The Blog of Ruth-Entry #1
January 17, 2011
Introduction
The following is the first entry of a blog written by Ruth. Her name has been changed in order to protect her identity. The policy of anonymity maintained by the Editors of this website is imperative in order to prevent abusive verbal attacks toward her which we have witnessed against others who have spoken out against Ephraimite monasteries. His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios is aware of her identity.
The Blog of Ruth is written by a woman who contacted the editors at the gotruthreform website desperately seeking help to reunite with her husband who was living at an Ephraimite monastery. She has documented her and her family’s ordeal in a series of letters and journal entries. This is a recorded history of her and husband’s journey in joining an Ephraimite monastery. This entry and subsequent entries on Ruth’s Blog will describe how the nuns at an Ephraimite Monastery came between the sacramental union of a husband and wife. We will focus on the facts of how an innocent, trusting and pious couple became victims of the blind obedience demanded by these monasteries. She wrote the following letter to Archbishop Demetrios. This letter was hand delivered to the Archbishop personally. It is divided into two parts. Part II will appear next week. The author’s altruistic intent in making these postings, which include some very painful personal information, is to educate others to prevent them from experiencing the intense pain and suffering she has endured. We applaud her courage and will protect her anonymity while shining the full light on her and her husband’s experience with Ephraimite monasteries.
Part I of Ruth’s Letter to the Archbishop:
September 22, 20__
To His Eminence, Archbishop Demetrios
Dear Your Eminence,
Even though the following letter is by necessity lengthy, I ask you to read it attentively as I am appealing to you for help in a very serious matter which concerns not only my husband and myself personally, but a cancer which is spreading wildly and causing terrible division in the Greek Orthodox Church in North America, as evidenced by a plethora of complaints I understand from credible sources are posted at various sites on the Internet.
Before describing the immediate problem, I need to lay a little groundwork. My husband and I have been interested in the monastic life for around 45 years, but having found no trusted spiritual father or no real trusted monastic connection, we married and raised a family. Seven years ago, a friend, who was actually living on the premises of the monastery at the time, introduced us to St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery in Florence, AZ. We became convinced that the leader of the monastery, Fr. Ephraim, was an elder of the caliber that one only reads about out of the distant past. We believed him to be inspired, a miracle worker, a prophet, based on hearsay from the many pilgrims that stream in and out of St. Anthony’s.
My first trip to St. Anthony’s, it happened I was immediately ushered to the waiting area to see Fr. Ephraim, who in turn ushered me to the room where Fr. Paisios, the abbot, counsels with non-Greek-speaking pilgrims. I spent on that visit a total of ten minutes with Fr. Paisios. The purpose of my visit was to get advice concerning our son. He informed me that my husband and I were called to the monastic life, I have no idea why. I strenuously objected on the grounds that our children needed us. He told me that we could do our children more good praying for them in the monastery than we could helping them in the world, and that God would take care of everything we left behind. This, I was informed, would be the sure means of their salvation.
The first time I received communion from Fr. Ephraim at the St Panteleimon Church where he at that time would often serve only women pilgrims, as I was receiving communion, he said out loud, slowly and distinctly, Ger-ron-dis-sa. I figured out what that word meant and was filled with confusion and misapprehension.
Fr. Ephraim’s secretary, also named Ephraim (Papa Ephraim as he is called), whom I later discovered is barely visible at the monastery except at trapeza, would greet me most every time I visited St. Anthony’s, which was a total of perhaps ten times. He would ask me to edit his writings about Byzantine chant, or to wrap a huge icon as a gift for someone, or write a testimony to publish on one of his Internet sites. Once he said to me, “One day, people like you and I will write Geronda’s biography.” I also once received a letter from Fr. Paisios, who is well known to never write letters to anyone. He sent it from Mt. Athos. He told me, “You are called to be a monastic. Don’t make any other plans with your life.”
In retrospect I can see all of the above as obvious appeals to vanity and pride, of which I most certainly possess my fair share. Along with feeling as though in some way that I could not fathom, I must have an unusual calling, I was perplexed and fearful of some enormous and mysterious responsibility for which I was undoubtedly unprepared. Most of all, I wanted to follow the Gospel. I knew I did not know or love God as I wanted to, but I wanted with all my heart to let God know that I wanted Him to be first in my life. “Whoever loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me,” and other similar exhortations were ever in my mind. I wanted to lay down my whole life for Jesus Christ, and to have Him in my heart.
