Jacob's Well - Spring/Summer 2021 - Borders

Orthodox Church in America

Diocese of New York & New Jersey

Spring / Summer 2021

Jacob's Well Spring / Summer 2021: "Borders"

Opportunities

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

Rev. Matthew Brown Executive Editor

Nick Tabor Associate Editor

Katie Sorensen Copy Editor

Dn. David Maliniak Art Direction & Design

Sophie Maliniak

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Front Cover

Madame Jumel's Garden (1936) Virginia Richards Frontispiece

The Great Taking of the Veil (1897-98) Mikhail Nesterov Back Cover

Saint Anne Makurian, 8th-9th c.

National Museum in Warsaw

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Daily Bread

Contents

| Family Life |

Diocesan Life 4

42

by Matushka Rebekah Markewich

| Theology & Culture |

Letter from the Editor

46

by Fr. Matthew Brown

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Breaking Language Barriers

Community After COVID Reflections on (Re)-Opening Our Parishes

interview with José Alberto Sánchez Fierro

by Fr. David Garretson

Stewardship and Ecology

| Arts & Culture |

by Fr. Terence Baz

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Suffering in Silence Opening Up About Miscarriages

50

“We Were on the Frontline” A Doctor Looks Back on the Pandemic Year

The Theologians of Grace, Place, and Space

by Rdr. Adedoyin Teriba

interview with Dr. Carol Holobinko-Haluszczak

52

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St. Basil's House

Album Review: Spilligion

by Spillage Village

by Katie Sorensen

by Femi Outlade

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Sparks of the Divine: Commemorating Archpriest Nilus Lerro

| Poetry |

56

by Nick Tabor

by Roy Meador

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Featured Essays

| Youth Pages |

Letter from a Fictive Country Seeking Stability Inside War-Torn Azerbaijan

The Church as a Living Organism

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“For Kings and all who are in Authority” On Political Power and the Kingdom of God

An Orthodox Teen’s Perspective on COVID

by Beatrice Olderog

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by Dn. Ezras Tellalian

26

Blank Page

by George Fillingham

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The Fog and the Swifts

Kid's Page: A Step by Step Drawing

by Genevieve Brown

by Fr. Isaac Skidmore

60

Coloring Page: Pentecost

61

2021 Diocesan Graduates

by Fr. Philip LeMasters

34

The Eucharist and Public Life

38

Walls and Ditches

by Dr. Will Cohen

by Fr. Bohdan Hladio

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Letter Editor

from

the

The Question Of Borders

by Presbyter MATTHEW BROWN

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imitations form the borders of our life and its story, giving it shape and meaning much as each genre of literature has its own conventions giving it its distinct character, or a game’s rules dictate its flow. Without these limitations the game would not be fun nor the novel interesting. Nor would your life without its imposed boundaries have any meaning, just as a word which seemingly means everything, in truth, means nothing at all.

In the realm of fantasy fiction, where the supernatural and the magical abound, this is particularly true. In realistic fiction, the limits of the story are largely set for you by the time, the setting, or the normal limits of everyday life. In fantasy, because so much of the fantastic is allowed, it is easy for the writer to let his imagination run wild. But all truly great works of fantasy, such as the Lord of the Rings

by J.R.R. Tolkien, are great precisely because of the boundaries they impose on themselves; for what they do not allow to be possible.

Borders are all around us. Our entire social lives are a series of borders, as is the natural world we inhabit. There are borders between different biomes.

Borders between those who are family and those who are not. There’s a border to the earth’s magnetic field, and a border between our job responsibilities and those of our co-workers. If in any of these cases the border was to be entirely removed, one could easily imagine the ensuing chaos. Life itself is contingent upon borders.

However, boundaries often have a negative connotation. They are something we are forbidden to cross; something that keeps us locked in. They separate and divide. And there are many cases in which this is true. If a border is too strong it becomes stifling and crippling. But boundaries also keep us safe, like a guard rail on a highway or the hearth for a fire. Borders are, like most things in life, a doubleedged sword. A nation’s border can protect us and create stability, but it can also produce suffering.

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This is something the people of Syria have been well acquainted with since the spring of 2011. When their country was engulfed in civil war, the border that was meant to protect them only trapped them in a near hellscape.

Consider a biological cell. Each cell has a membrane which distinguishes it from other cells and the outside world. That border must strike a balance and remain semi-permeable. If a cell’s membrane is impenetrable, then it cannot take in the energy it needs nor expel its waste. If it is completely permeable, it cannot protect the cell from viruses or other enemies. Were it to be stripped of its border, the cell’s contents would simply spill out into its environment and be absorbed by other cells. In both cases, it spells the death of the cell.

Another way to look at borders is by seeing them as a dichotomy between openness and closedness.

Setting a border is always a decision regarding how open or how closed I want my life to be. And the proper balance is often dictated by the circumstances.

In one situation, being more closed is better, while in another circumstance the same degree of closure would be unhealthy and counterproductive. The

Hermit Fathers and Immaculate Women (1932) Mikhail Nesterov

border between the U.S. and Canada can, because of numerous circumstances, afford to be more open, while the one between the U.S. and Mexico sadly cannot. Being open-minded is a necessary thing but at some point, one must make commitments, cement loyalties, and form opinions. It is, as G.K. Chesterton once put it, “Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” Neither an open or closed mind is inherently a virtue or vice. Rather, they are both necessary stages in making decisions. We must continually exercise both in life. Either extreme is a ditch we ought to avoid.

Even when we have settled on a course of action or formed a solid opinion, we must maintain an open mind, just as when we are learning, seeking answers, or wrestling with a problem, we must not be gullible or undiscerning.

In truth, borders can give us life and they can also destroy us. This truth permeates all of reality, from the smallest sub-atomic particle to the most complex and abstract of human social systems. The border is the point of contact between chaos and order. It is the place where that ancient cosmic battle is played out.

Too much chaos and we get death. Too much order and we get death. This battle between chaos and order is visible in the creation story in the book of Genesis.

“The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:1).

The story begins with the waters of chaos. It begins without form, without any distinction or boundaries. The rest of Genesis 1 is a series of separations and distinctions by which God sets boundaries between things to create beauty and life. “Then God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so” (Genesis 1:6-7). And again, in verse 14, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night.”

While borders gave shape to God’s creation, a border also barred Adam and Eve from Eden after their transgression. A border also kept the souls of the departed trapped in hell until Christ shattered that border in His Harrowing of Hades. The entire story of salvation is one of erecting the right borders and tearing down the wrong ones. In His Incarnation, Christ tears down the border between divine and human.

In His ministry, He tears down social boundaries between the sick and the well, between the rich and the poor, between the Jew and the foreigner. St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, summarizes it this way: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

The task of setting borders right, begun by Christ, was handed over to us, His people, to complete. St. Maximus the Confessor, one of our great Church Fathers, teaches that man was created last precisely to carry out God’s work of uniting divisions and shattering borders between things. Maximus writes (and I will paraphrase), “mediating between extremes and unifying through himself things that by nature are separated from each other by a great distance, the human person might gather all things together and lifting them up to God bring about the union of all things in God, in whom there is no division.”

This, then, is the task set before us: to set the borders of our lives and our world right. And it is no easy task. The work of creating a more just world or a more righteous life is very much a problem of righting our borders. However, it is not as easy as simply imposing new rules or erecting higher walls. Nor is it merely 5

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about tearing them all down. This is the mistake of our present political and cultural wars. It is finding the balance which leads to a flourishing of life. This balance can be seen in our theology of the Trinity. The three Persons of the Trinity are distinct but not separate. They are One and yet Three. It can also be seen in the Incarnation, where the border between the divine and human is kept. It is a border which unites yet preserves the integrity of each.

In its most abstract and ultimate sense, Orthodoxy’s theological approach to borders reflects the Trinity, in which that balance resides and originates.

When we set a healthy boundary in a relationship or between our work and private life, we are imprinting a mark of the Holy Trinity on the world. We are in a sense imitating God. And that is what all of creation was meant to be and what our labor as the Church, the body of Christ acting in the world, is meant to bring about, a reflection of God as Trinity–which is merely to say love itself.

Many of our societal problems concern borders, as with problems in our personal lives. Where we’ve failed to set proper boundaries in our relationships, issues of abuse or isolation emerged. Where we’ve failed to set proper boundaries to our profession, it harmed our family or led to acts of corruption. There is a boundary between my money and my employer’s money. Our leaders often have not set proper boundaries to their public service and have failed to discern their interests from those of the public good. We’ve erected walls to keep some people poor and to isolate us from each other, and therefore we are ignorant and afraid. We have even failed to properly erect a border around human life to guard its sanctity.

Many of the theological questions that challenge us today are questions of borders. Who is saved?

What are the limits of the church? What are the roles of women in the church? The challenges to parish life and ministry are also questions of borders concerning how we approach outreach, and how we receive converts. When we change the way we do ministry, it gives rise to a question: What is the border between the church and the world? jacob's well

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Change is almost a dirty word to us Orthodox, yet we have and must continue to change lest we set a border so secure from the pollution of the outside world that we succumb to the fate of all those who build their borders too high: death. It’s true that we are “in the world and not of it,” but we are still in the world. Our goal as a church is not to hide from or defend ourselves against the world, but to conquer it and transfigure it. Moreover, we must remember that the borders we erect are not permanent. They must change as the environment around them changes or they become obsolete and useless, like some ancient city wall which no longer encompasses the breadth of the city. Unless it is expanded, it can no longer hold off the barbarians.

We ought to heed the lesson of the cell. When a membrane is too impermeable, we starve; too porous, and our contents spill out. If we think that we have nothing to learn from the culture, philosophies, or religions around us, then we starve (and betray our Orthodox heritage of doing such things). If we imitate and blindly incorporate the current trends in thought or culture, we risk making ourselves indistinguishable from the world and blending in until we disappear, repeating the mistakes of some other Christian traditions in our own time. We must find a way to preserve the integrity of our own tradition while learning from and engaging with the world. Then we can hope to offer something that is Good News while avoiding the foible of answering questions no one is asking. As the Church (and in our individual lives), we ought to strive for borders that are incarnational: ones that unite us while also making us more uniquely ourselves.

REV. MATTHEW BROWN is the editor-in-chief of Jacob’s

Well and is studying for a PhD in theology at Fordham University. He is the rector of Holy Apostles Orthodox Church in Saddle Brook, New Jersey.

OPPOSITE: Santa Sofia (1891) John Singer Sargent

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Breaking Language Barriers

Hymnal, Pentecost Armenian (1678) Walters Art Museum

An Interview with José Alberto Sánchez Fierro

José Alberto Sánchez Fierro is a Spanish-speaking catechist in the Diocese of New York and New Jersey.

He spoke with us about his initial encounter with Orthodoxy in Mexico and how he came to be a leader in Spanish-speaking Orthodox outreach in the United States.

Tell me about your personal background and your background with Orthodoxy.

My full name is José Alberto Sánchez Fierro, but everybody knows me as Ioannis, my Orthodox baptismal name in honor of St. John the Baptist. In the Spanish community everybody calls me José.

I was born in the city of Atlixco in the state of Puebla, about three hours from Mexico City, where I moved as a young adult. When I was about 17, I started to look around for the true faith. Back then I knew nothing about Orthodoxy, so I was looking in other religions, desperately trying to find the truth. jacob's well

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But nothing happened. Eventually I gave up and I just became like a lot of Mexicans, following the directions from the [Catholic] priest. But to be honest I was not happy.

One Sunday almost 15 years ago I was walking past a nearby Greek Orthodox Church—the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom in Mexico City. They were performing a service outside. It was weird to me because Palm Sunday had already happened in the Roman Catholic Church. I approached the people, and it was amazing: They were chanting in Greek, I could smell their incense. I don’t know how I ended up inside the church, but it was so beautiful, like being in heaven. So I realized that was where I belonged, because I had this feeling that the place had been waiting for me.

I asked the priest after the service what they were celebrating, and he explained how their calendar was usually a few weeks behind the Roman Catholic calendar. He gave me some information. Thank God I had internet at home, and when I returned, I started doing my own research. It was becoming clear that this was my faith. I attended that church for almost a year and then was baptized.

How did you get involved in catechesis?

After I was baptized, I was attending a group called Catechisma in Mexico with some priests and friends.

People could bring a friend, or anyone interested in the faith, to talk and learn about Orthodoxy. I was one of three selected to be in a small group who studied more about the faith, to be able to teach others.

One day a priest called to ask if I was willing to travel to help other communities with catechesis, and I said yes, not knowing it was in New York. But I said to myself, “Why not?” The job was at St. Spyridon Greek Orthodox Church in Washington Heights. So I came to New York and we started a program there with a very small community of Hispanics, most of

them Dominican. But due to several difficulties, the GOA stopped the program.

I was ready to return to Mexico when an OCA friend I had made here, Kevin, called me. He said, “Why are you going to leave? You’re here; you can contact other churches and see if they need your help.”

So I started to knock on doors, but everyone said they weren’t interested, mostly because they didn’t want to deal with all the paperwork required for immigration.

But one day Kevin suggested that I call Fr. Joseph Lickwar at Sts. Peter and Paul Orthodox Cathedral in Jersey City. So I did, and he spoke with Fr. David Cowan, who was then at Holy Trinity in Yonkers, and after three weeks they called back and said I could work for them in the OCA. How did Holy Trinity’s connection with the Spanish-speaking community start?

Fr. David lived next to the church in Yonkers.

Across the street there is a building complex, where many elderly people live, all Hispanic, all Spanish speakers. Fr. David only speaks English, but somehow, they would communicate. He had a connection with one woman who was particularly active, who liked to get others involved and cook for everyone.

What does one of your meetings look like?

Fr. David would bring a Bible over to the meeting room in their building complex, and he would read the Gospel, and I would translate each word. I would say nothing of my own, just Fr. David’s explanation.

Then we would pray the Trisagion. In the Roman Catholic Church, they don’t have the Trisagion, only Our Father. They learned how to say the Trisagion in Spanish and to sing the hymn of the Holy Theotokos.

After that, we would pray for the sick and people in difficulties.

Do they regularly attend Holy Trinity?

Before COVID, they would attend services at the parish. They told me they felt welcome because all the parishioners looked at them with love. You feel it when someone welcomes you to become a part of the community, even if you don’t speak the language.

They told me they’d been in other churches with nonLatinos, and they’d felt different, but they said that was not the case in our church.

Has anyone from the group converted to Orthodoxy?

Right now, I have only two people that are most likely going to be a part of our Church very soon. From a group of almost ten, two are going to become Orthodox. And the others, likely later. They are thinking about it. One lady was telling me that she wants to become Orthodox, but she wants to

bring her whole family, and she doesn’t want to be Orthodox while they’re Roman Catholic.

Has this relationship with the Spanish-speaking community changed anything at the parish?

Yes. Fr. David would do parts of the Liturgy in Spanish. The comments from the group were amazing.

They were very happy just to hear the Liturgy in their language.

How has COVID affected your meetings?

I had been in Yonkers more than a year when my visa was about to expire, so I had to leave the country and re-enter. I went back to Mexico, I got my visa approved, and as soon as I came back and we started up again, COVID hit.

While I was in Mexico, I would call them over WhatsApp, but it’s not the same, talking to someone through a screen. Now that I am back, I can meet oneon-one in person, but not with the whole group.

The Hispanic community has been hit very hard

by COVID, and they don’t want to take the risk of going inside the church. But you know what I did?

All of them have internet access, so I told them where to go to watch the Liturgy online, and they love it.

They say, “One more time! One more time!” after they finish. And I also provided them with materials, some hymns and CDs, icons, and books and komboskinis.

I showed them how to pray with the komboskini, so they’ve been doing that. They’re amazing.

We all pray for this disease to be banished, and we’re going to go back to our normal life and do our work for the Church.

In the meantime, I’ve started a Facebook page to reach people interested in Orthodoxy throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

What’s your ultimate goal through this ministry?

One of my purposes is to share Orthodoxy with people, especially with the Spanish-speaking community. I call Orthodoxy this very well-kept secret. It is this little treasury that we have, that’s been there for centuries. So my purpose is to let the Hispanic community know that there is a way for them to share the happiness of the true faith.

Mission Ortodoxa Español – OCA – NY & NJ, Mr. Sanchez’s Facebook page for Spanish-speakers interested in Orthodoxy, can be found at facebook.com/ ortodoxiaespanolnynj.

For free materials on Orthodoxy in Spanish, contact Mr. Sanchez directly at joseorthodox33@ gmail.com.

- Interview by Katie Sorensen 9

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Stewardship and Ecology It’s Time to Make our Parishes Greener

by Archpriest TERENCE BAZ

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efore they fell from grace, Adam and Eve were called by God to care for His garden by naming the plants, tilling the soil, caring for the animals, and offering all their efforts back to Him. God loved walking and talking with them in the Garden of Eden.

At every Divine Liturgy, we continue offering back to God all our efforts toward our stewardship of creation.

It happens right after the Consecration. We also often begin our prayers by calling upon the Holy Spirit, “who art everywhere and fillest all things,” to continue the work of creation. Further, through our baptism, we intercede in a priestly way for all of creation. Many of the Church’s liturgical prayers reflect these sacred tasks. In the same way, Her calendar of saints and seasons is full of references to creation. The Orthodox Church also calls us to maintain a proper balance between our relationship with God and His creation through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving.

During the season of Great Lent, the Orthodox Church calls us to prepare for the great event of Pascha.

While, like the virgins of the Bridegroom Service, we should reflect on how our souls may have fallen short in their preparedness to be ready for Christ, we should also not forget to do so in practical ways. One way is to give to those who may be facing hunger because of the pandemic. Another is to strive to be responsible

stewards of all of God’s creation because that is no less sacred than the other tasks.

