The tradition of the Orthodox Church as I have been given to understand it, part 3

No matter how little I live up to it

Read Part 1 here, and Part 2 here. This is a long one, for which I apologize. Substack tells me it’s 9,200 words with a reading time of about 42 minutes. I promise to make next week’s post short and sweet.

In the fall of 2000, after months without Liturgy since abandoning Pangratios, my parish in Boston, along with several others from Christ the Savior Brotherhood, were received into the Bulgarian Orthodox Church under the omophorion of Metropolitan Joseph (Bosakov). All the priests were chrismated first, were re-ordained one by one, and then the faithful were chrismated by the priests. The churches and altars were consecrated. Both sacramentally and pastorally the change was transformative. The Holy Spirit had led us into the Body of Christ. Metropolitan Joseph proved an excellent pastor: a warm, open-hearted father and wise counselor, above all grounded in the faith. He brought normalcy to holiness and holiness to normalcy. The parishioners looked forward to his visits and enjoyed spending time with him. Their collective image of the Church was completed with the union of Spirit and Body.

Living up to that image of God, joining to it the likeness of God by one’s way of life, is a separate issue. We’ve seen somewhat the pattern of how this works (or doesn’t) a couple times in the narrative thus far. I have had and am still having to instantiate that pattern, that likeness, in my own life. It has not gone smoothly! Alas, I’m an American. I remember after my baptism I was asked about the experience and how I felt. My response was that I knew I was experiencing great blessedness, but that it was not yet the blessedness felt by those whose souls had been proved by trials and tribulations. I knew even then that that end state was rather my goal. Among my generation in the Brotherhood, I was far from alone in having ahead of me unimaginable trials, scandals, and falls. Once again, an awkward burden presents itself; I can only aim to be respectful of other people’s stories as I tell of my own separate, sometimes lonely relationship with the tradition of the Church.

The semester of college after my chrismation, I was to stumble hard over my intellect as I continued striving to integrate my whole self into the Church. When I conceived a desire to be a monk, my instinct was to wrap up my education early and forsake it. My appetite for knowledge, my drive for intellectual mastery, was a stumbling block that I wished to avoid by means of sacrifice. Just stop studying. I think the seeds for this inclination were sown in me from observing my parents as a child. I distinctly remember in a restaurant once hearing my mother lament bitterly that my father “was always right.” Being right was supposed to be a good thing, so it was intriguing to hear my mother, to whose perspective I was naturally sympathetic since my father was so angry all the time, express that there were contexts in which this was certainly not the case. I didn’t want to be right if it meant not being good — if it meant transgressing love.

In college I was studying philosophy and art and religion, not necessarily in that order; I was in a program where I made up my own major and was given freedom to study broadly. I was just hungrily devouring knowledge. There’s this phrase, “getting out over one’s skis,” used for when one’s head gets too far ahead of one’s feet, portending a crash. My knowledge far exceeded my grounding in virtue, the thing that justifies possession of knowledge. I knew it; I knew I had to draw back and slow down. Funnily enough, this knowing was already a crash. I had a friend at church who for his degree wrote a thesis that was not intellectually successful, and he knew it was not successful, though he humbly gave it to me to read anyway. As I read it and was critiquing it negatively in my thoughts, I endured an inner conflict I struggle to describe in words. I resented how this negative critique played out in my head, how this application of knowledge seemed to come between me and my brother. If he was sticking to it like a heretic, maybe that might have been different? But that’s not what was happening. He tried something, knew he came up short, got a passing grade, and was moving on with his life. But at this point in my life, by means of knowledge my head was getting way too far out over my feet. I relatedly did poorly on a philosophy test, and decided to withdraw from all but my language classes. I lost that semester and took the next semester off too. I took a pilgrimage to Alaska in the summer, which was a good use of time while I was there, but in the spring and fall when I should have been taking classes, I was too often idle instead. When I did return to school, I found I had forfeited my half-tuition scholarship. This really derailed my life.

That was 2001. With the help of the Church, I pieced myself together enough to finish my degree by the end of 2002. That brief period when the light dimmed was just a taste of what lay ahead for me. From having read Archimandrite Sophrony of Essex’s Saint Silouan the Athonite, however, I had the means to understand the pattern of what was happening. He writes,

The Staretz [Silouan] knew the trail by experience. He would point out the three main stages along the route. The first — the acquisition of grace. The second, when grace is lost. And the third when grace returns or is acquired anew through the ascetic toil of humility. Many people have received grace, and not only those in the Church but outside the Church, too, for God is no respecter of persons. No one, however, has preserved their initial grace, and only a very few have acquired it again. Whoever has not experienced this second period, whoever has not gone through the ascetic struggle for the return of grace, is virtually lacking in authentic spiritual knowledge.¹

Likewise — and I only read this in recent years — St. Isaac the Syrian (7th c.) offers the gentle analogy of a mother teaching her little son how to walk. At first holding the child, she will then stand back from him and call him to come to her of his own power. He will stumble and fall, and she will rush to catch him and lift him up.² St. Isaac ends the metaphor there, but it seems to me that if the child continually falls, even as he matures, that eventually a loving mother will have to leave him on the ground until he gets up and walks already. To the near-sighted child, each time the mother stands back feels like the abandonment of grace, but it is in fact the outcome of love and wisdom on the part of the mother. The child possesses the nature to walk and will not be fulfilled unless he honors the love of his parents and becomes like them. The threefold pattern that St. Sophrony describes happens on different fractal levels of one’s life, and the length of that intermediate abandonment can be quite elastic. The eternal Lord’s patience and longsuffering can easily outlast the prodigality of finite humans, and will do so as long as a chance for redemption remains.

