An Interview with Abbess Aemiliane
with Mr. Kevin Allen of Ancient Faith Radio • December 2, 2013
Mr. John Maddex: On July 17, 1981, 140 people were killed, and 216 others injured when two skywalks collapsed inside the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Kansas City. On Ancient Faith Presents… today, we have a special interview conducted by our own Kevin Allen with Abbess Aemiliane from the Sacred Monastery of Saint Nina in Union Bridge, Maryland. Abbess Aemiliane was one of the injured in that disaster, before she was a nun and before she was even Orthodox. It’s a story of her miraculous rescue and the circumstances that not only saved her life but changed it forever. Here’s Kevin.
Mr. Kevin Allen: And my guest in studio today is Mother Aemiliane. She is the abbess of Sacred Monastery of Saint Nina in Union Bridge, Maryland. And I’ve interviewed a lot of people, and Mother’s story is especially interesting, and you’ll be blessed by it.
So you’re originally from Kansas, and came to Boston to pursue graduate studies in education at Harvard.
Abbess Aemiliane (Hanson): Yes.
Mr. Allen: And while in Boston you were received into the Eastern Orthodox Church. Why don’t we begin by having you tell us a bit about your journey to the Orthodox Church? What attracted you, what obstacles did you face, etc.?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, starting out in the Kansas wheat fields and in a very loving and cohesive family, full of faith, which is almost necessary for farmers, and with my grandparents in the house [which] my great-grandfather, a Baptist preacher with a degree from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the 1880s, built. It was always clear that God is, not the slightest doubt, and he was with us night and day. My desire, from the very beginning, was to learn to pray. I didn’t know that anyone knew how. And also, living that way, in a consuming unit—not just a consuming unit, sociologically, but a producing unit, a family, plowing the fields, scattering the wheat in September, instead of keeping the grain for bread in the winter; living with risk, living with joy and great effort, there was really no boundary between work and play. We were together. We worked hard; we enjoyed it, and we enjoyed each other wonderfully.
So I always knew that there were living, active relationships between the heart and the mind and the body and the spirit and the animals and the creation and so on, but there was nothing in Western Christianity that gave me any handhold on how this works. Everything was kind of from the head up, and it really didn’t matter in church what you did the night before, what you ate, the position of your body or the motions of it, or what the smell was in your nostrils or any of that; it was all the words and the concepts in the head, and some singing, thank God! [Laughter]
So I didn’t find any handhold for all that, and I wasn’t very clear even what I needed, but I thought you just keep trying and you keep searching, and you go from one community to another, give what you can, take what you can. My needs were leading me more toward liturgical worship. My family was typical eclectic Protestant, take what you can from the Baptist tradition, Danish Baptist; and Danish Lutheran on the other side. But I never dreamed that I could find home, a church home which was inexhaustible, and was just so far ahead of me at every step that my only hope would be to keep up with the dust and to follow the tracks of the holy people in the faith of our fathers.
Mr. Allen: So your introduction specifically to Orthodoxy was—whom, how, and when?
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] In Canterbury, of all places. Of course, in the seat of the Anglican Communion worldwide, where I was for a year between college and graduate school. And there, coming back from Rome and from L’Abri in the spring break, I met my good friend, Mary, then Sanford, now Ford—Professor Mary Ford. And she said that she’d been baptized over the break.
Mr. Allen: In Orthodox Christianity.
Mother Aemiliane: Yes, in Oxford, in the Orthodox church there. So she explained to me many things. She has such a talent for simply and incisively cutting to the heart of what the chasm is, really, between East and West, which might not have been apparent to me for a long time otherwise. And she gave me a few books to read and so on.
Mr. Allen: And did you right into catechism and…?
Mother Aemiliane: No, I was very busy with myself and interested and drawn, but there were also many things that I didn’t understand. On the one hand, hearing the theological positions, finding them so obviously more, most adequate, and the real one, what I thought was obviously true, and being shocked by what the Western theologies really say, when you get down to it.
But also there were all the fashions of thought, presuppositions, and really conformity presenting itself as critical thinking, of feminism, of my age and education, and so on at the time. So there were things that I couldn’t understand and really struggled with and had to turn inside-out, really, to come into the Church.
Mr. Allen: Some of our listeners might be interested in one or two of those. What were some of the greatest of obstacles? Were they the normal obstacles that so many Westerners have, the Mother of God and the saints and the authority of the Church and things like that, or were there other things?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, it’s probably the same as everyone. I did not have problems with women not being priests, because early on someone explained to me that the priest in the service is an icon, and the icon is always historically accurate, and the priest is an icon of Christ: Christ is male, Christ the person, the real, historical person. So to me, I felt that really the Orthodox were perhaps the only ones who were legitimate in not ordaining women, and that didn’t bother me.
But as far as the Mother of God, I didn’t have any difficulty also with her or with saints, because what does it say? We’re surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. Do you really believe what you’re saying, that you—of eternal life? Well, why would you not ask your friend to pray for you? Why would you not make friends with somebody who is close to the person whom you need help from?
So that didn’t really bother me, but there was a certain invisibility of Mother of God. In coming into the Church, I was so busy with women and authority and liturgy, which I somehow identified liturgical worship with kind of… not just patriarchal but hierarchical authority. And I didn’t even see, coming into the Church, the Mother of God is the biggest thing in the Church. You see in the apse coming down from the dome, there she is, the bridge. And I didn’t see that in the iconostas, the Lord and his Mother are there on either side, equal in size. And I didn’t even hear—you cannot even complete a prayer without calling to mind the Mother of God. Those things were invisible and inaudible to me because of my preconditioned presuppositions.
But I was finding that somehow being in this Church didn’t bring about what I thought. So suddenly the priest is behind me, censing, or the service is going on in the narthex or in the lity, and somehow it was all circular and not at all linear and oppressive. But what helped—I could tell you many things about that; maybe I’m going on too much.
Mr. Allen: No, that’s fine. One thing you did say last night when we had a few over for a gathering, you mentioned that one of the things that a priest said to you that much of what he does behind the altar is invisible anyway! [Laughter]
Mother Aemiliane: Yes, this truth was very important. And then I think really what settled many things is not at all theory, of course, but experience. When I went to the Holy Land, when I went to Greece, and I saw that… There’s so many things wrong here and difficult here because there aren’t monasteries. Do I detect a point of view? But in any case, for instance, I went to the Holy Land. And I found that, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Holy Resurrection, the tomb of Christ, the slab on which he was lying, everyone is passing through, night and day, and venerating. Time for the Liturgy? The veneration stops, the slab itself, the tomb, becomes the table of preparation, proskomidi, and the piece, the big piece of the stone that sealed the tomb, becomes the altar. So during that time, of course we didn’t go in there, because the Liturgy is happening.
But the same with the Church of the Dormition, the Mother of God’s Tomb becomes part of the altar during the Liturgy. The same in Bethlehem: you go to Bethlehem, you come down the stairs into the cave. And I was with all these little old Greek pilgrims, falling down and venerating the star marking the place of the Nativity, and then reaching up and grasping what becomes the altar table in the Liturgy in order to pull themselves up and continue the pilgrimage. So then during the Liturgy that’s the altar.
Mr. Allen: Yeah. Interesting.
Mother Aemiliane: Can I just summarize?
Mr. Allen: Please! Sure.
Mother Aemiliane: What that means is there is nothing anywhere necessary to my salvation and to my sanctification that is inaccessible to me. So there’s no excuse.
Mr. Allen: As a woman.
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] Yes!
Mr. Allen: Right, right, good summary.
Mother Aemiliane: Also I went to the monastery, and I went to the women’s monastery. I saw the men and women and monks kissing the abbess’s hand. So it’s not just that everybody kisses the priest’s hand and he’s a man. So everything became very much more natural and very much more nuanced.
Mr. Allen: Not to mention the fact that the first followers of our Lord were women and the first who saw him rise from the grave were women and so on and so forth.
Mother Aemiliane: And the most courageous.
Mr. Allen: Yes, absolutely. You know, let’s move to a very seminal point in your journey, which occurred in the summer of 1981, when, as many of us, of my age, at any rate, remember: the two walkways collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, killing 114 people and injuring another 200, I think I recall. And you were there; you and your sister were there, and your sister’s friend who became her husband and your brother-in-law. And you were severely injured when struck by and trapped by the fallen beams and the debris. Would you tell us about that experience and your subsequent recovery and some of the things that occurred—if not, I’ll prompt you on those—that occurred that were quite unusual?
Mother Aemiliane: I was trapped. I was crushed. My knees broke my ribs. My face was on the floor between my knees. Nothing could move except my right hand from left to right, but not up and down. My consciousness was split into three, but apparently I never lost consciousness. We must have ducked from some reflex that never reached our conscious brain. And those realms of consciousness were, although I didn’t know the Orthodox conception of the human person at the time, but I experienced it—so there was the registering of impressions, the intake of sense data, my impression of my position, the unbearable—way past unbearable—pain, the inability to breathe.
Such things, that was one part, which was very, very distinctly divided from another part of my consciousness, which was of course my brain, which—brains are built to take in sense data and make sense of them. And impossible to make sense of all this overwhelming flood of unbearable data. And so my mind was thinking— I remember words in my head: “Did something happen? Did it happen now? Did it happen 20 minutes ago?”
Mr. Allen: So the brain was trying to catch up with what was really going on.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah, just completely flittering around in confusion.
Mr. Allen: Trying to make sense of, organize the data.
Mother Aemiliane: Trying to organize, yes.
Mr. Allen: Do you remember experiencing fear?
Mother Aemiliane: No.
Mr. Allen: Really?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, not at that time. [Laughter] The worst was already happening. It was suffering.
Mr. Allen: So you were really there, experiencing, trying to make sense of it, but not so much fearful.
Mother Aemiliane: Oh, I didn’t have time! The little words going on in my brain were the least of my problems. I was just trying to— I didn’t even know that I was trying to breathe, that my body was trying to breathe.
And the third part of my consciousness, which was completely distinct from the other two, was the prayer, which was, I would say, coming from my chest, not from my head. And at that time, it was just the reference to God, the groaning to God; it was not words at that first moment. But I was very lucky that I experienced those divisions on the point of death.
Then I felt my sister grab my hand, my wrist, from the right hand—she was on the right; all the others were on the left—and pulling it. And then her hand slipped away without being able to move me, and light came in on the floor, the western gladsome light of evening. And so I knew that she was out and that she had tried to pull me out, and of course that she couldn’t.
At some point—because, as I say, there was no conception of time, no possibility to feel time—then this prayer became words, and the words were to my guardian angel: “Where are you? I thought you’d be around in a situation like this.” A prayer without faith, without even courtesy, but actually a prayer in me according to the fact that it was coming from my heart; it was not words in my head.
Mr. Allen: So you were pinned under all of the debris that fell? How much weight would have been on you at that time, as you’ve researched that now, looking many years back?
Mother Aemiliane: The skywalks were 50 tons.
Mr. Allen: My word. Any sense of how many of those tons would have fallen directly on you?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, they distributed over the lengths of the skywalks. I’m not an engineer or whatever, but one fell on the other, and both on us.
