INTERVIEW WITH DR. ALBERT RABOTEAU PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR OF RELIGION

Reprinted with permission from THE CHRISTIAN ACTIVIST, " A Journal of Orthodox Opinion" (Note: Headings were added to the original article to aid the reader).

Dr. Raboteau is an African-American Professor and author at Princeton University, and a well-known authority on slave religion. He has two books, "Fire in the Bones" and "Slave Religion." He appeared in the recent PBS special on African-American Slavery, entitled "Africans in America."

Frank Schaeffer:   First, I want to ask you a couple of practical things. You're a professor at Princeton, but what is your actual title?

Albert Raboteau:   My actual title is the "Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion." I teach courses in American Religious History and a course on Religion and Literature. I've also developed a new course this semester called Spiritual Exercises, which is a seminar on some of the classics of Christian spirituality, both Christian East and Christian West.

FS:   How long have you been at Princeton?

AR:  I came to Princeton in 1982.

FS:   Did they hire you into your present position as a professor? Did you do graduate work there?

AR:  I did my graduate work at Yale and actually my first job offer was at Princeton but Yale also offered me a position, so I stayed at Yale. Then I moved from Yale to Berkeley and taught there for a number of years and did some administration there and then moved to Princeton on a visiting basis for a year in '81. I decided to stay and in '82 made the move.

FS:  When you moved to Princeton to assume your present duties, was this a change for you or was this something that you had anticipated in the sense that your own studies had led you to this field? Is this exactly what you'd studied for, what you're teaching?

AR:  Pretty much. That is, at Yale I studied American Religious History and specialized in African-American Religious history, writing a dissertation on the religion of slaves which was published as my first book called Slave Religion in 1977.

FS:   Who was the publisher?

AR:  Oxford University Press. It was a revision of my dissertation. When I went to Berkeley there was no Religious Studies department, so I taught in both the history department and the African-American studies department there and was involved in Religious studies. Part of my reason for moving to Princeton was I felt that being in a religious studies department would be a more suitable place in terms of colleagues who were involved in a common enterprise. I also moved to Princeton because I had gone to a very small university, Loyola in Los Angeles - now Loyola of Marymount - and that had set the image for me of the kind of teaching experience that I wanted. Berkeley, with 30,000 students was large and impersonal, a difficult place for me temperamentally although I loved the area in many ways. I also moved to Princeton because I was heading more and more into administration in Berkeley. My last two years there I was Associate Dean in charge of Student Advising in the College of Letters and Science, with 15,000 students. So I decided that Princeton would offer a chance for me to simply teach. Ironically within four years I was chair of the department there, which I did for four years and then I became Dean of the Graduate School at Princeton for one year and then resigned because I realized that this was really not what I wanted. It was the straw that broke the camel's back. I went back to full-time teaching and writing after that.

FS:   In your background, was there a point where you were studying to become a priest?

AR:  When I was high school age and even beyond, into college age, I thought about becoming a Roman Catholic priest and actually wanted to become a monk. When I was a high school senior I almost went into a Benedictine Monastery in New York. I graduated from high school when I was sixteen and decided that perhaps I was a little young to become a monk and that I ought to go to college. So I did, but I kept the idea of the priesthood and monastic life in mind so I majored in classics. Then as time went on the idea of the priesthood and monastic life seemed to recede. It didn't seem to be the path that I was heading down. Eventually, I majored in English and did my first graduate work in English at Berkeley. I did an MA. Then I decided to pursue my theological interests so I did two years of graduate work in Roman Catholic Theology at Marquette, and then taught theology for a year at a black college in New Orleans, Xavier. That experience convinced me that teaching was what I wanted to do and that teaching seemed to be my vocation. I then had to decide whether to go back to English or to continue with theology, and decided I wanted to do neither. I applied to Yale in Religious Studies in part because I heard of a professor there named Sidney Alstrom in the Study of American Religion who was quite eminent and quite broad in his interests, and also because Yale was beginning an African-American Studies program. It was an undergraduate program, but it indicated an interest in the area of African-American studies. I had decided that I really wanted to study the history of the religious life of black Americans as part of my interest in American Religion. I was particularly interested in the relationship between religion and the struggle for freedom of black people, so I applied to Yale and received a personal call from Sidney Alstrom encouraging me to come and so I did my graduate work there.

FS:   Do you see yourself staying where you are now?

AR:  At Princeton you mean?

FS:   Yes.

AR:  Well it's interesting because what I do has been changing slightly, that is both my writing and my teaching have taken more of a religious aspect. My last book, which was called Fire in the Bones , is a collection of essays.

FS:   Who's the publisher of Fire In The Bones ?

AR:  Beacon Press.

FS:   When did that book come out?

AR:  In 1995, and some of the essays in that volume are pretty much straight history - American religious history. Some of them are autobiographical and some of them are religious reflections. The sub-title of the book is Reflections on African-American Religious History . My interest in developing a course on Religion and Literature or Fantasy, plus this new course on Spiritual Exercises is a move in a different direction for me in terms of my teaching.

FS:   Before this interview, you mentioned that your course on Religious fantasy involved C. S. Lewis, of course, and J. R. Tolkein. Who else?

AR:  A number of other authors. We begin with some children's books: Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising . I wish we had time to read the whole series, but we don't, so we read the first volume. We also read A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin and we read a wide range of Grimm's fairy tales. We also read a very strange but interesting science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick called The Divine Invasion.

FS:   Do you find the course is well received?

AR:  It is. I've had wonderful response from students. I actually have to restrict the enrollment by application.

FS:   So what are the other courses you're now teaching at Princeton?

AR:  There's the Spiritual Exercises course, a course on African-American Religious History, a course called American Classics , that I co-teach with a colleague named David Curasco in which we look at some historical texts and a number of fictional texts that deal with some of the large themes of American identity, The American Experience.

FS:   What sorts of writers are you teaching?

