INTERVIEWS – Fr. Jovan Marjanac on why the Orthodox Church is Essential by Djuradj “George” Vujcic
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Urban Book Circle® (UBC)
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Fr. Jovan Marjanac on why the Orthodox Church is Essential
Djuradj Vujcic: With us today is Father Jovan Marjanac. He is a Serbian Orthodox priest at the Holy Trinity Serbian Orthodox Church in Kitchener, Ontario. He was born in 1986 and he moved to Canada at the age of ten. To start off, thanks so much for joining us and I wanted to ask how did you decide on becoming a priest and how does one know when they’re ready to be a priest?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I’m not sure. People ask that magical question, you know, if there’s some kind of a calling or something. It’s one of those things that I just kind of always liked and always wanted from the earliest age of having memories of my grandmother bringing me to church. But I can’t say that I had some kind of an epiphany moment that told me ‘aha it is this minute I can define as my decision point of wanting to become a priest’. It’s just something that you have a zeal for, a thirst for and you just drive toward it. God kind of leads you in that direction.
Djuradj Vujcic: Were you ordained a priest in 2013?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Yes. November 23, 2013.
Djuradj Vujcic: What is your experience being a priest in Canada? What would be a Canadian’s typical reaction to hearing the words Orthodox Christian and Orthodox Christianity?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I think that Canadians are much more accepting of you telling them you’re a clergyman or an Orthodox priest than even some of our own people – some of the Serbian people – who have these taboos that they’re stuck with even if they’re church-going people that a priest is some kind of a separate caste or something and they put you in a framework which usually very few people have (have a decent understanding of what a priest’s life looks like) so I think the Canadian people in general – non-Serbian Orthodox Canadians – are quite accepting and it may be that my approach to it is quite confident and accepting of others and so it’s reciprocal but I think it’s just a general aspect of Canadian society to be accepting of whoever wants to be anything as long as they’re a decent citizen and a good person.
Djuradj Vujcic: How important is it for Orthodox priests to be out in the community to – I don’t want to say evangelize – but let people know about Orthodox Christianity?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I think without evangelizing and doing outreach being an Orthodox priest in a country that is mostly not Orthodox Christian, we’d be missing our target and evangelization doesn’t have to be to the point of we’re going out to convert everybody to being Serbian Orthodox but just to bear witness to the faith and to bear witness to Christ’s message to everybody. God loves everybody so I don’t know, I don’t have to come into your house or pound on your door and give you my literature and try and convert you by getting you a job or buying you some furniture or something like that it should be just that. Even my neighbor who may be an atheist, a Hindu, a Muslim, Jewish, any other kind of Christian – he’s going to know that I’m an Orthodox Christian, at that an Orthodox priest which is one step further, and say: this is a decent person if that’s the code that he lives by then I can respect that or, God willing, maybe even look into it a bit further and then maybe wish to be baptized and become a member of the Orthodox Church but we’re not really in the business of going out there and grabbing people and soliciting. We don’t solicit in that sense but we do evangelize and that should be the message of the Church I believe very much so but at some point when you are serving ethnic churches, ethnic religious communities like our churches – Serbian Orthodox where predominantly people are Serbs or of Serbian heritage – you have road blocks which are unknown in other faith communities that are multicultural.
Djuradj Vujcic: So do people have the wrong idea about us? Does the word Orthodox maybe have the wrong connotations when they hear it?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Sometimes – especially living in a society that we live in here in Canada which is a quite liberal society – it does have connotations of this incredibly old-school, rigid, archaic, stoic kind of masculine group. But the Orthodox Church – even though our customs (a lot of them) are ancient – in fundamental essence has an accepting and welcoming tone for people with all sorts of outlooks on life and with all sorts of perspectives. The Church has a quite wide spectrum of people that it accepts into its cradle so we do get sometimes labeled as being unwelcoming, closed doors and so forth but it is quite the opposite once you get to know it.
Djuradj Vujcic: Right. The Orthodox Church is timeless so it kind of remains unchanged but at the same time it has existed for 2000 years so it can exist today. How important is it for the Orthodox Church to remain unchanged – for example the Holy Liturgy?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Well, the Holy Liturgy isn’t something that’s unchanged. The Holy Liturgy and its essence is unchanged and that is a repetition of Christ’s message – eat this bread this is my body, drink from this cup this is my blood – and that’s the New Testament (the New Covenant) but the Liturgy in its form has changed. I mean, just the very original – imagine what happened with Christ and His Apostles in that room compared to what we have today – it has obviously some modifications and we know through the centuries that what we have as the Liturgy has changed in minor ways. The themes haven’t changed, the structure hasn’t changed but there are some practices which have changed. One of them that’s very actual these days is how to give Communion whether or not with a spoon and you know some people get very emotional without having fundamental historical knowledge and they say, you know, for example, that the Church has been giving Communion with the spoon for 2000 years. Well that’s simply not factual. Now, I’m not one of those people that thinks we should be changing that and I think we should stay with giving Communion with the spoon but that only came into wide practice after about eight or nine hundred years of Christianity existing so we have to be very careful with those kinds of generalizations of nothing changing. The things which cannot change and we cannot allow to change are the fundamental teachings of the Church – the dogmas – everything else has room for modification.
Djuradj Vujcic: Modification in which way? Just small tweaks and not substantial changes?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: You know, if you look at it – if you reverse it for example: in the original Church in the first several centuries we had deaconesses which were females that were female clergy and they were somebody that had a liturgical role in helping with services in a minor way – delivering Communion to other Christians and so forth – so that is one of those questions that you get a lot in Western society: why aren’t women allowed to be priests, why can’t women go in to the altar and so forth and it simply isn’t so black and white as people make it sound and a lot of those questions of why the Church can’t change and modify itself – there actually is an underlying motive which is not Christian in its essence if people are honest with themselves. It always has some kind of other philosophy which is newer than Church philosophy that Jesus Christ taught us and this underlying tone is always something human-made and the Church does change, it does modify – it is very slow to move. It checks. For example, if the Bishops decide something in a council, the next Council of Bishops needs to ratify it so let’s say that could be hundreds of years we’re talking about between something being widely accepted. Then it has to be noted that the clergy, the priests, the monks and all of the people have kind of accepted this and then you can say ‘yeah, this is something that is widely accepted by the Church’. There have been a lot of things that a Council of Bishops for example will decide and it just doesn’t get accepted by the people or by the clergy and over time it gets thrown out.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you think that maybe these criticisms begin with someone saying something incorrectly? Do you think that people who don’t know the religion say something that doesn’t get checked and it just becomes accepted as fact?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: There are a lot of instances where generalizations or anti-clerical or whatever other types of philosophies play into criticism of the Church. The Church does not politically entertain any kind of view unless it’s so simplistic as saying ‘we’re atheists, we’re anti-Church and we’re anti-God and we’re going to infringe on your freedom’ but even then the Church finds a modus operandi like for example during the Soviet times when it was just blatant and open aggressive persecution of the Church. The Church still found ways to work and to function even under those circumstances from World War II when the Soviet Union for example was coming at a huge crisis in its efforts against Nazism so forth and the onslaught – they (the Church) came back and supported the Soviet government with Stalin. They were in essence supporting the people, the suffering people and trying to gather the rounds and it gave the Church a lot of credibility because it was able to put aside for example somebody that was a huge threat to its very own existence but through its love and through its self-sacrifice, the Church was able to show that any political affiliation, any political – even outright extremist atheist communism – is something that the Church can tolerate because its goals, its timelines are not from election to election or from quality to quality. It is something that exists from the beginning of time. I mean, it will exist until the end of time.
