How Does a Southern Baptist Boy Become an Orthodox Priest and an Army Chaplain?

2005-05-16T16:19:00.000-07:00

Below is an article I wrote for Alive In Christ, the quarterly diocese magazine of the Diocese of Eastern Pennsylvania of the Orthodox Church in America. I never intended to write an article, but when I was ordained to the priesthood October 16, 2004, the editor of the magazine asked me about my military service and how I came to be an Orthodox Christian and an Army Chaplain Candidate. The article is somewhat lengthy. You might want to read it in pieces or discard it alltogether if it gets boring. But anyway, its a really good picture of who I am and where I come from and my journey to the Orthodox Church and the Army Chaplains Corps.

My Road to the Priesthood of the Orthodox Church

Part I. My Road to Orthodoxy

I am the son of a Baptist minister, an American soldier, and an Orthodox Priest and as I place the cross of my priesthood around my neck before divine services, I continually get the feeling of inadequacy and disbelief that I could really be doing what I am doing. How does a pure, one hundred percent born and bred southern boy, reared on fishing, Tennessee football, momma’s cornbread and “Amazing Grace,” wind up standing in front of the Lord’s altar during the Thrice Holy Hymn, in the very lineage of the Apostles? It is out of this very feeling of inadequacy and disbelief that I return often in my mind to study the history of my becoming an Orthodox Priest.

I was the baby of the family and there were expectations. My older brothers were 6’2 and 6’4 and both played college basketball. I got cut from the 10^th grade team, much to their chagrin. So I stuck with football and baseball, but neither of those sports impressed my brothers or my dad, who was All Saint Louis County in 1947, very much. Like a lot of little brothers, I was picked on and teased quite a bit, but I learned to live with it and I knew I wanted to do things in my life that would impress my parents and my brothers, but most of all myself.

Growing up a White Anglo Saxon Protestant, I developed a deep sense of patriotism and I loved the stories of my uncle, an infantry soldier in WW II. I had another uncle who was a Marine in Vietnam, and yet another who was a Army soldier in Vietnam. They quickly became my heroes along with John Wayne in the movie, The Green Berets, and when my brother joined the Army in the late 1970s for a short stint, I thought he was the coolest thing ever. I knew that I was totally impressed with the military and I hoped that one day I would be good enough to join the ranks of those who defended our country and our way of life.

At the end of my junior year in High School, I applied through my congressman and received an alternate nomination to the U.S. Naval Academy where I wanted to pursue a commission in the Marine Corps. However, I never got the nomination, which wasn’t that important to me after my visit to The Citadel, in Charleston, SC. I read The Lords of Discipline, a book by Pat Conroy, a 1967 Citadel graduate, who wrote of his Citadel experience describing it in the second sentence of the book as, “. . . the history of my becoming a man.” After I visited the campus in the Spring of 1986, I realized that this was the place for the making of men, military leaders, and citizen soldiers. The Citadel promised to develop “The Whole Man” and would crown its achievement with a gold ring that would signify that this person was a Citadel man for life. Although terrified by the rigidity of the toughest fourth class system of all the military schools in the country (The Citadel and Virginia Military Institute were still the only all male military colleges in the country until 1993), I wanted to be a Citadel man and wear the ring, and then continue with a career as an Army officer, leading America’s finest. This was indeed the toughest military school in the nation, physically and academically, but this is exactly what I needed. At this time in my life, having been in church almost every Sunday since nine months before I was born, Sunday School, Church choir and youth group, I didn’t even know that such a thing as the Orthodox Church existed.

I remember the first day of “hell week” at The Citadel. All of us freshmen, known as “knobs” because of our freshly shaved heads, were gathered in Mark Clark Hall for a briefing. The officer stood in front of the 638 of us and told us to look to our left and right, that the man on our left wouldn’t make it through knob year and the man on our right wouldn’t make it to graduation. He was very close to being correct. Of the 638 freshmen that started the Citadel on August 18, 1986, only about a third of those graduated with me on May 16, 1990, and about 120 quit during the first few days of hell week. I tried myself to quit several times, but before I started, I begged my parents to not let me quit, no matter what I said later, and while my mom wavered on her promise to me from time to time, my dad held firm.

I graduated from The Citadel in May of 1990 at 21 years of age, however, it was a bad time to get an active duty commission in the Army. The Berlin Wall had just come down the previous fall, and the Graham-Rudmann Bill, the Senate budget crisis bill that cut government spending across the board, to include the military, had just gone into effect. In fact, I remember hearing rumors of contracted cadets losing their active duty contracts for showing up late to formation.