AR:  We read Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Faulkner's The Bear, and we also read DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk . We read Leslie Mermin Silcoe, a Native American writer's book called Ceremony, and also Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior . We look at some of the classical texts such as the Declaration of Independence - both versions - Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural. We also reach back a little bit further. We look at a wonderful set of texts called Broken Spears, which is an attempt to get at the Aztec's account of the conquests.

FS:   Now, to get back at a couple of more basic questions, are you married?

AR:  Yes.

FS:   Do you have children?

AR:  I have four children. My first marriage failed and I remarried. My second wife has two grown children and I have four children by my first marriage. They stretch in age from my youngest who's 13 to my oldest who's 25.

FS:   So who's still at home?

AR:  The thirteen-year-old.

FS:   Boy or girl?

AR:  A boy named Martin and he's...I should mention that he's also Orthodox. He's the one of my children who became Orthodox and serves at our church.

FS:   She's an artist by background.

FS:   Artist as in "painter"?

AR:  Yes. She also did some performance art in days past. For the last twelve years she's been working with out-patient psychiatric patients in Harlem at a clinic, and she runs a large studio which is a basement room of this clinic. The studio is called Souls in Motion , and she and her co-worker, a woman named Louise, encourage clients who are willing to express themselves artistically either in painting or in sewing.

FS:   Now, let me ask you to go back in your own life and tell me a little bit about where you grew up and how you went from that into an academic career.

AR:  It goes back to my parents to some extent and their influence. My mother was a school teacher. This was in Mississippi. My father was a handy-man, a taxi driver, a laborer. My father was killed in a racial incident three months before I was born.

FS:   What year would that have been?

AR:  1943. And because the white man who killed him claimed self-defense, and was not tried, my mother decided that the incident and the result of the incident meant that she did not want her children to grow up in the south. So at the age of 45, when I was two years old, she moved us north to the midwest.

FS:   And she was pregnant with you when your father was murdered?

AR:  She was six months pregnant when my father was killed. So we left; my two sisters, my mother and I. My mother remarried a man who had been a priest, a black priest - one of the early black priests in the [American] Roman Catholic Church. He had left the priesthood for a number of reasons, mainly what he perceived as racist treatment within the Roman Catholic Church against him as a priest. They got married and he taught Latin and Greek in seminary to the seminarians in my hometown, Bay St. Louis. The seminary had been founded in 1920 to train young black men for the priesthood. Most religious orders wouldn't accept blacks then. So he was an educated man and when we moved, and after my parents got married, he attempted to get a graduate degree, some certification at the University of Michigan. We wound up in Ann Arbor and he simply wasn't able to manage supporting a family and get a degree. So he wound up working as a janitor for many years to support us. Eventually we moved, in '58, to California where he found a job which was more suited to his own capacities. He wound up being a technical editor at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He tried to instruct me in Latin when I was about 5 or 6 years old, and I enjoyed reading. My family lived in small apartments and, in two cases, houses that were owned by women who worked at night so they had to keep me quiet during the day. So I learned to read quite early! I think those were influences upon me. I found gratification in school and did well, so the academic life seemed to mesh with the pattern of my own personality and with the influence of my parents.

FS:   Is your step-father alive?

AR:  My mother died in 1973 and my step-father died in '95 and is buried in Princeton.

FS:   What was his name?

AR:  Royal Woods. Royal Leo Woods, and my mother's name was Mabel, maiden name, Isham.

FS:   When you were growing up as a Roman Catholic, were you a practicing Catholic in spite of the fact that your parents were having these difficulties of racism with the Roman Catholic Church?

AR:  Yes. It didn't cause them to have any alienation in terms of their beliefs, particularly my mother. She was a very pious woman who prayed regularly and still had her prayer book - a frequently-used prayer book. They sent me to Catholic schools and we went to mass regularly on Sunday and on feast days, and then of course in Catholic school I went to mass daily as was required in those days.

FS:   Looking back on that period in your life, what was your experience of being a Roman Catholic?

AR:  I look back on it with gratitude. It was a wonderful formation in terms of a whole attitude, a spiritual attitude toward human life. I remember with great vividness the liturgical seasons, some of the liturgical practices such as benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the incense. I became a choir boy and then an altar boy so I was involved in learning the hymns - Latin in those days - and as an altar boy in learning the responses.

So my involvement was personal in terms of the Liturgy . I remember the May processions, the devotions to the Blessed Virgin. Confession was a regular aspect of life. I look back on it as something that ordered my days, that ordered the seasons, that was a very big part of the way in which I understood life and which led to a kind of - I don't quite know what term to use - I guess, seriousness about life and its meaning and its end that created a kind of "religious grammar" for me. Later on in life when I would meet people who had no such spiritual grammar it was somewhat disconcerting, because it was so ingrained with me.

FS:   Now if you were the age that you had been during those years [13] and let's say your growing up was taking place in the 1980's and 90's, do you think your experience of the Roman Catholic Church would have been the same?

AR:  Well, I can measure that because I have children! They went to public schools because the Catholic schools in our area just simply weren't very good. Secondly, the Liturgy has changed a good deal. Of course, the second Vatican Council had occurred and so the liturgy had been changed both in terms of language and in a number of ways in terms of a kind of revision that lost to some extent - I'm trying to be careful with my words here - the rituals that helped to convey some of the depth of the mystery to me.

FS:   When did you become Orthodox?

AR:  I became Orthodox on December 9, 1993.

FS:   And where were you chrismated?

AR:  I was chrismated at St. Peter & St. Paul Church in Mandell, New Jersey.

FS:   And that is...?

AR:  It¹s an OCA Church [Orthodox Church in America]. Mainly Russian and Slavic 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants, though the priest, Fr. James Parsells is a convert from Roman Catholicism, like me.

FS:   Is that your church now?

AR:  No. We - my wife and I and several others - some from Mandell, some from other Orthodox communities in the greater Princeton area have recently - by recently I mean last March was our first Divine Liturgy - formed a mission church. And the mission church is dedicated to the Theotokos Joy of All Who Sorrow.

FS:   So this is a Mission?

AR:  This is an OCA Mission church. We were helped a great deal by Fr. Paul, who's the Director of Missions for the OCA, in getting the Bishop's blessing and then beginning the mission.