Djuradj Vujcic: How is it that now we have a problem where – not only Orthodox churches but other places of worship as well – have been deemed non-essential? Is there anything we can do to convince people that they are indeed essential?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: So, there is an ongoing communication between our Orthodox Bishops – Romanian, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian etc. – and they have exchanges. I think they’re going to have a phone conference tomorrow or on Tuesday as well and as the situation develops they also look at what are our options and of course, this expands into efforts with other Christian groups particularly the Copts, Roman Catholics, Lutherans and other traditional kind of Christian denominations. The most alarming thing, it’s kind of understandable, we had this Corona scare and now it’s kind of winding down and we anticipate or we expect that we should be among the first ones allowed to reopen or go back to business – go back to the business of praying congregationally. But you know, I think there’s widespread understanding of the government’s or the public officials’ reservations and that we can understand. What we cannot understand is, for example, the province of Alberta banning Communion and giving a guideline for the reopening of churches at 250 people and then simply saying you cannot consume any food including Communion from a common chalice when they know that it’s a widespread practice among most Christians, certainly among all Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians and Oriental Orthodox, so this is something that infringes on our rights. Whether there’s five of us in church, ten, fifty or it’s a packed house, the government should not have the right to interfere in how we are Christian as long as we are not harming or infringing on anybody else’s rights whatever rights they may be and I think one of the fundamental things which we do is we try to be good citizens of the countries that we live in particularly in Canada even though sometimes some of the practices or the teachings don’t exactly abide by what we believe in but you will not see an Orthodox Church take any official stance against a government unless it is infringing on our basic and fundamental rights. And there are some things which are alarming right now but God willing it’s just temporary and it’ll blow over in the next weeks or months.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is that the official stance as well of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Diocese of Canada?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I can’t speak on behalf of the Bishop because there hasn’t been any kind of an official stance other than for the churches and the clergy to abide by whatever the provincial regulations are, however, one of the things that our Bishop made quite clear is that the delivery of Communion to our faithful is not to be modified. Now, that becomes interesting when you have this Alberta kind of guideline so I think there are creative ways that we have to work with the public authorities so that we’re not in collision with them and they don’t feel that we’re putting anybody at risk but on the same hand that we are not having our religious rights infringed upon.
Djuradj Vujcic: So being administered Holy Communion with one chalice – that is definitely one thing that cannot be modified?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It can, technically. But it shouldn’t. You can modify it under really strenuous, pressing circumstances and even that should be something that is so temporary or so extraordinary that it doesn’t happen more than once or twice. That’s my opinion.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is there something that we can do to help? Maybe contact a Member of Provincial Parliament? I mean we the laity.
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: There have been several appeals for petitions and letters sent to the MPs and so forth. My personal opinion is if we stuck it out through Easter and through Holy Week we can probably do so a little while more without getting too antsy. The summer is quite historically a very slow period in church so if you take last year’s patterns of church attendance there shouldn’t be very many people that are getting extremely upset about Church limits in July or August because those people weren’t in church in July or August last year for the most part. So if being patient during the summer months is something that we have to do because that’s the government direction, I see no issue with it at this rate. That’s my personal opinion. We are under very pressing and irregular circumstances. We’re live-streaming our services through Facebook, YouTube and so forth. We only go in with the priests and an assistant or two and we lock the church. Actually, once we’re in for the church service, the priests are doing their utmost to visit people if the circumstances allow and so forth. We’re constantly on phone calls, Skype, Zoom meetings etc. The larger gatherings like our church picnics and summer celebrations, the summer camp and so forth are being postponed or cancelled so we’re being responsible as much as we can but we’re very weary and afraid of the government sticking its fingers into how we administer Communion or how we’re going to have a church service behind closed doors etc. We don’t harm anybody, we pray for the government, we pray for civil authorities, we pray for the health, the peace, the salvation of everyone not just Serbian Orthodox Christians and I think that if this is a country which prides itself in separation of church and state then the state needs to abide by that and they should let the church do its part as long as it’s not breaking laws and hurting anybody and I don’t see that so we’re keeping a very, very close eye. It’s something that happened in Alberta – it’s isolated, that’s one province and it’s a guideline, it’s not a mandate so we haven’t seen any kind of repression or you know people going after the church for its practices yet. We anticipate there won’t be any but if there are then we’re probably going to have to step up to bring some awareness to this but at this time, I think we should just remain patient, obedient and everything is pointing in the direction that Canada will follow suit with the States and other Western countries which just started relaxing their rules.
Djuradj Vujcic: Can tough times like these ones bring us closer to God?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I think that’s exactly what they do. It’s a fact that when churches are full then priests are busy and when things are difficult people remember church and God when somebody dies, when somebody is ill and we tend to forget it when our bellies are full and we have good wine and cheer and things are just kind of fine and dandy. Only a smaller portion of people remember God when things are good. When it gets difficult and the doctor can’t help and the taxman can’t help and a lawyer can’t help and, I don’t know, the wealth of this world can’t help – then you turn to God. Usually. Not everyone. But I think that this kind of worldwide situation which is very difficult for everybody, I think, and stressful and becoming more and more stressful, people are turning to God and they’re doing it each in their own way and the Church is present trying to walk with everybody through that.
