Michael Plekon on the Uncommon Prayers We Pray

It is one of the great delights of my life that I have known Michael Plekon for a decade now, and continue to benefit from his friendship and counsel, to say nothing of his books. I have in the past written in his honour and also interviewed him about previous books, any and all of which are more than worth your time--both the ones he has written himself, and the many others he has edited or translated.

Two weeks ago the publisher sent me advanced page proofs of his forthcoming book, set for release on 15 September 2016: Uncommon Prayer. Prayer in Everyday Experience (UND Press, 280pp.). Amazon will let you pre-order a copy now and ship it upon release; but in case you forget I'll try to post a reminder of the book's release two months hence.

I asked Fr. Michael for an interview about this book, and here are his thoughts:

AD: In the few years since our last interview on here, discussing your Saints as They Really Are, what have you been up to? How did you get from that book to the present one, Uncommon Prayer, and what if any threads link them?

MP: Saints as They Really Are was the last in a trilogy of books about holy women and men in our time, how they pursued a life in and with God. I started out with persons of faith from the Eastern Church in Living Icons, but wanted to expand horizons. Thus those profiled and listened to in Hidden Holiness and Saints are ecumenically diverse, some even at odds with the institutional church. Given the conflict at the recent Pentecost Pan-Orthodox gathering in Crete over whether non-Orthodox Christian communities could even be called "churches," whether they were in any way Christian, bearers of the Spirit, the commitment to authentic and ecclesial ecumenical perspectives is all the more necessary! There is no reason, within the church's tradition, to doubt the faith of, say, a Thomas Merton or Dorothy Day, a Rowan Williams or Michael Ramsay any more than a Mother Maria Skobtsova or Alexander Men, an Alexander Schmemann or Nicholas Afanasiev or Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.

I mention not only Western Christians here but some of those associated with the "Paris School" and the "religious Renaissance" among the Russians, as Nicholas Zernov called it in the early 20th century. I do so because even these faithful Eastern Church figures have been called into question as "innovationists" or even "heretics" by some Orthodox traditionalists. Listening to these "ecclesial beings" or "people of the church," as Paul Evdokimov called them, it is clear that in both East and West, such women and men were attending to the "signs of the times." They were trying to bring the church into encounter with political revolutions and those fleeing them into exile, a destructive economic Depression, the rise of fascism and two horrendous world wars, followed by a cold war and buildup of nuclear arms.

Contrary to what one might suspect, the processions of these persons of faith was anything but a march of fearful, introverted believers. Rather, those already passed into the kingdom, as well as those still with us, despite their marked differences in vision, nonetheless converged in many ways. They celebrated the life of Christ lived out in the details of everyday life. Rather than condemn secular institutions, they remembered the preaching and enacting of the Gospel in the church's earliest years. They also connected the Gospel with peacemaking, with the fight for human/civil rights and social justice more broadly.

So as it usually is, "one thing leads to another" for me. The books about persons of faith and their experiences of looking for God and trying to live with God in daily life led me to prayer, I supposed the language of faith, the heart of spirituality. I think many are turning away from making a hard distinction between being "religious" and being "spiritual." Jesuit Roger Haight's new book on this, Spiritual and Religious: Explorations for Seekers, (Orbis, 2016) goes a long way toward getting back to inherent connections, commonalities, a lot of shared space, thinking and action.

This is exactly where Uncommon Prayer came to be. I very much wanted to look at how prayer is lived out after services are ended, after the scriptures and prayerbooks are closed--there in our daily round of existence. So I went back to some persons of faith I had written about before, such as Evdokimov, who wrote specifically on "becoming what you pray," also Dorothy Day and Maria Skobtsova, who refused to pit love of God against that of the neighbor--rather seeing the two as inseparable.

I also consulted Sara Miles and Barbara Brown Taylor, really fine writers on the experience of living what you believe, and Richard Rohr, Sara Coakley and Rowan Williams, who were explicit in describing the very personal aspects of prayer. But I also went, for the first time, to poets Mary Oliver, Christian Wiman, Mary Karr, but also Heather Havrilesky, who has done memoirs, criticism, and advice-columns!

And, wanting to share some of the rich experience with which I have been gifted, I take the reader into the maybe surprising liturgical work of food prep--the “liturgies” and community built up in parish pirogi making, baking of Easter breads and other pastries and the food fairs, post-funeral repasts and weekly coffee hours. After so many years in parish ministry, I wanted to share how there really is a “liturgy after the liturgy,” not only that of the “8th sacrament,” the coffee hour, but all those other adventures in food prep and eating that are at the core of my parish’s strong sense of community.

AD: Yes, I remember only too well how stuffed I was after a BBQ and picnic at St. Gregory's one Sunday two or three summers ago! I was also amazed at the gracious hospitality extended to me, a stranger. What a parish you have! 

MP: I also did some digging into my own prayer life, excavating what lies behind a now tattered, soiled prayerlist that is at least 30 years old. This list opened up both my learning to do pastoral ministry years ago, but more importantly how both forgetting and remembering are core elements of prayer and our lived prayer. I was also led to reflect on the experience of prayer in my “day job,” in the classrooms of a large, secular, public university of great ethnic and religious diversity. This is where I have worked for the past 40 years, and hopefully it can serve as a point of departure for readers to consider their own workplaces and homes and neighborhood as locations of prayer.

AD: As a former Anglican, I hear your title and immediately think of it as a riff on Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer. What was your intent in speaking of "uncommon" prayer? 

I explain this title and yes, as you suspect, I did want to suggest that just as much as we need and depend on the “common prayer” of the church, of the community here and over time, that prayer of course is never restricted to the liturgical services and books, that is, to the formal contexts. If St Paul says we should pray always and everywhere, then let’s have a look at how this appears in practice. I also think what is implied here is that we all too often imprison ourselves in the “formal” language and forms of prayer, not knowing we are doing that. And often the consequence is that we are tormented by how little we pray outside the church building and the prayers we recite or read from the books. That, in my own personal experience and in my pastoral experience, is simply NOT true! We pray a lot, in many other circumstances and locations. But often do not think of what we are saying, feeling, and doing as prayer.

