t help but feel skeptical—if not a bit dour—when we hear about these mass conversions. Even if we were received as adults ourselves, we might harbor doubts about other newcomers.
There are valid concerns, for instance, about the internet and how it affects new members as they learn about the faith. In an essay he wrote late in life, Metropolitan Kallistos Ware said he was glad his initial contact with the Orthodox Church—which for him, too, occurred in his teens, when he wandered into a vespers service in London—happened in the context of worship. “I encountered the Orthodox Church not as a theory or an ideology,” he wrote, “but as a concrete and specific fact, as a worshiping presence.” For better or worse, that experience is no longer the norm. Anecdotally, it seems most inquirers these days are learning about Orthodoxy online, and there’s a danger of them forming misguided ideas about the faith before they ever set foot in a parish—ideas that can be
hard to shake later. Priests can find themselves competing with YouTube personalities during the catechism process.
In a penetrating essay in this issue, Steve Christoforou demonstrates that the internet has upended norms of church life in ways even more radical than we might realize. “For what might be the first time in Church history,” he writes, “‘growth’ is being attributed not to the witness of the saints, nor to the grace-filled words of holy people transformed in Christ, but to the ability of certain people to attract attention on platforms that are designed to spread the vile and vainglorious.” (However, Christoforou ends on a hopeful note, acknowledging that the Lord can use the internet to draw people to Himself in an authentic way.)
But if some longtime parishioners feel wary about the newcomers, this unease might also be rooted in something broader and more vague: we sense that large-scale growth will inevitably change our internal culture, making it more American, in ways we might not prefer.
In a 2017 lecture on Orthodoxy in America, the writer David Bentley Hart suggested this was inevitable. “Every act of conversion,” he said, “involves a reciprocal transformation, a mutual act of appropriation.” In other words, converts always change the faith they’re converting to. The Orthodox Study Bible, for instance, was designed by former evangelicals, and was inspired by the “study Bibles” that have been a fixture in Protestant culture for decades. And Ancient Faith Radio was launched by John Maddex, an Orthodox convert who had previously worked as a broadcast manager at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Of course, many Orthodox Christians have found both of those resources immensely helpful. But the point is that they’re examples of converts refashioning elements of the faith in the image of what they’re used to.
If some of us feel uneasy about the prospect of cultural change, that shouldn’t be hard to understand. In a way, there’s nothing more Orthodox than wanting things to stay the same. However, we have to remember that the Church is not an exclusive club that exists only for the benefit of its current members. Hart’s lecture refers to the “original sin of Orthodox culture”: its repeated failures to “detach the universal mission of the church
from the local allegiances and worldly concerns of nations and ethnic groups.”
In this issue of Jacob’s Well, literary scholar Dn. Justin Jackson develops this point further, in an essay that centers on the book of Exodus (but has clear implications for our own time). American Orthodoxy began with “the marginalized, the immigrant, those bringing this foreign Christianity to these shores,” Jackson writes. “But also, after time, the immigrant Orthodox Church needed to understand fully what it was bringing to the Americas: the Church. Do we wish it to grow and to witness Christ’s love of this people? If so, then that’s going to take ‘outsiders.’”
As Jackson is hinting here, it’s easy to feel snobbish toward outsiders, even for those of us who converted to the faith and have no ethnic Orthodox ties. His words are a helpful reminder to guard ourselves against it.
More broadly, even if it’s an Orthodox impulse to resist change on most fronts, change has nevertheless been a constant in ecclesial history. As Hart has argued elsewhere, the Nicene Creed itself represented a radical innovation when it was introduced in the fourth century. It was a bold interpretation of the scriptures and the earlier Christian tradition, though this is hard to see now, because we’re inclined to read everything that came before it through a Nicene lens. Building on this argument, Hart suggests that for a true, living tradition, “openness to an unanticipated future is no less necessary than fidelity to the past.”
requires entire communities, not only the priests. Steve Robinson speaks to this point in a beautiful essay in this issue, in which he also describes his own learning process during 26 years in the Church.
Elsewhere in these pages, Joseph Kormos and Rev. Stephen Frase, co-chairs of the OCA’s Parish Development Forum, share results from a survey they conducted on parish growth, digging into some of the data and its implications. Rev. Paul Abernathy writes about the influx of Black converts at his parish in Pittsburgh, and considers the resonances between our faith and the African American spiritual tradition (a perennial theme in this journal). And the theology professor Rob Saler draws lessons from the Death to the World movement, which he calls an “influential vanguard for the ‘punks to monks’ aesthetic in Orthodoxy.” Saler treats Death to the World as a case study in how a secular subculture can be absorbed into ecclesial life, to galvanizing effect on the Church.
On one level, these essays add up to an argument for being cautiously optimistic, or even cheerful, about the current surge of newcomers (without being cavalier about the concerns it may raise). No doubt, Church growth is a messy process—but it’s not ours to contain or control. Our remit is more limited, as Robinson suggests in the kicker of his essay: “Now, go love some inquirers.” ♦
But this is not to suggest we can’t take wrong turns. The influx we’re seeing of new members—particularly, it must be said, young men, many of whom are looking for a salve to their feelings of confusion and alienation— puts a burden on us to make sure they’re properly catechized; and this is a process that
NICK TABOR is a freelance journalist and the Acting Editor-in-Chief of Jacob'sWell He is the author of Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created. Nick is a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in Manhattan.
Portable Icon with the Virgin Eleousa (early 1300s)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Photo: Ron Lach
Novel Terrain
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH ORTHODOX WORSHIP
by LILY ROLLER
As a 14-year-old missionary kid growing up in Colombia, I’m used to lively church services. A typical church service for my family includes deafening worship music, a congregation clapping and singing at the top of their lungs, praise dance with waving flags, and a 40-minute sermon that often ends in tears of joy. So my first visit to an Orthodox church was a completely new experience.
Every summer, my family returns to the States to visit our relatives and the churches that support us. This year we had a free Sunday to go with my cousins to their service at St. Mary Magdalen Orthodox Church, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Oh, this will be interesting, I thought, as we drove over the George Washington Bridge.
“Come on,” my cousin said, as she grabbed my hand and led me through the ancient-looking doors. The strong smell of incense greeted me the moment I stepped inside. Beautiful gold designs lined the pillars and the low ceiling of the sanctuary. On all sides there were pictures of people with halos on their heads. “Saints,” my cousin explained, noticing that I was studying them. They wore dark, thick robes. I stopped to look at one saint in the middle of the wall. He was bald but had a long beard, as if to make up for his lost hair. A book was tucked under one arm, and his other hand was raised, like he was giving a blessing.
I sat down on a bench, sandwiched between my cousins. The service started with the priest reciting the Liturgy. He wasn’t just reciting it, though—it was almost like a song. He chanted some of the lines, and the small choir in the back answered him in the same melodious way. Then the words flowed through the room as everyone raised their voices to join in harmony.
As the Liturgy continued, six young men stepped down from the stage where they had stood next to the priest and walked to the center of the room, where a hollowed-out table sat. Inside the table was a picture of Mary, surrounded by a dozen unlit candles.
“Those are the altar boys,” my cousin whispered as they passed, their long black robes swishing with every step. “They help the priest with stuff.” They took turns lighting a few candles each and then stepped back. One of them looked like he wished he were somewhere else.
The priest then grabbed a strange object from a table and started shaking it back and forth in a rhythm. Incense came out of it, contributing to the already fragrant room. After a little while, the altar boys sat down on the benches next to their families, and the priest stepped down from the stage. I looked around the room as he started his sermon. There was a symbol on the wall, a cross with letters: IC, XC, NI, and KA. The priest had a matching symbol tattooed on his wrist. What language was it? What did it mean?
Many things in the service puzzled me. Later, for instance, during communion, the priest dropped the elements directly into people’s mouths. It reminded me of a mother bird feeding her young.
“What’s he feeding them?” I asked my cousins as they walked back from getting the food dropped into their mouth.
“The holy soggy bread!” my little cousin smiled as he took his seat.
“No, it’s the Eucharist, bread soaked in wine,” his older sister explained, trying to keep a straight face.
Soon the service was over, and as everyone left the church, laughing and joking with each other, I smiled. My church was so different from this one. Both churches were unique, and I wondered if that might be a good thing, not a problem to be solved. Both churches are places where people gather to praise God—the same God. ♦
LILY ROLLER is a writer and Free Methodist missionary kid living in Colombia, South America. She is a 10th grade homeschooler.
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE FOUNDER OF ORTHODOX TOURS
For nearly three decades, V. Rev. Ilya
Gotlinsky has been taking Americans on trips to sacred sites overseas through his organization Orthodox Tours. He has led groups to the Holy Land, Greece, Turkey, Russia, and the Balkans—but has also branched out beyond predominantly Orthodox countries to tour Italy, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, among other destinations. Hundreds of parishioners have benefited from his ministry.
Fr. Ilya is a native of Riga, Latvia, but has been part of the Diocese of New York and New Jersey since he was ordained by His Eminence Archbishop Peter in 1998. He has served at St. Stephen Serbian Orthodox Church, near Buffalo, and at the Dormition of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church and St. Athanasius Chapel, both in Binghamton. He spoke with Jacob’s Well about the ways travel can contribute to spiritual and intellectual development, and about some of the challenges he faces in taking groups to wartorn and politically polarized countries.
For more information about Orthodox Tours, or to join an upcoming pilgrimage, visit
ORTHODOXTOURS.COM or email TOURS@ORTHODOXTOURS.COM
JW: Tell me a little bit about how Orthodox Tours got its start.
Fr Ilya: I started doing trips as if by accident. I was never planned on it, but back in the 1990s, not long after the Soviet Union collapsed, my parishioners at St. Stephen’s Serbian Orthodox Church asked me to lead my first trip to Russia. I thought it was a very interesting challenge. That same year, I was transferred to my second parish in Binghamton, New York. I had already planned the trip, and my new parishioners said, Well, it's too late for us to join now. How about if we travel with you on the same route next year? And that way I had two trips to Russia, one year after the other.
The third year came as if automatically after that, because there were enough people who heard but who were not able to travel during the first two years. Then people from those groups said, Well, it seems like you're doing a fair job. How about going somewhere else? And then we went to the Holy Land. And it started to snowball from there.
JW: How has Orthodox Tours evolved since then? What do tours look like now? And how do you spread the word?
Fr I: Early on, I started a website, and on occasion I advertise at various church fairs and via Ancient Faith Radio. For the most part, it remains through word of mouth, and I have a core group of people who travel with me repeatedly. Of course, new people gradually began joining in, such as my former classmates from St. Vladimir’s and friends in different dioceses and even in different denominations. I now have highly trained people with religious backgrounds who help me lead the tours, and some priests help me on occasion as well.
I look at the trips as educational experiences. I make it clear that these are introductions, first and foremost, to the history of the Church and to the art and holy sites of our faith. However, I also look at it as a religious ministry. The Lord rewards me with participants who give me ideas about where to take them. Most recently, we’ve travelled to England and Rome, respectively, with the theme of early Christianity in the West, especially since we have a great number of converts of non-Eastern European or Balkan or Middle Eastern background, and I want to discover that part of Church history with them.
JW: Do you often get participants who are still looking into Orthodoxy, or who are not
Orthodox at all but are interested from an educational standpoint?
Fr I: Yes, in fact, I have led many tours where most participants were non-Orthodox. There are some people who are inquirers into the faith. I'm very blessed to say that there were some people who converted because of the experience on the trips—for whom it may have been a last push, or who just got very curious. Especially people who are involved in the history of sacred art.
But there are also people who have no intention of converting, and they travel to a destination for a variety of reasons. I’ve had several people, either Protestants or Catholics, who, in the beginning, were sort of hesitant even to approach me, thinking that I exclusively work with my co-religionists. But finally, they did come along, and we have become friends with many of them. They're very appreciative, because in destinations where Catholicism or Protestantism remains a majority, they find for themselves something very special, something in their own history that they never heard about.
JW: This seems to be an interdisciplinary endeavor—architecture meets art history and Church history and politics—but is there any one aspect you find yourself most called to? Fr I: I love challenges. I love going to new places. When I'm going on the same exact tour again and again, I always try to incorporate something new. Orthodox Tours has become an intellectual outlet for me because due to various unfortunate circumstances, I was never able to pursue my academic career and achieve a higher educational degree. It is an outlet because for every trip I'm preparing, studying, and lecturing to coherently answer people's questions. At times, I have needed to substitute or help the guide, and that has required preparation.
There are also many sites in Europe and the Middle East, like holy places or pilgrimage sites, that have been forgotten by the public. If you specialize in a particular history, of course you’d know about them. But bringing them to the public is a wonderful, wonderful challenge. So a little bit like people in the Age of Discovery, I love to go out and to find those places and to find people who inhabit those holy places.
JW: There's something you said in your response there that struck me; that is, that the trips may serve a kind of personal discovery for people,
Moscow, Domes of Churches in the Kremlin (1852) Roger Fenton
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
but the fact is that these places exist— they’re here. And the people who live in them are here. How have you developed connections with local guides in each of these various destinations?
Fr I: Through experience, through time. Nothing happened overnight. And, of course, the best guides with whom I work are not even professional guides. They're either clergy or laymen who got involved in the sphere of commercial interest. So these are people who need to tell exactly the
"...the guides become instant friends, because those are the people with whom we breathe exactly the same spirit and exactly the same air. "
same story time and again to the crowds that go there just to look at funny things and try some goofy foods, to quote Homer Simpson. When visitors are very much interested in the history, and especially if those visitors are religious, the guides become instant friends, because those are the people with whom we breathe exactly the same spirit and exactly the same air.
In fact, I met my closest friend and my closest colleague in Serbia while doing many tours with him. My wife and I became so close with him that he became a Godfather to my younger daughter. So it's not only that he is a great man, but I appreciate him so much that, in the absence of a blood tie, and to have a spiritual tie, I invited him to become the Godfather, and he flew to the United States to hold my daughter during her baptism.
JW: It’s almost impossible to extricate the current political circumstances of some of the sites you visit—say, in Turkey, Russia in recent years, certainly Israel and Palestine— from the experience of a religious pilgrimage. How do you address this tension?
Fr I: Well, first, I want to address an issue that you didn't necessarily vocalize, but needs to be vocalized, and that’s safety. I don't do anything with my people that I wouldn't do with my family. In other words, I'm not doing anything crazy, and we're not going into any area where there is known danger. Second, knowing that people may have different opinions, we try to present facts. My mission is to bring people to the religious sites, and I try to avoid any kind of religious polemics, because I'm focusing on something else. I'm focusing on preaching Christ and
the Church—but sometimes discussing a place’s political circumstances is an unavoidable topic.
Even before the war started, I was saying to my travelers to Russia that some political tendencies in the country and some moves in the Church are not particularly in line with the Gospel, and some of my sentiments were not appreciated. But I felt that it was my duty to say it, because, after all, whenever you're going anywhere, it's not only about Orthodox Disney World, but also about the truth behind it. You cannot dismiss everything wholesale, but you need to discern and to draw distinctions between history, current politics, and attitudes of the people in the Church. And things must be called by their names.
And if it's not as much about enjoyment and excitement, at least it could be about peaceful prayer [about] those things that are lamentable and certainly deserve our attention as Christians through prayer and charity.
JW: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
Fr I: St. Augustine famously said that people who don't travel are like a book, and those who do travel are like a whole library of books. So I encourage people to travel, to see the beauty, and to believe that the world is still by far a safer and more beautiful place than mass media leads us to believe.
We can certainly encounter Christ in the parishes we normally attend, but it's rejuvenating to be in the places of our ancestors, where they prayed for generations, where they prayed for over 1,000 years. To understand that we are part
"We can certainly encounter Christ in the parishes we normally attend, but it's rejuvenating to be in the places of our ancestors, where they prayed for generations, where they prayed for over 1,000 years."
of that community, part of that experience; to realize that history is not a museum, that the stones are not just stones but witnesses to great events that we admire and proclaim as dear. ♦
(Left) Transfiguration Cathedral in Suzdal, Russia (Right) Hagia Sofia in Istanbul, Turkey
DEaTh To ThE World
WHAT THE PIPELINEPUNK-TO-MONK CAN TEACH US ABOUT CONVERT CULTURE
by ROBERT SALER
In the early-1990s, no one anticipated that a member of Sleep, the band from San Jose that invented the genre of stoner metal, would become one of the most prominent evangelists for Orthodoxy in the U.S. As of 1991, Sleep’s debut record had just been released, and it was quickly gaining a huge fanbase. But as his bandmates went on tour, Justin Marler, the guitarist, was already moving in a different direction. He started spending time at the St. Herman of Alaska monastery, where Rev. Seraphim Rose had lived until his death a decade earlier. And in 1994, Marler would launch the
publication Death to the World, which would soon galvanize what people still call the “punkto-monk” phenomenon.
