How Things Have Changed for Me Since My Last Post: Church and Professional Experiences in the Past Few Years

     Today is Tuesday in the Octave of the Dormition. The Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God was on August 15.  A lot has happened between my last post and now, and I can't even begin to fill my readers in on all that has occurred.  There have been so many changes, and I myself have grown and changed.  I believe that my last post was sometime in 2015.  Well, there have been some new happenings since then! (One would hope so).

       For one thing, I look a lot better than I used to, because I changed my diet as well as my profession.  I also changed from the Russian Orthodox parish to which I belonged in 2015 to my former Orthodox parish before that, a parish of the Orthodox Church of America. Returning to my old parish has been enormously better for me spiritually, as well as for my husband. Here are a couple of current pictures of me. If you compare this to my initial photo on this blog, you will see the difference. The first photo is of me at the beginning of Lent this year. The second is my most recent photo, for the Feast of the Dormition this year.

     The result of getting out of teaching, a profession in which I really didn't belong socially or spiritually, is that I now do work that is right and fulfilling for me.  The result of leaving the ROCOR parish to which I belonged in 2015 is that I am now in a place that is more congruent with what I need spiritually.  

     Regarding my experiences of priests in the past fourteen years, allow me to elaborate on a subject that needs to be broached. Priests need to know that women can often be quite tender and sensitive in soul, and if priests decide to berate us spiritually during Confession or give us "tough love" or tell us "the truth" about ourselves--which they usually have patently wrong because they really can't see into our souls, such methods will more often hurt us than help us.  We will leave Confession feeling spiritually battered.  For example, suppose a priest tells a woman that she is filled with vanity just because she likes to wear her hair in a nice style or wear jewelry.  Well, in actual fact, most women do not wear their hair nicely or wear jewelry out of vanity.  We wear jewelry and do our hair prettily for one main reason: we're female!  It is in the female nature to appreciate, create and foster beauty.  Very few of us are really and truly vain.  In fact, most of us are self-conscious about our appearance, quite the opposite of being vain.  Anyway, the bit about vanity is just a small example of things a priest can say to a woman which are more hurtful than helpful. (And it was one of several unhelpful things said to me over the years in various confession experiences). In any case, I now do fairly well interacting with my current priest, though I have decided to avoid ever totally giving my trust to a priest again, after some things I have experienced over the past few years.  We shouldn't trust priests that much anyway.  Our trust should be in God: trust not in princes or in the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation (Ps. 145/146: 3). 

     Having now returned to our old OCA parish back in February of 2016, I feel overall like I am getting what I really need at church.  At the previous parish, I got badly hurt; I often felt like my heart's blood was shed every time I opened the door and went in there.  I'm going to briefly tell the story here without any names being mentioned, either of the parish or the people referred to here.  Anyone from that parish reading this blog article should realise that I am telling this story from my own point of view, through the lens of having been spiritually and emotionally hurt there.  But I will try to be as gentle as possible in my rendition of the situation. 

     When we originally transferred from the OCA parish to the ROCOR one, that OCA parish (the one to which I've now returned) was undergoing serious problems that we couldn't handle, and our faith had been adversely affected by those problems.  (Those problems are gone and fully rectified now). We went to the ROCOR parish because we thought that perhaps an Old Calendar parish would be better for us, and it seemed like the best thing to do at the time.

     To be fair, the ROCOR parish was good for a while.  But by the fourth year, things were starting to get toxic for us with some key people there, and I was increasingly getting hurt there spiritually and emotionally.  It's really very simple: the parish was run mostly by the priest and his family members, and we ended up on the outs with him and a couple of them who were involved in the main ministries of the parish.  From that time forward, our experience there became a downhill journey.  I will not play the blame game.  It takes two to tango, and I'm sure that they felt like there were as many problems on our side as we felt there were on theirs.  There are things about our family that are actually not easy for everyone to deal with, mainly that we have two mentally disabled adults at home for whom we are caregivers, and those adults have ensuing health and social problems that can get overwhelming for anyone who is not accustomed to dealing with such things.   There were some genuine acts of kindness done to our family by the priest and his family.  All I can say is that we fell out with him and some of them at the end, and we are still in the process of healing.  The situation was exacerbated by a terrible personal tragedy that the priest and his family went through, just after we left their parish. That is about the sum of what happened, and not much more can be said.  

