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A JOURNAL OF ORTHODOX FAITH AND CULTURE ROAD TO EMMAUS Help support Road to Emmaus Journal. The Road to Emmaus staff hopes that you find our journal inspiring and useful. While we offer our past articles on-line free of charge, we would warmly appreciate your help in covering the costs of producing this non-profit journal, so that we may continue to bring you quality articles on Orthodox Christianity, past and present, around the world. Thank you for your support. Please consider a donation to Road to Emmaus by visiting the Donate page on our website. COMING INTO ONE’S OWN AMONG STRANGERS AT HOME Living Orthodoxy in Today’s Germany Corinna (Cornelia) Delkeskamp-Hayes, raised mainline German Protestant, grew up and stud- ied mostly in Bonn. She taught as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University before she and her husband Michael started a family in Germany. Baptized in the Serbian Church on the day of St. Kornelius of Komel by Abbot Basilius of the Skete of St. Spyridon in Geilnau in 1998, Cornelia presently works as a private scholar, presenting papers in Europe, the US, and China. She also serves as editor of Christian Bioethics—Non-Ecumenical Studies in Medical Morality and on the editorial board of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. RTE: Cornelia, coming from a Lutheran background, how did you learn about Orthodoxy? CORNELIA: For me, ‘learning about’ was not the problem. My best friends, Su- san and Herman Engelhardt1, with whom I have been working professionally for many years, had become Orthodox eight years before and been talking into my deaf ears ever since. My own life, however, was deeply involved on all levels, from children’s service to county government, with the local Prot- 1 H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr. (baptized Herman), MD, PhD, Prof. Emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine, Prof. of Philosophy at Rice, both in Houston, Texas, is widely known for his many essays, books (among them “The Foundation of Christian Bioethics”), book series, and journals, covering a wide range of subjects, from philosophy to bioethics and Orthodox theology. Opposite: Regensburg Skyline. 3 Road to Emmaus Vol. XI, No. 2 (#41) estant community. Although I already found myself at the more ‘theological-substance seeking’ margin of that social group, I was convinced that no self-respect- ing German changes his religion. (To me, switching religions was like switching professions, husbands, lawyers, doctors—it sounded too “American”). I was more worried about upsetting my collected ancestors in their Protestant graves than my own salvation. To be sure, I had always realized my lack of close Corinna (Cornelia) contact with God. I fantasized about a treasure chest Delkeskamp-Hayes hidden somewhere, where the real Christianity could be found. I knew, one day I would want to find it and open the lid. I literally prayed: “Lord, come and reveal Yourself—but stay at arms’ length, so as not to unsettle my happy life.” Well, He responded. Major trouble in my family plunged me into survival-prayer. It was at this point that I had those odd experiences no one in my Christian environment could make sense of. At times, during the kind of desperate prayer that takes possession of one’s whole being, when my ego was utterly crushed with the evil of my self-idolization revealed in its destructive impact on others, when allowing myself to face my utter nothingness (and I have to add that such daring, as I later learned, was possible for me because I was so securely nested in my husband’s love, that is, I did not have to ‘stand on my own feet’ protecting myself, so I could permit my grief to cry out in full vig- or). At such times I felt that something at the bottom of the well held me, like a protecting hand, and I sensed the overwhelming power of a love that had been there, waiting for me as joy overflowing the very vessel of my suffering. I asked my friends about this, but nobody understood, or knew the expe- rience. Everyone tried to reassure me that God does not want us crushed, and that I was getting something wrong. I finally had my hormone status checked, almost convinced that some physiological midlife transformations were driving me crazy and should be fixed. But the hormones were fine. The other thing was even stranger: while I was thus exposed to something profoundly unsettling, I ran into a temptation which, although embarrass- ingly ridiculous in itself, required all my powers to struggle against. This was worse. How could I have such transforming encounters with what I feared and hoped was a real live Divine love (even if His way of affecting me, if