As Orthodox Christians there are practical ways we can be better stewards of God’s creation, whether as members of our households, or our parishes.

Remember that every little step helps! In a country where the population is 330 million, if the great majority of people were to amend their wasteful and polluting practices, it would make a significant impact. Here are some practical pointers: 1. Has an energy audit been done on your church building? They are relatively inexpensive, and both New York and New Jersey will apply any savings gained from the resulting energy efficiency toward the cost of the audits. Here are relevant links for each state: • https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/All-Programs/ Programs/Energy-Audit-Programs • https://njcleanenergy.com/main/rebatesand-promotions/rebates-and-promotions.

2. Has your parish council considered installing either solar panels or a more efficient boiler system? Although we may have the resources to cover our parishes’ current energy usage, being good stewards of creation means planning for and

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achieving reductions in our communities’ energy consumption. A huge inefficient boiler using fossil fuels is not satisfactory these days. What is the alternative plan if it breaks down?

Styrofoam cups take centuries to decompose, whereas paper cups take only weeks. Parishes should have stopped using Styrofoam by now.

On a personal level, we should all strive to keep the Orthodox fasts. Reducing our meat consumption can greatly reduce our carbon footprint, because producing meat requires far more energy than producing the same amount of calories in plant protein. Recent global surveys have shown that the demand for beef has caused 41% of the deforestation since 2000, as land has been cleared for pastures!

Choose carefully when making purchases—not only of major items like cars and heating systems, but also of soybean, coffee, and palm-oil products.

Huge tracts of forests are being destroyed to make way for the latter’s production.

Invest in reusable shopping bags and try to minimize plastic usage in general. Parishes ought to use water filters instead of plastic bottles. Those bottles do great damage to sea life; there are many short videos about this. Here is one: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA9O9YUbQew. Minute particles are also getting into the food chain and could be a very serious issue in the future.

In colder weather, program your thermostat at 68°F or even 66°F during daylight hours. If that leaves you cold, you can always layer up on clothing. For overnights, lower it further still and grab an extra blanket. When church buildings are not used during the week, set the thermostat at 55°F. Stay on top of managing the temperature when people are away from the building or house.

Such steps will save a lot of money and energy.

The same holds true for summer air conditioning; keep the temperature no lower than 72°F. For those who like gardening, have you thought about composting (https://www.epa.

gov/recycle/composting-home)? These days, composting doesn’t have to generate unpleasant odors or attract animals. Also, be diligent about recycling.

9. Stop using herbicides and pesticides on your lawn unless you have grubs that eat up the grass. Their chemicals leach into the soil and ultimately into local aquifers and river systems.

If we strive to do our best to manage our homes and churches, we can offer those efforts back to our heavenly Father as our first fruits—unlike Cain, who chose to offer God only leftovers.

V. REV. TERENCE BAZ is the rector of Assumption of the Holy Virgin Orthodox Church in Clifton, New Jersey.

Healthcare worker donning a pair of protective goggles and protective equipment.

Public Health Image Library, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

“We Were on the Frontline”

A Doctor Looks Back on the Pandemic Year

For many of us, the pandemic ushered in new appreciation for healthcare workers at all levels—from the janitors who keep hospital rooms clean to doctors trained in intricate surgical procedures. With the worst part of the pandemic ending in the U.S., we spoke to Dr. Carol Holobinko-Haluszczak, an internist who runs a small practice in Bath, New York, and is also a longtime parishioner in the Diocese of New York and New Jersey.

She spoke about her tribulations in the pandemic year, the icons that adorn the exam rooms throughout her practice, and the prognosis for public health at this stage of the collective recovery.

Could you tell us a little about your background and your medical practice?

Well, I graduated medical school in 1985 from Philadelphia, then I finished my residency in New Jersey and landed here in 1989—in Bath, New York, which is in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. I’ve been here since. My business partner and I are board-certified internists, and we’ve had our own practice here in Bath since the early ’90s. We treat adults and teenagers older than 13. A big part of our practice is primary care. We've graduated away from hospital work. After you've put in so many years of service, they start taking you off the call schedule. jacob's well

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And what’s your parish?

I go to Holy Trinity Orthodox Church in Elmira Heights, which is about a 45-minute drive from here.

We've been going for roughly 20 years. Before that, we were a part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Diocese. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church wasn’t in communion with any other Churches, which is why we didn't find Holy Trinity earlier. Later the patriarch regularized UOC as under the omophorion of the patriarchs. So that's how we were able to go to Holy Trinity then.

Could you walk us through your experience with COVID? Yes, I've been a doctor on the ground for 30-some years, and we've never seen anything like this. The last pandemic we had was back in 2009, with the H1N1, and none of what we're seeing today is what went on then. The CDC had a webinar on January 31, 2020, trying to get the word out about COVID, and I decided to participate, because we have Corning Inc.1 near us, and they send a lot of people back and forth to China, or at least they did. And I thought, Hey, maybe I'll get a case of this—not knowing that within like six weeks, we would be shut down completely here in New York State.

So we were on the frontline. It was very, very, very difficult to know what to do, because the things were happening so fast. We would come in the morning with a battle plan, change it at lunch, and by supper

"It was really rough going in the beginning, and we needed all hands on deck, not only kids, but the heavenly hosts." change it again. We ran around trying to find personal protective equipment (PPE). Luckily, we were able to scrounge up two full outfits of PPE. But in the infectious-disease world, you're supposed to change those with every encounter. And we had two. So the stress was unreal. I even went down to the local hardware store looking for N95 masks. They were sold out. Things got out of hand very quickly. But we came up with a way to control the influx and outflow of our office. For anybody who had a respiratory illness,

we would have an outdoor visit. We figured we had a better chance out in the country, because we do live in the country, with them in their vehicles, rather than here in the office. Because at the time, the guidelines were that if you found out you had a COVID patient in the office, you had to quarantine that room for cleaning for an hour, and we only have five rooms—so how would we do that? We'd be dead in about half a day.

On top of all that, the testing kits were really hard to come by. We were lucky we got any at all. We would get five a week, and we had to be very careful about who we were testing and who we weren't, because you don't want to waste them. And then there was a turnaround time of five days, so that didn't help either. We were used to rapid flu tests that diagnose an infection in about 10 minutes; in this situation it was five days of not knowing whether the patient had COVID or whether we had been exposed to it. All the changes in the CDC, the WHO, the White House— it just went on and on and on.

I imagine it took over your whole practice.

Oh, yeah. We watched our entire schedule just, like, crumble. So when Governor Cuomo locked everybody down, he put out a message like on a Wednesday that said, “Look, anybody who can switch to telemedicine, do it.” So we talked to our electronic medical-records people there and they said, “Well, you're on for the tutorial tomorrow, which is Thursday.” In a normal situation, it takes four to six weeks to learn telemedicine in an established practice.

We were up and running in 72 hours.

Whoa.

(Laughs) We were scrambling. Luckily, my youngest son, Chris Haluszczak, lives in New York City, and he's in computers. He was our lifeline. I couldn't get audio and this and that. I finally reached out to him and said, “Help!” We were doing threeway phone communications, then he was trying to get into our computer. He was able to find out what the problem was and help us correct it quickly. He's used to it because we've had a family business from day one.

Anytime anything needs to be done, your kids end up doing it, that’s how it works.

Thank God you had that support within the family.

Yes, and there was another example of that: my cousin’s husband, Father John Haluszczak, in Pittsburgh, sent up an icon of the holy unmercenary

1. A glass and optical-fiber manufacturer, headquartered in Corning, N.Y. 13

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women doctors.2 I put that right in my room that I dedicated for video visits, so those women doctors were right above my head when I was on with the patients, trying to learn how to use this technology.

And then back here in my own office, I have a Russian icon of St. Luke the Surgeon.3 It sits here on my desk. It was really rough going in the beginning, and we needed all hands on deck, not only kids, but the heavenly hosts.

What a beautiful image, the icon of the unmercenary doctors being above your head. So how did your patients fare over the course of the year?

In the beginning, we made out pretty well. The summer was quiet. Then in December, we started with the second surge, and we had lots and lots of patients with COVID. In January, we had a number of deaths.

We did a lot of fielding on patients who had gone to the hospital and received Remdesivir4, and then had returned to the community. They would come here for their hospital follow-ups. To a T, they all felt like lepers. It wasn't their physical selves that were struggling, it was their spiritual selves, their mental selves. They were petrified that they were going to give this disease to someone else. They were afraid people were going to see them as pestilence and toxicity in the community.

I'm really on top of that when I'm talking to our COVID survivors. I try to make them realize that they are returning into society because they are well. They cannot give this disease to other people, effectively. I know there's all this material on the internet and social media that says otherwise. But these people needed that helping hand, that person who was willing to touch them, to hug them. They had this terrible feeling of being unclean.

Your faith has probably always played a role in your medical practice, no?

I think it has, yes. I'm also a DO—a doctor of osteopathy. We’re trained in holistic medicine from the very beginning. That dovetails well with religion

and faith. I have an icon of an archangel, or of St. Panteleimon, or Ss. Cosmas and Damian, or some other saint in each room.5 It's up on top, so it's not like in people's faces, and they don't have to venerate it or anything. But nobody's ever objected to it. I've had them in there for ages. So I think they know what my status is, and I'm not trying to convert them. I'm just trying to live my life.

Lately we’ve seen vaccination rates flattening around the country. As a doctor, are you telling people to get the shot?

Yeah, definitely. Since the vaccination program began in the middle of December, the hospitalization and death rate, coast to coast, have just gone straight down. The other thing about being vaccinated is that it improves your ability to move around. The CDC is saying that if you are fully vaccinated, meaning that two weeks have passed since you got the second shot, you don’t have to quarantine if you have contact with somebody who has COVID—or you don’t have to quarantine, in New York State, if you leave the state and then come back. And if you’re with other people who are fully vaccinated, like you are, you don’t have to wear a mask, even if they are from different families.

How should we be thinking about our risk level in this new stage?

Well, the mRNA vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer, are 95% effective. That still leaves a 5% chance, but in general, you’re taking a lot more risks than this every day. You’re getting behind the wheel or using your lawnmower or weedwhacker. What I don’t want to see happening people using this 5% risk as a reason to stay away from church, to stay away from community, to stay away from work. It’s not reasonable. We don’t make decisions based on a 5% chance. We’re also seeing that the people who do get COVID after the vaccine—let’s say you’re one of those unfortunate 5-percenters—it’s going to be a milder case.

- Interview by Nick Tabor

2. The Orthodox Church has a tradition of holy unmercenary physicians: trained doctors who have treated the poor without charge.

The Holy Unmercenary Women Doctors are Saints Zenaida and Philonella, sisters who were born in Tarsus in the first century (and were first cousins of the Apostle Paul), and St. Hermione, who was born in Caesarea of Palestine in the first century.

3. St. Luke the Surgeon was born in the Crimea in 1877. He worked as a rural physician for many years and continued treating patients after he was consecrated as a bishop in 1923. He was imprisoned three times by the Soviet government. He died in 1961 and was declared a saint by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in 1995.

4. Remdesivir is an antiviral medication that has been used to treat COVID-19, among other illnesses.

5. The Greatmartyr Panteleimon was an unmercenary physician born in the third century. According to tradition, he enraged the emperor Maximian by calling on the name of Christ and miraculously healing a paralytic. He was tortured and killed. Cosmas and Damian were twin brothers, reportedly born in Arabia in the third century. They were known as skilled doctors. They were martyred under the emperor Diocletian around the year 283.

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Icon of St. Panteleimon Byzantine, 15th c.

The Pushkin Museum

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St. Basil, from triptych with Christ, St. Basil the Great, and St. Blaise Russian, 19th c.

The British Museum

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St. Basil's House

Fr. Samuel Davis, Acting Rector at St. Simon of Cyrene Orthodox Mission in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has advised the ministry and occasionally serves at the house. He says American Orthodox have too often taken it for granted that our parishes will be filled with middle-class people. “But if we expect our Church to survive, to have a presence in America, we have to focus our interests here, in urban missions.”

He sees St. Basil’s House and ministries like it as an opportunity for clergy and laypeople to get a glimpse of life in these neighborhoods.

Fr. Samuel, contemplating what St. Basil’s future might hold, notes that giving clothing and food is one tier of serving Black and urban interests, but there are greater—and more complex—levels of urban missions, as broad as addressing the disinvestment that has led to the hollowing out of urban neighborhoods. “This is not a community of people who can’t do anything for themselves,” he says, although sometimes both charity and government responses give that impression.

Mat. Komline and her fellow volunteers’ vision for St. Basil’s does indeed reach that far. While they have many practical next steps in mind, such as expanding their gardens to offer more fresh food, establishing AA or NA meetings at the house, and building a lending library (the local public library has been closed due to COVID-19), she says they aim to identify opportunities for small businesses in the neighborhood. St. Basil’s House could provide business advice and start-up funding. “The goal is to meet a need in the neighborhood while also teaching skills to people who have no significant employment histories, and to provide employment locally.”

Fr. Samuel cites Archimandrite Raphael Morgan of Philadelphia (c. 1870-1922), the first Black Orthodox priest to serve in America, who writes of experiencing personhood in the Church but not in his everyday life. Whether a ministry like St. Basil’s is meeting the daily needs of its neighbors or revitalizing a neighborhood, the unique character of an Orthodox ministry is in recognizing the personhood in both those who serve and those who are served.

by KATIE SORENSEN

“T

he bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.” These famous words of St. Basil the Great inform the work of St. Basil’s House of Hospitality in Trenton, New Jersey, founded and principally served by members of Mother of God, Joy of All Who Sorrow Orthodox Church in Princeton, along with other Orthodox in the area.

St. Basil’s is situated in the Stuyvesant-Prospect neighborhood of Trenton, where the closure of a large hospital several years ago has led to the shuttering of nearly all businesses and services. Only three bodegas and two liquor stores survive. A quarter of the homes are derelict. Major churches have closed or relocated.

With the impoverishment of the neighborhood has come a steady increase in crime and drug traffic.

But amid this decline, from a small house on one of the neighborhood’s residential streets, St. Basil’s House volunteers serve meals, host Bible studies and prayer gatherings, and offer groceries and household goods to neighbors in need. While these are services offered by many charities and non-profits, Matushka Judith Komline, a lead volunteer for St Basil’s House, stresses the distinctive character of their work: “We strive to be a house of hospitality,” she says. She sees the work as a chance for Orthodox Christians to build relationships with people of different racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, “to listen to them, to come to recognize the image of God in them, to bear witness to them of the love of God in Christ.”

In keeping with this vision, the volunteers of St. Basil’s House make a point of not counting the number of people they serve, focusing on personal relationships rather than statistics. They borrowed this approach, and gained inspiration on many other fronts, from the St. John the Compassionate Mission in Toronto, Ontario. But recent events do point to the success of the ministry: With COVID-19 restrictions limiting attendance to half capacity, St. Basil’s volunteers have been turning guests away at weekly Wednesday breakfasts and prayer services.

They currently seek volunteers to support multiple meals and services each week, to accommodate all comers.

While the purpose of the house is to serve rather than evangelize, those served are exposed to many treasures of the Orthodox faith. Meals begin with “O Heavenly King,” the Great Doxology, or the morning prayer of St. Philaret of Moscow. The Jesus Prayer has a place in art classes, which are also an opportunity for meditation. Prayers for the sick are offered as needed, whether for those visiting or for their loved ones.

St Basil’s House accepts charitable contributions by mail: St Basil’s House 5 Valley View Ave. Gladstone, NJ 07934-2024 More information is available at stbasilshouse.org.

KATIE SORENSEN is the assistant editor of Jacob’s Well and a parishioner at Holy Ascension Orthodox Church in Albion, Michigan.

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Sparks of theDivine

Commemorating Archpriest Nilus Lerro

by NICK TABOR

F

r. Nilus Lerro told me once that when he was a senior in high school, he approached his father a bit timidly one night and announced his plans for after graduation: “Dad, I’m going to join the Jesuits.”

His father swore. “I already sent in the $70 deposit for your college tuition,” he said. “I won’t be able to get it back.”

I remember laughing, and Fr. Nilus perceived that I hadn’t understood. He explained that this had been his father’s way of deflecting his emotions. They were an Italian Catholic family, regulars at Sunday Mass, but life in a religious order was not what his parents had pictured for their only child. They wanted him to get married and carry on their family line. The news of his decision came as a blow. His mother would end up taking it even harder.

Fr. Nilus told others a story that complements this one. When his rich uncle heard about his plans, he tried to intervene, offering to bring him into his business. On his 18th birthday, his uncle drove up

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with a beautiful car. He said, “Look, a sensible man drives off with this car and meets a lovely girl. You’re gonna be a very happy man and make us all happy.”

Fred, as Fr. Nilus was known at the time, replied, “The car won’t take me to God, but my religious vocation will.”

For those of us who only met Fr. Nilus five or six decades after this conversation, which is all of us who knew him in an Orthodox context, it’s impossible to imagine his life going any other way. The man we knew had been so fully formed by his experiences in ministry that his personhood seemed inseparable from his role as a pastor. More than most Orthodox clergy, he was a churchman all the way through— truly an “ecclesial being,” as Paul Evdokimov would have said. His presence at the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in Manhattan in recent years was an unforgettable blessing. Since his death on Holy Wednesday this year, those of us who knew him well have been left with a glow, even while we’ve mourned him.

Fr. Nilus was born in lower Manhattan in 1940 and grew up in Brooklyn. After his education at Fordham University, he spent time teaching at a Jesuit high school (Fr. Pat Moloney, a Jesuit who was a close friend of Fr. Nilus, believes it was Regis High School on East 84th Street, widely regarded as one of the best Catholic high schools in the U.S.). He later studied theology for several years in Amsterdam.