Fr. George Calciu (1925–2006)

The living example of this truth given me and my generation in the American Church at this time was Fr. George Calciu — the legacy of St. Paisius Velichkovsky returns. Born in rural Romania in 1925, Fr. George Calciu had a very blessed childhood. The hesychastic spirit that blossomed in that land with St. Paisius a century and a half before survived in the forests and monasteries and filtered down to the people. Fr. George was the youngest of eleven children, and his mother was very holy. She raised him with tender wisdom, and already as a young boy he had miraculous experiences like seeing a field transform into a vision of Uncreated Light. But as a medical student in 1948, he protested the replacement of religion with Marxist ideology in newly communist Romania, and along with many, many others was arrested. After nearly a decade of confinement, he and fellow students were placed in Pitești prison where the most notorious psychological tortures would be implemented. Prisoners were made to torture each other in the most extreme, most dehumanizing ways, to incite a self-replicating cycle of abuse that was inescapable. This particular program lasted three years. Fr. George (not yet a priest) was made to renounce his mother, his family, his faith, his God — not just once, but ritually, in a transformative way. Preferring not to become an abuser himself in the later stages of reprogramming, he attempted suicide once but was prevented. The objective was to rewrite the personalities of these men and then disperse them into other prisons as agents of destruction. In the other prisons, however, is where Fr. George met pious older men, priests and monks who were prepared by experience to suffer for Christ. And for a couple years he was kept in an underground cell with three fellow survivors of Pitești and saw in them the irreducible beauty of the human image, most powerfully in one Christian who suffered unbearably from tuberculosis and died. The love and the forgiveness and the endurance in the Spirit that these Christian prisoners showed Fr. George rescued his soul from the abyss. By the time he and a million other political prisoners were granted general amnesty in 1964 (a condition of Romania joining the U.N.), he had reclaimed his Christian faith, and the desire was born in him to become a priest.

As a priest he taught in seminary and developed bonds with his students through prayer groups and trips to monasteries. In 1978 he was emboldened to preach a series of sermons during Lent that were critical of the communist regime. They had a huge impact on young people, and Fr. George was imprisoned again. The torment and isolation were again at full volume, but he was prepared for it this time and survived with his faith intact. He viewed the persecution as an expiation. International notoriety concerning his imprisonment led him to be released to house arrest in 1984, and exiled to America in 1985, settling eventually in Alexandria, Virginia. Fr. Seraphim Rose at the end of his life in 1982 had taken great interest in Fr. George Calciu and had begun publishing English translations of his sermons to the youth. The St. Herman Brotherhood, particularly the women monastics among them, maintained this interest and got to know him when he came to America. Fr. George took an interest also in the Christ the Savior Brotherhood and visited their parishes. Once in the nineties he drove up to Boston with some young people and regaled my parish (before my time there) with Romanian singing. During church services at Brotherhood parishes, however, he would stand in the back and not concelebrate. Thus with his presence he showed his love and care for the community, while with his abstinence from serving, he called attention to their lack of communion with the Church. In 2000 when the Brotherhood strove to fix their situation, Fr. George’s council was sought and appreciated. His advice at the time was that they should join the Church however they could. About Monk Herman Podmoshensky, Fr. George felt great pain of heart. Coming from the background of the deepest abuse imaginable, he said he prayed for Fr. Herman five times a day, recognizing in his prayers that Fr. Herman’s missionary labors, in America and in Russia, had brought more people to the faith than he had.

Then in 2003 I helped organize a conference of young people in Boston that brought in Fr. George as the keynote speaker. Again he was preaching to young adults. I met him and received his blessing. My priest learned from him a technique of prayer that was forged in prison, and it was then passed on to me. Fr. George, whose prayers had worked the most heart-rending wonders of repentance in prison, was yet adamant that he had not attained the ceaseless prayer of the heart that others had, many of whom he had met and observed. As for me, I am even much farther down the chain, a confession I make not out of humility but so as to avoid any confusion. Nonetheless the Church’s tradition of hesychastic prayer has reached me, and I do hang on to the fringes of it — unworthy as I have been to progress any farther than that.

So it was 2003, I was 23 years old, still wanting to be a monk, and now I had finished the college degree required of me for doing so. I was done with the mad consumption of knowledge that puffed up my pride and made virtue more difficult. I had not been back to Platina, but I had maintained correspondence with Fr. Damascene and had visited the St. Herman Brotherhood’s skete in Alaska. With my priest, and with counsel from Abbot Gerasim of Platina, I approached my bishop, Metropolitan Joseph, about pursuing the monastic life at St. Herman Monastery. His suggestion was that I go to seminary first. My priest beamed with agreement. Through correspondence I learned that Abbot Gerasim also agreed enthusiastically. I just wanted a path of repentance. But as was the case when I originally conceived my desire to join a monastery, down in that hole in St. Paisius Abbey, I needed God’s will to be done and not my own. Through my bishop, my priest, and the abbot to whom I hoped to be in obedience, God’s will could not have been any clearer. I was going to seminary — and, against my will, furthering my studies.