If this were an isolated instance, it would be interesting but not necessarily indicative of any broader trends. However, the connections between punk/metal culture and U.S. Orthodoxy increasingly run deep. There are numerous websites—13th Vigil, Punks and Monks bookstore, and Orthodox Outcast, to name just a few—that directly build on the groundwork laid by Death to the World and its bridges between music and spiritual countercultures. These sites, and the broader movement they represent, channel the rebellious energy of punk into another kind of rebellion against the world, this time spiri-
Skulls, Closing Vignette for Chapter 14, Illustration for Seven Brothers (1907) Akseli Gallen-Kallela
In thinking about this issue’s theme of “growth,” as it relates to conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy in the United States, my recent research into the intersections of punk rock/heavy metal cultures and Eastern Orthodoxy has helped me discover some patterns and overlaps that are common in contemporary conversion narratives. My recent book, Death to the World and Apocalyptic Theological Aesthetics, examines the story of Death to the World, from its founding as a zine, to its growth into a broader movement, and most recently, its revival as a magazine, merchandise outlet, and influential vanguard for the “punks to monks” aesthetic in Orthodoxy.
In this article, I would like to reflect more broadly on the question of how formation in punk rock and metal cultures sets the aesthetic, sociological, and even theological stages for acclimation to Orthodoxy. My goal is to suggest some reasons why punk/metal subcultures have been, collectively, a fertile ground for the growth of Orthodoxy in the U.S.
We should say first that this is not the first time rock and roll has intersected with a Christian subculture in the U.S. Evangelicals have long enjoyed a tense but generative relationship with consumer culture broadly, and music culture more
BB BB
Indeed, when I was writing about Death to the World’s move to produce more Orthodox-themed merchandise with a heavy-metal aesthetic (t-shirts, hoodies, buttons, patches, and the like), one of my editors asked if I thought Death to the World was simply a case of U.S. Orthodoxy onboarding evangelical merchandising culture. It’s a good question. On one hand, it would be implausible to suggest that any form of Christianity in the U.S. fully evades the long shadow of evangelicals’ influence. However, my answer then, and now, is that the “punk-to-Orthodox” dynamic is not simply an Orthodox version of the same phenomenon.
To illustrate why I believe this to be the case, I want to focus on how formative themes in punk rock and metal cultures resonate with, and are in some ways answered by, the forms of Eastern Orthodoxy to which many converts tend to gravitate.
The first theme is that of authenticity. Multiple studies of convert self-reports in U.S. Orthodoxy have stressed the role that “originalism”— that is, the notion that Orthodoxy represents the preservation and perseverance of the original church of the Apostles—plays in their decision to become Orthodox.1 Similarly, within both punk and metal cultures “authenticity” is a dom-
1 For more on this subject, see Rev. Oliver Herbel’s Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Church (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Amy Slagle’s The Eastern Church in the Spiritual Marketplace: American Conversions to
inant and normative standard—not only for the music itself, but for the lifestyle and subculture participation associated with it. Since long before the internet age, debates have raged about certain bands: are they actually living out the ethos of the subculture, or are they “sellouts” or “poseurs”?
In other words, debates over orthodoxy and heresy are not the sole province of religion. As prominent online Eastern Orthodox influencers such as Fr. Turbo Qualls, Fr. John Valadez, Buck Johnson, and Mano Elia (all of whom identify as converts from punk subculture to Orthodoxy, and who credit punk for playing a role in the transition) have stressed, debates over authenticity in punk culture can acclimate people to seek authenticity in religion as well. Punk critiques of the “phoniness” of mainstream culture easily map onto Orthodox convert critiques of the emptiness of, say, “mainstream” churches capitulating to consumer/entertainment culture. The point is that discourses of originalism and those of authenticity (however contested) are a natural sociological and theological pairing in this case.
With the desire for authenticity, of course, comes parallel suspicions of “authority” to the extent that “the system” or “the mainstream” is seen to perpetuate cultures of phoniness, materialism, and existential emptiness. Under the influence of such figures as Fr. Seraphim Rose, many “punk-to-Orthodox” converts pair despair about the “nihilism” of mainstream culture with suspicion of authorities—sometimes even Orthodox church authorities—whom they deem too cozy with the mainstream—and thus inauthentic. This is an ongoing source of tension among many of these converts, but also the source of the energy behind the claim (which forms Death to the
World’s tagline) that Orthodoxy represents “the last true rebellion.”
There is also overlap between metal subcultures and the Orthodox faith. They both put emphasis on the supernatural and otherworldly, as compared to the more immanent or “realistic.” Let me share an illustration from my own life. During the several-year period in which I was discerning my own reception into Orthodoxy, I would sometimes attend my mainline Protestant church’s services at 8:30 a.m. on Sundays, then attend Divine Liturgy at a nearby Orthodox parish at 10 a.m. On one Sunday when I did this, the night before I had attended a death-metal show at a local bar. At that gig, the headlining band performed a track whose title (and shouted chorus) was “Satan is real!” The next morning, I was struck by the fact that this sentiment—that is, the reality of the demonic, and of the spiritual realm more broadly—was present in the Divine Liturgy as well (albeit to a very different end!).
Meanwhile, it would have been completely out of place in my mainline Protestant church. In that way, death metal was more like Orthodoxy (and less like the “disenchanted” secular order) than either was like this Protestant church. From that perspective, it makes sense that people deeply formed in the supernaturalist aesthetics of metal culture (as well as adjacent cultures such as role-play, Dungeons and Dragons, etc.) might be primed to encounter the more supernatural elements of Orthodoxy with recognition and resonance.
This is not meant as an uncritical celebration of the punk-to-monk (or metalhead-to-monk) pipeline. These trends also raise concerns of their own. For instance, it’s not hard to see how the distrust of authority and “the system” that per-
vades punk subculture can easily morph into suspicion of other cultural authorities—for instance, medical experts who advised masking and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic (as well as the Orthodox bishops who took those experts seriously). It can feed into a broader problem with conspiracy theorizing that already exists in American Orthodoxy (as I and other scholars have documented). This conspiratorial bent has also, as scholars have shown, complexified the U.S. Orthodox church’s responses to claims made by Russia against Ukraine, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and so on. Put simply, “fight the system” energy tends to be unpredictable as to which systems it targets.
Likewise, too much focus on the “supernatural” (particularly when paired with skepticism towards this-worldly concerns around the poor and marginalized) can be detrimental to the church’s social witness on behalf of justice. The impact of converts upon the culture war is a story yet unfolding, and the dynamics surrounding Death to the World are a part of that. For priests and others who oversee catechesis, these are matters for serious reflection.
That said, we do not want to dampen the work of the Spirit. Indeed, the affinities between punk/metal subcultures and Orthodoxy show us that continuing growth in U.S. Orthodoxy, in many cases, represents less a repudiation of U.S. culture and more a transmogrification of its energies. Some of the trends we see in punk and metal cultures—young people searching for authenticity, rebelling against unjust systems, and expanding their imagination for transcendence, against the metaphysically flattening structures of modernity—can have a galvanizing effect on the Church, when these newcomers are properly catechized.
The full scope of this impact remains to be seen, and we haven’t entirely figured out what it looks like for this energy to be channeled properly. But we should remember that the church has a long history of adapting cultural disenchantment into vital spirituality, and thus we can be both calm and open to surprise as to what God will do with punks, monks, and all of us in between. ♦
ROBERT SALER is an associate professor of Theology and Culture and Associate Dean for Evaluation an Assessment at Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis. He has authored several books, including Between Magisterium and Death to the World. He is a parishioner at Indianapolis’s St. John the Forerunner Orthodox Church.
by STEVE ROBINSON
It has been about 32 years since I discovered Vladimir Lossky's book The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church in my Episcopal Church’s library (it had been checked out only once in the preceding decades). The day I finished the first chapter I was hooked. Since then, I have been in the trenches of what we might call “online convert Orthodoxy.” I started in Yahoo chat rooms, then became an Orthodox live radio-show broadcaster, blogger, podcaster, author, commenter in Facebook groups, and catechist/evangelist in mission parishes. I believe I have both done and seen virtually every zealous, sincere, immature, overboard, and fearful, hesitant, confused thing that people think and do when coming into the church and navigating the dissonance of its lived reality versus our internet-curated expectations.
I’m now observing the current tidal wave of inquirers flowing into, and sometimes overflowing, parishes. My current parish averages 50-plus catechumens at any one time. I know this surge will challenge the abilities and resources of our pastor and our community to adopt them into our family, and to help them manage their expectations and reactions to the encountered realities of American Orthodox parish life.
Like many of the inquirers who walk through the doors of the church, I had been “catechized” for years on the internet before I ever attended a service. When I finally showed up the first time for Vespers at an ethnic Greek Cathedral parish,
I was already intellectually converted, and I had even been “evangelizing” online.
I was unprepared for what I encountered. There was a chanter, one person in the “congregation,” and the priest—and the three of us visitors sitting in a pew toward the back of the chapel. And as I would find out later, the lone parishioner was the chanter’s girlfriend. My reaction was a mixture of confusion, disappointment, and, yes, judgment and condemnation. This was an 800-family parish, after all. But I had no clue that this reaction would characterize what I’d be dealing with, both personally and in my relationships with other inquirers, for the next 26 years.
Like everyone who comes to the church “already catechized,” I did not know that internet Orthodoxy is like reading online dating profiles and looking at carefully chosen and Photoshopped pictures. The personality, habits, disposition, attractiveness, and compatibility of my new theological lover were fantasies I had constructed. Of course. I had never talked to her, never gone out on a date and encountered her in person. Everything I knew was hearsay. I had never shared a meal with her, known her relatives (many of them from foreign countries), accommodated her idiosyncrasies, learned her language, or sat in prolonged silence with her.
When I showed up at Vespers unannounced, I caught the reality of Orthodoxy in its tattered bathrobe and house slippers, smoking an unfiltered
"Even in that nearly empty Vespers service, there was an ineffable, irresistible, unexpected beauty, which no description, dogma, testimonial, or digital experience could have given me. "
Camel with a Mason jar of cheap chardonnay in her hand. (Incidentally, one of my catechetical experiences later would be helping with a mission parish where the priest would go outside during the long chanter’s parts of Orthros/Matins and smoke in the parking lot.) I repressed my disappointment with what I found, because disappointment was the only emotion I felt. Even in that nearly empty Vespers service, there
was an ineffable, irresistible, unexpected beauty, which no description, dogma, testimonial, or digital experience could have given me.
So, like many who come to the Church via the internet, I had found the Church—and eventually, became Orthodox—for the beauty it promised. And yes, the beauty existed as advertised. As did the mind-boggling theological nuances, the profound spiritual direction, and the rich liturgical depth. But, unlike the internet, real people with real spiritual lives and real issues also existed in it—and I could not delete, unfriend, or fire insulting comments over their digital heads and go to bed with “likes” and a smirk at my correctness and cleverness. When you sit across from someone at coffee hour, the rules of the game are incarnational, not digital, and they’re far more complicated.
The reason is that the Church is made up of people. Lots of them. Each in “the hospital for sinners” with pre-existing conditions. I hoped for saints, but over the years I found the church
Miraculous Draught of Fishes (early 20th c., original dated early 6th c.) Byzantine, Tesserae, glass in wooden frame
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
of Corinthian libertines and Cretan gluttons. I hoped for one uniform understanding of the Gospel of mercy, but instead found legalistic, fundamentalist Galatians who viewed the Gospel as “law.” I hoped for the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace but found Timothean contentious schismatics who wrangled over words to create factions in the church. I hoped for humble pious clergy but found 3rd John clerics who loved their pre-eminence and respectful greetings in the marketplace. I hoped for the unspotted bride of Christ but found the seven churches of Revelation: Ephesians who had left their first love, pagan Pergamites, lukewarm Laodiceans. I hoped for a church with one mind but found nitpicking Pharisees and savvy Sadducees. I hoped for speaking the truth in love but found arrogant, angry, condescending apologists. I hoped for pure Christianity and found syncretistic and superstitious Colossians.
I expected to find charismatic, monastic bishops who “rightly divided the word of truth,” but I found flawed men in gold robes who often did not divide it according to the truth as I understood it from Orthodox websites and discussion forums. I found that bishops’ decisions for my jurisdiction trumped the Canons as interpreted by bishops in other jurisdictions, Facebook groups, and YouTube clerics with cult followings (or at least that was the bishops’ intent).
I hoped to find that the bishops’ and synod’s administration of the Church resembled the way I managed my own business: with transparency, timely decisiveness, clarity in communication, and with no respect of persons. But… well…
I hoped to find clerics and a par ish life that fit my understand ing of competent, pastoral, wise church leadership
and ministry, but it never occurred to me that my expectations were filtered through my American fundamentalist, congregationalist Bible Church culture and experience. I soon found I had to figure out how to live in a clerical leadership paradigm of a Middle Eastern culture that was explained to me as “God is an Arab sheik, and the priests are his princes.” And it was not received well when I asked, “where is this in Scripture?”
Well… you get it. In short, after spending six years reading books, surfing the web, and chatting online, I didn’t get it. At all. I was a spiritual adolescent raised by the wolves of the internet (and in many things was still an infant). I thought I was more mature than I was and thought I knew more than I did. I knew how to live in my head but not how to live in a real, big world I’d never had to navigate. I “knew” almost everything, judged almost everyone, and understood almost nothing. I knew book and internet intellectual Orthodoxy. I had no clue about 2,000 years of culturally informed, persecuted, martyred, and Old Country theocratically “lived Orthodoxy.”
Once I was “in,” I soon found that my bishop, priest, and fellow parishioners didn’t care about my opinions, prognostications, and interpretations of the Canons and “The Fathers,” nor about my views on who should be ordained, defrocked, commemorated, or regarded as a saint or a heretic. They were unimpressed with my keeping the visible spiritual disciplines, as I was unimpressed by their lack of observance.
So, intellectually I understood that the Church was still in existence dogmatically and practically. And I kind of knew the Church of Acts 28 was not identical to the Church of Acts 2, just as the Church of 2024 was not identical to the Church of Acts 28. To be Ortho -
Portrait of Christ (early 20th c., original dated late 5th–early 6th century)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
dox, one must accept that the Holy Spirit has guided the changes in the Church (from structure, to liturgy, to Canons, to vestments, to clerical offices, to non-dogmatic doctrines, prayers, fasting rules, and so on) from Acts 2 to the present day. Even through the messy parts of the story. And when you really understand Church history, you know there’s about as much messiness as there is holiness. Contrary to my old Bible church’s teachings, New Testament Christianity didn’t have to be re-discovered, recovered, or restored to its minimalistic First Century purity. It has always existed.
I eventually came to accept that the Church has both an unbroken apostolic succession and an unbroken succession of broken sinners. Both within the clergy and laity. The presence of Christ Himself in the flesh, His twelve first-hand witnesses, and the 70 disciples empowered by the Holy Spirit all leave us with a pretty ragged picture of the Church in the New Testament, and 2,000 years of tradition have not changed that. Church history only affirms and puts an exclamation point on the picture of the Church we see in the Epistles.
That is good news and bad news—but not really bad news, just real news.
What does all this mean for the new inquirer, catechumen, and convert? And perhaps more important, what does this mean for a given priest and his parish as they receive newcomers? Because no one becomes Orthodox online, any more than watching weddings on YouTube can make you married. That only happens in real life with real people in real relationships. And it’s hard.
For the inquirers and catechumens, I think this message is clear: the Church will not be what you expect. You will be both astounded and disappointed at what you find. The more you think you know, the more you don’t know, and the more trouble you might have engaging what is “real” that is in front of you. Find someone to talk to who doesn’t speak in memes and platitudes about the Church and Orthodox
life. It may not be someone in a black robe. Find someone older who has been there for decades, not years, and has won wisdom the hard way, not just from books.
It has been my experience with hundreds of converts, in person and online, for nearly 30 years, that the faster and harder someone runs at the Church, the more likely they will soon run through the Church and out the other side— instead of slowing down to humbly engage in the church’s life, via Her flawed and imperfect people.
To the Church and its leadership (including lay leaders), I’d say there is nothing new under the sun. People have flowed in and out of the Church for over 2,000 years, for various reasons and under various influences, in all cultures. Some stay and become saints and some do not. Don’t be fooled by zeal, piety, or knowledge. If someone is pushing to “be saved” (especially by their own preferred method) it might be a red flag that there’s more going on than just love for Christ and His Church.
Someone recently asked me, “How are we going to keep all these young men in the Church?”
I told them, “By love. If they have not been in your homes, at your tables, and haven’t learned they can call you and trust you with anything, they are a flight risk. There has to be a reason above knowledge for them to stay in the Church. And that reason only comes through a personal relationship with people who love them.”
Now, go love some inquirers. ♦
STEVE ROBINSON is the host of the Ancient Faith podcast Steve the Builder: A Layman’s View of Living the Orthodox Christian Faith, and the former host of Our Life in Christ, Ancient Faith’s first podcast. He is a parishioner at St. Ignatius Orthodox Church in Mesa, Arizona. His writing appears at http://steverobinson. substack.com.
“Were You There?”
THE EVANGELICAL WITNESS OF SACRAMENTAL ENCOUNTER AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE ORTHODOX CHURCH
by REV. PAUL ABERNATHY
She stood in tears at the back of the church. They seemed to flow ceaselessly, while the faithful joyfully proclaimed, “Christ is risen!” It was Pascha, and the grace of the Resurrection flooded our humble chapel. Betty Rice was experiencing the service for her first time as an Orthodox Christian, and something was moving her in a mighty way. Her life, her family, and her community had known great suffering. Pain, loss, violence, strain, and many traumas were the backdrop for her journey to Holy Orthodoxy, but on this night everything was different. To be in the mystical presence of the risen Lord Jesus, to receive Him in a way that sealed the grace of the Resurrection on her heart, was otherworldly. Something was healed for her that night.
