Presvytera Melanie DiStefano: Welcome to Family Matters: Fully Human Edition. This is Melanie DiStefano. Today I am joined by Justin Heard.

Justin is a young man, only 24 years old, but has quite a background. Justin is studying at Holy Cross School of Theology as a seminarian, and his history crosses the globe. He studied abroad in Tanzania, where he reached out to a blind school and brought 36 canes to children there. He taught at blind summer camp, assisted technology and cooking and cleaning life skills. He has been an advocate for the blind on many levels—local, state, and national—advocating in D.C. with the National Federation for the Blind. He found Orthodoxy in 2017 and was chrismated into the Orthodox Church in 2018, and now he and his wife are at Holy Cross in Brookline, Massachusetts. Looking forward to talking to you more and learning more about you. Welcome.

Mr. Justin Heard: Thank you! I’m excited.

Presv. Melanie: Okay, so tell us a little bit about your disability. What is your medical diagnosis?

Mr. Heard: Sure! So I was born blind. We just found out recently I have a genetic disease called Norrie’s, which causes blindness at birth and also some hearing loss. So I’m both blind and hard of hearing. The hearing loss didn’t set in until I turned 19, but, yeah, totally blind and can’t see anything. I have a prosthetic eye in my right eye, and my left is just a regular old eye. So it’s Norrie’s; Norrie’s caused that. So that’s basically it.

Presv. Melanie: Norrie’s, okay. So with the hearing loss, is it something that can be helped with hearing aids?

Mr. Heard: Yeah. Yeah, I use hearing aids. I have moderate hearing loss. It could progress—we’re not sure— It definitely has progressed over the past few years. We don’t know if it will continue doing so, and if it does I could get cochlear implants, but right now I’m hopeful that it won’t come to that. So we’ll see.

Presv. Melanie: So it’s pretty stable; that’s good. You serve on many levels to advocate for the blind—national, state, local, federations. What inspired you to become an advocate?

Mr. Heard: When I was a student in eighth grade, I went to a blind school for a year, which was an… experience. I mostly went to normal schools…

Presv. Melanie: [Laughter] Are you saying that tongue-in-cheek?

Mr. Heard: It definitely was an experience! I didn’t learn very much there. I wish I hadn’t gone, but there’s good things that came out of it. God knew what he was doing. I at the blind school connected with this group called National Federation of the Blind. NFB: I’ll just use that acronym from now on because it’s easier to say. Basically, we would have several conversations after school, and the leader of the group, who was the president of the Georgia affiliate, asked me; he was like: “Why don’t you come to Baltimore for an advocacy weekend? We’re going to go talk to congressmen about stuff, and you’d be really good at it.” I was like: “Okay, sure.”

The big thing happened when we got to the airport. I got out of the car, and I was like: “Okay, can I take your arm?” I should mention, this guy’s totally blind as well, can’t see anything. He’s waiting at the airport for me there, my mom drops me off, whatever. And I’m like: “Okay, can I take your arm? Do I ask for help? What do we do?” We’re at Hartsfield International Airport, world’s busiest airport now. And he goes, “Let’s just go!” And he takes off! [Laughter] And… I… am… I stood there for a few seconds and then ran after him. Oh my gosh! He navigated that airport with complete ease, knew every place he was going, asked questions, and that was the beginning. In Baltimore, I met so many people that I’d always heard about but never really met, like blind parents and blind grandparents and people talking about cutting down trees with chainsaws! [Laughter] Crazy stuff that I’d never imagined doing.

And so because I learned a lot from these people, I really just wanted to give back. I wanted to share that and make sure that other people had the same opportunities that I had. And so I really got involved in the advocacy movement. That was really just the big point for me where things changed. For a while, I was actually going to go into teaching blind students, because it was just such a natural transition for me, but Orthodoxy kind of changed all that, and we’re here.

Presv. Melanie: Very powerful. So as a teenager, you had a really life-altering experience. That’s awesome. So what did you study for undergrad?