AD: Your introduction notes the tendency of moderns to see religious practices such as prayer as more or less private hobbies, undertaken outside of a communal context. Do you have any thoughts on what can be done to overcome this tendency towards splitting off, towards privatizing and individualizing the faith and its practices?

We all know the old line of Tertullian, is it, about “a Christian alone is no Christian.” But it is no longer the case that the community of the local church, the parish, doubles as the same community of the village, the same community of local industry, work, factories, mines, mills. We are so much more diverse in just about everything, from language to culture to political perspective.

Robert Putnam would say we have lost community. But Nancy Ammermann would say, no, just look more closely. There are all kinds of ways we bridge our individuality to others, so many ways in which connect beyond ourselves. I think it’s silly to dismiss how we do this electronically, through social media and email and all the resources online. That is an enormous marketplace, a very real public square.  Think of the capacity we have to access books, images of paintings, pieces of music. But we also are drawn more to each other—concerts, sporting events, really an array of gatherings. And we continue to see urban areas growing in population.

All this said, our community life is NOT what it was even a generation or so ago. While some communities of faith and language and ethnicity continue as enclaves, the community of homogeneity and similarity has given way as we intermarry and move. As I see it, our faith and our prayer life is portable, adaptable. We are able, especially in America, to sing, pray, collect and distribute food and clothing with diverse others. We don’t need to question their faith; in practice we do not, but cooperate. This is the proverbial “other side” of what often appears to be an isolated, hyper-individualist culture. Putnam and Campbell in American Grace found this ability to work with others in the research they studied. I see that while there are more “religious nones,” who do not join a congregation, there are many people who try to live out what they believe, whether that takes identifiable religious/spiritual forms.

AD: I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about the importance of forgetting in Christian memory, and so I was struck by your introduction's noting the importance of "the experience of God's absence, God's silence" (p.7), when it often feels to people like they have been forgotten by God. Why is it important not to gloss over these experiences, these kinds of prayers? What can be learned from them?

First of all, the experiences of seeming to be forgotten by God, of God’s silence and absence are among the most frequent, the most common we have—and not just us in the 21st century but, I think, universally, and across time. The scriptures are replete with expression of just such forgetting, absence, silence, distance, especially the Hebrew Bible, and in particular, the Psalms.

Likely those who regularly pray the psalms, like monastics and others in religious communities, have been the most aware of the forgetting/absence/silence as only one side of the reality of life with God. Julian of Norwich, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Alexander Men, and more recently, Christian Wiman, Richard Rohr, Barbara Brown Taylor—these are just a few who give powerful expression to the experience of this kind of alienation from God. So, yes, as you say, this experience of silence and absence, of being forgotten, should be essential to our prayer language. Paul Evdokimov’s essay on God’s “foolish” or absurd love for us is subtitled as being linked to the “mystery of God’s silence” in contemporary spiritual experience.

AD: You note you are drawing on a wide array of people from diverse traditions. Are there any links between the English Anglicans, American Roman Catholics, and Franco-Russian Orthodox (inter alia) you draw on? Did you find common experiences of prayer across these lines?

Yes, there are some direct, documentable connections, say between Rowan Williams and Thomas Merton and the “Paris School” figures of Bulgakov, Mother Maria Skobtsova, Paul Evdokimov and Vladimir Lossky, also between Richard Rohr and Merton, perhaps his primary inspiration, but also between him and Julian of Norwich from centuries back. But even when there were no traceable connections, there are nevertheless strong similarities in perception and vision. A few colleagues and friends have noticed that so many of the figures to whom I listen, writers but also activists, in this book and the two before it, are women. I have found a preponderance of women writers doing good memoirs. I also think that when you look at the ecclesial backgrounds, it is not surprising there are so many Anglicans, then Catholics, and finally Orthodox--not a lot of Baptists or Evangelicals. Somehow, I think it must be the importance of the historical liturgies and with them, the important places of Mary and the saints, as well as monastic practices that fire such fascinating writing.

AD: Several times you mention that for at least some of the authors you draw on, prayer may be conceived as mindfulness or attentiveness to what one is doing as one goes about the day. Is it just me, or has such a discipline of attentiveness become vastly more difficult in this age of constantly beeping, endlessly updating text messages, social media, and other technical distractions? Is prayer of any type fighting a losing battle with our cellphones and tablets?

Our “devices” can be disruptive, interferences with real conversation, preventing presence to each other, substitutes even for actual encounter. Now I am neither a technomaniac nor a technophobe. I am immensely grateful for what the internet, what social media can allow me to see, access, even store and come back to later on. But I recall that even the desert mothers and fathers of the 3rd-8th centuries, in the stark desert landscape, with few texts or other distractions, were well aware of minds drifting, of boredom, depression, anxiety, temptation of very powerful sorts and more.

But mindfulness is a goal at which we can always aim. In Thomas Merton’s journals and some of his letters, one can chart his struggle to acquire greater mindfulness, more awareness of the presence of God at every moment. Merton, probably more than anyone else, restored the contemplative spirit and life to not just monastic but more general, even universal practice. I would note, too, there was not much Buddhist or Sufi about his doing so—he still has critics who react badly to his openness to Asian and Eastern religious traditions.

AD: You include wonderful selections from the "prayers of the poets." But--unless I'm wrong--apart from Dante, Ephraim the Syrian, and St. Gregory Nazianzus, all long dead, modern Christians tend to pray in prose (and unless they have the genius of a Cranmer or Chrysostom, often rather banal and prolix prose!). What is it about poetry that may be unsettling for some? And yet what gifts does it offer? 

Yes, much of our formal praying is in prose, though we surely sing a great deal and listen to a great deal of lyrical, poetic material from hymnwriters and the scriptures. Perhaps the poets I listen to in Uncommon Prayer, especially Mary Oliver, Christian Wiman and Mary Karr produce poetry that is more prosaic—simple, but precise, free verse and continuous form. What I find distinctive is the power of even short lines with only a few syllables—particularly true of Oliver and Wiman—that carry enormous weight in emotion and reflection. But in addition to these more technical points, what strikes me is the ability, especially of these here poets, but also of other writers I listen to, to sense so strongly the divine in most ordinary, inconsequential details of a field, a dog cavorting across a beach, a brief encounter with a neighbor or clerk. Again, the lesson here being the experience of God and of communion outside the accustomed confines of nave and prayerbook.