The stated mission of the Jesuits is to “find God in all things,” and for Fr. Nilus, this became a way of being. He became versed in scripture, Patristics, and modern theology; but he also had an openness toward contemporary culture. He wrote a master’s thesis on the theology of Ingmar Bergman’s films, and he loved to talk about Italian Neorealist cinema. He read The New Yorker with devotion. The other side of this was his easy, unfussy spirituality. He told me once that in Amsterdam, he and the other seminarians had to pass through the infamous red-light district to get to their morning classes. The women there would tease them, offering a “seminarian discount.” Fr. Nilus chuckled when he told the story. There was no lewdness in his description, but no self-righteousness either. He made it sound like there had been genuine warmth and empathy on both sides.

He was ordained to the diaconate in 1971 and the priesthood in 1972, serving in the Byzantine rite. For several years he was the co-director of campus ministries at Columbia University, and then in 1975, he was appointed to run the Office of Campus Ministries at Fordham. The department’s main responsibility was student counseling, but in an article in the campus newspaper, announcing his appointment, Fr. Nilus said he wanted to get students involved in helping homeless people around the Bowery, and wanted to add drama, music, and literature programs.

Sometime later, apparently in the 1980s, Fordham recruited him to be one of its envoys on Wall Street. The story, as he later told it, was that the university had some funds to invest, and it wanted its own people overseeing them. “The Jesuits have experts in every field,” Fr. Moloney explains. “That’s one of the MOs.” So Fr. Nilus began commuting from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus to the Financial District, where he was working at the investment bank Salomon Brothers, Inc. “He was, at that particular time, you would say, living high on the hog, having a very affluent lifestyle.” Wearing his expensive suits, and blending in with the high-finance culture, he belonged to the ranks of the “underground Jesuits,” Fr. Moloney says—“the Jesuits unseen.”

By the mid-2000s, he had parted ways with the Jesuits and was living on his own in Brooklyn, working at a Barnes & Noble store. Fr. Moloney isn’t sure

what led to Fr. Nilus’s decision, but he says there was a general “upheaval” at that time in the Jesuit order.

He believes Fr. Nilus wanted a “more liturgical way of life”—which is not, by and large, what the Jesuits are known for. Fr. Nilus was well acquainted with the Russian spiritual tradition, because at Fordham he had been close with at least two Jesuits who were well versed in it: Fr. Walter Ciszek, a priest who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union, and Fr. George Maloney, the founder of the university’s Institute for Eastern Christian Studies. Circa 2005, Fr. Nilus found his way to the cathedral on 2nd Street. Archimandrite Christopher Calin received him into the church by chrismation in 2006.

Afterward Fr. Nilus went to St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, where he studied for the Orthodox priesthood. He was vested as an Orthodox priest by Metropolitan Jonah in New York, in 2009, and he then returned to St. Tikhon’s as an instructor and the director of student life. “He loved the students so much,” Fr. Moloney says. I recall an anecdote he told about his time there: a seminarian was scrambling to get his cassock on before going to the grocery store. Fr. Nilus chided him, saying it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t need to go around advertising his status as a priest-in-training. He apparently detected a trace of vanity in the gesture.

Fr. Nilus retired at the end of the 2012-13 school year and came back to New York once more, where he took up residence at the cathedral and served as an assistant to Fr. Christopher.

For many of us as parishioners there, it was in Fr. Nilus’s role as a father confessor where he excelled the most. One cradle Orthodox friend recently told me he was the best confessor she’d ever had. Another friend remarked that Fr. Nilus had the skills of a trained therapist. Speaking for myself, I’ve never had a confessor who was more forgiving. Rather than coaching asceticism, he always emphasized the grace of God. He conveyed a sense of the “limitless love” of God that the French hieromonk Fr. Lev Gillet talked about; and along with Fr. Lev (whose writings Fr. Nilus treasured), he understood confession as a process of healing rather than punishment. But the effect of these encounters was never to encourage me to slack off in my spiritual life. On the contrary, they always inspired me to renew my devotion.

In his years at the cathedral, Fr. Nilus was also a frequent visitor to the Bonitas House, the youth shelter near Tompkins Square Park that Fr. Moloney runs. There Fr. Nilus met some young men who had recently migrated from Colombia and barely spoke a word of English. He became their teacher, working patiently with them until they were fluent.

Fr. Moloney says he was also a fantastic cook. He’d 19

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take over the house’s big kitchen and prepare food for a whole crowd. Fr. Moloney believes he learned these skills from his mother, but he says Fr. Nilus also acquired a knowledge of fine wine and food from his days on Wall Street. “The Italian food he cooked was incredible. He could bake, he could do everything.”

It was clear enough during his last few years that his health was failing. He was hospitalized in October 2019, and he spent the past year in an extended-care facility. He reposed at Lenox Hill Hospital on Holy Wednesday, April 28.

His example contrasts with some of our conventional notions in the Orthodox Church of what a holy person looks like. Fr. Nilus never married, but he was not a monastic. He wasn’t an ascetic either.

There was no somberness about him; he was bursting with joie de vivre. When it came to theology and spiritual counseling, he was no one’s traditionalist.

And yet, to deny his holiness would seem ridiculous to almost anyone who knew him well. The 2nd Street cathedral is a church of rare diversity, reflecting the makeup of New York City; and one of Fr. Nilus’s remarkable traits was the way so many of us there, of so many different ages and backgrounds, each felt a deeply personal connection to him. Since he fell asleep in the Lord, I have sometimes wondered if he was an example of what sainthood looks like. This is not for me to say; and there’s no question that Fr. Nilus had jacob's well

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his faults. The point here is not to idealize him. But at a minimum, we can say that he carried more than a few sparks of the divine.

NICK TABOR is the executive editor of Jacob’s Well. He is a journalist living on the Alabama Gulf Coast, where he is writing his first book. His long-term parish home is the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in Manhattan.

Letter from a Fictive Country Seeking Stability Inside War-Torn Azerbaijan

by Deacon EZRAS TELLALIAN

T

he afternoon of October 27, 2020 was a beautiful, sunny, quintessentially fall day in Nagorno-Karabakh. On the road to Martuni, we posed for a photo with a team of journalists. Less than a minute later, I dropped to the ground, prone.

I remember feeling the ground beneath me shake before I even realized what was happening. A bomb landed in the field less than 100 meters from us.

We were alone in the middle of a valley and being attacked. Thank God no cluster munitions were dispersed, or you would not be reading this. I looked up from the ground, toward my team members— none of us were bleeding. There was no sound. I rose to take some photographs of the explosion as our cameraman captured video. I remember feeling at peace—no anger at being attacked, no ill will against those trying to kill us, no fear of dying (what would be the use?), but a sense of calmness almost to the point of numbness. Some might call it radical acceptance.

After a few shots, we climbed back into the van and turned around toward the capital, Stepanakert, where we were staying. On the road, Azeris also detonated five loitering munitions (also known as suicide drones) just above us, maybe 50 meters away. In my photographs of this attack, I inadvertently captured what appears to be a Bayrakdar drone, which would have guided both attacks, indicating that they were intentional. Why were we being attacked? Well, I mentioned a capital. This capital, however, is of a country that does not exist.

Borders are one of those Socratic things. Like love, beauty, and justice, we think we know what they are, but when asked to define them, we struggle. So, what is a border? As someone born and raised in the U.S.A., borders have always seemed stable to me. I

would never have imagined finding myself amidst a border dispute so intense that my life would be in danger. My trip to Artsakh (as the Nagorno-Karabakh region is known to indigenous Armenians) during the war last October was a visceral object lesson in the complicated nature of political borders.

As far as I was concerned, I was in Artsakh, a place Armenians have inhabited for millennia. Even through Muslim rule, which lasted from the seventh century until 1805, Armenians had governed themselves, with five meliks, or princes, overseeing the region’s five principalities. After World War I, however, Joseph Stalin offered the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) and Nakhichevan Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR) to Azerbaijanis as an incentive to join the Soviet Union. So, the territory became recognized as part of the Azerbaijan SSR. The Russians, it should be noted, also laid claim to the region, and therefore viewed this territorial gain as a reconquest. This border drawing followed Stalin’s modus operandi of dividing and controlling, not only intentionally weakening the cohesiveness of these protectorates to mitigate the threat of revolution, but also setting the stage for conflict for decades to come. As for demographics, in 1929, nearly 90% of the population of NKAO were Armenian and 10% Azeribaijani. By 1989, the Armenian population was reduced to about 75% and Azerbaijanis made up over 20%.

In 1991, as the Soviet bloc was fracturing, the Armenians in the NKAO had a referendum in which they declared themselves the Republic of Artsakh, independent of the Soviet Union. Azerbaijan passed an analogous referendum about six weeks later. I say, “the Armenians in NKAO,” because the Azeris living there boycotted the election, thereby complicating the argument for recognizing Artsakh’s independence based on self-determination. But even if they had participated, the majority rule would have been the 21

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Photo: Dn. Ezras Tellalian

same. Though the referendum passed, latent ethnic conflict erupted into full-blown war from 1988 to 1994, after which Armenians controlled not only NKAO as it had been defined under the Soviets, but additional territories that belonged to traditional Artsakh as well. While on the one hand, these served as buffer zones for Armenians, the expansion of territory also displaced thousands of Azeris. Armenians remember mass killings in Baku and Sumgait; Azeris remember the mass killings of Khojaly. Though the fighting subsided for a couple of decades, tension between the two countries never abated.

"Borders are one of those Socratic things. Like love, beauty, and justice, we think we know what they are, but when asked to define them, we struggle."

From the end of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1994 until 2020, the so-called “line of contact” separated approximately 130,000 to 150,000 Armenian Orthodox Christians on 1,700 square miles of land from 7 to 10 million Azeris, who are 97% Shia. Armenians appeared content to live in relative peace on their ancestral land, not considering another serious war. The line of contact appeared to function as a border, albeit with the regular skirmish, and though Armenians were satisfied with the status quo, Azerbaijanis clearly were not.

Borders mean little, or nothing, if they are not respected by parties on both sides. Armenians did not see themselves as living in Azerbaijan, but Azerbaijan and the rest of the world never recognized the Republic of Artsakh, so it remains essentially nonexistent.

Thus, the tension was never resolved. There were skirmishes in 2014 and 2016. On September 27, 2020, Azeris attacked with full force, and another war began. In an instant, the line of contact became the frontline.

As a third-generation, Armenian-American descendent of genocide survivors, I had a deep, personal interest in this war. It seemed to progress with all-too-familiar elements. A grossly disproportionate attack by a major world power on an ethnic minority was ignored by the international community. The press, as usual, appeared to be interested only in the

militaristic aspects of the conflict—attacks on military and civilian targets; number of soldiers sacrificed; numbers of planes, helicopters, and drones that were shot down; shifts on the frontline—not exactly a nuanced, human picture of the impact of war. There were constant attacks on civilian targets, but where were the civilians? Though I never imagined myself travelling to a war zone, I felt compelled to use my experience with photography and my training as a psychologist to bring light to these souls and their experiences.

From the perspective of the United Nations, this is a sort of civil war—and I was in Azerbaijan. The Azerbaijani government used their territorial claim to justify attacks on civilians. Its army seems to have targeted local and international journalists in the areas controlled by Armenians, and Azeris even posted rationales on social media for injuring and trying to kill journalists, including the notion that they were there illegally, without permission from Azerbaijani government. The dispute over this particular “border” I had crossed when I left Armenia was not simply an abstract problem in need of a diplomatic solution; it posed an immediate, real threat to our lives.

While you may be thinking, Well, they were journalists in a war zone and should have expected this, or even, They asked for it!, I invite you into another scene.

A month into the war, three local children were taking refuge in a bomb shelter in the capital, Stepanakert, despite the constant—and I mean constant—shelling. These children could differentiate between the sounds of this conflict: Smerch and Grad missiles, with and without cluster bombs, artillery, loitering munitions, and so on. They even seemed proud of this ability. One of the children played with a toy AK-47. He did not yet seem to understand the concept of this weapon and hadn’t learned to point it only at targets one intends to shoot. Altogether, there were a dozen people living in two dark, cold, damp, underground rooms. One of the adults declared that nothing was different about living in a shelter during this war compared to the one in the 1990s, except the TV was newer and larger. These people merely wanted to be left alone to live in peace, yet they knew there was some incomprehensible geopolitical war over the land they happened to live on. The unwanted war over borders affected their lives and will continue to do so.

To say that no one should live like this seems trite, and though a ceasefire agreement was signed on November 9, 2020, the war continues. As I write this, the Holy Savior Cathedral (Ghazanchetsots) in 23

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Photo: Dn. Ezras Tellalian

Shushi is being dismantled. Perhaps worst of all, there are hundreds of Armenian soldiers and civilians being held, tortured, and killed as “captives” by Azerbaijan, rather than returning these people as POWs. How? By the same argument that this is an internal conflict based on the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan, the Azerbaijani government is rightfully detaining and punishing these people. Once again, the definition of borders affects the lives of individuals in active, tangible ways.

This is certainly not the only conflict of its kind happening today, nor are competing territorial claims a new phenomenon, but is it possible to improve what appears to be an inherent part of the human condition? The answer, I would suggest, is directly related to the construct of a border. In some ways borders unite people, but the definition of an ingroup necessarily also defines an out-group, allowing for social psychological processes like stereotyping and its ugly corollary, dehumanization.

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social constructs, our tendency to impose binary psychological distinctions, rather than appreciate the complexity of human experiences and subjectivity, gets us into trouble. And if border, a construct that ought to provide clarity, is itself so unclear, what are we to make of more abstract concepts as sovereignty and self-determination of nations?

Let’s take a big step back. It is natural for us to desire clarity—a better understanding of our environment may make it seem less threatening—but I submit that if we seek clarity about relationships between groups of humans, trying to find it in the physical demarcation of commodified land will not prove fruitful. If competing claims are being made on land based on past occupancy, usage, and importance (and there is little reason to believe these claims will cease anytime soon), borders will remain unstable.

The concept of land borders, therefore, is inherently problematic.

How about another big step back, this time all the way to the foot of the Cross? Yes, that is a huge step back, but from this perspective, where was the division between Jesus Christ and humanity? His arms were opened wide to embrace the world as He prayed for His persecutors to be forgiven. Notice the

Photo: Dn. Ezras Tellalian

disparate attitudes toward each other: we betray and kill Him, while He forgives us and grants us Life.

I have spent a lot of time trying to explain (from my admittedly biased perspective) how we arrived at this point based on history, but one of the beautiful aspects of our faith is, I believe, its ability to pull us out of the maelstrom of socially constructed reality and invite us into the peace of spiritual reality. Perhaps you have experienced such peace as your awareness of the presence of God has increased. This is an aspect of God’s grace.

In our liturgical lives, we often collectively pray for peace in the world, peace among ourselves, and peace within ourselves. We pray for “the peace from above,” a peace that the world cannot give. While it may seem that properly defined borders may result in more sustainable peace, any residual grievances over past actions and the status quo make conflict and war over borders, and within borders, inevitable.

When we can forgive, both as individuals and groups, somehow these borders we have erected to separate ourselves from others may dissipate. To build a peaceful future, we must figure out a way to unite, as humanity, around common goals. This, it turns out, is incredibly difficult, evidenced by its rarity in our

personal lives (see also Rom. 7:8). Perhaps one day, though, as we are waiting for Jesus to come again, we might all agree that peace is paramount and should be sought after at all costs. We may never see a peaceful world, but we must continue to hope in, pray for, and work toward one.

DN. EZRAS TELLALIAN is a graduate of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and is finishing a PhD in Cognitive, Social, and Developmental Psychology at The New School for Social Research. He is a deacon in the Western Diocese of the Armenian Church of North America. His photographs are published at rezras.com.

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How can our tradition interact with the world while maintaining its essential identity?

by Archpriest ISAAC SKIDMORE

W

e often encounter situations that raise the question of where Orthodoxy draws its borders—how it defines what’s in and what’s out. These situations include questions about how to respond to nonOrthodox visitors to church who eagerly approach the chalice, fellow parishioners who spotlight their political views in coffee-hour conversation, or the priest whose academic work broaches topics that, were they discussed in Sunday school, would scandalize.

Raised to their ultimate level, these questions impinge on our understanding of salvation itself. “Who is in the Church and who is out?” “Who will be saved?”

The conversation and controversy sparked by David Bentley Hart’s recent book, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation, indicates how near to the surface such questions reside for us. While I cannot, in this article, answer the question of where such borders need to be drawn, or enter dialogue with Dr. Hart, I will attempt to say something about the spirit of our border drawing—some principles I believe should inform our perspective when, inevitably, we must draw them.

I will also offer an image I find useful when thinking about how a tradition such as Orthodoxy can interact with the surrounding world while maintaining its essential identity.

We might be tempted to think of borders as concrete and static, like the markings on maps that delineate nation from nation with a sharply printed line. In actual life, though, borders usually function in a more dynamic manner. Children are sometimes surprised, when first visiting a border between states or countries, to find it marked by little more than a modest sign, on a terrain with few other features to distinguish one territory from the next. A look at how jacob's well

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borders operate in personal relationships, in biological systems, and in Holy Scripture confirms their dynamic rather than static quality.

In personal relationships, borders are often referred to as boundaries. Many of us know the discomfort that results from having boundaries that don’t adequately serve our needs. We may, for example, find ourselves in the crosshairs of others’ expectations that we will spend unrealistic amounts of time with them, because we have not made clear the limits of our availability. On the other hand, we may wish to draw closer to someone, only to discover that our rigid focus and schedule, or the ways we guard our emotional security, stand in the way of satisfying intimacy. In general, if we don’t consciously structure our own personal boundaries, our unconscious will do so for us. Unconscious boundaries, though, tend to depend on self-protective strategies that are primitive and immature—like passive-aggression or peoplepleasing—compared to those we fashion consciously, which makes it more likely they will cause hurt and misunderstanding.