FS:   Who's your priest?

AR:  We have a visiting priest, Fr. John Kasar. He drives down from Long Island every Sunday for Divine Liturgy, often with his six children and his wife, and he also comes once a month on Saturday for vespers and confessions.

FS:   What part of the life of your community do you partake in as one of the "founders" of this mission?

AR:  I'm the lay coordinator of the mission and I also conduct our weekly Bible study which meets on Tuesday nights.

FS:   What does a lay coordinator do?

AR:  (laughs) Everything except serve the Divine Liturgy! I'm in charge of paying the rent. We rent our church from Roman Catholic parish which outgrew the building and moved elsewhere.

FS:   Do you have icons there?

AR:  We have Icons; we have them up! The walls are studded with icons, and since we have people from various backgrounds, we try to include icons of saints from a variety of traditions, so in addition to Saint Vladimir we also have St. Moses the Ethiopian and many others. We have an iconostasis which was kind of "jerry-rigged" from materials left behind by the Catholics. (laughs) We have one set of vestments and we could certainly use more. A chalice and Eucharistic vessels and a censer were given to us by other churches.

FS:   If someone in your area wanted to come to Divine Liturgy, where is this church? Give me a name and address.

AR:  Divine Liturgy is every Sunday at 9:30. The church is located in Rocky Hill which is a small village next to Princeton. The church is located on Princeton Avenue. There's no address, it's just a small street - the church is very obvious.

FS:   How many years ago, and when and under what circumstances, did you first look at the Orthodox Church?

AR:  There's a little pre-history. When I was studying Roman Catholic theology at Marquette I read some of the works of Fr. Alexander Schmemann and also some works of Fr. John Meyendorf. But the actual "beginning," to the extent that we can trace such things, began with an exhibit of icons called "The Sacred Art of Russia - Gates of Mystery" which was shown at the Princeton Art museum. I went to the exhibit and was just stunned, not by just the beauty of the icons, but by the spiritual power.

FS:   When was that?

AR:  That would have been about a year and several months before my chrismation.

FS:   So, maybe seven years ago?

AR:  Yes, six and a half, I think. So I kept going back. I went back three times and I would just stand in front of some of the icons. One in particular was an icon of the Theotokos -I can't remember the name of it now - which just captured me. I gazed at her and She gazed at me. There was really a sense of the light emanating from the icon. As part of the exhibit and also part of the Fr. Georges Florovsky lecture series at the Princeton Chapel, Bishop Kallistos Ware gave a lecture and I was struck by it. He seemed to be one of those rare people in whom there's not much of a gap between their words and their person. Well, around that time I had accepted the invitation to become dean of the graduate school and a friend had thrown a party for me - actually my colleague, Elaine Pagels. I went to this party and there I met a man who had also been at the icon exhibit. We began to talk about it and he told me that he had recently, within a year or two, converted from the Episcopal Church to Orthodoxy. As the conversation went on, he invited me to attend his church.

FS:   Who was this?

AR:  John Perkins. Several Sundays later I took him up on his offer and I went. I was struck by the power, the spiritual power, of the Divine Liturgy in ways that I hadn't been moved by the Roman Catholic liturgy for many years. I was also struck by the warmth of the community of people. Here I was very different in background from these people but they were very hospitable. So I kept going. I went back the next Sunday and I kept going, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. There was no pressure; no one was pushing me toward anything. I kept going because I found it sustaining. This was during a very rough time in my own life personally and professionally with the deanship and also difficulties with my marriage. There were periods of time when I could physically feel the prayers of the people in the congregation as if they were holding me up. The sense of community was that powerful. That summer one other important event happened. One of the parishioners at St. Peter & St. Paul has a son who was in St. Vladimir's seminary in Crestwood, New York, and he suggested I accompany him up for a vespers service during Great Lent at the seminary, and maybe go early and meet some people there. So I agreed. He drove me up and he introduced me to a priest with whom he thought I might get along. The priest's name was Fr. John Breck, who at that point was teaching at the seminary. Indeed, we did get along. We struck up a wonderful relationship. He introduced me to another priest, Fr. John Garvey who was a former Roman Catholic. We struck up a relationship as well. Fr. John Breck learned that I was planning to attend a conference in Europe that summer. He sent me the addresses of an Orthodox monastery in England and one in France.

FS:   Which ones?

AR:  The one in England was St. John The Baptist, in Essex. I went and spent my fiftieth birthday there. I spent five days. It was very deep, a wonderful experience. I talked with some of the monks, especially one monk with whom I formed a friendship, Fr. Silouan.

FS:   Fr. Silouan! (laughter)

AR:  No, not St. Silouan and not Fr. Sophrony! Sadly, he had died three months before I got there. But I did meet a younger monk named Fr. Silouan who was very...well, he listened to my stories of woe. I also had written, before going abroad, to Bishop Kallistos Ware saying that I had heard him speak and that I was very attracted to Orthodoxy and wondered if I might speak to him, and he said "yes." So later I went to Oxford and spent an hour and a half with him. He was very pastoral. So by the time I got to the conference I had fairly much inwardly been moved to a decision to become Orthodox. I hadn¹t set out "intellectually" out of "dissatisfaction" with Catholicism to try and investigate a number of other Christian communions and "decide." It made sense because I felt increasingly unfed by the liturgy in the Roman Catholic Church, even though I had a good and friendly relationship with the pastor of the local church. Yet I felt no sense of community. (The parish is a large city parish with a lot people coming in and coming out, but not much of a sense of community.)

I had a dream during this period in which I was going to communion in a Roman Catholic Church and the Eucharistic minister was about to present me with the cup. I pulled out, from behind my back a liter bottle of Bourbon and poured it in the cup! Then I realized that this was not what you were supposed to do! Then I left. Reflecting on the dream, I realized it may have been saying to me, in symbolic terms, that for me the Spirit was lacking in the Roman Church and that I was trying to "supply" the Spirit that was not there. So I began to have some interviews and talks with Fr. James, the pastor at Mandell about Orthodox teaching and differences from Roman Catholic teaching, and he said "well," after a number of sessions, "you indicate when you think you're ready for chrismation." It happened that the wife of the man who had introduced me to this church, John Perkins, his wife Mary and their younger son, Timothy were going to be chrismated on the ninth and I decided that I would like to be chrismated with them rather than by myself. So we were chrismated together. My name is Panteleimon.