Mr. Heard: I started out with special education, and then I changed to psychology, and then I changed to religion, and that’s what I graduated with. So all over the board in a lot of different things.

Presv. Melanie: You like to learn.

Mr. Heard: I like to learn, but I don’t like tests!

Presv. Melanie: You don’t like tests? No, I know! I get you there! I feel you. I feel you, brother. I don’t like tests either! [Laughter] So tell us a little bit about the faith journey. You studied religion, too, and now you’re studying as a seminarian. What attracted you and led you to the Orthodox Church?

Mr. Heard: Sure. So probably from 13 to 19, I became what’s called a Deist, which for those who don’t know is like: “God’s like the greatest clockworker. He sets everything in motion, and then he just leaves us all alone, and the natural laws of the universe sort of play themselves out, and we reap the consequences of our own actions.” Because I wanted God to leave me alone, and I wanted to leave him alone.

But when I started college freshman year, I was around a lot of people that were inviting me to church, and I became really good friends with a Mormon, and all these different things; people saying a lot of different things. So I was like: Well, I really need to figure myself out, because clearly I don’t know anything at all. So I was like: All right, I’m going to start at Genesis, and we’ll go from there.

Presv. Melanie: I’m sorry I interrupted, but—

Mr. Heard: Go ahead!

Presv. Melanie: Did you grow up with any faith tradition in your early years?

Mr. Heard: Yeah, I grew up Southern Baptist. Reading the Bible and asking questions and doing research and stuff, and trying to figure out where I fit. And the girl I was dating at the time, she wanted to be a Christian, and I was like: “Well, you should join a church, because you’ve never been a part of a church, and I have. You need to find a community.” I was kind of, at that point, looking for myself: Are there any places that fit anything that I believe at this point? So I went on Reddit, of all places, which is kind of an online social media platform, and was like: “Hey, does anyone believe this stuff?” And I knew I wanted something that was grounded in history. So I got a couple of suggestions. One of those was Orthodoxy, and I thought that Orthodox Christians were kind of like Amish people: they didn’t watch TV or something. That was my first impression. I just didn’t know what it meant at all. [Laughter] So I was just like, okay, I’ll check this out. Why not?

I went to St. John the Wonderworker in Atlanta. That was my first experience. As soon as I was there I was like: Yep. This is my home, and I’m never looking back. That’s basically it. I found it in November 2017, and I was chrismated on Palm Sunday of 2018. I’m very happy to have found the Church.

Presv. Melanie: I think it’s fascinating that you found Orthodoxy through Reddit. It just shows that God works through social media. We advertise a lot of our resources on social media, and I know there’s a lot of down sides to it as well, but, hey, God is everywhere present, and he’s reaching us in every way that we’re searching. I just love that.

Mr. Heard: My wife also found Orthodoxy through Reddit, and she found it because when she would ask on the general Christian Reddit thing, not the Orthodox one, it was always the Orthodox Christians that gave her the answers that made sense to her. So she really went and found and did that. She’s still on there. I can’t stand the community where I was in, where I found it; it gets incredibly toxic. But my wife’s a trooper, and she also tries to share that with other people so that they can find it, too.

Presv. Melanie: Beautiful. So did you and your wife meet through Reddit, or did you know each other when you were on Reddit?

Mr. Heard: No! We met through Reddit! It is a crazy story. I won’t go through this for too long, but when we met, I didn’t know that she was a girl, actually, because if you know Reddit, 75% of Reddit is male. That’s just for sure a thing. I just knew this was a blind student, and I saw them on the Orthodox thing, and I was like: “Oh, blind Orthodox: that’s extremely rare.” I was like: “Hey! I’m blind, you’re blind. We should connect!” And she was like—again, not knowing she was a she—“Oh, I’m in Georgia.” I was like: “Are you serious? I’m in Georgia, too! This is crazy!” So I’m like: “Let’s connect. You can join my student division.”

