What’s Up, Brother?

Originally this article was submitted as part of the assignment for class Russian Church Abroad Its History and Identity-723 offered at Holy Trinity Orthodox Seminary.

This article was intended to be a collection of not just my own memories, but a sampling of all the favorite memories of our dear Hieromonk Alexander from those who knew him best. Unfortunately, it was beyond the scope of the project, simply due to the fact that I could not have possibly collected all these cherished moments and stories in such a short time span before I graduated from Holy Trinity Seminary. It is with a true pain in my heart that I ask forgiveness of all of you who knew him better than I, who could have given a better account of his unique pastoral character and love. May God grant rest to his soul!

May 1, 2024, Jordanville, NY

Musician Turned Priest

I will never forget the moment that I met the man who would become my father-confessor. It was Lent of 2017, I had just attended my first ever Presanctified Divine Liturgy at the parish of St. Mary of Egypt in Roswell, Georgia, out of a sudden desire to visit an Orthodox Church. After the liturgy, I was introduced to my future spiritual father, the then Archpriest John Townsend before he had taken monastic vows, and my future confessor Hieromonk Alexander. I shook his hand, and he introduced himself and said with a chuckle in his thick accent, “That liturgy we just celebrated is from the 5th century. That’s what’s up!” To this day I have never heard another priest, let alone a hieromonk, describe his joy for the services with such pedestrian slang, and yet it was so genuine. That was Father Alexander: an unpretentious, somewhat eccentric, yet joyful monk who was totally devoted to the Church.

How did such a character end up in a parish of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia located in north Georgia of all places, much less under the direction of a true Southern gentleman, the Georgia born and bred Fr. John Townsend? The path that led him to service in the Church is, like him, a unique one. Fr. Alexander was born in Kiev on June 5th, 1963, and was baptized in his home town at twenty five years old, having served his time in the Soviet Airforce as a radioman.

He graduated from Gliere Kiev Institute of Music with a specialization in guitar. At this time, as he related, many people were coming back to the Church in Russia, and mass baptisms were being done without much in the way of catechism. He was one of such uncatechized people. However, he was being drawn closer to the Church despite this lack of proper spiritual formation.

He recalled to me once how he was walking around the grounds of a convent, perhaps on the property of the Kiev Perchersk Lavra, and as he passed the residence of a holy eldress, he heard a voice call out from the open door or window. I clearly can recall him imitating this elderly, feminine rattle, “Careful, a priest is coming, a priest is coming.” He looked around and saw no one else. Immediately one of the cell attendants ran out and told him, “You will be a priest!” To which he thought, “Yeah right,” and continued on with his life as normal.

And could he be blamed for such a thought? He was a young musician who was disillusioned by the slow, grinding halt of Soviet society in the late 80s. His life went on, he played first as a part of a traveling circus, then as part of an ensemble in the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East, and later split off with a traveling group of these musicians to play traditional Yiddish music. The group broke up while on a visit to the Holy Land in 1990, and Fr. Alexander, on the urging of his friends, wrote a letter to God while at the Western Wall, imploring, “God, bring me to my senses, as I feel my life has gone all wrong.”

A year later he flew to America and was taken by a friend to celebrate his first ever Pascha with Fr. John Townsend, who took this strange young man into his own home. Father Alexander, who knew less than 400 words at this time according to him, learned English from watching movies (he loved mobster movies, I can’t recall how many times that he voiced his appreciation for mob-movie actors like Joe Pesci and Robert DeNiro) and from talking to his future confessee, Matushka Barbara Townsend. Fr. John helped him to get off his feet, and he ended up being an extremely successful guitarist in the Atlanta area, playing traditional Latin American music, as well as Gypsy and other Eastern European folk music.