      At our OCA parish now, my husband no longer serves behind the altar as a Subdeacon.  He did not get laicized, in case anyone who reads this post has heard otherwise.  He just retired, which he is allowed to do in the OCA.  The main reason he retired was his gout, not being able to stand through the services.  But he also retired because he got too spiritually and emotionally frustrated behind the altar, at both parishes where he served.

    I will sum up my husband's experiences as a Subdeacon in the Orthodox parishes where he served, because this is something that needs to be said. Speaking generally of both those parishes, my husband felt that he was being constantly criticized and blamed behind the altar for one thing or another, and that he was not listened to or respected when he tried to explain the situation from his point of view.  What I observed, generally, was that both priests at both parishes decided to dislike my husband and find fault with him.  They turned their faces against him.  

     Some of this was actually my fault, because I told those priests personal things that I should not have told them, things that were too personal about some difficulties in our family at the time.  My excess of personal information caused those priests and their wives to judge my husband, and this is how I learned a very hard but valuable lesson: NEVER talk to your pastor about your marriage's normal ups and downs or anything else so personal, and NEVER talk to your pastor about your family's financial situation.  Do not talk about these things with your fellow parishioners either. Ask people to pray for you by all means, but don't tell them what the prayers are for; rather, keep all family and financial information strictly private at church, as much as possible.  That's my advice.  Being able to rely on church members for support in difficult times is a nice ideal, but in my experience, it's only that-- an ideal.  Ideals and reality are two different things.  Human beings are in too fallen and sinful a state to avoid passing unjust judgment on each other, especially when too many personal matters are revealed at church.  Very few Christians are really strong enough to bear each other's burdens. You may think me cynical for saying this.  I'm only speaking from experience.

     There was also another thing that I am going to mention because it needs to be said, as a cautionary tale to priests:  at one particular parish I attended, there was so much exactitude going on then, so much obsession with absolute liturgical correctness, that I was routinely corrected publicly whenever I made any mistake with  directing the choir for the Saturday night vigil. Every time I made a mistake in the very long, complicated Vigil service, like maybe singing the wrong sessional hymn or Theotokion, I was corrected in front of the choir and the congregation.  I don't care what the justification was for that behaviour! It was wrong. First of all, it was demoralizing and embarrassing for me.  Secondly, it undercut my authority as a choir director and led the younger members of the choir to think that they could get away with behaving disruptively while I was directing.  Thirdly, I didn't make mistakes massive enough to warrant such public correction.  I just read a wrong troparion in the canon every now and then, which was natural since I was usually sight-reading the music most of the time and had the materials for the service given to me only a short time before Vigil.  Fourthly, correcting me in front of other people like that was UNPROFESSIONAL. I reject as utter garbage the idea of such things teaching me humility! Humility is one thing, humiliation another. Priests, if you treat your choir directors in that way, you will lose them, and deservedly so.  Corrections need to be made outside of service and privately, not in tones of thinly-veiled irritation, in front of the congregation.  This treatment by the priest and deacon of that parish played a big role in my decision to leave it.

     Now, the ensuing result of all this, changing parishes and getting our present jobs, is that my husband and I are healthier, happier and more at peace than we ever have been before. Our return to our former OCA parish was unquestionably the right move for us. It's also closer to our home and our jobs.  

     I work as the Organist-Choirmaster and Director of Music at a traditionalist Rite One Episcopal parish. Overall, my job is enormously less stressful and more fulfilling for me than teaching was. I'm not sick all the time the way I was before.  The hours of my job are more flexible to accommodate certain health issues I have with my respiratory system and immune responses.  Best of all, I'm doing the work I feel God has truly called me to do.  I should have been doing it all along, the work of church music ministry instead of school teaching.  