Mr. Allen: My, my. And just to clarify, your sister also had debris fall on her, but she was farther away so she wasn’t impacted the way others were, obviously?
Mother Aemiliane: The skywalks stuck on the wall to our right, slightly, creating a slight angle until a joint. From the joint onward, they were flat. So I was at a joint, and they were flat. She was to my right, where there was a slight angle. She was struck. Her back was broken in a compression fracture, but she did not require surgery. She had to be in the hospital flat for two weeks, and then they braced her and got her up slowly, and, yes, thank God.
Mr. Allen: And you also mentioned that she kept sending her friend, who became her husband, in to try to pull you out.
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] Yes.
Mr. Allen: Tell us a little bit about that and then how you finally are here today!
Mother Aemiliane: Well, I was not aware that he was pulling on basically what would have been my hips, bent at the hip, double, which was all he could see, and just maybe a foot under the beam. And so he would pull, but of course there was nothing that could be done. And so he would go back, and she would not accept it. And about the third time he turned back around, he had found her and picked her up and put her in a chair, and then come back. But he said that he saw me, that I was out.
Mr. Allen: So third time back to pull you out, which had been impossible physically before because of the debris and the weight on you and so on, suddenly he comes back and now sees you out of all this rubble.
Mother Aemiliane: Right. Yes, he did.
Mr. Allen: Did he see anybody pull you out?
Mother Aemiliane: No, he didn’t see anybody move or anything. He just turned around and saw me lying on my back on the floor, being held by somebody who, very soon after the accident, he could somehow remember the impression of a man who was there, holding me, but within about two years, he really could remember almost nothing.
Mr. Allen: Well, tell us about your impressions of who your savior was in the flesh.
Mother Aemiliane: I won’t tell you impressions. I will tell you exactly what happened. What happened was, when I called out to my guardian angel from under the rubble, then I felt my right hand taken as a handclasp, as in a handshake or a blessing, no—just a squeeze, no pulling, no movement, just squeezing my hand from the front, not from the side and wrist as my sister had tried from the side to pull me out.
And of course I didn’t know that there was nothing but rubble in front of me. And at the same instant—you could say the next instant? The same instant, I was out. I felt nothing; I felt no movement, no pain, no motion, just I was now lying on my back, staring up, and someone was holding me with his left arm over my back and with his right hand he was stroking my face and saying, “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be all right. I love you, my darling.”
Mr. Allen: This was in English.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah, yes.
Mr. Allen: My, my. And tell us about subsequent to that. So there’s a person whom we’ll talk a little bit about more—did you have any idea at this time, did you make any assumptions as to who this was, was it an emergency worker, or…?
Mother Aemiliane: No, no, I just knew that this person had saved me. I knew that he took my hand; I knew that he had gotten me out. My consciousness then unified, as I thought at that moment completely. With my great intelligence—Harvard, you know, and all that—I thought that he had taken my hand and swiveled out the top half of my body and I am now half in and half out, on my back. So I said to him, “Well, do you think you could get my legs out?” And he said, “Well, they’re out.” So as I’m lying there, being held, being supported, but on the floor, I look down the length of my body and saw myself lying on the floor with my skirt even in place as if I had lain down there and arranged it, my legs going down, my left foot at the floor turned sideways, inwards, with bones sticking out. And I was about maybe ten inches from the beam. I could see the beam, just maybe a foot off the floor. I could see under there my purse, which had fallen from my hand and marked the spot where I had been. And then I understood that I was out.
So he just continued the same, completely the same. And even though I then said a very stupid thing, I’m happy that I said it. He— I wanted something all down my back, and I could feel his arm, but I wanted something down the length of my back, corresponding to my spinal cord, my spine. And so I said to him, “Do you— Well, maybe if you got around behind me and put your legs on either side and held me up with your chest, it would be easier for you.” Just totally indirect and hypocritical and stupid, but also how was he in that position? How was he crouched there, holding me?
Anyway, he appeared to not even pay the slightest bit of attention and didn’t move, didn’t change, nothing. And I realized in that moment that he is taking care of me. I am not taking care of him. All the love and power and help was one way, was one way. And so I’m glad for this lesson.
After that, a gentleman— Oh, then my brother-in-law ran up from behind and said, “My God, you’re alive!” And I said, “Where’s Rachel?”
Mr. Allen: Your sister.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah. He said, “She’s behind you about ten feet, in a chair. She’s going to be okay.” And then he ran back to tell her that he had found me and we were there.
Mr. Allen: Now did he actually— Again, he saw this man, but it didn’t register who he was or what he was wearing or what he looked like?
Mother Aemiliane: He thought that he maybe was about middle-aged or something, and he thought there was something about his voice, a little accent or something.
Mr. Allen: Interesting.
Mother Aemiliane: He had a deep voice. That’s what his impression was. But he couldn’t long remember this, and this is typical, as I’ve found out. Most people, that’s what happens. I was in the rehab hospital afterwards: same story over and over again. First question is: What level are you? Second question is: What happened? Everybody says, “I saw the bridge, and then I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital,” or “I took a bounce on the board, on the diving board, and then I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital.” And while people were speaking and communicating as well. It’s just unbearable.
Mr. Allen: My guest is Mother Aemiliane, and she is the abbess of the Sacred Monastery of Saint Nina in Union Bridge, Maryland, and we’re speaking about both her journey and her accident which was a turning-point, one of several turning-points in her life. So, Mother, just picking up from there, did anybody else see this person who saved you? Was it an emergency worker? Was it a fireman? Was it…?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, can I tell you about the doctor? So someone came along right then from the right, and he said he was a doctor and where everything hurts and I can’t breathe and so on. And I told him that I wanted this support all down my spine, and he took from the rubble a stick, and he put it down my back between the supporting arm and my broken back, first fracture of the L-3, and I was greatly relieved by this.
Mr. Allen: This is the doctor that did this.
Mother Aemiliane: The doctor. While the one holding me never moved or changed from this whole activity of holding me and of telling me that I would be all right.
Mr. Allen: And no interchange between the doctor and the man that was behind you.
Mother Aemiliane: No.
Mr. Allen: Okay.
Mother Aemiliane: And then he went on to the left, where, although he held my face so that I couldn’t turn my head, I saw with my eyes the other people, also bent, folded double usually, like I had been, under the skywalks, and further down a person who was half-in, half-out, as I had been, and who was screaming very, very much. And there there was nothing but the Jesus Prayer and the love, and the God and the pain. That’s all that was and all that mattered.
Mr. Allen: And we’ll talk a little bit more of your discovery of who this—of the identity of this man was. Would you like to talk about that now, or do you want to talk about it in linear fashion?
Mother Aemiliane: You tell me. I don’t know.
Mr. Allen: Well, we are there. Did you ever discover—here’s the million-dollar question: Did you ever discover who that was who saved you?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, that was my main care in waking up from the surgeries and so on. As soon as my parents arrived after the two-and-a-half-hour surgery in which my lungs collapsed and the doctors told them they didn’t know if I would live, but if I did I would never walk. And the seven-and-a-half-hour back surgery, and waking up and finding my parents, saying that I wanted to find that man who had saved me.
Now I had gone to the Hyatt and prayed to find my spiritual father and guide and doctor and trainer, angel, but I didn’t think about that at the time, and I really didn’t have to, because the pain was a perfect spiritual director, [in the] Foster frame; also the spiritual struggle was very clear, the attacks of fear coming out of my body itself after such a slam, and also from the facts of my condition, which I knew very well that I could get a blood clot at any time in my legs, my paralyzed legs, and go to my heart and my brain and finish me right there in the hospital.
So I learned that pain is not a problem, and as the Elder Aemilianos told me later, as long as we don’t create it for ourselves, it’s not a problem; it can be a great blessing and doorway. But fear is a problem, and fear is absolutely an enemy that is to be rejected and fought and completely given no space to, no time, no bandwidth, no conversation, no nothing. Go against it directly. So these were some of the spiritual lessons of being paralyzed and being in this kind of trauma.
But I wanted to find that man. And my mother said the first night, “Well, maybe we could put a notice in the paper for him to come forward.” [Laughter] And what’s amazing is there were many, many people who helped, and there were many, many miracles. All of them turned up; all of them came back; all of them presented themselves, except the fireman who has to do with the doctor and this question of: did anyone else see this man? And the man himself. So it turns out that, as I found myself very miraculously healing and against all the medical prognosis and at lightning-speed according to them…
Mr. Allen: And you also said that you heard some very interesting supernatural things occur in recovery, though.
Mother Aemiliane: I didn’t know that they were supernatural…
Mr. Allen: Sorry to put words in your mouth.
Mother Aemiliane: ...and I don’t know that they are. But in any case, I remember on the day when I finally had the tube out of my stomach and was able to receive holy Communion, and I saw all these—at the time, I thought they were bishops, because I’d never seen any Orthodox monks except bishops. But they were all in black and only the first one had a staff. Anyway, they were chanting very beautifully, and they were marching through the intensive care ward. Anyhow, then later the physical therapist came on that day, as she came every day, and waved my legs around and would tell me to try to move them, and I never could move them at all, but I did have sensation. And so I kicked my whole left leg. And then the doctor said, “Well, we don’t know. Maybe she will walk.” They had said even if I lived, I would never walk. They told my parents that.
Mr. Allen: That was the diagnosis.
Mother Aemiliane: They said that straight from the beginning, yeah. But it would be, after a year in the hospital, with braces and canes and belts on my legs and so on. So the Lord decided otherwise, however, as the troparion of Christmas: when the Lord decides, the order of nature is overcome.
Mr. Allen: Yes, I love that, that tropar. So this experience—and maybe we’ll continue along in a linear fashion; we’ll come back to this person—maybe our listeners know where this is going, but we’ll get there eventually. So this experience must have affected your life in many ways. How did it affect your life spiritually? You eventually went back to finish your dissertation and finish your PhD at Harvard in psychology, is that correct?
Mother Aemiliane: EdD, from the Graduate School of Education of Harvard, in human development. Already in the hospital, I just needed to know—once I understood that it was impossible what happened, completely impossible…
Mr. Allen: Number one, for you to be pulled out of the rubble; number two, for you to have walked again.
Mother Aemiliane: All of those, but from the very beginning. I mean, what I thought had happened didn’t happen. It was impossible what happened. And I didn’t feel anybody swiveling me around and pulling me out, which would have killed me; besides that, my sister had already tried to pull me, my arm, around from the side. And the slightest motion from the floor to the stretcher, or from the stretcher to the X-ray table, from the X-ray table to the Foster frame—which were the only movements that I had from the time of the accident until I finally got out of the Foster frame—there was just [an] exponential, unbearable increase in the pain! And there had been no sensation of either movement or pain in this passage out from under the skywalks.
So then I understood we’re not going to find him by looking, putting a notice in the paper. But I wondered why I couldn’t remember his face or I couldn’t remember the whole image of his face, but just flashbacks now and then of parts or pieces, something, a cheek, although he had been so close. And my problems were: Why can’t I remember his face? And what am I going to do when I get well, or if the pain subsides? I’m not on the Foster frame; I don’t have my spiritual guide: how am I going to find my way? Although I was saved, although my sister was not killed or even—I mean, she’s fine—although I had everything, I needed a year after my accident. If you looked at me, you couldn’t tell that anything even had happened to me. It was just incredible, incredible recovery, as the doctors will tell you. But I saw no light in front of my face.