He was making over six figures doing this job! I have to stress here that Fr. Alexander didn’t play just for the money, he truly enjoyed what he did. He described to me once the “zen” of a group that played not for the people in front of them, or to inflate their own pride, or for the money, just for the sake of the music itself. There was some kind of bliss that carried him through to the end, and ended as soon as the first person clapped. Listening to his album “Sasha – Percussionata Project,” you can feel Fr. Alexander’s soul: he really wanted to impart comfort and joy to his listeners, he wanted you to forget the cares of the world, he wanted to weep with you, he wanted to pick you up and show you the beauty of life. It’s not hard to see how such a caring soul was ready to take on a greater responsibility for his fellow man.

Fr. Alexander was playing some of the best gigs in the Atlanta area, and his success threatened to take him away from Georgia, all the way up to New York City. It was then in 2009 that Fr. John Townsend told him that he needed a bilingual priest for the parish, and that Fr. John and Metropolitan Hilarion of blessed memory decided that Sasha, as he was affectionately known, was the best fit. Father Alexander humbly accepted. He continued to play music to support himself, but he was very careful, he didn’t accept swearing or blasphemy or any foolishness at the gigs he played, and played in his cassock and cross! He was so well respected that gig managers would adhere to his requirements, especially since he was not afraid to walk out on both the crowd, and his money!

No longer “Sasha”

When he became a monk in 2015, he stopped playing entirely except on special events or for himself or friends, but even then he was very conscious of his decision to be a monk and how his passion for secular music conflicted with his vows. A fellow parishioner told me a story once that some people who recognized him saw him playing and started yelling, “Sasha! Sasha’s playing! Hey, Sasha!” He stopped playing and walked away. He wasn’t Sasha anymore, he was Hieromonk Alexander. I had a similar experience at one of our yearly Russian Fall Festivals. Father Alexander had just finished a set with our deacon Fr. Jude on saxophone, I had some minor role to announce who had won some item in the raffle ticket give away. I picked up the microphone and said, “It’s not everyday you see a Russian monk play Brazilian music.”

I immediately heard, over Deacon Jude’s laughing, Father Alexander clearly and harshly saying, “No, no, no…” I awkwardly finished my announcement and after some time I went to Father Alexander, confused, but still desiring to ask forgiveness of him. “Fedya, it’s okay, don’t worry about it, but I’m a monk. I can’t have attention being drawn to me. I really shouldn’t even be up there playing in front of everyone, eventually I need to give up music entirely, but for now I play small events like this with the bishop’s blessing.”

Imprinting His Soul on the Church and Services

His artistic soul couldn’t be caged and he became a real renaissance man in terms of Orthodox art forms. The most obvious of these outlets was perhaps his iconography. He painted icons and the church walls of St. Mary of Egypt in the Jordanville style. He had a great love and respect for Jordanville, despite the fact that he was also quite critical of the sometimes dark and anti-social atmosphere prevalent there, and I clearly remember whenever he would start a new phase of the church renovations in preparation for St. Mary of Egypt’s consecration in 2020, he would say, “See these stars against the dark blue ceiling here? It’s what’s on the roof of the nave in the Jordanville cathedral,” “This flower and vine design here is based on what they have on the walls in Jordanville,” and so on.

While the renovated St. Mary of Egypt does indeed have a very unique and beautiful style, it has a distinct Jordanville flavor to it, all thanks to Fr. Alexander. I have to mention here that unless he was sick, which became more and more frequent before the end, he was always working. I could almost never come to church on a weekday or give him a call and not expect him to be in the middle of something, which he would happily invite me to take part in. I remember once I rang him up just to check in and see what he was up to, and I could tell he was very tense. “Father, are you okay? What’s wrong?” “Sorry brother, I’m on top of a 30 foot ladder with a paint brush in my other hand. I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t an emergency.” In the end, there wasn’t a single square foot of the church that didn’t feel his artistic touch, to the point that the church interior as it appears now, from the altar to the nave, is unrecognizable from just a few short years before his death.

His singing wasn’t exceptionally beautiful in how it sounded necessarily, but in how you felt his meaning behind the words he was singing. Like his music before, he really put his whole soul into the words that he sang. The best example of this was how he read “Let my prayer arise.” It wasn’t just a hymn for everyone else to hear, or an excuse for him to be the focal point of the service, it felt like his private prayer to God that he was sharing with us. For me, when I was still a parishioner at St. Mary’s, Lent was a presanctified divine liturgy with Fr. Alexander reading “Let my prayer arise” and the prayer of St. Ephraim.