AD: I loved your chapter on the community and communion discovered when making perogies! For that made me feel far less crazy in reflecting back on an intense and memorable experience of communion and community I had at an Anglican parish in Ottawa washing dishes long into the night after a potluck one Maundy Thursday evening. Do we tend to gloss over such experiences too easily, seeing them as too ordinary, too banal, and thus inconceivable places for theophany?

Only because we compartmentalize our lives do we somehow think, this is “religious,” this is “secular.” The scriptures don’t know such segregation, nor does the liturgy. Things are of God or not. And most things are of God. Now as I say that, I can hear someone in my parish insist to me that, of course pirogi making, baking, and the big December Food Fair are fine, but what we’re really here for is what goes on upstairs, i.e. in the nave of the church, the liturgy. And I can also hear myself retorting that of course, the Eucharist is the center of everything, communion with Christ and each other, but it is only an hour and some minutes most weeks. What about all the rest of the days? Years ago when I was in formation in the Carmelites, the texts and the teachers made this point, the same as in Benedict’s Rule. The kitchen pots and pans are as sacred as the communion vessels. Cleaning a room was not inferior to chanting a psalm or reading a chapter of the gospels. But when I look at church and diocesan websites, it’s clear that vested clergy, services, and icons trump soup kitchens and clothing pantries.

AD: Having finished Uncommon Prayer, what are you at work on now?

Oh, as I said, one thing for me always leads to another. Going back to some familiar figures as well as on to ones I had not yet examined, in Uncommon Prayer, prompted me to do likewise in yet another book, The World as Sacrament: Ecumenical Paths towards a Worldly Spirituality that Liturgical Press will publish in spring 2017.

I was struck, as I returned to figures I had written about, even translated some years ago, how fresh and powerful they still sounded to me, though I found myself looking for different things from them. And I was struck by their unanimous stress that faith be put into action, that the world be “churched,” that is, become the arena for love, mercy, and forgiveness. With some this was obvious—Maria Skobtsova, Paul Evdokimov, Dorothy Day, and Elisabeth Behr-Sigel.

But it was less apparent though real with the likes of Alexander Men, Lev Gillet, and Nicholas Afanasiev. From review of the proposal and sample chapters, Liturgical Press staff suggested I create an ecumenical selection of writers to consult, adding to these Eastern Church authors a comparable number from the West. Thus joining the gathering were Merton, Barbara Brown Taylor, Richard Rohr, Kathleen Norris, Joan Chittister and Marilynne Robinson.

Robinson’s trilogy of Gilead, Home and Lila became a very beautiful way, through fiction, of looking at grace, suffering, hope and mercy at work in the lives of a number of Midwesterners back in the 1950s. These are really parables retold in not too distant American heartland settings, with characters that have become unforgettable to readers. It was particularly helpful to have Robinson’s voice, imbued with the Reformed tradition, Calvin in particular, to listen to. The Franciscan and Benedictine and Anglican streams also came through with the inclusion of Rohr, Chittister, Norris, and Taylor.

Somewhere in winter of 2017 Cascade Books should be publishing “The Church Has Left the Building”: Faith, Parish and Ministry in the 21st Century, to which I contributed an essay, a collection of reflections I gathered and edited from an ecumenical group of laity and clergy on pastoral ministry, the parish and faith today. There are particularly personal and powerful reflections in this collection, one I have been trying to bring to light for several years now and finally am, with a great sense of relief and hope. No matter the demographic changes that are shrinking, reshaping the local churches, the church as communion and community endures. And I have to say this is the focus of the book I am hoping to write in the next year or so.

After 31 August 2017, I will be retired from the City University of New York, almost to the day of my starting teaching there 40 years ago, on 1 September 1977. I intend to keep writing, and giving retreats and talks as invited, even teaching at the parish level and occasionally in college settings. But Jeanne and I would like to have more time for family and for writing, her painting and pottery and other crafts.

The last several of the book projects I have described here and my own almost 35 years of experience in parish ministry have brought me to think that the principal charism or gift the Spirit is giving to and through the churches now is that of community and communion. As we see ethnic belonging, the tribalism of language disappearing, along with multi-generational presence in a town, a congregation, we see shrinkage, many small parishes simply becoming redundant due to other neighboring duplicates of who they are.

Some clergy friends, working in the Hudson valley where I live, have shared their on-going efforts to sustain parish communities, but not without sometimes painful closings of individual congregations, mergers and rebirths, reinventions. For me, as at once a sociologist of religion, theologian and pastor, there is a lot to mine here. Another colleague, interviewed here, Nicholas Denysenko, had likewise been exploring how religious identity is fed, shaped by liturgy and prayer—this another example of trying to make sense of the profound changes the churches are undergoing now and in the foreseeable future.

Ines Angeli Murzaku on Grottaferrata and East-West Monasticism

Quite unexpectedly within about a week of each other, two books, both devoted to the monastic community of Grottaferrata, showed up on my desk. The first was  The Greek Abbey at Grottaferrata, published a number of years ago now (and seemingly out of print). It is a short book with plenty of pictures, giving a general overview of the community. Then a new scholarly collection showed up, and I was able to interview its editor, Ines Angeli Murzaku, about her recent collection,  Monastic Tradition in Eastern Christianity and the Outside World: A Call for Dialogue (Peeters, 2013), 302pp. Here are her thoughts:

AD: Tell us about your background: 
 
IAM: I am a professor of Ecclesiastical History and Chair of the Department of Catholic Studies, Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. My research focuses on Ecclesiastical History, and particular, Byzantine and Catholic Church History. I have been awarded several grants for my work, including the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers - Germany, the Dumbarton Oaks Research Grant – Harvard University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant (SSHRC) - Canada, and have been awarded three times Fulbright Research Scholar Grants. 