FS:   When you came into the Orthodox Church was there anybody in the Roman Catholic church who said, "What are you doing? Why would you abandon your own tradition?" or tried to talk you out of it?

AR:  It happened fairly much without a ripple. One friend of mine, who is a Roman Catholic nun, at one point offered me the name of another nun who she thought might be able to give me some spiritual advice. From the tone of it I think she was concerned about my becoming Orthodox. One other friend, after the fact, several years later, expressed her sadness at losing me from Roman Catholicism. I've had a couple of other Roman Catholics who've expressed a kind of understanding. One of the most interesting things was a good friend of mine who was a Roman Catholic priest and a theologian, who presided at the baptism of my youngest, when I told him, he said, "Well, it's interesting. Several people have accused me of being more Orthodox than Roman Catholic!" Around the time of my chrismation, I was given an honorary degree from my old Alma Mater, Loyola Marymount and I had to tell them (and also around that time I was getting an honorary degree from Notre Dame), and in both cases I said, "I need to tell you that I'm no longer Roman Catholic. I'm Orthodox." The president of Loyola said, "That's fine, that's no problem." He said, "Let me tell you this story. I was in our chapel and a Mexican couple came in and said, 'Father, is this a Catholic chapel?' And I said, 'Yes, of course, this is Loyola University, this is a Catholic Chapel.' And they said, 'Well Father, where are the candles?' And I said, 'Well, we don't have any candles!' And they said, 'Father, I thought you said this is a Catholic Chapel!'" And then he sort of laughed and said to me, "The second Vatican Council was a puritanization of the Roman Catholic Church."

FS:   You came into the Orthodox Church, as you say, through a kind of experiential route. But now you¹re in the Orthodox Church. Perhaps, if your experience is something like mine, which was a little bit similar in some ways, there is time for reflection and now you're looking back and trying to figure out what you did! (laughter) At least that's my case! (laughter)

AR:  There are several things that I'd note. One for me is the Orthodox strength of the Trinitarian piety. The Orthodox emphasis is on the persons of the Trinity: God, Father Son and Holy Spirit. That's a difference for me in my experiential and theological experience of Orthodoxy between Orthodoxy and the Roman Church. In Orthodoxy there is a whole sense of the iconic nature of the human person. The emphasis is being made in the image and likeness of God. And what that means, in terms of the whole progress of the spiritual life, as enunciated in the Orthodox tradition is theosis. That to me has a deep resonance and that's not something I came into contact with in Roman Catholicism. To some extent the tradition of theosis for me has been a corrective to a kind of Roman Catholicism - this may have been even a deformation of Roman Catholic teaching - but a kind of Tridentine and Jansanistic tinge of perfectionism which was very much a part of my childhood understanding of what sanctity meant, of what we were called to be is a problem for me. Theosis is much deeper and in some ways is a much freer understanding of the process of sanctification, it seems to me. I would also point to the depth of sacramental understanding within Orthodoxy, that is the use of the material objects: incense, holy water, candles, and to carry that even further into the sense of the embodied spirituality, in the inspirited body, so that the prostrations, the bows, the sensory - if we can use the term in a "good sense" - the "sensual aspects" of Orthodoxy which insist that it¹s the whole person and the whole of creation that is being transformed, that¹s much richer, it seems to me. A sense that Orthodoxy is much richer than my experience in Roman Catholicism is there. The sense of an asceticism, which is an asceticism not only for the monk but also for lay people, permeates Orthodoxy. I'll put it another way, the monastic overspill into the parish life of the Orthodox with the fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, the fasts in Advent and Great Lent, and the other smaller "Lents." That tradition of asceticism it seems to me has been lost in Roman Catholicism. The sense of the importance of tradition and of an unbroken link seems to me to be more valid in Orthodoxy. It's more validly claimed by Orthodoxy than it is by Roman Catholics. There is also the whole issue of the Magisterium, with the Roman Catholic Church, which was exacerbated by the centralization of authority in the Vatican, after the first Vatican council and which has taken various forms especially after the second Vatican Council in reaction to Humanae Vitae and other things, which is kind of an ongoing nagging issue, over and over again within Roman Catholicism. So much energy, so much writing has to do with this issue of Papal authority and the teaching authority of the Church. But that seems to me to be a distraction. That's not a problem within Orthodoxy. Certainly we have the authority of the Bishop and of the Councils, but the issue of "Magisterium" is not at the forefront of our consciousness continuously. Those would be some things that I would point to.

FS:   Do you miss the Papacy?

AR:  No. I have a good deal of respect for John Paul II, but I don't miss the Papacy as a source of authority.

FS:   When you look at Church history, how do you see the Papacy? What's your take on it? Obviously the Orthodox view is somewhat jaundiced on Papal authority as it's understood by Rome.

AR:  I think that the sense of what I called earlier (and there are Catholics who feel this way, so I'm not unique in this) the increasing bureaucratization and centralization of Church Authority, not just in the figure of the Pope but in the Papacy and the Vatican Curia has been and is - for the last century and more - an ongoing problem. Archbishop John Quinn said something similar to that in his talk at the Campion Hall in Oxford several years ago, questioning whether things - even after the claims of collegiality that were so strongly made in Vatican II - if in fact this collegiality has gone by the board. The Roman Church is governed by a small group within the Vatican, bypassing episcopal authority and frequently out of touch with local and national issues. For a while the synod of Bishops in the Roman Catholic Church seemed as if it was moving towards at least some consultant of power, but even that seems to have been watered down, weakened.

FS:   When you hear talk of "unification of Orthodoxy and Catholicism" or kind of an ecumenist or ecumenical direction, how do you perceive that?

