After graduating from St Vladimir’s Seminary, Fr Joshua Burnett (M.Div. '15) was sent to St George Antiochian Orthodox Cathedral in Wichita, Kansas, where he served as assistant priest for three years. He is now the proistamenos of Holy Cross Church (Antiochian Archdiocese), just south of Baltimore. He and his wife Khouria Meredith have ten children in their care.
Remembering the arrival at St Vladimir’s Seminary
My father had been diagnosed with brain cancer, and two months into our first semester at seminary, he died. About a week after he died, Hurricane Sandy hit… It was a turbulent first semester! But it was also formative. Fr John Behr was the dean at the time, and his whole understanding of suffering and death—the centrality of the Cross to our Orthodox faith—informed the way I began to speak about my father’s death. When I gave the eulogy at his funeral, it was the first time I had the sense of speaking as an Orthodox Christian from an Orthodox perspective.
After seminary, I was sent to St George Cathedral in Wichita, a very large parish, where they had a funeral every week. Serving so many funerals was cathartic. Every death had its own particularity and grief, but it also carried within it, for me, echoes of my father’s death. Serving funeral after funeral helped me become aware of my own grief, and the comfort offered by the Orthodox funeral service became a comfort that sunk into my bones week after week.
Memories of Seminary
Family! We came to SVOTS with three kids and thought, “I guess we’ll have to wait for three years to have another kid.” Then, we saw all the families on campus, learned that there were midwives in the area and that insurance pays for them, and decided, “This is the perfect place to have a baby,” so our son was born halfway through seminary.
My wife didn’t expect me to be gone as much as I was. We went traveling with the bishop quite a bit. That was more of a burden than we were expecting. And I had a lot of growth points related to the bishop. Before I came to seminary, I had gone to the cathedral in Pittsburgh when (then Father and now) Bishop John was there. He was very laid back. He made me a subdeacon and had me help in the altar. I was so green, I wouldn’t even kiss his hand when I handed him things! I’d hand him the censer as if to say, “Here you go.” I think he must have been chuckling a little to himself, but he never insisted I pay him special honors.
So, I got to seminary and it was mind-blowing to learn all the protocols. When my dad died I simply wrote an email to my bishop notifying him that I’d be gone for the funeral, and he wrote back—very kindly—but saying, “OK, but this is how you address a bishop. You don’t TELL him, you ASK him!” (laughter) There was this whole world of hierarchy and courtesy that I had never been exposed to in my days as an Evangelical Protestant, but at seminary I learned—quickly!
Another aspect of seminary that I remember was the community service assignment. My wife asked me to try to get assigned to prosphora-baking most semesters because that was something that she could help me with at home (or, in most cases, do entirely on her own!). Because she did my community service, I had a little extra time with the family, and she had an opportunity to join me in service. This pattern followed us into the parish after seminary.
Life after seminary
I was at St George Cathedral for three years and it was lovely. I wish everyone could be given an assistant position right after seminary. You learn really valuable things in seminary but they aren’t what you learn as an assistant in a parish. At St George, Bishop Basil was there (he’s also a SVOTS alumnus) and his regimen was very similar to the SVOTS chapel. “We don’t mess around, there is an order to things, you should not be moving or talking, this is the altar of God.” He taught me this. He was both serious but warm and hospitable at the same time.
What I gained from SVOTS
During those years in Wichita, I had a Lutheran friend who talked about his seminary experience, saying, “Seminary just gave me the tools to give a Bible study off the cuff or maybe even a sermon. That’s basically what I got from seminary.”
And I certainly got that from seminary too; I could walk into a Bible study mostly unprepared and still be able to give something because of my seminary training. I gained confidence, and things to say without having to look in a book because we’d read deeply and widely.
But I received more than just a few pat answers from St Vladimir’s Seminary. I received a good academic education, something I’ve appreciated more and more as the years have gone on. I learned how to interact both with the Fathers and with modern scholars. That was helpful in terms of trying to figure out how to walk this line between what the Academy knows and what we know from our experience as Orthodox Christians. At SVOTS, I received a “critical appropriation” of the Christian tradition. Yes, we learned that there are things we receive dogmatically without giving it a second thought. But we weren’t led to believe that the deposit of faith is simply an inanimate thing that people pass on from generation to generation without any kind of interaction with it. We bring questions from our experience of the world, and being honest about those questions is important. It guards us against becoming too abstract or too blindly ideological. For me, SVOTS was like a gymnasium. It trained me to grapple—in an embodied, personal way—with the truth of our faith.
What have been the joys and challenges of clergy life?