First I made a month-long pilgrimage to Platina. I had actually yet to meet in person the man behind the monastery’s reinvention, Abbot Gerasim, but now I did so. I was meeting what I now feel is the most important man in my life. Hieromonk Damascene, for one, had met Fr. Seraphim Rose and was converted by his teachings, but when the date for his baptism came, Fr. Seraphim was on his death bed in the hospital and couldn’t perform it. Fr. Herman baptized him instead, and all Fr. Damascene’s subsequent formation occurred under him. Fr. Gerasim had converted earlier, however, and not through the St. Herman Brotherhood. He was a novice in the monastery under Fr. Seraphim Rose for over a year before the latter’s passing, confessing to him regularly and practicing revelation of thoughts with him four to five times a week. He was tonsured a monk at the time of Fr. Seraphim’s burial, over his coffin at the grave site. In just a couple years, once Abbot Herman was suspended, he’d be the only monastic brother left in the brotherhood who dated to the era of Fr. Seraphim, besides of course the suspended abbot and co-founder.

Discipline at Platina quickly deteriorated during this time. The original missionary aspect of the St. Herman Brotherhood came to be stressed far above the monastic, especially in cooperation with the Holy Order of MANS/Christ the Savior Brotherhood. There was constant traveling and scarce stability — and where stability was found, it was joined with isolation. Young Fr. Gerasim spent 1983–1986 in Alaska, on Spruce Island, largely away from his abbot and spiritual father. When he returned to Platina, Abbot Herman often wasn’t there, leaving him responsible for keeping order. Around 1990–1991 when St. Paisius Abbey was founded, that became the consistent base of Fr. Herman instead. And then Fr. Gerasim did his fair share of traveling as well: Mt. Athos, Italy, back to Alaska, Russia after the fall of communism, and most significantly Georgia, where his encounter with sanctity and community was most influential.... In 1994, Abbot Herman aimed to have Monks Gerasim and Damascene ordained to the priesthood. They were under Pangratios, but Fr. Gerasim by this time had seen enough of the Orthodox world to know he wanted nothing to do with him. They went to Russia where the writings of Fr. Seraphim Rose were immensely popular and Fr. Herman had connections. I don’t know how this worked; it is highly irregular, but the Metropolitan of St. Petersburg ordained the two monks. In 2000 when all the priests ordained by Pangratios had to be re-ordained, Frs. Gerasim and Damascene did not have to be. Russia in the nineties was a wild place.

Back in the States, however, the ecclesial position of the Brotherhood was not good, even as it was more active than ever before. Fr. Gerasim has written,

It is painful to me, even now, that I remained in schism all that time. Since I had a slightly broader experience of the Church than the other monks, I should have been the one to put my foot down or leave. I was not silenced when I disagreed or objected, but was often mocked and ridiculed. I grew to avoid direct conflict. I gradually accepted what was taking place. Perhaps this is why Abbot Herman was content for me to remain in the monastery and deal with day-to-day matters. I had acquired considerable knowledge of many aspects of the monastic life and the monastery functioned smoothly in his absence.³

The years 1996 through most of 1998 were spent by Fr. Gerasim in Alaska, and then a few months in Russia. He returned to run things in Platina for a bit, but then was off to Georgia for the St. Nino’s Way pilgrimage of 1999. That’s when I missed him at St. Paisius Abbey. The profundity of his fellowship with the Church in Georgia was making his ecclesial position unbearable. When he returned to California in September, he was called to a meeting at St. Paisius Abbey. Those that incited the final revolt against Monk Herman were the ones that were actually spending time with him, those that became privy to his immorality, and had the pastoral consequences laid on their shoulders: the leadership of the Abbey and the priests of the Christ the Savior Brotherhood, my very instructors at the missionary school that July. Fr. Gerasim was immediately of one mind with the others and went on more travels in search of an ecclesial home, to Jerusalem and Georgia specifically, but neither of those paths worked out. Nonetheless, that April, as I was being baptized on Lazarus Saturday, Fr. Gerasim was being called on to consummate the two Brotherhoods’ heroic stand. He writes,

One of the most sorrowful events of my life took place during Holy Week, 2000. I traveled at the end of Lent to Spruce Island. I informed Abbot Herman that not only his monks and nuns but a large group of priests who had been his spiritual children were formally requesting him to step down as abbot, to stop serving the Divine services and to return to California to take up residence outside the St. Xenia Skete at Wildwood, California, to cease offering spiritual counsel, and to lead a life of repentance and reclusion. It may be hard for those who read this to understand how difficult that experience was. I had to communicate this to a person whom I had hitherto regarded as my spiritual father, to whom I had hitherto shown obedience, to a person who had set himself above the law, above the Church, and above the censure of the Church.⁴

The difficulty was never lost on me. I was in awe of what it must have taken to accomplish this. The United States of America is a country founded on revolution, on rebellion. How do you baptize such a culture? Such rebellion from authority when embraced is what leads to personalities like Monk Herman’s. How do you turn that inside out and integrate it into the Church? Here was a path of fulfillment, an image of rebellion put in its proper place: in obedience to the Church of Christ — performed not but with a pain of heart reminiscent of Gethsemane. I wanted more than ever to join this monastery, which would now be in the Serbian Church and was actively and successfully stressing stability and regularity in its monastic life. I had to go to seminary first, a three-year program; that was the deal. In the meantime I spent summer breaks, and one Christmas break as well, at Platina schooling myself in obedience under Abbot Gerasim’s direction.

