Kh. Frederica Mathewes-Green: I’m here at Holy Cross Monastery outside of Wayne, West Virginia, up in the mountains in a little holler. I think that’s what you call it, a holler.

Fr. Basil: A holler, yes, it is.

Fr. Ephraim: Yes, ma’am.

Kh. Frederica: A holler means like what in water would be a cove, I guess?

Fr. Basil: A hollow.

Kh. Frederica: A hollow, basically; it’s just a hollow place in the mountains. It’s a hollow place that is being rapidly filled over the last 20 years with, as we were saying: if you build it they will come. You start out with six monks, and then you build a building and then more people come; you build a building, and pilgrims come, and more monks, and it just keeps growing and growing. It’s very beautiful here. I was first here about maybe 15 years ago, so it’s lovely being back again, and very, very impressive.

Fr. Ephraim: We’re happy to have you here.

Kh. Frederica: Thank you! So, Deacon Sergius and Father Basil…

Fr. Basil: I’m Fr. Basil and this is Fr. Ephraim.

Kh. Frederica: Oh, you’re Fr. Ephraim and it was Dn. Sergius [who] was…

Fr. Ephraim: Yeah.

Kh. Frederica: It’s like juggling, all the names, keep those names together.

Fr. Basil: [Laughter] We look a little similar.

Kh. Frederica: And you all dress alike.

Fr. Ephraim: Yeah, what’s up with that?

Kh. Frederica: You have this twin-sisters thing going on, very strange. [Laughter] But, yes, Fr. Basil, Fr. Ephraim. I wanted to talk for a little bit about one of the things that sounds weird to outsiders and Americans [which] is the whole concept of obedience. That as you are a member of this monastery, the abbot will give you “an obedience”—and America was founded in rebellion. That is revolutionary as our founding myth, and we never could be obedient to anybody. So I was hoping you could say something about what does obedience mean.

Obviously, it has a different meaning in the long, long history of monasticism. Could you, either of you, start explaining that to me and to our audience?

Fr. Ephraim: I mean, when you mentioned the revolutionary American spirit, I was immediately reminded of the Fathers saying that obedience to God is disobedience to the devil. So it’s sort of still inherently revolutionary in spirit. You mentioned how in the monastery we’re obedient to the abbot, but it’s even worse than that. [Laughter] We’re obedient to each other. Well, brothers, you know, because obedience is multi-faceted in that respect, it’s a shared yoke; it’s a shared struggle. The Fathers, in their exhortations to other monastics, frequently stress the need to be obedient to the brethren. It makes it a healthy kind of co-dependency, in a sense, I think, because you maintain your individuality in your will, in conforming your will to God’s will and to the will of the abbot who is dictating that for us, but you’re shaped by the abbot’s guidance of you and also by the circumstances of your living together in community by virtue of the work that you do, for instance. But obedience being a work of love and not drudgery—at least, that’s the ideal. There’s growing pains in that.

Kh. Frederica: How can you be obedient to each other? How does that work? It sounds chaotic, really.

Fr. Basil: Well, I think there are obvious ways, in a sense, that… There is sort of [an] order of monastic seniority, so in a more immediate sense, if you’re obliged to defer to those who are senior to you, but it’s not quite so hierarchical in the sense that, really, as Fr. Ephraim was saying, when it’s motivated by love, you’re ultimately striving to put the needs and desires of others before your own will. And so that extends to everything, even those who are junior to you. And cultivating that spirit of self-sacrifice, of self-emptying, which is what Christ exemplified in his own life, giving his life for the life of the world.

Obedience is our… is kind of the pathway into entering that reality inwardly. I think, bringing it back around again to the sort of American ideals that we’re instilled with, it can seem like obedience is intention or sort of antagonstic toward freedom, the idea that we’re kind of our own masters and we can live as we see fit, live according to our own values, our own will, or whatever it is. We’re taught to cherish that.

But I think when we’re talking, especially about monastic spirituality, the paradox is that obedience is freedom. It is freedom, because what happens so often in our fallen condition, the reality that when we’re separated from God’s grace, the power of sin dominates our will. And so we may think that we’re free to kind of live according to our own will, but what ends up happening is that we just become enslaved to our passions. Our will, in a very real sense, is… We may have political freedom, but we’re in spiritual bondage. The process of learning to be obedient to a spiritual father or to the rule of the monastery or to your brethren is to liberate us, actually—liberate us from the tyranny of our own arbitrary desires and obsessions and passions.