My other publications include Returning to Rome: The Basilian Monks of Grottaferrata in Albania, Quo Vadis Eastern Europe? Religion, State and Society after Communism (2009), and Catholicism, Culture and Conversion: The History of the Jesuits in Albania (1841-1946), published by Orientalia Christiana Analecta Series (2006). Currently, I am co-authoring a translation and critical edition of the Life of St. Neilos of Rossano (1004) for Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University (2014). Also, I am working on two projects: Monasticism in Eastern Europe, Russia and the Former Soviet Republics for Routledge (2015) and Italo-Greek Monasticism, from St. Neilos to Bessarion for Ashgate (2015). I was the vice-president of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) (2007-2013) and a United Nations (NGO) Christians Associated for Relationships with Eastern Europe accredited representative.
 

AD: What led to putting this collection together?

Fascination with and love of monasticism Eastern and Western; the history of monasticism; exchanges and interactions between Eastern and Western monks their dialogue and ecumenism. I am most interested in Italo-Greek or Italiot monasticism, which is probably the least known form of monasticism, a monasticism with which I am very well acquainted. Southern Italy/Magna Graecia of the Occident is a real treasure in providing a home and “accommodations” to Italo-Greek hermits, the cenobites, those living in-between the cenobitic and hermetic.
   
AD: Give us a sense of the significance of Grottaferrata in both monastic and ecumenical terms.

Grottaferrata is a “survivor” (p. 118); as my colleague, Enrico Morini pointed out in his contribution, Italy had a tremendous number of Italo-Greek monasteries and Italo-Greek saints whose lives have come down to us through the ages.  Grottaferrata is one of the last of these monasteries, and has such a distinctive relationship with the papacy in Rome and has borne witness to these Western Christians of the importance and vibrancy of the Eastern Monastic life.  Much of this tradition has been lost over the centuries in the rest of Italy, or at least severely diminished, but at Grottaferrata, there is both the old tradition of Italo-Greek practice and the new tradition of being on the forefront of ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue. 

One particularly important element that is distinctive to Grottaferrata, which I tried to give a sense of in my chapter, is its willingness to help both the Italo-Greek monks and the Western monks feel comfortable at the monastery, feel a sense of belonging and Grottaferrata’s incredible hospitality, a kind of hospitability that only monks can provide.  From the time of its founder, Neilos of Rossano from Calabria, until the present day there has been a comfort with communicating with both traditions, particularly in using rituals that incorporate Greek, Latin, Italian and on special occasions Arbëresh – the language and ritual of the Italo-Greeks or Italo-Albanians who since the fifteenth century have been living in Southern Italy: Calabria and Sicily. A good number of the monks of Grottaferrata have come from these Byzantine communities.

AD: Your introduction mentions Hubert van Zeller’s idea that both the monk and the man in the world are on the same path, seeking grace and a rule of life. This strikes me as similar to Paul Evdokimov’s idea of “interiorized monasticism.” What can those living “in the world” learn today from some of the monastic communities surveyed in the book?  

Here, I think that Gregory Glazov’s very personal and intimate account is really helpful.  His family, living in such close proximity with the monks and sharing in their communal life, is an example of Evdkimov’s interiorized monasticism. Here is a family that is really living with monks and whose family life is a kind of monasticism — which seems to be what Evdokimov is advocating in Struggling With God.

AD: Your introduction mentions the importance of hospitality in monastic life. Tell us more about that.

In terms of how the monks themselves understand hospitality and generosity, it is nothing less than a Biblical virtue that figures prominently throughout Scripture — in the story of Lot and the angels that became central to the famous Holy Trinity Icon by Andrei Rublev, Christ first appearing as a stranger who dined with the apostles at Emmaus, and in many other important moments in Acts, Genesis, and elsewhere. That is why it figures so heavily in the monastic rules — both East and West.  In terms of historical practice, hospitality functioned as a way of maintaining strong networks among monastic communities and cultivating bonds with the broader society. It also functioned as a major way of doing outreach and charity — something which we see today.  All of these characteristics of monastic hospitality have continued to the present day, though now the community is much broader and more global, and the communities face many new challenges. 

Presently, monastic hospitality — particularly at Grottaferrata, but also in other monastic communities I have visited — is functioning in a missionary and ecumenical way. It is still a way of building networks and forging relationships, but it is also an invitation to gather together and share; this invitation goes out to other Catholics from the Western rite, Protestants, and especially the Greek-Orthodox, with whom Grottaferrata has an inherent connection.  As you can see in John Radano’s contribution to this volume, monastic communities have done tremendous work in terms of opening up dialogue with other Christian groups.  The publications that they have put out, like Irenikon and Eastern Churches Quarterly, are the fruits of monastic hospitality — the monks, freely and hospitably giving their time and sponsorship to these publications, are in a sense inviting their readership communities into their monastic life and sharing their patrimony with them.  It is even more explicit in the case of liturgical movements like the Taize communities in the Western Christian tradition.

At Grottaferrata in particular, hospitality also takes on a more directly educational function; when I have taken my Seton Hall students there, they have not only had the opportunity to experience the historical practice of Eastern monasticism, but they also have come to meet the Abbot Emiliano Fabbricatore and monks-members of the community and see them as people whose lives and concerns are not that different from their own, even though they had a different vocation. My students had the opportunity to sense the warmth of monastic practice and the monastic lifestyle, even if they did not always understand everything that was going on! The service was in Italiote-Greek!!!

AD: You note (p.11) that a “monastic community is an eschatological community.” What do you mean by that, and what is the significance of its eschatological focus?

Frequently, the monks saw their lifestyle as the fulfillment of Matthew 19’s commandments to give up all that they had in order to fulfill Christ’s will, and as a foretaste of what Christ told his followers in Mathew 22:30 about the way that they will live in heaven at the end of time — as people who neither marry nor are given in marriage.  We are also told that in the life of Christ — that is to say the resurrected life — the things that divide us, the barriers and walls, like nationality, language, and even confessional differences, cease to exist.