Djuradj Vujcic: Why is it that when people are experiencing tough times and they ask God to help and God does help that they then kind of go like ‘oh, okay, time to continue as I was before’ and they don’t really stop and think ‘maybe this wasn’t a coincidence’?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I’m not sure why but relative to that I can say that the Church doesn’t expect us to be somebody that gets it – the lightbulb goes on and then the light stays on the rest of your life. The Church and the Holy Fathers tell us they expect us to struggle so when the light gets more dim you turn it up. When the light goes off, you find a new lightbulb – you figure out how to get the light back on in other words. It’s a fall and rise kind of struggle and I think that my understanding and perception is a simplistic way of putting it but God expects us to not give up, to struggle, to be good people, to be forgiving people, to be accepting, loving people and I think that God will reward that effort and that struggle. One of the fundamental teachings of Christianity and Orthodoxy is that somebody could have been an evil person all their life and, as one of the Holy Fathers says, even a sincere sigh of repentance in his last moments could be enough for the Lord to accept his repentance and his sorrow and to give him a place in eternity. So, it’s not our position – whether you’re clergy, a Bishop, layman, board member or whatever kind of authority in the Church – to be dismissive of anybody, to be critical of anybody. That’s difficult but one of the simplest ways of looking at it is we pray for God’s will to be done not what we want so you don’t say ‘God, give me the lottery numbers tomorrow morning.’ That doesn’t happen. You pray for God’s will to be done and then one part of it is that we forgive our trespassers – those who have wronged us as we want ourselves forgiven by the Lord and others so those are the two kind of fundamental things. I mean, they’re words from the Lord’s Prayer (from Our Father) but that’s kind of the very simple essence of what the Church expects from us.
Djuradj Vujcic: You mentioned earlier when things are going well and when things are fine and dandy that God is last on the list of things people think about. Why do you think that this is?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Materialism. Materialism is the fundamental driving force which separates us from God and in the West, in Canada where we live, we live in a country that is materially well taken care of. We have places to live that are good, we have plenty of food, plenty of drink. If you’re kind of a person without major issues you can get by with the fundamentals even on social assistance and if you’re a little bit more sound and don’t have major life issues, you can probably get an education or a job that will provide a decent living for you and others and there’s people that excel significantly above that. Material goods in abundance make us focus on them and obtaining more of them or if we’re comfortable, we want more. If I have a 20-inch TV, I want a bigger one and so it is a downward spiral and what it does is it takes away the fundamental things which are most important in life and those are immaterial things, spiritual things out of the focus in our life whereas if you look at the Eastern countries of the world – and I’m not just talking about Christians in the East, I’m talking about other people where there are mass populations of people – they live a much more humble life. Those people are much more focused on a spiritual life and the spiritual values with transgenerational family units so a household where you see grandparents, parents and children living together is perfectly normal whereas – look at us in current times now even with our kind of closest housemate, our spouses, our children. А lot of people are saying ‘I’m going nuts’ and can you imagine that a lot of these families – I mean even in the Balkans up until recently this is what you had. You had these communal housing units where several generations lived together and this was something which was huge and a provider of huge life lessons. Important lasting life lessons for somebody from the get-go. It wasn’t ‘see Grandma and Grandpa once a week or twice a week for lunch or for hanging out after Church’ or so forth. You saw them every day and so you were immersed in respecting somebody that’s older and somebody that gave birth to your mother and your father and so forth so that’s just a small example of some of the things which we are losing because we have more money. We can afford to have Grandma and Grandpa in one house, Mom and Dad in another and live apart so we lose some of these values.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is that why Orthodox Christians fast?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: One of the reasons that we fast is to relieve ourselves of worldly cares and one of them being our body. The Holy Fathers and I’m not anywhere near some kind of a spiritual father like, you know, some of our monks and more experienced confessors that we have but some of the fundamental teachings are the most challenging to put into practice. The first is that if you hunger your body, if you take away caloric food or drink from your body for a brief period of time – even if it’s just for one day – it will be easier for you to focus on other things. It is a fact that may not be supported by science but it is something that I have experienced on my own body and it is something that not eating meat, heavy food and dairy for a while will leave you more focused and you will have more energy and you will feel much better. This is not me saying ‘be a vegetarian or a vegan all the time’. I eat meat but when I skip having a glass of wine with dinner and I’m having simple food, fruits and vegetables and so forth and I’m not focusing on having a meal and all that stuff – first of all, it gives me more time during the day but it gives your body more strength, more awareness and if you’re doing it for spiritual reasons like we do with fasting it gives you more awareness to focus on spiritual gains, on spiritual betterment, learning and so, in a sense, it is giving up something that is material for spiritual focus.
Djuradj Vujcic: For people who fasted not just during Holy Week but on Wednesdays and Fridays and they want to take Holy Communion – how do they go about doing that?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: So there is something that is wrong with the way the Serbian Orthodox community (I’m not sure if others do it as well) approaches – sometimes, not always – Communion. We will fast seven days or three days and they’ll do it even really strict some of them will fast with only water and boiled vegetables and stuff like that. Very simple – no oil, nothing caloric really and then they get Communion and then they stop fasting until you know six months or ten months down the line when they want to have Communion again. That’s wrong. That is not what the Church wants from us. The Church wants us to during every single Liturgy, every single Eucharist we are supposed to commune and we are supposed to partake of the body and blood of Christ. The more often we do, the better it is for us as Orthodox Christians. Coming to a Liturgy and not having Communion is like being invited to somebody’s house for dinner and not eating. Everything that is there – all the prayers, everything that you’re doing there, everything that the priest is doing to prepare is for you to have Holy Communion. So, the ideal would be that we all fast Wednesdays and Fridays in the fasting periods and not just seven days leading up to Communion, that we commune at every Holy Liturgy and that we receive Communion when our confession (the holy sacrament of confession) and repentance when our conscience calls us to do so. So, if you feel that it’s good to be getting into a habit of having confession regularly, let’s say once a week or once every two weeks, excellent. If you feel that you should do it sporadically, maybe I’ll go a month without having confession but then I’ll have a couple of them and the next month or I’ll have ten of them in the next month and so forth. As long as it’s happening and as long as you have a spiritual rhythm then it should be a healthy Christian lifestyle but the most fundamental thing is that Communion should be often in life and Communion should be something that we strive for coming to church. Standing there for an hour and a half listening to all the prayers to sanctify bread and wine – a miracle happening with bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ – and not wanting to go up there, something is missing.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you find that when people get really into Orthodox Christianity – right after being baptized or if they were baptized for example as a baby and then they start actually doing things the way they should be – do you find that people are very gung-ho and they’re really into it? Then they kind of do everything by the book – the Book of all books – and then after a while they start to get burned out and they slow down a bit and they go back to their old ways?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Yeah. So somebody that’s just been baptized, there’s a term for it (it’s called a neophyte) and that is one of the characteristics – not always – but it is quite often present for somebody that just kind of dives into it headfirst. One can train them in – and that’s usually their spiritual father who can train them in – and teach them that not everything is so black and white and that they shouldn’t be a hundred and eighteen percent into it but maybe they should be only 104 percent. Those people are usually in for a rude awakening once they see some of the human side of the Church or the way that the Church has gone through the ages given all the different circumstances. What usually happens to those people is they see a clergyman, a Bishop or a priest or a deacon or a monk that isn’t the ideal that they’ve set up in their own mind. He doesn’t reflect an icon that they have in their house and the world comes crumbling down so that’s why coming into the Church, it is very important that somebody that’s going to be baptized as an adult is catechised, that they go through catechism, they go through religious education to prepare so that they know at least the fundamentals and it can’t be something that’s done in a two-hour block in a few weeks. It has to be something that’s done over a period – ideally a year – where they can go through a whole year cycle, see what’s going on, how it happens, the upside to downside, the practices which could be better and so forth and that they had learned to accept everything that the Church does and then become full members and so forth. Otherwise, what happens is – there’s a saying in Serbian of ‘he’s a bigger Catholic than the Pope’ – it leads you to failure so it is something that has to be tempered. It is something that has to be gradual and it is something that has to be under the leadership, the guidance of a sound spiritual father and that is not always your closest parish priest. Sometimes and ideally if it’s available, if it’s possible, it is somebody in a monastery that is an experienced monk confessor that can lead you through it and with today’s technology that’s usually attainable but in any other sense just a serious and dedicated priest.