And we’re texting, and at the time, too, I was dating someone else before this, and so I would never have connected with her if I had known she was a girl, because I was dating somebody! But on the day we started texting, and before I knew, was the day that that relationship ended, and then a couple days later I found out that she was a girl, and I was like: Oh wow! This is so weird! [Laughter] And then we found out that we grew up— I went to school with her cousins, K-12, and they never mentioned us to each other. It’s just crazy. I don’t know how it happened.

Presv. Melanie: Oh my gosh!

Mr. Heard: Yeah, it’s a nuts story.

Presv. Melanie: That’s incredible! Oh my gosh, that’s a beautiful story. Thank you for sharing that.

Mr. Heard: By the grace of God.

Presv. Melanie: Absolutely. How long have you been married?

Mr. Heard: Almost a year.

Presv. Melanie: Okay. So is this your first year at Holy Cross?

Mr. Heard: Yeah. Yeah, we got married and moved up here a month later.

Presv. Melanie: So you’re sharing that newlywed journey at Holy Cross and as a fellow newlywed on Holy Cross campus, it’s a beautiful time. I hope you’re enjoying it together. Let’s talk about the whys. You went to Holy Cross. What led you to study at a seminary?

Mr. Heard: At first it was because I was a crazy convert, and every convert thinks they should be a priest. That was initially the drive. Not every convert—some converts are more sane. [Laughter] But eventually just after praying about it and stuff, I realized how much God has built a lot of this into my life and just done a lot of preparation for ministry work. I’ve always loved helping people, but not in a sense of providing solutions—I definitely used to try to do that and it doesn’t work—but just being with people in their struggle and walking with them through their struggles and helping find their own solutions with God’s help I think is an incredible process to watch, and just watching people grow is amazing when it happens. That’s something I really enjoy.

I also have a lot of leadership experience, and that’s very important for this kind of stuff. As a side bonus, I’ve always been in choirs and singing, and we sing all the time in the services. The biggest thing I think is that— I was thinking about life and I was like: Is there really anything better that I can do? This is where I have zero excuses for missing any church service. It’s my job to be at a church service. And not only that, but I get to read and listen to the beautiful prayers and hymns and all that they reveal to us. I truly think that our theology is reflected in our services, and we just do so many things where we elaborate on Scriptures, elaborate on the Fathers; we even incorporate words from the Fathers in hymns, like St. Gregory the Great—St. Gregory the Theologian, excuse me. And that’s just so beautiful and amazing to experience. I would love to be a part of that as a priest. That’s a long-term goal, but ministry overall is something that I know that I’m supposed to do, and I know that God wants me to do.

Presv. Melanie: Let’s talk about your long-term goal of hopefully someday becoming a priest and just some of the practical implications of that. I’m not saying this in any way to be discouraging. I’m just asking questions, because probably a lot of people listening would have more questions. The main question that came to my mind was just the handling of the holy Gifts during Liturgy and the type of accommodations that might be needed for somebody who has visual impairment. I’m just curious as to what you think might be possible in that area of the priesthood.

Mr. Heard: Sure. There are a couple possibilities. The first is— Now, for the sake of getting from— I’m going to totally throw him under the bus: Fr. Philip Zymaris here at seminary, and he talks about this, where if you look at canon law and things like that, which often gets used in these situations, we actually see that before—I think it’s the 12th or 13th centuries, we actually prohibited the use of spoons in the Church. It was wrong to do that. The Body of Christ was placed into the hand of the faithful, and spoons are kind of a later addition into the liturgy. I do think that’s possible, and that would solve a lot of problems. It’s also very controversial.

So to avoid the controversy, another possible avenue… I should emphasize that this is all ideas, because in the end I need to be behind the altar and I need to be experimenting and trying things out. So a couple of experiments that I’ve thought of are getting something that has a similar weight to the holy chalice and then practicing with water and bread, and just practicing: What would getting the bread out of the chalice and into someone’s mouth without spilling anything look like? One thing I’ve thought about is having it set up to where the faithful come to the same level, so the chalice or the spoon doesn’t have to move up and down too much, so like having a step up for shorter people to get there, so that way it wouldn’t be as big of an issue. In the end, it’s all based on experiment.