Betty is African American. I can remember meeting her in the early days of my ministry with what is now the Neighborhood Resilience Project, based in the Hill District, a predominantly Black community in Pittsburgh. Rooted in the Gospel and the teachings of the Orthodox Church, and inspired by the civil rights movement, the Neighborhood Resilience Project aims to help transform trauma-affected communities into resilient, healthy ones. I was blessed to establish this ministry in 2018—two years after I had begun serving at a new mission parish in the Hill District, St. Moses the Black. At that time, I assumed many elements of Orthodox worship, like the icons, would seem foreign to most people in the
neighborhood. But as it turned out, our traditions often spoke to them in a way I didn’t anticipate.
On another day, for instance, I had a visit from an African American woman whose teenage grandson had been murdered on the steps of his house, two doors down from her. In a moment of anguish over the trial of her grandson’s alleged killers, she stood outside my office, peering into an
The Transfiguration (late 13th century) Getty Museum
icon of the Transfiguration. After looking intently, even longingly, at this icon for a long while, contemplating the unbearable pain in her heart, she said to me, “Father, I have many questions for God about everything that happened. I was so confused, so uncertain, so wounded. But something amazing just happened right now. I stared into this icon, and somehow, some way, God answered me. I stared into this icon and found God’s peace. Somehow, in this icon, God answered every question I had.”
Many other visitors to St. Moses and the Neighborhood Resilience Project have expressed similar thoughts. It has often seemed that the people of this community, in some mystical way, recognize Orthodox Christianity. They respond not only to the icons, but also to the prayers, the incense, and even the sacred music. I can remember when one African American woman who had also become Orthodox brought her older father to the Divine Liturgy for the first time. In the middle of the Liturgy, she leaned over to him and said, OK Dad, I just want to prepare you because this church music is different from what you are used to. Annoyed by her comment, he responded, Don’t talk to me like I don’t know this music. This is like what we used to sing a long time ago.
I believe the explanation for this has deep historical roots. When we think about the development of Christianity in the U.S., it’s important to understand that for African Americans, the faith took hold in a radically different context than it did for most other racial and ethnic groups. Whereas many journeys to America began in pursuit of a better life, the journey for African Americans began with excruciating pain and unspeakable horror. The transatlantic slave trade tore millions of Africans from their families, enslaving them in most brutal conditions. Many Africans didn’t even survive the terror of the slave ships. And for those who did arrive on American shores, their new lives were often characterized by beatings, rape, starvation, murder, and radical isolation.
The testimony of one survivor of slavery, Ottobah Cugoano, is worth quoting here. Cugoano was born in West Africa in 1757 and was captured for the slave trade as a young child. He wound up in the Caribbean and was later taken to London by a merchant. After he was freed,
he joined in the cause of abolition. In his 1787 autobiographical pamphlet, Cugoano describes the terrors he experienced as a young boy:
I was thus lost to my dear indulgent parents and relations, and they to me. All my help was cries and tears, and these could not avail; nor suffered long, till one succeeding woe, and dread, swelled up another. Brought from a state of innocence and freedom, and, in a barbarous and cruel manner, conveyed to a state of horror and slavery … And yet it is still grievous to think that thousands more have suffered in similar and greater distress, under the hands of barbarous robbers, and merciless taskmasters; and that many even now are suffering in all the extreme bitterness of grief and woe, that no language can describe the cries of some, and the sight of their misery, may be seen and heard afar; but the deep sounding groans of thousands, and the great sadness of their misery and woe, under the heavy load of oppressions and calamities inflicted upon them, are such as can only be distinctly known to the ears of Jehovah Sabaoth.1
It was not hope, nor joy, nor excitement, nor eagerness that characterized the African journey to America during the transatlantic slave trade, but rather, it was pain of the heart. This pain became the origin of an agonizing prayer, the prayer of broken hearts, which—in the words of Cugoano—“can only be distinctly known to Jehovah Sabaoth.” This was a collective cry to the heavens, beseeching an almighty God for His mercy and compassion. His words resonate with a description of prayer from St. Paisios the Athonite, which appears in the second volume of the saint’s collected spiritual teachings:
Real prayer begins from pain; it is not a pleasant experience, a ‘nirvana.’ What kind of pain is it? One is troubled in the good sense of the term. He feels pain, he groans, he suffers when praying for anything whatsoever. Do you know what it means to suffer? Yes, he suffers, because he is participating in everyone’s pain or in the pain of one particular person. This participation, this pain is rewarded by God with divine exaltation. Of course, he doesn’t ask for this exaltation, but it
1 Ottobah Cugoano, Narrative of the Enslavement of Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa; published by himself, in the Year 1787 (London: Hatchard and Co., 1825).
comes as a consequence, because he participates in the pain of others.2
In the sea of unrelenting pain which poured forth from African hearts in violent bondage in the Americas, real prayer was born. The world had betrayed and forsaken these beautiful souls who now had no ignorance or naïveté regarding the perverse character of this fallen world. For these enslaved Africans and their descendants, their cries, unheard by men, became prayers heard by God.
These circumstances opened a path for profound encounters with the living God. Slaves cried out in sheer agony to heaven, and our Lord Jesus Christ was the God that visited them. There was this deep sense that Christ had revealed Himself as a God of mercy, and this spurred a desire to reject this world and look heavenward. There was an abiding sense that when crying out in the hour of pain, prayers were heard by the Lord. In His presence, the worshipers became free in a different way; free from this world, becoming instead children of God and citizens of the Kingdom.
Consider the account of Anderson Edwards, which appears in the landmark book Slave Religion , by the Orthodox Christian and African American scholar Dr. Al Raboteau (of blessed memory):
We prayed a lot to be free and the Lord done heered us. We didn’t have no song books and the Lord done give us our songs when we sing them at night it jus’ whispering so nobody hear us. One went like this:
My knee bones am aching, My body’s rackin’ with pain, I ‘lieve I’m a chile of God, And this ain’t my home, ‘Cause Heaven’s my aim.3
Generations after slavery, this faith can still be found among African Americans in 21stcentury America. Although slavery ended in 1865, suffering for Blacks in the United States did not. The Jim Crow era lasted for another century and took many forms of expressions, some of them brutal. Take the policy of redlining, for instance, which was imposed by the Federal Housing Authority in 1934 to ensure no investments would be made in predominantly Black communities to support home ownership and business development. Let us also remember the hundreds of thousands of African American lives that have been claimed by gun violence over the decades, as well as the disproportionately high infant and maternal mortality rates among Black Americans. All this is to say that pain has
2 Elder Paisios of Mt. Athos, Spiritual Counsels Volume II: Spiritual Awakening (Thessaloniki: Holy Monastery “Evangelist John the Theologian”), 346.
3 Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution of the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 218.
The Descent into Limbo (late 13th century) Getty Museum
remained familiar to African Americans up to the present day. Despite this being the case— or maybe more accurately, because this is the case—a humble and mighty prayer is still to be found deep in the African American heart. It is that brokenhearted cry to Jesus that our suffering ancestors taught us, which for many continues to be the center of life.
This is the prayer that is now leading many African Americans to the Orthodox Church. That deep tradition of sorrowful joy to be found in the Church of the Apostles is like a beacon guiding the brokenhearted home to the ancient Church. It is by the Cross that the Lord draws all people to Himself (Jn 12:32), and it is indeed by the cross that many African Americans have been drawn to Christ in Holy Orthodoxy. It is in the Orthodox Church that the mystery of the Cross is experienced in its fullness.
That old spiritual that our ancestors sang, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?,” takes on new meaning when we experience the mystery of anamnesis in the liturgical life of the Holy Orthodox Church—whereby we remember through mystical participation in the Life of Christ. The Orthodox Christian who has encountered the Lord in the divine services of the Orthodox Church is able to answer the poignant old Black voice, “Yes, I was there.” More important, however, it is the Orthodox Christian who can perhaps more profoundly respond, “Were you there when my Lord rose from the dead?”
“Christ is risen!” That Paschal proclamation written on the heart of every right-believing Orthodox Christian now completes the revelation painfully begun long ago with the cross that many poor African enslaved persons bore long ago. It is the pain of the Cross that is now transfigured by the risen Lord Jesus Christ, who promises, “Most assuredly, I say to you that you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; and you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy” (Jn 16:20).
Returning to Betty, who stood in the church weeping that Holy Pascha night, something had happened. She knew the Cross well. Both her son and grandson had been shot down senselessly in the streets. After these murders, an unspeakable pain gripped her heart. There were days when it was difficult for her to even get out of bed. This loss was more than she could bear, and it seemed that she had not only lost her son and grand-
son, but also that they had lost their mother and grandmother too.
That Pascha, however, everything had changed. “Come, receive the Light!” the priest chanted as the royal doors of the altar were opened. “Christ is risen!” She heard these words for the first time as an Orthodox Christian, and she now knew she was finally in the presence of the risen Lord Jesus Christ. Yes, she was there when He was crucified, but now she was finally there in His Resurrection. Later, at the end of the service, as I stood offering a Paschal greeting to parishioners, Betty approached me, sobbing, and gave me a hug. “Tonight,” she said, “my son got his mother back.” She felt alive for the first time in decades.
Her experience, and many like it, seem to be the fulfillment of everything our suffering ancestors of African descent told us was possible. It is this fulfillment that I believe is now drawing many of African descent into the Holy Orthodox Church. In this context and heritage, Orthodox Christianity is not foreign or strange, but rather familiar, comforting, and liberating.
Betty later established a group called Healing Your Heart, which ministers to other women who have lost their children and loved ones to gun violence. She now comforts women, entering into their pain with prayer and thanksgiving. What began as she partook of the Eucharist has now poured out into the streets and living rooms where brokenhearted women are found in great numbers. We can’t just stay in our church now, Father, she has told me. We have to go out into the streets, making some kind of great procession. We’ve got to walk the streets praying, Father! We need to go out into the community and bring all heaven down to earth!
That’s what she experienced that Holy Pascha night: In hearing “Christ is risen!” in that eucharistic context, she experienced all of heaven coming down to earth. Now she wanted that for her entire community. Through people like her, the faith of the apostles continues to spread in a mighty way among a suffering people. ♦
REV. PAUL ABERNATHY is the founder and CEO of the Neighborhood Resilience Project and the author of The Prayer of a Broken Heart: An Orthodox Christian Reflection on African American Spirituality. He is the founding pastor of St. Moses the Black Orthodox Church in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
That “Motley Throng”
GROWING THE CHURCH, RIFFRAFF AND ALL
Iby DN. JUSTIN JACKSON
n Exodus 12:37-38, as the Israelites prepare to follow their God, to throw off their bondage, and to worship the God of Israel as Moses has implored, we are told that “... the sons of Israel marched from Ramesses to Sokchotha; the men were about six hundred thousand foot soldiers, apart from the chattels. And a great mixed crowd went up with them, and sheep and oxen, even a great many animals.”
I am not here to question the accuracy of this prodigious number—600,000 footsoldiers (which, including women and children, would bring us to around two million sojourners); after all, Exodus 1 and 2 explain the miraculous fecundity of the Israelites as they suffer in their bondage (indeed, even becoming more fruitful as they suffer under their hardships!). Rather, in light of our theme, “growth,” I’m interested in what Exodus 12:38 describes as the ‘erev rav (or ‘erevrav; epimiktos polys, in the Septuagint), that “mixed crowd/mixed multitude” who sojourn with the Israelites. The rabbis were interested in who made up that “mixed multitude” and about what imprint those members made on the exodus. Opinions, of course, varied. However, the vast majority of exegetes agreed that this group was made up of non-Israelites—and, more to the point, that they were those witnesses who wished to follow God more than to follow Pharaoh. These witnesses to the great plagues decided to follow the very
God who sent these plagues rather than to obey Pharaoh, their god, any longer.
This brief passage always takes my students aback a little, and this surprises me because 1) I teach at a Christian college, and 2) by this time, they've already had six weeks of my showing them the ways in which “exile and return” is a paradigmatic structure within Old Testament narrative; i.e., it offers us constant and repeated penitential narratives and models for our turning (back) to God. When we read with this paradigm in mind, which should be a default mode for Orthodox Christians, the Old Testament literarily (and thus quite literally) attempts to demonstrate that God desires not the death of sinners but that they should turn and live (Ez. 18:23).
Perhaps the reason for my students’ reluctance to think about non-Israelites as would-be Israelites is that they’ve previously been taught about certain supposedly (and actual) exclusivist claims made by the Hebrew Bible, claims misunderstood by ancient readers and yet illumined and corrected by the New Testament. But this still strikes me as odd, because by this time we’ve also read the Book of Jonah—wherein the future persecutors of the Israelites, the Assyrians, have been spared by God even before they’ve persecuted the Israelites. Still, God shows all of them great mercy, even if only temporarily. And the Ninevites’ repentance is even highlighted and praised
(Reverse) Moses Staying the Plague (c. 1780/1785)
William Blake
National Gallery of Art
(Top) Jonah preaching
Repentance from the Basilica of Our Lady of the Rosary
by St. Matthew as he recalls this sign of Jonah (12:38-41). In a nutshell, my students will accept and even be delighted by the repentance of the Ninevites, the very people set to besiege the Israelites within 50 years of when the Book of Jonah is set, yet they are taken aback that such foreign entities—this ‘erev rav—would be spared, or even that such riffraff would be allowed on the Exodus with faithful Israelites.
This notion of the outsider as a model for Israel (and as a model for Scripture’s readers) should hardly take any Orthodox Christian by surprise: we read St. Andrew’s Great Canon twice during Lent (just in case it doesn’t stick the first time—or, for some of us, the 61st time!).
But if we simply read the genealogies of the New Testament during the Nativity fast, for example, then we can hardly be scandalized. Indeed, Christianity seems to be, by God’s own decree, a
group of outsiders, riffraff even. It’s a scandalous list but hardly surprising, and I’m not referring only to Holy Prophet-King David. Repeatedly, depictions of the ancient Church in the Old Testament demonstrate the ways in which the outsider is brought into Israel—and it’s often simply through obedience (even if monolatry at times), by faith, doing those things commanded by God.
I’ve already mentioned the Ninevites, who took on Israelite penitential practices without even knowing what they’re doing. But to this we can add Ruth. She’s the Moabite, which our narrator repeatedly points out, but Naomi and Boaz see her only as an insider, as family, because of her actions and because of her fidelity to Naomi (and thus to Naomi’s God). We can add Hagar, Sarah's Egyptian slave girl. When pregnant with Ishmael, she is chased away by Sarai where the angel confronts her in the wilderness, asking her where she is going, and she is told that God has heard her suffering; so “now go suffer” (Gen. 16:912). There are few formulae in the Old Testament that map out the history of Israel (or the Church) better than this: God has heard your suffering; now go suffer.1 Perhaps more appropriate here, we can look to Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law and a priest of Midian. After the exodus, when the Israelites have been freed by dint of God’s hand (manifested through Moses’ hand), and right in the midst of their murmurings and disobedience, Jethro shows up again. He’s a foreign priest but one who has heard of the glories of God. In contrast to the Israelites, he’s delighted by the miracles and the protection of this new God and simply asks Moses, “Where do I sign up?” (my own rough translation of the Hebrew).
The growth of Israel (and thus the ancient Church) is an odd thing to behold. If we follow the pattern, there always seems to be a catastrophe or disaster leaving us with a remnant of the faithful, then adding others to that remnant, then maybe another loss, another remnant, another loss, and so on. It seems that our best models for behavior come from the outside and that Scripture works hard to make us conscious of this phenomenon. While we keep looking for purity from within Israel, the sacred text may be asking us to look to the earnest desire for God from outsiders who yet still serve other gods and thus are left with a sense of insatiable wanting.
1 The Greek reads, “God has given heed to your humility; now go humble yourself.”
If the messianic promise is a universal harmony (howsoever imagined), then it makes sense that the marginalized become central to that narrative—that outsiders are brought to the messianic meal, as it were. The margins will help to build the center (taking our cue from the stone which has been rejected).
Every American Orthodox Christian ought to understand this basic, evident principle: at the birth of Orthodoxy in America were the marginalized, the immigrant (my own grandparents), those bringing this foreign Christianity to these shores. But also, after time, the immigrant Orthodox Church needed to understand fully what it was bringing to the Americas: the Church. Do we wish it to grow and to witness Christ’s love of this people? If so, then that’s going to take “outsiders” (except “outsiders” here means western converts and not immigrants). So whereas Orthodoxy was once itself a stranger in a strange land in America (as Orthodox immigrants), it has now found itself a stranger (American Orthodox Christians converts) in a strange land (European, Eastern European, and Near Eastern Orthodoxy). I find it all sublimely biblical, and even prophetic.
So now let us return to the ‘erev rav, the freeing of Israel from the bondage of Pharaoh and death, and let’s think about life in the Church, the Body of Christ. If this ‘erev rav are outsiders, then one has to ask how did these outsiders come to worship this foreign God? And what an odd thing to imagine that a God who brings plagues upon a people would also be a God who wishes to be in communion with those same people. But I believe that’s where we are in this story. Every plague unleashed by God on Egypt is a call for them to turn to the God of Israel, to Christ. The narrative logic of the plagues demonstrates that two things are at play in God’s warning (yes, warning) to the Egyptians and to the Israelites: that this God can bring death, and that this God can hedge in any of those who obey.