Kh. Frederica: It seems like the obedience has two dimensions, that there’s a vertical dimension, that you’re obedient to the abbot. As you were saying, he may give you an obedience, which is the work you’re supposed to do, and you do that. The work itself has certain constraints in terms of what time of day it needs to be completed and that sort of thing. There’s a whole little shower of obediences involved in that one larger obedience. But there’s also the “obedient to each other” thing, that horizontal dimension. Perhaps it amounts to thoughtfulness, to trying to— You know that it bothers your brother if you whistle or something, so you don’t whistle around him. You’re just trying to be thoughtful toward each other.

Fr. Basil: Well, it’s a brotherhood, you know, so it’s sort of predicated on a conscientiousness. If you’re going to live it intentionally, as it’s been handed down to us, even in a familial relationship or a romantic relationship, a working relationship, it’s helpful to have a sort of concept of what’s expected and to maybe do something before you’re asked to do it. You might get a positive repercussion out of that. And that’s a demonstration of love from it. You’re told in a very sort of simplified way, you can leave it at that; you can just not do the thing—or you can strive to do the opposite of not doing that thing, which would be to do something virtuous in its place in working with another person instead of waiting for someone to have to tell you what to do. Again, this is a very simple action daily. You go out of your way to be proactive and demonstrating your conscientiousness, your love, your desire, your zeal in serving God, really, in being able to do that thing for the sake of awareness.

Because people may think they have their independence and freedom from obedience in that spirit that we were discussing earlier, but someone’s got to serve somebody. So most people are ignorant of the fact that they’re serving socio-political trends, for instance, that they’re trying to keep up, that they have to kind of toe the line, and that’s more and more nowadays. But to serve Christ, that’s a freeing servitude. That’s a salvific— I guess it’s experiential, but it requires deep self-awareness, I think, if you’re going to live it. You can waste your life at a monastery. You can waste your life: you can not find your salvation in a monastery. Just because you wear these clothes and live in these confines, go to services, that doesn’t mean you’re living intentionally. You can live it completely blindly.

Kh. Frederica: I was just going to say, in ignorance, that of course it’s so much easier in a monastery, because so much of your daily “pleasing myself” choices are taken away.

Fr. Basil: Well, you always find a way. [Laughter] I think we’re so predisposed toward self-pleasing, pride. You can be proud in your obedience.

Fr. Ephraim: Well, I mean, Abbot Dorotheos of Gaza, who was a sixth-century abbot and wrote what we often refer to as the ABCs of monasticism, when he’s talking about this idea that we come to the monastery and we give up great possessions, you have the possibility of acquiring lands and wealth and power; but then we argue over our favorite hammer to use. [Laughter] It’s like that same—

Kh. Frederica: The same impulse is coming out!

Fr. Ephraim: The same impulse manifests itself in things that are so inane and trivial.

Fr. Basil: Because that’s all you’ve got! Your world is so small.

Fr. Ephraim: But part of that, I guess, inner monastic journey, the spiritual work, is to root out those very impulses in our heart.

Kh. Frederica: I guess that’s one of the things you hope to get from the abbot is that he will know you so well that he will be able to speak to you—privately, hopefully, in a kind word, and a timely word.

Fr. Basil: All the brothers get to know each other very well. We’re a fairly small community, comparatively.

Kh. Frederica: I know you started with just six. How many—? Is it right for me to ask? The brothers, how many?

Fr. Ephraim: With all of the novices and candidates, those who are here for the long-term, I think we’re around 25 to 26.

Kh. Frederica: Wow. That’s big.

Fr. Ephraim: We have a few more coming. You know, we are… If you look at Orthodox monasticism globally, we’re a pretty moderate-sized community, but in terms of communities in this country and communities specifically that are English-speaking in this country, we’re one of the largest if not the largest.

Kh. Frederica: And one of the most remote locations, I guess.

Fr. Basil: It’s a bottleneck. [Laughter]

Kh. Frederica: Precious wine in that bottle.

