The tradition of the Orthodox Church as I have been given to understand it, part 2

The nephilim strike back

Read Part 1 here.

There are burdens that are hard to carry because they are heavy. And then there are burdens that are hard to carry not because they are heavy — in the scheme of things, they’re plenty light — but because they are awkward to hold. It can be very difficult to get a proper grip on them. I have before me an awkward burden, one that nonetheless causes great anxiety due to the terrible stakes involved with carrying it. In the previous part of this article, I laid out a segment of history concerning the tradition of the Orthodox Church, the understanding and, indeed, possession of which has been passed down to me from certain sources. I have had an overall positive experience of these sources, even overwhelmingly positive I would say. There exist certain others, however (none in my current email list that I’m aware of), who have had negative experiences, even overwhelmingly negative experiences, from the same or associated sources. My positive experience by no means negates the reality of their negative experience — while I willingly lift my awkward burden, there are some out there who have been crippled by too heavy a burden, placed on them against their will — but neither, I must say, does their negative experience negate the reality of my positive experience. This is the act of discernment to which love is calling me right now. I have been handed a lit candle that I aim to raise on a candlestick, that light might shine on those in my house. If I were instead to drop it on someone, because it is awkward to hold, I could possibly burn someone who is already suffering harm, and I could possibly lose the light of my candle. What then? Should I put it under a bushel instead? Love knows no such despair.

The Holy Order of MANS was a religious body that sprung from a charismatic leader in 1960s San Francisco — contemporary to the founding of the St. Herman Brotherhood in that city, but wholly separate. It was New Age, syncretist, with a perennialist bent, and quasi-monastic, with a strong focus on social work, like serving the needs of the poor and sheltering battered women. MANS was an acronym standing for the Greek words Mysterion, Agape, Nous, and Sophia. Their leader, Fr. Paul, taught what he called “the science of man.” When he died in 1974, the Order was roughly three thousand strong, spread across many missions in North America, and some in Europe.

As they moved on from their founding, the original rules of celibacy were relaxed, marriages and families were formed, and under new leadership in the late 1970s, their outlook grew to be more ecumenical and less gnostic and cultish. The perennialist emphasis on tradition came to the fore, and the ecumenical vision of their leader, Andrew Rossi, narrowed in on Orthodoxy. Eventually the writings of Fr. Seraphim Rose came to his attention, and he contacted Platina with great interest.

Unfortunately Fr. Seraphim had freshly passed away. Abbot Herman received Andrew Rossi, meeting him in 1983. That same year, grief piled upon grief for the monastic founder when his beloved Bishop Nektary of Seattle, spiritual descendant of Optina Monastery, also died. (The monastery church also burnt down somewhere around this time.) In this context, the interest in Orthodoxy on the part of the Holy Order of MANS appeared to the mission-minded abbot as a heaven-sent vocation. As the eighties progressed, the Order shed its New Age vestiges and adopted traditional Orthodox Christian beliefs. They were met with suspicion by existing canonical Orthodox jurisdictions in America, who were not open to receiving their communities en masse. The Order knew, however (rightly I believe), that their communal identity was a good that should not be sacrificed. The very charismatic Fr. Herman, meanwhile, offered them a living link with the spiritual tradition they craved, the likes of which I described in part 1, and so they remained aligned with him.

But Fr. Herman had been suspended by his Russian bishops in 1984, pending investigation into serious moral accusations, an investigation to which Fr. Herman never submitted. The abbot had ceased from any obedience to his hierarchs, particularly in the founding of a monastic skete on Spruce Island in Alaska (home of St. Herman) without any bishop’s blessing and against the wishes of the local Church authorities there (a separate jurisdiction). For the American converts following Fr. Herman, this all appeared to be wrongful persecution, the likes of which is common in lives of saints as recent as St. John Maximovitch, and the stand that their leader was taking against corrupt authorities and in the name of spiritual freedom was nothing but appealing. Fr. Herman became acquainted with a schismatic Old Calendarist Greek bishop stationed in Queens and arranged for him to receive into his fold the willing members of the Holy Order of MANS, to be renamed Christ the Savior Brotherhood. In 1988, some 750 such members were so received, their communities intact — and Fr. Herman was at last defrocked for disobedience. That means he could no longer serve as abbot or as priest, but he did so anyways. The St. Herman Brotherhood owned all its own properties, and no hierarch could control what they did on them.