One of my friends that I remember, one of my dearest friends, a couple in England, had said to me at that time, “Well, with everything that’s happened, and with the settlement and all that, do you ever think: Why were…?” And he had a good name—his name was Kevin [Laughter]—and I said—I was startled, and I said, “Kevin, with everything that’s happened, the question is not why work; the question is why live.” So for me there were 114 people killed on my left hand; what am I doing? There were 267 in the hospital the first night. A priest said to me, in intensive care still in the first week, that those people would all become very important to me.
Mr. Allen: And you stayed in touch with many of them, as I understand it, through the years.
Mother Aemiliane: Those are the ones who died.
Mr. Allen: Oh, okay. Got you.
Mother Aemiliane: And he said, “You will live for them, and your life will carry all of their lives.” So what could bear that meaning? And I had most of my doctorate to do, and every choice… But as my life was more broken than my body.
Mr. Allen: So, moving forward, you finished your PhD work, and then shortly thereafter, your sister got married, and then you decided to go to Greece to follow the monastic way of life, is that—?
Mother Aemiliane: No, no, no. I decided much earlier, while I was still really within a year of the accident, as soon as I could walk. Because Archbishop Iakovos of blessed memory invited—wrote a letter to Abbot Aemilianos of Simonospetros Monastery in the Holy Mountain and invited—and asked him to send his son, a hieromonk at the time, Dionysios, to Holy Cross to the Theological School in Boston, to hear confessions and speak and to celebrate in all of Great Lent in 1982. And I had heard of these two monks before; in fact, it was learning of their existence without any fantasy of ever meeting them, and not even being able to remember their strange names, Aemilianos and Dionysios. That was the tipping-point for me to join the Church, which, if I had not, I would be dead.
Anyhow, so I learned that this person was going to be in Boston. And I said to the priest who told me, well, would I be able to bring them to see me, and he said, “You must.” So I got myself on the plane with my braces and canes and all this—body brace, not leg brace—and I went to Boston. And I waited in line for the confessional, and eventually the last person on the last day who was admitted for confession was me! And the next day— And then that night Geronta celebrated the all-night vigil, and the next morning he flew off and left.
Mr. Allen: And what was significant about that encounter, that meeting.
Mother Aemiliane: That was what I needed.
Mr. Allen: Did he encourage you in your monastic direction at that point?
Mother Aemiliane: No, not even a conversation about that. I had problems, and I hardly told him anything that happened, that I was very injured and so on, but I didn’t even tell him about this miracle, because I had issues that I really needed help, and no one ever spoke to me like this: straight from God to my heart, just knowing.
Mr. Allen: So then you went to Greece…
Mother Aemiliane: Well, it took time. It was gradual. I thought, “Why don’t I learn the alphabet?” So I started: alpha, vita, gamma… And then I thought, “Well, I can take a Greek course. They have books, they have classes; one can learn.” And then I thought, “Well, why don’t I go to Greece? They have airplanes. People can go and come.” I’d never thought about it somehow. It was like somebody on Mars: monks on Mt. Athos, my goodness!
So within a year and a half of the accident, and about nine months after my confession, I managed to go to Greece, and on the way I went to Essex, to Fr. Sophrony, and the elder told me, “Since you’re traveling, go to England, to Fr. Sophrony, and then go to the Holy Land.” And it could be in any order, but the way it worked was I went to England and then I went to the Holy Land, and then I went to Romania, to the monastery where Geronta Aemilianos, which he founded, and where I later lived with him.
Mr. Allen: So tell us about that relationship and how this all kind of ties together.
Mother Aemiliane: Well, what happened was, after my confession, which solved my one problem of “Now what do I do?” or “How can I find my way in my spiritual life or in my life?” then the remaining problem was “Why can’t I remember his face?” And this problem also was resolved when I saw a photograph of the Elder Aemilianos.
Mr. Allen: You recognized him as that person?
Mother Aemiliane: Yes.
Mr. Allen: My, my! Now, I have to pull out the skeptical Kevin here, because there will be listeners listening from all backgrounds that will wonder—forgive me, Mother—whether this might have been delirium or hallucination or so on, or just your desire to close this gap, to settle the issue of who this man was. How would you answer those? How would you respond to that sort of worldly skepticism?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, anyone can think anything they want. Everyone’s perfectly free to make their own conclusions and with whatever data they find relevant. For me, however, I can tell you in detail so many concrete datums from the time I was struck all the way through until four and a half hours later when I finally was given a shot for pain, going into surgery. And even going into surgery, upside-down on the stretcher, in unbearable pain and after all of that, I saw a man whom I had seen once before in my life, and I recognized him as a Lutheran bishop of Kansas, and I was just outside the door of the operating room, and I said, “Pray for me!”
Mr. Allen: So you were cognizant; you were mentally there.
Mother Aemiliane: And they stopped the cart, and he took my hand, and he prayed for me. And then they went in. And after some weeks, he came into my hospital room, and he was introducing himself. I really laughed. I thought, “If I could recognize him at that point, and I couldn’t recognize him in my hospital room!” [Laughter] So anyone can think whatever they want, but I’ve found that almost nobody can tell you what happened in the accident even if they were awake, and people saw them and spoke with them—because it’s just unbearable.
Mr. Allen: And you can remember so many of the details up through hours and hours, so there’s no question in your mind—don’t let me put words in your mouth—that this Geronta, this Elder Aemilianos, was the man. Now, let me ask you a question—you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, or you can deflect or whatever—did you ever have a conversation with him that he acknowledged that he understood that he was there?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, actually, apophatically, that’s another proof, because if he could have denied it, he certainly would have, and I certainly saw him deny anything that people wanted to attribute to him out of their great respect and their devotion and that sort of thing.
Mr. Allen: Supernatural sort of thing.
Mother Aemiliane: It was: “Oh, I didn’t do that. I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t say that,” whatever he could. And he always suppressed any conversation about it, because he couldn’t deny it. And so these are facts. Also my spiritual father, I sent him the detailed from the cassette tapes that the lawyers made me do in the hospital still in my bed, just as fresh as could be, the account of everything, every single detail with everything I could remember throughout my care, everything. From that, I sent the account to the Elder Dionysios, who—anyone who knows him knows that any fantasy or whatever is just totally--
Mr. Allen: Discarded?
Mother Aemiliane: It’s put in order immediately. There’s none left at all for a second. But just to say that anybody who wants to be skeptical can, and Fr. Sophrony says that if the Holy Spirit doesn’t inform your heart, you can see the apostles standing in front of you and you will throw rocks at them.
Mr. Allen: But you told me, or I heard last night that he sort of acknowledged--
Mother Aemiliane: There was one time. There was one time.
Mr. Allen: What was that? Tell our listeners what that was like.
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] There was one time where it was somehow possible for me to say to him, “Well, Geronta, what did you see? What happened to you that night?” And he looked at me and he said, “Maybe I’ll tell you some other time.” Then he looked down and smiled.
Mr. Allen: Wow. So there was an acknowledgment there that something happened that he was acknowledging. Yeah. My, my, my!
Mother Aemiliane: One other note about this, though, that after some time we were once waiting for the archbishop of Crete to come, so all the nuns and novices were out waiting at the gate. So Geronta, the Abbot Aemilianos, came out also and was waiting for the archbishop, and the archbishop was delayed, so we had an impromptu synaxis, assembly right there, informally, and people were asking the elder things. And one nun asked him, “When there’s a miracle and somebody, through somebody’s prayers, and they’re recognized later— For instance, little children who somebody picks up a car and it didn’t hit them, and they go to Mt. Athos with their father to give thanks to the Mother of God, and he sees some elder and says: Oh, it’s him! A six-year-old or a five-year-old, whatever. How does that happen? How do they know each other?” she asked.
And Geronta said, “Well, right this minute, this moment, how do you see me? How are you able to see me?” So the sisters were there speaking, and it came out that, well, the way that one sees another is the light—the light. If there’s no light, you can’t see the other person, in the same position. And Geronta said simply, “And in this case, this light which allows each to see the other, is Christ.”
Mr. Allen: So, again, I’ve got to put my skeptic hat on; then we’ll wrap this section up and move on to the next section of our fascinating interview, of course. My skeptic hat for those that are listening would be: You cried out to God and cried out to your guardian angel, and this living elder, beyond our understanding, rescued you. You recognize that he somewhat acknowledged that. Why do you think it was he who was sent, and what are people to make, listening that don’t come from our tradition where this occurs, and they’re thinking, “Oh, these Orthodox, they’re back to talking about the saints again and bilocation and so on”? Maybe just speak a little bit about that.
Mother Aemiliane: I appreciate the question, and I don’t know! I don’t know whether he bilocated or whether… Probably… I mean… What I know is my prayer was to my guardian angel. What I know is that this elder saved my life. And in between those two facts is the sense that my prayer was not only faithless but downright rude and demanding, petulant even. “I thought you’d be around in a place like this.”
Mr. Allen: But you were forgiven. You were in a pretty rough spot!
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] Thank you for your forgiveness, but what I feel is that the holy Scripture says that the prayer of a righteous man availeth much, and I know that my prayer was unworthy, and I know that his prayer was worthy. And I don’t know if it was him himself or if my angel looked like him, because that was who [had] made it possible… I don’t know those things, and I don’t even try to think about it.
I remember one time I said to the Elder, again showing my utter, utter, utter foolishness; I said, “Oh, I thought it was an angel, but it was a man,” as if that were something inferior. And he said to me, my Elder Dionysios, he said, “Look, it’s actually superior to be saved by a man, because angels are born to serve, but man to love.”
Mr. Allen: Interestingly enough, too, wasn’t there another sort of event that we could refer to?
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] Yes, many months later I learned that all of this happened on the feast day of St. Aemilianos.
Mr. Allen: My, my.
Mother Aemiliane: It was about ten after seven on the day of St. Marina, which was the day of my baptism, in the city, and it was about ten after three on the feast day of St. Aemilianos, right in the middle of the all-night vigil, about the time of the great doxology in Greece, St. Aemilianos.
Mr. Allen: Amazing. Well, we’re speaking with Mother Aemiliane, the abbess of the Sacred Monastery of St. Nina. We’ve been speaking about her just remarkable journey to the Orthodox faith from being a farm girl, if you will, from Kansas, and then this incredible and both horrible tragedy that she underwent and the remarkable recovery—and all I can call it is this supernatural experience that we’ve been discussing.
Mother, let’s move beyond that and talk about [how] you first joined a large monastery in Ormylia, Greece, a sister monastery to one on Mt. Athos, under the spiritual direction of the elder who saved you, Aemilianos. You were in a new country with a different culture and language. Tell us briefly about your experience living and praying in that environment, what that was like.