The boundaries we set often prove to be inadequate because we don’t fully understand ourselves and our needs. If I were to give you an iguana and ask you to set boundaries to keep it safe and healthy (or to keep others safe from it), you would be able to do so only if you understood iguanas and their needs. Otherwise, you’d only be guessing, and would just as likely harm the iguana as help it. Our setting of personal boundaries can suffer in the same way if we’re only guessing at what healthy boundaries are. To set healthy boundaries, we need to fulfill the admonition to "know thyself.”

The world of plants and animals provides another means of seeing borders as dynamic. In biological

organisms, borders preserve the conditions that are necessary to sustain life. With that in mind, we might imagine that impenetrable borders are best, because they can shield organisms from hostile outside forces.

This assumption falls short, however. Living organisms, whether they be single cells or human communities, often require resources that come only from outside themselves. In such cases, a degree of permeability is essential. Further, an organism’s purpose and function might include more than just its own survival. It might be part of a larger biological system, in which it sustains and nourishes other organisms.

When an organism's reason for existence does not end with itself, an exaggerated emphasis on its own self-preservation can backfire, because it deprives its ecosystem of the health necessary not only for the ecosystem but for the organism’s own survival. On all levels, from the microbiological to the human, an organism’s health depends on balanced coexistence with its environment. For this reason, the World Health Organization, in developing its quality-of-life index, takes into consideration environmental factors, including “noise, pollution, climate, and general aesthetic of the environment,” recognizing that “in some cultures certain aspects of the environment may have a very particular bearing on quality of life, such as the central nature of the availability of water or air pollution.”1 While a review of borders in the contexts of relationships and biology confirms their dynamic quality, we might wonder whether it has any relevance for Orthodoxy’s borders. It might even seem impertinent to suggest the Church can benefit from our reflection on Her borders at all—because, as the nineteenth-century Russian theologian Alexei

Khomiakov said in The Church is One, “Christ, her Preserver and Head, does not change,” and, “the Church and her members know, by the inward knowledge of faith, the unity and unchangeableness of her spirit, which is the spirit of God.”2 A look at Church history, though, including the vigorous debates that attended the Seven Ecumenical Councils—whose declarations the Church celebrates as nothing less than “the faith which has established the universe”3— ought to persuade us of the role that human consideration plays in the shaping of spiritual unity and its contours.

It should not surprise us that factors important to personal boundaries hold relevance for the Church because she is, Herself, a relational being. As in our personal relationships, the uncertainty we sometimes have about Orthodoxy’s boundaries may correspond with insufficient reflection on the Church’s nature and Her needs. Like someone only guessing at how to care for the iguana, we assert boundaries that, perhaps more often than necessary, contribute to misunderstanding and hurt. Fruitful discussion of the Church’s boundaries occurs only in tandem with thoughtful reflection on Her theology and mission.

In addition to being a relational being, the Church is also a living organism. For this reason, knowing how borders function biologically can help us consider how borders serve the Church’s health. If we become too inwardly focused, oriented solely towards ecclesiastical self-preservation—constantly defining Orthodoxy against other forms of Christianity, for instance—we risk overlooking the degree to which our very reason for being, as Orthodox Christians, includes the salvation and wellbeing of the world outside. We may unduly emphasize the impermeability of our borders,

1. World Health Organization. PROGRAMME ON MENTAL HEALTH WHOQOL User Manual, March 1, 2012, p. 66. https:// www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHO-HIS-HSI-Rev.2012.03 2. Khomiakov, Alexei. The Church is One: Essay on the Unity of the Church. https://pages.uoregon.edu/sshoemak/325/texts/ Khomiakov/Khomiakov%20The%20Church%20is%20One.htm 3. From the Synodikon of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.

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and falsely imagine that we should not be nourished by anything from the surrounding world. Our aim, tragically, may become merely how to isolate ourselves from it.

When faced with questions of how to guard its purity, the Church’s instinct to always opt for the more stringent and rigorous approach proves inconsistent with how the Church has navigated various dilemmas of the past—including, for example, the issue of whether to readmit to communion believers who had obtained libellus certificates, verifying they had made sacrifices to gods, as was required by Decius, the thirdcentury pagan emperor. The rigorist perspective, represented by the Roman presbyter Novatian, asserted that no earthly confessor or bishop had authority to forgive these apostates, and that they could only await their fate at the Last Judgment. A more lenient policy prevailed, however. Not only were penitent apostates granted remission, but those who sided with Novatian (now consecrated bishop over his own schismatic sect), who called themselves “pure and better”4, could return to the universal fold. Though they had been administered by schismatic presbyters, their baptisms were accepted as valid when accompanied by repentance, confession, and chrismation within the canonical Church.5 The historian Henry Chadwick says these events “highlighted the conflict between the primitive conception of the Church as a society of saints and the now-growing view . . . that it should be a school for sinners.”6 Given the dynamic nature of the Church’s interaction with the world, perhaps the terminology of borders is, itself, misleading. Here, I would like to suggest an alternative approach that conceptualizes the borders of a tradition—in this case, Orthodoxy— not primarily as protective barriers but as integrative zones. I find it helpful to think of traditions as having cores and edges. In this model, the core represents the tradition’s conservative function. A healthy core both guards the deposit—its most fixed and durable elements—that is already there, and yet remains appropriately open to new information that emerges from its edges, where it interfaces with the surrounding world. The new information is interpreted according to the principles embodied and enshrined in the core, but also nourishes the core by keeping it connected to

the world in which those principles must be applied, and over time becomes integrated into the deposit that makes up the core itself. It becomes part of the tradition’s living memory, its working DNA. This model provides a tool by which we can evaluate whether traditions are, at the core, overly rigid or overly permeable. There are plenty of examples of both, and a single tradition can suffer from one excess or the other at various times.

We find precedent for this approach in Judaism’s handling of the Talmud, one of its primary sacred texts. The Talmud is arranged with the Mishnah— the Law, in a distilled, memorizable form—in the center of the page. Other sections of text, the Gemara, the Rashi, and other commentary from centuries of interpretation, appear to the side of the Mishnah, in the space between the Mishnah and the edge of the page, their increasing distance from the central text corresponding with decreasing weight in their canonical significance.7 The authority of the central text, in this model, is not monolithic.

Minority interpretations are retained in the marginal commentaries because they are considered vital to the understanding of the tradition as dynamic and adaptive. The work is considered never to be entirely complete, because it reflects a dialogue that continues into the present.8 Although the Talmud is fixed and static with regard to its central text—“a mishnah does not move from its place”9 is cited as a cardinal rule by the rabbinic scholar Adin Steinsaltz—religious traditions sometimes reflect the eventual subsuming of the central text by what was once merely marginal.

A prime example of this is Christianity itself, which began as an interpretive school within Judaism.

The New Testament represents the codification of an oral tradition concerning the meaning of the life of Christ—in particular, how it represents the culmination of the historical development, and the fulfillment of types and allegories, present in Scripture. What is now the central Christian text, the New Testament, first stood in a place equivalent to the marginal notes of the Talmud. The edges have, as it were, been slowly assimilated into the central text, and finally become central to the tradition. However static the central elements of the Christian tradition seem

4. L’Huillier, Archbishop Peter. The Church of the Ancient Councils: The Disciplinary Work of the First Four Ecumenical Councils. New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 1996, p. 131.

5. Chadwick, Henry. The Early Church, Revised Edition. New York: Penguin, 1993, pp. 117-120.

6. Chadwick, p. 119.

7. Kremer, W. The Talmud: Why Has a Jewish Law Book Become So Popular? BBC News Magazine, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/

magazine-24367959

8. Steinsaltz, Adin. The Essential Talmud: Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (C. Galai, Trans.). New York: Basic Books, 2006.

9. Steinsaltz, p. 62. jacob's well

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to be—however much they seem to reflect a timeless, unvarying nomos—their origin reveals a process of appropriation of materials that were initially marginal.

In Orthodoxy, materials such as the Philokalia could be seen as representing marginal commentary like that which appears alongside the Mishna in the Jewish Talmud.

The core of any tradition might be described in terms of the extent to which it is able and willing to allow its margins to have influence. A partial determinant of this will be the tradition’s confidence in the grounded nature of its central tenets. A tradition whose core assumes an entirely defensive posture towards its margins is often one whose central tenets appear arbitrary in the context of current realities.

The authority of such a tradition is experienced, more and more, as deriving from mere edict. A tradition that ceases to receive information from its edges has absolutized perspectives and strategies that once may have had critical value for its survival.

On the other hand, when a tradition’s core demonstrates a degree of permeability towards its margins, it acknowledges the relation of its central teachings to universal truths that exist independently of its own authority. Likewise, it acknowledges the changing nature of the surrounding world for which its teachings have relevance. Such a tradition does not fear the annihilation of its own perspective upon relaxation of its advocacy for that perspective, because it considers reality to be its ally, and ultimately its vindicator. It values information from its margins because this information enables the core’s adaptation, evolution, and development—even if it initially introduces dissonance. A saying of St. Isaac of Syria alludes to the quiet confidence inherent in a tradition with this perspective towards its own teachings: “Someone who is considered among men to be zealous for truth has not yet learnt what truth is really like: once he has truly learnt it, he will cease to be zealous on its behalf.”10 Yet another image of cores and edges might be drawn from the phenomenon of black holes, in which material that resides at their edges moves towards, and eventually becomes, their center. If, as a thought experiment, we envisage the area at the center of a black hole possessing consciousness, we can imagine it might be tempted to defend against its disappearance into a singularity, against the material pouring in from the edges by which it may eventually be supplanted. It would take a particular kind of faith and confidence for it to resist becoming merely

defensive—a faith that its essential nature will remain intact, not because it resists the reality that surrounds it, but because it understands itself as integral to that surrounding reality, and as fundamentally in service to it. Orthodoxy might benefit from reflecting on its interface with the outside world as a creative and integrative zone rather than merely a defensive barrier. In the case of black holes, in fact, Stephen Hawking suggested that information at the center of a black hole is not actually obliterated in its process of swallowing up surrounding space11, but retained indefinitely—confirming, by way of analogy, that a tradition’s essential identity can be enriched, not inevitably obliterated, by interaction with its own edges and the surrounding world.

Finally, we ought not overlook Scripture’s depiction of God’s relationship to borders. We might be tempted to consider borders as what separates the Church from what is alien to it, but Scripture shows us that God uses them for purposes that are ultimately inclusive. As Christ says, our Heavenly Father "causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matt. 5:45).

When God establishes borders, he sometimes appears later to disregard them for the sake of more fully communicating his intentions. As He says in Hosea (and as Sts. Paul and Peter quoted), “I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.’ I will say to those called ‘Not my people,’ ‘You are my people’; and they will say, ‘You are my God’” (2:23; Ro. 9:25; 1 Pe. 2:10). While we should not naively imagine that God's liberality implies that we do not need to articulate borders in Church life, we need to remember that borders are not ends in themselves. They are aspects of a larger message of universal mercy. They are elements of the divine grammar, whose purpose ultimately is to communicate love to all creation.

V. REV. DR. ISAAC SKIDMORE is a licensed therapist in Oregon and an adjunct professor in the school of clinical mental health counseling at Southern Oregon University.

He is an auxiliary priest at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Ashland, Oregon. He is the author of Edge of the

Abyss: The Usefulness of Antichrist Terminology in the Era of Donald Trump.

10. St. Isaac of Syria. Daily Readings With St. Isaac of Syria (A. Allchin, Ed.) (S. Brock, Trans.). Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1989, p. 61 11. Overbye, D. “No Escape From Black Holes? Stephen Hawking Points to a Possible Exit.” The New York Times, June 6, 2016. https:// www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/science/stephen-hawking-black-holes.html 29

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“For are in

and all who ”

On Political Power and the Kingdom of God

by Presbyter PHILLIP LEMASTERS

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hat is the border between Christ’s Kingdom and the kingdoms of the world? The Savior said clearly that His Kingdom “is not of this world,” but the world is where we have to live out our lives as His followers.

Throughout the Divine Liturgy, we pray for the salvation of all, peace for the world, and the wellbeing of our civil authorities and armed forces. To do this with integrity, we must discern how to deal with political and social matters in ways that not only convey the transcendence of the Kingdom, but also show how God’s will can be done, albeit imperfectly and partially, here on earth. The border between these realms is real, but not impermeable.

The tension between the heavenly reign and earthly politics strikes at the heart of the Christian faith. The gospels show that Jesus Christ rejected the temptation to acquire conventional political power throughout His ministry. Despite the expectations of His own disciples and the cheers of the crowd on Palm Sunday, the Lord steadfastly refused to take up arms or lead an insurrection as an earthly king. The Roman Empire crucified Him at the instigation of corrupt religious leaders who saw Him as a threat to their power, which was based on distorting the faith of Israel in order to gain prestige, wealth, and influence for themselves. Those who riled up the crowds against jacob's well

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Him said to Pilate, “If you let this Man go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar… We have no king but Caesar!” ( Jn. 19: 12, 15). In reality, they served no one but themselves and plotted against Christ when it became clear that He was a threat to their interests (the post-truth political world is nothing new). Though Pilate was not eager to crucify the Savior, under his leadership, a placard was put on the Cross, calling Christ the king of the Jews, as a warning of what the Romans would do to anyone who dared challenge their authority.

There could not be a more vivid manifestation of how Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world than the profound contrast between how He ascended the Cross and how His enemies put Him on it.

This realization challenges the delusions of those who distort Christianity into a way of making the interests of nations and ethnic groups their false gods.

Only His Body, the Church, is “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, His own special people…” (1 Pet. 2:9).

The merely human distinctions of this world underlie the political and social divisions that happen to exist in our collective life outside of Paradise. They lack the power to raise anyone from the dead or usher in eschatological perfection. The fullness of God’s salvation does not come through any particular arrangement of the powers that be in the collective life of humanity. In

Hungarian Holy Crown from The Torten of the Hungarian Nation (1895) Original from the British Library

Christ’s Reign, one’s citizenship or ancestry in Belize, Iraq, Mozambique, or any other nation has no intrinsic spiritual significance at all. In Jesus Christ, as St. Paul taught, “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all” (Col. 3:11).

Before the majesty of the One Who alone is thrice-holy, the nations remain, as the Prophet Isaiah proclaimed, “a drop in a bucket” (Isa. 40:15).

That includes our own, regardless of where we live, how we vote, or any other human characteristic.

Amid the stress of the current political climate in America, we must remember that there is no one-to-one correspondence between any political structure or ideology and the Kingdom of God. The border between them remains real. It is what the philosophers call a category mistake to think that there is something like a “Christian politics,” other than the faithful witness of the Body

"There could not be a more vivid manifestation of how Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world than the profound contrast between how He ascended the Cross and how His enemies put Him on it. " of Christ. The history of Orthodoxy includes many different arrangements of politics and religion, none of which have been free of tension and imperfection.

Some Byzantine emperors were proclaimed as saints while others were condemned as heretics. There are also Orthodox rulers, such as Czar Nicholas II, whose holiness was manifested in the consequences of complete political failure, at least by worldly standards, through their martyrdom. Periods of persecution

and of peace have both produced saints. Regardless of challenges presented by circumstances beyond our control, the Church has withstood all, and will persevere. As the Lord taught, “the gates of hell will not prevail” against His Body (Matt. 16:18).

In every Divine Liturgy, during the Great Entrance, we pray for “our President, civil authorities, and armed forces,” that the Lord would “remember them in His Kingdom, always, now and ever, and unto ages of ages.” No matter who is president or what party controls what offices, we offer this petition for God to fulfill His gracious purposes for and through them. My Romanian friends have reminded me that they prayed the same petitions for decades for the Communist head of state. When we do this, we are following St. Paul’s instruction to pray for “kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence” (1 Tim. 2:2). Obviously, such prayers are not a reward for rulers or governments we particularly admire. Paul, of all people, understood this; like Christ, he too called for submission to the governing authorities, including the matter of paying taxes. (Rom 13:1-6). He lived in the pagan Roman Empire and was martyred under the Emperor Nero.

We also pray in the Divine Liturgy for the peace of the whole world. God’s peace is not reserved entirely for the eschatological future but entails blessing and healing for people today who must endure the trials of life in a broken world. Those who enter liturgically into the Kingdom of Heaven must respond to the problems of their neighbors in ways that foreshadow the fulfillment of God’s gracious purposes for them.

Even as God’s reign transcends conventional political and social divisions, those who live eucharistically will not allow the divisions of the fallen world to define the parameters of their love for others. No matter who has civil authority, we pray that God will “speak to their hearts good things” concerning God’s Church and His people.

Orthodoxy is relatively new both to the American scene and to the challenges posed by Western democracy. While the Church is neither a partisan political party nor a nationalistic entity, its members certainly may vote for candidates whom they can support in good conscience in light of their understanding of an Orthodox vision of God’s purposes for society. The laity may run for office and participate in campaigns and other forms of peaceful political action. The Church does not, however, endorse a slate of candidates, a party, or a political ideology. People of the same beliefs and morality may well at times vote for opposing candidates because of prudential judgments about what policies will be most effective in serving God’s intentions for social 31

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Icon of the Last Judgement Holy Trinity Russian Orthodox Monastery, Jordanville, NY

life. Politics remains the art of the possible, and it is impossible to avoid shades of grey in the world as we know it. Given that some politicians (and people in other walks of life) cynically use religious and moral rhetoric for their own corrupt ends, we must be “wise as serpents” in assessing what candidates and policies are worthy of support in given contexts (Matt. 10:16).

Above all, that means rejecting the temptation of thinking that any political ideology or earthly ruler will bring salvation to the world. “Put not your trust in princes…” (Ps. 146:3).