We became foster parents in Wichita and had several children placed with us; we ended up adopting the final two children placed with us. We were moving away from Wichita and had to decide whether to adopt or to send them back into the system. That decision required a lot of prayer and deliberation. Foster kids have experienced a lot of trauma, and that trauma often gets expressed in troubling ways. For instance, our now daughter would get up to the sink and wash her hands and leave the water running, and then say “Susie!” (Susie was a little younger than her.) “I left the water on for you, you can wash your hands!” But what she had done was leave just the hot water on, and it was scorching hot, and Susie would put her hands up under the water and scream! Our kids were pretty peaceable but suddenly, with the introduction of these foster kids, our house felt like a war zone. We struggled as parents, especially as we watched our kids struggle. When it came time to make the decision to adopt, we went around and asked our biological children, and one of them said, “You know, I think it’s going to be very hard, but it will provide us an opportunity to exercise self-control.”
I believe this child had absorbed some of the teaching that we had received in seminary: that it is through our suffering that we are united with Christ’s suffering, and that the suffering we would go through, with and for these kids, would be good for us and, of course, good for them too. We were opening up the possibility for God to transform them and us, and so we prayed and hoped for that possibility.
And God has provided. With the stability of a loving home, our adopted children went through a transformation, almost overnight. The girl who would turn on the hot water for her sister is now a compassionate and trusted caretaker of her younger siblings. And, of course, the rest of the family has changed as well. We are learning to trust in God’s providence and to put less stock in “reasonable” calculations. Our adoption has even been transformative for our parish on a number of levels. We have one family that became foster parents after we arrived and two other families are in the process of becoming licensed. People see it up close and it inspires them to take the same step, thank God.
Our big clergy family also changes people’s expectations. Parishioners recognize that I’m not as available as an empty nester priest would be. That changes how parishioners view themselves, their relationship with the priest, and with the rest of the church. In some ways—when it works well—people are more self-sufficient and interdependent on one another rather than dependent on the priest.
Challenges of many new inquirers and catechumens
We’ve always had catechumens, but it used to average between 6 –10 or so. Now we have 25 catechumens and I know of brother priests who are seeing 70, 100, and more! Our catechumenate is a formal program with classes, and it lasts a year. I describe it to them as like getting engaged.
There is another group of people though. We have a lot of inquirers who are just staying inquirers, who have been attending and learning for a while. So, altogether, almost 50 people are either catechumens or inquirers! In addition, almost every week we have visitors. Some of our visitors probably are seeing how crowded our parish is and so they go looking for something less crowded (laughter). As long as they end up in another Orthodox parish—thank God, I’m happy with that.
So yes, it is a challenge. Our parish identity is being challenged by how many new people there are here. Oftentimes I think that the old timers have felt like the outsiders and have felt displaced. I’m working on some things to help them with that.
Also, our parish tends to be on the conservative end of the political spectrum. That comes with some plusses and minuses. It would be great if people didn’t talk politics at all, but they do! And newcomers hear conversations during coffee hour and they think, “Oh—is that the kind of people who are here?” and they get worried. But usually, for most of the parishioners, regardless of their politics, their faith really is first. Yes, they care about politics and they are talking to others who have the same leanings during coffee hour, BUT when it comes down to it, are they going to avoid a fellow parishioner of a different persuasion politically? No.
Even if these differences between our parishioners have at times become really fractious on social media, at the end of the day the people involved have said, “Look—we need to come together here and put this aside and recognize that, first and foremost, we are brothers and sisters in Christ.” The few times there have been social media “fights,” in the end it has ended peaceably.
Dealing with social media
It’s usually on the topics on the fringe where people butt heads. One of these is how men understand women. We have a lot of young men coming into the Church and many of them are disenfranchised and/or feel disenfranchised, and they feel like they can’t make it in life. “I have a job but I can’t buy a house, can’t seem to find a girlfriend”; there’s a lot of discrepancy between the expectations they had growing up as opposed to the reality of their adult lives.
Then the reaction is, “Feminism has been ascendant for a while and now men are second-class citizens and I am angry about the place women occupy in the world.” But also, “I am going to learn how to be a player and date women serially.”
Often this is being brought into the Church and is something I’ve had to address very directly, in our catechism classes and general parish classes, like a class I did on marriage. I am talking about the dynamic between men and women, and making sure our parishioners are not OK with unhealthy attitudes. We try to understand where these attitudes are coming from, and we aren’t going to denigrate people. We will be compassionate but also express the Orthodox understanding of the relationship between men and women.
How do we rehabilitate these young men? In my parish what is working well is to get them involved in service. I have actively said, “We need the dishes washed, or, someone’s donating a couch, can you help move it? Our playground is a mud pit, let’s have a workday to dig everything out and put in mulch, can you help?” And the young men have stepped up in ways that have really touched my heart. They are serious about this and are asking, “What else can I do?” They’re going above and beyond, counting Sunday collections, visiting people who are homebound…it’s beautiful to see the ways they have found their place. Belonging through service has been transformational. By God’s grace, some of these young men who are learning and growing in the Faith will even eventually become priests. We sent one family to seminary last year and will do so again this year.