I will say this, too, that there are a lot of things beyond even the communion that I don’t know how I would do and will take a lot of experimentation. And I’m fully open to the idea that if we do all these experiments and we come up with: there are too many barriers for me to be a priest in any meaningful sense, I’m totally willing to accept that verdict, because that’s fine. I mean, it’s just reality. But what I do want to do is to try and to figure these things out and to be given an opportunity to do that. I think that’s what I’m supposed to be doing.

Presv. Melanie: We had talked before about the particular canons that prohibit somebody who is blind from becoming a priest, and that they were written hundreds and hundreds of years ago when there wasn’t the type of assisted technology that we have today. There are a lot of things that can be done. I even would add another possibility of an accommodation is to have the blessing of either a sexton or a deacon to help with both the preparation and distribution of Gifts. So as a priest you still are consecrating and distributing, but just somebody to help assist with that is another possibility.

Mr. Heard: Sure.

Presv. Melanie: What are some of the challenges you’ve encountered in life because of being blind?

Mr. Heard: I think very few challenges are because of the disability itself, and I think most of them are around people having low expectations of what they expect a blind person to be able to do. An example I often give is: when someone makes a website, they often don’t think, “Oh, a blind person is going to one day use this.” They might even think a blind person can’t use a computer or an iPhone or anything; blind person can’t access the internet. I’m not condemning them for thinking that. It’s ignorant and that’s fine; I totally understand—but it’s also harmful ignorance. So if we expect more from blind people, we expect blind people to—to put this in an Orthodox context—if we expect blind people to be at church and to be involved in a ministry, then it will become accessible: we’ll take the steps necessary to do these things. This really applies to all disability.

There are, of course, limitations from blindness. I mean, I’m never going to drive a car. There might be a self-driving car, but I’m not going to drive one if we actually— We tried making a car that blind people could drive, and it just wasn’t very feasible. It worked; we drove around the Daytona 500 with it, but it was very slow, and it’s not really feasible for roads. Obviously, if I drop something on the floor, it’s going to take me a couple more minutes to find it than someone else. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I think in the grand scheme of things, those are minor obstacles compared to low expectations.

Presv. Melanie: Interesting. And have you found that to be part of the struggle at seminary as well?

Mr. Heard: Seminary… Not… In terms of professors, no, because a lot of the academic stuff that we’re doing is… I don’t want to say simple, because it’s not, but straight-forward. If I was taking a science or a math class, accessibility gets a lot harder, because you have to figure out how are you going to show a blind person these graphs or how are you going to demonstrate the problem on a— There’s just a lot more details. Science, you have to have accessible lab equipment. Because we’re mostly— I mean, this is humanities, so we’re mostly just reading and writing, and it’s really easy nowadays to make that stuff accessible.

So I’m using a computer to have this conversation right now. My computer can read ebooks and most digital documents. I have software on here that if people send me a photocopy, I can scan it and it’ll pull out all the words and just put it in plain text. We even have a service that for textbooks, I can tell this library, “Hey, I need this textbook in an accessible format,” and they’ll give it to me in two or three months’ time. We have so many resources now that make something like Holy Cross easier in terms of academics.

I think the barriers that I do encounter tend to be barriers that exist across the entire Church, which is… The biggest issue, honestly, is publishing. It’s so hard— We’re still in 2022, very recently, publishing books in print-only format; there’s no ebook version. Maybe there’s an audio version, but if there’s no ebook, there’s probably no audiobook either. And that makes it really hard, not only to acquire my academic materials, but, more importantly for me, participating in the services themselves. I cannot find any service ebooks that are usable. We do have things like—

Presv. Melanie: The liturgical texts aren’t?