I recently read an obituary by one of his friends who he used to collaborate with while he was still a musician, a Brazilian Mandolin player named Marilynn Mair. She described that he was “exacting” as a musician. (https://www.marilynnmair.com/notes/2024/losing-sasha/) This was true. When he would begin Vigil, he would immediately cut off and silence anyone who was singing “O Come let us worship…” out of tune. He would sometimes warn people before parts in the services where the clergy would sing, that,  “Only people who know how to sing may sing, please and thank you,” while making eye contact and smiling mischievously at the people who he had shushed in the past.

His exactness also manifested in his liturgical style as well. He would gently correct Fr. John on his pronunciation of certain Slavonic litanies, down to each individual syllable. This exactness also lent to him trying to incorporate the unique Jordanville liturgical style as much as he could, during his monastic retreats to Holy Trinity he tried to copy everything he would see there in great detail and take it back to Atlanta. When I moved to Jordanville for seminary I became a direct link for him, and I would occasionally record certain parts of the services for him to incorporate into the newly formed Optina Elders skete that is still co-located with the St. Mary of Egypt church.

The Russian-Ukrainian-American Priestmonk

He was a true monk, despite not being attached to a monastery for most of his short monastic life. It’s hard to appreciate how difficult that must have been for him, and I recall at least on one occasion how he lamented this, but he accepted it as God’s will. Roswell is by no means a quiet suburb in the deep South, it’s a hustling and bustling community. St. Mary of Egypt is right off a state highway afterall. Despite the fact that he was living a monastic life in what way he could with his own struggles, he always felt himself as the lesser of other monks. He would tell me about his sabbaticals to Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, and relate “Fr. So and so – that’s a real monk. And Fr. So and so, he’s got this and that going on, but he tells no one and doesn’t complain. A real monk!” Thank God, he was granted his wish to be attached to a monastic brotherhood just a few years before his death when Metropolitan Hilarion blessed the foundation of the Holy Optina Elders skete.

Father Alexander fit in perfectly to the multiethnic environment of St. Mary of Egypt and worked hard to preserve its open armed, missionary character. He was a great lover of his Russian-Ukrainian heritage, he had a great veneration for Russian saints, and had quite strong opinions about his native homeland. Despite that, he was by no means a Slavic chauvinist. Infact, he had quite a severe opinion of priests who knew English but served in Slavonic, because he viewed it as his duty to bring the faith to the American people, and anyone who he encountered for that matter. He of course did say Slavonic exclamations and litanies, but I never heard him do an entire liturgy in Slavonic. His description of himself during his interview with Tatiana Veselkina for Orthochristian.com is apt, “I am a Russian-Ukrainian-American priest who tries to guide people to Orthodoxy. And I try to do it only with love.” (https://orthochristian.com/158023.html)

How many Russian priests in America do you know that would call themselves American as well as Russian? This is by no means a jab at those priests, would I ever call myself a Russian priest if I moved to Russia? No, but Father Alexander’s love bridged that great cultural gap between these two countries to the point that he even felt comfortable calling himself American.

He loved everyone and made it his mission to bring people to Christ in any way he could. He was by no means a street preacher or a catechist, except by his own example, but he brought so many into the Church because of his genuine, loving character. The unfortunate negative stereotype of Orthodox priests, especially to secular Russians, is a cold, rigid, insipid, unapproachable cleric. Fr. Alexander destroyed any such notions within the instant of meeting him, from his simple, more or less grammatically correct English that was lightly “seasoned” with his use of American slang, his good sense of humor which he often turned on himself, his genuine smile, and his open arms, literally.

He was a hugger. I think he probably holds the Guiness World Record for most hugs given by a Russian man. He brought many people to Christ through the witness of his genuine love for them. Even if he could tell people weren’t open to converting, he was able to talk to them like the unpretentious human being that he was, he wasn’t trying to bash anyone over the head to force them into the Church.