Djuradj Vujcic: How important is it for someone to have not just a confessor but a spiritual father as well?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It’s fundamental. It is one of the basic things that you have to do and if you are doing anything without it you’re wrong so having a blessing, having the spiritual permission and the spiritual authority of a confessor father in your life is one of the very basics. If you don’t have it, you’re doing something wrong.
Djuradj Vujcic: How important is it for people to remember that this is their spiritual father and not a friend or a buddy but someone that they should look up to as they would, for example, their own father?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: One of the most basic things is that clergy are not friends. A priest is not a friend to his parishioners. We can share a beer, we can have a meal together but we’re not buddies, we’re not Super Bowl buddies, we don’t hang out non-stop and so forth unless it’s in the capacity of priest-parishioner and so there is a barrier where there are priests that are very jovial, friendly and open. I’m one of them. I push the border of being happy, tell jokes, be very open to everybody and so forth but it doesn’t mean that you’ll be at my house Monday to Friday and we’re going to be hanging out from morning to night, that you’re going to see me in my shorts or we’ll go to a beach together and that kind of stuff. I do that with my family and with my very close circle of friends but in the capacity of priest-parishioner that is not something that should be widely practiced because there is a distance which gives responsibility. It’s mutual. For example, why do priests have a kind of distinct look? Why do we have these beards and long hair? In one way, people are looking at us and so they act in a more respectful and a different way when they see a clergyman but it’s for me. If I’m walking around like this, I can’t behave however I want. It is a constant reminder to me that I have a greater burden to bear and that I have a certain set of criteria imposed on me which I chose. Nobody stuck me with it and I have to abide by this for the greater good and for my own person.
Djuradj Vujcic: Isn’t it important for people to remember that the faith itself is perfect and people are not perfect? Do you think that maybe in this sense, priests are held to an unfair higher standard?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It is paramount, it is paramount. How many times have I heard people say it about me: ‘I don’t like that priest, I don’t like that he does this or he does that and I’m not going to church’. That is absolutely wrong. The priest has deficiencies as a human being. As everybody else, the priest has deficiencies, mistakes, some wrong habits, you know, that are a part of who he is and that he’s struggling with probably. Sometimes these mistakes are not so obvious but the Church, the grace that the priest carries through his ordination, through the laying on of hands of a Bishop making him a clergyman is perfect. It is infallible. The grace of the Church is something that cannot be tarnished by the sins of a Bishop. All the Bishops in the world, a priest or all the priests in the world…the grace of the Church is impeccable and our love for the Church should be towards this grace which is the presence of God on earth and every priest has it through ordination. He has the Church’s (God’s) blessing to have this grace and so the deficiencies of an individual clergyman should not be disqualifying factors in diminishing our love toward the Church or towards God.
Djuradj Vujcic: How important is it for young people to be involved in the Church in your opinion?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It is fundamental. I use that word a lot (laughs). We’re not a fundamentalist church but I think it is one of those crucial things where the Church even sometimes bends what is perceivable to be acceptable in our community just to draw the young people in toward the Church. For example, a church will often give its hall or organize a youth party so that they come there, they interact on church grounds, the priest is there and he finds a way to talk to somebody. We’re on these Facebooks, these Instagrams, these Facetimes – all this new stuff we try to follow and sometimes it’s onerous. I’m telling you, man. Learning Instagram when you’ve never even heard of it takes time but you do it so that you’re present in the mannerism which young people communicate. You have to learn the slang sometimes which – I’m not an old man, I’m 34 – but some of the things that 25-year-olds are using as common words goes over my head because when I was their age we spoke differently. So, you learn these things, you throw it in in kind of a half-humorous manner but the fundamental thing or the most basic thing is that you build trust. You build trust with young people and they see that you’re just a normal person with a firm set of beliefs and if you build that trust then you can get into serious religious conversation on the faith and get them involved in sacramental life.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you find there’s a gap when it comes to age groups? That it’s little children and parents but then people – for example, I’m almost 28 – people my age don’t really flock to church? If so, do you know why?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: There are several reasons I have. One which is not very popular but I believe that some of the people who are the leaders in the church are older just kind of because the church is such a traditional structure. The older people are the ones that set the tone. They’re the ones that we look to and from generation to generation in the last fifty years I believe things have changed so dramatically in the way the world functions especially in the West versus fifty years prior to that and that’s because of the technology, because of people’s lack of attention, lack of reading what people found entertaining etc. Fifty years ago if somebody sat down with you and started talking to you about the surface or the population of a country in the world and its geographical topography – that’s somebody that’s educated, has read books and so forth. Now we start talking about that and if I’m lying, you’re going to pull out a phone, Google it and you’re going to call me on it and so things work at a much more expedient pace. Young people these days do not have the attention span that people had before and we have to move with this. If the Church is run by people that are Bishops 60, 70, 80-years-old – it’s not easy for me as a 35-year-old to catch on to all of these things, can you imagine then how much more challenging it is for them? I think this is something that has always been present in the Church. I think it’s something that always will be present between the late teen years (seventeen or eighteen) kind of until you get married or maybe even have children you don’t find many of those people in church and the reason being they’re struggling. They’re trying to figure out who they are, a lot of them are partying, having fun doing whatever but when life becomes real and when it stops being clubbing in downtown Toronto or hanging out at soccer games or whatever else and people – that’s just kind of passé – but when you start marrying, when you have children then life changes and now the things that were interesting to you when you were twenty-one are no longer as interesting and you start reading, introducing these questions into your life where hopefully you have a good enough foundation from your youth so that in your early teen years when you were forming your mind from your parents, you have enough of a base that you come back to the Church’s teaching when you’re looking for some of these answers and if the parents do it right, if the parents leave room for questions which can be answered by saying ‘I don’t know the answer or I’ll find out’ or ‘I’ll ask somebody’ then people have the children build a trust for the Church and its teachings. One of the worst things you can do is tell a child ‘that’s just the way it is, we’re Serbian, you’re Orthodox and that’s just the way we do it.’ That’s terrible, that’s dismissive, it seems shallow and it is a very lackadaisical approach towards something which should be a compass through all of our life.