AR:  It's interesting because I perceive it monastically. That is, I think if you go to some Roman Catholic monasteries and some Orthodox monasteries, there are deep resonances, deep spiritual resonances in both places. That is, on some level I would perceive, I want to use my words carefully here, closeness . But on the level of organization and important issues there are and remain differences. I would hope that those differences could be overcome and yet, from an historical perspective, these things could take a long, long time to come, if they ever do.

FS:   Don't you think unity with the Roman Catholic Pope would always have to be at the price of Orthodox collegiality?

AR:  Yes. I must say there would have to be a radical redefinition of the Papacy. John Paul has opened the door for discussion of what the role of the Pope is, but I would be very surprised if that discussion could lead towards a new definition of Papal infallibility.

FS:   Because it would actually have to go back to the tradition before probably, I guess, the 6th or 7th century where you'd have Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople...

AR:  Yes. The ancient patriarchates, the "big five."

FS:   That's not something that the Roman Catholics have taken very seriously for quite a long time I imagine.

AR:  I think there are some Roman Catholics who think similarly, but of course they can't be vocal about this, if they are publishing or if they are scholars, without serious difficulties.

FS:   To change the subject, I would like to discuss the issue of what appears to me to be somewhat of a mystery. Some of the most ancient Orthodox branches of the Church, in Ethiopia and other places, are African. But apparently this doesn't seem to be understood or noticed by either the African-American community, the white community, or American Christians in general. Why?

AR:  Well, with regard to personal experience, I was rather astounded by the warmth with which I was welcomed by the hospitality of the Orthodox people in Mandell who basically come from an ethnic background which is not mine! (laughter) I have heard - I haven't experienced this, but I've heard - not just I but other "ethnic groups" might be very unwelcome in some "ethnic" Orthodox parishes. It raises the whole question of the "ethnic identity" of Orthodoxy. I think that's been a problem and remains a problem. Let me say two things about my perception of the ethnic identity issue within Orthodoxy. One is it would be interesting to go back and compare this current problem as its perceived with the "Americanists crisis" in the Roman Catholic Church in the 19th Century in the United States. That is, there were those Roman Catholic Bishops who said "Look, you need to stop the German language mass. You need to translate it into English. You need to stop the German language instruction in schools, you need to move into English." The Germans said "Nope. If we lose the language, we lose our children, we lose the faith." So some of these battles were fought out by Roman Catholics and it would be interesting to go back and see if there's anything instructive in that. I say that simply as an American religious historian. The second point I want to add is that sometimes it seems to me that the "ethnic identity issue," which is a hard issue because it involves people's identities, it involves nostalgia, it involves the old poignant links to homelands, sometimes homelands that have been racked with horrible war and destruction, so it's a deeply poignant human issue. But, it strikes me that sometimes the ethnic identity syndrome hides a deeper problem. That deeper problem is what is the relationship with Christianity, Christian faith and any particular culture or society. To some extent because we are historical, any form of Christianity is going to be imbedded in a particular culture in a particular time. But Christianity has to transcend any particular culture and time, and not just transcend it, but to some extent be counter-cultural! It's precisely that aspect sometimes of the "ethnic identity" that worries me on two grounds. One is that if Orthodoxy is simply an ethnic religion, where's the room for the counter-cultural force of the Christian faith, both regarding the so-called foreign identity, whether it's Greek or Serbian or Albanian or whatever, and with regards to the dominant American culture. To put it in another way, for those of us who are to some extent pan-Orthodox, there's still the danger of a creeping American cultural identity. That is, we can't afford to simply become American! That is, there are values in American society that are deeply antithetical to Christianity. So what I am trying to present is that the problem of "ethnicity" to some extent clouds this deeper problem of the proper relationship, the counter-cultural relationship of Christianity and Christian life and Christian faith to any culture, including modern American culture.

FS:   It's been my experience - and this may trigger some thoughts with you - that there has been a certain type of Orthodox person that comes out of an ethnic background, second or third generation, that may have become so anxious to be "American" and to "make it" and "fit in" and get their kids into Harvard or Princeton or wherever, that there's almost a sense that if some old monk came wandering out of Athos they would be embarrassed by this man! It seems to me that there are some Orthodox who would be much more comfortable if their priests and their monks and their liturgical life were more culturally "mainstream American," maybe Episcopalian in terms of cultural acceptance. So it's interesting because there are actually two "ethnic" movements going on. There's kind of the straight ethnic experience - "why isn't everything in Greek?" kind of ethnicity - but then there's the other one when someone's grandson now comes away from Princeton and he doesn't want to hear from his grandmother who says this is the Advent fast or this is Lent. He wants to be "modern" and "American," above all not labeled as a "fundamentalist."

AR:  You've said it much better; that's exactly what I'm trying to say! At both ends we risk avoiding the tension that's at the heart of the historicity of Christianity. That we have to be in the world, but not of the world. And both, holding on with both hands to an old ethnic identity, say a European ethnic identity, and the new version of acculturation, especially acculturation to a consumer-oriented society, both are evasions of this deep counter-cultural tension which the Orthodox monk, by definition, stands for.

FS:   Speaking of which, in terms of looking for a solution, I find it personally encouraging that Orthodox monasticism is beginning to seriously establish itself in North America.

AR:  I think you're absolutely right. The spiritual health of the Body of Christ depends upon the monastic life of prayer and individual guidance from the monastics.

FS:   How do you see monasticism as being important to the American experience of Orthodoxy?