It was in the spring of my senior year at The Citadel when the Commandant of the Coast Guard made a visit. He was short on junior officers and was offering direct commissions to those Citadel graduates who met various qualifying standards. Although I had my heart set on being a combat leader, I needed a full time job. As these were the days of the hit television series, “Miami Vice” I knew that the Coast Guard was heavily involved in the federal counter narcotics mission and I thought that would be exciting, so I applied, interviewed, and was commissioned in the U.S. Coast Guard as an ensign in August, 1990. However, my excitement of working with Sonny and Crockett on “Miami Vice” came to a quick halt when the Coast Guard sent me to Galveston, Texas to be a Marine Environmental Protection officer, in charge of investigating oil pollutions. This, of course, was not what I had in mind when I joined and I was somewhat disappointed. However, after a year I was given the opportunity to command a law enforcement detachment. After graduating from the Coast Guard’s Maritime Law Enforcement School, I was put in charge of a small unit in Galveston. We deployed on Navy ships and conducted counter narcotics and intelligence work that the Navy could not perform because of their status under the Department of Defense, the Coast Guard being under the Department of Transportation at the time. My team and I also deployed to the later phase of Operation Desert Storm, to the North Red Sea to inspect vessels passing into the Gulf of Aqaba, to Aqaba, Jordan, ensuring they did not contain items prohibited by the United Nations embargo against Iraq. We did the same thing later in 1993 in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of the former Yugoslavia.

However, I had married my wife, Pamela, during my hitch in the Coast Guard, and my young bride and I were growing weary of long months apart, not to mention I was rather unfulfilled in the Coast Guard, so in August of 1993. I checked out the Army, and as Desert Storm was over, they really weren’t looking for officers from outside West Point and ROTC. I talked at length with my young bride and my parents and for lack of anything better to do, I decided to go to law school.

Having been raised in a family that were strong supporters of the Religious Right and Pat Robertson, my parents recommended I go to his Christian law school at Regent University, and it was there, ironically, that I found the Orthodox Church.

When Pamela and I arrived at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, we immediately found a small-scale example of the American Religious experience. There were Protestants of every denomination, a few Roman Catholics, and there was even one Greek Orthodox woman in my class, all gathered to be Christian attorneys after Pat Robertson’s vision of infiltrating our liberal society with Christian lawyers, judges, and politicians. However, It got interesting when some professors instituted daily student led devotions before the first class of the morning. This inevitably became an opportunity for each student to give an apology for his faith group. The most interesting to me were the charismatic groups, in no short supply at Regent, who would emphatically state that if you did not speak in tongues and had not received the Baptism of the Spirit, you probably weren’t saved. They would be countered by the Presbyterian’s Reformed theology on the next day who would claim that speaking in tongues was a gift that ceased and had nothing to do with salvation, and so on to the point that we ended up having discussions about theology more than the law. Intrigued by these discussions, I was nonetheless constantly questioning myself as to why there was only one infallible Scripture and so many different denominations, all claiming to be interpreting it correctly, yet none could agree on things as basic as salvation, baptism, communion, etc.

It is important for me to mention here that I was raised in a Godly home and my parents taught me that to live for Christ was the key to happiness. I had been reared with Bible-based Sunday School my entire life and I had maintained that even after I left home. I had a good knowledge of the Scriptures and general Southern Baptist doctrine, but I had never heard the things that I was hearing here in morning devotions at law school.

I had a good friend in law School named Tom Diehl. He was from Carlisle, PA and he and his wife Dana attended First Baptist Church in Norfolk with Pamela and I regularly. We were in a Sunday School class with others Regent law students, and we began to question the Baptist Church in particular and the entire Protestant experience in general. Tom had a friend from his undergrad days at Temple University that had become Orthodox. At this point I had been to one Orthodox liturgy with a Greek friend in the Coast Guard in Galveston. The entire service was in Greek and all I remember from the service is that there was a man, whom I presumed to be the priest, with a long beard walking around swinging this ornamented metal object from a gold chain around the church. I also remember that the people were very friendly to my friend Gus, but no one spoke to me. So I had no idea what the Orthodox Church had to offer to anyone.

Throughout this period of study and searching, however, I did become convinced of one thing I had never before considered: the last section of John’s Gospel, chapter 6, where Christ speaks directly to His disciples about the reality of eating His flesh and drinking His blood, became extremely profound to me, especially verse 53 in which Christ says, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.” Further He says in verse 55, “For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed.” This verse was very disturbing to me. I had asked Jesus in my heart as a child and I thought that’s all I had to do. I had never considered this before. Especially disturbing was that at the end of the chapter, John tells us that Christ’s message here was so disturbing that many of His disciples walked with Him no more. Well, I personally was determined that I was not going to walk with Him no more because of this and therefore I would have to make a major change in the way I viewed communion.