In the ten years between then and 1998 when I walked into a Christ the Savior Brotherhood parish in Boston, the two brotherhoods (St. Herman and Christ the Savior) thrived together, being all but indistinguishable. I was present as a catechumen for the Greek bishop Pangratios’s final visit to Boston. Being yet a teenager and brand new to Orthodoxy, I had no idea what having a bishop was all about; no one had ever talked about him before. What I observed that day was the uneventful coming and going of an anonymous figurehead that didn’t mean anything to any of the parishioners around me. Everyone took their cues from Abbot Herman, who was their real spiritual leader. Under the guidance of my priests, I read voraciously from the church bookstore, heavy on publications from Platina that faithfully reflected the Orthodox tradition transmitted to Fr. Seraphim Rose by the Russian émigré community. Other books besides, like Abba Dorotheos’s Discourses and Sayings, St. Ignatius Brianchaninov’s The Arena, and Archimandrite Sophrony’s Saint Silouan the Athonite were nectar to my heart and soul. All this reading was in the context of generously long Church services that the Brotherhood learned from Platina, with congregational singing by a close-knit community of families, single people, and other college students, services which in their Orthodoxy lacked only the attribution of a proper bishop.

In the summer of 1999, after my freshman year of college, I jumped at the opportunity to attend the St. Herman Brotherhood’s annual missionary school at St. Paisius Abbey in Forestville, California. The abbey was a women’s monastic community stocked largely with folk from the Christ the Savior Brotherhood. For the occasion of the month-long school, the instructors included both CSB priests and monks from Platina. Staying in a tent outside the abbey grounds, I attended daily church services in the morning and evening, with classes and physical labor during the day. It was my first exposure to Orthodox monasticism. One weekend I was able to ride up to Platina with four other students and visit the monastery, venerate the grave of Fr. Seraphim, and see his monastic cell in the woods. Another time I went to San Francisco, to the Joy of All Who Sorrow Cathedral, and venerated the incorrupt relics of St. John Maximovitch.

And at the Abbey I met Abbot Herman, and received counsel from him on multiple occasions, albeit never alone. The first time was in the trapeza (dining hall). He asked me what my plans were for life. I hesitated to answer, because I didn’t know, but eventually figured it would be beneficial to speak openly about what my plans had been up to that point. In my teenage years I had been so depressed and hopeless that I forsook any realistic or practical plans for myself and consented to the dream of being a filmmaker, which I thought I would pursue after college. So, speaking up, I phrased it in the past perfect: “I had wanted to be a filmmaker.” “God forbid!” Fr. Herman shouted me down, emphatically declaring how bad movies were and what a vain, self-centered fantasy that was, which ten others he knew had pursued, and they were all bums. He suggested I be a dentist or a plumber instead. It hurt, but it was something I was ready to hear. The fantasy born of depression needed to die. I have a distinct memory of one afternoon digging a hole in the hard earth, I forget why, other than that it was my obedience to do so. I was alone. In that hole, sweating in the sun, I had to acknowledge the persistence of my vain fantasy, but I also recognized that if I were to pursue it, it would be of my own will and thus would surely fail. What I wanted above all was for God’s will and not my own to be done. I wanted to join a monastery.

By the time the missionary school ended, I was figuring it would be time within a year to leave all and follow Christ. Why finish college if I was to be a monk? Mentioning this to Fr. Herman during a car ride (with three others), I was immediately and gently rejected. It was not a hard pastoral decision to make. This nineteen-year-old catechumen had to put aside romantic notions of living in the woods, go and finish his degree, and continue learning the Orthodox way in the context of a parish.

At the Abbey I also met Hieromonk Damascene, not only the author of the 1,000-page biography of Fr. Seraphim Rose Not of This World and the newly published, very impressive Christ the Eternal Tao, but also the current occupant of Fr. Seraphim’s cell in the woods at Platina. He was one of the instructors. Before I left I asked him if I could write him, if I could maintain correspondence with him, and he agreed. I did not at this time meet the one monk besides Abbot Herman who was senior to Fr. Damascene at the monastery in Platina, Hieromonk Gerasim. He was at this juncture on a pilgrimage to the country of Georgia, which would turn out to be of crucial importance. I personally had no indication things were about to change radically, that, for instance, this would be the last missionary school at St. Paisius Abbey. I returned to Boston, returned to college, and was baptized the following spring.