Despite myself, but in likelihood to my benefit (so I reluctantly admit), my seminary studies were transformative. That is where I went deep in patristic study, focusing especially on St. Maximus the Confessor but reading also, for example, plenty of Gregories: the Theologian, of Nyssa, Palamas. I learned Church history much deeper than I had before. I read the Philokalia — previously I had held such advanced reading at arm’s length, as beyond my station, focusing on hagiography instead, but now I had cause to read it just to deal responsibly and prayerfully with my academic tasks. And then there was my reading of Scripture. In my seminary studies is where I discovered a formalistic method for reading Scripture that incorporated patristic contemplation. For my thesis I developed a chiastic fractal model of the Gospel according to Matthew.

All of this learning, as I suspected it would, proved acclimating to a life of monastic obedience — which I began in earnest when I finally joined the monastery in 2006 — more difficult. At least that’s how it appeared to me. I would have had trouble in the kitchen in any event, it is true, and that was my most devastating obedience, so ill-equipped was my psyche for planning and cooking large meals all by myself, for a week at a time. But when it wasn’t my week in hell cooking all the meals, I was still having a hell of a time battling my ongoing prideful addiction to knowledge over virtue. The summer before I arrived in Platina, I was sent on one last academic journey by Abbot Gerasim: a two-month immersive course in the ancient Greek language at University College Cork in Ireland. I always managed good grades in language courses (Spanish and Russian), but never seemed close to actually escaping my prison of monolinguality. Studying ancient Greek was different. I was actually picking it up. But when I got to the monastery, that learning wasn’t nurtured. I felt like I had been given a baby and then was ordered to watch it wither with starvation. I was asked to check some Greek patristic quotations for Fr. Damascene here and there, but not nearly enough to develop my faculty for the language. Also, while in Ireland that summer, as a side project I studied Genesis. It was then that I first discovered the fivefold fractal pattern that I would write about in “The Cosmic Chiasmus.” Abbot Gerasim readily blessed my Scriptural contemplations in the monastery, even once when I was near convinced I should give them up. However he never blessed me with any time to do them. I was burning with desire to test the pattern in other books of Scripture, and perhaps find other patterns, but besides maybe a couple hours on Sunday, and whatever time I could bear to steal from sleep at night, reading the Bible (apart from the Psalms in church) was not part of my monastic schedule.

This was by design, and it was the design that I had so actively been seeking. Obedience over knowledge. This was what I had wanted. But after seminary I had crossed a line that I couldn’t overcome. Assisting Fr. Damascene on publishing matters, I chafed at what I viewed as his utilitarian approach to the writings of the Church Fathers, unable to fulfill simple requests without inward resistance and grumbling. In my thoughts I “knew better.” But let’s say that I did, even: what good would it avail if I lacked humility the way that I did? I was out over my skis — way out. I had not wanted to go to seminary. But it was God’s will for me to go to seminary. This was the trial that God must have wanted for me. I was being abandoned by God’s grace. Attempts to get up and walk toward my retreating mother were not successful. Continually forcing myself to fulfill daily obediences, I found myself angry all the time. I was startled to find one day, as I stood over Fr. Seraphim’s grave trying to pray, the distinct impression that within my heart I had lost the ability to repent.

Other than that, things were great. The outward life of the monastery, that which didn’t depend on my virtue, was paradise. Living on a wooded mountain off the grid, using woodstoves for heat in the winter, having no escape from heat in the summer, sleeping on wood plank beds with just a little padding, lighting the church at night and in the early morning with nothing but candles, a full daily liturgical schedule in English that started at 4:30 AM, constant access to the sacraments... I loved it. Above all I had an abbot I trusted. This was the greatest blessing, perhaps of my life. I trusted Abbot Gerasim the way one is supposed to. It wasn’t idolatrous. I had no illusions of him being a perfect man. But I trusted that even if he made a mistake in his spiritual direction of me, that that was the mistake that God meant for me to endure for my edification. This was the joy and the freedom that one seeks in life. It occurs in such a relationship of obedience.

But here I was standing at Fr. Seraphim’s grave, captive to my will, reaching down for my faculty of repentance and finding it missing. My heart was a stone.

I got really sick. The timeline is fuzzy and doesn’t make sense to me, but at some point my stomach started burning up. It would regularly happen in the morning that I’d wake up feeling fine enough, but then at some point during the morning church services my empty stomach would inflame. This happened reliably regardless of how I was doing psychologically. I could be at peace, and it would still burn. My ability to digest foods began to deteriorate. Then a really wicked flu did the rounds at the monastery, and I was undone. I have never been sicker in my life. I couldn’t eat anything, my stomach was in such tremendous pain. From the incessant coughing my whole chest and back were in agony, and I could hardly bear to lie down from the pain throughout my back and the incessant, ceaseless, non-stop coughing. My lungs hurt to breathe. Oh, I couldn’t eat, sleep, or breathe is all. The sleep deprivation in this state was sheer torture. This went on for a week maybe, I’m not sure how long.