In my Evangelical Baptist rearing, I took communion often. Most Baptist churches offer it once per quarter, usually on Sunday evenings, and sometimes even on Sunday mornings. However, it means very little to the typical Baptist as compared to the Orthodox Christian. First of all, I had been taught from my youth that the grape juice and small unleavened, unsalted crackers that I was consuming were merely symbols, and symbols only, of the body and blood of Christ. I never questioned this growing up. Of course it was just a symbol. After all, if you put the grape juice under the microscope you won’t find any hemoglobin. The sole purpose of this event, as far as I was taught, was obedience to Christ when He said, “This do in remembrance of me.” This is exactly what every Baptist pastor would say at communion as He urged us to think about Christ’s suffering on the cross for us. Interestingly, we were taught to make sure we were right with God before we took this grape juice and crackers, following Paul’s admonition to the Corinthians. However, it was always reinforced that this was just a symbol, and not really Christ’s body and blood.

I had never before heard of anyone believing that communion was the actual, literal body and blood of our Lord. The very idea seemed ludicrous to me. So I began to ask around, and fortunately for me, I was at a university that had a divinity school and I worked out in the gym with one of the divinity school professors. He affirmed for me that indeed there were Christians who believed this and that the idea that communion was not the actual body and blood of Christ did not come about until after the Protestant Reformation. Being of a conservative, traditionalist nature, I found this disturbing. Here entire Christendom had been expounding one idea since the beginning of Christianity and some real smart people in the 16^th Century finally figured out that everyone had been doing it wrong the whole time! That idea didn’t sit too well with me so I decided to check out the father of all Protestants, Martin Luther. I went into the Divinity library, found a copy of his writings and in the table of contents of the book I was reading (I honestly cannot remember which it was) and found a short chapter on the Eucharist. I opened it up and read something along the lines of, “I will not believe that the wine and bread do not become the actual and literal body and blood of our Lord. Neither can I explain it. It is a holy mystery.” At that I set the book down, went home, and prayed, “Lord, I will not be one of those disciples that rejected you because they could not understand this mystery. From now on, wherever I am, I will take your communion as your actual body and blood.”

As it turned out, the very next Sunday at First Baptist Church in Norfolk, VA, Dr. Bob Record was going to have “The Lord’s Supper.” I became very excited about my new found faith and was determined to have a wonderful experience communing with God in this new way. For the first time in my life I was going to take these elements and actually believe that they were the body and blood of Christ. I remember sitting in the pew with Pamela, anxiously awaiting this service. The elements were passed out and Dr. Record stood in front of the enormous congregation, held up the wafer, and he said these words that I’ll never forget: “Then our Lord said, ‘This is just a symbol of my body . . .’” I was absolutely mortified. I was angered on one hand and horrified on the other that this man, in order to further a false teaching, was willing to go so far as to misquote Holy Scripture! I knew even as a Baptist that Christ never said anything about symbol at His last supper. I don’t remember exactly what my response was, but I do remember Pamela telling me to be quiet, that people were looking at me. It was at that moment that I knew that next Sunday, we were going to a church that celebrated communion every Sunday, where it was taught that the communion elements were that actual body and blood of Christ.

My cursory study of Church history led me to believe that if the crisis ever came, and I left the Protestant faith, I would be heading to either the Roman Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church and I began to lean heavily toward the Orthodox Church simply because of my historical understanding of the Great Schism of 1054. I did not believe that the Pope was right in unilaterally changing the Nicene Creed and then excommunicating the Orthodox for not accepting the change. So the next Saturday after my communal debacle at First Baptist Church in Norfolk, Pamela and I were standing tall at Great Vespers at Dormition Orthodox Church in Norfolk and looking around in ecclesiastical culture shock I remember thinking, “How am I ever going to get used to all of this?” I knew that there were going to be some hard pills to swallow, but I didn’t care anymore. We were heading down this road and we weren’t looking back.

After an 18 month catechumenate with my priest, Father Theodore Panchak (I managed to turn his hair completely white), Pamela and I were chrismated into the Orthodox Church in America during the feast of Dormition, 1995.