Mr. Heard: Yeah, liturgical texts. Yeah. I mean, we do have things like [Digital] Chant Stand, which we use, but the seminary chapel… And just like many parishes, we don’t always do exactly what AGES is doing. Not that we should always have to do what AGES is doing, but it does create a barrier, because at Holy Cross we’re using our own service books, a lot of them from Holy Transfiguration. I think that’s one of the largest barriers that I encounter here.

Presv. Melanie: So lack of resources in formats that are readable for someone who has visual impairment.

Mr. Heard: Yeah. And they do… I mean, I will say Fr. George Parsenios, who’s the dean of the graduate school, he did pull out a lot of the non-variable parts of matins and vespers that the school uses and put them in documents for me, so I do have those and that’s very nice. I was like: Thank you. I think he literally sat there and typed them all on his keyboard, which, I mean, that was a lot of work, and that really does go a long way. But at the same time, because of the variable parts of matins and vespers are like half the service, it only goes so far.

I think staff here do everything that they can. Mostly this is an infrastructure issue and just something that takes kind of a systemic change to get through.

Presv. Melanie: Right. I’m thinking even on a parish level, I had not considered before even talking to you how we could—and I have son with disabilities, but because he’s not blind, it’s not on my radar—how can we make the services more accessible to someone who’s blind. You had mentioned that you have a device that you can actually read Braille; it scrolls? I just found that fascinating. So for instance, for, say you download something from AGES onto this device, if you could describe how you’re able to follow along and read it, that would be really helpful for listeners, I think.

Mr. Heard: Yeah, so if anyone wants to look this up, it’s called a refreshable Braille display, and there are lots of different kinds, so I won’t get into the details of that, but I have one of those. To simplify it, it’s like a Kindle for Braille. I can take documents, like a Word document or a .pdf even, but mostly Word documents and text files, and I can put them on the device—I can use a flashdrive or download them directly onto it—and when I open the document, at the bottom of the screen, it’s like this teeny-tiny little line, and on that line it will translate whatever is on the cursor: it’ll translate it into Braille. Whenever I scroll, the next line will come up in Braille on the bottom of the device, kind of one line at a time.

I can also type on that same device as well, and it will translate the Braille into print, and I can write up a document on there if I choose to—I don’t do this often, but I can write a Braille document and do the same thing: just put it on my computer or email it to somebody or whatever, and it’ll completely be in print and everyone can read it.

Presv. Melanie: Love it. If you’re helping to chant the service, you can actually read the lines that you have to chant with that device.

Mr. Heard: Yeah. Another issue—and it’s interesting. I’m going to take chant this fall, so we’re kind of navigating this now. One issue, with chanting, is that Byzantine notation doesn’t really have a solid Braille system. There has been one designed, and I haven’t really looked at it very much. The problem is that all the textbooks are in Greek Braille, so I couldn’t really read that anyway.

But even Western notation Braille music, which has been worked on extensively, it’s a very clunky system. Most blind people don’t actually sightread their music while they’re singing or doing anything, because it’s just too hard; it’s too labor-intensive. So if they use Braille music, they’ll use it to memorize whatever the piece is beforehand and then maybe they’ll go in with the lyrics and just read the lyrics and leave out the notation. We’re figuring out: Well, how does this translate to chanting? And what does that look like? It might look like memorizing the odes and then also the various fixed hymns and kind of going about it that way.

The other thing is, too—and luckily, for the long-term goal, if I’m a priest, for the most part I don’t have to chant a service. For the most part: there are exceptions.

Presv. Melanie: You have chanters to help with that.

Mr. Heard: Yeah, so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal, but it is something I do want to figure it out, because if a blind person comes to church and they want to chant, then they should be able to do that.

Presv. Melanie: Right. That’s what I was thinking about, even choirs or that type of thing. But choirs do generally use Western notation. That’s fascinating. I am just not somebody—my brain does not work well with Byzantine notation. I took chant. [Laughter] I was in seminary, and I took Byzantine chant. I got some of it, but it never absolutely clicked with me, and I’m better at learning just by ear and memorizing the odes, as you said, and sort of applying the text that way. Some of us, even when we have sight, can’t figure it out! [Laughter]

Mr. Heard: Sure, sure.