I had been led to believe that it was spiritually correct for spouses not only to live celibately, but to live in separate monasteries. At no time did I believe that there would ever be a breach in our caring for one another or in our mutual commitment to the very same thing, namely, to do this for the sake of saving our wayward children. We were to be absolutely one in our purpose, as we had always been, but carrying out our tasks in separate places. I was later to understand that marriage, being a Sacrament created and blessed by God, should not unlawfully be torn asunder, which we unfortunately agreed to using our own misguided light of understanding. By the time I realized this, it was too late.
In 2007, after four years of preparation, I left for a women’s monastery. My husband stayed behind to finish up business, sell the house and help take care of our daughter and her child. My husband’s sister had moved in and was filling in for me. It seemed like all the bases were covered.
At the monastery, the abbess seemed cordial. We had many good talks. She was the seemingly compassionate person that most people know. After I had been there for ten weeks, my daughter was so unhappy she was hinting at suicide. Fr. Ephraim quickly sent me home. I had the distinct impression at the time that it was not that they cared about my daughter, but rather that they didn’t want a suicide associated with the monastery. I wept for days because I did not want to leave the monastery.
Three years later, after we had sold our home and property, distributed everything we owned to our children, setting them each up with households of their own, and also after we had given our business over to our son, and provided other resources for our daughter, we left for the women’s monastery, as an interim step toward our final goal. By now, our daughter was married with three young children, and her new mother-in-law seemed tremendously supportive. God, it seemed, was at last answering all our prayers!
We moved close to the women’s monastery, to a beautiful setting, a lovely house, and we were lavished with everything under the sun that anyone could ever want or need. We were constantly being given gifts, gourmet meals, clothes, pastries, a continuous stream of presents. We spent most of our time working at the main monastery or attending services. We drove back and forth in the middle of the night for liturgies. We kept vigil. We had freedom to travel and to see our grandchildren.
I noticed the abbess would frequently turn on excessive charm toward my husband– not unnoticed by the sisters who would ask me if I were jealous. In their innocence, they would make comments like, “They love each other so much.” She often flattered him by indications that he was a holy person, a wonderful person, so valuable to the monastery, how the sisters loved him, etc. He had private conversations with her which he never told me about, but I could see that his mind was often somewhere else. A “holy and dispassionate” courtship was unfolding right in front of my eyes, but I was too trusting to perceive it. I saw that he was being irresistibly drawn to her – her charisma and charm are the hallmarks of her personality. He said to me, “You just don’t know how I feel when I am around her.” Finally, when he told her he wanted more to remain at her monastery than to go to St. Anthony’s, she arranged for him to go to a nearby men’s monastery instead, and told him that she would ask a blessing for him to return to her monastery and serve as the priest there. He would be at a closer brother monastery; we would all be in the family. They could see each other on occasion. She had told him, “You’re in our club.”
I was pretty stoic about all this. I was fully convinced that she loved us somehow equally. She seemed to have such a wonderful way of making miracles happen. The day my husband left for the men’s monastery, one of the sisters euphemistically informed me that he and the Gerondissa had tears in their eyes as they parted, a revelation which suddenly stabbed deeply into my heart.
After he left, I went directly to the abbess and asked her what I should do next. She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Do whatever you want to do.” I had thought she would welcome me to move into my keli in the monastery, but she just walked off. Later, I asked her the same question, and she gave me the same answer, very coldly. So I moved in, but everything felt inexplicably strange and unwelcoming. I couldn’t imagine what was wrong or what was going on. Then, unlike the first time I was living there, she never brought me into the front area in church where the nuns stand for services, but instead for several weeks left me out in the church with the pilgrims. Neither did she give me a key to the building, so that every time I needed to get in, I had to tag along with someone, wait for someone to come, or pound on the kitchen window. I felt like an outcast, a stranger, an unwelcome guest. In no way was I made to feel welcome, or drawn into the cenobium.
The abbess remained perfectly cold and distant throughout my entire time there. We had none of the warm conversations characteristic of the other time I lived at the monastery. Her exchanges with me were laced with disapproval, and yes, what felt to me like hatred. She at times would humiliate me in front of the others, which I reasoned was standard monastic practice. I didn’t expect to be treated with kid gloves. Neither, however, did I expect that my experience this time would be the complete opposite of what it had been the first time I went there to live. Clearly, I was being treated differently from the other novices.