Part II. My Journey to the Priesthood

The following December I completed my goal of graduating from Law School. I received my Doctorate of Jurisprudence, and my faculty recommendation to the Board of Law Examiners of the State of Tennessee to take the Bar Examination. That was my next goal. After all, being a goal oriented person, I was always challenged with having something challenging to complete. I took the state bar review course and studied for six straight weeks, eight hours per day during the week while Pamela worked at the local bank in Lebanon, Tennessee. We had moved back to my hometown in middle Tennessee because my dad had lined me up with a job at Lee and Lee Attorneys, a small firm. At noon on Saturday I would close up the books and take the rest of the weekend off. At this point, Pamela was pregnant with our oldest child, Alexandra, I had a car payment and a mortgage to pay for, plus my student loans. I had a lot riding on that bar exam.

I took the Tennessee Bar Examination in February, 1996 and got my results in April. I had passed on my first try. I never called them to ask what I made out of fear that they would take a closer look and realize that I hadn’t actually passed! Nevertheless, I was licensed the same week and found myself in the courtroom representing a DUI client at the Lebanon Courthouse not even two weeks later.

There was really no defense to the case against this man so I talked to him and plead him guilty. I remember him handing me five one hundred dollar bills, stuffing them in my pocket and thinking, “Wow, that was the easiest five hundred bucks I ever made.” frowning at the fact that it all belonged to the firm. Just then, several of the more elderly Wilson County, Tennessee attorneys made their way to introduce themselves to the newest kid on the block. I ended up hanging out at the courtroom, particularly impressed with this one older gentleman who told me that he too had tried his first case in this courtroom, 50 years ago. I remember being very attentive as he told me how much trial experience he had in fifty years and thought for a moment that I wanted to be like this man. However, when I got back to the office I realized something. I began to look around at the books on my shelf, and think about the case I had just settled and kept repeating in my mind, “50 years . . . 50 years . . . 50 years . . .” It was then that the stark reality of the last three years of law school hit me head on. Being so engulfed in my goal of completing law school, and then passing the bar exam, I had never really considered whether I really wanted to be an attorney. It was like hard punch in the gut. The answer was no. I didn’t really want to be an attorney. I had never wanted to be an attorney. I wanted to be a leader of combat troops since I started The Citadel and now it seemed that was no longer in the realm of possibility. I was stuck in my job and this was it: a job I saw that was full of liars, politicians, backbiters, thieves, and just about every bad quality that I had grown to dislike since my Citadel education. I was instantly miserable. Sure there were good lawyers, but even the moral ones had to swim and feed with the sharks in a feeding pool of human beings.

It wasn’t long after that that I decided I could be happy if I ran my own business; that is if I was able to take that $500 and stick it in my own pocket instead of Mr. Lee’s. In conjunction with that move, I began to consider how I could get back to my dream of leading combat troops. I finally decided that maybe I could join the Army National Guard and that would at least give me one weekend a month and two weeks per year commanding troops. I talked it over with Pamela and she encouraged me to check it out. The Army National Guard would not allow me to transfer my Coast Guard Commission because it was under the Department of Transportation, so I agreed to go to Basic Training and do it the old fashioned way.

That fall the Army, because of my education, allowed me to enlist in the Tennessee Army National Guard as an OCS option enlistee. I completed the 9 week Army Basic Training class at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, graduating number one in my class, company honor grad. The following spring I started Officer Candidate School, an incredibly grueling 8 weeks at Fort Carson, Colorado and Fort Benning, Georgia. Officer Candidate School is especially challenging. Here they take a fully qualified Army soldier and give every effort to stressing the soldier out with non-stop gut wrenching physical training, no sleep, and very little food, plus throwing college level Army doctrine and small unit combat tactics classes, no contact with family or loved ones, and just when the Army can pound no more stress into the soldier and can not simulate a stronger combat environment, and just when the soldier thinks he can take no more, they put him in charge of his peers, who are images of the walking dead, to accomplish a seemingly impossible task. Many did not make it. Many a candidate was placed in charge of the platoon at the beginning of the day, and at the end of the day we saw them wearing civilian clothes carrying a duffle bag, jumping in a taxi on the way to the airport.

However, I was running on pure emotional octane the entire time. I had gone through too much to turn back now. I took on every task with the enthusiasm that this was my calling and that the Lord created me to do just what I was doing. I never flinched. I was so ecstatic just to be there and I knew the drills like the back of my hand from four years of training at the Citadel that it was more fun to watch others stressing out. Before I knew it, the summer was over and I was an OCS grad. Although the capstone field training exercise at Fort Benning left me with a severe case of swollen, pink, dripping poison ivy on both legs from ankles to mid thigh, I was never happier when my wife Pamela pinned me with the gold bars of a U.S. Army 2^nd Lieutenant. Master Sergeant Billy Lannom, the recruiter who had stood by me the entire time gave me my first salute as an Army officer and I returned a silver dollar to him, as is the tradition that has been handed down in the Army. He also gave me my first set of 2^nd Lieutenant bars and my Armor branch insignia.