Fr. Ephraim: Well, you know, people put forth that desire to come out and visit us, and we’re happy to have them. But there is an immediacy of the interaction. You’re living with 20+ men in a day-to-day, shoulder-to-shoulder set of circumstances where you’re going to church together, eating your meals together, depending on where you work you’re frequently working with each other. But it’s a family in that sense, and so we rely on one another to have that intentionality in our purpose in being here. And we can tell. You can observe, when you come to know someone decently, how things are going. And in the spirit of love, I think, the fathers and brothers try to demonstrate that concern and we try to build each other up. That can be, unfortunately, a unique aspect in the monastic life in a global context. Certain cultures are a bit rough! We’re mostly all Americans here, I think. We have a bond in that kind of experience.

Fr. Basil: I think, too, just speaking to that element of brotherliness, the concept of obedience can sound very top-down or autocratic in a sense, and I think the important thing to remember is that everyone is kind of subject to obedience. The abbacy is an obedience, and it’s a service.

Kh. Frederica: It’s a burden to some extent.

Fr. Basil: Yeah, absolutely. So anything, any obedience that someone’s given, even a priesthood in the monastic context or the diaconate, whatever it is, there’re obediences and there are opportunities for service. And so everyone has their role. Everyone kind of has their place. The purpose of exercising that obedience is to really minister to your brethren and not to lord your position or your power over them. [Laughter]

Kh. Frederica: It’s a help, I guess, to be in an intentional community, because you— in theory, at least, everyone knows how you’re supposed to be toward each other. You know what the ideal is, and you know what you’re aiming for, and you can be totally fooling yourself about whether you’re sincerely pursuing that or not, but probably somebody’s nearby to hopefully help you learn you’re doing it wrong!

Fr. Ephraim: Well, the abbot is a shepherd, and the other spiritual fathers. But, you know, Matushka, I think nowadays some young men don’t even necessarily know what the ideal might be. There’s a lot of extra guidance and support and responsibility for the senior fathers to, with God’s help, demonstrate as much as possible what those ideals are. We have a novice reading list here at the monastery that helps to formulate the proper phronema, the proper mentality, of the monastic life for new men coming into the brotherhood. It’s pretty broad, but it facilitates a comprehensive—having a comprehensive understanding of what it means to be an Orthodox Christian monastic, and really to be a human being, a real human being.

Kh. Frederica: Yeah, because there are certainly many—increasing numbers, I would guess—that have never really known a father. And so they don’t know what it’s like to be in obedience under a father, and how nurturing and how positive that is for your own growth. You just expand and expand out of yourself, if you’re a boy who has a good father. And without that, it’s hard to know what you’re supposed to be, and the world is telling you you need to think for yourself and be by yourself and strike out on your own. It’s very damaging, but it sells stuff.

Fr. Ephraim: Well, if you can replicate this image, that means you’re successful; that means you’re a man; that means you’re a woman or whatever. But also just the idea of working as a team. Brotherhood in the understanding of what a team is, it’s that reliability upon one another, a healthy degree of dependability. That means that I’m going to put myself to be— For you to be able to count on me, I have to be able to demonstrate that and not in words but by my life. So you do that through the avenue of obedience.

Kh. Frederica: You know, I think that’s an area in which men have a natural advantage over women, or boys over girls, because boys like team sports. And they don’t come very naturally for girls. We want to do—me and my friend were going to trade doll clothes or something, but when girls are trying to team up to do something, it just is not as comfortable.

Fr. Basil: [Laughter] Oh no! Something’s going to happen!

Kh. Frederica: I know, I know! But at least you guys, you have an advantage that you’re probably not aware of, because I think that’s probably a little harder for the ladies to get used to the idea of being on a team.

Fr. Ephraim: Yeah, maybe it’s a— I’m sure there’s a degree of an even playing field there, because there’s always the element, the innate element, of selfishness that we all have to fight. If it’s not exteriorly demonstrated or acted upon, there can be a great interior battle that is not observable. But that should be, obviously, confessed, and by the grace of God and the grace of your spiritual father, worked upon, but it’s a very interior life. But it’s multi-faceted. It’s something…

I remember traveling overseas, in America and overseas, visiting other monasteries, and observing the fathers, whether it’s in Greece on Athos, or in the Middle East, or something like that. A lot of times there would be a monk, just a simple monk, who might be at the monastery for a week, a couple weeks, a month, something like that, and maybe even a few days, but there is something observable about this single monk in these given places, and I don’t know exactly what it is. I asked people about this, and they said, “Well, maybe it’s a grace, a gift that God is trying to provide you for you to realize that this man is really working on himself. He’s really putting himself out.”