More theologically, Eastern monastics saw their practice as part of how they became people who could participate in theosis.  As Athanasius of Alexandria explained the Incarnation, “God was Incarnate so that we might be made god.” That process, theosis or divinization, required that the monks become as Christlike as possible in order to participate in this understanding of the bodily resurrection. Monasticism for these Eastern monks emphasizes this paradigm of becoming like Christ and also welcoming Christ in the form of the visitor, the outsider, and the stranger.  The practice also emphasizes being like Christ in perfection and representing with fidelity the doctrine that they have received, and communicating that doctrine to others.

When Evdokimov was writing his essay "Eschatology: On Death, the Afterlife, and the Kingdom: 'The Last Things'” (found in the collection Michael Plekon edited, In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader) one of the themes that he addresses is the idea of healing as salvation— not as a bodily healing or a full restoration, but rather as a deliverance from disturbance into a feeling of ease or peace.  The monks embody this in some important ways: the rules laid out in the Typikon of the monastery reduce strife and conflict, the management of a wise elder or abbot helps individual monks to deal with temptations and support the group to adjust to new situations, and the prayer practices foster metanoia or repentance which helps heal the wounds from sin.  Essentially, the monks are working to put themselves into a state of equilibrium, like Evdokimov describes, so that they can provide an example of that equilibrium to the world.  Are these communities perfect? Of course not. But they are doing their best to serve as an example of what the afterlife is going to look like, or as my good friend and colleague Dr. James McGlone would say, “a little piece of heaven on earth.”

AD: Your chapter as well as a couple others focus on “holy silence” and its importance in monastic life. But arguably silence is important for everyone, yes? It seems to me a particularly acute struggle today for many of us, tethered as we are to devices (phones, tablets, etc.) that never leave us alone, never give us opportunities for silence. Why does the monastic tradition so emphasize the importance of silence, and what can we learn from that today?

For monks, silence was about apathy, being without passions that could distract you from God.  It was a state of prayer and a state of perfect practice.  It also was hard to achieve, which is why there was so much literature.  However, it is important to note that there were two kinds of silence that fell under the title of hesychia — the first was the freedom to be able to withdraw from worldly affairs for reflection and the second was the state of reaching passionlessness through prayer and reflection (which is what we conventionally associate with the word).  Not all of us can withdraw to the extent that a monk can — as laypersons we are often called to have jobs in the secular realm and to raise families, but all of us can find ways of withdrawing from technology at certain points during our day and using that withdrawal as a time to be in relation with God and each other and as a time to reflect.  One thing that we can learn from the lives of the saints is that you do not wait to be given an opportunity to withdraw from the world — you create that opportunity, or better, seize that opportunity. This peaceful space can be created.

AD: Many of the chapters in the book focus on the role of monastic communities as places of encounter and dialogue—between Eastern and Western Christians, and between Christians and monks. Is Grottaferrata still playing that role today? What other communities do you see as especially adept at such dialogue?

Yes, I think so. Grottaferrata and its monks are at the vanguard of dialogue. The newly appointed Abbot Michel van Parys is a scholar and man of prayer and dialogue. Besides Grottaferrata is the Monastère de Chevetogne, Niederaltaich Benedictine Abbey, Abbey of Gethsemani in the USA  and several others.

AD: Sum up your hopes for this book and who should read it.

This book is part of a much broader project, which is to make Eastern monasticism a much bigger part of our scholarly conversation in the West — where it is often overlooked.  For instance, the book I am currently editing and contributing to addresses the history of Eastern monasticism in Eastern bloc countries and the former Soviet Union. The suppression of religion in these countries has created a gap in scholarship, and all of these countries had a rich history and very much to offer in monastic practice before the state shut down religious institutions and ended religious practice. It is my hope that this particular book inspires students, fellow researchers, and interested laypersons and clergy members to explore a heritage that has been highly influential in our civilization, or better, has laid the foundations of our civilization.  These articles are great starting points for further investigations, in addition to being unique contributions to this broader conversation.

AD: Having finished this collection, what projects are you at work on now?

Currently, I am working on a translation and critical edition of the Life of St. Neilos, and I will be pursuing another contract for a translation of the Life of St. Elias the Younger otherwise known as St. Elias of Enna.  These two Italo-Greek saints’ lives are interesting because they describe real people and important historical situations at a time when Sicily and Calabria were being transformed by their interactions with the Arabs, the Byzantines, and the West.  By putting these important primary sources into English and into the hands of new scholars who have been impeded by a lack of English-language resources, I am hoping to inspire future generations of scholars in the field.  There is also the collection I mentioned earlier, Monasticism in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Republics, which will be published by Routledge in 2015. Additionally, I am working on an edited volume entitled Italo-Greek Monasticism, from St. Neilos to Bessarion for Ashgate which is scheduled to appear in December 2015. My projects on Italo-Greek monasticism are long overdue projects and will do much justice to a forgotten page of Byzantine history: Suum Cuique Tribuere, Ea Demum Summa Justitia Est.

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson on Elisabeth Behr-Sigel

Last week I received from the publisher a copy of Sarah Hinlicky Wilson's book Woman, Women, and the Priesthood in the Trinitarian Theology of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (T&T Clark, 2013).

I have been reading it with great interest after being introduced to Elisabeth Behr-Sigel by my friend Michael Plekon who, over lunch a few years ago, gave me a copy of a wonderful biography he edited, Toward the Endless Day: The Life of Elisabeth Behr-Sigel. If you are interested in her fascinating life, or simply want a good biography about an unusual figure who led a long and interesting life, this biography is for you. 

(photo credit: Jim Forrest)

Elisabeth Behr-Sigel (EBS) (left) is not as well known as some of her other contemporary Orthodox theologians, perhaps in part because she does not fit into the usual categories. Her thought on several issues stands out, but it is perhaps on the question of women, and their possible sacramental ordination in the Orthodox Church, that most marks Behr-Sigel's thought. This question has been treated in a new book just published by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson, whom I asked for an interview. Here are her thoughts:

AD: Tell us a bit about your background:

SHW: I’m an east-coast American Lutheran of assorted European heritage who lived in a very Lutheran bubble until leaving college. Thereafter I worked at a journal under the leadership of an ardent Catholic, went to a Presbyterian seminary, and ended up the consultant to the international Lutheran-Orthodox dialogue at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg, France, which serves the Lutheran World Federation, itself an organ of communion among about 95% of the world’s Lutherans.

Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

AD: How did you, an American Lutheran writing a dissertation at the Presbyterian-affiliated Princeton Theological Seminary, end up writing about a French Orthodox theologian?  

SHW: The easy and uninteresting answer is: I needed a topic I could finish in a year, so that meant Luther was out of the question! I highly recommend doing dissertations where the secondary literature is virtually nonexistent. 

The more interesting answer is this. During my college years, I was in a very Catholic-oriented crowd of Lutherans, and some of them thought that eliminating the ordination of women in Lutheranism would increase our chances of ecumenical reconciliation with Catholics. (Now I think that’s not only placing an unfair burden on women but ignores the vast number of other issues that continue to separate us.) At the same time, one of my mentors said to me, “You’re the only reason I still believe in the ordination of women.” I was really shocked by this ad hominem (ad feminam?) argument, which I knew he would refuse in any other context. Ironically, I didn’t actually have any intention at the time of becoming a pastor—for awhile I myself was opposed to the ordination of women because it was the surest way to keep safe from such a terrible fate! 

Enter my friend Michael Plekon, an esteemed Orthodox theologian and priest, who said: you need to read Elisabeth Behr-Sigel’s book. I did, and it cleared my head beautifully. Here was a woman outside of the Lutheran-Catholic crossfire, who knew and appreciated feminism but did not consider it determinative for Christian faith, and who built on Scripture, patristic studies, and contemporary Orthodox theology to make a case for the ordination of women. Though the set of arguments on this topic is different depending on one’s confessional location, tracing the argument in another church’s setting was extremely illuminating of my own. I went to France to meet her the following year and exchanged occasional letters with her until her death. In many ways, my dissertation was paying a debt of gratitude to this remarkable woman. (And I did end up getting ordained after all. Oh well.)  

AD: You currently hold a position at the Institute for Ecumenical Research in Strasbourg. Among some Orthodox (and others) “ecumenical” is a bad word (the “pan-heresy” even), thought to mean the evacuation of all doctrine and the reduction of Christianity to the lowest common denominator. Tell us how you understand ecumenism and the search for Christian unity. 
 

I think we can get at ecumenism best via a cultural analogy. The gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was not to make everybody speak and understand one language, but to make all the people there understand the gospel in their own language. In mission, we don’t seek to draw all people into one single culture that alone houses the gospel, but for the gospel to move out into every culture and make each culture its dwelling place. This means that people are entitled to remain “at home” in their own cultures, even as the gospel takes hold of those cultures, inhabits them, and transforms them. But Pentecost also implies that we need to step outside of our home cultures, out of those places comfortable for us, to see what other people’s homes are like. Note how hard it was even for the apostles to leave Jerusalem; the Spirit had to keep nudging them out—sometimes only persecution would do the job! It is an essential part of growth into Christian maturity not to make the mistake of thinking that the gospel and our home culture are logical equivalents; we will naturally equate the two if not pushed beyond our boundaries. The tension between “at home” and “away” has to be maintained, not eliminated. We are allowed to be at home where we are at home; we are not allowed to deny other people the right to be at home where they are at home. 

Analogously, ecumenism should not demand that no one feel at home anymore, leaving one theological tradition for an ecumenical super-theology or minimum-theology that belongs to everybody and nobody. But ecumenism should drive people to travel beyond the borders of their home theology and home church to see what else is out there, which will then help them to be better Christians both at home and abroad. Ecumenical voyaging helps people see the weaknesses and failures in their home church—every church has them, for none can manage everything perfectly—and also to recognize their own real strengths. It should make them discover that there are real Christians over there—and thus that their church is also Christ’s church, which means it is also our church, even if in different clothing! We may legitimately critique other Christians, but we may not deny them the baptism that made and keeps them Christian. I think there has to be a lot more of this “ecumenical voyaging” before any further talk about unity can even be meaningful.

AD: Elisabeth Behr-Sigel herself had an interesting “ecumenical” path in her own life, moving from the Protestant tradition to Orthodoxy but continuing to be deeply engaged with the World Council of Churches and other Christians. What message does her life have for Orthodox Christians today--and others?

I think of Elisabeth as a shining example of the beauty of hybridity in Christian faith. We have only one God, but where creation is concerned we are not to be locked boxes or fall into essentializing delusions. Elisabeth’s earliest experience was of the cultural hybridity of Alsace (where I live now!), a place both French and German, always negotiating those two realities. Then there was her multilayered religious hybridity: her father was a Protestant Christian but her mother was Jewish. Elisabeth was baptized in a Lutheran church but experienced the friendly engagement of Lutherans and Reformed, something that has been impossible or rejected in other parts of the world, and her most significant mentors in her teen years were Reformed. Then she became Orthodox through chrismation, not rebaptism—but even after that, she served as a lay pastor in a Reformed church for eight months. She married a Russian, learned the language, and participated in Orthodox churches whose identity at the time was much more Russian than French. Her dearest friend Lev Gillet had a Catholic-Orthodox hybrid identity. And on and on. 

The basic thing she calls into question is the idea that authenticity means closure. I resonate deeply with this part of her witness. Earlier in life I would have thought that ecumenism would mean watering down my Lutheranism; in reality, I think it’s made me a better Lutheran, because I am no longer an ideological Lutheran: I have a better sense of our genuine strengths as well as a humbling sense of our serious weaknesses. (I also am an American living in France, and a white mother of a brown child, so I experience hybridity at many levels of my being.) I once thought ecumenism was a winner-takes-all struggle to be the true church—whether through the triumph of one confession over the others, or a reduction of all local and confessional details to a minimal acceptable homogenous standard. These kinds of perspectives only survive if you assume that you have to be one thing and one thing only. If hybridity is OK, proper to the church instead of alien to it, the whole question shifts radically. I think this is the challenge that world Christianity especially poses to “historic” churches.

AD: You note in your introduction that the question of The Ordination of Women in the Orthodox Church is assumed by some to be an “intrusion” of “secularism” or “feminism.” You argue that it was not so with EBS. Tell us how she approached the question.