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you find that churches in the diaspora have to take on more roles than a church normally would? Does this maybe make people forget that this is a church and not for example a cultural club?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Yeah, that’s something that we struggle with a lot in the diaspora. That the churches have become congregational places, soccer teams, folklore groups, ladies’ organizations, retiree organizations and so forth. It has its place and it’s good because people gather around the Church, they use the property (a certain portion of people that aren’t very churchy) and spend their efforts organizing a soccer field we’ll keep on the church ground. If you give them a field to kick a ball and so forth it has mutual benefits but there are also downsides where some churches become bingo centres, Friday fish fry centres, places that we hang out and play bocce ball, poker or our kids dance but they don’t have any or minimal interaction with the spiritual life which is really why that place exists. If your church ground is more focused on Serbian dance or soccer or roasting meat and beer and the church is empty on Sunday then everything is upside down.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you find that it is maybe more challenging to be a Serbian Orthodox priest outside of Serbia? Do you find that it would be easier maybe to be a priest back home as they say?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I can’t say easier. I think it’s different. They have things over there which are quite hard. I understand when living in Canada or the US it is difficult to find political support there – government support for some of the things that we stand for and I completely understand that. Imagine being a priest in a country that declares itself to be 90% Orthodox Christian baptized and they don’t have understanding for some of the basic things that we stand for. That’s a heartbreaker and you know the clergy there have their own challenges. We don’t have material challenges here. We have a basic pay, we have housing usually or an allowance for that and our wives usually work and so we have a decent life as far as the material side of things are concerned. Over there it’s not so easy. There are very poor clergy families and then you have all sorts of places that have real daily threats just because they are clergymen or Orthodox Christians. We don’t experience that here, thank God, so it can’t be as simple as “more difficult here”. It’s more difficult in some ways but some of the things that I experienced when I go back home and I see what the clergy deal with and – God help them because they have some challenges and issues that we certainly don’t here in Canada.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is the Serbian Orthodox Church outside of Serbia a way for people – for example like me who were born here in Canada and have only been to Serbia once – is it a way for us to be connected because we’re spiritually close but physically far away?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Yeah, it is. It is. That’s one of the plus sides of being an ethnic church is that the Serbian culture, the Serbian language, the Serbian music, food, all of this folklore is intertwined into the Christian Orthodox message. That has its downsides as well. Sometimes people focus more on being Serbian than being an Orthodox Christian and a church is not here primarily for this but its primary mission is not to teach your child the Serbian language. You should do that at home with your kids. The Church’s primary mission is not to make your kid a good dancer (although that’s good if they become a good dancer) and it is not a place for you to congregate and play bocce ball and cards. It’s good if it gives you some of the social relief and companionship but its fundamental, primary and lasting goal is to bring people to salvation. It is a religious goal and spiritual goal and so all of this other stuff piggybacks on it but it is not the body which carries the Church. The body which carries the Church and sometimes the knapsack on the back piggybacking is heavy but the body which carries the Church is Jesus Christ and that is what we need to grasp onto. Everything else that the Church has had thrown onto its back is extra and it’s most often here that the language barrier is quite often a topic. If somebody doesn’t speak Serbian or they have a very basic understanding of Serbian and they’re twenty-two years old and they were born in Canada and they have a very, very basic conversational knowledge of the language and their mother or father is standing there insisting that the priest speaks Serbian to them then something is wrong there. I am NOT there to teach you the language. The priest is not Serbian Rosetta Stone. The priest is there to teach you your faith and so if I see the youth can communicate at a higher level in English then I will speak to you in English or Russian or Greek or Swahili or Hebrew or whatever language I feel you would get it best because that is what Jesus Christ did. He was all things to all people. St. Paul said: I was all things to all people. If he went to a Greek he tried to make him understand who and what Jesus Christ is and his message. He didn’t fight for him to become a Hebrew or a Roman or whatever else and so it’s good but the place for your child to learn Serbian is in a Serbian classroom in a Serbian textbook and with you at home. Not in church, that is not our primary goal.
Djuradj Vujcic: Does this tie into the important role parents have in educating their kids at home? For example, not just bringing their kids to you once a week on Sunday for Bible study and then expecting you to do their job for them?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: If the parents don’t have Church in the home seven days a week, it fails. The priest becomes this guy with a big beard and a long black dress that the kids are in awe of. They will turn thirteen, they will hit puberty and nothing will awe them. They will think they’re smarter than Mom and Dad, they will think they’re smarter than the Church and they will think they’re smarter than everything in the world and then that awe factor is gone and if they don’t have a sound understanding of the Church and it wasn’t present at home and they don’t have a close relationship with the priest then it is moot. So, the parents that are bringing somebody into the Church – it has to be in the home and it can’t be in the home three-four times a year, it has to be in the home every day. The more it is in a home, the more chance you have of your child being a good Orthodox Christian.
Djuradj Vujcic: I wanted to touch again on live streams. Is there an official Serbian Orthodox Church stand on this? I noticed some priests do the live stream and some don’t?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: There is debate or a difference of opinion on live streaming. I understand both. I’m one of those people that is for live streaming because if you’re – I feel that the good – the presence that it gives of the Church in a person’s life with our liturgical life in absentia occurring these days – outweighs the negative aspects. The basic understanding of a liturgy is that you’re there physically and you’re going to participate and you’re going to commune so if we were going in some ways strictly by the efforts of the Church, when the priest or the deacon says ‘catechumens depart and those who aren’t baptized depart’ we should all be shutting down our screens and/or the priest shutting off the camera that’s transmitting the service but the goal in live streaming at least for me – and I think for my fellow co-celebrant in Kitchener here Fr. Goran – is to just bring something to the people. They’re not participating in the real way that we are meant to participate but we’re bringing it to them in some way at least and so we don’t have a period of two or three or four months where they’re not going to have any kind of access to their own live community where they would go and pray. So, watching from home, the radio, over the Internet is in no way participation in the Liturgy however it is a level of involvement which is better than nothing.