Orthodox Christians must look at politics with a strong note of realism also because people often fall prey to the temptation to absolutize the relative in an idolatrous fashion. The old heresy of Manichaeism lurks behind uncritical rhetoric about a dualistic struggle between Good and Evil, capital G and capital E, in the choice between inevitably ambiguous and compromised options, none of which will usher in the eschatological Reign. Unfortunately, some today speak of politics in precisely such terms, regardless of their affiliation or ideology. Their words give the impression that the salvation of the world rests on a particular arrangement of political power. Thinking in this way amounts to looking for false messiahs to purify a nation from evildoers and bring an illusory jacob's well

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realm of perfection to the world. Even a passing acquaintance with world history should suffice to disabuse anyone of such unrealistic expectations for earthly kingdoms. Placing our hope elsewhere than in the Lord serves only to inflame our passions against those we view as enemies because they have different opinions on relatively trivial matters. This amounts to building a false border.

One way of attempting to cope with anxiety caused by slavery to the fear of death is for people to identify themselves with something larger and more powerful than their mortal selves, such as a nation, a racial group, or a political movement. Those who do so project their well-being onto the hope of worldly success in a way that inevitably fuels a prideful sense of their own superiority. If someone criticizes their cause, they take that personally as an assault to their very existence. The passion of anger then rears its ugly head against anyone who would dare to do so.

Politics ceases to be the process of discerning the most prudent steps to pursue the common good in a lessthan-perfect world under a given set of circumstances.

Instead, it becomes a brutal contest for life or death.

This is another form of the nihilism, for it recognizes no truth other than a vain attempt at self-preservation.

It is, however, possible to participate in politics

in ways that are not distorted by pride, fear, and anger. Doing so requires mindful vigilance and acquiring the spiritual health found by orienting our

"The border remains, but the God-Man has made it possible for every dimension of our existence, including even political life, to provide a glimpse, however dim, of the entrance of humanity into the Wedding Feast of the Lamb." lives fundamentally toward a kingdom not of this world. Doing so requires learning to pray for all the governments and peoples of the world, especially those we consider our enemies, in an echo of the petitions of the Divine Liturgy for the salvation and blessing of all. It requires fasting from media, thoughts, and words that inflame our passions and keep us from seeing every neighbor, especially those with whom we disagree about politics, as a living icon of the Lord. It requires giving sacrificially of our time and resources to build relationships with the suffering and outcast people with whom the Savior identified Himself, especially when doing so requires overcoming fear and prejudice toward those we have come to view as “the other.” It requires crossing many of the false borders of this world.

If we do not pursue faithfulness to the way of Christ from the depths of our souls, we will lack the spiritual strength to avoid the powerful temptations to idolatry that come with the politics of the world as we know it. If we fall prey to those temptations, we will end up rejecting the Savior as surely as those who handed Him over to Pilate and said that they had no king but Caesar. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in The Gulag Archipelago, “the line separating good and evil passes…right through every human heart.” Even as we pray for our leaders, our nation, and the rest of the world, we must not assume that “our side” embodies perfection and that “the other side” is of the devil.

That is a false border. Instead, we must gain the purity of heart to see the world and all its inhabitants in the brilliant light of Christ. Surely, every social order and person serves Him at least to an extent, but even the best of them fall radically short of manifesting the

fullness of His Kingdom. No partisan agenda has ever lined up fully with the Beatitudes.

The border remains, but the God-Man has made it possible for every dimension of our existence, including even political life, to provide a glimpse, however dim, of the entrance of humanity into the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. For the Church to pray with integrity for such an entrance, its common life must provide an embodied witness of what happens when people become radiant with holiness in a communion of love that overcomes the petty distinctions of nationality, ethnicity, and ideology. The Church must form people with the character necessary to discern how to bring their political and social engagement into union with the great Self-Offering of the Savior. They will offer themselves within the context of a world very far from its restoration while engaging it in a manner that signals hope to those beyond the Church’s visible boundaries. Christ’s Kingdom as “a new heaven and a new earth” will be all encompassing, but until its consummation, the tension between His Reign and that of other kingdoms remains (Rev. 21:1). The distinction between them is not in God but in us.

Those with pure hearts may engage any dimension of the life of the world in a fashion that points to its fulfillment in the life of the world to come. Christ’s Kingdom remains not of this world, yet it is relevant to addressing its many challenges.

REV. PHILIP LEMASTERS is a professor of religion and the director of the honors program at McMurry University.

He served on the board of trustees at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary from 2008 to 2020. His most recent book is The Forgotten Faith: Ancient Insights

for Contemporary Believers from Eastern Christianity (Cascade, 2013). He is the pastor of St. Luke Orthodox Church in Abilene, Texas.

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The Eucharist and Public Life

Rethinking the Relationship Between Faith and Politics

by Professor WILL COHEN

A

s Christians and as Americans, we often see the border between faith and politics heavily patrolled to prevent incursions from either side. From the side of politics, there is the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion,” and the 1954 Johnson Amendment that says religious groups will lose their tax-exempt status if they endorse a political candidate.1 Hannah Arendt, the Jewish intellectual from Germany known for her writings on totalitarianism and the Holocaust, argued in her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics” that only empirical facts should carry weight in politics.

Arendt acknowledges that truth also comes in other forms, but in her mind, ultimate truth has to butt out of political deliberation within a constitutional democracy, or the result will be theocracy.

At the same time, we see a parallel line of defense signaling that politics has no place in the realm of faith.

There is the First Amendment clause barring Congress from “prohibiting the free exercise” of religion. There are the various iterations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) advanced at federal and state levels to shore up faith’s perceived vulnerability to unsympathetic interpretations of the “free exercise” clause.2 In these instances, faith paradoxically must use political means to prevent political encroachment.

But in other ways, we may say that faith patrols

itself. Parishioners often make their discomfort known when sermons get “too political”; bishops tend to discourage priests from making such forays. Terms like “sanctuary” that apply to a portion of the worship space underscore the sense of church as a place relatively sheltered from the tumult of world events, social tensions, and breaking news.3 By the words of the Cherubic Hymn to “lay aside all earthly cares” and by the stable structure of the Divine Liturgy as a whole, we may find ourselves steadied on Sunday mornings from the buffeting and gusting winds of contemporary society, with all its rapid changes and complexities. Church is where we breathe more deeply, where we encounter the eternal mystery of God. Yet when does the desire to remain in such an atmosphere of exalted beauty go too far? When does our deep human longing for transcendence cross over into escapism? It can be a fine line. We might be encouraged by spiritual texts or the advice of a pastor to get less caught up in politics; perhaps during Lent we “fast” from taking in political news. Certainly, there are moments where such an approach has its place, but as an overall way of thinking about the relationship between faith and politics, it is limiting and incomplete, indeed often damaging both to politics and to faith. The two need each other. Exactly what place our Christian faith should have in our

1. Some today who champion the Johnson Amendment as if it were the logical outgrowth of the Establishment clause do not recall or acknowledge that it arose out of raw partisan political calculation, not constitutional principle.

2. At the federal level, the RFRA was passed in 1993 in response to a Supreme Court decision that gave states broader authority to enforce laws that may turn out to restrict religious freedoms—as long as it was incidental and not by intent. The RFRA sought to challenge such laws if there could be another way of accomplishing the government’s legitimate goals with less restriction on religious freedom. See https://www.ncsl.org/research/civil-and-criminal-justice/religious-freedom-restoration-acts-lb.aspx 3. The word “sanctuary” itself can have significant political overtones, as in the concept of “sanctuary cities” in recent tensions around detaining undocumented immigrants. Indeed, churches themselves serving as sanctuaries from political violence has a long history.

See Richard H. Feen, “Church Sanctuary: Historical Roots and Contemporary Practice,” in In Defense of the Alien, Vol. 7 (1984), pp.

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politics, and what relevance our politics should have to our faith, is a perennially challenging question. We will always struggle to get it right. But we’re assured of getting it wrong (and badly so) if we fail to recognize and respect the question itself, and its importance for the health of our politics and our faith alike.

According to Israeli philosopher Moishe Halbertal, “Politics needs a reference point outside of politics.” The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (not known, among opinionators, as the most religiously oriented) recently quoted this insight with a view toward our own ailing democracy.

Arendt’s claim that ultimate questions must not enter into political deliberations has been challenged by contemporary political theorists.4 The work of the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has been especially important in shifting the conversation away from the idea that the civil sphere ought to be a purely secular space, one that polices its borders to keep out religion.5 It is important for people of faith today to be aware that in the “secular” world of scholarly discourse on faith-and-politics questions, there is much greater

openness to the positive contributions faith can make than there was a half-century ago.

Yet just what influence religion ought to have on judicial and legislative processes continues to be a contested question—not only in more secular circles, but also among people of faith themselves. At one end of the spectrum is the view that the more hands-off Christianity’s relationship to the political sphere, the better (for Christianity); at the other is the view that Christianity’s declining sociopolitical influence is unmistakably bad for everyone. In a 2013 column on the then-intensifying debate over same-sex marriage, the Orthodox priest and journalist John Garvey of blessed memory, reflecting the hands-off view, observed that “we Christians have, by acquiescing to the coercive nature of law, painted ourselves into a corner.” He noted that Orthodoxy, before the ninth century, had no distinctly religious marriage rite, that marriage conformed to local custom, and that it was the “empires, East and West, [that] made the church responsible” for marriage in a way that obscured the difference between the sacramental and the legal.

4. Cf. Jeremy Elkins and Andrew Norris, eds., Truth and Democracy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

5. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” in E. Mendieta and J. VanAntwerpen, eds., The Power of Religion in the Public

Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2012).

Spring (1921) Boris Kustodiev

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“To this day,” he added, “we haven’t gotten over this confusion.”6 Garvey’s view offers insight to help free Christian faith from the entanglements of civil law and its enforcement, which can so easily obscure the Gospel.

But it’s not so clear whether the state and its laws stand to benefit when Christianity retreats. In that situation, does a different set of values replace those of Christianity? If a values-neutral civil society is a myth–if governmental policies and laws inevitably embody and enshrine values of one kind or another–

"The voice of faith...enables human beings to look beyond government as the source of answers to life’s most vexing questions." then from a Christian point of view, isn’t it better to ensure as far as possible that societal structures reflect a Christian vision of life, rather than some other? Socalled “Constantinianism” gets a bad rap,7 but when church and state were “wed” in the cooperative model of Byzantine symphonia, it spurred many social advances, including the spread of hospitals, for which St. Basil (among others) is well known.8 Today, in what used to be the center of Byzantine symphonia, the Patriarchate of Constantinople is so far from having a “symphonic” relationship with civil authority that it could only look on helplessly as Recep Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, recently turned Hagia Sophia, the world’s most glorious place of worship built by Christians, back into a mosque, after it had

functioned as a museum since Turkey’s founding as a modern secular state.9 If the Byzantine conception of symphonia lives on anywhere, it might be in Russia, where the Moscow Patriarchate has a mutually supportive relationship with Vladimir Putin’s regime.

But it’s debatable whether that relationship has served Russia’s civil society well. To take one example, after the Putin regime recently imprisoned its most outspoken critic, Alexei Navalny, tens of thousands of Russians took to the streets; but instead of publicly criticizing the regime’s unprincipled action, the Moscow Patriarchate found a way to be critical of the protests.10 In the process, the Orthodox faith is obviously not well served; its true radiance is dimmed.

What some may espouse as symphonia, others thus have reason to decry as religious nationalism.

How, then, might the realms of faith and politics benefit each other, without faith being coopted by political power? There are other models that may be considered, such as the Civil Rights movement, in which the language and energy of faith entered politics, and at the same time political action deepened and enriched the participants’ faith. This movement arose within an African American ecclesial culture that had long understood faith and politics to be deeply interpenetrating.11 We might make two observations about the tradition in which Martin Luther King Jr. stood.

First, King and his fellows considered challenging and changing the civil law to bring it closer into alignment with a Christian vision of God’s kingdom as a valid and realistic religious goal. In their minds, this required spiritual disciplines (of trust in God’s providence, turning the other cheek, and so on) and therefore involved a growing in faith; thus both the “secular” and the “sacred” realms were enhanced in the process. Second, according to this tradition, even where a movement rooted in faith fails to bring about

6. John Garvey, “An Imperfect Union: When Church & State Marry,” Commonweal, September 30, 2013.

7. Perhaps most influential among 20th century theologians critical of government-sponsored Christianity has been Stanley Hauerwas. Cf. S. Hauerwas, The Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983).

8. See Thomas Heyne, “Reconstructing the world’s first hospital: the Basiliad,” https://hekint.org/2017/02/24/reconstructingthe-worlds-first-hospital-the-basiliad/. For a favorable view of Constantine and his legacy of church-state relations, see Peter Leithart, Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom (InterVarsity Press, 2010).

9. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53366307 10. https://orthodoxtimes.com/russian-orthodox-church-against-the-protests-in-russia/ 11. Granted, there are differences between Orthodox ecclesiology and that of African American Christianity (with its largely Protestant roots). But there is nothing in Orthodoxy that precludes the kind of “realized eschatology” that King promoted with his vision of the beloved community on the sociopolitical plane. Indeed, the Roman Catholic scholar William Cavanaugh, who explored the implications of eucharistic ecclesiology for social justice in Pinochet’s Chile, drew heavily on the work of Alexander Schmemann (W. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist [Blackwell, 1998]). Orthodoxy typically emphasizes the eternal kingdom’s inbreaking into the Divine Liturgy more than in social relations or political developments. But the Liturgy contains within itself seeds of a political theology grounded in Scripture. Properly understood, the exhortation to “lay aside all earthly cares” must be interpreted in terms of Matthew 6:24-34 with its commandment to not prioritize temporal needs for oneself above concern for God’s kingdom and his righteousness, which requires us to attend to the temporal needs of others as per Matthew 25:31-46.

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desired political change, the prophetic voice from the church resounding in the public sphere nevertheless serves a tremendously important purpose of its own.

This purpose is to remind the civil power that it is not the arbiter of ultimate questions of value. The voice of faith, even when it’s heard coming from outside the corridors of power—perhaps especially coming from the outside—enables human beings to look beyond government as the source of answers to life’s most vexing questions. The state and its power are thereby relativized. Consider King’s remarks about the war in Vietnam: “God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment,” he said at New York’s Riverside Church in 1967, “and it seems that I can hear God saying to America, ‘You’re too arrogant!

If you don’t change your ways, I’m going to rise up, and break the backbone of your power!’”12 Here, King was desacralizing American power by reminding Americans of God’s sovereignty over all the nations of the world, including their own. This was not different in principle from the way St. Augustine desacralized the power of the Roman empire in his great work, The City of God. The state needs to be reminded by the church that it is not supreme, that God is above it.

This truth must be conveyed, however, in a prophetic and not a theocratic key.

Considering these observations, we may say that when and where there is injustice, the church committed to announcing the good news does not have the luxury of staying out of politics. In fact, it may be asked whether a church that encourages and embodies an apolitical way of being in the world is not acting from a place of tacit political privilege, in contrast to the oppression from which King and others sought to help African Americans gain greater freedom.

In naming and challenging injustice in the political realm, then, the church is doing something intrinsic to Her nature. If this is so, then engagement with politics can contribute to the fullness of our faith. In recent years, a variety of religious thinkers have recognized the need for a public, politically active faith, and have developed what may be called a spirituality of political engagement. The title of an insightful book by Princeton scholar Eric Gregory, Politics and the Order of Love, is emblematic of the trend. So too is A Theology of Public Life by University of Virginia theologian Charles Mathewes. A section in the most recent encyclical of Pope Francis carries

the subheading “Political Love”.13 Among Orthodox theologians, Aristotle Papanikolaou has written an influential book relating theosis to political life.14 The idea may initially strike us as strange, accustomed as we are to thinking the two realms should be separate."

But when we overcome our impulse to separate political and ecclesial life, we can see the fruit of their proper interrelation.

The logic and spirit of the eucharist should be carried with us from the Liturgy, not only into our families but into our communities, shaping our participation in public life on various levels. Before I receive the eucharist, I must be at peace with my brother or sister, and this spurs me continually to reevaluate all my relationships: including those with people at a distance from me, with whom I might not be in right relationship because of how I benefit from a policy that harms them, that I have been happy to see remain in place. It’s equally important that I allow eucharistic thinking to shape my political and economic judgments. I must bring all my swirling and competing questions of policy into the ambit of prayer and the church’s sacramental life. In the proskomedia, when the priest thrusts the lance into the Lamb that will shortly become the body of Christ, he says, “In His humiliation justice was denied Him.” It was at every level of judgment, not only religious but political as well, that Jesus was denied justice. As I prepare to receive Him, I must ask myself to whom in the world of laws and policies, in which I am a participant, is justice denied in my own place and time? And what am I doing about it? If on the days between Liturgies I am prayerfully wrestling with these questions, as integral and not extraneous to the spiritual life, then the wisdom and creativity of God will offer avenues and moments in which for Him to act through me in His love for human beings. Politics is a disheartening business, yes, but God will not refuse to cross the border with us even into the realm of politics, if it is in a spirit of self-giving love that we seek to unite ourselves with Him in our forays there.

And who is so great a god as our God? He is the God who does wonders!

DR. WILL COHEN is a professor in the Department of Theology & Religious Studies at the University of Scranton.

He is the former president of the Orthodox Theological Society in America.

12. These words were delivered in a speech given on April 4, 1967, one year before his assassination, at Riverside Baptist Church in New York City.

13. Fratelli Tutti, ¶’s 180-182.

14. The Mystical As Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).

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On the Limits of the Church

by Presbyter BOHDAN HLADIO

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nity is a Christian virtue. The Nicene Creed speaks of “one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.” At the Last Supper, after He had washed the disciples’ feet, Our Lord prayed for everyone who would believe in Him “that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me” ( Jn. 17: 20-21). As Christians, we wish to realize our Lord’s prayer for unity within the Church. At every Liturgy we are enjoined to “love one another, so that with one mind we may confess the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in essence and undivided.” Unity, it turns out, is a characteristic of the Trinity, in Whose image we are made.

