A monk finds mercy, one step at a time

The last thing Father Andrew remembers from the afternoon of July 31, 1998 was asking his brother monk if he was too tired to continue driving back to New Mexico.

It had already been a tough day. They had taken the pre-dawn vigil hours as Orthodox Christians in eastern Colorado prayed the Psalms for 24 hours before the funeral of a friend killed in a car crash.

The young novice said he was tired, but OK. Father Andrew went to sleep, after reclining his seat all the way. That was probably what saved his life when the car tumbled off Interstate 25 near Pueblo, Colo. The 60-year-old monk was unconscious when rescuers pulled him from the wreck. Days later, he awoke and learned that Brother Mark – the one novice at the fledgling St. Michael's Skete in Canones, N.M. – had died.

Doctors warned him that massive head wounds cause pits of depression. Then there are the unique forms of doubt that stalk shepherds who feel lost in the wilderness.

"I have worked with many people who have struggled with depression. Looking back, I had no idea what they were dealing with," said Father Andrew, who asked that his secular name not be used since monks strive to leave their pasts behind. "It's not that you feel sorry for yourself. You just don't feel – anything. I kept praying: 'God, have mercy on me.' "

A "skete" is a small community that is not yet a monastery. St. Michael's is a 15-acre enclave on a gravel road 90 minutes northwest of Santa Fe, where the high desert hits the mountains. For a decade, Father Andrew and a few supporters have worked in an old adobe house, a chapel shed and a cellar in which they make 10,000 beeswax candles a month, to sell to churches. Working foot by foot, they also are turning pumice, concrete and Ponderosa pine into a small sanctuary blending Spanish architecture and Russian Orthodox tradition. Brother Mark's arrival had been a sign of hope.

"You can't help but ask questions," said Father John Bethancourt of Santa Fe's Holy Trinity Orthodox Mission, who has spent many hours working at the skete. "But I believe God is building something here. I believe God will send other monks. ... We need more monks and more monasteries, not less. I don't think we can afford to lose one."

Father Andrew had faced tough times before during his own battle with alcoholism and then in years of work as a rehabilitation counselor. He also had been an Episcopal pastor, before he became an Orthodox monk. He already knew the answers to many tough questions.

"What was really tough was that before, when bad things happened in my life, I knew it was my fault," he said. "When I was drinking and stuff, I could see why I kept getting in trouble. But why this? Why now?"

During walks with his Australian shepherd, which also survived the crash, the monk gazed at the splendor in his valley. Yet he heard "dark voices" in his head muttering that death was the only reality and everything else was illusion. He heard echoes of his agnostic next-door neighbor during his Texas boyhood and his physics professor at the University of the South whose skepticism verged on nihilism.

There was no moment of epiphany. Father Andrew kept saying his prayers, doing his work and accepting invitations to fellowship and worship with others - even when he felt dead. He began reading works by believers active in science, medicine and public life. He didn't run from his questions.

Just before Christmas, a horrible cold put the weakened monk flat on his back. He said he turned on the radio and was assaulted by "every lousy Christmas record I had ever heard in my life." He fled to church and his cloud of depression lifted during the Christmas rites.

A year after the crash, Father Andrew said he continues to pray for God's mercy, while seeking answers to his questions. It's that simple, but not easy.

"I am supposed to continue a monastic life. I know that much," he said. "I still want to know what God wants to have happen here at the skete. I don't have a broad vision about the future. That's in God's hands, not mine. I have to take one step at a time."

Faith? An issue of human rights?

WASHINGTON – The reports pour in via a handful of understaffed and overlooked religion news services that have sprung up on the Internet.

In Pakistan, two Christians were jailed after they clashed with a vendor who refused to serve them ice cream in the same bowls offered to Muslims.

"I do not have any bowls for Christians," he said, according to the Compass Direct news service. The brothers were accused of attacking Islam, under a statute that, if read literally, calls for execution. Their families fled into hiding. Supporters – including some Muslims – are trying to find them a lawyer willing to take the case.

In Iran, the fate of 13 jailed Jews remains unclear. In Russia, an extremist stabbed a leading rabbi. In China, the battered and lifeless body of Father Yan Weiping was found in a Beijing street, hours after the underground Catholic priest was arrested during an illegal Mass. In Tibet, the United Nations-sponsored World Bank is helping the Chinese government move more people into territory seized from Buddhists.