The Nile, turned to blood and stinking like death, is the first indication that this is a God who controls the Nile and thus the Egyptians’ lifeblood (and thus the gods associated with the Nile). That stench of death is a prophetic warning of what is to come. The plague of frogs will do the same thing: they stink like death. But they invade and demonstrate that this God can get close to us with this death and that there’s nothing one can do about it. The plague of lice
simply magnifies the proximity of God to our own being. If death looks like lice, then we are in trouble. Even the Egyptian magicians can do nothing against the lice.
God then begins to demonstrate that while He can utilize these vehicles that remind us of death and can also show that He can bring it close to our very persons, He can also distinguish and protect those who obey His commands. So when the Israelites’ land and livestock are spared from destruction (the fourth and fifth plagues),
"If the messianic promise is a universal harmony (howsoever imagined), then it makes sense that the marginalized become central to that narrative—that outsiders are brought to the messianic meal, as it were. "
we witness that obedience does not lead to death; indeed, obedience leads to a preservation of life. And it seems to be an easy obedience, one that serves the livelihood of the Israelites: obey God and avoid destruction (this may be the eschatological teaching par excellence).
Here, we begin to witness a much more focused prophetic warning: this god is a God who can control death (and is not controlled by it) and who can bring it in closer proximity to us (indeed on our very selves, like lice). But now in the seventh plague we see an important shift. God has warned of the next plague and says that whoever obeys and brings in their livestock and servants, then that livestock and those servants shall be spared: “Thus he who feared the word of the Lord among Pharaoh’s servants gathered his cattle into his houses” (9:20). It’s a brief, remarkable line, easily overlooked, but it certainly begins to give us a sense of who are the ‘erev rav: these are the outsiders who can read prophetically, who understand that God can hedge in those who desire His protection, and so they do the unthinkable: they obey this new God whom they do not know. And their livelihood is spared. The text has moved us from what at first appears to be injustice—“I will harden Pharaoh’s heart” (how
can Pharaoh be punished for the very thing God did to him?)—to God saving those Egyptians who obey Moses’ prophetic words. In short, those who listen to and obey God become Israel.
I don’t believe this reading becomes merely an example of a hermeneutic of an extreme misercordia (though I could be accused of far worse). I’d simply point out that Scripture makes it plain that God’s deliverance of the Egyptians was not simply to show His power or sovereignty as a sort of reason for all of His actions; rather, His warnings and actions (the plagues) were always only a means of moral instruction (for the Israelites and Egyptians alike): obey and you shall live.
When the Israelite midwives refuse to do Pharaoh’s bidding and murder the Israelite children, we are told that they “saved the male children alive” (1:17). They disobeyed one god (Pharaoh) only to serve their own, whether they knew it or not, even though their God seemingly had abandoned them. When Pharaoh’s own daughter disobeys her father (and her god) and saves the future prophet of Israel, Moses, she too obeys Israel’s God; sometimes a simple act of moral rebellion can be a great act of faith. Indeed, after Pharaoh’s daughter protects Moses, we are told that “God heard their
"This is a God of the ‘erevrav , we riffraff who do little right but who have seen the light and desire it, who have seen God, tasted Him, and desire more—even when we worship that golden calf. "
groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then God looked upon the children of Israel and was made known to them” (2:24-45). The only question that remains is: Who are these children of Israel? The answer is, I think Scripture makes clear, those who follow these commandments of this foreign God (who Himself is an outsider in Egypt—and even to His own people!).
When the ninth plague arrives, the most overlooked plague as far as I can tell (probably because it entails no destruction), it bears direct
witness to all the other plagues and to the coming of the tenth. We are told that all the land experienced darkness, “a darkness that may be felt” (10:21). Because God has been warning them about death and His ability to bring it upon their very existence, I believe this is a prophetic warning about the death that is coming, that this darkness is quite literally God bringing Sheol (Hades) to Egypt. This is a darkness that hangs on them like lice for three days. While the Egyptians wander in darkness (Sheol), the Israelites have the light (life, Christ Himself).
The Egyptians who have witnessed this God’s protection over the Israelites and even themselves now must “feel that death,” being cut off from all others in darkness, separated, isolated, while the Israelites can feel the light, the kavod (the Glory) of God, and thus see the face of their neighbor. God can obviously save the Israelites from this death, so when the threat of the tenth plague comes (the death of the firstborn) and when the Israelites are told how to avoid said death, it would make perfect sense that the ‘erev rav, these outsiders, this riffraff2, would again follow suit and listen to this new God, look to the Israelites as a model, and even butcher and eat prohibited animals (a lamb, for example—holy in Egypt). “Do this, and you shall live” becomes an imperative for the Israelites and all these other nations—Egyptians and whatever other foreign people may be there. Do you desire life and to obey God? Then there will be great suffering, but also true freedom (living a life in virtue) and true life, eternal life.
And that’s what these outsiders have discovered and chosen: a God who gives life, who commands obedience, who can defeat these other gods, and who protects His people from death (and offers eternal life). When God reveals His name to Moses a second time on Sinai, “The Lord God, compassionate, merciful, longsuffering, abounding in mercy and true” (34:6), we start to get a sense of why this is His name, and why it is His name for the Church: because who can survive without these divine attributes? If God desires not the death of a sinner but that he turn and live, then we need His compassion and long-suffering. This is a God of the ‘erevrav, we riffraff who do little right but who have seen the light and desire it, who have seen God, tasted Him, and desire more— even when we worship that golden calf.
2 Here, I am using Cassuto’s, Fox’s, and Alter’s translation of ‘erevrav being a single word and having negative connotations.
The ‘erevrav, I am convinced, are the cornerstone of the Church. The ‘erevrav may be outsiders, riffraff even, but they are not stupid (though some of us are). They see the source of life and follow Him even if they do not fully understand. But I also take this as a definition of life in the Church, which does not mean to give up one’s rational faculty, but rather to follow it, to read the writing on the wall, as it were, and to follow this God even when we don’t fully understand. This is no blind obedience but a way of reading prophetically, to see all of our various entanglements and yet to be able to read in advance the end of those entanglements—as either walkers in darkness or in light.
I will end with one final observation because my exegesis here, I admit, is rather loose (it is) and is based more on the Hebrew than the Greek (probably so), which brings me to Pharaoh’s daughter. She has a name; indeed, she is included in the genealogy of Israel in 1 Chron 4:18. This daughter of Pharaoh, Bat Paro (literally daughter of Pharaoh), Bithia, was one of the ‘erevrav certainly one of the first in her disobedience of her father and god, Pharaoh. Rather, she let this this riffraff, this Moses, live, and she feared God. This is why in the rabbinic tradition she is known as Bat Yah, daughter of God. I think it fair to say that when she disobeys her own father, she is already clearly one of the ‘erevrav to him (much like the Israelite midwives), but in this way she became a child of God.
When we think about the growth of the Church—how to grow it, where to grow it—and shudder a bit because of the violence, injustice, perversity, and utter banality of so much of what we must face spiritually day-to-day in this world, let us look back on this riffraff and consider their own sacrifice: they followed a God they did not know and for only one reason—to live. They turned from their own gods, and from the shame and punishments they’d find therein in that disobedience, and they followed an invisible God. Or, even better, they followed the hand of this God through the hand of Moses, an old man who couldn’t speak well, who wasn’t even sure if he liked this people, and who kept bringing them more suffering (but also life).
The life of the Church is a life of repentance, a turning to God, indeed to life itself, and no one tastes this desire for life quite like the riffraff, because we know the emptiness of all of our vain pursuits. Like the ‘erevrav, we may not know why we are doing what we’re being asked to do, but we
know our life depends on it, and we know of God’s mercy, His compassion, and His longsuffering. There is no other God for the riffraff than Christ our God, longsuffering, who takes the weakest and builds His Church upon them. It is upon a God of mercy and compassion and upon a repentant people that the Church shall grow. ♦
FR. DEACON JUSTIN JACKSON serves at Holy Ascension Orthodox Church in Albion, MI. He is professor and chair of English at Hillsdale College. He runs a substack—How Do You Read It?—wherein he goes through various literary readings of the Hebrew Bible and other texts. https://bibleandliterature.substack.com/
Personification of
the Gentile Church (5th c.) Basilica of Saint Sabina
Anecdotally, it’s been clear for several years that many Orthodox parishes in the U.S. are experiencing serious growth. Certain communities have reported that newcomers are showing up in astonishing numbers, and many of those visitors are sticking around to go through catechism and be received into the Church. This is hardly news—some longtime parishioners have already witnessed it in their own congregations. But there’s been less clarity about where the growth is happening. And there’s still less consensus about what’s driving all this interest, and what is attracting so many people to the Orthodox Church in particular.
For the last decade, the two of us have co-chaired the Parish Development Forum, an annual OCA conference where clergy and laypeople join in a dialogue about ways to keep our parishes healthy. In preparation for the 2023 Forum, we conducted an online survey of growth trends in the church, which spanned many parishes across several dioceses. Besides looking at how the newcomers became interested in Orthodoxy, our intention was also to look at
what these trends meant for the Church and how we should collectively respond. In particular, we sought to understand:
• What are the demographic, sociological and experiential characteristics of those coming to the Orthodox faith? What are they seeking? How do they “discover us”? What are they finding?
• How can our parishes better connect with those seeking Christ?
• Why are many parishes experiencing a flurry of inquirers and converts, and why does this flurry seem to be happening in some parishes and not others?
The survey spread rapidly and garnered almost 800 responses. The results yielded important insights. Of course, this approach had its limitations. We started by emailing known converts in parishes of three OCA dioceses sponsoring the forum (the Archdiocese of Western Pennsylvania, the Diocese of Midwest, and the Bulgarian Diocese). Later we invited a national response, when the survey link was published on OCA.org. In other words, it was not a random sample; we can assume that people who spend significant amounts of time online were more likely to participate.
At the same time, the respondents represented 45 states and provinces, even if a significant share (42%) came from Ohio and Pennsylvania. Two-thirds were from OCA parishes. Though the survey did not meet the rigorous standards that would be expected in peer-reviewed social science research, we believe it’s the most serious attempt so far to take a bird’s-eye view of the recent growth trends.
In this article, we will present some of the insights garnered from our data and describe some of the issues, opportunities, and challenges that we believe Orthodox parishes are facing.
Convert Characteristics and Attitudes
POST 2019
Almost half of the survey respondents converted since the beginning of the pandemic (“After 2019”). Much of the following data focuses on the post-2019 convert cohort.
GENDER AND AGE
The data show that among recent converts, men significantly outnumber women. Among those converting before 2010, 57% of respondents were male. Between 2010 and 2019 it grew to 68%. Among the post-2019 convert respondents, 75% were male. While the format of the survey may have made it more appealing to young men, anecdotal experience in many parishes seems to confirm the outsized presence of men among guests, inquirers, and catechumens.
The median age at conversion of post-2019 respondents was 31, with the median age among male converts slightly younger.
PREVIOUSLY CHRISTIAN
Most respondents (63%) identified as some form of Protestant/Evangelical, while (17%) were former Catholics. 10% had no previous religious background. Another 10% said they had once considered themselves atheists. Threefourths had never switched religions before.
MARITAL/EDUCATIONAL
At the time of the survey, 65% were married. The educational attainment profile of respondents was generally in line with national averages.
PANDEMIC INFLUENCE
Of those converting since 2019, almost half said the pandemic influenced their decision to seek a new faith in some direct or indirect way. The ominous nature of Covid led many to ask themselves existential questions, like “What is important in life?” For those who already had a church home, the church closures of the Covid era often led them to think about what was and wasn’t working for them at their current church homes. It also afforded more internet time to seriously explore options for a new spiritual home.
WHAT ATTRACTED THEM?
As converts, each of these respondents had made an important faith decision at some point, so it comes as no surprise that they tended to identify themselves as religiously serious, and, in some cases, theologically sophisticated people. When explaining what was attractive about Orthodox Christianity, one respondent said, “I wanted a faith that intruded into my daily life every day of the year.”
Of course, respondents gave varying answers about what attracted them. The word “authenticity” was used often—though this no doubt carried different meanings for different people. Many of the most common answers could be distilled further to “Tradition,” “Beauty,” and “Depth.”
Some motivations seemed less solid. “I like Cathedrals and googled ‘religions with cathedrals,’” one person wrote. Some implied consumer-style “church shopping”: “Orthodoxy was the best fit with what I believe.” Others reported using an online “Christian Denomination Selector” tool.
For one person, finding Orthodoxy was a random act. “I’d exhausted other options… to find God…went to Google maps, looked up ‘church’… an Orthodox parish happened to be the nearest to me.”
While two-thirds of recent converts indicated they were “seeking a deeper spiritual life,” an equal number seemed to be running not to but away from something when they indicated “dissatisfaction with previous religion” as a motivator.
OBSTACLES
While “the Theotokos,” “icons,” and “unlearning previous doctrines and practices” were often cited as obstacles to becoming Orthodox, the concern most mentioned by respondents was the effect it would have on relationships with friends and family. Many converts faced challenges related to their family's reaction or losing friends. Issues like family members not converting, difficulties in discussing Orthodoxy with non-Orthodox family, and feeling isolated in their conversion were mentioned often. “My family thought I was joining a cult.”
Overcoming the seeming insularity of Orthodoxy was difficult. “The most difficult hurdle for me was to believe that the Orthodox faith and Church were actually open to me, that I could actually be Orthodox.”
ONLINE INFLUENCERS
The impact of online influencers (podcasts, videos, websites, and so on) driving people to various interest areas, including significant traffic toward Orthodox Christianity and related topics, is now well known. At the time of the survey, this factor was only beginning to emerge. Survey results revealed the extent of this influence. Half of post-2019 converts indicated that a podcast or YouTube channel had an important influence in introducing them to the Faith.
Comments about Orthodox online podcasters/influencers varied. There were notable positive remarks about the role of specific online Orthodox commentators. The now well-known Jordan Peterson-to-Jonathan Pageau pipeline was the way in for many. There were also several negative reactions. Numerous respondents found the zeal of certain online influencers to be highly “toxic.” Many comments evoked love/hate reactions—for instance, “He helped me… but I hope the clergy clamp down.”
Despite the checkered reaction to these influencers, one priest with whom we discussed the data put it well: “These influencers stir the pot and as a result put Orthodoxy in front of many people.” In considering the question of “Why now?,” the impact of these influencers is significant.
PARISH SELECTION
We asked respondents about their current parishes. What were the characteristics that attracted them? Many of the responses were predictable: geographical proximity, “welcoming and friendly” atmospheres, “presence of other children,” and qualities of individual priests (“No pressure”; “Good teacher”). “Services in the English language” was by far the characteristic they mentioned most.
Some respondents spoke of the importance of finding a parish with a “young age profile.” Highly ethnic and/or in-
sular parish qualities were common turn-offs. Some wanted a parish with “many converts like us,” while others opined that “being around cradles is helpful for my spiritual growth.”
Well over half of recent converts compared options by visiting more than one Orthodox parish when that was geographically feasible.
CONSERVATIVE STRAIN
There’s a clear strain of political and cultural conservatism among the post-2019 respondents. Some have a kind of countercultural, off-the-grid orientation. “I was living in the woods while building a log cabin at the time,” noted one respondent.
Many said they homeschool their children. It was also common to express disdain for Covid masks, shutdowns, and vaccines, as well as modified communion practices. Some complained of “militant leftists” in society and in the church. Many expressed harsh opposition to “ecumenism,” and a few showed interest in rebaptism as the entry route into Orthodoxy. We found a common preference for removing pews from worship spaces and for women to wear head coverings. In the words of one respondent, “Women dress modestly and a majority wear head coverings. I feel that I attend a parish where people take their faith seriously.” However, we also received comments like “Glad I’m in a parish where I’m not required to wear a scarf,” and “Loved seeing female readers and women holding communion cloths.”
Challenges and Opportunities
These survey results, along with anecdotal observations from parishes, revealed important challenges and opportunities:
NOT EVERYWHERE: DISCOURAGEMENT
While many parishes are experiencing an increased flow of inquirers, this is not true of every parish. Many outstanding parishes have seen little change in their typical visitor flow. Stories of growth of converts in other parishes can weigh heavily on pastors and parishioners at parishes not experiencing a flow. A sense of discouragement or even jealousy can develop. It should be remembered that for most parishes, this is happening to them—it’s not a trend they have actively brought about. By and large, parishes are doing nothing different from their past practices. While it is useful to be sensitive to patterns of this surge, it is important to realize there are numerous factors that influence guests visiting the parish. There is no secret recipe for inquirers visiting many of our parishes. We should warmly and honestly rejoice in the growth seen by others. May we all be able to focus on simply being the Church in this time and in our particular places.
BE PREPARED
When guests arrive—and they will eventually—we must be prepared. Respondents noticed when assigned greeters were unavailable or distracted. “A parish that notices when you step through the door is a truly blessed one,” noted one respondent. Connect guests to someone who will shepherd their first arrival experience. “I never once attended a service without people bringing me blessed bread. I LOVED THAT!” a respondent offered.