Djuradj Vujcic: Why is it that when someone really wants to go every Sunday to the Holy Liturgy – why is it then that they find sleeping in on Sunday is the best time to sleep in and they find all sorts of excuses not to go but they want to go?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It is very simple: because the devil doesn’t want you to succeed. The devil is a liar and the devil will fill your head with any kind of lies that it knows you’re weak to. So if you have an issue with food, the devil will say ‘why don’t you just have a big family breakfast and it’ll bring everybody together and you’ll all feel great’ and you’re gonna say ‘yeah that’s a good idea’ and then the most important meal of the week which is having Communion in church is what you’ve deprived your family of for some eggs and sausage which you can have seven or six other days a week. Or if you’re somebody that, you know, works six days a week at a difficult physical job, the devil will say ‘you’re tired, you’re providing for your family, just sleep, rest, God understands, trust me, God understands’ but it’s like saying ‘oh the doctor knows what’s good for me’ and then not doing what the doctor would tell you. It’s like saying ‘yeah he wants me to exercise and eat good food and take my insulin because I’m a diabetic’ but then you say ‘nah, forget it I’m not gonna do it today because I’m gonna sleep in because I’m tired’ well that’s not the way it works and nobody can chastise you for it. I have lots at church regularly. I’m not gonna beat them with a Bible stick but the responsibility is something that we cannot escape that will catch up to us and maybe it will not catch up to us in this world but it will certainly in the next.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is this why it’s important to have spiritual counsel? To tie in to that, we have a monastery in Milton. Do you think that maybe one day we can fulfill our dream of having monks that we can learn from?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: So, we do have monks. We have two full-time monks there now and a Bishop being the third I guess but it’s difficult for a Bishop to be involved in day-to-day kind of stuff but we have two full-time monks. Оne of them is fluent in Serbian and the other monk in English – he’s a fourth-generation American born of Serbian heritage – so if you aren’t proficient in Serbian you can go there where you have Fr. Sava if you’re not proficient in English and if you prefer speaking Serbian you have Fr. German and both monks have had an extensive life experience. The Milton monastery is something that the Serbian community has made into a very untraditional monastery. A monastery is not a grounds where you should be having picnics, where you should be having singers coming in with bands, you know, 100 yards away from a cemetery, soccer games and stuff like that. There’s a lot less of that – less and less thank God – but that is not really what a traditional monastery does and I understand that it was a congregation of Serbian people for a time and so it served its purpose for that but those times are over. There’s no bombings, there’s no wars back home, there’s none of this stuff that we all need to get together and commune that we cannot do in our Church so the monastery needs to become an elevated place of spiritual life. It needs to become – look at the most successful monasteries on this continent. Holy Trinity Russian Monastery in Jordanville, St. Anthony’s Monastery, the Greek monastery in Arizona, in Canada we can go to Bolton which is a convent of the Greek Orthodox Church also started by Elder Ephraim (Moraitis). Those are places of spiritual silence. You walk in there and nobody’s wearing shorts, nobody’s walking their dog through the property or biking through there or roasting chevapi or sausages. It is a place where you come for a spiritual need, you fulfill it and you leave. It is the place for people who have left this world where nuns or monks live a life of spiritual, prayerful solitude fulfilling the vows which they took. Not a place where they need to be emptying garbage cans on Sunday night or Monday morning because 300 people came to have a birthday party. That’s wrong and that is something that we need to fix. It is not anybody’s fault, it is not the former Bishop’s fault, the current Bishop’s fault, it is not the priests’ fault. It is all of our fault and we all need to work on bettering that and making that because the benefit will not be to the monks that will be living there or to the Bishop. The benefit will be for all of us. Every single one of us will have a benefit if we have a strong, serious, spiritual monastery that we can go to when we need that in our life and we all need it more often than we like to think.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is this something Bishop Mitrofan is working towards?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Oh, definitely. We’re all working towards it. The focus and the lifestyle up there honestly is changing day to day more and more in that direction. Every morning, every evening, there are church services. Every day Saturday and Sunday there’s liturgies, the monks are always in the monastery – at least one of them. If one of them goes to the store or something the other one is there on duty available so if people walk in then the monastery church is open all the time. You know, there’s a more present spiritual aura, environment, activity and I work in the office there several days a week every week and it looks more and more like a traditional monastery.
Djuradj Vujcic: That’s very good to hear and to cap off, what message would you have for us to continue on during this pandemic and to not lose faith?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Obedience. One of the fundamental things which you learn as a seminarian – so, I went to a Russian seminary. When I showed up there, not far – I wasn’t in Moscow – at the end of my education but it was just in upstate New York. You show up, you think you know everything, that you know everything better than everyone, you’ve got a beard, you go, you do your prayers, you’re doing everything, you know, the “best way” and sometimes it takes a year, sometimes it takes three-four years or sometimes you realize some things once you’re gone five-six years out of a monastery or seminary lifestyle and the basic thing is obedience. You are not the top deciding factor and if spiritual life is something which is present and our faith is something present that is why it is so important to have a spiritual father. Somebody that is already in your life above you. You are not the one that gets to decide, there are people older than you so you have a priest, the priest has a Bishop, the Bishop has a Synod, the Synod has the Council of Bishops, the Council of Bishops has an Ecumenical Council so the Church always has these steps or hierarchy which is not something that is there to make sure we are punished or that we strictly follow these rules. No, it’s there as a level, as an implemented guidance system for all of us which leads to these people on top of the Bishops who are the successors of the Apostles who have the greatest grace among us and who have the greatest knowledge. This is why it is usually older people because they’ve seen more, they pray more, they fast more and so they’re wiser and this is why you want them to be at the top of that church pyramid trying to trinkle down the right instructions and if everybody on the way down to all of the lay people who have just children and a basic family then people are following the instructions of the Church. The Church in general, not just your community church in Kitchener, Toronto or wherever but the voice of the Church in general, then we can get through anything. This pandemic is nothing new, there have been other pandemics. Unrest in the United States is nothing new, it’s happened there and it’s happened in other places and there’s ways to get around it. Wars – nothing new, it’s happened before and there’s ways to get around it. The fundamental thing and you can call it a million different things, you can have different strategies – the Church’s approach is always love and that is the only thing – you do work which can solve any kind of a problem whether it is a pandemic, whether it is human rights issues whether it is war, conflict and anything in the world and those are big picture things it could be just something in your day-to-day life, the solution to it is love because we do all that in many different ways, it takes different forms but the Church’s teaching is love and everything that the Church wants us to do, everything that the Church tries to implement in our daily life, everything that the Church gives us of itself – its lowest common denominator is love. God’s endless, self-sacrificing love to better us. That is why Jesus Christ is the epitome of love in the world that’s passed and the world that will come. God took on the form of man, He took on our body which hungers, which thirsts, which feels pain. Jesus felt all of that and it in the end, He was killed and shamed and He took all of that, wrapped it together, defeated it and resurrected giving us hope and that is the most fundamental, most basic paramount and an important virtue of an Orthodox Christian is having this hope in the resurrection.