Mother Aemiliane: Well, that was really paradise, and it is paradise. For me, of course, there are many challenges, and it’s a work to go to become a monk or nun. And the elder said to me that being a foreigner, being a stranger, xenoitia, is a heavy work. And his words, of course, saved me, as many times, so whenever I felt a little tired: of course, it’s a heavy work, learning a language, and having no psychological underpinnings for what I was doing.
Mr. Allen: Right. Stranger in a strange land, of sorts, yeah. [Laughter] Are there advantages in your opinion now—you’re an abbess now. You’ve formed a monastery; we’ll talk about that. I mean, are there advantages to being a monastic first in an Orthodox country in terms of your monastic formation?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, this is the way the Lord fixed it, and certainly all of us I think need to at some time, or can greatly benefit from visiting an Orthodox country, both the monasteries and also just the people, because we may think that we’re a strange and ancient minority, or we are counter-cultural; we are innovative and forward-, critical-thinking and special and so on. So we need to also go and find a place where the Orthodox Church is the catholic Church.
Mr. Allen: And what that looks like, right.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah, what it looks like and what it’s like for just simple people who may not have any education, to have consciousness and consciences that are just baptized for centuries, and their reactions and their expectations. They teach us what it is to be a Christian or to be a nun or monk by their requests, what they expect from us, and what they do. It’s amazing to live in an Orthodox country.
Mr. Allen: And you became, if I’m not mistaken, your Elder’s chief translator from Greek into English, and you translated sermons and writings and so on?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, I’m very ashamed to admit, having played a lot of role in that, because of the kind of fearfulness of translating word for word, and not having—taking the time or having the courage to translate it as it should be done, which is to really feel completely the meaning in every detail and nuance and then finding a way to say that in the language. Many of my translations are horrible and practically incomprehensible, just word for word basically, speaking Greek with English words. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. So, unfortunately…
Mr. Allen: So the community in which you found your beginnings of repentance, if you will, included women from many different parts of the world, if I’m not mistaken, from Romania, Russia, Britain, South Africa, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, the US, etc.?
Mother Aemiliane: Ah, yes. We were sent to make new monasteries in Greece, and all these people were constantly finding that they could express their hearts and hear God’s word for them from the elder in their confessions and without any plan or program, somehow the Holy Spirit, from the very beginning, gathered an international and pan-ethnic, some cradle, but from all the cradle ethnicities and countries, but also from all the European countries and from Asian countries and so on…
Mr. Allen: In what ways do these various cultural backgrounds of the community… How do they influence your lives together, and how does that influence you now in being the abbess of a pan-ethnic community in Union Bridge?
Mother Aemiliane: And in America, which is by nature multi-cultural, pan-ethnic…
Mr. Allen: Exactly. So this is part of God’s working, if you will, to get you used to that sort of environment even then.
Mother Aemiliane: But for us what I found was that it was very good for our spiritual life, because it wasn’t any—again, the same thing, there was no—not a lot of cultural glue or even linguistic glue, so the community was a community and is a community on the raw basis of mystical communion and in our spiritual birth and choice to be born from… Because in spiritual childhood and fatherhood, the child decides to be born; in natural birth, everybody has something to say except the child, and it happens to the child, and it happens from love, and the Holy Spirit is always there. But there’s a lot of things that are not chosen, and there are many things that are healed by the spiritual childhood and fatherhood in which the child decides to be born, and from whom, wishing to know that which this person knows, being known by this person from God, not from any other way, and wishing to have whatever comes out of his life be what comes forth from his father’s lips and life.
So immediately in the monastery you have this condition of radical freedom. There’s no spiritual event without radical freedom of choice. And so whatever else happens that may look religious or spiritual, that’s not from freedom of choice—it may be sociological, it may be psychological, it may be whatever, but it’s not a spiritual event.
So we find ourselves with all of this very clear. It’s either babble or pentecost, one of the two, all the time. And that can be very helpful in focusing what’s really going on. It is not an issue of language, it is not an issue of culture, it’s not an issue of social class—none of those things. It’s an issue of the heart, sin or not. It’s sin or the Holy Spirit. And with the Holy Spirit, with the trampling and rejection of our ego and the choice for the other person instead of for ourselves, then there is no difficulty of communication or anything else.
Mr. Allen: You know, I’ve had requests, which I mentioned to you, from listeners, to have an abbess on the program, which, thank God, I do now have, who could speak a little bit about the essence of or maybe some of the differences between, if there are such, male monasticism and female monasticism. Maybe that’s a dumb question, I don’t know. But are there any differences? I mean…
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] I’m very intrigued by this question, and thank you for saying, “if there are differences.” Several things come to mind. One is the same tonsure and the same habit, the same monasticism from the fourth century, from St. Pachomios onward. Another thing that comes to mind is the Geronta, the Elder Aemilianos, saying in the assembly of all the nuns, that one day—I can’t remember exactly what led into this, but he said, “Nuns are not women. They’re men.” And then—which is true—and then one of the nuns said, “And what are monks?” And he answered, “Angels.”
Mr. Allen: Yeah, terrestrial angels.
Mother Aemiliane: Yep. So he also explained that the hair—the hair is… The glory of God is a man; the glory of a man is a woman; the glory of a woman is her hair. But in the tonsure, the hair is cut. The hair is offered to God, and there’s no more issue of men and women—and glory, as far as that goes.
Mr. Allen: But there are some natural differences, in terms of how men relate to one another, how women relate. Women are nesters, one hears. I don’t know. [Laughter] I raised two daughters, and I know there are differences.
Mother Aemiliane: Yes, thank God, there are differences, and real differences. And in practical terms, that works out. For instance, that’s why you have to have an abbess. You don’t have nuns and just nuns and a spiritual father; you have an abbess.
Mr. Allen: So what role does she play different from the role of an abbot in a men’s monastery?
Mother Aemiliane: Not necessarily different from the role of an abbot, but women are protected from some temptations. Women have such an additional help in their spiritual life, because they cannot become priests, and so they don’t have the temptation of thinking about this, which—to be a monk, you cannot want to be a priest. You can’t want to be anything but a monk. So it’s very helpful for women, for nuns, that we can be at the essence of things and not be distracted by some hope or thought or attraction--
Mr. Allen: Of the power of authority…
Mother Aemiliane: Or something like this. It can be—women can be maybe a little bit more complicated as far as spiritual life or psychological things, and that’s not at all bad—I’m not saying something bad at all—but descriptive. Certainly they need each other. And I remember when I went to Greece, another reason to go an Orthodox country—I suddenly saw the very much more strictly defined male-female rules in the home. And that works. It just works.
Mr. Allen: You see that in many traditional countries and cultures.
Mother Aemiliane: And then in a monastery, you have unisex. You have the women doing the plumbing and doing the tractors and doing the mechanics…
Mr. Allen: And farming…
Mother Aemiliane: Farming, and everything without electricity. The woodworking, everything. And you have the men ironing and sewing and doing all the things that the women did. And so this, for me, this felt like such a revelation of health, of a healthy society. In a family, when you have children, when you have pregnancy, when you have very real, physical differences, it works to have these roles. But that’s not all there is to it, either. There’s a whole side of the Church which is the monastic side, and in which it’s completely… Everything is opened to and possible for everyone.
Mr. Allen: Right, not gender-oriented at all.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah. I remember one time the abbot was leaving on a journey, and one of the hieromonks said, “Well, did you iron those socks to get the last bit of moisture out after being washed?” and all the nuns were totally shamed. [Laughter]
Mr. Allen: Well, I must say that having you and Sister Ignatia with us, one of the things that has resonated with me—and I hope I don’t embarrass you by saying this—has been the love that you’ve shown. And it reminds me—which I’m thick-skulled, so I forget this—that at the end of the day, that’s what this whole journey is about, isn’t it? It’s about being able to love, both those around us, our family, and most of all God. So thank you for that.
Let me close with this one. You were sent forth, then, obviously from Greece or from traditional Orthodox country, to build a monastery here, to found one. Based on your experience in helping to build a monastery in Greece, what advice do you have for establishing and building up monastic female communities in the US or in other non-majority Orthodox countries?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, I don’t know about advising; I’m looking for advice and looking for help always and feedback, in that—my light, a very huge light in my own understanding of where we are right now is Fr. Sophrony, who said to me one day, in a completely—when I had no possibility of even formulating a question, he said to me: An Orthodox—the very same Orthodox monastery and tradition, which is organically related to its environment—an Orthodox monastery is organically related to its culture and its surrounding environment—when in a non-Orthodox country, will take very different forms and appearances in order to be the very same authentic itself tradition and monasticism.
Mr. Allen: Its essence and ethos will have to be worked out differently.
Mother Aemiliane: Yes, because if you have to… It’s the same as the issue of translating. And if we try to keep the same language only because we’re terrified because we would lose something in translation, then we’re denying Pentecost. The Holy Spirit couldn’t have come and given everyone the same language; he wasn’t capable of doing that.
Mr. Allen: I don’t want to put you on the spot or get political here at all. We have 15 different national jurisdictions in this country. What is that, in your opinion, taking the wisdom of Elder Sophrony—and I’ve also heard something similar from Fr. Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory—on the one side, that things must adapt to remain what they are in essence as opposed to some imposition of some external order which would be the allegory of just a word translation without translating its essential meaning—what does that mean in your view, if you’re able to, in terms of Orthodox ethos truly becoming American? And by that I don’t mean an Americanized version; I mean truly, deeply, rooted in this country? Because we have people that, as an example, as we’ve discussed this morning, earlier, off-air, believe that you’ve got to do liturgy in Greek or hymnody in Slavonic or whatever for it to be “authentic.”
Mother Aemiliane: It means listening. It means that we can’t take a copy from Greece or from somewhere else and just plunk it down and say that that is authentic. It’s so difficult because, by the very effort to remain faithful to the tradition, the tradition is distorted. The traditional also with jurisdictional unity or whatever, the tradition is you’re going to a new place, you translate the liturgy and the Scriptures, and then you’re into a new church and a local church. So we have to listen, and then we will know how to say what we know with the words and with the forms and with the colors and with the languages and with the arrangements, organizations, that will mean to the person who is our neighbor, what it is. And Fr. Sophrony agonized over the color schemes in the iconography.
Mr. Allen: Really?
Mother Aemiliane: Trying to explain, delving into: What do these colors mean to an Englishman? Sending the fathers to school; they did research in the King James Bible, on the Book of Common Prayer, to find: What are the words that an Englishman feels and can express his spirituality in? And then they made a translation of the Liturgy, which was the words that an Englishman… It meant what it is in his language. What incredible listening! What incredible pastoral love and sacrifice and just dying for one’s neighbor! And it’s not easy. It’s not easy to know what is baptizable, what is congruent, and what is, in fact, inimical and impossible to reconcile. Fr. Sophrony in England, for him, one example was tears. In England, it is just shameful to cry. You don’t do that. And he said--
Mr. Allen: Stiff upper lip and all.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah, but it’s much more than we realize. There he drew the line. He said, “I’m sorry. You can not be a Christian and lead a spiritual life without crying. You’ll have to weep.” He said, “This is inimical. You cannot be a Englishman and be a Christian and not cry.” So this discretion is a very, very… Diakrisis. It’s a very rare virtue. Not everybody has this. It’s hard! So this is what we find ourselves in front of, this incredible challenge.