Not long after, the news came down to me. The St. Herman Brotherhood had forced Fr. Herman to step down as their leader and leave their monastery. The Christ the Savior Brotherhood was unceremoniously leaving their uncanonical bishop Pangratios and seeking admittance in a canonical jurisdiction. The latter story is easier to tell. This man Pangratios was a defrocked priest who just started his own church; he had no apostolic authority. It turns out the Greek Archdiocese defrocked him back in 1970 after he plead guilty to charges of sodomy and corrupting the morals of a minor, having abused two 14-year-old boys at his home in 1968. The criminal court sentenced him to probation, because, I don’t know, that’s what you got for sexually abusing kids in 1970 I guess. I think he claimed to have been consecrated a bishop after this, but I don’t know the details. A couple years after CSB left him he’d be charged again for the same offense, again with a 14-year-old boy, this time at his church in New York in 1999. As far as the timeline of what the Brotherhood knew, all I know is this: (1) leaders of the CSB received proof of his 1970 conviction, and then (2) they successfully led their people away from him and into the canonical Church.

It’s a rule that, in America at least, never seems to fail: church bodies outside of communion with the canonical Orthodox Church are revealed eventually to be sexually corrupt. From the ascetical experiences of the Church, it’s not hard to see why. A very common way God relates with his followers when they are in the grip of pride is by abandoning them to fall into carnal sins. The abandonment should be a wake-up call in regard to their pride. The message doesn’t get received properly when one is distracted by the resultant entanglement with despair. Pride and despair are like brother nephilim that terrorize and tyrannize our lives. They are both born of self-opinion: pride opines itself good, while despair opines itself bad. They both equally take the attention that we should have for God and place it on the self instead. A common trick they pull is hiding on either side of a trail through a ravine. When a wayfarer passes through, they send their toady fornication to pester the traveler. Different scenarios can ensue. Fornication can subdue the traveler, and then lead him or her to the end of the trail where despair is hiding, so as to be consumed there. Alternately, fornication can merely chase the traveler in the direction of pride, so as to be destroyed there. Mixed and confused scenarios can ensue if the wayfarer becomes aware of all three forces, and struggles to and fro between them as they close in on his or her position. All the while, of course, there is a lifeline offered from a cliff above if our attention could be directed properly. The lifeline is from God ultimately, but for humility’s sake, without which we cannot be saved, it is mediated through the Church, through the body of the faithful that is to be identified with the person of Christ, wounds and all. The wounds can be scandalous, it is true. They can be used for occasions of mistrust. Are you filled with anger? Are you filled with lust? Would it kill you to trust? — And if it did? If it did kill you to trust? If confessing and repenting and trusting in the scarred Body of Christ did lead to your death? Do you believe you would rise again in glory?

I wouldn’t venture to pinpoint the defrocked (and now deceased) Monk Herman Podmoshensky on the spectrum of pride and despair. Nor would I speculate how he got there, though, not unlike a Roman Polanski, he did have a traumatic origin story with his father being taken from him at a tender age by a totalitarian political regime. Nonetheless it must be said: the sin of pederasty had a home in his soul. To this day I do not know the scope and extent of his crimes. Stories I’ve personally heard actually only involve embracing and kissing; but it’s not a topic that gets talked about, so that doesn’t tell me anything. There used to be a website documenting accusations against him, but it no longer exists; I had never visited it. There was a time when I was under the impression that his falls into lust were never with minors, that even if he sinned against God and man he at least never sinned against the state. Someone I knew and was friends with, who as a kid grew up in Christ the Savior Brotherhood, himself disabused me of this notion with his own firsthand experience as a young teen.

I was naive. As a nineteen-year-old catechumen in July 1999, when I met and knew Fr. Herman, well, I saw things that sure made sense in retrospect. There was a time when I was invited to speak with him on a veranda. It was the most private conversation I was to have with him, but there was still someone else present. The day previous he had asked me about my family background, and I told him of my parents’ divorce. This day we were talking about movies. We disagreed about Tarkovsky and Bresson, but the mood was very congenial. He said he could tell I could appreciate beauty. At one point he needed help sitting down. He was 65 and overweight, with all kinds of health problems, and there continually seemed to be occasions for such physical contact. As I was helping him, he leaned in close and asked if I knew why he liked me. “Because you’ve suffered, haven’t you?” he said. And he started holding me, cradling me in his lap like a small child. I was six feet tall, however, so my feet were still on the ground and I had to bend back to accommodate the position. I didn’t say anything in response to him; my mind was muzzled. Nearby, maybe ten feet away, a novice monk I never saw again (many came and went under Abbot Herman) was putting the last touches of paint on an icon of St. George slaying the dragon. Eventually Fr. Herman let me go, and we continued talking.