I was commissioned as an Armor officer and after completing the Armor Officer Basic Course I was assigned as a tank platoon leader at Company M, 3^rd Squadron, 278^th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Tennessee Army National Guard, and I loved every minute of it.

I finally had my troops and my command and as I trained those fine men, and later moved on to lead a Cavalry Scout platoon and became a Cavalry Troop Executive Officer it began to occur to me that it wasn’t the combat training that was my favorite thing about the Army, it was that I was completely and totally in love with the American Soldier. In the Army we call typical soldiers, “Joe” after the fictitious hero G.I. Joe. These “Joes” after they realized that I genuinely cared about them would do anything for me. They demanded that I go to sleep on a night watch and they would take turns filling in for the “LT” so I could get some rest on a long field problem. I would say a prayer for them and their families before each deployment to annual training and I would personally thank each of them for protecting my family in a way that I could never do on my own. I became brothers with these men and as I would shake each man’s hand after a major training event, I would get chills up and down my spine and choke back tears as these young men, many of them only eighteen years old, would tell me that they would follow me to hell and back, and give their young lives for me if necessary.

I am still in love with the American soldier. I am convinced that there is no one finer in this country of ours. There is no one in our society who bears on his young back the weight of the responsibility of providing the blanket of freedom under which every one of us eats, sleeps, works, and worships in this great nation that provides us, the Orthodox minority, the freedom to worship in the way the Church directs us. We owe all that to God in heaven and the American Soldier on earth. The American soldier is 100% volunteer who gives up college, fraternities, video games, girls, and the pleasures of young life in exchange for a life of service, eating and sleeping in fragments, living in ditches of mud and water, experiencing miserable cold wet winters and scorching summers in all the nastiest places of the world, just because he loves his country. He does this, all the while realizing that most of his American citizenry will never fully appreciate what he goes through for them.

I understand that American soldier when I look into his eyes, and it wasn’t until Christmas day, 2002, outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan when an eighteen year old kid from the 82^nd Airborne, with whom members of our unit were on patrol, was shot through the head, protecting his friend, by a Taliban renegade, that I realized what these young men really do. Our creator says, “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friend.” The entire Gospel is a Gospel of love. The Apostle John tells us, in his first epistle, chapter four verse 7, “Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.” And what is the greatest love as the Creator of love defines it? It’s exactly what that young man did. He laid down his life for his friend whom he knew and those friends whom he doesn’t, you and I, his fellow Americans.

I was serving then as the S-5, Civil Affairs Officer for 1^st Battalion, 20^th Special Forces Group (Airborne) of the Alabama Army National Guard. We had been deployed to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. I felt I had maxed out my time with the 278^th Armored Cavalry Regiment (incidentally, at the writing of this article, the 278^th has been in Iraq for about a week in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom) and wanted to move into something more challenging. Special Forces was the route for me, something I had considered since commissioning, and there was a whole battalion in the Alabama Army National Guard. I transferred down there in August, 2001, just in time to see the twin towers in New York City go down from the office of the District Attorney General, 11^th Judicial District, Chattanooga, Tennessee where I had been working as a prosecutor for the last three years.

Before 9/11 my life was finally set. I was happy enjoying two successful careers, one as a prosecuting attorney, and the other as an officer on the fast track in the Army National Guard. I had left private practice, which I had hated from the beginning and been very satisfied prosecuting criminals in Chattanooga. I had made friends with lots of influential people and had semi-secret plans to run for judge in 2006. On the Army side of the house, I had finished the Armor Captains Career Course and Airborne School. I had done everything a lieutenant in my career path could do, and was busy preparing to make Captain and go to Special Forces training. Pamela and I were settled into a nice house we were renting and about to buy in the beautiful Chattanooga neighborhood of Signal Mountain, which sits literally on top of a 1200 foot mountain overlooking the Tennessee River Valley and the entire city of Chattanooga. Pamela was one semester away from finishing her Bachelors Degree in Nursing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. My oldest child was playing soccer and I was the coach. We had just started a new OCA mission in Chattanooga, and life was grand.