Mr. Allen: Mother Aemiliane, thank you so, so much for taking the time to come to southern California to be in studio and to speak with us today.
Mother Aemiliane: Thank you. We support you with all our hearts and with our prayers.
Mr. Kevin Allen: And my guest in studio today is Mother Aemiliane. She is the abbess of Sacred Monastery of Saint Nina in Union Bridge, Maryland. And I’ve interviewed a lot of people, and Mother’s story is especially interesting, and you’ll be blessed by it.
So you’re originally from Kansas, and came to Boston to pursue graduate studies in education at Harvard.
Abbess Aemiliane (Hanson): Yes.
Mr. Allen: And while in Boston you were received into the Eastern Orthodox Church. Why don’t we begin by having you tell us a bit about your journey to the Orthodox Church? What attracted you, what obstacles did you face, etc.?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, starting out in the Kansas wheat fields and in a very loving and cohesive family, full of faith, which is almost necessary for farmers, and with my grandparents in the house [which] my great-grandfather, a Baptist preacher with a degree from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago in the 1880s, built. It was always clear that God is, not the slightest doubt, and he was with us night and day. My desire, from the very beginning, was to learn to pray. I didn’t know that anyone knew how. And also, living that way, in a consuming unit—not just a consuming unit, sociologically, but a producing unit, a family, plowing the fields, scattering the wheat in September, instead of keeping the grain for bread in the winter; living with risk, living with joy and great effort, there was really no boundary between work and play. We were together. We worked hard; we enjoyed it, and we enjoyed each other wonderfully.
So I always knew that there were living, active relationships between the heart and the mind and the body and the spirit and the animals and the creation and so on, but there was nothing in Western Christianity that gave me any handhold on how this works. Everything was kind of from the head up, and it really didn’t matter in church what you did the night before, what you ate, the position of your body or the motions of it, or what the smell was in your nostrils or any of that; it was all the words and the concepts in the head, and some singing, thank God! [Laughter]
So I didn’t find any handhold for all that, and I wasn’t very clear even what I needed, but I thought you just keep trying and you keep searching, and you go from one community to another, give what you can, take what you can. My needs were leading me more toward liturgical worship. My family was typical eclectic Protestant, take what you can from the Baptist tradition, Danish Baptist; and Danish Lutheran on the other side. But I never dreamed that I could find home, a church home which was inexhaustible, and was just so far ahead of me at every step that my only hope would be to keep up with the dust and to follow the tracks of the holy people in the faith of our fathers.
Mr. Allen: So your introduction specifically to Orthodoxy was—whom, how, and when?
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] In Canterbury, of all places. Of course, in the seat of the Anglican Communion worldwide, where I was for a year between college and graduate school. And there, coming back from Rome and from L’Abri in the spring break, I met my good friend, Mary, then Sanford, now Ford—Professor Mary Ford. And she said that she’d been baptized over the break.
Mr. Allen: In Orthodox Christianity.
Mother Aemiliane: Yes, in Oxford, in the Orthodox church there. So she explained to me many things. She has such a talent for simply and incisively cutting to the heart of what the chasm is, really, between East and West, which might not have been apparent to me for a long time otherwise. And she gave me a few books to read and so on.
Mr. Allen: And did you right into catechism and…?
Mother Aemiliane: No, I was very busy with myself and interested and drawn, but there were also many things that I didn’t understand. On the one hand, hearing the theological positions, finding them so obviously more, most adequate, and the real one, what I thought was obviously true, and being shocked by what the Western theologies really say, when you get down to it.
But also there were all the fashions of thought, presuppositions, and really conformity presenting itself as critical thinking, of feminism, of my age and education, and so on at the time. So there were things that I couldn’t understand and really struggled with and had to turn inside-out, really, to come into the Church.
Mr. Allen: Some of our listeners might be interested in one or two of those. What were some of the greatest of obstacles? Were they the normal obstacles that so many Westerners have, the Mother of God and the saints and the authority of the Church and things like that, or were there other things?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, it’s probably the same as everyone. I did not have problems with women not being priests, because early on someone explained to me that the priest in the service is an icon, and the icon is always historically accurate, and the priest is an icon of Christ: Christ is male, Christ the person, the real, historical person. So to me, I felt that really the Orthodox were perhaps the only ones who were legitimate in not ordaining women, and that didn’t bother me.
But as far as the Mother of God, I didn’t have any difficulty also with her or with saints, because what does it say? We’re surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. Do you really believe what you’re saying, that you—of eternal life? Well, why would you not ask your friend to pray for you? Why would you not make friends with somebody who is close to the person whom you need help from?
So that didn’t really bother me, but there was a certain invisibility of Mother of God. In coming into the Church, I was so busy with women and authority and liturgy, which I somehow identified liturgical worship with kind of… not just patriarchal but hierarchical authority. And I didn’t even see, coming into the Church, the Mother of God is the biggest thing in the Church. You see in the apse coming down from the dome, there she is, the bridge. And I didn’t see that in the iconostas, the Lord and his Mother are there on either side, equal in size. And I didn’t even hear—you cannot even complete a prayer without calling to mind the Mother of God. Those things were invisible and inaudible to me because of my preconditioned presuppositions.
But I was finding that somehow being in this Church didn’t bring about what I thought. So suddenly the priest is behind me, censing, or the service is going on in the narthex or in the lity, and somehow it was all circular and not at all linear and oppressive. But what helped—I could tell you many things about that; maybe I’m going on too much.
Mr. Allen: No, that’s fine. One thing you did say last night when we had a few over for a gathering, you mentioned that one of the things that a priest said to you that much of what he does behind the altar is invisible anyway! [Laughter]
Mother Aemiliane: Yes, this truth was very important. And then I think really what settled many things is not at all theory, of course, but experience. When I went to the Holy Land, when I went to Greece, and I saw that… There’s so many things wrong here and difficult here because there aren’t monasteries. Do I detect a point of view? But in any case, for instance, I went to the Holy Land. And I found that, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Holy Resurrection, the tomb of Christ, the slab on which he was lying, everyone is passing through, night and day, and venerating. Time for the Liturgy? The veneration stops, the slab itself, the tomb, becomes the table of preparation, proskomidi, and the piece, the big piece of the stone that sealed the tomb, becomes the altar. So during that time, of course we didn’t go in there, because the Liturgy is happening.
But the same with the Church of the Dormition, the Mother of God’s Tomb becomes part of the altar during the Liturgy. The same in Bethlehem: you go to Bethlehem, you come down the stairs into the cave. And I was with all these little old Greek pilgrims, falling down and venerating the star marking the place of the Nativity, and then reaching up and grasping what becomes the altar table in the Liturgy in order to pull themselves up and continue the pilgrimage. So then during the Liturgy that’s the altar.
Mr. Allen: Yeah. Interesting.
Mother Aemiliane: Can I just summarize?
Mr. Allen: Please! Sure.
Mother Aemiliane: What that means is there is nothing anywhere necessary to my salvation and to my sanctification that is inaccessible to me. So there’s no excuse.
Mr. Allen: As a woman.
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] Yes!
Mr. Allen: Right, right, good summary.
Mother Aemiliane: Also I went to the monastery, and I went to the women’s monastery. I saw the men and women and monks kissing the abbess’s hand. So it’s not just that everybody kisses the priest’s hand and he’s a man. So everything became very much more natural and very much more nuanced.
Mr. Allen: Not to mention the fact that the first followers of our Lord were women and the first who saw him rise from the grave were women and so on and so forth.
Mother Aemiliane: And the most courageous.
Mr. Allen: Yes, absolutely. You know, let’s move to a very seminal point in your journey, which occurred in the summer of 1981, when, as many of us, of my age, at any rate, remember: the two walkways collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, killing 114 people and injuring another 200, I think I recall. And you were there; you and your sister were there, and your sister’s friend who became her husband and your brother-in-law. And you were severely injured when struck by and trapped by the fallen beams and the debris. Would you tell us about that experience and your subsequent recovery and some of the things that occurred—if not, I’ll prompt you on those—that occurred that were quite unusual?
Mother Aemiliane: I was trapped. I was crushed. My knees broke my ribs. My face was on the floor between my knees. Nothing could move except my right hand from left to right, but not up and down. My consciousness was split into three, but apparently I never lost consciousness. We must have ducked from some reflex that never reached our conscious brain. And those realms of consciousness were, although I didn’t know the Orthodox conception of the human person at the time, but I experienced it—so there was the registering of impressions, the intake of sense data, my impression of my position, the unbearable—way past unbearable—pain, the inability to breathe.
Such things, that was one part, which was very, very distinctly divided from another part of my consciousness, which was of course my brain, which—brains are built to take in sense data and make sense of them. And impossible to make sense of all this overwhelming flood of unbearable data. And so my mind was thinking— I remember words in my head: “Did something happen? Did it happen now? Did it happen 20 minutes ago?”
Mr. Allen: So the brain was trying to catch up with what was really going on.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah, just completely flittering around in confusion.
Mr. Allen: Trying to make sense of, organize the data.
Mother Aemiliane: Trying to organize, yes.
Mr. Allen: Do you remember experiencing fear?
Mother Aemiliane: No.
Mr. Allen: Really?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, not at that time. [Laughter] The worst was already happening. It was suffering.
Mr. Allen: So you were really there, experiencing, trying to make sense of it, but not so much fearful.
Mother Aemiliane: Oh, I didn’t have time! The little words going on in my brain were the least of my problems. I was just trying to— I didn’t even know that I was trying to breathe, that my body was trying to breathe.
And the third part of my consciousness, which was completely distinct from the other two, was the prayer, which was, I would say, coming from my chest, not from my head. And at that time, it was just the reference to God, the groaning to God; it was not words at that first moment. But I was very lucky that I experienced those divisions on the point of death.
Then I felt my sister grab my hand, my wrist, from the right hand—she was on the right; all the others were on the left—and pulling it. And then her hand slipped away without being able to move me, and light came in on the floor, the western gladsome light of evening. And so I knew that she was out and that she had tried to pull me out, and of course that she couldn’t.
At some point—because, as I say, there was no conception of time, no possibility to feel time—then this prayer became words, and the words were to my guardian angel: “Where are you? I thought you’d be around in a situation like this.” A prayer without faith, without even courtesy, but actually a prayer in me according to the fact that it was coming from my heart; it was not words in my head.
Mr. Allen: So you were pinned under all of the debris that fell? How much weight would have been on you at that time, as you’ve researched that now, looking many years back?
Mother Aemiliane: The skywalks were 50 tons.
Mr. Allen: My word. Any sense of how many of those tons would have fallen directly on you?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, they distributed over the lengths of the skywalks. I’m not an engineer or whatever, but one fell on the other, and both on us.
Mr. Allen: My, my. And just to clarify, your sister also had debris fall on her, but she was farther away so she wasn’t impacted the way others were, obviously?
Mother Aemiliane: The skywalks stuck on the wall to our right, slightly, creating a slight angle until a joint. From the joint onward, they were flat. So I was at a joint, and they were flat. She was to my right, where there was a slight angle. She was struck. Her back was broken in a compression fracture, but she did not require surgery. She had to be in the hospital flat for two weeks, and then they braced her and got her up slowly, and, yes, thank God.