It wasn’t an intrusion, because Elisabeth went out after it herself! Again, such a perspective assumes a “locked box” attitude toward the church, which is further premised on some kind of competition between creation and redemption. They’re not the same thing, but they’re not mortal enemies, either. Changes and movements in the world’s history and culture may have prompted the discussion about women in the church, but Elisabeth was convinced that these changes were already the long-term outcome of the gospel itself: that the leaven of Galatians 3:28 had taken nearly two millennia to raise the heavy lump of pagan societies. To assume that questions about women are an intrusion is basically to assume that being a woman is somehow not natural or proper to Christian life. Well, you can find remarks to that effect here and there—but these must be considered as much a heresy as a radical feminist denial of the Fatherhood of God or the incarnation of Jesus Christ.

AD: Your second chapter is devoted to Paul Evdokimov’s thought on women. I’ve heard it repeatedly said that, had he lived longer, he would have revised his writing and thinking in the area. If so, what in his thinking likely could or should have been revised?

He said as much to his wife, who reported this in a letter to Michael Plekon—that’s my hard proof—though I think others heard him say the same. Evdokimov was a pioneer: nobody had thought and written so extensively but also positively about women in the Orthodox world before him (and it wasn’t exactly an ancient tradition in the Western world by his time, either). He wanted to validate and honor women in the church and criticize their maltreatment. He also perceived a particular variant of feminism that actually despised sexual difference and wanted to make women the same as men, so he set out to oppose that. (I find many people think that this is the single unanimous goal of feminism; it is certainly not.) So it always happens that people at the forefront are starting from scratch, trying things out, making things up—and some things work, while others don’t. What Elisabeth ultimately came to differ with Evdokimov on was his essentializing of feminine being and attributing it to the being of God the Spirit. The more she searched, the less she could find to support such a notion. Had Evdokimov lived longer and stayed in conversation with Elisabeth, I think he probably would have begun to revise in the direction she laid out.

AD: Your third chapter begins by noting that prior to 1976, EBS had never put anything in print about women in the Church. What led to the change in her thinking and writing? 
 

I expect she thought about it quite a bit before. But the impetus for writing was her invitation to give the keynote address at the first-ever international gathering of Orthodox women at the Agapia convent in Romania. By then, the ordination of women was in the air in the West, so she touched on the matter briefly (and rejected it). But I think a lifetime’s experience as a woman in the Orthodox church was ready to erupt, and once she got started there was no holding her back!

AD: Tell us a bit about the female diaconate, treated in your sixth chapter. I’ve often heard it remarked by competent historians (e.g., Robert Taft) that the evidence of female deacons cannot be doubted. How did EBS approach the question? 

She accepted the conclusions of many scholars that there had once been an active female diaconate, and she spearheaded a petition to the ecumenical patriarch asking for it to be reinstated—however, not simply re-created from the past, but adapted to present needs. At the same time, she was concerned it could be seen as “throwing a bone” to women as a way of giving them an office but avoiding further discussion of ordination to the presbyteral and episcopal offices. My own sense is that the interrelationship of the three offices is strong enough that there is great fear that a real female diaconate today would inevitably lead to a female presbyterate—and that has been enough to strangle all progress on reinstating a female diaconate.  

AD: Ultimately your argument, if I understand it correctly, is that discussions about the ordination of women to the priesthood depend less on what Tradition says, or which passages of Scripture one consults. Ultimately everything rests on Trinitarian theology—an argument I’ve made elsewhere in writing about same-sex marriage. Tell us what light Trinitarian theology sheds on these debates. 
 

Yes, the Trinity is determinative, but probably not in the way expected. Elisabeth doesn’t follow the social trinitarian approach of community-in-diversity. In fact, had she known it, I think she would have been suspicious of it, because it was precisely the assertion of gender diversity within God that she found so problematic. Evdokimov had argued that the Son is masculine, the Spirit is feminine, the two together image the unknowable Father; Thomas Hopko made this line of thought famous, and it was finally accepted by the Rhodes Consultation on women in the church in 1998. Elisabeth, by contrast, followed the trail blazed by Vladimir Lossky and his work on personhood in both God and humanity. To be a person is to be fully one’s nature and yet not reducible to one’s nature, not enclosed by it or self-identical to it. For Lossky, this was the proper reading of what it means to be in God’s image—we don’t share God’s nature, but we share God’s non-reducibility to His nature in His tripartite personhood. For Elisabeth, this is how Jesus could take on and redeem the flesh of women without sharing their “female nature,” and therefore why women could iconically image Jesus as priests. The last chapter of my book traces this out at greater length, for while Elisabeth referred to Lossky frequently, she never developed the exact line of correspondence between her thinking and Losksy’s, so I tried to reconstruct her line of thought to make it clearer.

AD: Having finished this book, what writing projects are you at work on now? 
 

Most immediately in front of me is a kind of handbook on Pentecostalism and charismatic movements for Lutheran churches in the Lutheran World Federation, as Pentecostalism is our most pressing ecumenical challenge at the moment (and the other side of my responsibilities at the Institute, along with Orthodoxy). Longer term, I’m working on re-evaluating the practice and theology of saint veneration within Lutheranism. While we definitely dispensed with the invocation of the saints, I see compelling evidence that we quietly created our own Lutheran version of veneration, including of our own indigenous Lutheran saints. Once again, Elisabeth was a huge help to me here, as a practitioner of the “new hagiography”: one that doesn’t shy away from the flaws and failures of the saints but takes them up into the greater view of God’s transformation of humanity. I think there is a great deal of ecumenical potential to be found in attention to one another’s saints. For my basic perspective on the matter, see my contribution to Church and Culture!

Paul Evdokimov on Women

Paul Evdokimov remains one of the most interesting figures to come out of postwar Orthodoxy in France--a rich time with many rich thinkers, as I noted before. His book on marriage, The Sacrament of Love, remains to my mind the most theologically satisfying of any work in contemporary theology. But his theological anthropology, as those who have read Woman and the Salvation of the World know, remains problematic. According to at least three scholars I know who have studied and written about Evdokimov, he did not want this last book of his published, fearing it was unfinished and still needing work; but it was published posthumously anyway. 