Borders, limits, walls, and boundaries separate rather than unite. And yet, it’s impossible to imagine our lives without them, including our lives in the Church. We practice “closed communion,” forbidding those who have not been sacramentally received into the Orthodox Church from receiving the Eucharist. Unlike certain Protestants who recognize no ecclesial boundaries at all, or Roman Catholics, whose principle of unity is in one man, the Pope, our Orthodox commonwealth has many jurisdictional boundaries. How can all this be reconciled with our Lord’s prayer for unity?

As Orthodox Christians we are often proud of our differences, whether it be our diocese or nationality; our “autocephalous” Church; our self-identification as “cradle” or “convert”; our language, culture, heritage, and so on. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with recognizing these “borders” or differences between us as individuals, parishes, dioceses, or churches as long as we look at it “from above,” from the perspective of our common faith and practice. Different rooms within a house could be a useful metaphor, perhaps even fences between neighbor’s yards might be acceptable.

When the operative metaphor becomes thick walls whose function is to keep “others,” including our coreligionists, out, we’ve got a problem.

We sometimes see walls where there are none, or even construct walls that needn’t be there. While human beings tend to construct their identity in opposition to an “other,” doing so when this “other” is a fellow Orthodox Christian is problematic at best.

For example, we might consider what transpired in 2018 when the Ecumenical Patriarchate announced its plans to grant autocephaly to the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. The Moscow Patriarchate was opposed to this action, and in retaliation it severed communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate, forbidding its faithful from partaking of the Holy Mysteries in churches within its jurisdiction though there is no meaningful difference between

the Moscow Patriarchate and the Autocephalous Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

Another interesting example of theological “wall building” has to do with the difference between the Oriental (so-called “Monophysite”) and Eastern Orthodox Churches. My friend Andrew Youssef offered a presentation on Chalcedonian vs. nonChalcedonian Christology at the Sheptytsky Institute in Toronto (the entire presentation can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRhNNm2FTY&t=5s), which included “The Quote Game.”

He would post two quotes, one by an Orthodox father and one by Severus of Antioch (regarded as a saint by non-Chalcedonians but condemned for heretical teaching at Constantinople in 536), asking his audience to identify which quote was “Orthodox” and which was “Monophysite.” For example:

A. Following the blessed Cyril, we also confess one

incarnate nature of the Word of God and by saying ‘incarnate’ intend the substance of the flesh. So, the Word was made flesh without giving up His immateriality and He was wholly made flesh while remaining wholly uncircumscribed.

With respect to His body He becomes small and contracted, while with respect to divinity He is uncircumscribed.

B. Observe, therefore that when [Cyril] has confessed one nature of God the Word, who is incarnate, he says that each one of them continues together and is understood in the particularity that belongs to the nature. But the same elucidates what the particularity that belongs to the nature is. . . [Cyril:] “Therefore let us recognize that even if the body which was born at Bethlehem is not the same, that is, as far as natural quality is concerned, as the Word which is from God and the Father, yet nevertheless it became his, and did not belong to another man beside the Son.” So, which of the above is “Orthodox,” and which is “heretical?”

At the risk of oversimplifying a complex issue, if there seems to be little or no difference between what the Chalcedonians and non-Chalcedonians are teaching, how and why did this division come to exist in the first place? If it was simply the result of linguistic, cultural, and political factors, and the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox do worship the same Christ (as the official dialogue between the two communions concludes), why is this division permitted to persist?

Where we choose to build our ecclesial walls or delineate our jurisdictional borders depends upon the quality of our ecclesiology. Is it open or closed? Do we regard the Church primarily as institution or as 39

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Illuminated Psalter Byzantine, late 1100's The Metropolitan Museum of Art

sacrament?

Fr. Georges Florovsky, in his essay “The Limits of the Church,” draws a distinction between the institutional and the sacramental borders of the Church. He juxtaposes the position of Cyprian of Carthage over and against that of Augustine of Hippo (who, for Florovsky, is unquestionably a holy father of the Church). While Cyprian limits “the Church” to its institutional borders, Augustine understands the Church to extend out to the borders of sacramentality, i.e., wherever baptism and the eucharist are celebrated. According to Augustine, the Church can somehow be mystically present even within heterodox bodies.

Following Florovsky, we see that there are two basic approaches to the question of where one finds the borders of the Church: the inclusive and the exclusive. The exclusivist approach is characterized by markers which are narrow and rigid, while the inclusive position tends to “give the benefit of the doubt” as much as possible to those outside the institutional Church. An extreme example of the exclusivist approach is the “Old Calendarist” groups, who recognize neither ecclesial nor sacramental reality outside the borders of their own jurisdiction or diocese. The inclusivist approach is reflected in, for example, these words of St. Philaret of Moscow: “An Orthodox Christian is supposed, in the spirit of love, joyfully to find a preserved grace outside of the Orthodox Church.” Or, as Metropolitan Platon of Kyiv (1803-1891) put it: “Our earthly walls do not reach the sky.”1 Walls or Ditches? Borders or Frontiers?

A healthy attitude toward “the other,” no matter who they might be, is usually characterized by respectful give-and-take, by listening as well as talking, and, most

importantly, by true love and condescension for the other, whether that other is “one of us,” a stranger, or even an enemy (Mt. 5:44). With this in mind, whether in relation to those outside her borders or to those within the Orthodox Church, Fr. Cyril Hovorun’s suggestion that “an alternative to the mentality of sharp-cut borderlines is the open mentality of frontier” can be useful.

Fr. Cyril notes that at the time of Cyprian of Carthage, “the Roman Empire . . . did not have borders; it had frontiers that constantly moved. The frontiers were supposed to expand as far as possible and had to include as much land and as many people as possible.”

I would suggest that this metaphor, “the metaphor of ditches, features that once protected the Roman frontiers,” which served “not to lock up already possessed

1. Cyril Hovorun, Scaffolds of the Church (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017), 167. jacob's well

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to guard, lines which should not be crossed. But the “royal path” is usually the best.

Our challenge as Orthodox Christians in the twenty-first century is two-fold: we must strive to tear down the walls which impede deeper communion within the institutional Church, and to conceptualize the boundary between Church and non-Church in terms of frontier, rather than border. Whether internally or externally our vision should be: …a vision of the Church that does not look for excuses to lock its gates and build strong walls around it. This church rather looks for opportunities to open them up as widely as possible. This church tries to reach the most remote places and peoples and make them its own territory and citizens. This church works hard to irrigate desert lands and make them fertile. It struggles to change the mind of the inhabitants of these lands from hostility to favor, and then to make them its own people.3

lands, but as platforms for further limitless expansion”,2 can be a useful tool in conceptualizing borders—whether within or outside the Church, whether these borders are the result of clear and necessary divisions or the result of misunderstandings, historical contingencies, or human passions—in a manner which at least offers the possibility of constructive dialogue, if not rapprochement.

Extremes meet. Neither “circling the wagons” and isolating ourselves from the ambient culture (not to mention our fellow Orthodox Christians!), nor saying, “there’s only one God, and all religions are the same, anyway” reflect a healthy or faithful approach to the Gospel. There are borders which are important

For those of you who played the quote game, quote A is from John of Damascus (Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase Jr. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999), 283); while quote B is from Severus of Antioch (in Iain R. Torrance, Christology after Chalcedon: Severus of Antioch and Sergius the Monophysite (Norwich (England): Canterbury Press, 1988), 148).

FR. BOHDAN HLADIO has written many essays and translations for ecclesial and secular publications. His first book, Northopraxis, was published by Holy Dormition Monastery Press in 2009. He is the rector of St. John the Baptist Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Oshawa, Ontario, and is a PhD student at the Toronto School of Theology.

2. Ibid, 5.

3. Ibid, 179.

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Suffering in Silence Opening Up About Miscarriages

by Matushka REBEKAH MARKEWICH

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light breeze gently blew my hair against my face, where it caught in my tears and was held fast. I took a deep breath as I wiped it away. I passed a small wooden box to the priest who had been quietly chanting near a row of small tombstones. A waft of incense hit my face as he took the box and gently lowered it into the earth.

A piece of my heart was buried that day. Since then, I have repeated this experience again and again—and again, and again, and again. I had my first miscarriage when I was 23. Since then, I have had eight more unsuccessful pregnancies. I have two living children, aged 9 and 10, who have been a huge comfort to me. But nothing else in my life has been so challenging or painful as experiencing those losses.

Each time, I struggled, wondering why God let it happen to me. Sometimes I even felt like my prayers were just screams in a void. It tested my faith and pushed me past the edge of what I thought I could bear. I felt isolated and alone. I didn’t know anyone who had gone through the same circumstances.

Still, I know that many women have shared these experiences. Miscarriages are much more common than we imagine. According to the March of Dimes, in the U.S., as many as 50% of pregnancies end with a miscarriage. In spite of how common they are, they often lead to silent suffering. Our society has stigmatized open discussion of miscarriages. This leaves women feeling isolated and alone. I am writing

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about my experiences in the hope that it will help other women feel a little less alone.

I found out I was pregnant again one beautiful winter day in 2015. My family had recently moved back to our home state so my husband could be rector of Christ the Savior Parish in upstate New York. Our children were 3 and 4 years old. I had already miscarried four times. Still, I was healthy and optimistic about the future. I was both happy and anxious. The next two weeks felt like an eternity, but I made it past the point where my miscarriages had always occurred in the past. My blood work looked perfect, and I was certain this pregnancy was working out.

I had an early first ultrasound scheduled. It was a cold winter day, and taking our small children out felt overly daunting, so I left them at home with my husband and went to the appointment alone. I was excited to get a glimpse of our child. I chatted a bit with the ultrasound technician about the pregnancy, but as the image began to appear on the screen, she paused. An agonizing moment later, she said in a low, quiet voice: “It is ectopic.” She quickly left the room to find the doctor, and I was left alone, in utter shock.

An ectopic pregnancy had always been one of my worst fears. It is when the embryo implants outside the uterus, often in the fallopian tube. As the placenta grows, the fallopian tube can rupture, which causes life-threatening internal bleeding. It is always fatal to

the baby and can also be fatal to the mother if it is not treated quickly. Usually, the treatment is to surgically remove the entire fallopian tube, but surgery can be avoided (only if detected early enough) by terminating the pregnancy with medication. There are no other options. Before this moment, I never really knew what I would do if I had an ectopic pregnancy.

Sometimes I had thought that I might just let myself die. I didn’t want to ever end my child’s life to save my own. However, it is easy to have noble thoughts when you aren’t in the situation and don’t have small children to take care of at home. While the technician went to find the doctor, I took a cell phone photo of the ultrasound machine. It had been left on, with the last picture the technician took still on the monitor.

It was so special to me. I don’t think I’ve ever shown anyone that photo.

The doctor came back and confirmed that it was a “textbook case”—there was absolutely no doubt it was ectopic. While there have been extremely rare cases of both mother and baby surviving an ectopic pregnancy, my baby was implanted in a location where it could not survive,

and my own life was greatly endangered. My fallopian tube was about to rupture at any moment, in which case I would hemorrhage to death unless I underwent emergency surgery.

The memories of those moments still bring tears.

I called my spiritual father, who said I needed to think of my living children. He said there was no need for me to die for a child that could not live. While I knew that was true, choosing to end the pregnancy was the worst moment of my whole life. I cried in that room so much that I think they started sending patients to the other end of the hall. I couldn’t help it. It was the deepest, most raw emotion I have ever felt. I was alone through the entire process, since my husband had stayed home.

The doctor said medication was a better choice than surgery. However, for the following week I was still at a high risk of a fallopian-tube rupture. Within a day I started to have concerning symptoms, so I went to the ER and was admitted overnight. The doctor there was one of the kindest and most caring physicians I have ever met. I had a lot of internal bleeding, but it wasn’t enough to necessitate im-

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mediate surgery, so I was sent home. I needed blood work nearly every day for the next week to make sure the bleeding wasn’t fatal. During that time, I was overwhelmed with love by close friends who texted and called. At the same time, I was hurt that God let it happen. I felt like He had let me down in the worst way imaginable; I couldn’t understand why He didn’t just let me miscarry, as with my other pregnancies.

Why did it have to hurt so much? Why did I have to make a life-or-death decision?

I felt like a terrible person. I wasn’t sure I deserved to live, and I worried I had made the wrong choice.

I’ve heard seminarians talk about that sort of scenario, suggesting it might be better for the woman to die.

The details of my experience became a secret part of my life. I was afraid that if people knew, they would shun me. At one point I tried to discuss it with a trusted friend, and the response was an implication that maybe it would have been better if I had let myself die.

I know my friend probably didn’t think about the full meaning of those words, but it made me not want to discuss it with anyone ever again.

I became pregnant again one year later. This time, one of my closest friends and I had the exact same due date. I miscarried within a few weeks. It was excruciating to watch her go through every stage of pregnancy, because it was a tangible reminder of what I had lost. Five months after that miscarriage, I became pregnant for the last time, and I miscarried shortly after finding out. My same friend, still pregnant, and her family were visiting us when it happened. It was extremely difficult, but we got through it and became much closer friends.

The grief of that final loss was cumulative, and I felt all the previous losses as if they had just happened all over again. I felt shame, even though I knew I wasn’t at fault. I felt guilt for being sad and not content with my children who were living. I was afraid I was wasting my precious time with them, while they were small, by focusing so much on babies I had lost.

I went through stages of both being angry with God and feeling guilty about this anger. I felt like my body had caused so much death. I felt like it had failed at the most basic aspect of being a woman. I wanted to punish it and I struggled with thoughts of self-harm.

I was clinically depressed. My anxiety spiraled out of control. I knew I needed help, so I went to my doctor and started antidepressants and therapy. Through that experience, I found out I also had undiagnosed Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. I had avoided taking antidepressants, thinking I just needed to try harder or pray more. My therapist compared this to trying to fix a house without any scaffolding. You could do it, but it would be a lot more difficult. Medication was the scaffolding that would help me apply what I jacob's well

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was learning in therapy. I went to confession often; it helped carry me through those dark times.

During this period, my family members and friends kept having children. People would hand me their babies to hold, and I would choke back tears while counting down the shortest amount of time to hand the child back without seeming rude. I dreaded baby showers, but was afraid that if I didn’t attend, my friends would think I didn’t care about them.

There was an exact moment when I began to feel true peace. I was asked to be the godmother of a baby girl. Her baptism was around the same time as my last due date. As I held her, waiting for the Baptism service to start, I realized that in comparison to eternity, our lives on this earth are so brief, just a flash. The children I had lost would never know pain or grief and would be with Christ for eternity. At that moment, I stopped feeling like I had caused death; these unborn children were alive in Christ. That was something I always had always known before, but at that moment, my heart finally understood it: They were and always would be alive in Christ. My body created life.

It can be difficult to know how to talk to someone who is grieving after a miscarriage. Even after suffering so many losses myself, I often struggle over what to say in these situations. There just isn’t anything that can make it better. We always want to fix things, but only time heals grief. I have heard all sorts of misguided comments, ranging from, “At least now you won’t gain weight” to “Maybe it wasn’t a real pregnancy after all.” Although remarks like these are rather extreme, they came from well-meaning clergy who were trying to cheer me up. Unless you are the priest of a woman who has miscarried, or a close friend, it is best to listen to her rather than talk. Do not ask her any invasive questions about her body (it happens). Instead of saying, “Let me know what I can do,” be direct and offer to make a meal or clean her house. You could also get her a gift card so she can get something for herself.

If you are unable to do anything, at least tell her you will pray for her. Gestures like these often help more than you could know. I still remember feeling buoyed by love during my own sorrowful times; it made them more bearable.

If you are a close friend, family member, or husband, I would suggest letting the woman grieve in her own timeframe. Well-meaning loved ones often push a woman to get back to normal and “get over it.” I would also suggest being sensitive about baby-themed anything. Baby showers, baby announcements, asking her to watch or hold your baby—all of these can be silently excruciating to a grieving mother. That’s not to say you shouldn’t include her, but be sensitive to her feelings and don’t be offended if she isn’t up to participating.

If you have recently suffered a miscarriage yourself, I promise your situation will get better. Give yourself all the time you need. Treat yourself like you would treat your best friend. It is common to struggle with guilt after a miscarriage, but confession can help free us from this. I have also found comfort in the liturgical services for the babies my husband and I have lost. We have buried their remains at the cemetery of our beloved monastery. Many churches have plots set aside for miscarried infants. Finally, I suggest remembering that people often say hurtful things inadvertently. It is hard to give grace to people when you are the one hurting, but if I hadn’t done this, I would have lost friendships entirely.

"At that moment, I stopped feeling like I had caused death; these unborn children were alive in Christ."

It has been several years since my last miscarriage.

One question still comes back to me: “Why did God let all of this happen?” I don’t know the answer, but I know God doesn’t cause suffering. It is a result of the fallen world in which we live. I still grieve my lost children and I always will. But that is how grief works; you don’t stop loving what you lost. In the service for the burial of an infant, one of the Odes of the Canon says, “Thy departure from this earthly life is a cause of grief and sorrow for your parents and all who love you, O little child; but in truth, you have been saved by the Lord from sufferings and snares of many kinds.”

Despite my grief, I feel peace that those lives will be with Christ for all of eternity.

MATUSHKA REBEKAH MARKEWICH is a freelance photographer and full-time mother of two. She is a parishioner at Christ the Savior Orthodox Church in Ballston Lake, New York, where her husband, Rev. Matthew Markewich, is the rector.

