pat loughery

Day 10: October 29, 2008

We awoke for our last day in Iasi and packed for a couple hours’ travel to Neamt Monastery, where we would stay for our last evening together.

I created many CD copies of the photos I had taken to this point on the trip to share with other students and teachers, and during the down times of the day we passed around CDs. I’ll email the full list when I return home to make sure that everybody was able to receive a copy of the pictures for themselves.

After leaving our baggage on the bus outside the hotel, we walked to the Theological Faculty building, a brisk 15-minute walk. It was as far as I wanted to go, plus a few blocks. This is the school where Fr. Sava is the dean, and Fr. Sava met us and introduced us to the school.

The oldest theological school in Romania, they will celebrate their 150th anniversary in 2014. There are currently some 1500 students, undergraduate and graduate, in this facility. They support four major areas of study, including pastoral theology and cultural theology. Pastoral theology is the area of study for those wishing to be ordained as priests. Cultural theology is for the artistic stream, which teaches icon painting, icon restoration, music and other disciplines.

There are several distinctive features of this school that set it apart from other theological schools in the country. The first is intense teaching in liturgy so that the growing church in Romania will have well-trained pastoral ministers in the cities as well as the villages. Since Father Sava is the professor of liturgics he was understandably proud of this focus. The second is training in the Orthodox understanding of mission. They do not convert Christians of other streams to Orthodoxy, but they seek to renew and reshape the Orthodox Church from within. The school also celebrates an openness to the values of the outside world. Ninety percent of the current faculty in theological education has studied abroad, which helps to diversify the staff.

The student pays approximately sixty percent of the educational costs of the school, with the remaining forty percent paid by the government so that religious leadership is well equipped to serve the people.

There was a funny and illuminating moment with Father Sava at this time. Noting that the vast majority Orthodox priests and monks wore beards, one of the students asked Fr. Sava if there were rules for beards – who wears them, how long they are, etc. Father Sava’s response illustrated his wonderful sense of humor: “Our wives are the rules.” Wives of married priests decide whether the men wear goatees, are clean-shaven, or wear short or long beards. Many of the monks wore very long beards, an indication that they are not married and also an illustration of their choice to live separately from the rules of the world.

We toured inside the facility, with my favorite rooms being the art studio in which students are taught to paint icons and other works. The remains of some geometric diagrams on the chalkboard and the partially finished drawings on the walls showed me the thoroughness of the students’ training. Icon painters then apprentice under an accredited painter and are required to pass skills based accreditation process before being released as icon painters themselves.

We also saw the classroom where students are taught to restore icons in a variety of stages of decay. The painstaking work of redeeming these historical artifacts was fascinating. I asked for an estimate of the amount of time it would take to restore icons, and learned that it can very easily be three times as long to restore and icon as it would be to create one, with much longer restorations possible also.

After these visits we had short lectures by two of the theology faculty including an overview of Romania’s pride, the important Orthodox theologian Dumitru Staniloae. A profound thinker and prolific writer, he is regarded as the 20th century’s greatest Orthodox theologian with over 90 volumes published including the definitive translation of the early church fathers’ wisdom, the Philokalia.

Ray Bakke led us in a time of reflection about the themes we had heard on the course so that we could reflect on the major topics. I wrote about twenty of them in my notebook to refer to later as I’m writing my project paper.

From Iasi, we drove to the Neamt monastery, known as one of the cultural centers of monastic spirituality in the Romanian Orthodox world. We arrived around seven PM, had dinner at eight, and I went to sleep shortly after that. I had walked enough during the day that it was very difficult to keep the pain under control. I had hoped to finish the day’s journal entry, but fell asleep just beginning it.

The pace of this trip was very difficult and, even though I slept on the bus as much as possible, my body didn’t feel very rested. My mind was in better condition than my body, although it was difficult to deal with constant pain.

I was disappointed that we had driven so far from Iasi to stay at Neamt but didn’t get to participate deeply with the monks at this monastery. We did get a wonderful feast of food for dinner and a tour of the church building by flashlight, but I would have loved to participate more into the life of this church.