Just before we started the OCA mission (now St. Tikhon’s mission in Chattanooga), the Greek Church we attended there did not have a permanent priest. A retired priest from Nashville would drive, under orders from the Bishop in Detroit, the two hour drive to Chattanooga every Sunday and return home. I became good friends with Father Nicholas, as I had with every priest that I spent any time with at all. I had always had the utmost respect and admiration for the priesthood. They were the real soldiers of the Church who gave their lives for their sheep. I had always had an interest in the priesthood, but had been told that lawyers and soldiers can’t be priests, and for good reason, I believed. I always thought, “Maybe someday when I retire, if the Lord leads, I’ll attend seminary and see where it goes from there.” I recall sitting down with the very charming and wise, but exhausted Father Nicholas, whom me and my wife adored when he said to me, “You know, this parish needs a full time priest, somebody who has a love for the Church and the Gospel, somebody like you, George. You know, you could attend some late vocations work and get ordained and take over here. You’d do really well.” Of course, that was the funniest thing Pamela and I had heard in a long time and we all had a good laugh. I politely told Father Nicholas that I was flattered at his compliment, but my life was well set now. I had a promising and moving career as an Assistant District Attorney in Chattanooga, and I was a National Guard Officer. I was planning on running for judge, and who knows, maybe for something bigger one day. The thought was nice. It was something I would enjoy doing maybe someday after I retire, but in order for me to become a priest, life as I knew it would have to come to a complete stop. Besides, everyone who knows me, especially my wife, could tell you that I am most certainly not priest material. I’m obnoxious, impatient, demanding, perfectionist, and a type A personality, a perfect fit for the careers that I was enjoying. Father Nicholas smiled politely and with a twinkle in his old eyes he winked a Pamela and said, “The Lord’s will be done George.” I remember driving home that night thinking about the absolute blessing of serving at the Lord’s holy altar as a priest of His Church and then explaining to Pamela how I had other plans, we were settled and had roots down in another career, and how life as we knew it would have to stop for that to happen.

However, on September 11, 2001, that’s exactly what happened. As I watched the twin towers go down in a gigantic cloud of dust and debris that covered the grandest city in the United States, I knew that nothing was going to stay the same. I knew that somehow, sometime, the 20^th Special Forces Group was going to be involved and it was scarcely a few weeks after that when we got the word. 3^rd battalion was mobilizing immediately for a period of 6 months, followed by a battalion from the 19^th Special Forces Group, followed by us. Our mobilization period on active duty would be for one year. Like a good employee I notified by boss immediately and he was not pleased. He couldn’t believe that I would be gone for an entire year. Who would he find to replace me for an entire year? I told him the mobilization was a good six months away, but there would be extended drills, schools, and periods of training in between. A few weeks later, he called me into the office and asked me to resign telling me that my job performance had weakened, and that I wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, etc. I knew that I was about to become a victim of a USERRA violation.[1] The fact was, I could refuse to resign and he couldn’t fire me. He was in a difficult position as a public figure and would never do that. However, he started putting pressure on me to resign almost weekly, through his executive assistant, who was extremely politically motivated. I began to realize that I could probably hang on to the job until I left, and force him to rehire me when I cam back, but eventually, he was going to get rid of me. It had become a power struggle the moment I refused to resign. I had no future there.

My plans had come to a screeching halt. What was I going to do when I returned? I would have to go back into private practice, one thing that I swore to myself, and Pamela, after nearly starving us to death, that I would never do again. I remember praying, and begging God for an answer. We were now at our new mission, St. Tikhon’s in Chattanooga, and just when things were looking so promising, this all happens. I was about to leave my wife and children for a full year, do service in the combat zone with a Special Forces unit, and come back jobless, having to start everything over again.

I didn’t bother looking for another job. “Hey, will you hire me? I’m about to go fight the Taliban and I won’t be back for a year, if ever, but I need some security for myself and my family when I get back. So will you hire me now?” That sounded incredibly stupid.

About that time I received orders from my battalion commander to report to the Civil Affairs Officer Advanced Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The good news is that I would be promoted to Captain upon completion and moved onto the commander’s staff as the Civil Affairs Officer. I was just happy to get away from the D.A.’s office and that constant harassment for a couple weeks.

I arrived at Fort Bragg and went through my own ritual of familiarizing myself with the post. I put on my running shorts and shoes and ran down Ardennes Ave., the stretch of road that cuts right through the heart of Fort Bragg, the very road on which the famed heroes of the 82^nd Airborne Division have conducted their physical training for the last decades, whose barracks are on either side of the road for miles. As I ran past the Division Chapel I took a close look to see if there were any Orthodox services, (usually there are not because of the extreme shortage of Orthodox priests in the Army). “Like there’s going to be an Orthodox priest at the 82^nd Airborne, jumping out of Airplanes and hanging around with combat infantry soldiers. Yeah, right!” I said to myself as I approached the Chapel. However, to my extreme delight, there were Orthodox services scheduled for 0900 in the morning! I remember thinking to myself how life couldn’t get much better than this. Here I was away from that dreadful D.A.’s office, doing PT (physical training) at Fort Bragg, running down the famed Ardennes through the heart of 82^nd Airborne country, and I was even going to get to go to liturgy in the morning! I got back from my run and called Pamela and excitedly told her the good news.