One day out of the blue she accused me of being a bad wife, of being a manipulator and a controller, while my husband, she said, was such a “mild” man. The particulars she mentioned were completely erroneous. For example, she said in the way of an accusation, that I made all the decisions in our marriage. I explained to her that nothing could be further from the truth. We had an agreement that I would manage the house and the bookkeeping, he would manage our business, the yard, the vehicles, and the parish, we both would in agreement handle the children, etc. It became clear to me that she was guessing so that she could enjoy talking about him and learn more about him. In any case, bringing up our marriage was completely out of context and dissociated from the reasons I had asked to speak with her.
Then after one month, [knowing full well that I had spent seven long years diligently digging my husband and myself out of the world, helping our children to stabilize (I thought), and preparing for this new life with my whole heart] she informed me without warning that I was too willful and would probably not make it there. At that, she walked out of the room with no further explanation, left the monastery for ten days, and drove to Arizona. I was completely devastated. My whole world collapsed. I was in a state of utter crisis with no one to talk to and no one to help me. The abbess would call the monastery to talk with the sisters each day, but she would not speak to me when I requested to talk with her. One of the sisters asked her to call me but she never called. When she returned, she ignored me completely, and then accused me of not speaking to her for “three whole days”. One reads stories of incredibly wayward monks or nuns that spend years learning obedience, but after one month, with no provocation whatever, she had announced that I was unfit for the task.
One Saturday, a doctor came to give the sisters B12 shots. He wanted to examine me because of pain I had in my right side. A sister went to request this, but the sister returned to say that the abbess said no. Later, just after the doctor left, she sent word that I could be examined. When I found her to say that the doctor had left, she said that she had never told anyone I couldn’t be examined. These are the kinds of convoluted exchanges at which she was a master.
Frequently she would twist something I would tell her into something else entirely, or she would ascribe to me motives that were completely inexplicable to me. In this letter I am only giving a few examples of the kinds of things that went on.
At the monastery, absolutely everything is to be known by her and controlled by her. Where you are, what you are doing, how you are doing it, who you are talking to, what you are saying, how you are feeling, how much and what you eat, nothing escaped her notice and her control. Censorship was so absolute that even reading a label was forbidden. Part of obedience was full disclosure, which included tattling on everyone around you. The idea of covering your brother’s sin, or even your brother’s idle comment, was never mentioned.
It slowly dawned on me that I was deliberately, imperceptibly, secretly being forced to leave the monastery of my own accord, although there was never an instance when I was in any way disobedient or willful or unwilling to do what I was told. Whereas when I was living at the monastery the first time, I was given a job that was within the range of my strength, this time, I was placed where I could barely make it, with a lot of standing and heavy lifting. I could and did do the work well, but with the anxiety and fear I was experiencing, and the icy coldness and disdain of the abbess, I felt anything but protected. Whereas I had believed I would be warmly sheltered in the heart of a wonderful new mother, my angel in the flesh, I found myself constantly bracing for a capriciousness I had never before experienced in another person. It was like living in a nightmare in which anything at all might happen without notice.
I worked under a sister who showed every indication of being what we used to call manic-depressive. This sister has had numerous episodes, (sometimes several in one day, as she herself told me,) wherein she has completely broken down and been unable to function, one of which she had while I was working under her. At these times, the sisters knew to give her a wide berth. She had a very sharp tongue and I have seen her argue with the abbess openly. At times she was on a happy high; other times, she was in dark and morose places. The abbess told me to ignore her when she was like that. Here is someone I witnessed openly challenging the abbess, and yet she was entirely suitable to be a nun. She was quite vocal around me and expressed anger when she was required to do something she didn’t want to do. All in all, I liked this warm-hearted sister anyway and admired her tenacity.
I ask you to forgive the tedium of relating these painful experiences which I had all but put behind me, but I believe that only with specific instances can the kind of mental and emotional abuse this abbess delivered be unveiled.
One red-flag day, the abbess said to me that I would never give up my will. She said, “If I tell one of the younger sisters that black is white, she will repeat it back to me, and she will believe it. If I tell you that black is white, you might repeat it back to me, but you won’t believe it. You have had too much experience in the world.” I was astounded at this revelation that I was supposed to unquestioningly believe a blatant lie, and an absurd one at that. From that point on, I could not help observing more and more manipulative devices used to control the minds of everyone around me. Even so, these realizations occurred to me in vague, disconnected doses, and I was only slowly to connect the dots and process them several weeks after I returned home.