Reaching out after church can be more important than the first impression. Invite guests to stay for coffee. Connecting guests with other parishioners is essential.
COMMUNICATE WELL
Make sure your parish’s website, social media, and map listings are up to date. These, as well as live-streamed liturgical services, were respondents’ primary onramps to parish awareness. In a online materials, it can help to emphasize distinctive quali-
ties of Orthodoxy—like “authentic,” “apostolic,” and “alive.” Good photos can communicate warmth and beauty.
ANYTIME. ANYWHERE.
Sharing our faith is not always seen as a core competency of many Orthodox. However, we would suggest that all parish faithful (newer and more seasoned) ought to be capable of explaining their choice to worship as Orthodox Christians.
IDENTITY AND INTEGRATION: THE ‘TWO-PARISH PROBLEM’
Parishes that are used to incorporating a handful of new communicants annually face a much different dynamic when 20 or 30 (or more) new members arrive for multiple consecutive years. A parish can quickly find more than half of its parishioners are “recently new”.
Connecting people of diverse ages, values, occupations, educational and economic backgrounds, ethnicities, and cultures can be a challenge. Parish rhythms change as new arrivals have new needs. The priest’s calendar often becomes fuller as a result.
Small-“t” parish traditions (as many refer to them) may exclude new arrivals rather than welcome them. One new convert, straining to become a part of her new community, said in the survey, “It's not my culture. I don't know the dances or the food!” Parish veterans with longstanding relationships may seem cliquish (rightly or wrongly). Conversely, newcomers may naturally gravitate to groups of other recent arrivals, which limits their assimilation. Differences in viewpoint often surface about the qualities of the church building and frequency of services.
These factors may cause an active (yet stable) parish to lose its balance. In a case like this, the “two-parish problem” may be at hand.
The responsibility for integrating newcomers ultimately lies with the parish and its existing members—but new converts also must do their part. Rev. Alexis Vinogradov, the former rector of St. Gregory the Theologian Church (in Wappingers Falls, New York), has offered insight about this in the pages of Jacob’s Well:
• We often bend backwards to make every stranger feel welcome, and we desire not to impose any barrier, but there is an alliance that is to be formed.
• As much as the stranger becomes more and more welcome, his or her responsibility towards the church community will also increase, for the Body of Christ is whole only in the proper functioning of all her members, and the visitor grows from status of stranger to that of a functioning and much needed member of Christ’s Body, in this specific place.
• That process and its goal of integration is the ultimate foundation of all healthy hospitality in parish life.1
The integration of newcomers does not happen automatically. Assuming the matter will “work itself out” is not the most effective way to ensure that relationships between new and established members will grow in a healthy way.
Clergy and other teachers in a parish may need to consider this as part of the catechism curriculum. They should consider intentional strategies to help minimize the risk of this “two-parish” problem.
At the same time, it’s important to recognize that parishes are having success at finding the balance. One respondent noted, “I came for theological and philosophical reasons. I have fallen in love with the people!”
THE CHANGING FACE OF THE NEW ARRIVAL
Recent newcomers at Orthodox parishes often exhibit clear differences from past arrivals. Many have little or no prior experience in church communities. A greater percentage of recent arrivals say they come from broken families. Younger and more conservative than previous waves of converts, many see themselves as fleeing modernity. They seek “meaning” and are drawn to stability, depth of worship, asceticism, and discipline. More than a few arrive with strong opinions and have a sense of zealous, doctrinal confidence engendered by following the podcasts of influencers. They may bring misconceptions—even reactionary views in need of reshaping.
Priests need to be on the lookout for extreme and unhealthy views and practices. Basic catechetical materials are needed to provide the key fundamentals of proclaiming the faith and to help new members distinguish between
1 “Parish Hospitality,” spring/summer 2015 issue
dogma and more speculative teachings. Also, continual improvement in counseling skills and willingness to refer to appropriate professional counselors may be needed to help new arrivals with family and social difficulties.
Moving Forward
Even with all the challenges mentioned above, this period is still an ideal opportunity to bring Americans to Christ in and through the Orthodox Christian Church.
Many have referred to this as the “Orthodox moment.” The question must be asked, “What will we do with this gift? What could we accomplish in this ‘moment?’” Can we, by understanding the characteristics and needs of those coming to the faith, expand or extend this phenomenon?
And most importantly, in the context of this essay, many of us need to ask, “What can my parish do to actively prepare? How can it help more people come to know Christ and His Church, with its distinctive doctrines and worship? How can it be a parish where new arrivals will stay and become the foundation for sharing this gift with future generations?” ♦
JOE KORMOS is a former product marketing manager and the Parish Development Ministry Leader for the OCA Diocese of the Midwest and the Archdiocese of Western Pennsylvania. He is a parishioner at Christ the Savior-Holy Spirit Orthodox Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
V. REV. STEPHEN FRASE is the rector of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in Columbus, Ohio. He is also a science teacher in the Olentangy Local School district.
"The goal of evangelism is not personal conversion to an individual and privatized faith but rather to be a member of a worshipping community."
FR. ERIC TOSI, KEYNOTE
Secular Age
by STEVEN CHRISTOFOROU
“Behold, a sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds came and devoured them. Some fell on stony places, where they did not have much earth; and they immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away. And some fell among thorns, and the thorns sprang up and choked them. But others fell on good ground and yielded a crop: some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” (Matthew 6:3-9)
This seems like a good time to be an Orthodox Christian. Major news outlets are writing about Orthodoxy. Celebrities and internet influencers are talking about us, and in some cases even converting. Parish halls are groaning under the weight of dozens of new inquirers and catechumens.
And yet, I can’t help but look at these developments with skepticism. Over the years that I’ve spent in full-time Orthodox ministry, I have often found myself arguing that the “growth” so many others are talking about is more likely a bubble that will eventually pop.
Of course, I do recognize that more people are joining the faith. Before I began to work with FOCUS North America, an Orthodox organization that helps provide food and other basic resources to the poor, I spent a decade directing the youth ministry of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. In both capacities, I’ve visited many of these packed parish halls myself, and I’ve heard countless conversion stories. In some ways, I’m happy to see so many newcomers in the Church. But I also wonder if we might be seeing the rapid growth of the seeds that fell on stony earth, rather than the early development of seeds that landed in good soil.
Many newcomers these days say they feel turned off by “secular” innovations in other religious traditions, and they’re seeking a form of Christianity that seems more pure—one that has escaped the world’s influence. But I want to challenge some of the underlying premises of this idea. As people who live in a postmodern world, we are all deeply influenced by postmodern ideas. Secularity is not just an external thing that we can escape if hunker down in the correct ecclesial bunker. And even the ecclesial bunker that we’ve chosen may be less ecclesial (and more ideological) than we think. It's possible, in other words, that interest in “Orthodoxy” doesn’t actually correlate with interest in the Orthodox Church.
But to probe these questions, we’ll need to start with a deeper engagement with the notion of the secular.
PART 1: WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE SECULAR?
One of the most helpful books I’ve read on secularity is James K.A. Smith’s How (Not) to be Secular, a book introduced to me by my dear friend and colleague Christian Gonzalez. Smith’s handy volume is a close reading of Charles Taylor’s
influential tome, A Secular Age. While we explore some ideas posed by Taylor, we’ll do so through the lens of Smith’s text.
As contemporary Christians, we tend to assume we’re surrounded by “secular” forces that are hostile to the Church— and we feel like the walls are closing in. This assumption shapes our approach to everything from pop culture to Christian ministry. We blame the culture for leading our young people away from the Church, and we try to inoculate them from the “secular” forces they’ll encounter when they go to college or start their first jobs. This assumption also influences the way we talk about the apparent “growth” of the Church: “secular” forces are destroying religious traditions around the world, so people are finding their way into a space that hasn’t yet caved on issues like female ordination and gay marriage.
Taylor understands the secular in a different way. He begins with a description of premodern societies, where there was no divide or hostility between the “sacred” and “secular.”
The “secular” referred to the temporal or the earthly. In that sense, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers had secular vocations. But those vocations complemented the sacred vocations of clergy and monastics who burned the candles they made and blessed the loaves of bread they baked.
In that era, almost everyone lived with a sense that physical reality was permeated with the transcendent. It was an “enchanted” world, where earthly kingdoms were thought to be grounded in heavenly ones, and where anyone could turn a corner and stumble upon an angel or demon. The notion of “believing” or not believing in God wouldn’t have made much sense—conceiving of a world without God was scarcely possible.
This all changed in the Age of Enlightenment. Starting in the 17th century, Europeans were overcome with a sense of intellectual confidence, a belief that they could understand all things by the power of pure reason. They ceased to think of the world as a cosmos (where God created all things for a purpose) and more as a universe where rational actors could discern the scientific laws that govern the material world. As Smith puts it, during the Enlightenment, “we get the ‘mechanistic’ universe that we still inhabit today, in which efficient causality (a cause that ‘pushes’) is the only causality and can only be discerned by empirical observation” (42).
This shift came with a “subtraction,” as the sacred—with all of its bias and irrationality—was removed, leaving a pure “secular” reality behind.
We can see this in a variety of fields. Take astronomy, for example: the sun ceased to be seen as a god moving across
the sky, and rather as a giant ball of gas that could be understood in terms of chemical and physical laws. And in politics, people were no longer subject to kings who ruled by divine right; instead the wisest were selected to debate in a congress or parliament and craft rational laws for the good of the polity.
This “subtraction story” should be familiar, because it’s one that we Orthodox Christians tend to use to explain the state of ministry and the Church: we find ourselves in a battle with secular forces to prevent the continued “subtraction” of the sacred out of our lives. It’s why American Christians react so viscerally when prayer is removed from public schools, for example. But these concerns are wrongheaded, because they’re designed for a world that is long gone. As Taylor argues, we have moved on to another era, one where the forces of “secularity” have already won.
inescapable sense of its contestability. We don’t believe instead of doubting; we believe while doubting. We’re all Thomas now” (4).
We Christians stand in the splendor of the Liturgy and wonder whether any of the ritual has a point. We stand at our icon corners and wonder if we’re just talking to ourselves. We stand at the graves of our lost loved ones and wonder whether there really is a God after all. But this doubt isn’t limited to believers. Even non-believers are haunted by doubt—though, in their case, the doubt that haunts them is faith.
Non-believers hold their children and wonder how it’s possible to love someone so deeply. Non-believers stand at the graves of their lost loved ones and hope that there really is a God after all. Because we are all caught in what Taylor calls the “cross-pressure” between faith and doubt. And all we can do, in the midst of this formless chaos, is plant our flag somewhere and choose to believe something. But for us, unlike our premodern forebears, it’s always the case we that have to choose.
This may be hard for us to accept, because we (especially we Orthodox Christians) believe the same things that our forefathers in faith believed. But our society is secular because we live in a time where belief in God is understood to be one option among many others. The sacred has already been dramatically subtracted in our lives. We are trapped in the “immanent frame,” a way of seeing the world in purely mechanistic and material terms.
Taylor and Smith point to a few assumptions that undergird the way we, as 21st century people, tend to see the world. Meaning and significance have come to be understood as constructs of the perceiving mind. Faith has become a matter of private opinion. And we think of time purely linear—not cyclical, in the way liturgical time is.
If those are the assumptions that underlie our current secular age, what does that mean for us today? Even for those of us who choose to believe? In short, it means we’re all secular. Like it or not.
Faced with the cold emptiness of a merely physical universe, people still search for meaning to help give their lives direction and purpose. This flattened existence is simply too empty to bear. So we try to believe—not as our forefathers in the faith did, but as people firmly grounded in this secular reality. As Smith explains, “even as faith endures in our secular age, believing doesn’t come easy. Faith is fraught; confession is haunted by an
PART 2: SECULAR THINKING IN THE CHURCH
It’s critical to keep in mind is that faith is certainly possible today. In fact, we see it all the time. As we said earlier in this post, religious affiliation may be dropping—but that doesn’t mean a desire for faith is diminishing. And that
"Faced with the cold emptiness of a merely physical universe, people still search for meaning to help give their lives direction and purpose.
desire can manifest itself in any number of ways, from New Age spirituality to Orthodoxy Christianity.
Yet, just because a contemporary person ends up in a traditional faith, that doesn’t mean he or she is exempt from our common secular condition. Most contemporary converts still tend to think about faith in individualist terms, as part of a personal quest. The convert maintains an interior checklist against which he judges various
traditions. And when he’s satisfied that a particular ideology (like “Orthodoxy”) satisfies the criteria he’s looking for, he “joins.” It’s hard for us to maintain any real, felt sense of being received into the Church sacramentally, or of encountering Christ and being united to Him. We simply do our research, determine our own personal criteria for truth, and then begin identifying with the club that meets the criteria we set.
This is a consequence of the “buffered self” that Taylor and Smith describe. As the center of meaning shifts to the individual mind, the person becomes more and more closed off to the possibility of transformation. Even conversion becomes something that happens on my own terms, based on my own criteria.
And these criteria tend to skew in a particular direction. Taylor and Smith both observe that this modern approach to faith is particularly at risk of looking backward to an imagined golden age. It’s easy for a convert to believe he has returned to a premodern state, and achieved some kind of re-enchantment. But this confidence is folly because, as Smith stresses, “There’s no going back. Even seeking enchantment will always and only be reenchantment after disenchantment” (61).
We certainly see this in the contemporary Church, where many people seem to be drawn not to the Kingdom of God, but to an idealized version of Imperial Russia or Byzantium. And they rejoice in “castigating the unfettered subjectivity of modernity” while making names for themselves criticizing bishops on Twitter and setting themselves up as the ultimate authority. But again, this isn’t to say that genuine faith is impossible in our secular world. We just have to know what we’re up against before we can proceed.
This brings us to one of contemporary Orthodoxy’s most divisive subjects: the internet.
PART 3: IS THE INTERNET DRIVING CHURCH GROWTH?
If you recognize my name, it’s likely because of the work I spent nearly a decade doing online. In 2013, I launched the weekly video Be the Bee, as part of my work with the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese youth ministry, and ultimately hosted nearly 180 episodes. I was also a co-host of Pop Culture Coffee Hour, which I helped to launch in 2015. Both shows developed fairly large audiences, at least by the standards of our little
Orthodox world. So it may come as a surprise to see me critique online Orthodoxy in all its forms (not just the “bad” stuff). Online media and the contemporary influencer economy are a potent distillation of the forces we identified above: the individuated, selfcurated search for authenticity in a world stripped of meaning and enchantment. They’re changing us, as a Christian body, in ways that are subtle but sure.
My three basic concerns are that the internet:
1. Appeals to our baser passions (even at its best);
2. Reinforces the hyper-individuality of our secular world; and
3. Transgresses even the most basic canonical boundaries.
I think these points are all fairly uncontroversial. We all understand that the internet is a breeding ground for the salacious and scandalous, that it facilitates the self-directed quest for authenticity at the heart of our secular condition (“I converted” vs “I was received,” as we noted earlier), and that it encourages people to selfanoint themselves as preachers, teachers, and prophets. Even so, most of us, in our own ways, continue to feed the content machine of contemporary, internet “Orthodoxy.” I suspect that’s because we interpret the three points above as risks that, somehow, don’t apply to us. We sidestep the concerns by sorting Orthodox content into two buckets: good and bad. As long as the content I produce or consume is on the “good” end of the spectrum, no further analysis is needed. Here’s the dance in action:
1. I agree that the internet appeals to our baser passions, but I’m producing/consuming content that appeals to something higher.
2. I agree that the internet reinforces the hyperindividuality of our secular world, but I’m building/ part of a community of believers who are moving beyond the secularity of the wider culture.
3. I get that the internet transgresses even the most basic canonical boundaries, but I have a blessing to do this work.
Now, I’m not interested in having a conversation with every Orthodox content creator or consumer about their favorite media. A lot of people have invested a great
deal of effort into their identities as content creators, and they take pride in feeling that they’re helping the Church. I’m not here to criticize them. Instead, I’m just going to critique myself.
I quit making Orthodox videos and podcasts back in 2022, but I’m still primarily known for that chapter in my life. Every time I visit a new parish, people thank me for that work. Both laity and clergy—whether deacons, presbyters, or bishops—tell me Be the Bee and Pop Culture Coffee Hour helped spur real growth, both for people who grew up in the Church and for those who discovered the Church through our work.
So sure, the content I helped create may very well have been “good,” but it nonetheless contributed to the quicksand of modern, secular self-direction and authenticity-seeking.
This all boils down to a simple proposition: there simply can be no blessing to preach and teach universally, without regard to canonical boundaries, as one does on the internet.
If that’s true, then what does the blessing to preach and teach actually look like in practice? Well, in early 2024, I was in Nashville to lead a retreat at a parish in the Antiochian Archdiocese. That Sunday, I offered the sermon during the Divine Liturgy. And I did all of this only by invitation and with the blessing of the presbyter who is responsible for that eucharistic community (serving, as he does, with his bishop’s blessing). I have no business speaking to a congregation just because I think I have something true or important to say. A few weeks later, I helped lead a retreat for the OCA’s Diocese of Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania—and again, I was there only by invitation.
The Church, if it’s anything at all, is local and eucharistic. Its fullness is found in the bishop surrounded by his clergy and laity. And it’s the bishop who has ultimate authority to preach to those in his diocese: no other person, not even another bishop, gets to walk into this diocese and start preaching or teaching.