I somehow survived the flu. My gut didn’t recover. My diet from this point on would be extremely limited. I would get sick very easily. I needed more rest. Seemingly my daily morning sickness could be avoided if I slept through it. Medicines and diagnostic tests from the clinic in town an hour away were not very helpful. Amidst all the struggles I’ve described both spiritually and physically, I thrice approached Abbot Gerasim in despair of being able to go on at the monastery. Three different times, spread apart by I don’t know how much, I approached him ready to quit, and all three times he convinced me to stay on and keep trying. If I recall correctly, the third time was during the short period after the abbot had already announced the unthinkable.

In 2009, when Fr. Gerasim gathered the brotherhood to tell us he was leaving, I immediately felt the abandonment and the trauma of it. When I was fourteen and my father left, I was so relieved because he was so angry. Now my father was leaving again, and I was so upset, because he was so meek. Though Fr. Gerasim spoke of having struggled badly with anger in his earlier monastic years, by the time I knew him, life had beaten it out of him. I never saw him angry. Once I witnessed him on the phone with a pilgrim who was to be picked up for transport to the monastery. A long-term guest of the monastery was sent to pick him up on an especially hot summer day, and he was waiting a very long time. On the phone it was sorted out that the pilgrim had neglectfully traveled to an entirely different city from the one he told us. Overhearing this, I became, on behalf of the guest sent to pick him up, who now had to drive a long distance to a different city, very frustrated and mad. Fr. Gerasim did not skip a beat in responding to the pilgrim with kindness and patience. I was amazed. I relied on that patience. Perhaps too much I relied on that patience.

What happened was that in November of 2008, while the newly recessed nation was swept up in enthusiasm for hope and change in electoral politics, the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), stunned by their own financial scandal, elected for their new Metropolitan their own version of a well-spoken, inexperienced newcomer, Abbot Jonah Puffhausen. This monastic Californian convert, who had been raised to the rank of bishop just eleven days prior, represented a huge, shocking change from the OCA’s past leaders, typically East Coast Carpatho-Russian administrators. And Abbot Jonah was a good friend of the St. Herman Monastery — more than that, he was Fr. Gerasim’s godfather, having been instrumental to Fr. Gerasim’s conversion when the two were in college. When Fr. Gerasim first visited Platina and met Fr. Seraphim Rose in 1980, he was joining young Abbot Jonah on the trip. Abbot Jonah started a Californian monastery in 1996 that in 2006 (the same time I moved to Platina) moved its location up to Manton opposite Platina at the very top of the Central Valley. Though in different jurisdictions, we were sister monasteries and often visited each other. Now the abbot of Manton was the head of the whole OCA, which had episcopal vacancies to fill, notably in Alaska. Metropolitan Jonah requested and received Abbot Gerasim’s transfer from the Serbian Church to the OCA. He was to attend seminary that fall, 2009, in preparation of possible consecration as a bishop.

The Platina I knew, and of course this was remarkably different from the past, was a monastery that stressed stability. Fr. Gerasim spoke Spanish and Russian and knew Slavonic, but he didn’t know Serbian. The Serbian Church was never going to be interested in a convert bishop, let alone one that didn’t speak Serbian. He was never in danger of being pulled away from the monastic life like this, or so I thought. I never in a million years thought this could have been possible. When I came under Fr. Gerasim’s direction, I expected this to be an opportunity for a lifelong commitment. Instead, I was facing the distinct impression that God was terminating the relationship because I proved unworthy of it, freeing my spiritual father for more promising pastures.

For a successor as abbot at Platina, Fr. Gerasim handpicked a man I respected, who had only recently been made a priest. He was a previously married man, having been twice widowed. He was a man with a big heart, who had known a lot of pain, and had a gentle demeanor. He had a daughter who was also a monastic. He was an excellent builder and craftsman, being skilled in all aspects of construction. I had good reason to give the situation a chance, but it did not work out between us. Mine is such a complicated soul that only spiritual fathers with exceptional pastoral range seem to be able to cover it. I was outside of this new abbot’s range, it was clear. His last words to me in confession were filled with frustration: “I haven’t the words to help you.” In subsequent confessions he said nothing at all. I was so educated, I had such great spiritual knowledge, that my sinful will was fortified on all sides. I saw his predicament — and I couldn’t help him either.

It had been three and a half years since I joined the monastery. It was 2010. I was thirty years old. I was a novice in a monastery, but I had no spiritual father. It was a monastic brotherhood, but I had no brothers either. I was the youngest member for as long as I was there. None of my friends or acquaintances from the world, either from the Christ the Savior Brotherhood or from seminary were coming to join me. Looking around, you’d think I was the future of the monastery, which gave me absolutely no confidence. Physically I was so sick, it had been a year since I was able to participate fully in the monastic schedule. Something else that really wore on my conscience was that the fathers of the monastery relied on state welfare to pay their medical bills. Out in the world there was a generation-defining financial crisis, and the state of California was having major budgetary problems. My uncle worked as a translator in the Marin County Courthouse and was having his paychecks withheld because the county couldn’t afford to pay him. Though the monastery lived communally and supported itself through publishing and donations, when receiving medical care we all took welfare as individuals with no income. This terrible clinic I was going to, which functioned largely as an outlet for the pharmaceutical corporations, offered me no real help and did so at high cost to the state. Perpetuating this situation felt like cold-hearted dereliction toward my Californian neighbors.