The next morning I got dressed, said my pre communion prayers and headed off to liturgy, “Divine Liturgy, right here on Ardennes, in the land of the 82^nd Airborne at Fort Bragg!” I couldn’t believe it. I walked in the door, early. I was the first one there and I found the priest already in his vestments and received his blessing. His name was Father Eugene Lahue and he was an OCA priest, a graduate of St. Tikhon’s in Pennsylvania. He was unlike any priest I had ever seen. He was about my age and I had never known a priest my age. He was down to earth and he spoke Army. We talked about the Joes and about soldiering. He was assigned to the support battalion at the 82^nd Airborne Division and had logged more than 70 jumps with them. I chuckled to myself about the concept of an airborne priest, flying out of the C-130 at 130 miles per hour, feet and knees together, hands on his reserve chute with his cassock, pectoral cross and riassa flapping in the 130 mph wind, although I knew he jumped in regular combat gear like everyone else.

For the next two weeks I spent every spare moment with Father Eugene. I couldn’t get enough of him. I watched him in his ministry to the soldiers and was totally impressed by this down-to-earth soldier/priest. I had found a new hero. When I went to confession with him he met me at the chapel. We were both wearing our Army uniform of the day. He slipped that stole right over the top of that Battle Dress Uniform and as my head was bowed covered by the stole I stared at his combat jump boots and smiled, thinking to myself, “Any man wearing combat boots underneath his stole can hear my confession any day.”

I had talked this over with my wife. Part of the reason I didn’t want to be a priest was that every priest and priest family we had known was, . . . well, . . .weird. It was a good weird Pamela and I were quick to add, but nonetheless a weird that we, most certainly, were not, nor ever could be. They were always wearing those cassocks, which were essentially a black dress, and we wanted our priests to wear the cassock, but it was still a black dress. The typical priest sort of came across wimpy to me. I loved them, but they just typically weren’t the manly men that I was used to hanging around.

But Father Eugene was every inch the manly man. He was a prior 11B Infantryman when he was enlisted. After Airborne school I had secret fears about jumping and I tried to explain this to my other priests, but they never really got the picture. Father Eugene sure got the picture and told me to quit crying and do my job, which is exactly what I needed to hear. He was assigned to the most famous infantry division in the U.S. Army, perhaps in the world. He was totally down to earth and not weird at all. I met his wife and kids, and they were just like my wife and kids. Father Eugene it seemed, unlike any other priest I had met before, was just like me.

The next thing I knew, I was finished with the Civil Affairs course and was back in Chattanooga, sitting in General Sessions Court Division V once again trying to figure out what I was going to do after the coming deployment. We were on a break and I was thinking about an email I had received from a National Guard friend of mine who had told me he had just become Orthodox and was hoping to go to seminary and possibly become an Army chaplain. “That would be nice.” I said to myself as I read the email months before. We had a wireless internet connection in the courtroom to check criminal records and I found myself surfing the net to the Army Chaplains Homepage, and it was just then that I figured out what the Lord had been gently telling me for the past two weeks. I began to see Father Eugene as doing what I wanted to do, what I was meant to do, what I was being called to do, and it all became clear in an instant. The Lord was kicking me out of the D.A.’s Office, out of the city of Chattanooga, and calling me to serve Him, just like Father Eugene, in the Army. After all, who loved the Army and soldiering more than me? Who loved the Church more than me? This was the perfect way to put them both together. Either way, I wasn’t going to be able to stay at the D.A.’s Office, and I sure wasn’t going back to private practice! This was the answer. It was clear.

Immediately, however, the demon of doubt, assigned to talk me out of being a priest, began to work, and he did his job well. I talked to my wife and for the next few months and into the next two years that demon worked overtime on both of us and the excuses flowed effortlessly. “Who am I kidding?” I asked myself as I pictured the typical priest and family in my mind. “There is no way I can pull this off. I’m not like that. We are not like that. Our kids are not like that. I’m impatient, bold, insensitive, and I have a flaming type A personality.” Then would come round two of the attack: “I have a career. We have plans. We have roots. I’m coaching my child’s soccer team. How will we ever financially afford living on Pamela’s paycheck only? How will we ever afford to move all of our things all the way up north to Pennsylvania?” That demon of doubt never rested and neither did Pamela and I while thinking seriously about this.