Now let’s say I want to set up a YouTube channel to teach and preach to people, not just in Nashville and Pittsburgh, but anywhere in the world. Who can give me a blessing to do that? If we took the ecclesiology of the Church seriously, we’d know the answer to that question is “no one.” There are no universal authorities in the Church, and there is no one who can grant someone the ability to preach and teach anywhere in the world. That’s
why, for example, there is no universally recognized catechism in the Church. No living person has universal teaching authority, so there’s no one to either draft or bless such a project.
Granted, this has been a concern on some level since the invention of the printing press. But under traditional publishing models, some amount of vetting has usually been possible. Institutions like St. Vladimir's Seminary Press have acted as gatekeepers. But as the internet has transformed the scale, speed, and accessibility of communication, this issue of canonicity has become a problem in a way it never was before.
The Orthodox Church does recognize “ecumenical” teachers like Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and Maximos the Confessor, along with modernday saints like Silouan the Athonite and Sophrony of Essex. The designation “ecumenical” means they were recognized as teachers for all people throughout the world, not just the cities where they reigned as bishops. However, they all had something important in common: they didn’t present themselves as ecumenical teachers during their ministry. When Saint Basil was the bishop of Cappadocia, for example, he would have never walked into Thessaloniki or Antioch and acted like he was the ruling bishop there. It was only later, after his repose and recognition as a saint, that the Church recognized him as a father and teacher of all.
Unfortunately, in our contemporary influencer economy, we’ve become accustomed to people claiming an ecumenical mantle for themselves. What’s worse, we see people cultivating platforms for themselves, completely disconnected from holiness or communion with God.
For what might be the first time in Church history, “growth” is being attributed not to the witness of the saints, nor to the grace-filled words of holy people transformed in Christ, but to the ability of certain people to attract attention on platforms that are designed to spread the vile and vainglorious. These are people who have (whether they care to admit it or not) anointed themselves ecumenical teachers. They have claimed that status because of their skills with attracting attention, rather than lifetimes lived in communion with the Living God. Internet “Orthodoxy” is a place of impatience and shortcuts, where (illusory) short-term
growth comes at the expense of long-term transformation in Christ.
This might be hard to accept as we look at parishes that are full of new people. Even if online Orthodoxy is terrible, we might ask, isn’t it good that it’s getting people in the door?
My experience in youth and young adult ministry makes me dubious. During the decade I spent in that field, I saw a ton of ministry that, at least in the short term, seemed successful. I saw hundreds of youths gather for retreats; I saw hundreds of young adults gather for conferences. And yet, in the long run, between 70% and 90% of those people—with slight variations between jurisdictions—ended up falling away from the Church. Many young adults would gather for our fun social events, but those didn’t lead them to attend parishes on Sunday mornings. I learned that enticing kids with ice cream and pizza doesn’t lead to their eventual spiritual formation, nor does attracting young adults with opportunities for professional networking and dating.
In this secular age, people are drawn to Orthodoxy for a variety of reasons: maybe they’re looking for a Christian communion that doesn’t marry gay people, maybe they’re looking for a community that feels ancient and gives them a sense of place and purpose in a culture shaped by cheap consumerism. How different is this from the kid who’s looking for ice cream or the young adult who’s looking to network?
For decades, the Orthodox Church has proved far better at raising people who ended up as former rather than faithful Orthodox Christians. What makes us think we’ll do any different with our new crop of catechumens?
Several priests have told me they’ve clashed with new inquirers who visit their parishes already confident that they know what Orthodoxy is. When presented with something at the parish, these inquirers will object and say that they learned differently from a video or podcast. Sometimes the inquirer falls away entirely; sometimes he finds a different parish that will reinforce his preconception of what Orthodox is.
It is here, perhaps, that we can see a stark contrast between the contemporary ideology of Orthodoxy, borne out of our secular age, and the mystical reality of the Church. Orthodoxy may be a personal adventure that we embark upon as autonomous individuals, but that’s not what the Church is. Orthodoxy may be a system that satisfies my own personal vetting and gives
me what I’m looking for in a religion, but that’s not what the Church is.
In the Church, we are nourished by the very Body and Blood of our Lord. “You are what you eat,” as the old saying goes; and in being invited to literally eat Jesus Christ, we are called to be deified in Him. The danger in Orthodoxy is that we can be nourished instead by content. Rather than gather with other Christians and endeavor to grow in holiness together, we can be tempted to consume a never-ending stream of podcasts, videos, articles, and posts.
Of course, we don’t know how these changes—in technology, in our lifestyles, in the ways people find the Orthodox faith and learn about it—will play out in the long-term development of the Church. The Lord can turn even the most sour lemons into lemonade, so He can certainly use this moment to bring people to Him. If that’s the direction this is all taking, what kinds of signals can we look for? I can think of a few. If large numbers of newly received Orthodox Christians are still in the church after a decade, and they have stable connections to particular parishes—if they’re not jumping from parish to parish, or jurisdiction to jurisdiction, looking for “authentic Orthodoxy”—that will be a major sign of encouragement. We should also hope their home parishes, rather than their favorite influencers, become their main sources of information and instruction.
This kind of authentic growth, if it’s manifest, will also lead to more people attending seminary and more parishes opening up. Those will be tangible forms of evidence that we’re seeing more than just an internet fad.
In the Parable of the Sower, the seeds that fell on stony places “immediately sprang up because they had no depth of earth,” but the sun quickly scorched them (Matthew 13:5-6). Are we seeing shoots grow from seeds that fell in stony places, or are we seeing the first growth of healthy plants that will yield good fruit? Time will tell.
In the meantime, if reflection this encourages a bit more diligence and care regarding the Church’s trajectory, I’ll take that as a good start. ♦
STEVEN CHRISTOFOROU is the Executive Director of FOCUS North America (focusna.org) and a parishioner at Saints Catherine & George Orthodox Church in Astoria, NY. His personal writing appears at StevenChristoforou.substack.com.
On Being Led in Times of Uncertainty
by MICHELLE WEBSTER-HEIN
Last month, on our little farm, one of our ewes gave birth to quadruplets. Ordinarily this would have been a joyful occasion, but four lamb fetuses competing for the nutrients of one mother makes for bad math. My daughter, Alyosha, warmed the little lambs in the oven, and her brother, Silas, fetched blanket after towel after blanket. All of us—including my parents, who were visiting—rubbed them down to dry them, warm them, and increase their circulation. Soon my farmer/anesthesiologist friend arrived in our barn, with her kneecap coveralls and her bag of tricks like some homesteading superhero. We hoped desperately she’d be able to help. But despite all our efforts, the lambs died one by one until only one tiny female remained. My friend roused the little lamb up to temperature and tube-fed her with the mother's colostrum, but after a good hour of intervention, with all advisable tasks complete, the baby still seemed too weak, too frail. We wrapped her in a lambing blanket and nestled her beside her exhausted mother so she might expire in peace.
I am just now discovering, at age 43, that success is little proof of the rightness of an action, just as failure is little proof of the wrongness of an action. Take the previous story. Thanks to the guidance of our highly expe -
rienced friend, we knew our actions were sound. That is, we did just what we should have done. And yet, the lambs died. Our right actions, each of them, failed—evidence that a good work can result in a bad outcome.
Spoken one way, this sounds obvious to the point of banality. Sometimes you do the right thing, and it doesn't work out. Our failure to save the lambs does not, of course, suggest that we shouldn’t have tried. But in my life, and especially in my work as a writer, I have tended to interpret success as proof that I did what I ought to have done and failure as proof that I must have gone wrong somewhere along the way.
Last year, I received some bad news that was, frankly, harder to bear than losing lambs. My literary agent told me the novel I had spent the past five years writing had little (read: no) hope of selling, at least not right now. My first novel, Out of Esau, about the dissolution of a marriage in a small Michigan town, was published last year. My new novel was a sequel; but because Out of Esau sold only modestly, selling a follow-up book with the same characters didn’t seem like a winning strategy from a sales perspective.
As you might imagine, this news hit hard. I cried many tears, I consumed many carbs, and I prayed many prayers. And then, two nights later, af-
ter pray-crying myself to sleep, I woke from a dream, which I realized, upon waking, had given me the premise of a new novel. So I slipped out of bed, brewed a big pot of coffee to compensate for all the sleep I was about to sacrifice, pulled a new notebook off of my shelf, and began again.
This story makes it sound as if I'm sure of what I’m doing. However, while I remain deeply grateful for this divine guidance, I am also terrified. Yes, I believe that the Spirit led me to the landscape of this new story. But divine guidance is sadly no assurance that this book will sell a greater number of copies, or even that it will sell at all. All “right action” in my current pursuit runs a high risk of failure. I know this now more than I ever have, and it haunts me.
It also raises the question, why continue? And the best answer I can manage is: Because I feel like it. Because the characters in my dream are coming to life. Because they're raising all sorts of interesting questions and conflicts. Because I'm having fun following them around. Because I want to keep going.
When I speak sentiments like these out loud, I hear my childhood pastor raise his warning cry: Following our desires means following our sinful nature. Following our wants is to be willingly led astray. In the fundamentalist church
Shepherdess and Her Flock (about 1864–1865)
Jean-François Millet
of my childhood, any natural desire was inherently suspect. A strong desire to do something, therefore, became almost a reason not to do it.
And then, on the other side, I hear Mary Oliver offering up her masterpiece. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. If I am not to be led by the evidence of success, can I follow my feeling instead? Are my feelings too fickle? Could this end in my sprinting gleefully away from all responsibility, abandoning my children and trading my husband Scott out for someone whose secrets I've not yet explored? How do we distinguish between feelings we ought to follow and those we ought to disregard? How do we understand which feelings whisper the way of the Spirit and which ones will lead us astray? How are we to be led when we've reached the sidewalk's end of reason?
In reality, I don’t think this is such a conundrum. It doesn’t take a degree in theology—or even a belief in God— to understand that some desires ought to be followed (for example, sharing a cup of coffee with Scott each morning), while some ought to be denied (for example, meeting a sexy stranger for coffee each morning instead). And
the answer does rely, as Oliver suggests, on love. My love for Scott is deep, and my love for our children is deep, as is my love for the life we've built together. And letting the soft animal of my body love this goodness naturally restrains me from trying to replace Scott with Brad Pitt, for example.
But what about cases where desires can seem more suspect? Yes, I want to write and the world is on fire. Yes, I want to spend hours, weeks, months, years writing something that may never see the light of day, and there are so many more objectively important things I might do. The difference is, I don't want to do them. I don't love them. I don't need them. And I need to write. I need the process of piecing words together, of sewing stories. If I don't sink down into that process for even the span of a week, I begin to grieve, and what better proof of need is there than that?
So. Can I still believe in the rightness of writing this novel, as much as I believe in the rightness of trying to save those baby sheep?
Speaking of which, that last little lamb—the one we nestled next to her mother with every expectation that she would pass—surprised us. When my father and I returned later to the barn, I stroked her body to confirm that she had died, and she kicked. Squealing, I fetched my supplies. Then I milked the
mother and slipped the feeding tube down the little lamb's throat, my eyes stinging with unexpected joy.
Aren't most actions acts of faith? We’re always pursuing goals that we know we might not attain. In this way, times are always uncertain, and, as such, we are always being led sightlessly along—by dreams, by signs, by needs, by love, by answers just out of reach. And so, we reach, beyond our certainties, beyond ourselves, into the wilderness of unknowing. We continue to stumble after the Spirit, down a path we will never fully comprehend. ♦
MICHELLE WEBSTER-HEIN is the author of the novel Out of Esau and the newsletter The Almanac of Small Acts. She attends Shalom Community Church, a Mennonite/ Brethren congregation, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
REFLECTIONS ON THE JESUS PRAYER
by CHARLES E.A. LINCOLN, IV
When readers pick up the lesser-known novels of J.D. Salinger— going beyond The Catcher in the Rye, his quintessential portrait of 1950s Americana, which remains a staple of high-school curricula—they’re usually not expecting an introduction to the deeply esoteric traditions of Orthodox Christianity. And yet, there he is, in Franny and Zooey, unpacking the Jesus Prayer— which had been whispered in quiet monasteries on Mount Athos for centuries before it was shouted into the chaos of the Glass family’s living room in mid-20th-century New York.
It’s a striking juxtaposition, but Salinger makes it work. In fact, he uses it to crack open something universal: the deep hunger for authenticity, meaning, and connection to the divine in a world that often feels overwhelmingly false.
Franny and Zooey consists of two stories about the youngest siblings in the Glass family, who are the focus of much of Salinger's fiction. The brother, Zooey, and sister, Franny, are brilliant and more than a bit neurotic. Franny has a nervous breakdown, and she takes solace in a 19th-century Russian spiritual classic well known in Orthodox circles: The Way of a Pilgrim. Franny herself clings to like a life raft in a sea of modern disillusionment. The pilgrim, like Franny, seeks meaning in a fragmented world, finding
Russian Peasant (18th c.)
Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki
solace in the ceaseless repetition of “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
As a Greek Orthodox Christian lawyer, I often think about how this same juxtaposition plays out in my own life. In courtrooms and conference rooms, and while writing memos, the Jesus Prayer feels almost out of place—an ancient phrase carried into a world of modernity and legal jargon. But, as in Salinger’s writing, that dissonance is precisely the point. It’s not about fitting the prayer into the world; it’s about letting the prayer reframe how I see the world. Like Franny, I often find myself repeating “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” in moments when everything feels too loud, too fast, too shallow.
And like Zooey, I’ve had to confront the fact that the prayer isn’t just a way to “escape” the phoniness around me. It’s a way to confront it—to see Christ in the people I’d rather ignore, to engage with the tasks I’d rather avoid, and to embrace the flaws in myself that I’d rather deny.
It’s surprising that Salinger—so rooted in American individualism—found his way to a prayer that’s all about surrendering the self. But maybe that’s the genius of Franny and Zooey. It reminds us that the hunger for something greater transcends time, culture, and even the conventions of mid-century American literature.
All of us—or so it seems to me—experience an existential crisis at one or more points in our lives. Indeed, it can even be a general condition we live in for long stretches. It may affect our religious belief, or it may not. In my own life, I’ve seen how some people lose their faith during such times, overwhelmed by the weight of uncertainty. Their pain resonates with me, and I always hope they find a path to healing and peace.
For my part, the Jesus Prayer has helped me stay more focused and has given me hope for a better future. Like the pilgrim wandering through 19th-century Russia, or Franny sitting in that living room, I have found that this ancient prayer has a way of making even the most chaotic modern life feel anchored. And that chaos is not always existential; it is often the relentless anxiety of work itself. The stress of being a lawyer affects me on a physiological level, and I’ve spoken with others who feel the same. In those moments, I have found solace in silently repeating the Jesus Prayer to myself: 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.' ♦
CHARLES E. A. LINCOLN IV is an attorney specializing in international tax law. He is a parishioner at Transfiguration Greek Orthodox Church in Austin, Texas.
A Baptism of Sound
A CONVERSATION WITH MOTHER KATHERINE WESTON ON ORTHODOX MUSIC
Over the past decade, there has been a swell of new Orthodox liturgical music by American composers. Benedict Sheehan, a three-time Grammy nominee, has likely been the most visible of this trend; but there are others, composing in different styles, whose settings of Orthodox hymns are now being used in parishes throughout the U.S., including Kurt Sander, Samuel Herron, John Michael Boyer, and nazo zakkak. But no one is doing work more groundbreaking than the compositions of Mother Katherine Weston, the abbess of St. Xenia Methochion Monastery in Indianapolis, which draw heavily on African American spirituals. Her “Jubilee Liturgy,” a complete setting of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, premiered at the 2023 conference of the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black (of which she is the president).
In an interview conducted over email, I spoke with Mother Katherine about the underlying connections between Orthodoxy and the Black church tradition, her own composition process, and what the flourishing of new liturgical music tells us about the state of American Orthodoxy.
- Nick Tabor
JW: It’s my understanding that before you joined the Orthodox Church, you were Episcopalian—and you were drawn to Orthodoxy, in part, by the Church's music. Could you say more about that? Did you have
a musical background? What about the music was compelling for you?
Mother Katherine: I was drawn by the beauty—both the iconography and the music, not yet having exposure to Orthodox church architecture. Of course you can find beauty in the Episcopal Church as well, but by the time I fell in love with Orthodox art forms, I had long migrated away from the church I was born into. We’re talking about the late 1980s. I was on the staff of the Raphael House Family Shelter in San Francisco, and the staff members were exploring Orthodoxy together. Our choir director1 assembled a large group of singers to learn Rachmaninoff’s All-night Vigil. The many rehearsals, the performance in a church, and a final performance in a redwood forest: Believe it or not, all this allowed the music to steep through my soul. It was a big part of my preparation for baptism. In fact, if baptizo (βαπτίζω) literally means to immerse, then singing Rachmaninoff was a “baptism” of sound. Being in a large choir, breathing and singing as one—this could introduce the feeling of being part of a body, the body of Christ, not just an isolated individual. You don’t get this same experience in a Protestant service, singing short, individual hymns.
Did I have a musical background? I came from a music-loving family. Everyone played some piano, everyone sang. I’ve sung in choirs or at the kliros my entire life since grade school.