AR:  Well it seems to me that the Orthodox monastic tradition has been central to Orthodoxy. Particularly within Orthodoxy this tradition is a profound witness to the importance of prayer. Importance isn't even the right word. The centrality of prayer, the necessity of prayer! It's as necessary as breathing as one of the primary purposes of human life. Secondly, the centrality of asceticism, that is a sense that one has to continually be aware of and struggle against the tendencies towards gratification of the self. And both of those are crucial in a society like ours which is dominated by a kind of distraction, noise and busyness...an outward distraction which moves inwardly and distracts us from the quiet necessary for prayer, and which continually focuses us on consumption as the means of finding meaning in your life. Monasticism is profoundly antithetical to this. Monasticism affords a spiritual father or spiritual mother. And that's something that again I think we need, and that people hunger for. We need someone who can, through the gift that God has given them, through the depths that have been opened up within them due to their intensive prayer life, help us to place our life in a holistic context so that confession is not just a matter of listening to sins, but is a matter of a spiritual father giving us a perception of a whole direction, the whole location of our spiritual life and where we are. That's something that comes out of the Orthodox monastic tradition which is rare, I would surmise, in most [American] Orthodox parish life. Monasticism gives those of us who lead busy lives, distracted lives, places to go to recover some orientation, some sense of centering, some sense of what our spiritual lives are supposed to be about. I think that people, not just Orthodox people, but all Americans are spiritually hungry! Monasteries are crowded! I've called some monasteries, and it's hard to find room to get in! People recognize authentic spirituality and the peace that radiates from these places and are attracted to it like moths to the flame.

FS:   Why are so many American people becoming Orthodox today?

AR:  If one can generalize, it would seem to me that it's precisely because of the counter-cultural aspects that Orthodoxy appeals. That is that deep hunger that I mentioned earlier among Americans or other modern people for a sense of mystery. The only rituals that we have in the dominant society are rituals of common consumption: Super Bowl, Thanksgiving, which ends with a day of obscene shopping on the next day! The whole sense of a profoundly counter-cultural movement - counter-cultural not just to be counter-cultural, but counter-cultural in the sense of pointing towards the direction of deeper meaning and even more than meaning, pointing towards the direction of theosis. This is what we're made for!

FS:   Looking at the world you live in and, to some extent, I live in as a writer of fiction and occasional movie maker and so forth, how does Orthodoxy "fit" with the post-modern world, women's studies departments, political correctness, hate of anything that smacks of "patriarchal tyranny"; all these kinds of "litmus tests," of a political correctness?

AR:  Well, I think Orthodoxy doesn't "fit"! One of the aspects of Orthodoxy, and I think of all true religious belief, is a willingness to submit, to surrender. Therefore, the intellectual aggressiveness and the imperialism of these categories that occur - and I don't want to get into "truths" and half-truths that may be involved in a social critique that some of these post-modern movements are based in - but in terms of a kind of mantra of class, race and gender, social analysis is not the way in which one judges religious experience or faith. One has to surrender. Without a willingness to surrender, it's hard for me to see how there can be faith.

FS:   Then why do you have so many people who are trying to bang the door down of religion who seem to have such a political agenda?

AR:  I think you're giving people more credit for a consistent rationality then they generally have! (laughter) I think that religion has frequently, not just in the modern world, but frequently been turned to other purposes by people who claimed to be practitioners of the tradition and those purposes have sometimes been much more destructive of life and limb than modern radical feminists or revisionists are to basic doctrine today. So I think we need to be aware that within "us," within the Church itself, within each of us as members of the Church - this is another thing that monastic tradition can teach with its constant attention to reading the heart - we all have seeds of fragmentation, of schizophrenia, of twisting even the best, even for good purposes to ends that are ultimately selfish and based on aggrandizing the self. So in answer to some of these questions, why do people claim to be members of the Christian community or a Christian community and have their own agendas? It's precisely because they are their own agendas! These are ideological battles and ideology can often disguise itself as theology and the only answer I know to that, again, is some sense of tradition and submission to the Tradition. Tradition is a living thing, a living reality, we must constantly check where we stand with regard to the larger community. People aren't often willing to do that, it's a matter of power and defense of one's own position and power often disguised in "rights" kind of terminology. So that's what I would point to and in all frankness, and I would say this cautiously, certainly some of our own bishops in various times and places have not been free of these kinds of issues of power. Ideology creeps in, political ideology, ideologies of various sorts.

FS:   One ideology that I see that isn't very often identified as left or right is this sort of American Impulse. It's like a steam-roller that seems to me to be homogenizing the human experience much like the great title of a new Urban Planning book, The Geography of Nowhere. When I picture American culture, as someone who's spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, you fly in and you see this sort of style of urban development, one can almost see the monasteries as sort of tiny little outposts of something else, of...

AR:  ...civilization?

FS:   Yes, civilization!

AR:  Well, that's Alistair MacIntire's conclusion in After Virtue; we need some new Benedict for the emerging dark ages.

FS:   Speaking of which, what is America right now?

AR:  There are many "Americas." I think we have to avoid one danger too, which is to use Christianity or Orthodoxy merely as a stick with which to beat the Twentieth Century. There is good and we need to recognize good wherever it occurs. So I'd say that there are many Americas. I think immediately of my wife's own work and what she's doing in Harlem and other good things, other communities where people are engaged in building community, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, doing Matthew 25 and doing it for religious reasons. So there are a lot of "Americas" out there. But there is an impulse towards America becoming "nowhere." Part of this to me is a kind of logical extension of what I referred to earlier as the basic temptation of the human heart towards self aggrandizement which is almost mirrored in a kind of almost banal way by the model of cultural consumption. Much of what makes this society and culture "go" is the model of self-gratification and feeding oneself and that leads to nowhere.

AR:  What is the Orthodox mission to the African-American community given Orthodox history? We Orthodox are different than the Protestants and Roman Catholics because there is no historical Protestant or Roman church that existed in Africa as early as Orthodoxy. What, therefore, is the Orthodox mission to African-Americans?

AR:  I've been increasingly getting involved with an Orthodox group in Kansas City that is addressing this issue. There have been five conferences, the sixth will be held this February at St. Mary of Egypt Orthodox Mission which is right in the inner city of Kansas City, led by some former Evangelical Protestants who converted to Orthodoxy and became members of the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. They have been mounting a vigorous mission among African-Americans, struggling with these questions: How do we create an Orthodox presence among African-Americans? How do we articulate the ancient Christianity in its African form in Ethiopia, in Egypt in a way that demonstrates that Christianity has not simply been a "European religion"?

FS:   Not to mention India...

AR:  Right.