Then there are the Catholics in India and the secret missionaries in North Korea and the terrified evangelicals in Saudi Arabia and, in the Egyptian town called El-Kosheh, hundreds of Coptic believers continue to insist that they were placed under false arrest and tortured by police.

The inaugural meeting of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom was held shortly before a recent summit between President Clinton and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Before moving on to housekeeping issues – finding office space, naming a staff – the nine-member commission quickly produced statements on the scandal in Iran and Egypt.

"The Coptic community is finding it increasingly difficult to practice its faith freely," said the commission. "If the situation of Coptic Christians is raised with him President Mubarak will understand how strongly millions of Americans care about these reported human rights violations and about the future of the largest Christian community in the Middle East."

The problem, of course, is that Egypt is financially and strategically tied to the United States. Mubarak also faces tensions at home between competing Islamic factions. And religious freedom remains such a messy issue, the kind that sophisticated diplomats and business leaders prefer to avoid.

"You still have people in the bureaucracies saying, 'That's really a RELIGIOUS issue, not a HUMAN RIGHTS issue, and if we raise it, that could make people get testy,' " said Catholic activist Nina Shea of Freedom House, a commission member. "Some people even say that treating religious freedom as a human rights issue will violate the separation of church and state."

Nevertheless, the commission has staked out a three-part agenda for its early work: focusing on documented cases in China and Sudan; investigating new reports from settings such as Pakistan, India and Russia; and preparing materials to educate U.S. diplomats about the realities of religious persecution.

But the commission, said Shea, also faces another challenge – investigating the current status of U.S. policies in this area, agency by agency and nation by nation.

"Let's take Sudan," she said. "If what is taking place there is truly genocide, and, at Freedom House, we're convinced that it is, then surely dealing with the reality of genocide would affect U.S. policy. Right?"

While the commission cannot ignore "geopolitical realities," its chairman stressed that it will do everything it can to convince government officials, the media and the public that religious persecution is, in fact, a human rights issue.

Clearly, many nations do not share America's commitment to religious liberty, said Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. In some nations, there are ties that bind the ruling party or regime to a specific faith. At this point, members of religious minorities can be seen as dangerous rebels, enemies of the state or foreign agents who are attacking the culture's traditional values.

But this kind of conflict occurs whenever people from different cultures discuss human rights, said the chairman of the commission. One person's religious liberty is another person's Western cultural imperialism.

"Religious freedom is an essential human right, a matter of freedom of conscience," said Saperstein. "We, hopefully, will be able to convince the world that we are right on this issue."

Just another story about Sudan

WASHINGTON – A story can be inspirational without having a happy ending.

Activist Jim Jacobson of Christian Freedom International is used to seeing suffering during his illegal visits to Southern Sudan, where war bands sent by Khartoum's Islamist regime continue to terrorize Christians, animists and even other Muslims. But his face still clouds over when he describes what happened this April to a tribal matriarch in the burned-out village of Akoch Payam.

It's not an unusual story. That's the problem. It's a frighteningly ordinary snapshot of life in the overseas twilight zones in which intolerance, violence, politics and big business are creating nightmares for many believers.

"Religious persecution is so widespread and the issue is so complex. Sometimes it seems like there is nothing that governments and bureaucrats can do," said Jacobson, a former Reagan White House staff member who now works in hands-on relief work. "There are so many stories to tell that you can end up leaving people stunned. I mean, everybody talks about Sudan and China. But this is bigger than that. Things are happening all over the world."

To cite one example, Jacobson noted that he has made nine trips into Burma during the past 12 months, leading "backpack medical teams" into areas in which the government is pitting Buddhists against Baptists, with tragic results. He's also watching events unfold here in the nation's capital, where the new U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom - which grew out of legislation passed last year - is holding its first meetings.

Meanwhile, Sudan's hellish civil war is finally receiving attention because of a strong media hook - the renewal of slave trade. But, again, the story is more complex than that.

When Jacobson's plane landed, a family rushed out with the body of a grandmother named Anchor Ring. She had been hacked with a machete as more raiders rolled through the region on horseback, stealing the latest United Nations shipment of food and kidnapping new slaves to carry away the spoils. The head wound was so deep that Jacobson and a journalist traveling with him could see the yellow membrane around her brain.

Her tribesmen pleaded: Could the plane carry her to Lokichokio? A hospital there, just over the border in Kenya, offered the latest in Western technology.