Mr. Allen: And you also mentioned that she kept sending her friend, who became her husband, in to try to pull you out.
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] Yes.
Mr. Allen: Tell us a little bit about that and then how you finally are here today!
Mother Aemiliane: Well, I was not aware that he was pulling on basically what would have been my hips, bent at the hip, double, which was all he could see, and just maybe a foot under the beam. And so he would pull, but of course there was nothing that could be done. And so he would go back, and she would not accept it. And about the third time he turned back around, he had found her and picked her up and put her in a chair, and then come back. But he said that he saw me, that I was out.
Mr. Allen: So third time back to pull you out, which had been impossible physically before because of the debris and the weight on you and so on, suddenly he comes back and now sees you out of all this rubble.
Mother Aemiliane: Right. Yes, he did.
Mr. Allen: Did he see anybody pull you out?
Mother Aemiliane: No, he didn’t see anybody move or anything. He just turned around and saw me lying on my back on the floor, being held by somebody who, very soon after the accident, he could somehow remember the impression of a man who was there, holding me, but within about two years, he really could remember almost nothing.
Mr. Allen: Well, tell us about your impressions of who your savior was in the flesh.
Mother Aemiliane: I won’t tell you impressions. I will tell you exactly what happened. What happened was, when I called out to my guardian angel from under the rubble, then I felt my right hand taken as a handclasp, as in a handshake or a blessing, no—just a squeeze, no pulling, no movement, just squeezing my hand from the front, not from the side and wrist as my sister had tried from the side to pull me out.
And of course I didn’t know that there was nothing but rubble in front of me. And at the same instant—you could say the next instant? The same instant, I was out. I felt nothing; I felt no movement, no pain, no motion, just I was now lying on my back, staring up, and someone was holding me with his left arm over my back and with his right hand he was stroking my face and saying, “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be all right. I love you, my darling.”
Mr. Allen: This was in English.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah, yes.
Mr. Allen: My, my. And tell us about subsequent to that. So there’s a person whom we’ll talk a little bit about more—did you have any idea at this time, did you make any assumptions as to who this was, was it an emergency worker, or…?
Mother Aemiliane: No, no, I just knew that this person had saved me. I knew that he took my hand; I knew that he had gotten me out. My consciousness then unified, as I thought at that moment completely. With my great intelligence—Harvard, you know, and all that—I thought that he had taken my hand and swiveled out the top half of my body and I am now half in and half out, on my back. So I said to him, “Well, do you think you could get my legs out?” And he said, “Well, they’re out.” So as I’m lying there, being held, being supported, but on the floor, I look down the length of my body and saw myself lying on the floor with my skirt even in place as if I had lain down there and arranged it, my legs going down, my left foot at the floor turned sideways, inwards, with bones sticking out. And I was about maybe ten inches from the beam. I could see the beam, just maybe a foot off the floor. I could see under there my purse, which had fallen from my hand and marked the spot where I had been. And then I understood that I was out.
So he just continued the same, completely the same. And even though I then said a very stupid thing, I’m happy that I said it. He— I wanted something all down my back, and I could feel his arm, but I wanted something down the length of my back, corresponding to my spinal cord, my spine. And so I said to him, “Do you— Well, maybe if you got around behind me and put your legs on either side and held me up with your chest, it would be easier for you.” Just totally indirect and hypocritical and stupid, but also how was he in that position? How was he crouched there, holding me?
Anyway, he appeared to not even pay the slightest bit of attention and didn’t move, didn’t change, nothing. And I realized in that moment that he is taking care of me. I am not taking care of him. All the love and power and help was one way, was one way. And so I’m glad for this lesson.
After that, a gentleman— Oh, then my brother-in-law ran up from behind and said, “My God, you’re alive!” And I said, “Where’s Rachel?”
Mr. Allen: Your sister.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah. He said, “She’s behind you about ten feet, in a chair. She’s going to be okay.” And then he ran back to tell her that he had found me and we were there.
Mr. Allen: Now did he actually— Again, he saw this man, but it didn’t register who he was or what he was wearing or what he looked like?
Mother Aemiliane: He thought that he maybe was about middle-aged or something, and he thought there was something about his voice, a little accent or something.
Mr. Allen: Interesting.
Mother Aemiliane: He had a deep voice. That’s what his impression was. But he couldn’t long remember this, and this is typical, as I’ve found out. Most people, that’s what happens. I was in the rehab hospital afterwards: same story over and over again. First question is: What level are you? Second question is: What happened? Everybody says, “I saw the bridge, and then I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital,” or “I took a bounce on the board, on the diving board, and then I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital.” And while people were speaking and communicating as well. It’s just unbearable.
Mr. Allen: My guest is Mother Aemiliane, and she is the abbess of the Sacred Monastery of Saint Nina in Union Bridge, Maryland, and we’re speaking about both her journey and her accident which was a turning-point, one of several turning-points in her life. So, Mother, just picking up from there, did anybody else see this person who saved you? Was it an emergency worker? Was it a fireman? Was it…?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, can I tell you about the doctor? So someone came along right then from the right, and he said he was a doctor and where everything hurts and I can’t breathe and so on. And I told him that I wanted this support all down my spine, and he took from the rubble a stick, and he put it down my back between the supporting arm and my broken back, first fracture of the L-3, and I was greatly relieved by this.
Mr. Allen: This is the doctor that did this.
Mother Aemiliane: The doctor. While the one holding me never moved or changed from this whole activity of holding me and of telling me that I would be all right.
Mr. Allen: And no interchange between the doctor and the man that was behind you.
Mother Aemiliane: No.
Mr. Allen: Okay.
Mother Aemiliane: And then he went on to the left, where, although he held my face so that I couldn’t turn my head, I saw with my eyes the other people, also bent, folded double usually, like I had been, under the skywalks, and further down a person who was half-in, half-out, as I had been, and who was screaming very, very much. And there there was nothing but the Jesus Prayer and the love, and the God and the pain. That’s all that was and all that mattered.
Mr. Allen: And we’ll talk a little bit more of your discovery of who this—of the identity of this man was. Would you like to talk about that now, or do you want to talk about it in linear fashion?
Mother Aemiliane: You tell me. I don’t know.
Mr. Allen: Well, we are there. Did you ever discover—here’s the million-dollar question: Did you ever discover who that was who saved you?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, that was my main care in waking up from the surgeries and so on. As soon as my parents arrived after the two-and-a-half-hour surgery in which my lungs collapsed and the doctors told them they didn’t know if I would live, but if I did I would never walk. And the seven-and-a-half-hour back surgery, and waking up and finding my parents, saying that I wanted to find that man who had saved me.
Now I had gone to the Hyatt and prayed to find my spiritual father and guide and doctor and trainer, angel, but I didn’t think about that at the time, and I really didn’t have to, because the pain was a perfect spiritual director, [in the] Foster frame; also the spiritual struggle was very clear, the attacks of fear coming out of my body itself after such a slam, and also from the facts of my condition, which I knew very well that I could get a blood clot at any time in my legs, my paralyzed legs, and go to my heart and my brain and finish me right there in the hospital.
So I learned that pain is not a problem, and as the Elder Aemilianos told me later, as long as we don’t create it for ourselves, it’s not a problem; it can be a great blessing and doorway. But fear is a problem, and fear is absolutely an enemy that is to be rejected and fought and completely given no space to, no time, no bandwidth, no conversation, no nothing. Go against it directly. So these were some of the spiritual lessons of being paralyzed and being in this kind of trauma.
But I wanted to find that man. And my mother said the first night, “Well, maybe we could put a notice in the paper for him to come forward.” [Laughter] And what’s amazing is there were many, many people who helped, and there were many, many miracles. All of them turned up; all of them came back; all of them presented themselves, except the fireman who has to do with the doctor and this question of: did anyone else see this man? And the man himself. So it turns out that, as I found myself very miraculously healing and against all the medical prognosis and at lightning-speed according to them…
Mr. Allen: And you also said that you heard some very interesting supernatural things occur in recovery, though.
Mother Aemiliane: I didn’t know that they were supernatural…
Mr. Allen: Sorry to put words in your mouth.
Mother Aemiliane: ...and I don’t know that they are. But in any case, I remember on the day when I finally had the tube out of my stomach and was able to receive holy Communion, and I saw all these—at the time, I thought they were bishops, because I’d never seen any Orthodox monks except bishops. But they were all in black and only the first one had a staff. Anyway, they were chanting very beautifully, and they were marching through the intensive care ward. Anyhow, then later the physical therapist came on that day, as she came every day, and waved my legs around and would tell me to try to move them, and I never could move them at all, but I did have sensation. And so I kicked my whole left leg. And then the doctor said, “Well, we don’t know. Maybe she will walk.” They had said even if I lived, I would never walk. They told my parents that.
Mr. Allen: That was the diagnosis.
Mother Aemiliane: They said that straight from the beginning, yeah. But it would be, after a year in the hospital, with braces and canes and belts on my legs and so on. So the Lord decided otherwise, however, as the troparion of Christmas: when the Lord decides, the order of nature is overcome.
Mr. Allen: Yes, I love that, that tropar. So this experience—and maybe we’ll continue along in a linear fashion; we’ll come back to this person—maybe our listeners know where this is going, but we’ll get there eventually. So this experience must have affected your life in many ways. How did it affect your life spiritually? You eventually went back to finish your dissertation and finish your PhD at Harvard in psychology, is that correct?
Mother Aemiliane: EdD, from the Graduate School of Education of Harvard, in human development. Already in the hospital, I just needed to know—once I understood that it was impossible what happened, completely impossible…
Mr. Allen: Number one, for you to be pulled out of the rubble; number two, for you to have walked again.
Mother Aemiliane: All of those, but from the very beginning. I mean, what I thought had happened didn’t happen. It was impossible what happened. And I didn’t feel anybody swiveling me around and pulling me out, which would have killed me; besides that, my sister had already tried to pull me, my arm, around from the side. And the slightest motion from the floor to the stretcher, or from the stretcher to the X-ray table, from the X-ray table to the Foster frame—which were the only movements that I had from the time of the accident until I finally got out of the Foster frame—there was just [an] exponential, unbearable increase in the pain! And there had been no sensation of either movement or pain in this passage out from under the skywalks.
So then I understood we’re not going to find him by looking, putting a notice in the paper. But I wondered why I couldn’t remember his face or I couldn’t remember the whole image of his face, but just flashbacks now and then of parts or pieces, something, a cheek, although he had been so close. And my problems were: Why can’t I remember his face? And what am I going to do when I get well, or if the pain subsides? I’m not on the Foster frame; I don’t have my spiritual guide: how am I going to find my way? Although I was saved, although my sister was not killed or even—I mean, she’s fine—although I had everything, I needed a year after my accident. If you looked at me, you couldn’t tell that anything even had happened to me. It was just incredible, incredible recovery, as the doctors will tell you. But I saw no light in front of my face.