FS:   And I'm always struck by that story of the Portuguese arriving saying "What's this?" when they found Orthodoxy alive and well in the 16th century in India. The spread of Christianity is much more complicated than your average white Protestant ever realized!

AR:  (chuckle) Right...than unfortunately, most black Protestants realize too, because Christianity is, in their minds, being identified as a "European religion."

FS:   But, there's something that pre-dates all that, Orthodoxy.

AR:  That's right. So we've been holding these conferences. I began to get involved in the fourth conference and the proceedings of the conferences have been published in a book called Unbroken Circle .

FS:   Where's that book available?

AR:  You can get it by calling St. Mary of Egypt Mission in Kansas City. Fr. Moses Berry, who's a black Orthodox Priest, who's also been very much involved in this, and the editor of the book, Fr. Paisius Altshul, is in Kansas City. [See the special offer in this issue of The Christian Activist.] He's white, he's married to a black woman, Matushka Michaela and they're just wonderful people; they're salt of the earth. He makes his living by house painting. They have a coffee house with a book shop called "Desert Wisdom," a bookshop right there in the inner city desert. They take in homeless people, they help battered women. They publish a little booklet of about 7 or 8 pages called "Cross Bearers," which deals with African- American spirituality and its connections to Orthodoxy.

FS:   How would someone get that?

AR:  By writing to: Cross Bearers, c/o St. Mary of Egypt Orthodox Church, PO Box 090492, Kansas City, MO 64109

FS:   Tell me more about your thoughts on reaching African-Americans.

AR:  When we think of the early Church, we think of martyrdom. We think of modern Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as time and place of martyrdom. If one looks at American slaves, who were persecuted and in some cases actually killed for attending prayer meetings, and sometimes persecuted for the "heresy" of teaching that Christianity and slavery are antithetical, might we not find there confessors and slave martyrs...slave confessors and martyrs? I have written an essay that outlines some similarities between Orthodox Spirituality and African-American spirituality

FS:   With the "bad taste" in the African-American community's mouth, as it were, - collectively - from White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant/Western Christianity, without going into all that, what is the Orthodox road to reach an African-American Christian?

AR:  In some ways it's so simple that we don't think of it! It's communication. That is, there are two questions there. One is how do Orthodox people become more mission-minded? That is the whole thrust of Christian identity as the on-going Body of Christ in time and history, to be the voice of Christ, preaching the Good News and to be the hands of Christ, attempting to heal and console those who are suffering, those who need healing. That therefore leads - should lead - to an open heart, to a heart that's open and communities full of hospitality. Hospitality first of all for one another, within the parish, within the community itself, but also hospitality for others. So to be closed, to be inward looking, that's precisely what Christ was condemning in terms of the Jewish leadership of His time, their religion had become an inward possession - it was not a city upon a hill as Isaiah says in which all nations will come and gather. If you go back, back to the foundings of Orthodoxy in America, St. Innocent was a missionary, traveling thousands of miles in kayaks on the open sea, building churches, translating Gospels into native languages. We have models of missionary activity within the American memory of the Orthodox Church, within America that most of us don't know about, or don't take as models. So communicating the mission-minded attitude; one of the things that we're trying to say in our mission - I don't mean to keep returning to our mission as some kind of a model, because we have a lot of difficulties - but one of the things we've tried to inculcate is that mission doesn't just mean a newly formed church which is small and then it gets larger and becomes a parish. Mission is part of our identity and indeed if we got to be of a certain size, some of us should leave and start another Orthodox mission which leads to the notion of presence. Once you have a missionary mind that's become part of your Christian identity how then, given the nature of our societies, do you establish a presence among people who are not just like you? And that's more difficult, I think. One of the ways of doing it is actually to try, for people to actually try, as the group in Kansas City has, to found churches in places that aren't traditionally Orthodox, within inner cities. Another way is to establish relationships, friendships with non-Orthodox church people whether through projects in common, and perhaps through actual church business, where people, for example, who may have no idea at all what Vespers is, come and actually witness an Orthodox Vespers. I think the power of something like that should not be under-estimated.

FS:   Well, given your own experience of one icon!

AR:  Yes. So how does it work? It works through us being icons to others, that is being icons of love and hospitality as communities and as individuals.

FS:   It would seem to me the fact that Orthodoxy appeals to the whole person, deals in liturgical ritual, has a connection to the most ancient history of The Church, that the "fit" between Black America and Orthodoxy is ready-made. Now maybe I'm wrong...

AR:  You've just summarized my article! I argue both of those points: One, you establish with the ancient African Christian history that Orthodox people weren't involved in the Atlantic slave trade at all. It's a different history. For instance, the ancient Ethiopian monarchy has been Christian for centuries. Some of the Orthodox monasteries in Africa are ancient; it's an unbroken tradition. These are black Orthodox people. Then there is the embodied spirit and the enspirited body: that's very much an Orthodox and African-American orientation. The notion of suffering, the tradition of the African-American's identification with the sufferings of Jesus fits in well with Orthodox tradition. There are several other elements that I identify. The sense of the person as not simply a monad but that the person himself or herself has a long foreground in terms of ancestors. Within Orthodoxy we continue to celebrate our ancestors of the faith.

FS:   We have our memorials.

AR:  Yes. And not just to our own genetic ancestors, but to our ancestors of the faith, our saints. So our own sense of the importance of community, that is a community that extends back in time, is there. Another experience I had just before I became Orthodox, besides my encounter with the icon, was my first Pascha. At Pascha I was standing outside at the doors of the Church chanting in Slavonic, Greek and English "Christ is Risen" and the doors of the church opened and we moved in. I physically had the sensation of generations of Christians moving into the church with us. That kind of connectedness to the past, to our ancestors in faith, is something that's very powerful in African religion.

FS:   The "cloud of witnesses"?