Amidst all these calamities, though, there was one that would prove especially disastrous moving forward, though in another context it might have been a tremendous boon. I remember the moment very clearly but not all the surrounding facts. It was late in my term at the monastery, probably a Sunday afternoon. I had a bit of precious free time, so I went to my cell to set about to do what I habitually did, which was study Scripture. I didn’t get far when I lost interest. I stopped. I shut the bulky IBM ThinkPad, I closed the book.... I stared out the window. It had finally happened; it was done. My desire for knowledge had been slain.

Towards the end of Lent, I informed the abbot of my resolve to leave the monastery, my intention being to stay through Holy Week and Pascha and leave the week after. He did not react well. I was in very bad shape physically. Having once been lead chanter, I seldom sang anymore because it hurt to use my diaphragm, but on Lazarus Saturday, the ten-year anniversary of my baptism, I forced myself to sing the Liturgy. Afterwards I was in so much pain I could hardly walk. It was the last time I would chant or read in Church for a long time. I was concerned about my durability during the long services late in Holy Week, which I couldn’t bear to miss. But the abbot was being very strict with me in the beginning of the week, despite that I had already told him I was leaving. It was disturbing because his reaction suggested he didn’t understand how obedience worked. I was concerned about how the rest of Holy Week was going to transpire and how I was going to attend the services. My sister lived in the Bay Area but five minutes away from an excellent little parish that I always enjoyed going to. I worked it out such that if I left at a certain time on Wednesday, I could be there in time for the evening service and Holy Unction, and I wouldn’t miss anything. I boxed up all my books (which were a lot) so the fathers wouldn’t have to. Later I’d give them an address to ship them to. One by one I located all the fathers and asked forgiveness of them and said goodbye. They hadn’t known I was leaving. I could tell that the older monks were hurt to see me go, having seen so many other departures in previous eras. My sister came at the right time to pick me up. The last thing I did at the monastery was go to Fr. Seraphim’s grave and beg him for forgiveness, and for help. Then I left. But to say goodbye to one of the senior monks, on my way out I had to go to a house in the village of Platina where at the moment he was tending to the needs of Fr. Herman. Staying outside, I saw the disgraced monastic founder through a door, and he smiled and waved. I doubt he recognized me from eleven years prior. We had zero interaction my entire time in the monastery; he was truly banished.

The priest at this little parish in the Bay Area had an excellent voice. The way he read the Passion Gospels Thursday evening was so haunting; in my desperate state, in sharp physical pain that spread throughout all my bowels, completely uncertain of my future such that I felt I was facing death, I perceived I was hearing a live account of events that were happening very close by me.

After Pascha and Bright Week (which included Annunciation that year), I began a trip across the country, looking for where I should go and what I should do. I still retained the rank and dress of a novice monk; the abbot allowed me to remain a novice as I searched. Starting in San Francisco I said goodbye to the relics of St. John, but not before praying in his presence as much as I could. I went to St. Anthony’s Monastery in Arizona, to spend time there in prayer and to seek counsel from Elder Paisios. A year earlier, while still at the monastery, I was blessed to make a similar trip. At that time Elder Paisios counseled me only to be patient and pray. That was hard to hear in the midst of my struggles as it was already all I could think to do on my own. But I took it as a word from God and tried to apply it. Now fourteen months later I was back, having left my monastery. He called my attention to the importance of tears and warned me against pride. It occurred to me that tears indeed were of great importance at this juncture in my life, but that they were largely absent.

The very same day I encountered Hieromonk Dorotheus visiting from Safford three hours away, and I spoke with him too. Safford was whither the women of St. Paisius Abbey moved, and Fr. Dorotheus with them, after leaving the St. Herman Brotherhood in 2000; I was familiar with him from there. I was struck this day by the difference in pastoral conversations that these two men, Elder Paisios and Fr. Dorotheus, conducted with me. With Fr. Dorotheus, the tone was warm, with human connections and familiarity. Not so with Elder Paisios, whose concentration was on prayer to Christ. I appreciated the beauty and rightness of both styles. I figured my soul required more of the former, though. At Platina I did not behave with familiarity toward any of the fathers. As I said before, I had no brothers; the only one I spoke with openly was Fr. Gerasim. This did not work. I needed friends, brothers, but I wasn’t finding any. These Greek monasteries that Elder Ephraim had started in the States (I also visited Holy Archangels in Texas), I admired them greatly, but I never felt them to be a possible fit for me. At this point I wasn’t healthy enough for them anyways.

Other highlights on my journey included making it to New Jersey in time to see consecrated as bishop my dean and spiritual father while in seminary, Fr. Michael Dahulich. While there I saw friends from seminary, and I saw Fr. Gerasim. He was enjoying his time at seminary. He would be there for three years; pursuing my bygone relationship with him was thus not an option because he was off the pastoral market. God had clearly relieved him of his duties toward me. Speaking with me then, he encouraged me to accept the medical help that I was being offered. There was a deacon in Pittsburgh who was a doctor and offered to see me. I indeed had great spiritual sickness and great physical sickness, and I didn’t know how to address either one or in what order. So I took Fr. Gerasim’s advice and went to my father’s in Pittsburgh. The one novel suggestion the deacon doctor gave me was taking medication for anxiety. I was always skeptical of psychiatric drugs, at least in my own case. But I got the prescription and tried it. I swear I never felt so anxious as I did on those pills. I stopped taking them and felt better. So yet another path came quickly to a dead end.