I don’t know, maybe he looks tired or something like that. I don’t know exactly what it is exteriorly, but there is something very special about some of these fathers that maybe I didn’t even get to converse with—they don’t know English and I don’t know Greek very well. So there is something. There is a spirit. There is an observable spirit that we are— we have the ability, by God’s grace, to obtain, that can really provide somebody way more than that given person might know, but something that’s fueled me for the past ten years of trying to struggle with the monastic life that some of these men have given me. They don’t know that.

Kh. Frederica: They may not know it or you might not even have talked to them.

Fr. Ephraim: Yeah, but I think it’s that spirit of obedience, of really struggling to live the Christian life, the spiritual life.

Kh. Frederica: So this is another kind of a definition of obedience now: a struggle. I was thinking just the other day about I forget which Desert Father it was, but it’s one of the Desert Fathers stories. It was in the days when they used to baptize in the nude, so it was way back at the beginning, and this was the monk who was in charge of the baptisms.

Fr. Ephraim: This was Abba Conan. [Laughter]

Kh. Frederica: Oh, that’s a great one!

Fr. Basil: This was a nightmare for probably many monastic fathers!

Kh. Frederica: So I should recap for listeners. That’s right, Abba Conan. He had a terrible struggle with lust, and the Forerunner appeared to him and said, “I will help you. Don’t worry about this. I will be with you. I will help you.” And then there was a beautiful young woman waiting for baptism, and Conan decided: I’m going to leave the monastery; I can’t do this any more; this is terrible.

And St. John appeared to him again and said, “I told you, I’ll help you. I’ll help you.” And Conan said, “You said that the first time, and you didn’t do it! And I’ve had it! I’m leaving.” [Laughter] And so the Forerunner laid hands on him and prayed and said, “I thought you wanted the crown. I can pray and take those desires away, but I thought you wanted the crown. Only strugglers get the crowns. Are you struggling? Are you fighting? Or are you being obedient?” It’s like it’s the same thing from two different points of view.

Fr. Basil: Well, there has to be a dynamic quality to it. You can… It’s one thing to— Actually, one of the previous abbots, Bishop George, would say it’s one thing to give up your will; it’s another thing to give up your understanding. There are layers to it in terms of you can outwardly conform to something while still be grumbling inside about how stupid this is and I can’t wait to get through with this or whatever. But obviously we’re struggling for some— a deeper level of obedience. You might think, “Well, that is sort of effacing your individuality or your personality,” but Fr. Sergius, our Fr. Sergius, has a saying that I like a lot. I think it pertains to this particularly.

You were talking about obedience, the important thing isn’t what you’re doing but whom you’re doing it for, and you have to remember that you’re doing it for your brother made in the image of God, and therefore it has to be motivated by love. It has to be energized by love, and then it becomes that perfect obedience that’s in imitation of the obedience of God the Son to God the Father; that it really is that. Our monastic obedience is meant to be an image of that divine reality, but, obviously, we’re struggling with the flesh and our years of habitual sins and everything, all the baggage that our culture, our society, loads on us. We’re all works in progress in that regard.

Kh. Frederica:

Fr. Ephraim: The Greeks say, maybe specifically on Athos—they have a phrase. I forget how to say it in Greek, but if someone, if a monk asks another monk for a favor or asks him to do something for him: “Do a love for me.”

Kh. Frederica: Oh! “Do a love for me.”

Fr. Ephraim: Because you’re— Gosh, I wish I could remember how to say it. But it’s a proving of your love for Christ. It’s a proving of your love for Christ. It’s easy to love people that love you. Even Christ talks about that: it’s easy to do things for people who are nice to you. Are you going to really going to prove that? Are you going to put your heels in the dirt and show your volition.

Kh. Frederica: Even the Gentiles love the people that love them.

Fr. Ephraim: That’s easy stuff. It’s proving your desire for God, proximity to God, and that’s when it’s hard.

Kh. Frederica: It seems like in some ways, being in an environment that is just saturated with the demand for obedience on every side. It might be easier because you wouldn’t have to think about things. You could say, “Well, I was going to do that, but—that’s off the table. Now I’m just going to focus on this.”