One of my friends that I remember, one of my dearest friends, a couple in England, had said to me at that time, “Well, with everything that’s happened, and with the settlement and all that, do you ever think: Why were…?” And he had a good name—his name was Kevin [Laughter]—and I said—I was startled, and I said, “Kevin, with everything that’s happened, the question is not why work; the question is why live.” So for me there were 114 people killed on my left hand; what am I doing? There were 267 in the hospital the first night. A priest said to me, in intensive care still in the first week, that those people would all become very important to me.
Mr. Allen: And you stayed in touch with many of them, as I understand it, through the years.
Mother Aemiliane: Those are the ones who died.
Mr. Allen: Oh, okay. Got you.
Mother Aemiliane: And he said, “You will live for them, and your life will carry all of their lives.” So what could bear that meaning? And I had most of my doctorate to do, and every choice… But as my life was more broken than my body.
Mr. Allen: So, moving forward, you finished your PhD work, and then shortly thereafter, your sister got married, and then you decided to go to Greece to follow the monastic way of life, is that—?
Mother Aemiliane: No, no, no. I decided much earlier, while I was still really within a year of the accident, as soon as I could walk. Because Archbishop Iakovos of blessed memory invited—wrote a letter to Abbot Aemilianos of Simonospetros Monastery in the Holy Mountain and invited—and asked him to send his son, a hieromonk at the time, Dionysios, to Holy Cross to the Theological School in Boston, to hear confessions and speak and to celebrate in all of Great Lent in 1982. And I had heard of these two monks before; in fact, it was learning of their existence without any fantasy of ever meeting them, and not even being able to remember their strange names, Aemilianos and Dionysios. That was the tipping-point for me to join the Church, which, if I had not, I would be dead.
Anyhow, so I learned that this person was going to be in Boston. And I said to the priest who told me, well, would I be able to bring them to see me, and he said, “You must.” So I got myself on the plane with my braces and canes and all this—body brace, not leg brace—and I went to Boston. And I waited in line for the confessional, and eventually the last person on the last day who was admitted for confession was me! And the next day— And then that night Geronta celebrated the all-night vigil, and the next morning he flew off and left.
Mr. Allen: And what was significant about that encounter, that meeting.
Mother Aemiliane: That was what I needed.
Mr. Allen: Did he encourage you in your monastic direction at that point?
Mother Aemiliane: No, not even a conversation about that. I had problems, and I hardly told him anything that happened, that I was very injured and so on, but I didn’t even tell him about this miracle, because I had issues that I really needed help, and no one ever spoke to me like this: straight from God to my heart, just knowing.
Mr. Allen: So then you went to Greece…
Mother Aemiliane: Well, it took time. It was gradual. I thought, “Why don’t I learn the alphabet?” So I started: alpha, vita, gamma… And then I thought, “Well, I can take a Greek course. They have books, they have classes; one can learn.” And then I thought, “Well, why don’t I go to Greece? They have airplanes. People can go and come.” I’d never thought about it somehow. It was like somebody on Mars: monks on Mt. Athos, my goodness!
So within a year and a half of the accident, and about nine months after my confession, I managed to go to Greece, and on the way I went to Essex, to Fr. Sophrony, and the elder told me, “Since you’re traveling, go to England, to Fr. Sophrony, and then go to the Holy Land.” And it could be in any order, but the way it worked was I went to England and then I went to the Holy Land, and then I went to Romania, to the monastery where Geronta Aemilianos, which he founded, and where I later lived with him.
Mr. Allen: So tell us about that relationship and how this all kind of ties together.
Mother Aemiliane: Well, what happened was, after my confession, which solved my one problem of “Now what do I do?” or “How can I find my way in my spiritual life or in my life?” then the remaining problem was “Why can’t I remember his face?” And this problem also was resolved when I saw a photograph of the Elder Aemilianos.
Mr. Allen: You recognized him as that person?
Mother Aemiliane: Yes.
Mr. Allen: My, my! Now, I have to pull out the skeptical Kevin here, because there will be listeners listening from all backgrounds that will wonder—forgive me, Mother—whether this might have been delirium or hallucination or so on, or just your desire to close this gap, to settle the issue of who this man was. How would you answer those? How would you respond to that sort of worldly skepticism?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, anyone can think anything they want. Everyone’s perfectly free to make their own conclusions and with whatever data they find relevant. For me, however, I can tell you in detail so many concrete datums from the time I was struck all the way through until four and a half hours later when I finally was given a shot for pain, going into surgery. And even going into surgery, upside-down on the stretcher, in unbearable pain and after all of that, I saw a man whom I had seen once before in my life, and I recognized him as a Lutheran bishop of Kansas, and I was just outside the door of the operating room, and I said, “Pray for me!”
Mr. Allen: So you were cognizant; you were mentally there.
Mother Aemiliane: And they stopped the cart, and he took my hand, and he prayed for me. And then they went in. And after some weeks, he came into my hospital room, and he was introducing himself. I really laughed. I thought, “If I could recognize him at that point, and I couldn’t recognize him in my hospital room!” [Laughter] So anyone can think whatever they want, but I’ve found that almost nobody can tell you what happened in the accident even if they were awake, and people saw them and spoke with them—because it’s just unbearable.
Mr. Allen: And you can remember so many of the details up through hours and hours, so there’s no question in your mind—don’t let me put words in your mouth—that this Geronta, this Elder Aemilianos, was the man. Now, let me ask you a question—you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, or you can deflect or whatever—did you ever have a conversation with him that he acknowledged that he understood that he was there?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, actually, apophatically, that’s another proof, because if he could have denied it, he certainly would have, and I certainly saw him deny anything that people wanted to attribute to him out of their great respect and their devotion and that sort of thing.
Mr. Allen: Supernatural sort of thing.
Mother Aemiliane: It was: “Oh, I didn’t do that. I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t say that,” whatever he could. And he always suppressed any conversation about it, because he couldn’t deny it. And so these are facts. Also my spiritual father, I sent him the detailed from the cassette tapes that the lawyers made me do in the hospital still in my bed, just as fresh as could be, the account of everything, every single detail with everything I could remember throughout my care, everything. From that, I sent the account to the Elder Dionysios, who—anyone who knows him knows that any fantasy or whatever is just totally--
Mr. Allen: Discarded?
Mother Aemiliane: It’s put in order immediately. There’s none left at all for a second. But just to say that anybody who wants to be skeptical can, and Fr. Sophrony says that if the Holy Spirit doesn’t inform your heart, you can see the apostles standing in front of you and you will throw rocks at them.
Mr. Allen: But you told me, or I heard last night that he sort of acknowledged--
Mother Aemiliane: There was one time. There was one time.
Mr. Allen: What was that? Tell our listeners what that was like.
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] There was one time where it was somehow possible for me to say to him, “Well, Geronta, what did you see? What happened to you that night?” And he looked at me and he said, “Maybe I’ll tell you some other time.” Then he looked down and smiled.
Mr. Allen: Wow. So there was an acknowledgment there that something happened that he was acknowledging. Yeah. My, my, my!
Mother Aemiliane: One other note about this, though, that after some time we were once waiting for the archbishop of Crete to come, so all the nuns and novices were out waiting at the gate. So Geronta, the Abbot Aemilianos, came out also and was waiting for the archbishop, and the archbishop was delayed, so we had an impromptu synaxis, assembly right there, informally, and people were asking the elder things. And one nun asked him, “When there’s a miracle and somebody, through somebody’s prayers, and they’re recognized later— For instance, little children who somebody picks up a car and it didn’t hit them, and they go to Mt. Athos with their father to give thanks to the Mother of God, and he sees some elder and says: Oh, it’s him! A six-year-old or a five-year-old, whatever. How does that happen? How do they know each other?” she asked.
And Geronta said, “Well, right this minute, this moment, how do you see me? How are you able to see me?” So the sisters were there speaking, and it came out that, well, the way that one sees another is the light—the light. If there’s no light, you can’t see the other person, in the same position. And Geronta said simply, “And in this case, this light which allows each to see the other, is Christ.”
Mr. Allen: So, again, I’ve got to put my skeptic hat on; then we’ll wrap this section up and move on to the next section of our fascinating interview, of course. My skeptic hat for those that are listening would be: You cried out to God and cried out to your guardian angel, and this living elder, beyond our understanding, rescued you. You recognize that he somewhat acknowledged that. Why do you think it was he who was sent, and what are people to make, listening that don’t come from our tradition where this occurs, and they’re thinking, “Oh, these Orthodox, they’re back to talking about the saints again and bilocation and so on”? Maybe just speak a little bit about that.
Mother Aemiliane: I appreciate the question, and I don’t know! I don’t know whether he bilocated or whether… Probably… I mean… What I know is my prayer was to my guardian angel. What I know is that this elder saved my life. And in between those two facts is the sense that my prayer was not only faithless but downright rude and demanding, petulant even. “I thought you’d be around in a place like this.”
Mr. Allen: But you were forgiven. You were in a pretty rough spot!
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] Thank you for your forgiveness, but what I feel is that the holy Scripture says that the prayer of a righteous man availeth much, and I know that my prayer was unworthy, and I know that his prayer was worthy. And I don’t know if it was him himself or if my angel looked like him, because that was who [had] made it possible… I don’t know those things, and I don’t even try to think about it.
I remember one time I said to the Elder, again showing my utter, utter, utter foolishness; I said, “Oh, I thought it was an angel, but it was a man,” as if that were something inferior. And he said to me, my Elder Dionysios, he said, “Look, it’s actually superior to be saved by a man, because angels are born to serve, but man to love.”
Mr. Allen: Interestingly enough, too, wasn’t there another sort of event that we could refer to?
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] Yes, many months later I learned that all of this happened on the feast day of St. Aemilianos.
Mr. Allen: My, my.
Mother Aemiliane: It was about ten after seven on the day of St. Marina, which was the day of my baptism, in the city, and it was about ten after three on the feast day of St. Aemilianos, right in the middle of the all-night vigil, about the time of the great doxology in Greece, St. Aemilianos.
Mr. Allen: Amazing. Well, we’re speaking with Mother Aemiliane, the abbess of the Sacred Monastery of St. Nina. We’ve been speaking about her just remarkable journey to the Orthodox faith from being a farm girl, if you will, from Kansas, and then this incredible and both horrible tragedy that she underwent and the remarkable recovery—and all I can call it is this supernatural experience that we’ve been discussing.
Mother, let’s move beyond that and talk about [how] you first joined a large monastery in Ormylia, Greece, a sister monastery to one on Mt. Athos, under the spiritual direction of the elder who saved you, Aemilianos. You were in a new country with a different culture and language. Tell us briefly about your experience living and praying in that environment, what that was like.
Mother Aemiliane: Well, that was really paradise, and it is paradise. For me, of course, there are many challenges, and it’s a work to go to become a monk or nun. And the elder said to me that being a foreigner, being a stranger, xenoitia, is a heavy work. And his words, of course, saved me, as many times, so whenever I felt a little tired: of course, it’s a heavy work, learning a language, and having no psychological underpinnings for what I was doing.