I remember he jokingly told me once that he was “the Godfather of all Jewish converts to Orthodoxy in Atlanta,” or something to that effect. He baptized something in the number of perhaps 15-20 Russian Jews, if I recall correctly, and while we can forgive him for the exaggeration, for him it was a great joy. We gained a few Black Americans to our parish, and he, not wanting to make a big deal out of it in public and make our new parishioners uncomfortable, privately told me how much it made him rejoice, because to him it was a trickle that could lead to a great conversion.

His sense of humor, though it may not have been appropriate for a hieromonk, is also something worth commenting on. He loved to make people happy and make them closer to the church community with a laugh. A good part of these jokes were at his own expense. He had to wear an eyepatch for quite some time a few years before his death, and he cracked a joke at dinner with my parents that, “I should call Hollywood next time they have a James Bond movie, I’m Russian, I have an eyepatch, I wear all black, I’m the perfect Bond villain!” Though it’s clear his monastic vows would pinch his conscience in some way when he felt he had gone too far, sometimes he would smack himself on the head or clap his hand over his mouth and say, “Forgive me, when will I ever shut up?”

He genuinely cared about how someone was doing, he was hyper-attuned to it, and it was anathema to him to walk away from a spiritual child without having sufficiently cheered them up or having given them a better, more positive perspective of their sorrows. I remember when I would call him over the phone he would instantly pick up on how I was feeling, and he would say, “You sound good brother, thank God, how are you doing?” or “No, no, Fedya, you sound depressed, what’s going on brother?” He put others’ well-being above his own at every opportunity and was deathly afraid for the souls of others who were on the path to apostasy or “taking a break” from the Church. I find myself coming back again and again to add to examples of how father’s love manifested towards the parish and other people, I could keep on listing off how he loved the children, how he would always introduce people in the parish to each other to engender new friendships, and so on, but I’m afraid this article would turn into a small novel. For now it suffices to say: he meant what he said, he tried to bring people to Orthodoxy “only with love.”

Speaking the Truth, Even if it Hurt

Father Alexander could sometimes have a temper. He could be very stubborn and insistent in some ways. It was my job during the height of COVID to go through the church and tape X’s onto the ground 6 feet apart from each other. These X’s would represent where the laity could stand according to the quarantine regulations so we could get as many people into church as was legally possible. I was lazy and did not put them exactly 6 feet apart, a lot of them were perhaps a few inches or half a foot below 6 feet apart. Father Alexander checked my measurements and immediately told me off. When I argued that it’s close enough, he strongly retorted, “No, brother, it matters! You don’t care, but if the health inspectors come here and see it’s not all 6 feet apart, they will care! Do you want to see the church closed down?! Do you want to see Fr. John and I get arrested? Redo them all!”

At the start of the unfortunate war between Ukraine and Russia there was a protest planned against Russia to be conducted during a Sunday liturgy at St. Mary of Egypt. Of course if they only knew the ethnic composition of the Slavic membership of St. Mary’s, which was half Russian and half Ukrainian, they might have rethought their endeavor. In any case, having heard this news from Fr. John over the phone I immediately began to worry about my confessor’s reaction to such an event. After I finished my phone call with Fr. John I immediately called Fr. Alexander and I tried to mask the true meaning of the phone call, but I could tell he was agitated. After some failed attempts at small talk I finally broached the subject, “So, father… Fr. John told me about some protest coming up soon…” “Yes–Fedya, I’m going to go out there and show them a real Ukrainian! I’m going to really educate them about all this, I’ll speak in Ukrainian too!” It was useless to try and turn him off the path, he was too passionate about what had been happening in his home country since 2014, and I knew that it would take nothing short of him being locked in his room against his will to keep him from going out to meet the protestors. Thank God, there was rain and the protestors canceled the event, never to reschedule it.