Enthroned Madonna and Child Byzantine (c. 1250/1275) National Gallery of Art

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Community After

COVID

Reflections on (Re)-opening Our Parishes

by Archpriest DAVID GARRETSON

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s we seem to be approaching the end of a lengthy pause in “normal” parish life, we have an opportunity to examine with faith and with fear our life as Christians, parishioners, servants, and members of one another in Christ. It is a chance to consider what does and does not work in our parish life. I believe this is nothing less than God resetting His Church. A time of retreat and reflection is a part of a healthy Christian’s life. We all are looking to be free of the various limitations (or boundaries if you will) imposed by the pandemic. If we are honest, we’ll admit there were many other boundaries to our true witness to the joy in Christ even before those made necessary by the medical emergency. I would like to explore, given the theme of the issue, what we in our specific parishes can do to remove those boundaries to the proclamation of the Gospel. Of course, this sort of discussion is based on each of our lived experiences and may seem irrelevant or even mistaken. I simply would ask, as they say at AA meetings, that you “take the best and leave the rest.”

The first boundary we have in our parishes is the inability to truly see Christ in one another. One of the parts of parish life I miss the most due to the restrictions is coffee hour. Specifically, I miss the casual, seemingly trivial conversations I had with my parishioners after the services. Of course, the services, and especially the Divine Liturgy, fully manifest the reality of the Kingdom of God here and now.

But without parishioners being with one another in community outside of the services, they cannot put into practice what the services have given them. On this count, live-streaming technology isn’t much help.

Without actual face-to-face contact, we can love our fellow Christians while finding our fellow parishioners

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annoying (a variation of the Groucho Marx line, “I love humanity, it’s people I can’t stand!”). We do not love our neighbor in abstraction but despite all the minute ways they offend us and get on our nerves. Our isolation has heightened our desire to have things “our way” without the practical realities that come with living with others. Rebuilding shared community is our first challenge as COVID is brought under control. We know how to prepare for reopening our parishes from a health-and safety point of view. Now we need to pray and plan for the spiritual dimensions of returning to common worship and fellowship.

But we also need to look at the barriers we put up for people in the wider world, for those who don’t attend our services. Several decades ago, there was real controversy regarding “barrier” issues such as language,

calendars, and even the idea that parishioners could be other than “our” (Russian, Greek, Serbian, etc.) people. Since then, healthy pastoral leadership has put those issues in the rear-view mirror in most of our communities. Autocephaly has been achieved, and there is a vision of a church in and for North America. We have our services live-streamed over the internet and most of our parish facilities are handicapaccessible. I would suggest that while these reforms have broken down significant barriers, we have left greater ones in place.

Over the years I have been privileged to visit many parishes, from all jurisdictions, throughout North America. Especially in urban environments, I notice a disturbing clue to the boundaries we set up in our parishes. Often the name of the church is in

English and the native language of the parishioners, yet the “No Trespassing” signs are in English and Spanish! This cannot simply be dismissed as fear or even racism. The underlying problem is the attitude this suggests toward surrounding neighborhoods. It communicates that the parish building is an exclusive place. While many parishes may not have such obvious “signs,” can we honestly state that, if our parish closed, anyone other than our parishioners would notice or even care?

When the first Russian missionaries were sent to Alaska in 1794, their passage and expenses were underwritten not by the Church, but by the Russian-American Company. This was typical of the era. The officers and staff of the company expected that the monks from Valaam would concentrate on 47

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Resurrection - Descent into Hell, with Feasts and Selected Saints Russian, 16th c.

Arkhangelsk Regional Museum of Fine Arts

ministry to the Russians working in Alaska and those indigenous people who entered into relationships with the Russians. It was to the consternation of the officials of both the Russian government and the Russian-American Company that the missionaries, most notably St. Herman, advocated for the native people who were being exploited by the Company.

The missionaries saw all the people of Alaska as their parish.

Another example of a missionary being challenged to expand their vision of ministry is in the famous encounter between St. Innocent of Alaska and St. Nicholas of Japan. During one of his numerous journeys, St. Innocent stopped to visit the newly appointed chaplain to the Russian Embassy in Hokkaido, Fr. Nicholas Kassatkin (as he was then known). It appears that Fr. Nicholas saw his ministry as simply taking care of the Russians attached to the embassy and those Orthodox who happened to be passing through. It also appears that he spent the majority of his time translating French novels into Russian. St. Innocent, who was already a bishop, upbraided the young Archimandrite and encouraged him to engage with the Japanese people. The result of that encounter was the young priest’s transformation from an inwardly focused chaplain into St. Nicholas, the Enlightener of Japan. jacob's well

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Both of these examples (which can be found in Paul Garrett’s biography of St. Innocent) illustrate that most of our parishioners are not formally identified with our parish! Teasing out the example of St. Nicholas of Japan, is our parish a chapel or a parish church? A chapel is an institution which focuses its ministry on a specific group of tightly defined people. A hospital chapel and its chaplain, for instance, are responsible to the patients and staff of a specific facility. parish church, on the other hand, is called to minister not only to those who self-identify as parishioners, but to the entire community. Broadly defined, I would submit that anyone who considers themselves parishioners or needs assistance from a parish are de facto parishioners. I do not know any parish priest of any Orthodox jurisdiction, or any other faith tradition, who does not have a considerable number of people whom he has never met who consider themselves his parishioners.

For certain legal reasons, most Orthodox churches in North America have a concise definition of who is and is not a parishioner. However, those reasons are not in the Gospel, nor even in the canons, but in the various property disputes that have troubled the Orthodox church. Part of our church culture is to see “ministry” primarily directed to those who are “parishioners.” I remember the first time I saw in the

narthex of an Orthodox Church an extremely detailed menu of charges for various sacraments and services.

There were two columns of prices: one for parishioners and another, higher set for non-parishioners—talk about boundaries! I started laughing so loudly that I had to leave the church (followed by the candle-desk lady who assured me that since I was coming around so much, Father would give me the parishioner price!).

Sadly, I need to clearly state, given the factionalism of the times, that I am not advocating open communion or becoming a wedding chapel for all and sundry. However, I am advocating for a change of vision of what parish ministry is and who it is for.

This means the removal of all man-made boundaries to sharing the Gospel which we have erected, however comforting we may find them. Lest this sound too nebulous, I am proposing the following concrete areas where we can expand our ministries out of the chapel model and into those of a fully functioning parish.

• Offer parish facilities to community groups •

•

• • •

without reservation or fee. (It is good practice for the group to provide an insurance rider).

Have a substantial, intentional way to respond to needs within our communities: • Sponsor food and clothing drives to support local food pantry.

• Make almsgiving a dedicated part of our operational budgets.

• Encourage parishioners to staff local homeless shelters, food banks, and the like.

• Offer parish facilities to host town meetings and events. Often municipalities are required to pay for such rentals. This income can be directed into further community outreach.

Make sure our parishes are “good neighbors”.

Keep facilities clean and well maintained. Allow neighbors to use parking lots and their children to play on the grounds. Would you consider attending a church that chased your child out of their parking lot?

Speak to the neighbors. Invite them to services and remember their names.

Support local first responders, police, and EMTs, and offer facilities for their events (again, without charge).

When someone is visiting, make sure that trained, intentional greeters welcome them. Follow up with them.

talking from our hearts about Christ is often difficult for most of us. When people ask us about our faith, do we begin with the joy that Christ has brought to our life, or do we focus on secondary issues, such as why our celebration of Pascha/Easter is later? Sharing details or data keeps us behind a boundary; it keeps us “safe.” People are hungry for transformation and meaning in their lives. They don’t need religious Trivial Pursuit answers—they want to hear from our hearts and our lived experience. As Christians, this is our primary responsibility to the entire cosmos.

I recognize that this final boundary can be frightening and intimidating. We are often afraid we will give the wrong answers. But we can never go wrong if we speak in love and in faith in Christ. As we reopen our parish communities, we can pray for and strengthen one another to become one together, by becoming fully alive in Christ. We can accomplish the removal of boundaries to our individual and collective maturity as Christians through prayer and action.

The typical Paschal icon is properly called the “Harrowing of Hell.” In this icon the Risen Christ reaches out to bring Adam and Eve out of bondage in Hades. In our prayers we need to humbly ask God to show us what practices and assumptions we have that may be hindering us from growing closer to Him. This is not simply a prayer of repentance, but a matter of asking for a revelation and for courage. Christ stands on the gates of Hell. The ultimate barrier to human salvation is destroyed by the Resurrection. That same power gives us the vision and the courage to destroy whatever boundary there is between our life together and the Joy of our Lord.

V. REV. DAVID GARRETSON is is the rector of Ss. Peter and Paul Russian Orthodox Church in South River, New Jersey. He is a union organizer and negotiator with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees.

The final and most difficult boundary we need to cross is the one within ourselves. While we are comfortable in the external details of our church life, 49

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The Theologians of and

Grace, Place,

Space

The Christian Witness of Gertrude Jekyll and Edward Lutyens

by Reader ADEDOYIN TERIBA

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things; And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

- From “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

O

ne of the most intriguing aspects of our faith is the way Christ creates and sustains the universe. A prayer we often recite describes him as “everywhere present and filling all things.” Thus, to study creation through Christ’s kenosis and grace is to study an aspect of reality that He shares with us. Put differently, to study or even commune with a flower is to commune with God through His grace. The use of the word “commune” here is intentional, since communion is synonymous with another word: “prayer.” Perhaps we can say that appreciating God’s cosmos is a form of prayer; and if, as St. Evagrius says, “one who prays is a theologian and a theologian is one who prays,” then we are all theologians.

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Edward Lutyens, can help bring this into focus for us.

We might call them theologians of grace, place, and space. Or perhaps it might be more succinct to say Jekyll and Lutyens were priests of grace through space and place. The philosopher Martin Heidegger once said that not all spaces are places. When a space assumes a character, it becomes a place. Jekyll and Lutyens created an English place—a marriage of the British landscape with British architecture that embodied God’s grace.

But who were they? Gertrude Jekyll (“Geeekerll” is how the English pronounce her last name) was born in London in 1843. She was a painter before becoming a gardener. Her gardens are known for their painterly quality; she painstakingly juxtaposed flowers whose colors completed one another. She continued to design gardens even after giving up watercolor

ABOVE: Gardens at Le Bois des Moutiers in Normandy, France

Plaque at the Holy Island Lindisfarne Jekyll Garden

painting, due to her failing eyesight, at the age of 48.

Some scholars claim that part of the colorful nature of her gardens was due to her disability. Sometimes those with weak eyesight have more sight to see than those who can physically see. But there was also a spiritual component in her work; she was able to look at landscapes with a vision of how creation could be offered back to God as a form of thanksgiving. Her writings are littered with allusions to Holy Scripture, defending the human need for beauty and nature.

Hence, one can call her a public theologian, offering God’s creation back to Him in praise in a way that benefits all those who go to her gardens.

Her designs have had an incalculable impact on horticulture and garden design in England and the U.S. In the U.K., many of her gardens have become part of the group known as the Royal Gardens, accessible to the public and under the financial stewardship of the British government. Some of the most outstanding gardens she designed are the Hestercombe Gardens and Hartland Abbey Gardens (the Abbey was built in 1157, but Gertrude designed the garden at the turn of the twentieth century).

Edward Lutyens (1869-1944) was one of the most important British architects of the turn of the twentieth century. He created a modernist house type that was both humane, reflecting the tradition of the English townhouse, and innovative for its time. In other words, he made the traditional English country home newly relevant. He also designed prominent public buildings in India, which was then a British colony. He embodied the old vision of what tradition meant: not something archaic, but ever changing, ever innovating; the fountain of youth that springs eternal.

She and Lutyens met when he was 20 and she was 46, and thus began a collaboration for the ages, namely in marrying gardening and architecture. The metaphor that comes to mind is a hand in a glove. Both of them saw the home and the garden as part of a single entity that was a place. Some of their designs were deeply enmeshed: at the Hestercombe Gardens, for instance, the flora wraps around part of the building, forming the “cover” for parts of the houses. To say I love the homes and gardens they designed would be an understatement. Their projects have made me rethink what architecture is.

For me architecture has now become both structure and landscape. In the best designs, these components are interwoven and delight in one another. They show the Trinity, three

loving Persons, one in essence. Hence the goal of architecture, its ultimate telos, is to reveal the Trinity.

Vegetation, flowers, and vines can clothe architecture like a garment. They show the Lord robed in majesty.

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

(Matthew 6:28-29)

Jekyll and Lutyens’ collaborations, joining houses and gardens, cannot be described effectively, only experienced. They are heavenly, showing the manifold wisdom of God. There are ramifications in all of this for our own lives. Is this not what we are called to do—to ascend and descend the ladder that leads to heaven?

Is not the Mother of God the ladder to the Anointed One—the Christos? We venerate the Mother of God because her obedience led to the revelation of Christ’s humanity in His taking on of her flesh. It showed how the grace of God took on a concrete form. The grace of God displays itself all around us in concrete ways in the beauty of architecture and gardens. Every time an architect and landscape designer create something beautiful, they participate in the grace of God, obedient to the promptings of the Holy Spirit (as Mary heeded the word spoken to her by Gabriel).

Hence, in their partnership, Jekyll and Lutyens obeyed the call to create beautiful places.

Let us be inspired by their example and look for God’s glory in the gardens all around us. My spiritual parents at Princeton showed me the glory of flowers at Pascha. It led me to ask myself, what beautiful flowers exist in my home country of Nigeria? Why can I not create gardens of delight in Nigeria and in the United States? This is all to say: go to those Chinese gardens; go to those Italian villas; go to a botanical garden near you; go and see the logoi in nature, which is part of the Logos. Why can’t we be theologians of grace, space, and place in our own back yards?

RDR. ADEDOYIN (THEOGENES) TERIBA is an assistant professor of art and urban studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He is a tonsured reader at St. Gregory the Theologian Orthodox Church in Wappingers Falls, New York.

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Album Review:

Spilligion

by Spillage Village

“Why do we live on the surface When our hearts search for the deep?”

by FEMI OLUTADE

M

usic has always been one of the most essential ways for Black people to reconnect with God and find hope amid hardship. In the nineteenth century, enslaved Africans sang songs, now known as Negro spirituals, that spoke of finding freedom in the world to come, even as they were being oppressed in this world. These Negro spirituals would later influence numerous music genres originated by Black artists, including gospel, blues, rock and roll, soul, R&B, and even hip-hop.

The album Spilligion, released in the fall by the Atlanta hip-hop collective Spillage Village, carries this tradition forward, exploring spirituality and the Black urban experience in the context of the Coronavirus pandemic and the recent lockdowns. The lyrics deal with a variety of religious faiths (with track names like “Oshun,” referring to a West African goddess of rivers and sensuality; “Cupid,” for the Roman god of erotic love; and “Shiva”, for the god of destruction in Hinduism), but the album is most heavily influenced

by Western forms of Christianity. The cover art gives us a sense of what we’re in for. It parodies Renaissance-

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style paintings of Mary, the mother of God, enthroned in the heavens holding baby Jesus. Jesus is replaced by a bear cub, in a playful reference to the group’s previous albums: Bears Like This, Bears Like This Too, and Bears Like This Too Much; and instead of angels, we see the members of Spillage Village, all wearing bear masks. But the most striking feature is that Mary is replaced with a skeleton, evoking the Grim Reaper. It’s an indication that death, judgment, and the afterlife will be central themes of the album.

The kinds of choices that can lead to life or death are illustrated in the album’s first eight tracks.

Collectively, these tracks reveal how an individual’s pursuit of God’s spirit is often hindered by the pursuit of corrupting pleasures, most notably money, drugs, and sex.

The corrupting influence of money is depicted on the opening track “Spill Vill,” where a pastor steals money from a church to buy a luxury sports car, and also on the track “Judas,” where a romantic relationship dissolves over arguments about money. The influence of drugs is repeatedly highlighted on tracks like

“Baptize,” “PsalmSing,” and “Ea’alah (Family),” as various members of the Spillage Village rap about smoking marijuana while reading the book of Genesis and trying to feel closer to God. The influence of sex is depicted in “Mecca,” “Oshun,” and “Cupid” as the group raps about having casual sex with women all over the world to cope with the daily frustrations of life.

However, as the album reaches its ninth track, “Shiva,” we find that this practice of using money, drugs, and sex as coping mechanisms has now led to anxiety, confusion, and depression: Now that we're sittin' here reminiscin' I just picked a pen up to mention Maybe illustrate my tears on construction paper Cut it out, put it on the fridge to save for later Open up, I'm so cold inside from what's happened to us Maybe your daddy died, or you're hooked on drugs Stuck in the house of blues Can't find a way out, don't know which route to choose It's gettin' pretty hot in here The hotbox done turned to a coffin

Here, one of the Spillage Village members, Johnny Venus, depicts himself writing tearful rap verses like a child making art to stick on the outside of a fridge. Johnny then realizes how the hardships he

and his peers have endured (in his case, losing a father and being addicted to drugs) have left them empty and cold, like the inside of a fridge. He also describes them as being in the cold “House of Blues,” a reference to blues music, in which African American artists traditionally sing about their experiences of misery and oppression.

At the end of the verse, Johnny Venus changes up the imagery. “It’s gettin’ pretty hot in here / The hotbox done turned to a coffin.” This is a reference to “hotboxing,” or smoking marijuana inside a car or another enclosed space to inhale more smoke and get extremely high. While smoking marijuana previously provided an escape, the overwhelming isolation now makes the hotbox feel like a coffin, which reveals how 53

Spilligion (2020) Spillage Village, JID and EarthGang

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The heavens in the sky start to cry as we look for love Dying deep inside, lonely kisses and empty hugs Why do we live on the surface When our hearts search for the deep?

