My visit to St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Seminary in South Canaan, Pennsylvania, was a long time coming. For eighteen years I lived only thirty-five minutes from it, occasionally taking the road past its striking golden and brown domes that rose anachronistically from the dairy land of northeast Pennsylvania. I was raised Protestant and went to a Catholic school for college. My experience with Orthodox Christians was more sparse. I had a close friend in college who had helped lead the tradition’s student organization, but I could count the actual number of Orthodox services I had attended on one hand. So, while I had some free time, I thought it only fitting that I see what it was like on the ground for the Eastern Orthodox in my hometown, and the perfect opportunity presented itself: The seminary was hosting a barbeque event described as a night of appreciation for its supporters to “share all the good God is doing” at St. Tikhon’s.
St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Seminary was founded as a pastoral school in 1938. It derives its name from Tikhon of Zadonsk, an eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox bishop who was canonized by the church in 1861. The saint also inspired Dostoevsky’s Bishop Tikhon in Demons. It is one of only three seminaries in the United States operated by the Orthodox Church in America. It now runs both an academic press and bookstore dedicated to the promotion of Orthodox theology. The seminary has seen considerable growth in recent years. Last year, they ordained seventeen seminarians, the most ever.
The drive to the seminary takes you across the sloping foothills of the Poconos. I went on a cool late summer day. The leaves were beginning to turn yellow, and the sun’s warm rays covered the pastures and forests in a golden light. It’s times like these, immersed in nature, that one reflects on how hollow our digital worlds really are. I felt a bit of guilt thinking of the many hours of online scrolling I had let rob me of experiencing God’s creation as it was intended. Even before setting foot on its grounds, the seminary was changing me.
The seminary itself is connected to an Orthodox monastery also named after St. Tikhon. A paved road bisects the complex’s buildings. As I parked my car in the lot next to the road, I immediately encountered a young couple with about six children under the age of eight. Three of the children were being towed in a small red wagon by the father while he held a fourth. Two more were walking with the mother. The sight was a marked contrast to my year in Manhattan where it is not uncommon to approach a baby carriage carrying a dog, not a child. I quickly learned, as I approached the gymnasium where the barbeque was being held, that the couple was the norm, not the exception for the families of St. Tikhon’s. Many more young children milled about on the front lawn. I learned that last year’s barbeque had eighty children attend.
The gym was packed with over a hundred people, half of whom appeared to be converts to the faith. St. Tikhon’s is growing not simply due to births. In particular, I noticed that most of the young priests in attendance were married. I saw one in his late twenties who already had three kids. A priest told me that they often joke that there is something in the water at St. Tikhon’s that leads to the desire for many children. Certainly, the people who take their faith seriously have more to live for.
The night’s meal was a cornucopia of savory pulled pork and fresh collard greens. After grabbing some food, I took a seat and struck up a conversation with an older priest next to me. He was a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, and he had served on St. Tikhon’s board for the past ten years representing the alumni association. Despite living forty minutes north of New Haven in Connecticut, he made the trip down to Pennsylvania for board meetings several times a year. When I told him I had worked at First Things, he smiled. He was a fan of one of First Things's retreat lectures he had watched online.
Before the meal, everyone stood up for the blessing and faced a giant icon of Mary and Jesus that hung on one of the walls of the gymnasium. The priests that were scattered throughout the building took up a Greek chant. Their voices filled the room like thunder. I felt transported to the monasteries of Mt. Athos in Greece, essentially the Vatican of the Eastern Orthodox, which I had seen on a 60 Minutes documentary.
After the meal, a gentleman came to the microphone to discuss St. Nikolai of Zicha. Born Nikolaj Velimirović, St. Nikolai had been a Serbian Orthodox bishop who spent his final years teaching at St. Tikhon’s. He had suffered much for the faith, including being imprisoned at Dachau concentration camp. When he died, this gentleman’s mother kept his prayer beads. When she was having surgery with a very low chance of survival, the beads were placed on her in her hospital room; her condition immediately improved. The man was now returning the beads to the seminary for a shrine erected to St. Nikolai.
The crowd began to disperse after the speech. I was invited to tour the seminary officially in the future, an invitation that I gladly accepted. As I got in my car to leave, I couldn’t help smiling to myself. The future belongs to those who show up, and whatever the doctrinal differences between myself and the Orthodox, they were committed to being a part of the future.
Jacob Adams, a former First Things junior fellow, writes from Washington, D.C.
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Image by Ivan Veličković, from Wikimedia Commons, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