Later he needed help again getting out of his chair. He went to lie down in a room where there was another monk, who talked to Fr. Herman about a trip he (the monk) was about to go on. There was also another layman present, a recent convert, to whom Abbot Herman was dictating corrections for a publication they were working on. While this was going on, I was asked to massage the abbot’s feet, which I did. He lamented that he was such an egotist to have me working on his feet like that, but I reassured him saying that he was giving me the chance to serve. My impression at the time was that the room was filled with love, a sober, unsentimental Christian love. If I wouldn’t have called it a chaste love at the time, it would only have been because the need to wouldn’t have occurred to me.

When I called my experiences in the brotherhoods (CSB and SHB) positive, even overwhelmingly positive, this stuff was not what I was referring to. This was just weird. But I at no point thought anything sexual was going on — affectionate, yes, and I was naive to think that that was okay. I remember in Boston, a year later, when we were told of the upheaval at the monastery and, vaguely, the reasons why, I didn’t bat an eye in approving the changes, not even needing any further explaining. It, along with dropping our uncanonical bishop, seemed to me immediately as the right things to do. And the right things to do were exactly what I would have expected these beautiful communities I was joining to do. As far as I was concerned, my faith was being emphatically affirmed.

I was present for less than two years of Herman and Pangratios’s combined reign. The Brotherhood kids who were raised in all thirteen years of it — well, many of them thrived, and continue to thrive, specifically on account of their upbringing. But others bore the brunt of the pride and despair, the lust and the anger, of their fallen leaders. The fortunate ones thrived because the quality of the spiritual tradition being passed on was, I believe, as advertised. The prayers, the services, the teaching, the literature, they were all in line with the Spirit of the Church, faithfully inherited and transmitted. Except it was disembodied. And a spirit without a body is, like I said in part 1, a ghost. Christ is not risen in the flesh if you worship only a ghost.

Conversion is an arduous process, though. It’s not typically going to happen all at once. Christ is in the Spirit, and the Spirit is in Christ. If you pursue One faithfully you will unfailingly find the Other. And They will both unite you to Themselves and to the Father. In retrospect it looks like the trajectory of the Christ the Savior Brotherhood was always towards membership in the canonical Church with their local communities intact. Their thirteen years with a fake bishop was just a necessary training school — you might call it “Orthodoxy for kids” if there weren’t so many pederasts involved. Alas, it’s probably not a repeatable formula. But looking back, how else could they possibly have converted successfully to the Orthodox Church? It was never not going to be a messy, messy situation, as sin does not get purified without a fight. We have as a helpful counterexample the other major mass conversion to Orthodoxy that began in 1980s America, the much bigger Evangelical Orthodox Church. In 1987, formerly Protestant communities that were growing increasingly Orthodox over the last decade, numbering some 2,000 strong, were accepted directly into the Antiochian Church. Hence they had attained the Body of Christ; but the acquisition of the Spirit of the Church required more from them than they had originally bargained for, and their Antiochian bishops had no experience shepherding flocks of their breed. For all their canonicity they did not avoid scandal and heartbreak and lost souls and defrocked priests — just for different reasons from those of Christ the Savior Brotherhood. But in the end, fifteen to twenty years down the line, they ended up in the same place: largely a very positive if rocky story of mass conversion of American religious communities to the spiritual tradition and sacramental body of the Orthodox Church.

I’ve characterized my writing this portion of the article as a calling; I don’t mean a divine calling, as if I were so special. My writing is a response to the love that is within me for the Christ the Savior Brotherhood, for my home parish in Boston. They were there for me. They, sinful Americans that they were to start, yet faithfully received the tradition of the Orthodox Church, transmitted it to me, and delivered me into the Body of Christ. Everything that I like about myself and my life starts there. This love is not blind, though. My heart aches for those for whom the Brotherhood’s grace was not sufficient covering.

It’s not over. Love also calls me to write about my ten-year history with the St. Herman Brotherhood after Monk Herman’s departure. If this is “The tradition of the Orthodox Church as I have been given to understand it,” then the story doesn’t end in the year 2000 with me newly illumined. Conversions take time. But again I’ve reached what I must recognize is a stopping place, even if I’m not done. I hadn’t planned on this being a trilogy, but I think I can finish it given one more chance. Again, I’ll try not to dally.

Read Part 3 here.