But there were also many encouraging words from the Lord. First of all the children loved the idea of daddy being a priest. Father Eugene was very encouraging as well as several of my former priests who told me that God uses all types of personalities and people and if it is His will that I attend seminary and become a chaplain, then He will take care of all those financial details.

I remember reading about Abraham, living with his family in total prosperity in Ur. He was certainly established in life, with land, cattle, and many servants, living in the land of his father. It was truly home. Yes, Abraham was living the good life, the life which he had earned since his youth and everything was going well for him until the Lord told him in Genesis12:1 to pack his family and belongings and go “. . . to a place that I will show you.” The Lord didn’t even tell Abraham where he was going, when he would get there, or anything else about the plan. He basically just said to Abraham, “Start walking and I’ll tell you when you get there.” And what did Abraham do? He did just that.

After reading that passage and thinking on it for a while, I figured that if Abraham could take that step of faith then I could too. Pamela and I agreed that we would pursue this improbable course of action until the road ran out and we received confirmation from the Lord that this was something He didn’t want us to do, and there were plenty of ways He could do that. All we did was say, yes. The Lord would have to work out all the details of work for Pamela (who had not even graduated from nursing school), moving expenses, and all the other little details, any of which could be show stoppers.

I applied to St. Tikhon’s Seminary after hearing such wonderful stories about it from Father Eugene, and prepared to depart with 1^st Battalion, 20^th Special Forces Group for Afghanistan, leaving these details up to the Lord. I was fortunate enough at the beginning of the deployment to remain as rear detachment commander but finally in December, just one week before Pamela’s graduation from UT Chattanooga, my number was called. I said goodbye to Pamela and the kids at the Atlanta Airport and 24 hours later I was in another world.

I had been in many third world countries before, but I remember thinking to myself that Afghanistan had to be a fourth world country. The Air Force C-17 landed us at Kandahar Air Base in mid December, 2002, in the middle of the Operation Enduring Freedom war zone. We arrived in the middle of the night and received a quick briefing on where the mines were around the runway and how to avoid them. When the sun came up the next morning, I new I wasn’t in Tennessee anymore. Everything was brown, from the powdery dust we walked on to the jagged peaks around us. The land was truly dead. I could feel an eerie, ominous presence all around. This was an un-Christian, un-Godly, immoral land. This was a land where you could be shot, lying in a pool of your own blood, and the people would just walk on by. I had never felt so far from home. In the plywood air terminal, just past the sign that said, “Clear All Weapons Before Entering Terminal,” was a small board that read, “Schedule Of Religious Services.” It was Saturday and I looked closely and sure enough there was an Orthodox service! My heart jumped! It was a 0900 in the Romanian Sector of the base. The next morning I attended liturgy, right in the heart of Muslim controlled Afghanistan, with a group of Romanian infantrymen, and the Lord spoke confirmation in my heart. As a matter of fact, the priest’s name was Father George.

I spent the months in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan in prayer and preparation to attend seminary. I even found spare time to finish my first seminary class via internet extension. I built a small icon corner in my section of the tent in which I lived and spoke to my family on the telephone as often as I could.

While I was gone, those little details began to disappear. First of all, Pamela graduated from UT Chattanooga and passed her nursing licensing exam. She also made contact with Wayne Memorial Hospital in Honesdale, PA and by the time I returned home, they had given her a job and agreed to pay for our moving expenses as a relocation allowance in return for Pamela’s employment for three years! What a confirmation that was!

With all doubts now removed, we headed up to Pennsylvania in the summer of 2003 and I began classes that fall. Since then, I have struggled with new doubts and frustrations, but the Lord has been faithful, holding my hand the entire way and gently assuring me as the gentle Shepherd that He is.

In close proximity to my ordination, I was sworn in as a chaplain candidate and assigned to 1^st Battalion, 109^th Infantry, Pennsylvania Army National Guard, and I served my first liturgy in the computer lab of the Scranton Armory, with this my new flock, my new Joes. I thanked God for His faithfulness in my life, and during the liturgy, as I elevated the gifts with my combat boots underneath my vestments, that feeling of inadequacy and disbelief seemed for a brief moment to become one of peace, wonder and thanksgiving, that our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ had chosen me to minister, not only to the Orthodox faithful at large, but to best of the best in our country, the American Soldier.

Priest George Hill

[1] USERRA is the Uniform Servicemembers Employment and Reemployment Rights Act. It is a Federal Law that prohibits an employer from firing an employee who is about to be deployed for military duty or to not hire such an employee back at the end of that duty. However good the law sounds, it is very hard to enforce and has very little teeth.

See the Orthodox Church in America's website at http://www.oca.org.

Army Priest

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