Presv. Melanie: Let’s look at overall your hopes for people as an advocate for the blind. What are your hopes for people who are visually impaired in the Church?

Mr. Heard: For blind people, I want it this as somewhere where blind people can first of all read the latest Orthodox books that come out. I think that’s important. I want accessible liturgical resources. I mean, that’s a huge deal, and it would be extremely helpful. I think the biggest thing that I want is to change attitudes about disability within the Church. I feel like, just like our infrastructure is behind, 30 years plus in accessibility, our attitudes are also behind, 30 years plus.

And I haven’t encountered a lot of negativity in the Church—I don’t want to give that impression—but just like really all Christian denominations, we don’t do well with disability, because it’s uncomfortable, and it’s one of those things where it forces people to ask: Well, why didn’t God heal him? Or why aren’t my prayers working? Or this or that. And so it makes people uncomfortable, and often when we humans are uncomfortable with something, we ignore it, because it’s way easier to ignore something than to confront it.

My big dream is to really change the attitude on disability, and there’s a lot of good work being done with that in the Church. I know Of Such is the Kingdom book by Summer—Kinard?

Presv. Melanie: Summer Kinard, yeah.

Mr. Heard: Summer Kinard. It’s a really good resource for that. I know other people working on disability theology. You guys are doing this work as well on the Fully Human podcast; that’s what we’re doing here today. So there’s a lot of things happening, but I think if we can change the understanding of disability as a whole, then these other changes will fall into place. That doesn’t mean that we don’t need to make infrastructural changes, like we need to wait until attitudes change—I don’t think that’s the case at all. If you go home to your church and you don’t have Braille signs over the men and women’s restrooms, that’s a big deal! That needs to be changed. It’s not expensive either.

I think if we’re designing retreat centers—but the retreat center has zero wheelchair access at all or just—it’s not feasible even for a wheelchair user to use it: that’s ridiculous, and it needs to stop and be changed, right away. But changing attitudes has a more long-term effect than just these more short-term infrastructure changes, because, as we’ve seen, with our technology and especially during the pandemic, things are always changing, and new needs are always going to arise. We’re always going to be having different conversations about what works best when, with different disabilities. It’s always going to evolve.

Presv. Melanie: Yeah, I like that. The attitude really is the most important, especially when you consider the Church to be a place of refuge, a place of love and communion with God and one another. You would hope that with that shift in attitude, then all people will feel home when they enter, when they are a part of a church. All the people, no matter what ability or disability. Yeah, the attitude thing is of utmost importance.

But I’m glad you also mentioned those practical changes that can be made, because our church does not have a Braille sign next to the men and women—those are things we can easily do better at, so thank you for suggesting some of those practical things, too.

Mr. Heard: No problem.

Presv. Melanie: I would like to start asking this question of everyone who comes on the show: What does it mean to you, Justin, to be fully human?

Mr. Heard: To be fully human is to be a full member of the body of Christ. I think fully human is theosis, honestly. It’s being in that unity, even though there’s still individuality within that unity. And we often think backwards, like when we make mistakes we’ll say, “Oh, I’m only human” or something, but really with the incarnational understanding of the soul, to be fully human is to be saved and to be participating in God. So I think that, to me, is what that means. I think that’s what every single member of the Church is, whether consciously or unconsciously, striving for that.

Presv. Melanie: That’s beautifully said. Thank you. Well, Justin, it’s been a joy talking to you, and I pray that God opens all the doors meant to be opened for you in your life. I look forward to working with you in the future, to change attitudes.

Mr. Heard: Absolutely! Yeah, absolutely looking forward to it. Thank you for having me.

Presv. Melanie: Thank you, Justin.

Mr. Heard: I appreciate it.