Please forgive me, babe, I'm nervous Scared to go to sleep Perfection is the goal these days But I want something pure All that life throws our ways A love that will endure

This search for purity and love ultimately leads to the song “Hapi,” in which the group sings about escaping from the overwhelming influence of their urban environment and retreating into the natural environment of the forest. This shift in environment seems to lead to a spiritual breakthrough, as members of the group look to turn from destructive pursuits, beginning with the pursuit of money: So, you get rich, I'ma try to get free, but Not exclusive, mutually, but Oh, I, oh, I gotta find the balance between

Here, Spillage Villager Mereba concludes that money cannot buy freedom and might even be a distraction from finding true freedom. At the same time, she recognizes that being rich and being free are not mutually exclusive but require a balance that remains elusive to her. Moreover, this theme of finding the balance between extremes leads directly to a verse that appears to be the central thesis of the album: Some say, "Life is just a Hell And it's here we dwell until we're truly, truly, truly free" Some say, "Projects and ghettos and seeds that will never grow Is all there is to see”

Johnny and his peers are succumbing to a kind of spiritual death.

Moreover, the repeated use of the word “hot” may be a subtle indication that Johnny and his peers are experiencing a taste of Gehenna, the fiery valley of destruction into which those who reject the Kingdom of God are cast at the Last Judgment. The idea of the Last Judgment at the end of times is then confirmed on the following track, which is appropriately titled “End of Daze,” in reference both to the biblical End of Days and the dazed state of mind that smokers experience after “blazing” marijuana.

While the “End of Daze” at first seems to focus on God’s judgment, the song’s outro takes a dramatic turn: It reveals God to be deeply compassionate, as God weeps at humanity’s failed attempts to find love apart from God: jacob's well

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I'll stay with you through the night and in the darkest times We'll fight through it all until we reach that dawn

Here Johnny Venus outlines two opposing ways of contextualizing the suffering that African Americans continue to experience on this earth. According to one perspective, life on earth will always be a living Hell that Black people can only escape when they die. This is a perspective that was widely adopted by enslaved African Americans who held onto the hope of being free in the world to come even while freedom seemed impossible in this world. In contrast, Johnny Venus also acknowledges that some Black people have become disenchanted with traditional spirituality and the idea that they will experience freedom in the world

to come. This materialist perspective thus denies that there is any spiritual reality beyond the dilapidated housing projects and ghettos that are clearly visible in this world.

Johnny Venus is reluctant to wholly adopt either perspective. Rather, he tries to find a balance between these extremes, by committing to staying beside those who are suffering. He also vows to fight for the freedom of those who live in darkness until they reach the dawn of a new day. This idea of finding freedom at dawn mirrors the Exodus story, when God led the formerly enslaved Israelites through the Red Sea with a pillar of fire at night and led the Egyptian army to destruction at dawn. Similarly, the Prophet Malachi spoke of a day when God would burn those who are proud like chaff in an oven but would free God’s people like cattle released from their stalls when the “Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.” It is this biblical vision of freedom that inspired civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as they sought to free Black people from racial injustice. Fittingly, Johnny Venus’s verse ends with lines that echo Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech: I dream of a world where love is the rule Where hearts walk two by two; And I with you I dream of a place where a child's wish can always come true And the old and withered become renewed

In this verse, Johnny Venus dreams of a world that is governed under the rule of God’s love. He describes this world as one where “hearts walk two by two,” like the animals who were gathered into Noah’s ark and delivered into a world where all those who practiced injustice were washed away. Similarly, Johnny Venus dreams of a place where the “old and withered become renewed.” This final line of the verse seems to refer to the final section of the Revelation given to St. John the Evangelist, in which God creates a new heaven and a new earth. Subsequently, St. John hears a voice saying: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among the people, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”

And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

St. John’s vision thus epitomizes the Christian hope that Jesus will one day rule His kingdom, in which He has renewed all of creation and enabled humans to truly love their neighbors. Moreover, within the context of Spilligion, St. John’s vision also seems to be the ultimate hope that enables the members of Spillage Village to keep searching for real love as we hear on the album’s final song entitled “Jupiter:” So hold my hands and dance with me tonight You know, they say we're all about to die And maybe it's the love we all are tryna find Who knows what lies, it's only by design

Having taken the time to understand the themes and messages of Spilligion, what should we take away from the album as Orthodox Christians, most of whom are not African American? As with any experience of cross-cultural engagement, I would invite my brothers and sisters in Christ to approach an album like this as an exercise in Christ-like empathy, compassion, and humility.

In listening to Spilligion, we should be all the more aware of how a person’s environment in modern, urbanized America exposes them to destructive influences. These are the kinds of influences that drove Christians into the wilderness to become monastics.

We should recognize that we are also susceptible to these influences. We should thus have a greater degree of compassion for those who are suffering outside the safe harbor of the Church and feel compelled to follow Jesus’s example of joining humanity amid their suffering. As St. John the Evangelist wrote, “If God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Let us so love our neighbors, particularly those in the Black community who have opened their hearts to us in numerous ways, including on the album Spilligion.

FEMI OLUTADE is a software engineer living in Irvine, California. He is a parishioner at St. Paul's Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine. He was a writer on the fifth season of the podcast Dissect, and his cultural criticism and other writing is published at https://medium.com/@folutade.

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THE FOG AND THE SWIFTS

by Roy Meador For Wayne Willer The fog has worn the edges off everything.

It is too late for the trees pressed flat as if between two sheets of waxed paper, their green grayed.

Only the swifts are beyond the crush of this moment.

I can hear them working at the borders. I can see them tracing out a geometry only they understand.

This morning when one mystery crosses the expanse of another I follow my usual steps foot after foot to work.

ROY MEADOR is a poet and retired college librarian and associate professor of English. He and his wife, Donna, live in Ankeny, Iowa.

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BLANK PAGES

by George Fillingham In Sri Lanka somewhere is a strip Of ground about 12 feet long, a pacing length, A track of sand and dust, separated, Marked off for meditation by Buddhist monks Because tradition has it that this dirt path Retains the footprints of the Buddha himself.

What could we possibly learn from footprints?

Perhaps the earth, like any blank sheet, Records the essence of the printing foot.

Does Jerusalem remember Jesus?

Or Job? Isaiah? David? Solomon?

I remember walking German forests; Do those pine needled forest floors Remember me? Or should the earth shed Me as lakes shed passing geese?

GEORGE FILLINGHAM is a poet, laborer, and former writing instructor living in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.

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An Orthodox Teen’s I

Perspective on

COVID

by BEATRICE OLDEROG

am glad the pandemic happened. That may seem like an unbelievable statement, but I mean it. Due to COVID, I became closer to God and Jesus. I know that many others have also come closer to God and Jesus or become Christian during the pandemic.

When I first had the idea of becoming closer to my faith, I realized that I had never picked up a Bible on my own and read it. So, I bought one. I started studying it, and soon I got a study Bible to dive deeper into texts that I had not read before. Now I read my Bible every day, and I pray every night before bed.

COVID left people with a lot of time on their hands, giving them a chance to think about their faith and the world around them. In that time, many were able to bring God into their lives. Many were scared when we all had to stay home for safety, and God helped them by comforting them, so they grew closer to God. Many have now strengthened their faith and have learned to trust God because of the pandemic.

With all the idle time, young people have also brought God into their lives. You can see this in my parish.

Children as young as two are now learning and appreciating the Bible, and older kids are diving deep with our priest into understanding the Bible because of the pandemic.

On the other hand, many people blamed God for the difficult things that happened and for all those who died, and because they were scared, they became separated from God. COVID was also difficult for those who depend on going to church or who look to others to motivate them to stay close to God. When they could not go to church or see others, they lost their faith.

COVID gave us a lot of free time to think about everything. Some of us thought and decided to come closer to God, and others became fearful and blamed God for the pandemic, so they moved further away from him. But with everything opening and our lives returning to normal, we may not again have the opportunity we have had to become closer to God and Jesus. From the pandemic, I have learned that we must use the time that we have to try to get in the habit of putting God in everything we do. The pandemic may bring something positive to our lives by showing us that hardships can be a blessing.

BEATRICE OLDEROG is an eighth-grader living in Orange, New Jersey. She is a parishioner at Holy Apostles Orthodox Church in Saddle Brook, New Jersey, and is the daughter of Kai and Anne Olderog.

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Step-by-Step Drawing

Scan QR code to see a video from the artist!

by GENEVIEVE BROWN

1. To start, draw a wide upside-down U shape, then bring the right side of the U down. Draw the wing by sketching a curved line outwards from the middle of the previous line.

2. Next, draw the belly of the dove below the lines you've already drawn. Then, draw an adjacent line next to the first wing. This will be your second wing.

3. Then, draw another adjacent line close to the first line you drew, but don't let it touch the dove's back.

Finish off the wings with a straight or bumpy line.

4. Next, draw another adjacent line next to the second wing you drew like you did with the first wing. At the end of your wing bring a straight line down and draw a tail as shown in the picture.

5. Add a beak, eyes, and feet. Your drawing should begin to look like a dove now.

6. Then, draw an olive branch in the beak of your dove's mouth.

7. Now, add your own finishing touches, such as a rainbow, clouds, a sun, an ocean, or any other details you want in the background of your drawing.

8. Now for the last step: add color!

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2021 Diocesan Graduates Larissa Cheplick, parishioner from Holy

Trinity Orthodox Church in Elmira Heights, NY, graduated from Thomas A. Edison High School in Elmira Heights, NY. She will attend Daemen College in Amherst, NY, to obtain her Bachelor of Health Science degree and later her Master of Science in Physician Assistant Studies. Larissa has received many awards and accolades throughout her high school career. She was the valedictorian of her class, a Mark Twain Scholar, and was inducted into the National Honor Society and National Technical Honor Society.

She was also given the role of senior captain on her varsity cheerleading team after being named Most Valuable Player the season before. In the future, Larissa hopes to use her knowledge in the medical field to help those living in underserved communities and make a difference in the lives of those around her.

Angelina Christos, parishioner at Church of the Annunciation in Brick, NJ, graduated from Toms River High School North. She will attend the University of Colorado Boulder, majoring in psychology. Angelina’s proudest accomplishments of her high school career were her membership in the National Honor Society, being on the Varsity Track

team, and receiving the TRN Academic Award all four years.

Stephen (Kodi) Dotterer, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in Syracuse, NY, graduated from Christian Brothers Academy. He will attend Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH, as a post-graduate student, and hopes to explore various fields of study while playing hockey and baseball.

Julia Eltarazy, parishioner at SS. Peter and

Paul Church in Bayonne, NJ, graduated from Bayonne High School. She will attend Felician University and plans to major in biology/pre-medicine. Julia was a member of several clubs including fencing, ice skating, volleyball, and poetry. She is also a talented guitar player.

Evanina, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Church in Wayne, NJ, graduated from Wayne Valley High School. She will attend Stockton University in the fall.

Julia

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Larissa Fitzgibbons, parishioner at SS.

Peter and Paul Church in Syracuse, NY, graduated from Onondaga Central Sr. High School. She will attend Duquesne University, having received three university scholarships, and will major in digital marketing at Duquesne’s Honors College. Larissa received many academic and athletic awards throughout her high school career. She was a member of the National Junior Honor Society, National Honor Society, and the cross-country and basketball teams. Larissa was voted to the All-League second team her freshman year, received a 48th place medal at the McQuaid Invitational, and was voted to the All-League first team her senior year for Cross Country. She was co-captain and MVP of the basketball team her sophomore year.

Qualifier in the e-business category, a 2020 New Jersey Consumer Bowl Champion, and she received accolades in debate, including receiving the Best-Speaker Award three times in the Junior State of America.

Hunter College in the fall. During Michael’s freshman year, he won second place in the Science Fair and his tennis team won the city championship.

Elijah Ruff, parishioner at Christ the Reanna Paxton, parishioner at Church of

the Annunciation in Brick, NJ, graduated from Brick Memorial High School in Brick, NJ. She will attend University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, PA, as part of the PharmD program. Reanna received four scholarships: the Founders' Scholarship, the 1821 USciences Bicentennial Scholarship, the USciences Honors Award, and the KUAFF Scholarship Sons & Daughters Undergraduate Award. She made the honor roll every semester of high school and co-captained the Mock Trial team.

Savior Church in Ballston Lake, NY, was homeschooled and will attend Hudson Valley Community College in the fall to pursue the college’s Electric Certificate.

Sophia Sahm, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in Syracuse, NY, graduated 5th in her class from Homer High School.

She will attend Le Moyne College, having received the college’s Presidential Scholarship, and will major in nursing.

Macrina Kraus, parishioner at Holy

Trinity Church in East Meadow, NY, graduated from East Meadow High School. She will attend SUNY Albany, majoring in psychology. Macrina was a member of the ASL Honor Society and the varsity cheerleading team.

Elizabeth Leoniuk, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in South River, NJ, graduated from Somerville High School in Somerville, NJ. She will attend Rutgers University, majoring in pharmaceutical science.

Lizzie

Lomjaria, parishioner at SS.

Peter and Paul Church in South River, NJ, graduated from Middlesex County Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Technologies in Edison, NJ. She will attend Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in business administration. Lizzie received multiple awards in business during her high school career. She was a Future Business Leaders of America State Winner and a National jacob's well

Julia Siragusa, parishioner at Church of Peter Penkrat, parishioner at Holy

Resurrection Church in Wayne, NJ, graduated from Ramsey High School. He will attend Bergen Community College in the Fall. Peter lettered all four years as a varsity member of the school’s swim team and was a co-captain this past year.

the Holy Cross in Medford, NJ, graduated from Shawnee High School. She will attend Arcadia University, having received a university scholarship for art, and will major in medical illustration. Julia was a member of the National Honor Society, a Title Winner for Contemporary Dance 2021, and a People's Choice Award recipient. She served as Vice President of both the ASL and Kids for Wish Clubs, and earned her Girl Scout Gold Award.

Brian Karl Posluszny, parishioner at SS.

Peter and Paul Church in South River, NJ, graduated Allentown High School in Allentown, NJ. He will attend Rutgers University’s School of Engineering in the fall. Brian played varsity football, was a member of Robotics Team 1807 for four years as a build leader, and served as an officer of the Future Farmers of America (FFA) for three years.

Michael Rosca, parishioner at Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in New York, NY, graduated Maspeth High School in Queens, NY. He will attend

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Sofia Kantor, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in Syracuse, NY, graduated from Christian Brothers Academy. She will attend Le Moyne College in the fall.

Elena

Rose Vichiconti, parishioner at Holy Resurrection Church in Wayne, NJ, graduated from Wayne Valley High School. She will attend Montclair State University, majoring in speech pathology.

Rose is a member of the state and regional

1st place award-winning marching band, 1st Chair bass clarinet in the Symphonic Orchestra, and a member of the Woodwind Ensemble and Jazz Band. She is an épée on the fencing team, a participant in school musicals, and holds a black belt in Taekwondo. Additionally, Rose is a recipient of the Presidential Volunteer Service Award (bronze and silver) and is a liaison/volunteer for the Wayne Interfaith Network.

Alexander Zabierowski, parishioner at

Holy Trinity Church in East Meadow, NY, graduated from Carle Place High School. He received a scholarship towards his college education and will attend Binghamton University in the fall. Alexander earned honor roll status throughout most of his high school career and was enrolled in eight Advanced Placement (AP) classes: calculus AB, Spanish, English language, physics 1, U.S. history, world history, European history, and statistics.

Sara Kfoury, parishioner at St. George

Calli Santangelo, parishioner at Holy

Church in Buffalo, NY, graduated from SUNY at Buffalo with a Bachelor of Science degree.

Resurrection Church in Wayne, NJ, graduated from the University of Scranton with a Master of Science in occupational therapy. She will be completing her Level 2 fieldwork at Geisinger Hospital in Scranton, PA, and then her final Level 2 fieldwork at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York.

Evan Levitsky, parishioner at Holy

Resurrection Church in Wayne, NJ, graduated with honors from the University of Pittsburgh with a Bachelor of Science in finance and a minor in economics and statistics and a certificate in business analytics. He plans to pursue a career in finance.

parishioner at Holy Resurrection Church in Wayne, NJ, graduated from Lafayette College with a Bachelor of Science in electrical and computer engineering. John was a threeyear starter on the football team and was elected a team captain by his teammates.

He recently received the Leopard Award, which is given to the player who best represents the work ethic and ideals of a Lafayette football player. John will pursue a master’s degree this fall in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Burk,

Adam Kantor, parishioner at SS. Peter and

Paul Church in Syracuse, NY, graduated from SUNY-ESF Ranger School with an Associate in Applied Science (A.A.S) degree in forest technology.

Church in Buffalo, NY, graduated from SUNY at Buffalo with a Master of Architecture degree.

Simona Eveline Matovic, parishioner at

Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in New York, NY, graduated from Rice University with a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics, English, and business. She will be moving to San Francisco to pursue a career.

Paul Rogozenski, parishioner at SS. John

Mira Shami, parishioner at St. George

Alexis Steffaro, parishioner at SS. Peter and Paul Church in South River, NJ, graduated magna cum laude from Lafayette College with a Bachelor of Arts in international affairs and Russian Eastern European affairs, and a minor in Russian language. She will continue her studies next year at the University of Nottingham in England, pursuing a master’s degree in international security and terrorism.

Peter and Paul Church in South River, NJ, graduated from the University of Arizona with a Master of Science in physics. He plans to pursue a doctorate in astrophysics and cosmology.

Christina Rosca, parishioner at Holy Transfiguration Chapel in Princeton, NJ, graduated from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelor of Science in neuroscience with highest honors (2020) and a Master of Arts in medicine, health, and society (2021). Her accomplishments include: All-SEC and All-American in women's tennis and Academic-All-American.

Christina will spend two years in the professional women's tennis circuit and then plans to attend medical school.

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