1 The future Fr. Gregory Schultz of St. Michael the Archangel Serbian Orthodox Church in Huntsville, Alabama.
I flunked out of violin and piano lessons, though, but I picked up guitar at age 11. Over the years, I have played for both pleasure and informal performances. Providentially, I learned enough music theory in childhood to score out the little songs I wrote—you could say that music notation became a hobby. And that was very important later on.
JW: People often seem more surprised when they hear about Black Orthodox converts than white ones. But Fr. Paul Abernathy says elsewhere in this issue that he’s had Black visitors to his parish in Pittsburgh who immediately feel at home with the Orthodox Liturgy, in part because they feel like there’s a connection between Orthodox music and African American spirituals. Was that a factor for you, and have you encountered it with others? If you do see a connection there, I’d love for you to say more about it.
MK: There is an important connection between the spirit of Orthodox music and African American spirituals, but I was not aware of this initially. The connection is joyful sorrow—what the Greeks call harmolypi (χαρμολύπη). This has to do with really and truly having God as our only hope in this world—not our wealth, not our status, not our strength, but God alone. And it has to do with experiencing God as our joy in the midst of earthly tribulations. My enslaved ancestors—that is, the enslaved Christians in America—had this in common with the early martyrs and persecuted Christians. This spirit is embedded in the spirituals and in our Orthodox music, even though we moderns have to struggle not to trust in ourselves.
I became aware of the connection between the ethos of Orthodox music and the spirituals through the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black (FSMB), of which I am a founding member and the current President. In our earliest conferences, in the 1990s, we heard a talk by Fr. Damascene (Christensen)2 on that topic. Fr. Moses,3 of blessed memory, spoke about Gospel music as well. Fr. Damascene and Dr. Al Raboteau,4 of blessed memory, both spoke of the African
American slave martyrs and confessors. These themes have been curated and built upon in our two volumes, Foundations: 1994–1997 and Jubilation: Cultures of Sacred Music. Fr. Alexii Altschul, our Spiritual Advisor, also speaks extensively on this topic in Wade in the River: The Story of the African Christian Faith. Without this groundwork, I would have had no reason to compose any liturgical settings.
JW: When did you begin writing your own arrangements of liturgical music, and how did that project come about? Did it have anything to do with your work with the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black?
MK: Yes, my composing was always bound up with the Fellowship’s work. At our 2005 conference in Denver, Fr. Martin Ritsi of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center was the guest speaker. During the final presentation, after sharing with us about the mission work in Africa, he turned to us and asked, “Why don’t you use the spirituals as inspiration for liturgical music as part of your own evangelical outreach?” Oh my goodness, the gathering exploded with excitement. Clusters of people were sharing their inspirations for what could work. We were still sharing on the ride to the air port afterwards.
I had an idea too—but I had the advantage of my ex perience in music notation. So I went home and scored out my Anaphora based on “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” That first draft needed more de velopment, but parts of it are still embedded in how we sing it today. In this setting, the Anaphora answers the ques tion “Were you there?” with “I am there as a witness to Christ’s Passion and Resurrection in the Divine Lit urgy.” And the idea
2 Presently Abbot of the St. Herman of Alaska Monastery, Platina, California.
3 Founding member of the Fellowship of St. Moses the Black and President for the first 26 years.
4 Dr. Raboteau, an African American convert to Orthodoxy, was the Henry Putnam Professor of Religion, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He was a regular conference presenter for the FSMB.
of having the words of the spiritual in dialogue with the liturgical moment continues to be part of my process today.
JW: It might say something about the development of Orthodoxy in the U.S. that we’re at a stage where we’re adapting our liturgical practices to the local cultures. Do you have any thoughts about that?
MK: Yes, there have been conversations in seminaries and among American Orthodox church musicians for decades now about finding an authentic American expression of Orthodox music. Certainly at St. Vladimir’s and St. Tikhon’s. They primarily see two authentic sources for that inspiration—sacred harp and spirituals. You might think of sacred harp as Appalachian music—but some black churches have used this tradition as well. There are several composers incorporating Americana elements in their works. Benedict Sheehan, Archpriest John Finley, Monk Martin (Gardner), Dr. Vladimir Morosan, Dr. Shawn “Thunder” Wallace, and nazo zakkak are all ones whose work I am familiar with. There’s a whole chapter in Jubilation devoted to this question. But it’s bidirectional— that is, a parish or organization may commission a piece to reflect local cultures—so it’s not just coming from the musicians.
What does that mean about the stage we’re at? I don’t mean this in a negative way, but the Orthodox Churches in America are no longer just immigrant congregations trying to preserve their own culture. Remember that some of the older parishes were founded by ethnic clubs that valued their faith enough to build their own houses of worship. That’s a beautiful thing. And now the Orthodox Church has taken root in this soil and among this diverse group of people who make up the U.S. So now people are looking for authentic cultural roots here so we can make a cultural offering to Christ from the collective heritage He has given us. “Thine own of thine own.”
JW: What do you hope to achieve by arranging Orthodox hymns in a way that’s inspired by African American spirituals? I’m sure it brings you some amount of creative fulfillment, but does it also have a larger pastoral purpose? Do you see it as a form of missionizing?
MK: I’ve heard composer and conductor Benedict Sheehan say that certain music “sounds like church” to someone or some group. I’ve come
to believe that just as we receive an imprint of our native language early in childhood, we can also receive an imprint of worship music. And that’s what “sounds like church” to us throughout our lives. There are different ways in which spirituals can inspire Orthodox liturgical music and I’m not, by far, the only composer inspired this way. But when people hear my Jubilee Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, it does “sound like church” to some people. And this is not necessarily along racial lines. The spirituals have entered the mainstream of American worship music. So white Orthodox converts from the South have really responded to it. One priest said “It’s like being in church and at home at the same time.” When I heard my Trisagion sung in Liturgy for the first time, I felt like a deep part of my soul was able to be present that had not fully participated before, even though I had worshipped as an Orthodox for over 30 years. Likewise, there are some black people who really resonate with it, but some who criticize me. They might have been brought up on the Gospel style or call-andresponse, and that’s what “sounds like church” to them. I respect that, and I hope to be an inspiration to a new generation of composers, but I can only create in a way that is authentic to my own musical background and experience.
JW: On one hand, we’re a church that reveres its traditions and is slow to make changes. But on the other, there’s a case to be made that as the demographics of American Orthodox parishes change—so that we have fewer people who were raised in Orthodox ethnic cultures, and more converts—it can become inauthentic for us to keep doing everything in a strictly Greek or Slavic fashion. It can become a kind of cosplay. My question is, how do we change our practices while still being faithful to the tradition?
MK: That’s an important question, and I can only answer based on how I approach it. So first of all, I don’t compose in isolation. I consult with Dr. Zhanna Lehmann, who has extensive musical training and experience. She began her musical education at the Kazan State Musical Conservatory in Russia and then earned her doctorate in Choral Conducting at the University of Illinois in 2018. A mutual friend introduced us in 2021 when she was looking for new and interesting liturgical scores for a Nativity concert—and I was looking for a choir to sing my music. (Unlike many composers, I’m not a choir director.)
When she heard that someone was writing Orthodox liturgical music based on spirituals, she was very excited because she first encountered and sang African American spirituals in Russia. She told me that Russian people love our spirituals because they have a resonance with certain genres of Russian music, especially religious folk music and “penitential psalms.” I can’t break it down here, but that genre of singing was actively developed for a couple of centuries, through the 1600s. Because of this history, the American spirituals feel familiar to Russians.
Now I’ll go back to your question of how we change our practices while staying true to tradition. Centuries ago, as our faith took root in Slavic countries, there was a natural inculturation of the liturgical chant—it absorbed some of the flavor of the local folk music. This was an organic development seeing that the folk music expressed the identity of the people. Russian composers— Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov—they all incorporated elements of Russian folk music into their masterworks. So as a composer, I am attempting to walk in their footsteps by taking inspiration from the spirituals—the only music completely original to the U.S.—to touch the souls of African Americans, of Americans, and beyond. Because the spirituals have had an in-
ternational audience since the post-Civil War period. So in short, we maintain the tradition by changing in an organic, traditional way.
JW: Perhaps you could give us an example, explaining how one of your arrangements came about?
MK: I said something earlier about the beginning of my first liturgical composition, the Anaphora. Now let’s talk about the Trisagion, one of my favorites. In the summer of 2022, Dr. Lehmann said she thought I was ready to complete a setting for the entire Divine Liturgy since I already had so many of the elements written already. It was still necessary to arrange a Trisagion. I generally comb through the spirituals I know, that I have in written collections, and that I can find recordings for. I look for slower melodies, which already eliminates a majority of them. On YouTube I came across the great Marian Anderson singing “You hear the lambs a-cryin’” in her inimitable contralto voice. The music was so simple and deeply stirring. The lyrics are a dialogue between our Lord and Peter based on John 21:15–17. “You hear the lambs a-cryin’, O shepherd, feed-a my sheep.”
In the Trisagion, the rational sheep of Christ no longer cry out in inchoate moans, but they cry, “Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have
Still from the Jubilee Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, sung at St. Moses The Black Fellowship Conference in Houston, TX, October 2023
mercy on us!” In the Divine Liturgy, they are fed on the word and on the Holy Eucharist. There seems to be a trend in Orthodox composition towards becoming more ethereal, more transcendent. But my compositions reflect His Incarnation and His immanence. In my notes to the conductor for the Trisagion, I write, “We are carrying baskets, heavy with all the concerns for which we plead God’s mercy—for ourselves, our loved ones, the sick, the suffering, the imprisoned. Those in a place of war... We offer all this to the Lord in a hymn rich with earthy harmonies and heartfelt pain. And the Lord hears us.” The Fellowship has a documentary of the premiere of the Jubilee Liturgy —Houston, Texas, 2023 on YouTube. 5 You can listen to it there. We sang it again last year in Indianapolis and I’m still working on making the audio recording available.
JW: What has been the response to the music you’ve published? Is it being used in parishes? Have you encountered any skepticism, and if so, how have you responded?
MK: The initial response shocked me in a good way. I had been working in my own bubble, un-
aware of the conversations happening in Orthodox seminaries and among Church musicians. What we talked about earlier—looking for authentic American inspirations. And then as I was editing Jubilation: Cultures of Sacred Music, I needed to connect with and interview various American Orthodox musicians and composers. That’s when I learned that they had been waiting for someone like me. It was something, I imagine, like the surprise of an infant emerging from the internal solitude of its mother to the arms of a loving family. Dr. Lehmann, whom I mentioned before, premiered several of my hymns with her Illinois Orthodox Choir—in 2021 the “Our Father,” “It is Right, Indeed,” the Cherubic Hymn. In 2022 the Polyeleos and a Paschal Troparion— and they have continued.
Dr. Peter Bouteneff has been a supporter from the beginning. He invited me to participate in a couple of podcasts. The first, a panel discussion in collaboration with Cappella Romana, was in May of 2021.6 The second was a conversation between just the two of us for his Luminous podcast.7 St. Vladimir’s Seminary invited me to present at its Summer Sacred Music Institute in 2023. There I was introduced to the
6 “Let My Prayer Arise! Orthodox Music in the Experience of African Americans.” A panel discussion with Fr. Turbo Qualls, myself, Dr. Shawn Wallace (Associate Professor of Jazz Studies at the Ohio State University and Orthodox Christian), and Dr. Peter Bouteneff, Dr. Rob Saler, and Dr. Alexander Lingas. https://youtu.be/-R63kkHi4cg?si=agM2R6E_4-byooT5
conductors who rehearsed four of my pieces with the group of over 30 singers.8 And then to my surprise, they incorporated them into the Hierarchical Divine Liturgy which culminated the week. Juliana Woodill was one of them—she has since performed two of my pieces with her Archdiocesan Choir of Washington, D.C.9 Dr. Alexander Lingas, musical director of Cappella Romana, sang in the Houston premiere of the Jubilee Liturgy in view of performing five selections in concert in February of 2024. This concert, “How Sweet the Sound,” was a collaboration between Cappella Romana and the Gospel group, Kingdom Sound, directed by Derrick McDuffey. Each of my selections was prefaced by a rendition of the spiritual which inspired it.10 It was a great vision and a great execution—we’re hoping to do something more in the future. Dr. Lehmann has also introduced some of our pieces at the Sacred Music Institutes of the Antiochian Archdiocese. If I’ve forgotten a musician, I hope they’ll both forgive me and jog my memory. It’s no reflection on them.
I have my critics, too, as I said earlier. Those who are comfortable bringing their thoughts to me are my fellow Black people. Some have said that my compositions are little more than Russian-style Church music with some syncopation and some call-and-response added. But any Black person hearing it for the first time comes as a guardian of their own worship-music traditions. They come with strong hopes and fears. You know the feeling when your favorite novel is made into a movie—are they going to get it right? Will the characters look and sound as you envisioned them in your own mind? They want to know, “will it sound like church” to them.
In all fairness, I do have deep Slavic musical roots because that’s what I’ve chanted and sung as a monastic for over thirty years. And the Slavic four-part harmony—which is not a Slavic invention but an integral part of Western music—is well-suited for interpreting the spirituals. Here’s why—shortly after emancipation, Jubilee Choirs were formed at black colleges and in the communities as well. They brought the spirituals to the stage for the first time, and they sang in four-part
choral groups. The best known, which are still singing to this day, are the Fisk Jubilee Singers. So stylistically speaking, finding inspiration in the spirituals for four-part liturgical compositions just makes sense. But in Gospel singing you have a soloist and backup choir. The soloists make use of a lot of improvisational melisma, just as you find in some Byzantine chant. Perhaps another composer will explore the intersection of those two genres.
But on the ground is where it really counts— are my liturgical settings being sung in parishes? Certainly, but I don’t know to what extent. It’s apparently quite rare to hear a Divine Liturgy sung “from Amen to Amen” all from the same setting or composer. These Liturgies become celebratory occasions given that a choir must be assembled to rehearse an hour and a half of new music—that’s quite a commitment and quite a feat! Most often, parish conductors wanting to introduce a little variety look for litanies, a Trisagion, a Cherubic Hymn, and hymns to sing during the communion of the clergy and the faithful. Musicians go home from Church conferences with new scores and introduce them to their home parish. Some of my scores are downloadable from the Fellowship website. So bit by bit, these little compositions take wing and occasionally someone will tell me that they’re singing something at their parish. My dream is always this: that somewhere an African American family will visit an Orthodox parish for the first time and hear one of these pieces sung. And they’ll recognize that the Orthodox Church indeed has its tent flaps open to them. ♦
8 Benedict Sheehan, Talia-Maria Sheehan, Mka. Juliana Woodill, Dn. Dr. Harrison Russin.
10 The second half of the concert featured How Sweet the Sound, by Dr. Shawn “Thunder” Wallace, consisting of the Orthodox Vespers reimagined in the Gospel style. https://youtu.be/wppI0XHCj-I?si=xEc5DMr9yc-9U79n
The Wholeness of Grace
THE VISION OF DONALD SHEEHAN
by FR JOEL BRADY
In the spring of 1983, Donald Sheehan went to visit his father’s grave, for the first time since the funeral seven years prior. His father’s alcoholism, violence, and abandonment of his family had left Sheehan with deep wounds, but he had come to the grave to forgive and to ask forgiveness. Sheehan was a literature professor, living in New Hampshire, where he oversaw a poetry center at the former home of Robert Frost. Though he was something of a spiritual seeker, he didn’t have a church home. He had never been inside an Orthodox Church. Nevertheless, a week after his visit to the gravesite, he woke up one morning to find the words of the Jesus Prayer—so well known in Orthodox spirituality—“spoken within me, filling me.” The prayer had come to him of its own accord.
The following year, Sheehan happened on a copy of The Way of a Pilgrim in the library at the college where he taught, and to his astonishment, he found those familiar words printed on the page: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me.” He started attending a parish near his home, and he was received into the Orthodox Church in December of 1984.
This experience, recounted in In the House of my Pilgrimage: Violence, Noetic Healing, and Personhood (Resource Publications, 2023), is a key moment that seems to illuminate what comes both before and after it: the mystery of love and grace overcoming the wounds of human violence is a theme that runs, implicitly or explicitly, through the book’s every page.
In another detail of this same story, we see one of Sheehan’s other favorite themes. He notes that when he found The Way of a Pilgrim, he remembered having heard of it, and the Jesus Prayer, in J.D. Salinger’s novel Franny and Zooey. To some this might seem to “explain away” the apparent miracle of the prayer appearing uninvited in Sheehan’s mind. But it gives an example of something no less miraculous: God’s ability to use the apparently profane in mysterious ways to reveal Himself. Throughout the book this is
In the House of my Pilgrimage Violence, Noetic Healing, and Personhood
Donald Sheehan
Resource Publications
$39 | 344 p.
illustrated both through autobiographical accounts of grace revealed in unexpected situations, and through studies of literary works that, under Sheehan’s eye, reveal subtleties of the spiritual life in wholly unexpected ways.
Many will be familiar with Donald Sheehan from his writings on spiritual life, literature, and the Psalms: collected in his books (The Grace of Incorruption, The Shield of Psalmic Prayer, and his own translation of The Psalms of David), all edited and published posthumously by his devoted wife Xenia. This latest collection of his work contains much of what those who appreciated the earlier books have come to love in his writing, but also opens for us more of the life out of which his thoughts and writings emerged.