His temper often had a better outlet, however. He had zero patience for disobedience, for willfulness, or for any open display of pride. He was always quick to make sure that everything was “done decently and in good order” (1 Co 14:40). While such discrepancies were rare in our parish, thank God, he nevertheless was the first one to act. A group of zealous new converts sat with Father John discussing various spiritual topics after a Sunday liturgy. Father Alexander walked in, saw one of the new converts cutting off Father John in the middle of a sentence, and it was he, not Father John, that immediately corrected him. No rudeness, no hurt feelings, just a simple, curt, and emphatic admonition, often laced with humor to soften the blow. As a rule Fr. Alexander was incredibly defensive of Fr. John and was very sensitive to people abusing Fr. John’s kindness, such was his love for him.

If people were discussing politics at coffee hour, even if they weren’t getting agitated and angry with each other, Fr. Alexander would step in and “break it up,” “Brothers, you know the rule about discussing politics, let’s change the subject, how does Putin and Trump and all that affect your salvation? Let’s talk about spiritual life!”

He spoke his mind when he thought it was a truth that needed uttering, rather than a needless truth that would hurt a soul for no reason. We had a professional beggar, a woman in nurse’s scrubs who drove a Mercedes no less, visit our parish regularly and beg for money. Father Alexander would walk up to her, brazenly open up his cellphone, go to his banking app, and point to his bank statement, then to his credit card debt, “I’ll give you what’s in this (his nearly empty checking account) , if you share this with me (his credit card with atleast a few hundred dollars worth of debt).” The latter was, as a rule due to his generosity, usually greater than the former. Towards me, a young man who had an incomplete formation, he was always correcting my bad habits with gentle, often humorous admonitions, “Brother, stop bouncing your knee all the time, chill out! You’re making me nervous.” “You keep doing such and such and you’re going to struggle to find a wife that can put up with you!” “Oi! How have you not gotten arrested driving this way?”

His insistence and his enthusiasm also bled into his ministry. He often would tell people who were hanging around church but not fully committing to it yet, “It’s time, brother/sister, come on. Let’s get you baptized.” And often they would take him up on it and really embrace the faith, finally. He did this not just with baptisms but even ordinations, tonsurings, and other significant milestones in ones spiritual life. Fr. Mikhail Beliakov of St. Mary of Egypt related once how he was under the impression he was only going to be ordained a deacon for St. Mary’s, and that was it. Well, he was ordained a deacon, and soon after Fr. Alexander started training him, saying, “So when you’re a priest, you need to watch out for this…”

Humility

I want to emphasize that he really strove for humility. He never called anyone “my son,” or “my daughter,” he confessed to me once that he had tried it but said it just didn’t feel right to him, and thus everyone was his brother and sister. He went to great lengths to use himself as an example, in a negative sense, since he and I shared some qualities in our spiritual struggles that made us alike, not in terms of personality, but our spiritual life. He also wanted to teach me what it was really like to be a priest because he had for some time been preparing me openly to go to seminary, and was convinced of my future priesthood. Besides that, he saw that I still held onto a naive view of priests as “supermen” even a few years after baptism.

I remember once how I once called him my spiritual father, and he strictly told me, “No. I’m not your spiritual father. Don’t even call me that behind my back. Father John is your spiritual father, I am your confessor. A spiritual father is someone who has had years of experience, who is a man of prayer, a real priest.” I tested this order in his presence once more a month later by asking him what the word for spiritual father was in Russian, and he picked up on my slyness and told me, “It’s dukhovni otets, but brother, really, I’m not your spiritual father. That’s Father John. I’m your confessor.”

In intimate moments when it was just him and I, he would speak frankly about what it was like being a priest, all the struggles and so on. He, again, would use himself as a negative example and implore me, “Don’t be like me. Be better than me. What kind of a priest am I?”

His Spiritual Life

He was a man of simple faith, and though he never attended seminary, others have commented his theological education was on par with priests who had been there. If I had to guess, it was due to his extreme devotion to reading various lives of saints, since as far as I know he was by no means a reader of thick, theological texts. He would enthusiastically talk with anyone about a life they had read, and it didn’t matter what time period or where they were from. He had an astounding knowledge of different saints and loved to share his appreciation of them, he was always using examples of different saints whose lives he had read during confession or in day to day counsel. Besides that, Fr. Alexander knew theology because he lived theology, he had knowledge of God because of the love that has already been mentioned repeatedly.