Is obedience a help in terms of deflecting temptation before it even gets to you? Not always, apparently. [Laughter]

Fr. Ephraim: Well, you know, the devil’s crafty. I think that it certainly… It’s part of the monastic clothing and the schedule, all of the elements that make up the good order of the monastery, the fact that we don’t shave or cut our hair is sort of like unburdening yourself of a lot of the things that might take up time in someone’s day, what I do in a day: I’ve got to spend time doing my hair or whatever it is. We don’t have to worry about it! And again, you might say, well… Of course, we use clothing and hairstyles and all of these things to express our individuality, but I think what you find in Orthodox monasticism is that eliminating all these kind of superficial ways of expressing individuality actually brings out our authentic personality.

Fr. Basil: It exposes the inner man, yeah.

Kh. Frederica: That’s a paradox, yeah. When you’re doing everything all alike, eating the same food, dressing alike, your individuality…

Fr. Ephraim: You realize, because then when you are doing all these things the same, but you see that we’re still all different; we’re still all ourselves, but we’re not defining ourselves with these kind of external things.

Kh. Frederica: It’s in a paradox. You are at last free for the first time in your life to be yourself.

Fr. Ephraim: Yeah. I mean, there’s not the same social stipulations or whatever. There’s not an inherent popularity contest. We’re not here to work for a paycheck or something like that. The payoff, all of it, is an interior life. It is something that’s intended to be specifically salvific. I mean, the atmosphere in which we find ourselves—I guess if you want to call it the parameters that our clothing or the Typikon, the daily schedule, what these set for us that helps obviously shape the continuity of our lives—what time you’re supposed to work, what time you’re supposed to… So those parameters are obviously very healthy, and in a world increasingly without parameters, we see what’s happening.

But the necessity for structure is inherent. It’s blessed. But you know, I think it requires a voluntary—well, obviously it requires a voluntary commitment to submit yourself to this lifestyle, and I think— Well, I know the monastic life is a calling, but I think if I felt personally comfortable concerning my salvation staying in the world, I wouldn’t be here; I would have a different kind of liberty or a different kind of mobility, I suppose you could say, variety. I think what people see, something that they see when they come here, when they come to a healthy monastery, is that there’s a real sense of unity of purpose. So I think all of these elements of structure help solidify that into a living experience. The fathers have been doing this for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. There are so many of the saints of the Orthodox Church who are monastics.

Kh. Frederica: Yes. And I was thinking that to someone outside of the Orthodox Church it would seem obvious to them to say, “Why are you wasting your time on yourself? Aren’t we supposed to serve the poor? Why are you not at a soup kitchen in downtown Charleston, West Virginia? Why are you not out there doing good works for people, to help other people?”

Fr. Ephraim: You know, Christ says we’ll always have the poor with us. Why did—was it St. Mary?—make the offering, pour the oil on his feet. They could’ve sold that to feed the poor, Judas said. Well, Christ said, “You have the poor always with you.”

Kh. Frederica: You know, something I noticed not too long ago, he says, “Go and tell John what you see, that the blind see and the lame walk and the deaf hear and the poor get a bag of money.” Right? No, he says, “The poor have the good news preached to them.” It’s not: And the poor get rich. Suddenly it’s not parallel, except it is parallel, because if being rich isn’t helping the rich, how’s it going to help the poor?

Fr. Ephraim: That’s not to just trivialize the plight of the poor, because, frankly, we see plenty of it in our area, but I think… I was just having a conversation about this with a local Baptist man the other day who is very devoted to trying to eradicate poverty in our county. He was able completely to grasp the significance of the fact that what produces material poverty so often is a spiritual vacuum, a lack of spiritual, of internal order in people’s lives, in their relationships. Monasticism in its primary vocation, its primary witness, is precisely the witness of Mary choosing the God part, to stand at Christ’s feet and listen to his word. And so we are focused on that whole-hearted dedication to Christ, but it has—it still has a transformative effect on our surroundings. It’s what St. Seraphim says with his famous saying: “Acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved.” Well, you know, if all it takes is one person for that kind of spiritual impact to occur, you can imagine what impact it might have for a whole community of men to—not that we’ve all acquired the spirit of peace, but that we’re striving. We’re striving towards that.