In retracing the steps of my life, I did not neglect returning to my parish in Boston. On one level I enjoyed seeing again these people that I loved, but it was strikingly obvious to me throughout my stay that I did not belong there anymore. I was never supposed to come back, certainly not as a broken man in search of healing. Not dissimilarly I visited my old seminary at St. Tikhon’s in the Poconos of Pennsylvania and for a short while stayed at the monastery there. Forced by my poor health into idiorrhythmic necessities, I felt at conflict with the communal life Abbot Sergius was building, he having inherited a community with an overly idiorrhythmic recent past. Again I was alienated.

In my travels I was not not going to visit my mother. She had settled in Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. It was to her that I had my books shipped, until I found out where I’d be living. Eventually, and this wasn’t a linear progression, I settled down with her. My family, unchurched and in a state of divorce as it was, was the only thing left to me. I forget when, some winter day probably — though not at my mother’s because I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction; probably at my father’s — I came to terms with the fact that my monastic life was over. My cassock and monastic belt, which I had been wearing this whole time, I removed. I had lost. For a monastic, all aspects of life become bound up with the monastery. It is at once your home, your spouse, your family, your job, your income, your insurance, your mission, your prospects for the future, your retirement plan — I lost everything at once, along with my health.

On my trip across the country, while driving a rental car somewhere in the plains states, I was parked at a gas station, and I heard a song on the radio, to which I related all too much. Truly, “I never knew the dark could be so deep....”

At my mother’s I at first maintained a full cycle of prayers from the Horologion. Doing them on my own, I came to memorize them like never before. Memorizing Psalm 118, all 176 verses of which I recited every day as part of Midnight Office, became a project. I eventually did it, but by the time I did, my energy was waning. I hadn’t the moral strength on my own to keep it up. My memory of the psalm quickly faded. Worst of all there was not a good church for me to attend nearby. I had to drive into D.C. two hours away to attend services. Doing this for Liturgies was prohibitive due to my health which was at its worst in the mornings. I would attend evening Vigils at the Russian Cathedral. I liked it there. But I made no friends; I couldn’t participate in parish life. I never failed to attend Holy Week and Pascha, but to my shame I admit I went years without sacraments.

My health was something that I could positively work on. Removing stress and sleeping in were helpful. It allowed me to pay attention to foods more closely. Gradually, with rest, my gastritis healed, which was a great relief, but my problem was revealed to be intestinal. I still wasn’t digesting food properly and was constantly sick. Once, in February 2012, I ate something I shouldn’t have, or in an order I shouldn’t have, and became dangerously ill, requiring hospitalization. If I hadn’t got intravenous hydration, I feel something very bad could have happened. But the cause of my dysfunction remained unknown. Doctors had ruled out all the known culprits. I got a book from the Mayo Clinic that had a section on digestion. After the mouth and trachea was the stomach, and the book listed all these things that could go wrong in the stomach. At the end was the large intestine, and the book listed all the things that could go wrong in the large intestine. In the middle was the small intestine, and the book said 90% of all digestion occurred there. But there wasn’t any list of things that could go wrong with it. If 90% of digestion occurs there, surely there’s a host of ways that gets messed up. But no, it was a complete blind spot. I guess if you can’t reach it with a camera, modern medicine will conclude it’s not important. I stopped wasting time, energy, and money looking for a cure from the healthcare system. I concentrated on rest and diet, paying attention to how different modes of eating affected me and finding the ones that didn’t hurt as much.

For a long while I forsook the Church’s fasting because I figured my diet was limited enough. I finally gave that up and reapplied myself to the fast regardless of how difficult it was. In this I discovered the tremendous power of the Church’s fasting schedule for keeping one in communion with others. Besides some anonymous church attendance, it was largely all I had, and yet I still noticed a significant difference for the better. I always knew abstractly that Church tradition identified the fight with gluttony as the beginning of spiritual warfare, but I had never begun in earnest to make real that tradition in my life. At the monastery, living on a mountain, frequently engaged in physical activity, I felt a strong need for caloric intake and could hardly restrain my appetite. I believe now though that that appetite had even more to do with my impassioned soul and the attachment to the flesh that attends pride. On a daily basis whether I’m hungry or not is not of course unrelated to the body, but it has more to do with the soul and where its attention lies. As the years went on, it was harder and harder not to see my illness as spiritually providential. I was never going to tame my stomach on my own, so God sent an angel of His left hand to strike me.