     Allow me to disgress a moment about why I stopped being a school music teacher, and wouldn't go back into teaching if I were offered five million dollars a year to do so--not unless it were maybe a college professorship. While I had some good moments in teaching and some great students in various schools, the truth is that going into teaching was a mistake for me.  I should never have done it, because in the end I turned out to be emotionally, physically, and spiritually unfit for that type of work.  In an eighteen-year teaching career that grew progressively more difficult every year with almost every school in which I worked, I experienced far too often the following things: (1) unsupportive administrations, (2) administrations that didn't understand teaching elementary music and choir and what it entailed, (3) a progressive increase of administrative paperwork (like curriculum mapping, etc). that took so much time out of my regular classroom duties that my workdays became 10 hours long just trying to keep up with stuff like lesson plans, (4) unsupportive fellow teachers who routinely hurt my feelings, talked about me behind my back, or complained about me behind my back, and (5) increasingly disobedient and disrespectful students in the classroom whose behaviour I was supposed to somehow overlook or whitewash, with increasingly namby-pamby language being used by administrators and workshop leaders to explain why traditional methods of discipline could not be used anymore in today's schools.  Granted, there were some supportive fellow teachers and good people I met. I am still friends with those people today.  But overall, the teaching experience got worse and worse every year.  Then, my immune system collapsed because I was teaching at multiple schools in the end, and I was thus being exposed to multiple respiratory diseases.  At that point, I could not have continued teaching even had I wanted to do so.  

     I begged the most holy Mother of God to pray to the Lord Jesus for me in a special way, and I prayed to Christ that He might please direct me towards the kind of work that was right for me.  I also added, crying out to Christ Jesus, that all I had ever wanted to do was serve Him in musically in a church!  Well, exactly two months later, a new position opened for me in a field I never dreamed I would re-enter: full-time church music ministry for a salary, rather than just a stipend or as a volunteer.  This was the field I had started out in originally, but I had supplemented it with teaching because of low pay in my church work (a different story having to do with gender discrimination which I'll tell some other time).  I supplemented the church music ministry work with teaching music in Catholic schools, but eventually turned away from Church music as a profession because I didn't think I could still do that kind of work as a member of the Orthodox Church.  I actually found out, when this new position in church music ministry opened so smoothly and quickly for me at the end of my teaching career, that I could indeed work in that type of position and still be Orthodox as long as I had two things: (1) an understanding Orthodox pastor and parish; (2) an understanding employer who accepted that I can only take Communion in the Orthodox Church, and who accepted that having time to attend Orthodox services was vital to remaining in good standing within my faith community. I found both of those things, thanks be to God.

     However, when I changed professions from teaching to full-time professional church music ministry in May of 2016, I got a lot of negative feedback from some fellow Orthodox Christians who thought I was abandoning the Orthodox Church by doing church music ministry work in a church of a different confession.  But I have not left the Orthodox Church at all, as most of my readers know. I still receive Communion regularly in the Orthodox Church, and I am a member at my parish (the aforementioned OCA parish) in good standing.  My husband is also a member in good standing, and he also receives Communion at our OCA parish.  He works as the business administrator of that same Episcopal church where I work.  

     Here's the thing: these are our jobs.  They are not some kind of attempt to leave the Orthodox Church or betray it, unlike what some overly zealous fellow Orthodox Christians have suggested.  I also must mention that if the Orthodox Church on the whole would pay its choir directors a living wage, and this were made a professional standard in all Orthodox dioceses, then those of us who make our living by directing church music would not be compelled to seek employment at other churches.   The proper payment of staff and lay ministers is something that needs to be addressed some day by Orthodox bishops in a synod.

     I also feel very strongly that the talents God gave me, along with the Bachelor's and Master's Degrees He provided through His providence, are better used at my current job than they were in my previous music positions, especially in the schools.  Teaching music in the schools was not a true or full usage of what God had given me, for two reasons: (1) The constant respiratory and throat diseases I caught from the students almost ruined my singing voice completely.  (2) Sometimes, I also hurt my feet and hands dealing with work in the classroom, and there were several times when I was not physically safe in classrooms because the students were being allowed to act like hooligans with little intervention or support from the administration. Suffice it to say that by the end of my teaching career, my musical talents in the schools were used being far less than skills in babysitting and crowd control.  Suffice it to say that I ceased to feel safe as an employee in any school system, private or public.

    So, at the Episcopal church where I now work, I play the organ, direct the choir, teach the choir liturgical music in their Anglican tradition, help support the parishioners through prayer and music, and I administrate the music program.  I run the music program by planning the music for all services, scheduling all rehearsals and musical events, managing repairs to instruments, building up the music budget, typing and graphically designing the service leaflet, and writing blog articles on music and organ playing for the church's website.  I also have a weekly newletter with spiritual reflections on the hymns of the week, which I send out to the choir and other people who follow the music program at the church. As for my husband's job, he answers the phone, helps parishioners with information they need for church services and events, keeps the books, handles accounts, does administrative desk work for the parish under the pastor's supervision, and acts as a sort of security person regarding the alarm system and other safety issues.  