it really was Him, didn’t fit any theological framework at my disposal), and yet 4 COMING INTO ONE’S OWN AMONG STRANGERS AT HOME at the same time be touched by what even I recognized as utterly evil? All of this alienated me even more from my Protestant home culture as well as from the Catholics with whom I was professionally engaged, or had become friends with, because our children went to a Franciscan school with a mon- astery attached. When the Engelhardts had a few hours of plane layover in Frankfurt some months later, I exasperatedly gave them the whole picture. They just looked at me in silence (a miracle in itself) and I sensed that they knew. Half a year later, they squeezed a three-day missionary invasion into their busy sched- ule and overcame my resistance by sheer loving determination. In the end they left me with an icon of Christ, a prayer book, and the order not to go anywhere, but wait for further orders. RTE: They didn’t want you to visit an Orthodox service on your own? CORNELIA: As good friends, they know my many weaknesses. They also know how difficult it is, especially for Protestants, to stomach what, from the outside, seems to be Orthodoxy’s exclusivity and rule-consciousness. Even worse, German Protestants tend to live in a haze of human dignity and self respect, and are quite likely to feel hurt, scandalized, and rejected when con- fronted by less-experienced priests from other cultures. So they wanted to be careful of my first encounter with Orthodoxy. While at a conference in Freiburg, they asked a young Orthodox man who “seemed right”, where he “went to fill his batteries”. His spiritual home was the Skete of St. Spyridon at Geilnau, with its Swiss abbot, Fr. Basilius, and a German monk, Fr. Paisius, and this is where they later sent me. So I had the great privilege of finding Orthodoxy among people who not only had roots in my own culture, but who patiently tolerated my intellectualism. (This young man, Johannes Sigel, still tells about the first Easter night we spent together at the Skete, and how horrified he was by my rambling away about Hegel after liturgy.) I first came to that holy place in spring of 1997, was baptized there in 1998, and have spent overnight visits there every month for confes- sion and nourishment ever since. RTE: Has your church life remained predominantly with German Orthodox communities? CORNELIA: Not at all. There are very few of those in Germany, and, since we live in a village east of Frankfurt, the closest two are in Mainz and Würz- 5 Road to Emmaus Vol. XI, No. 2 (#41) Hieromonk Paisius, Abbot Basilius, Monk Nil. St. Spyridon Skete, Geilnau, Germany. burg—too far away to attend regularly. Yet this turned out to be a blessing, because it gave me the opportunity to share church life with different ethnic communities. I first tried St. Nicholas Church in Frankfurt, a Russian Church Abroad par- ish. It was a community of political émigrés who had fled Communist Russia at various periods, with their children and grandchildren. That was quite a homogenous group, and with my Protestant over-sensitivity and ego-cen- trism, and having been used to very outgoing hospitality, I interpreted their spiritual absorption and concentration on one another as unwelcoming. So I tried the Greek Church, dedicated to the Prophet Elias. Here, dur- ing my very first liturgy, three little old black-clothed yayas, one after the other, got up from their wall seats and told me to sit down. As a monastery trained (arrogant) German, I stayed on my feet, of course. But their loving care touched me. During my years of growth into Orthodoxy, these Greeks 6 COMING INTO ONE’S OWN AMONG STRANGERS AT HOME have been my teachers. I have learned from the patience with which they en- dured my know-better Phariseeism, the kindness and superior humility with which they welcomed the zealot convert, and the ease with which very pious Greek “monastic-type” believers move among the more worldly faithful who make it to church just before communion! Eventually, my (then still) non-Orthodox husband was ready to accom- pany me to church, but because he finds the Greek chanting too foreign, we went back to the Russians. Their priest, Father Dimitri Ignatiev, who had been ill during my first visits, was an extremely welcoming host, interspers- ing German readings and ektenias in his Church Slavonic. Moreover, the Russians, once they recognized us as part of their community, turned out to be just as loving and hospitable as the Greeks. This parish has seen increas- ing numbers of immigrants from the East, many of whom had not previously led an Orthodox life, and yet seem almost genetically disposed to fit in.

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