I mentioned above that he wasn’t a catechist by any means, but he knew about the spiritual life and its struggles and all its nuances. He was a master at explaining, in simple terms, why things work the way they work in spiritual life. To use Hieromonk Kosmas’ expression in his Orthodox Talks series, “In real life, 2+2 = 4, but in spiritual life sometimes it’s 1, or 3, or 5.” If that’s the case, Fr. Alexander was a mathematician of the spiritual life; he usually had an answer, and it made the most complex spiritual problems seem simple. He also had the humility to sometimes say, “I don’t know, let’s ask Father John.”

He waited for Lent and all the other preparatory fasting seasons like a child waiting for Christmas. He was always excited for Lent, to him it seemed like the passing years existed only to bring the next Lent and Pascha. “Oh, it’s over now, brother,” he would say after Bright Week had come to a close, “but we’ll blink and it’ll be here again!” His joy on the feast days was legendary, especially on Pascha, where he had a tradition of eating Paschal eggs with Duke’s Mayonnaise with “the guys” (according to St. Mary’s Deacon Peter Epstein, a veteran of the tradition, it could only be Duke’s brand mayonnaise.) He would fly about and greet everyone before retreating to some hidden corner for his Paschal egg with Duke’s and, with Paschal joy, perhaps a shot or two of vodka as well.

The Parish Confessor

And now, having laid the groundwork for understanding him in the barest sense, I have to crown these recollections with a recounting of his confessional style before closing them. During confession Father Alexander became that true father accepting his prodigal son back into the fold. He didn’t just wait for you to come back to God, he ran. If one came to him and was already dragged down “with a contrite and humble heart,” eager to cast his sins before God, Father Alexander was very gentle. With someone like me, a stupid young man who wanted a bandaid for his pride, he would become severe, or even poke fun at how I saw myself.

Speaking of Fr. Alexander as a confessor, he was not just some kind of “drill sergeant”, for every deserved reprimand that he gave me, it would also be twinned with a loving exhortation. “Pick yourself up! It’s okay, God forgives you brother.” There was a particular phrase he always said that will be burned into my brain, “You have to keep fighting!” He wanted you to have holy wrath for sin, to pick up your cross and get back into the fight, and it was very inspiring to see his above-mentioned anger turned against the devil who was bringing you to such lows at confession.

Just as when someone came to him depressed outside of confession, within confession he would always try to lift up the confessee. You could approach him feeling like a real “son of the devil,” and by the time you walked away you felt his love, and through him, God’s love. No matter what you told him, no matter how much he might have to reprimand you, or in my case no matter how much I would cause him disappointment or worry, it would always end with not just a hug, but a real embrace. And it didn’t matter who you were, even if you were an older man closer to his age or even older, you were getting a hug from him right after absolution! That was Father Alexander in a nutshell: the fatherly embrace after absolution. The prodigal son could not have felt a hug too dissimilar than that from his own father.

He was many things, he could make you laugh until your stomach hurt, he could tell stories like nobodies’ business, was so talented in so many ways, he could be argumentative and sometimes even say and do things that scandalized people, yes, but above all else he was that boisterous, loving priest who truly felt himself totally unworthy of his ministry. And that’s true: he didn’t raise people from the dead or heal diseases by his word or float when he prayed; instead he raised souls from the dead and healed spiritual diseases through his apparent impartiality and care towards the flock.

I know there are many of us out there who, when we find mercy from God and are granted salvation, will be looking forward to the final embrace from that true shepherd of ours; and we will tell him those words he never would have allowed to be spoken to him while he was alive, “You were worthy of your priesthood, father, if for nothing else but because of your love for God and man.” May God grant rest to the soul of our dear Hieromonk Alexander! Memory Eternal!