    We believe that God placed us in these jobs through the prayers of the Theotokos, and we are not working in any capacity which conflicts with our practice of our Eastern Orthodox faith.  This is especially true in my case, since the form of the Mass used at this Episcopal church is almost identical to the Western Rite Orthodox Mass of St. Tikhon. I can use my little Western Rite Orthodox prayer book, the St. Ambrose Prayer Book, and follow right along every Sunday with hardly a glitch, except that the Prayers of the People in the Episcopal Mass are before the Offertory instead of during it. As for the problems that the Episcopal Church has overall, some serious issues which are at odds with the teachings of the Orthodox Church, the parish where we work--and the Episcopal diocese in which we work, overall--does not support the new innovations of recent Episcopal conventions.  The parish where we work shares the beliefs of the Orthodox Church regarding the nature of marriage according to the Bible, and other issues regarding family life.  The priests and parishioners where we work have a very sound Scriptural approach to the Christian faith, with a healthy knowledge of commentary by the Church fathers and writers such as C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton.  All of these things make this little Episcopal church a great place to be for earning our daily bread!  It's very hard these days to find a place of employment that upholds the same values as oneself and one's family.

    The fruits of our labours are the most telling about the rightness of our choices.  We have been healthy physically, overall, much more so than we used to be.  We have been solid financially. We have experienced love and understanding at our work place that we have never had before with any other employer.

     Regarding our participation in the Orthodox Church, we have been able to grow spiritually at our OCA parish, even though we can't always be there for services except during the weekdays.  There has been cross-pollination between our work at our jobs and our spiritual growth, especially for me since I have become a Western Rite Orthodox Benedictine oblate in my prayer rule.  Though I remain in the Eastern jurisdiction of the Orthodox Church, being Serbian Orthodox in culture and New Calendar OCA in practice, I have the blessing of my priest to combine the Rule of St. Benedict with my prayers from the Eastern Horologion.  As a result of having my own Western spiritual heritage restored to me, I am flourishing spiritually, because I don't feel like half of me has been forcibly ripped out. Once, I had an overzealous priest who made me give up everything Western when I was newly baptized.  That really wasn't good for me spiritually.  By the way, the restoration of my Western heritage began at the ROCOR parish where I was from 2011 to 2016, something for which I will always be grateful to them.  From that point, the restoration of my Irish and Norman spiritual heritage has really taken off and blossomed in the past three years.  

      Also, I feel like I have more spiritual freedom now, whereas before in my previous parish, I felt like I was being pressured to do things that I couldn't physically handle, like having to attend a three-hour vigil in order to receive Communion or attend an evening Vespers every time I wanted to receive from the Chalice.  I found that practice to be too much for me in the ROCOR approach to Orthodoxy, which is why I will not go to another ROCOR parish, even though there is great beauty in the Russian tradition.  I can't handle those longer services. It makes me ill because of my health issues, and spiritually, I feel like I'm burning a rope at two ends.  Some people can handle that kind of rigour.  I cannot.  I need to get proper rest and do my Communion preparation and praying of Vespers at home. Besides, there is also the aforementioned fact that my husband and I are caregivers to two disabled family members who live with us, and we really can't be away from home at night.

     So, this concludes what is essentially both a fill-in on the past years' events, and also what is honestly a cathartic rant.  I have said things that I felt needed to be said.  I hope that if anyone entering the Orthodox priesthood reads this, or any new priests, you will profit by some of the experiences I've shared.  There is a lot of hurt expressed here. But I also hope that you will take away from this post the fact that I am now pretty much happy and at peace.

     One last point: I talked a lot about what I can and can't handle.  Being able to understand our spiritual limitations and levels of endurance is essential to maintaining a healthy prayer life.  If fasting, long services, standing for long periods or anything else is making one burned out, physically sick or dysfunctional spiritually, then such practices need to be revisited with one's father-confessor and probably jettisoned.  These things are supposed to be a means to an end, not the end itself.  All Christians need to be cautious about taking on spiritual disciplines that might be too much for them. 

      That's all for tonight.  God bless!