AR:  Yes, the cloud of witnesses. The presence, the fact that icons offer a sense of the presence of those who are represented by the icon is within African traditions, the sense of iconic representations of spiritual beings, spiritual powers, is very strong. Then there is the music. One of the things I harp on a lot is the sad joyfulness that struck me very strongly in Orthodox music. I remember crying the first few times I heard the Cherubic Hymn. It conveyed the sense of sad joyfulness which is the minor tone. For African-Americans, that's the tone of life, that's what reality is. It's bitter-sweet, it's sad joyfulness. So that's another element that brings us together.

FS:   Something Tolkein understood.

AR:  Yes. Yes. Yes! And it's the tone of the Spiritual as well. We find this is the way in which slaves "talked" about religion that it was not enough, as one slave used to say, to just talk about God. You have to experience the power of God upon the altar of your heart. So the whole sense of the mystery of the Liturgy is making God present. This is not just words about God, not just words about words about God in terms of preaching the Bible, but actually that the Liturgy makes God present. And finally, there is the sense of the other world as being very close to this world. There's a permeable veil between the two. This is also something very present in African and African-American spirituality shared by Orthodoxy.

FS:   The martyrific experience of the black community in this culture, contradicts the idea that God's blessing is only manifest in material blessing and not in suffering. African-Americans understand that whereas in White Protestant America if you don't have all the stuff you pray for, something's wrong. 'Cause if you send ten dollars to the televangelist you're supposed to get everything back!

AR:  Yes, that's right. It gets back to this issue - to put it very succinctly - if Jesus came as a suffering servant, who in 19th century America resembled Him more, the slave or the master?

FS:   Or would understand Him?

AR:  Yes.

FS:   Or was following Him?

AR:  That's right. And that sense is very strong in African-American spirituality, of following the model of the Passion and the Resurrection. That the hope lies - that the precedent for us is in Exodus - and then again in the Passion death and Resurrection of Christ - that model is the model that our lives, our history is re-duplicating, is following. And the sense therefore is that suffering has meaning. Suffering cannot be evaded. You may think that power and status and wealth can evade suffering. Ultimately we are all going to suffer and die! So that's another area that creates a kind of resonance between Orthodoxy and African-American piety on a very deep level. When I was talking to that monk in England at St. John the Baptist in Essex, he said that if I become Orthodox, I should write about the similarities between African-American spirituality and Orthodox spirituality. And I thought to myself "What similarities?!" I couldn't see the forest because I was in the midst of the trees! My colleague David, when I told him I was contemplating becoming Orthodox said, "Do you know how much that fits with the deepest interest in you, of your work?" And I said, "No I don't." So it was only in reflection that I began to see how these things all fit together and that writing a book on Slave Religion, which goes into the African religious background and talks about African-American spirituality, in some ways was part of the preparation for being able to see the connections between the two. So when I said that I can trace the moment when I became interested in Orthodoxy to the icon and the exhibit at Princeton, clearly the patterns of God's providence reached much further back in terms of my own history and academic interests, and where they have led me, how they are coming into some integration at this stage of my life.

FS:   After you became Orthodox, your family...?

AR:  It was interesting. When I became Orthodox I had been recently divorced. My son Martin became Orthodox. He was attending Roman Catholic Easter Sunday Mass with my god-daughter. He was 9 years old. He had been coming to the Orthodox services with me and with my wife-to-be, who was attending services as well. In the middle of the Roman Catholic sermon he looked at my god-daughter and said, "This is like easy-listening music.'" So they got up and walked out and went to a local drugstore and bought some candy. (laughter) After that, he asked his mother if he could come to Orthodox services and she said "sure." So he kept coming and decided he wanted to be chrismated and started going to church-school. So he was chrismated. My son just celebrated his chrismation anniversary about a month ago. My second wife had been baptized Congregationalist and been raised as a non-denominational Protestant. She grew up and in maturity began to be very interested in Eastern Religion, particularly Taoism, in part because she began to study Chinese medicine with a Taoist priest. So Christianity seemed very foreign to her. That is, she had a strong reaction against the Christianity of her childhood and the "Christianity" of the culture around her. Orthodox Christianity was something new for her. It was very different than the "Christianity" she had known as a child or had seen in adulthood! She was moved very much by the liturgies and particularly very moved by the icons. My wife was particularly moved by an icon of St. Elizabeth of Moscow which would become her chrismation name. She began to meet some Orthodox people. She went to a monastery and saw Orthodoxy in that context. And then she went to one of the Kansas City conferences and she met a monk there named Fr. Damascene, and he was working on a book on Taoism. I mentioned this to Fr. Paisius who presented to Julia, my wife, a chapter from Fr. Damascene's book. And so things began to "click." Because my wife works in the inner city of Harlem, she saw Orthodoxy with kind of a social face, a social presence. As gradually she began to move towards Orthodoxy, Fr. John Garvey, whom I mentioned before, who has an awareness of Eastern religion and knowledge, instructed her. And then she was chrismated in his church, St. Nicholas Albanian Orthodox Church in Queens and took the name Elizabeth.

FS:   For Elizabeth of Moscow?

AR:  Yes. And then about a year later, we got married. We got married in an Orthodox service presided over by Fr. John Breck and Fr. John Garvey, two priests that I had first met at the seminary before my conversion.

FS:   It's been my experience that in Orthodoxy there is a lot more than meets the eye. I keep stumbling into new things that let me know that it will always be the beginning of a kind of journey.

AR:  I can put it in the geography of the Church. The iconostasis stands there and the icons are the windows into the kingdom, but we're not yet into the kingdom. But occasionally we get glimpses! For me, the Orthodox Church remains a place where those glimpses occur. It's difficult. There are times when there are personality conflicts. There are times when people are very human and fallible. But there are also times when amazing things happen. This has been my experience with the mission. We worry, worry, worry and then suddenly something will happen that will settle the problem without my doing anything about it! So an ongoing sense of the Orthodox Church as a place of the mysterious, the miraculous, is true. For me it has become very much the center of my life. I've been restored to the centrality of Christianity within my life through the conversion to Orthodoxy and through my involvement and participation in the mission. It shapes my seasons. It shapes my days. It shapes the way in which I live in the world.

James Buchfuehrer, Publisher
Frank Schaeffer, Editor
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