Mr. Allen: Right. Stranger in a strange land, of sorts, yeah. [Laughter] Are there advantages in your opinion now—you’re an abbess now. You’ve formed a monastery; we’ll talk about that. I mean, are there advantages to being a monastic first in an Orthodox country in terms of your monastic formation?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, this is the way the Lord fixed it, and certainly all of us I think need to at some time, or can greatly benefit from visiting an Orthodox country, both the monasteries and also just the people, because we may think that we’re a strange and ancient minority, or we are counter-cultural; we are innovative and forward-, critical-thinking and special and so on. So we need to also go and find a place where the Orthodox Church is the catholic Church.
Mr. Allen: And what that looks like, right.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah, what it looks like and what it’s like for just simple people who may not have any education, to have consciousness and consciences that are just baptized for centuries, and their reactions and their expectations. They teach us what it is to be a Christian or to be a nun or monk by their requests, what they expect from us, and what they do. It’s amazing to live in an Orthodox country.
Mr. Allen: And you became, if I’m not mistaken, your Elder’s chief translator from Greek into English, and you translated sermons and writings and so on?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, I’m very ashamed to admit, having played a lot of role in that, because of the kind of fearfulness of translating word for word, and not having—taking the time or having the courage to translate it as it should be done, which is to really feel completely the meaning in every detail and nuance and then finding a way to say that in the language. Many of my translations are horrible and practically incomprehensible, just word for word basically, speaking Greek with English words. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. So, unfortunately…
Mr. Allen: So the community in which you found your beginnings of repentance, if you will, included women from many different parts of the world, if I’m not mistaken, from Romania, Russia, Britain, South Africa, Israel, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Greece, the US, etc.?
Mother Aemiliane: Ah, yes. We were sent to make new monasteries in Greece, and all these people were constantly finding that they could express their hearts and hear God’s word for them from the elder in their confessions and without any plan or program, somehow the Holy Spirit, from the very beginning, gathered an international and pan-ethnic, some cradle, but from all the cradle ethnicities and countries, but also from all the European countries and from Asian countries and so on…
Mr. Allen: In what ways do these various cultural backgrounds of the community… How do they influence your lives together, and how does that influence you now in being the abbess of a pan-ethnic community in Union Bridge?
Mother Aemiliane: And in America, which is by nature multi-cultural, pan-ethnic…
Mr. Allen: Exactly. So this is part of God’s working, if you will, to get you used to that sort of environment even then.
Mother Aemiliane: But for us what I found was that it was very good for our spiritual life, because it wasn’t any—again, the same thing, there was no—not a lot of cultural glue or even linguistic glue, so the community was a community and is a community on the raw basis of mystical communion and in our spiritual birth and choice to be born from… Because in spiritual childhood and fatherhood, the child decides to be born; in natural birth, everybody has something to say except the child, and it happens to the child, and it happens from love, and the Holy Spirit is always there. But there’s a lot of things that are not chosen, and there are many things that are healed by the spiritual childhood and fatherhood in which the child decides to be born, and from whom, wishing to know that which this person knows, being known by this person from God, not from any other way, and wishing to have whatever comes out of his life be what comes forth from his father’s lips and life.
So immediately in the monastery you have this condition of radical freedom. There’s no spiritual event without radical freedom of choice. And so whatever else happens that may look religious or spiritual, that’s not from freedom of choice—it may be sociological, it may be psychological, it may be whatever, but it’s not a spiritual event.
So we find ourselves with all of this very clear. It’s either babble or pentecost, one of the two, all the time. And that can be very helpful in focusing what’s really going on. It is not an issue of language, it is not an issue of culture, it’s not an issue of social class—none of those things. It’s an issue of the heart, sin or not. It’s sin or the Holy Spirit. And with the Holy Spirit, with the trampling and rejection of our ego and the choice for the other person instead of for ourselves, then there is no difficulty of communication or anything else.
Mr. Allen: You know, I’ve had requests, which I mentioned to you, from listeners, to have an abbess on the program, which, thank God, I do now have, who could speak a little bit about the essence of or maybe some of the differences between, if there are such, male monasticism and female monasticism. Maybe that’s a dumb question, I don’t know. But are there any differences? I mean…
Mother Aemiliane: [Laughter] I’m very intrigued by this question, and thank you for saying, “if there are differences.” Several things come to mind. One is the same tonsure and the same habit, the same monasticism from the fourth century, from St. Pachomios onward. Another thing that comes to mind is the Geronta, the Elder Aemilianos, saying in the assembly of all the nuns, that one day—I can’t remember exactly what led into this, but he said, “Nuns are not women. They’re men.” And then—which is true—and then one of the nuns said, “And what are monks?” And he answered, “Angels.”
Mr. Allen: Yeah, terrestrial angels.
Mother Aemiliane: Yep. So he also explained that the hair—the hair is… The glory of God is a man; the glory of a man is a woman; the glory of a woman is her hair. But in the tonsure, the hair is cut. The hair is offered to God, and there’s no more issue of men and women—and glory, as far as that goes.
Mr. Allen: But there are some natural differences, in terms of how men relate to one another, how women relate. Women are nesters, one hears. I don’t know. [Laughter] I raised two daughters, and I know there are differences.
Mother Aemiliane: Yes, thank God, there are differences, and real differences. And in practical terms, that works out. For instance, that’s why you have to have an abbess. You don’t have nuns and just nuns and a spiritual father; you have an abbess.
Mr. Allen: So what role does she play different from the role of an abbot in a men’s monastery?
Mother Aemiliane: Not necessarily different from the role of an abbot, but women are protected from some temptations. Women have such an additional help in their spiritual life, because they cannot become priests, and so they don’t have the temptation of thinking about this, which—to be a monk, you cannot want to be a priest. You can’t want to be anything but a monk. So it’s very helpful for women, for nuns, that we can be at the essence of things and not be distracted by some hope or thought or attraction--
Mr. Allen: Of the power of authority…
Mother Aemiliane: Or something like this. It can be—women can be maybe a little bit more complicated as far as spiritual life or psychological things, and that’s not at all bad—I’m not saying something bad at all—but descriptive. Certainly they need each other. And I remember when I went to Greece, another reason to go an Orthodox country—I suddenly saw the very much more strictly defined male-female rules in the home. And that works. It just works.
Mr. Allen: You see that in many traditional countries and cultures.
Mother Aemiliane: And then in a monastery, you have unisex. You have the women doing the plumbing and doing the tractors and doing the mechanics…
Mr. Allen: And farming…
Mother Aemiliane: Farming, and everything without electricity. The woodworking, everything. And you have the men ironing and sewing and doing all the things that the women did. And so this, for me, this felt like such a revelation of health, of a healthy society. In a family, when you have children, when you have pregnancy, when you have very real, physical differences, it works to have these roles. But that’s not all there is to it, either. There’s a whole side of the Church which is the monastic side, and in which it’s completely… Everything is opened to and possible for everyone.
Mr. Allen: Right, not gender-oriented at all.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah. I remember one time the abbot was leaving on a journey, and one of the hieromonks said, “Well, did you iron those socks to get the last bit of moisture out after being washed?” and all the nuns were totally shamed. [Laughter]
Mr. Allen: Well, I must say that having you and Sister Ignatia with us, one of the things that has resonated with me—and I hope I don’t embarrass you by saying this—has been the love that you’ve shown. And it reminds me—which I’m thick-skulled, so I forget this—that at the end of the day, that’s what this whole journey is about, isn’t it? It’s about being able to love, both those around us, our family, and most of all God. So thank you for that.
Let me close with this one. You were sent forth, then, obviously from Greece or from traditional Orthodox country, to build a monastery here, to found one. Based on your experience in helping to build a monastery in Greece, what advice do you have for establishing and building up monastic female communities in the US or in other non-majority Orthodox countries?
Mother Aemiliane: Well, I don’t know about advising; I’m looking for advice and looking for help always and feedback, in that—my light, a very huge light in my own understanding of where we are right now is Fr. Sophrony, who said to me one day, in a completely—when I had no possibility of even formulating a question, he said to me: An Orthodox—the very same Orthodox monastery and tradition, which is organically related to its environment—an Orthodox monastery is organically related to its culture and its surrounding environment—when in a non-Orthodox country, will take very different forms and appearances in order to be the very same authentic itself tradition and monasticism.
Mr. Allen: Its essence and ethos will have to be worked out differently.
Mother Aemiliane: Yes, because if you have to… It’s the same as the issue of translating. And if we try to keep the same language only because we’re terrified because we would lose something in translation, then we’re denying Pentecost. The Holy Spirit couldn’t have come and given everyone the same language; he wasn’t capable of doing that.
Mr. Allen: I don’t want to put you on the spot or get political here at all. We have 15 different national jurisdictions in this country. What is that, in your opinion, taking the wisdom of Elder Sophrony—and I’ve also heard something similar from Fr. Alexander Schmemann of blessed memory—on the one side, that things must adapt to remain what they are in essence as opposed to some imposition of some external order which would be the allegory of just a word translation without translating its essential meaning—what does that mean in your view, if you’re able to, in terms of Orthodox ethos truly becoming American? And by that I don’t mean an Americanized version; I mean truly, deeply, rooted in this country? Because we have people that, as an example, as we’ve discussed this morning, earlier, off-air, believe that you’ve got to do liturgy in Greek or hymnody in Slavonic or whatever for it to be “authentic.”
Mother Aemiliane: It means listening. It means that we can’t take a copy from Greece or from somewhere else and just plunk it down and say that that is authentic. It’s so difficult because, by the very effort to remain faithful to the tradition, the tradition is distorted. The traditional also with jurisdictional unity or whatever, the tradition is you’re going to a new place, you translate the liturgy and the Scriptures, and then you’re into a new church and a local church. So we have to listen, and then we will know how to say what we know with the words and with the forms and with the colors and with the languages and with the arrangements, organizations, that will mean to the person who is our neighbor, what it is. And Fr. Sophrony agonized over the color schemes in the iconography.
Mr. Allen: Really?
Mother Aemiliane: Trying to explain, delving into: What do these colors mean to an Englishman? Sending the fathers to school; they did research in the King James Bible, on the Book of Common Prayer, to find: What are the words that an Englishman feels and can express his spirituality in? And then they made a translation of the Liturgy, which was the words that an Englishman… It meant what it is in his language. What incredible listening! What incredible pastoral love and sacrifice and just dying for one’s neighbor! And it’s not easy. It’s not easy to know what is baptizable, what is congruent, and what is, in fact, inimical and impossible to reconcile. Fr. Sophrony in England, for him, one example was tears. In England, it is just shameful to cry. You don’t do that. And he said--
Mr. Allen: Stiff upper lip and all.
Mother Aemiliane: Yeah, but it’s much more than we realize. There he drew the line. He said, “I’m sorry. You can not be a Christian and lead a spiritual life without crying. You’ll have to weep.” He said, “This is inimical. You cannot be a Englishman and be a Christian and not cry.” So this discretion is a very, very… Diakrisis. It’s a very rare virtue. Not everybody has this. It’s hard! So this is what we find ourselves in front of, this incredible challenge.
Mr. Allen: Mother Aemiliane, thank you so, so much for taking the time to come to southern California to be in studio and to speak with us today.
Mother Aemiliane: Thank you. We support you with all our hearts and with our prayers.