Fasting, besides its communal and ascetic benefits, also helps you keep time. You never forget what day of the week it is when Wednesday and Friday are fast days. The cyclical liturgical structure of the Church then becomes embedded in your life. The same can be said regarding the four seasonal fasts. The years, however, the years still tend to blend together, and that’s definitely what happened throughout my thirties. The only reason I can identify the year of my hospitalization is that it occurred on a Super Bowl Sunday that can be easily looked up. Where no such landmarks exist, it’s a complete blur, and I experienced it as a blur as it happened. I had no friends. I spent a lot of time watching movies, my love for the medium having been first reawakened by Turner Classic Movies on television. My desire for knowledge remained dead; my books remained in their boxes in the storage room. When a full translation of St. Maximus’s Ambigua appeared in 2014, I noticed and bought a copy for my collection, but didn’t read it. I had no cause to. But my desire for film grew — not dissipative entertainment, mind, but art films, historic films demonstrating the origins of cinematic language, and foreign films as windows into other cultures. This ended up being very important. I have no life if I don’t desire God, but I can’t turn my desire to God unless I have desire in the first place. Those years of languor after leaving the monastery were caused, I believe, as much by the death of my intellectual desire as by anything else.

An idea took root in me, I don’t know when, maybe beginning around 2016. I had an idea for a movie, a screenplay I might write. It would put into practice my ideas of chiastic fractals in a creative way. I didn’t begin to take the thought seriously until there occurred to me a way to incorporate ascetic themes into the story. It could be an edifying story, one that made use of some of my dusty old spiritual knowledge. It simultaneously occurred to me that I hadn’t had a meaningful conversation with another soul for several years. At this point I didn’t remember what year I left the monastery and traveled the country. It has only been through subsequent investigation that I figured that out. All I knew was that subjectively I was in a land far, far away from anyone else and had been so for a long time. And my thought told me clearly and distinctly that if I didn’t begin to write, I might never communicate with another soul ever again. I began a creative endeavor. It involved a little reading.

During this time — the actual chronology is impossible to recover, so this is very impressionistic — I kept going to the cathedral in D.C., and a familiar face started turning up there, not your average parishioner but a bishop. Metropolitan Jonah Puffhausen had been unceremoniously booted out of OCA leadership, for reasons I’ve never fully understood and haven’t looked deeply into. I never had a great deal of trust in the way the OCA operates. Then in 2015 (so the internet tells me) he was released to join ROCOR, provided he not serve over a diocese. He had a house in Alexandria, Virginia and was attending the cathedral frequently. One time I greeted him; he recognized me, and I reintroduced myself.

It was a slow process that I undertook with hesitancy and discomfort. Since leaving the monastery I had felt like a veteran from a war that no one knew or cared about. But I went to see Metropolitan Jonah once, then eventually another time. I remember asking him about my idea to write and he blessed it. I figured since he was the one who took my abbot away, and then showed up in Virginia where I was years later, that God intended me to be his problem now. Through confession and the Eucharist, he would restore me to the communion of the Church. At first I couldn’t bring myself to confess in church the way it’s normally done. I required separate sessions, and Vladika indulged me. Gradually I became more functional and needed less special attention.

In conjunction with the spiritual healing, I found a probiotic that I believe has been helping my gut health. I still have a very limited diet and can get sick easily, but I am incrementally less disabled. I started waking up mornings and going to Liturgy without damaging my health. These days I’m fasting better than I ever have before. The covid era lit a fire under me. In all my darkest days I was never not in church for Holy Week and Pascha. And then suddenly no one was allowed. As “consolation” we bore the horrific insult of watching a live feed of an empty cathedral on Pascha. There are certain landmarks in my life every ten years. My first year of life was 1980 after being born at the end of 1979. In 1990 at age ten I was inducted into the American mythology and quantum diabolism of Twin Peaks on television. The year 2000 I was baptized and subsequently chrismated into the Orthodox Church — and there were events around my baptism that typologically reversed my initiation into Lynchian electromagnetism ten years prior. The year 2010 marked my departure from the monastery and the total collapse of my life. Then in 2020, after completing a screenplay that was in part a response to the mythology of Twin Peaks — I was made to spend Pascha watching church on a computer. I have a hunch that in future pandemics, authorities will have a much harder time keeping people out of churches.

The Church does not exist on a computer, nor can it be digitally replicated by videos, live streams, articles, or podcasts. Nor can you learn it by reading books. The Church exists only in her own media, by which I primarily mean persons, body-and-spirit persons. Persons with long histories, histories that can sometimes be troubling. But persons whose lives have been touched by the three Persons of the one God in Trinity. I now live in Pennsylvania 40 minutes from a parish that I regularly attend, singing in the choir and serving as a reader. I confess and receive communion regularly. I keep a daily prayer rule. I sometimes, by God’s grace, shed painful tears of repentance for all that I have lost and for all the people I have failed. I had a tearful reunion with Fr. Gerasim when I attended his consecration to the episcopacy in Dallas in 2021, having a meaningful reunion there also with Hieromonk Damascene, now abbot of Platina. I’m not married and don’t want to be. I lack obedience, and I miss it very much. In person, Metropolitan Jonah blessed me to begin writing on The Symbolic World, and in person he blessed me to start a Substack. I am solely responsible for the things that I write.

1. Archimandrite Sophrony, Saint Silouan the Athonite, td. by Rosemary Edmonds (Crestwood, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999), p. 127.

2. See The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, Revised Second Edition, Homily 39 (Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 2020), p. 323.

3. Abbot Gerasim (Eliel), “Biographical Sketch,” updated June 6, 2011, p. 19. This is a 35-page autobiographical document that was made publicly available online at a time when Fr. Gerasim was being considered for the episcopate.

4. Ibid., p. 29.