Djuradj Vujcic: Thank you so much, Fr. Jovan, for taking the time and I hope we can do this again sometime.
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Likewise. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure having a chat. Usually I have to do bilingual which sometimes is entertaining but it is always nice to speak to somebody that is young, relatively close to me in age and has a sound knowledge of the Church and thirsts or hungers for more. It encourages a priest to do more and to be better.
Djuradj Vujcic: Thanks again and Christ is risen!
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Indeed He is risen! God bless you, thank you.
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I’m not sure. People ask that magical question, you know, if there’s some kind of a calling or something. It’s one of those things that I just kind of always liked and always wanted from the earliest age of having memories of my grandmother bringing me to church. But I can’t say that I had some kind of an epiphany moment that told me ‘aha it is this minute I can define as my decision point of wanting to become a priest’. It’s just something that you have a zeal for, a thirst for and you just drive toward it. God kind of leads you in that direction.
Djuradj Vujcic: Were you ordained a priest in 2013?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Yes. November 23, 2013.
Djuradj Vujcic: What is your experience being a priest in Canada? What would be a Canadian’s typical reaction to hearing the words Orthodox Christian and Orthodox Christianity?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I think that Canadians are much more accepting of you telling them you’re a clergyman or an Orthodox priest than even some of our own people – some of the Serbian people – who have these taboos that they’re stuck with even if they’re church-going people that a priest is some kind of a separate caste or something and they put you in a framework which usually very few people have (have a decent understanding of what a priest’s life looks like) so I think the Canadian people in general – non-Serbian Orthodox Canadians – are quite accepting and it may be that my approach to it is quite confident and accepting of others and so it’s reciprocal but I think it’s just a general aspect of Canadian society to be accepting of whoever wants to be anything as long as they’re a decent citizen and a good person.
Djuradj Vujcic: How important is it for Orthodox priests to be out in the community to – I don’t want to say evangelize – but let people know about Orthodox Christianity?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I think without evangelizing and doing outreach being an Orthodox priest in a country that is mostly not Orthodox Christian, we’d be missing our target and evangelization doesn’t have to be to the point of we’re going out to convert everybody to being Serbian Orthodox but just to bear witness to the faith and to bear witness to Christ’s message to everybody. God loves everybody so I don’t know, I don’t have to come into your house or pound on your door and give you my literature and try and convert you by getting you a job or buying you some furniture or something like that it should be just that. Even my neighbor who may be an atheist, a Hindu, a Muslim, Jewish, any other kind of Christian – he’s going to know that I’m an Orthodox Christian, at that an Orthodox priest which is one step further, and say: this is a decent person if that’s the code that he lives by then I can respect that or, God willing, maybe even look into it a bit further and then maybe wish to be baptized and become a member of the Orthodox Church but we’re not really in the business of going out there and grabbing people and soliciting. We don’t solicit in that sense but we do evangelize and that should be the message of the Church I believe very much so but at some point when you are serving ethnic churches, ethnic religious communities like our churches – Serbian Orthodox where predominantly people are Serbs or of Serbian heritage – you have road blocks which are unknown in other faith communities that are multicultural.
Djuradj Vujcic: So do people have the wrong idea about us? Does the word Orthodox maybe have the wrong connotations when they hear it?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Sometimes – especially living in a society that we live in here in Canada which is a quite liberal society – it does have connotations of this incredibly old-school, rigid, archaic, stoic kind of masculine group. But the Orthodox Church – even though our customs (a lot of them) are ancient – in fundamental essence has an accepting and welcoming tone for people with all sorts of outlooks on life and with all sorts of perspectives. The Church has a quite wide spectrum of people that it accepts into its cradle so we do get sometimes labeled as being unwelcoming, closed doors and so forth but it is quite the opposite once you get to know it.
Djuradj Vujcic: Right. The Orthodox Church is timeless so it kind of remains unchanged but at the same time it has existed for 2000 years so it can exist today. How important is it for the Orthodox Church to remain unchanged – for example the Holy Liturgy?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Well, the Holy Liturgy isn’t something that’s unchanged. The Holy Liturgy and its essence is unchanged and that is a repetition of Christ’s message – eat this bread this is my body, drink from this cup this is my blood – and that’s the New Testament (the New Covenant) but the Liturgy in its form has changed. I mean, just the very original – imagine what happened with Christ and His Apostles in that room compared to what we have today – it has obviously some modifications and we know through the centuries that what we have as the Liturgy has changed in minor ways. The themes haven’t changed, the structure hasn’t changed but there are some practices which have changed. One of them that’s very actual these days is how to give Communion whether or not with a spoon and you know some people get very emotional without having fundamental historical knowledge and they say, you know, for example, that the Church has been giving Communion with the spoon for 2000 years. Well that’s simply not factual. Now, I’m not one of those people that thinks we should be changing that and I think we should stay with giving Communion with the spoon but that only came into wide practice after about eight or nine hundred years of Christianity existing so we have to be very careful with those kinds of generalizations of nothing changing. The things which cannot change and we cannot allow to change are the fundamental teachings of the Church – the dogmas – everything else has room for modification.
Djuradj Vujcic: Modification in which way? Just small tweaks and not substantial changes?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: You know, if you look at it – if you reverse it for example: in the original Church in the first several centuries we had deaconesses which were females that were female clergy and they were somebody that had a liturgical role in helping with services in a minor way – delivering Communion to other Christians and so forth – so that is one of those questions that you get a lot in Western society: why aren’t women allowed to be priests, why can’t women go in to the altar and so forth and it simply isn’t so black and white as people make it sound and a lot of those questions of why the Church can’t change and modify itself – there actually is an underlying motive which is not Christian in its essence if people are honest with themselves. It always has some kind of other philosophy which is newer than Church philosophy that Jesus Christ taught us and this underlying tone is always something human-made and the Church does change, it does modify – it is very slow to move. It checks. For example, if the Bishops decide something in a council, the next Council of Bishops needs to ratify it so let’s say that could be hundreds of years we’re talking about between something being widely accepted. Then it has to be noted that the clergy, the priests, the monks and all of the people have kind of accepted this and then you can say ‘yeah, this is something that is widely accepted by the Church’. There have been a lot of things that a Council of Bishops for example will decide and it just doesn’t get accepted by the people or by the clergy and over time it gets thrown out.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you think that maybe these criticisms begin with someone saying something incorrectly? Do you think that people who don’t know the religion say something that doesn’t get checked and it just becomes accepted as fact?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: There are a lot of instances where generalizations or anti-clerical or whatever other types of philosophies play into criticism of the Church. The Church does not politically entertain any kind of view unless it’s so simplistic as saying ‘we’re atheists, we’re anti-Church and we’re anti-God and we’re going to infringe on your freedom’ but even then the Church finds a modus operandi like for example during the Soviet times when it was just blatant and open aggressive persecution of the Church. The Church still found ways to work and to function even under those circumstances from World War II when the Soviet Union for example was coming at a huge crisis in its efforts against Nazism so forth and the onslaught – they (the Church) came back and supported the Soviet government with Stalin. They were in essence supporting the people, the suffering people and trying to gather the rounds and it gave the Church a lot of credibility because it was able to put aside for example somebody that was a huge threat to its very own existence but through its love and through its self-sacrifice, the Church was able to show that any political affiliation, any political – even outright extremist atheist communism – is something that the Church can tolerate because its goals, its timelines are not from election to election or from quality to quality. It is something that exists from the beginning of time. I mean, it will exist until the end of time.