During the four months that these and numerous other things were taking place, I began feeling intense dread, and later gripping fear, of getting up in the morning. Each day I would step out into the bright sunlight on that beautiful monastery campus, and would double over panting from anxiety. (At that time I did not know that I was having anxiety attacks as I had never experienced anything resembling that before). I never knew when the next bomb would be dropped, or what direction it might come from. The abbess said to me, “You are so…..delicate,” an allegation that under other circumstances would have been entirely amusing.
One day, one of the senior sisters whom I had known from the beginning (that is about 6 years) and whom I knew loved me and always enjoyed my company, came up and told me that she didn’t want to interpret the noon reading in trapeza for me anymore, it was just too much. Always before, she had looked for opportunities to talk to me, to the point of trumping up questions about the orchard, or chit-chatting about Byzantine chant, just to share time together. I saw by the shame all over her face and how she dropped her head and eyes and shoulders that she was ordered to do that. After that she couldn’t look me in the eye again.
Near the end, the abbess told me to go home and live a life of seclusion like a nun, keeping the prayer rule at home. She said that near the end of my life (?) I could return and be tonsured into the Great Schema. (“You need me to sponsor you,” she said in a warning tone.) She said that was often the way Fr. Ephraim handled older women, and that older women almost always went home because of their children, while older men would stay in the monasteries.
(I would like to point out here that I in no way returned home because of my children or grandchildren. I returned home because, first, I was treated with a bizarre and abnormal kind of cruelty which produced an anxiety I had never known in my life. Second, I began seeing too many discrepancies between life at this monastery, my experience at other non-Ephraim monasteries {which included a 20-year close friendship with a different abbess}, and my voluminous readings about monastic life including many Athonite recountings. More importantly, trust had been broken, and once that happens with a looming authority figure, it’s all over, no matter what you may have had your heart set on. So despite my sincere willingness to embrace the monastic life, I finally, in the end, had to admit to myself that it grated against everything I had ever thought of as Christian to give my life over to a person who had given herself the right to manipulate her spiritual children with lies.)
I asked who would advise me to keep me from falling into delusion. She snapped back, “You know the prayer rule, just do it.” I asked her if it was somehow God’s will that I leave. She said, and these are her exact words, “Why bring God into this? You came here, you tried it, you couldn’t do it, and now you’re leaving.”
The evening before I left, I told her within fifteen minutes of my phone call with my daughter that I would be leaving the next day. Later she railed at me saying, “And I had to learn that you were leaving from the fathers at the men’s Monastery. You didn’t even tell me!” This was an out and out lie, but was by no means the only time she just simply fabricated things out of the blue.
On the actual day that I left, she stuck by me like glue. She made sure no sister approached me or even understood that I was leaving. She interrogated me on who exactly I had told that I was leaving, saying I had no blessing to do that. She then threw her arms around me and holding my hand tightly promised to pray for me. She said that God had a much better plan for me. I was weeping uncontrollably, wailing out, “I’m grieving, I’m grieving!!! I will try to take my husband out of my heart!!” This was because I was going through all the stages of grief as though my husband had died.
The abbess showed no signs of caring that I was distraught, but rather said to me, “You are still fighting. Are you going to reject God’s humbling you?” I replied, “I thought you said this was not God’s will.” Then she began to stammer and mumble unintelligibly. Her parting shots were, “Go home and find your peace,” and “Don’t be bitter. It will disrupt your prayer life.”
And so ended nearly four months of torment, inner pain beyond anything I have ever known, a living hell. To top it all off, during the entire time, it was as though God, the Theotokos, all the saints, the angels, everyone who had always always been there for me, had entirely abandoned me. My prayers of desperation seemed to simply disperse into an empty universe. I now attribute part of this to the fact that at the monastery there was time to work, eat, work, go to church, work, do your prayer rule, work, sleep, and work, but no time and certainly no encouragement to “be still and know that I am God.” As we drove away, I had the overwhelming sense that God was at last speaking to me: “You will not find Me here!” To me, this did not at all mean that God is not there, or that He cannot be experienced there, (otherwise, why would any pilgrims ever bother to go there, unless they just liked the looks of a gorgeous, opulent monastery?). It meant that within the confines and directives of the life that I was living, I would never possess the sense of loving enclosure I needed to truly enter that silent, deep-heart prayer which had formerly been the delight and most essential ingredient of my life.
Editor’s Note: Part II of Ruth’s letter to His Eminence will be posted next week.