Kh. Frederica: If I could speak to that, because just a couple of days ago I was watching an interview, where an Orthodox person was being interviewed by a non-Orthodox Christian. And the Orthodox person said that, “Acquire the spirit of peace and a thousand around you will be saved,” and when they got to the question-and-answer period, the host said, “So you think we should just go out in the woods and get real peaceful feelings? Like that’s the goal, is feeling really peaceful?” And I thought: Ah! That’s so easy to misunderstand! Because I think what St. Seraphim meant was something more like: “Acquire the Holy Spirit,” and it’s going to be an uphill struggle, and you’re going to be struggling with yourself most of the time. But if you have the Holy Spirit within you, then it’s like him lighting up the snowy words, and Motovilov couldn’t even look at him because he was so bright.

Yeah, I think people outside Orthodoxy sometimes look at monasticism and think that’s what you’re doing: you’re just trying to sit and feel very peaceful and how pleasant that is, and that’s not helping the world at all.

Fr. Ephraim: Well, I mean…

Fr. Basil: Tell them to come on down! [Laughter]

Kh. Frederica: Yeah, give it a try! You try it, bub!

Fr. Basil: “Obedience” is the word used to refer to our various tasks or jobs, as we say, and so it’s a very active, in that sense. There’s plenty to do, and it takes a lot to keep a community of over 20 men just up and running on a day-to-day basis.

Kh. Frederica: But the only thing, I think, is that there’s a way in which a concentrated community of prayerful men, it does something on the spiritual level. It’s beating down the devil, right downtown in Charleston, everywhere around here. There’s spiritual battles going on, and this is like a core of power. You’re like the Power Rangers. [Laughter] It’s just something powerful is happening here, and that’s what happens when people pray this intensely and bind themselves to each other the way that you have. So it’s not just you get to feel peaceful.

Fr. Ephraim: And it’s all God’s grace. Well, there is a material philanthropic effort that the monastery obviously does, in secret.

Fr. Basil: Not necessarily in a structured, institutional.

Fr. Ephraim: It’s very organic. So that net supplies plenty of opportunity for us to serve in that regard. It’s obviously just not showcased. I remember Elder Ephraim of Arizona, whom I was blessed to interact with a number of times, said that in a sort of paraphrased way, God— The state of humanity now is so bad, the state of monasticism now is so comparatively sad, that God has lowered the bar so low for us that all you have to do is be a little bit obedient. [Laughter]

Kh. Frederica: That’s so sweet. Wow.

Fr. Ephraim: He said all you have to do is just be obedient. But the bar is so low for you to get to paradise, that all you’ve got to do is try to be a little bit obedient.

Kh. Frederica: That’s so great.

Fr. Ephraim: So the explosive spiritual reality behind that… I mean, it’s maybe not immediately evident to us, or to other people or to society, but the life is lived for ultimate things, ultimate gains. Like you were mentioning before, Christ didn’t come, didn’t manifest himself on earth to tell us to quench poverty forever. There are elements, there are repercussions of the fall that humanity experiences, has experienced, and will experience. Our job is to try to unite with Christ, to save our souls, and to love one another. All the things hang— All the Law and the Prophets hang on two commandments. You can demonstrate that love; you can live that life in a multi-faceted way.

The Church is composite. The monastic life serves a certain purpose, a certain role. Priests, parish priests, their matushkas, the parishioners, the hierarchs: everybody serves specific roles and purposes. It’s that cohesive team effort of mutual obedience and respect, the demonstrated conscientiousness of the spiritual life, that allows for that impact to be experienced. I mean, it changed my life. I was not raised an Orthodox Christian.

There’s a spiritual reality that if— We can be blinded to it if we choose to be. The scales have to fall from our eyes.

Kh. Frederica: God can do that. He can make those scales fall. Me, too. I guess we all… Gosh, the Lord has reeled us in from so many strange creeks and streams and ponds. We just keep leaping into his net.

Fr. Basil: Yeah, we keep putting the scales back on!

Kh. Frederica: Yeah, I know! [Laughter]

Fr. Basil: It’s fishy!

Kh. Frederica: Very fishy. Thank you so much, Fathers. I’m glad that I’m able to do this series of talks here at Holy Cross Monastery, because I’m getting questions answered, and I’m thinking so many things I hadn’t thought of before. Thank you so much for letting me be part of your community for a few days.

Fr. Basil: Thank you. And pray for us.

Fr. Ephraim: That we would be blessed to be obedient. For goodness’ sake! [Laughter]

Kh. Frederica: Pray for me, a sinner.