We have, then, for some time needed a critical appreciation and evaluation of Evdokimov on these questions, and now it seems we have it in a new book from a Romanian scholar: Simona Sabou, Trading Silence for Words of Praise: The Status of Woman in Eastern Orthodoxy as Reflected in the Works of Paul Evdokimov (Lambert Academic, 2012), 224pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This work offers an analysis of Russian theologian Paul Evdokimov's view in regard to the position of woman in Orthodox theology. He starts from the doctrine of imago Dei, which requires a discussion of Evdokimov's view of God, emphasizing the importance given to personhood within Orthodox theology, and arguing that the concept of the monarchy of the Father on the one hand undermines our understanding of personhood itself, and on the other hand leaves room for hierarchical and subordinationist structures. On marriage, he distinguishes between monasticism and marriage, and while he presupposes monasticism to be a threat to the status of marriage and that a low status of marriage, in turn, is a threat to the status of woman, he fails to address either of these. Ultimately, it is argued that Evdokimov's particular attempts to both praise woman and deny any inferiority when compared with man are undermined by his wider Orthodox tradition, where personhood is not fully established, where monasticism has a higher status than marriage, where woman is to be mother without any parallel requirement for man, and where woman is not allowed an equal ministerial status with man.

The Martyrdom of Alexander Men

From the pen of Michel Evdokimov, theologian-son of a theologian-father Paul Evdokimov, comes a new book: Father Alexander Men: Martyr of Atheism (Gracewing, 2011), 104pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Father Alexander Men (1935-1990), a priest assassinated after the fall of communism, is a highly regarded figure in Russian Orthodoxy. He was brought up during the War and marked by the Stalinist era. Following the completion of his theological studies in Moscow, he was appointed to various parishes around the capital, in particular Alabino and Novaïa Dérévnia. But his personality and influence soon brought him into conflict with the authorities and he was persistently hounded by the police and subjected to interrogations and searches of his home. Father Men was not an agitator but the embodiment of an ideal of spiritual resistance to communism effected through prayer, the liturgical and sacramental life, and the valuing of the human person

Paul Evdokimov and Olivier Clement

Francophone Orthodoxy has produced an enormous number of extremely important and influential thinkers over the last century, many of them connected to L'Institut Saint-Serge in Paris. Among the outstanding figures, Paul Evdokimov occupies a unique place.

I drew on his Art of the Icon: A Theology of Beauty in a course on iconography last year. It is a dense treatise but worthwhile.

His Woman and the Salvation of the World: A Christian Anthropology on the Charisms of Women continues to influence my thinking as I am working on a new book about sexual differentiation in the Christian East.

His Ages of the Spiritual Life as well as In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader are both wonderful collections, the latter especially diverse, treating everything from eschatology to the Theotokos, the Eucharist, and the Church. Both of these books were edited by Michael Plekon, who provides a brief biographical sketch of Evdokimov in Tradition Alive and a longer study of him in Living Icons: Persons of Faith in the Eastern Church. Plekon continues to do so much to make European Orthodoxy accessible to North American anglophones--not just in his work on Evdokimov, but also on Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Nicholas Afanasiev, and others.

But it is Evdokimov's book on marriage that I return to again and again, regarding it as the most profound treatment I have seen: The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Light of the Orthodox Tradition.

His insights into marriage and its sacrifices, and his idea of a universalized and interiorized monasticism, remain very important and are developed in that book with a depth of wisdom I have seen nowhere else--as I have briefly and modestly indicated elsewhere. Consider but one passage:

The wedding rite symbolically summarizes the entire married life. The betrothed have already exchanged rings; they have already been crowned and they partake of the one cup of life. It is only in the evening of life that this cup, symbolic of fullness, will be taken, when the shadow of the crowns will fall upon it... [and] the spaces of the heart that do not exist as of yet... are created by suffering. In order to be loved by the other, one must renounce oneself completely. It is a deep and unceasing ascetic practice. The crowns of the betrothed refer to martyrdom.

In 2007, I put together a summer course at the Sheptytsky Institute devoted to his life and works, almost all of which have, over the years, been translated into English.

One work that was not translated (there are others), but is now available in English thanks to New City Press, is Orthodoxy (New City Press, 2011), 450pp.

As Olivier Clément says in his foreword: 

The appearance in 1965 of Orthodoxy, a masterpiece of synthesis, was a landmark in religious publishing and earned for its author a doctorate of theology from the Institut Saint-Serge in Paris. Paul Evdokimov here circumvents all scholastic theology on the one hand, and the traditional approach of the 'Dogmatic' theologians on the other, to develop an original synthesis of Orthodox theological thinking. Although he constantly quotes the Fathers, he does so creatively, so as not simply to repeat them, but to incarnate their spirit in our own time and for our future. In addition, he enriches Patristic thought by bringing to bear on it the two great movements that have occurred in Eastern Christianity: the theology of the divine energies in the 14th century which enlightened our understanding of the material world and human culture; and the Russian religious philosophy of the first half of the 20th century with its prophetic intuitions, its Pentecostal understanding of the modern world, and its vital eschatology. A theological approach in which the human intelligence progresses by an ascesis of repentance, of the great conversion of the heart, metanoia, is here set forth so as to show, or rather celebrate, the theosis or deification of the whole human person.... An understanding we might call eucharistic, gathering together and clarifying the experience of life in the Church, an understanding inseparable from the golden chain of holiness, including the holiness of intelligence, which the Church venerates in those whom she calls the 'Fathers.' 

Clément, himself the author of very significant texts, has also been brought into English through New City Press:

• Roots of Christian Mysticism: Texts from Patristic Era with Commentary
• You Are Peter: An Orthodox Reflection on the Exercise of Papal Primacy
• On Human Being: Spiritual Anthropology

All three contain much wisdom--as do his others from other publishers. Of course I read with great interest the second of the two, his book on the papacy, and devoted a section of my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity to discussing it.

I'm greatly looking forward to receiving Evdokimov's Orthodoxy, and I will have more to say about it on here when I do.