The first section of the book, through prose reflections and poems, carries us in a not-alwayslinear fashion through Don’s childhood, with its
painful intertwining of beauty and violence, his rejection of the violence and pursuit of beauty in literature, and the conversion described above. Along the way we’re given a spiritually perceptive reflection on alcoholism and a study of St. Symeon the New Theologian that includes Sheehan’s richest presentation of the idea of personhood which runs through much of his work. And that idea of personhood, seen in light of the autobiographical material, is not at all abstract. It expresses Sheehan’s own experience, both of the world’s disfiguring and depersonalizing violence, and of emerging out of that violence into the wholeness given by divine grace.
In the second section, we have a series of literary reflections: on Dante’s Paradiso; on the poetic structure of the Akathist hymn; on Robert Frost; and on the Psalms and the story of David. Throughout this section there runs a strong theme of uniting apparent opposites: the struggle of reconciling life’s oppositions and contradictions is seen as an important means by which we know God and experience the noetic healing referenced in the title of the book (that is, the healing of our nous, our inmost spiritual being and the faculty responsible for spiritual perception).
This is expressed in part through Sheehan’s fascination with chiasmus: the method of reading a text as radiating out from, and converging on, a key central point. This becomes not just an interesting way of looking at a text, but an image of how, in Christ, apparent contradictions are drawn together and resolved (sure enough, the essay on the Akathist hymn falls almost at the center of the book, and addresses this theme of antinomy in particularly direct terms). This union of opposites is a fascinating philosophical and theological concept, over which much ink has been spilled in scholarly books and journals, but here it has a certain concreteness. By bringing together autobiographical material of a sometimes-tumultuous life with writings from throughout that life, the book as a whole shows us how grace in a person’s life can bring together apparently disjointed and contradictory elements into a beautiful (one might say iconic) whole.
The third section contains several studies of Shakespeare. Here Sheehan draws heavily on the thought of the French scholar René Girard, putting it in conversation with the writings of St. Isaac the Syrian and Fr. Pavel Florensky. In his analysis, Girard is not only a foil for the Orthodox writers, but part of a real synthesis
(even if the synthesis is finally more Orthodox than Girardian). Girard believes Shakespeare’s work lays bare the dynamics of envy and violence that drive human society. This reading appealed to Sheehan, given his own formative experiences of violence. But for him, the way out of (or, perhaps better, through) this violence comes not from Girard, but from Florensky’s notion of countenance (the “face” of true personhood) and even more so from St. Isaac’s teaching on scripture and inner stillness.
St. Isaac, significantly, is given the book’s “last word.” The writings in this third section of the book are not explicitly “personal,” for the most part; but in light of what comes before them, we can see the vision of divine light emerging from the darkness of human violence as autobiographical.
Interspersed with Sheehan’s writings throughout the book are several essays and reflections by people who knew him. These reveal more information about the author’s life, but they also demonstrate the effects Sheehan had on people around him, and the ways his life and thought continue to bear spiritual fruit in the lives of others.
This is not a book to read quickly, in hopes of extracting a few interesting ideas or useful concepts. It’s a book to spend time with—sometimes feeling illuminated by its moments of brilliance, other times exasperated by its ambiguities. As one might expect in a posthumous collection of writings, sometimes thoughts are simply left unfinished, and a careful editor can only go so far in finishing them. But to read this book carefully, through its difficulties and frustrations, is to glimpse a lifetime of thought, and to see how Christ works through it all, drawing all to Him. Rather than giving the reader neatly packaged religious ideas, it offers a vision of Christ working in the thoughts and words and events of a whole life. By showing this in the author’s life it suggests, perhaps, how it can also be found in the reader’s. Approached this way, it’s a deeply rewarding work. ♦
REV. JOEL BRADY the rector of Holy Apostles Orthodox Mission in Lansing, New York.
ON THE EVE OF MARK'S BAPTISM, MY DEFENSE
by Annalise Wolf
The dying alone happens every day.
No baby lives without knocking for escape, for entrance.
“A heart alone is such a stone,” “whose parts are as thy hand did frame” – thyself! But, the heart alone.
Icon of the inward, outward folding of the god-man. Fish-baby preserved in wax, inhabiting nor dry land nor sea: waters of baptism salted from the beginning. Salt of the brow etches baby's nerves.
A stone water-worn, a stone heart folded together, salvation from. Exit or entrance? Or knocking for notice?
Thy servant rears a broken altar of uncut stone, having witnessed our dead selves, carried our dead selves. Eternity a mobius strip of hearts, persons, natures, entrances, exits: that blade the present.
As long as your finger traces it recedes & beckons: stress fibers flood the place of pressure.
The dying alone happens every day – I never imagined we both could live. Each part meets in this frame – dying twinned & living too.
If my body chance to hold my peace – keep her from sliding out of my bloodstream (every baby catches a little) “lost to my flesh forever.” The longer I hold her, the less it is peace, and less waiting for her to stay. Stones never cease.
ANNALISE WOLF is a writer living in Manhattan and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection.
Daniel Kuriakose
THE STORY OF BEETHOVEN by
We need not seek in sea-nymphs or tree-spirits not in the lassitude of tree-spirits, nor in a grass of politics and arrest, nor in love, nor in the city’s famous somnambulant grackles what appears to be caught in speech, she said and told me about a man named Beethoven who could change the architecture of a city just by listening for an afternoon sitting at a bench by the bike stands at Prospect Park on the first day of 2024’s spring and apartment buildings overnight Viennese. Then they went up to him. Beethoven, get off our streets, they said so he plugged his ears, or that’s what she told me, that all you need is to tell a man, go deaf, and he will.
DANIEL KURIAKOSE lives in Brooklyn.
Coloring Page
2025 Diocesan Graduates
High School
Kyrianna Feliciano, parishioner at Christ the Savior Church in Paramus, NJ, graduated from Fair Lawn High School. Kyrianna is a member of the Student Council, a Student Equity Leader, a member of the National Honor Society and Spanish Honor Society and recipient of the NJ State Seal of Biliteracy. Kyrianna will be attending The College of New Jersey, where she will be studying Marketing with a minor in Psychology.
Evangeline Brad, parishioner at Church of the Holy Cross in Metford, NJ, graduated from Williamstown High School, Williamstown, NJ. Evangline is a member of the German National Honor Society
and Captain of her high school field hockey team. She was MVP and won the Coaches Award for field hockey. She is also a four-year varsity letter winner for field hockey and All-Conference second-team winner three years in a row for different positions in field hockey. She has received an athletic Scholarship to play field hockey for Mansfield University in the Fall, where she intends to study Sports Nutrition and Exercise Science.
Joseph Eltarazy, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in Bayonne, NJ, graduated from Bayonne High School. Joseph was recognized as an AP Scholar, and is a member of Spanish Honor Society, National Honor Society, Ice skating Club, Chess Club (in which he received a tournament award for 3rd place), and was captain of Fencing Club. He was a member of Bayonne High School's Student Council. Outside of school, he is a BLS Provider and an Altar Server at Saints Peter & Paul Orthodox Church in Bayonne, NJ. He will
be attending Rutgers University where he will be study Biology.
Sarah Saad, parishioner at St. Gregory the Theologian Church in Wappinger Falls, NY, graduated from John Jay Senior High School. Sarah is an incredible artist who will take her talents to working with people. She will attend cosmetology school after graduation.
Basil Metz, parishioner at St. Gregory the Theologian Church in Wappinger Falls, NY, graduated from Highland High School. Basil is an honors student and an Eagle Scout. He lettered in track and cross country and is an active member of St. Gregory's as an altar server. His Eagle project was putting in a new playground for St. Gregory's youth. He
will attend Hartwick College where he will study Nursing.
Gabriella Rubis, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in South River, NJ, graduated from Immaculata High School, Somerville, NJ. Gabriella has served as both VP & President of Spartan TV, Director of Spartan Arts, Executive Student Council Publicity Chair, and participated in Spartan & Acapella Choirs, Symphonic Band, Antioch Retreat Leader, Honor Roll, Rho Kappa National History Honors, Broadcast Signature Honors with selection of student intern at NBC News NY, CBS Sports and Mariano Films, and Immaculata Golf. She is a recipient of a Marist and Red Fox Merit award for study in Communications. She will attend Marist University where she will study Communications & Media.
Hannah Horner, parishioner at Church of the Holy Cross in Medford, NJ, graduated from Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Mass. She received Honors/High Honors every academic term. She is a twotime Dance Captain, received The
Peacemaker Award for her community service work tutoring with Twice as Smart, and is Co-President of the Malala Fund (Deerfield Academy Chapter). She spent a school year aboard in France in 2024, is co-founder of the DA French Club, took a service trip to Tanzania in 2025, is NJCTS Youth Council Member and former Board Member, and presented a TED talk. Hannah will attend The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where she will study Business Analytics.
Aidan Prokopienko, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in East Herkimer, NY, graduated from Central Valley Academy. Aidan was a member of the National Honors Society in his Junior and Senior years. He was on the honor roll and member of Herkimer Boces for four years. He will attend SUNY Cobleskill, where he will study to become a diesel mechanic.
Jonathan Zabierowski, parishioner at Holy Trinity Orthodox Churhc in East Meadow, NJ, graduated from Carle Place High School.
He will be attending CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he will study Computer Science and Information Security.
Michael Penkrat, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Wayne, NJ. Graduated from Ramsey High School, Ramsey, NJ, where he excelled in football, lacrosse, and was a four year varsity letterman and co-captain of the swim team his senior year. Michael graduated with honors in math and science. Michael will attend The New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in the fall to study Mechanical Engineering.
Sabbas Jelia, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Wayne, NJ. Graduated from Pequannock Township High School, Pequannock, NJ. Sabbas excelled in soccer and graduated as a distinguished scholar with high honors for his accomplishments in World Language and French Honors Society. He also was a club member of Operation Smile and the Environmental Club. Sabbas will attend Marist University in the
Fall, majoring in Sports Communication with a minor in Journalism.
Alexander Reese, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Wayne, NJ. Graduated from Bergen Catholic High School, Oradell, NJ, where he was a member of the National Honor Society, Math Honor Society, and Social Studies Honor Society. He also excelled as a member of the varsity baseball team. Alexander will attend Penn State University in the Fall to study Business.
Elias Brown, a parishioner of Saint Mary Magdalen Orthodox Church in Manhattan, NY, and graduated from Glen Rock High School, Glen Rock, NJ. He will be attending the Turning Point program at Bergen Community College, Paramus, NJ. Elias achieved the rank of Life Scout and ran Track and Cross Country for all four years. As a tonsured reader he also serves in the altar.
in Homer, NY. Andrea is graduating as one of the top ten percent of her class. She will attend the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she will study Mechanical Engineering.
Undergraduate
Gabriel Cowan, parishioner at Holy Trinity Church in Elmira Heights, NY. Reader Gabriel Cowan graduated Wednesday, April 30, from the Corning Community College Automotive Technician Training Program—a two-semester program equipping students with skills and competencies required to safely service vehicles and work in the automotive repair center environment as Certified Technicians. Gabriel is the grandson of Mitred Archpriest Nicholas and Matushka Anastasia Molodyko-Harris, and James and Penny Cowan, and the son of V. Rev. David and Matushka Tamara Cowan. Thanks be to God!
Anna (Olga) Renodin, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in East Herkimer, NY, graduated from Herkimer County Community College with an Associates Degree in General Studies. Her patron saint is St. Olga of Alaska. She focused on History and has been accepted to SUNY Albany for studying History. She is interested in museum curation and sharing the history of America with others.
Julianna M. Cheplick, parishioner at Holy Trinity Church in Elmira Heights, NY, graduated from SUNY Delhi with a Veterinary Technician Degree. Julianna is planning to further her education in the Veterinary Sciences.
Andrea Sahm, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in Syracuse, NY, graduated Homer High School
Alyse (Seraphima) Renodin, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in East Herkimer, NY, graduated from Herkimer County Community College with an Associates Degree in General Studies. Her patron saint is St. Seraphim of Sarov. She focused on writing and is interested in working/interning to develop experience.
Larissa N. Cheplick, parishioner at Holy Trinity Church in Elmira Heights, NY, graduated from Daemen University with a Bachelor of Science in Natural Health Sciences & Physician Assistant. Larissa will begin her rotations in Summer 2025 to complete her licensing requirements.
Alexandra Sveshnikova, parishioner at St. Olympia Mission in Potsdam, NY. She is graduating summa cum laude from SUNY Potsdam with a B.A. in Anthropology and honors concentrations. She received over twenty awards, including the Faculty Award, given to the graduating senior with the best academic record. Alexandra completed three internships, two grant-funded research projects, and presented at two national conferences. She is co-authoring a publication based on fieldwork in Kenya and plans to pursue a career in Biological Archaeology.
Julia Eltarazy, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in Bayonne, NJ, graduated from Montclair State University with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. Julia plans to continue her education in medical school. In her spare time, she enjoys fitness exercise, travel, and exploring.
Dan Cohen, parishioner at St. Olympia Mission in Potsdam, NY, graduated from Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY. He entered Clarkson through the Clarkson School, the university’s early college pro-
gram. After graduation, he will work at L&M Radiator, Inc. and attend St. Basil of Ostrog’s Serbian Orthodox Church in Chisholm, MN. He will be deeply missed by his St. Olympia’s family, where he sounded the bells and semantron, baked prosphora, and served in the altar.
Matthew Plachuta, parishioner at Orthodox Church of the Holy Cross in Medford, NJ, graduated from Wilmington University. He was a dual-enrollment high school student, who completed high school one year early in 2024 and earned his BS in Business Management in 2025, a few days before his 18th birthday! Matthew looks to pursue a career in construction management.
Eva Czukkermann, parishioner at St. Gregory the Theologian Church in Wappinger Falls, NY. Eva is graduating summa cum laude from RIT with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering and will be commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. She is assigned to Robins Air Force base in Macon, GA.
Julia Siragusa, parishioner at Church of the Holy Cross in Medford, NJ, graduated from Arcadia University with a major in Scientific Illustration and minor in Italian and Entrepreneurial and Curator Studies. As a Scientific Illustration student, Julia majored in both science and art programs. She studied abroad in Florence, Italy for a semester, where she expanded her love of the culture and language. She was also the captain of Arcadia's Dance team for all four years, making her study of the arts very well rounded and fun. She is looking to continue her education at graduate school in the future.
Olivia Reduto, parishioner at Holy Trinity Church in Yonkers, NY. She graduated with honors from UMass Amherst with degrees in Hospitality & Tourism Management and Vocal Jazz Performance. She twice received the Downbeat Latin Jazz Award for collegiate jazz performance. She studied and performed internationally. She worked in event planning for the NYC Mayor's Office at Gracie Mansion and was a staff manager the NY Athletic Club. She will be working this summer at Caramoor Center for the Arts.
Larissa Elizabeth Fitzgibbons, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in Syracuse, NY. She graduated with honors from Duquesne University with a Bachelor of Science in Business. She dual-majored in Marketing and Management with a Minor in Sports Marketing. Larissa served as the VP of Marketing for the campus Women in Business group and the Director of Recruitment for the American Marketing Association. She was also a member of the Delta Sigma Pi national business fraternity, the Future Business Leaders of America, the Duquesne Student Advisory Committee, and was inducted into the Duquesne Integrated Honors Society. She hopes to stay in Pittsburgh and work in Marketing for a local or national business.
Rose Vichiconti, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Wayne, NJ. Graduated from Montclair State University, earning two B.A.s: Psychology and Linguistics, and a minor in Cognitive Science. While attending she held several leadership positions, including Peer Mentor, University Fellow, Orientation Leader, and Resident Assistant. She is president of a local sorority,
Sigma Delta Phi, and recently was inducted into the Order of Omega, an honor society for members that embody scholarship, leadership, and service. Future plans include attaining prerequisites necessary to pursue a graduate degree in Speech Language Pathology.
Steven Medeiros, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Wayne, NJ. Graduated from William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ, with a double Bachelor of Arts Degree in Finance and Economics. He is currently working as a Leadership Fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia.
Julia Evanina, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Wayne, NJ. Graduated from Stockton University, Galloway, NJ, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology. She plans to attend Ramapo College in the Fall to obtain her Master's Degree in Medical and Forensic Social Work.
East Meadow, NY, graduated from SUNY Old Westbury with a Bachelor of Science in Adolescent Education in Mathematics. Alexander was recognized with Summa Cum Laude, was on the Dean's List each semester, and completed extra courses to achieve a Pure Mathematics Degree. He now works at a middle school in Glen Cove, New York.
Sophia Sahm, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in Syracuse, NY. Sophia has earned her Bachelor of Science in Nursing from Le Moyne College and is a Registered Nurse. She will be working as an RN at St. Joseph's Hospital in Syracuse, NY.
Graduate
Alexandra Plachuta, parishioner at Orthodox Church of the Holy Cross in Medford, NJ, graduated from Wilmington University with her Master's Degree. She currently works for Nemours Children's Health in healthcare education and will be getting married in the parish in July 2025.
Alexander Zabierowski, parishioner at Holy Trinity Church in
Giselle Ristovski, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church in Wayne, NJ. Graduated from Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, with a Master's degree in Speech-Language Pathology. She is currently working in her field at Lodi Public Schools.