"We radioed the U.N. compound, but we already knew what would happen," said Jacobson. "They asked if she had a passport and visa to travel into Kenya. Right! Does she have a passport and visa? First of all, we're hundreds of miles out in the bush. It's like stepping back 6,000 years in time out there. On top of that, we're in rebel territory in the middle of a civil war. Who has the power to give out passports? The government in Khartoum, that's who."

No, she didn't have a passport and visa. Then the hospital is full, said a U.N. official.

The tribesmen could see that the plane was half-empty and they struggled to grasp the politics of the situation. They didn't understand that, just over the border, bureaucrats were waiting with a book of regulations. They would make Jacobson turn the plane around and take the injured woman back into the bush, back into the war zone in which her grandchildren were being kidnapped and sold into slavery. It would cost nearly $10,000 to make the symbolic gesture of flying her to the hospital, knowing she would be turned away.

Jacobson did what he could, leaving behind medical supplies that might save her life.

Whenever he tells this story, listeners want to know if Anchor Ring survived. And what about the others injured in the raid? What about those who were kidnapped as slaves? What about the burned houses, the burned churches?

"I don't know what happened to her," said Jacobson. "There's no easy way to communicate with those villages, except to go there. We'll have to go back and we will go back. There's just so many places we need to go, right now."

Worship '99: Buy incense now...

The worshippers may gather in a candle-lit sanctuary and follow a liturgy of ancient texts and solemn chants, while gazing at Byzantine icons.

The singing, however, will be accompanied by waves of drums and electric guitars and the result often sounds like a cross between Pearl Jam and the Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. The icons, meanwhile, are digital images downloaded from the World Wide Web and projected on screens.

The people who are experimenting with these kinds of rites aren't interested in the bouncy Baby Boomer-friendly megachurch praise services that have dominated American Protestantism for a generation. They want to appeal to teens and young adults who consider "contemporary worship" shallow and old-fashioned and out of touch with their darker, more ironic take on life. They are looking for what comes next.

It might be smart to buy incense now, before prices rise.

"People are trying all kinds of things trying to find an edge," said the Rev. Daniel Harrell, a staff member of Boston's historic Park Street Church who is active in ministry to the so- called "Generation X" and other young adults.

"They'll go online and go to Brother Jim's icon page. Then they right-click with a mouse, save some icons and they're in business. The basic attitude is, 'It's old. It's real. Let's put it up on the screen and play a grinding grunge worship song. That'll be cool.' "

The result is what Harrell, writing in the journal Leadership, has called "post-contemporary worship." If previous generations of free-wheeling Protestants have tried to strip away layers of tradition and ritual, in an attempt to appeal to modern people, some of today's emerging church planters are trying to add a few doses of beauty and mystery. They are trying to create - on their own terms - new traditions out of the pieces of old traditions.

It helps to realize that almost every church found in an American telephone book has been buffeted, for several decades, by changes caused by television, rock 'n'roll, the Internet and every other form of popular culture. Vatican II opened the door to neo-Protestant changes in Catholic hymnody and worship, while some influential Protestants have been digging into their ancient roots. Others have openly tried to incorporate elements of drama, humor and film into user-friendly services for the media age.

"While some churches are busy buying brand-new hymnals, others are discarding theirs, not to be replaced," noted John Witvliet, director of the Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College. "Some churches are approaching such changes eagerly and expectantly; others are embroiled in 'worship wars.'"

If the Baby Boomers shunned churches that they thought were pompous and boring, then their pierced, tattooed and media-numbed children appear ready to shun churches that feel fake and frivolous. The key, according to Harrell, is that worship services must feel real. Services are judged to be authentic when they feel authentic.

"It's not that feeling has totally replaced doctrine, or anything like that," he said. "The people who are doing this have doctrine. In fact, they are usually very, very conservative - almost fundamentalist. But they may know little or nothing about the doctrines that actually go with the symbols and the rituals and the words they are using."

The final product is uneven, to say the least. Protestant piety collides with Catholic language and Orthodoxy iconography is grafted into charismatic prayers. These experimental churches noted Harrell, are almost always based on a "free church" concept of government in which all decisions are local. A shepherd and his flock can change from one style of worship to another with a show-of-hands vote in a mid-week committee meeting, if they want to do so.

"So people are borrowing things from all of these traditions, often without realizing that some of these symbols and rites may even clash with each other," he said. "It's easy to be cynical about this, but they really are searching for something. They are borrowing other people's images and rites and experiences, as part of their own search for something that feels authentic. They are trying to step into the experiences of others."