Djuradj Vujcic: How is it that now we have a problem where – not only Orthodox churches but other places of worship as well – have been deemed non-essential? Is there anything we can do to convince people that they are indeed essential?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: So, there is an ongoing communication between our Orthodox Bishops – Romanian, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian etc. – and they have exchanges. I think they’re going to have a phone conference tomorrow or on Tuesday as well and as the situation develops they also look at what are our options and of course, this expands into efforts with other Christian groups particularly the Copts, Roman Catholics, Lutherans and other traditional kind of Christian denominations. The most alarming thing, it’s kind of understandable, we had this Corona scare and now it’s kind of winding down and we anticipate or we expect that we should be among the first ones allowed to reopen or go back to business – go back to the business of praying congregationally. But you know, I think there’s widespread understanding of the government’s or the public officials’ reservations and that we can understand. What we cannot understand is, for example, the province of Alberta banning Communion and giving a guideline for the reopening of churches at 250 people and then simply saying you cannot consume any food including Communion from a common chalice when they know that it’s a widespread practice among most Christians, certainly among all Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians and Oriental Orthodox, so this is something that infringes on our rights. Whether there’s five of us in church, ten, fifty or it’s a packed house, the government should not have the right to interfere in how we are Christian as long as we are not harming or infringing on anybody else’s rights whatever rights they may be and I think one of the fundamental things which we do is we try to be good citizens of the countries that we live in particularly in Canada even though sometimes some of the practices or the teachings don’t exactly abide by what we believe in but you will not see an Orthodox Church take any official stance against a government unless it is infringing on our basic and fundamental rights. And there are some things which are alarming right now but God willing it’s just temporary and it’ll blow over in the next weeks or months.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is that the official stance as well of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the Diocese of Canada?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I can’t speak on behalf of the Bishop because there hasn’t been any kind of an official stance other than for the churches and the clergy to abide by whatever the provincial regulations are, however, one of the things that our Bishop made quite clear is that the delivery of Communion to our faithful is not to be modified. Now, that becomes interesting when you have this Alberta kind of guideline so I think there are creative ways that we have to work with the public authorities so that we’re not in collision with them and they don’t feel that we’re putting anybody at risk but on the same hand that we are not having our religious rights infringed upon.
Djuradj Vujcic: So being administered Holy Communion with one chalice – that is definitely one thing that cannot be modified?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It can, technically. But it shouldn’t. You can modify it under really strenuous, pressing circumstances and even that should be something that is so temporary or so extraordinary that it doesn’t happen more than once or twice. That’s my opinion.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is there something that we can do to help? Maybe contact a Member of Provincial Parliament? I mean we the laity.
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: There have been several appeals for petitions and letters sent to the MPs and so forth. My personal opinion is if we stuck it out through Easter and through Holy Week we can probably do so a little while more without getting too antsy. The summer is quite historically a very slow period in church so if you take last year’s patterns of church attendance there shouldn’t be very many people that are getting extremely upset about Church limits in July or August because those people weren’t in church in July or August last year for the most part. So if being patient during the summer months is something that we have to do because that’s the government direction, I see no issue with it at this rate. That’s my personal opinion. We are under very pressing and irregular circumstances. We’re live-streaming our services through Facebook, YouTube and so forth. We only go in with the priests and an assistant or two and we lock the church. Actually, once we’re in for the church service, the priests are doing their utmost to visit people if the circumstances allow and so forth. We’re constantly on phone calls, Skype, Zoom meetings etc. The larger gatherings like our church picnics and summer celebrations, the summer camp and so forth are being postponed or cancelled so we’re being responsible as much as we can but we’re very weary and afraid of the government sticking its fingers into how we administer Communion or how we’re going to have a church service behind closed doors etc. We don’t harm anybody, we pray for the government, we pray for civil authorities, we pray for the health, the peace, the salvation of everyone not just Serbian Orthodox Christians and I think that if this is a country which prides itself in separation of church and state then the state needs to abide by that and they should let the church do its part as long as it’s not breaking laws and hurting anybody and I don’t see that so we’re keeping a very, very close eye. It’s something that happened in Alberta – it’s isolated, that’s one province and it’s a guideline, it’s not a mandate so we haven’t seen any kind of repression or you know people going after the church for its practices yet. We anticipate there won’t be any but if there are then we’re probably going to have to step up to bring some awareness to this but at this time, I think we should just remain patient, obedient and everything is pointing in the direction that Canada will follow suit with the States and other Western countries which just started relaxing their rules.
Djuradj Vujcic: Can tough times like these ones bring us closer to God?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I think that’s exactly what they do. It’s a fact that when churches are full then priests are busy and when things are difficult people remember church and God when somebody dies, when somebody is ill and we tend to forget it when our bellies are full and we have good wine and cheer and things are just kind of fine and dandy. Only a smaller portion of people remember God when things are good. When it gets difficult and the doctor can’t help and the taxman can’t help and a lawyer can’t help and, I don’t know, the wealth of this world can’t help – then you turn to God. Usually. Not everyone. But I think that this kind of worldwide situation which is very difficult for everybody, I think, and stressful and becoming more and more stressful, people are turning to God and they’re doing it each in their own way and the Church is present trying to walk with everybody through that.
Djuradj Vujcic: Why is it that when people are experiencing tough times and they ask God to help and God does help that they then kind of go like ‘oh, okay, time to continue as I was before’ and they don’t really stop and think ‘maybe this wasn’t a coincidence’?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I’m not sure why but relative to that I can say that the Church doesn’t expect us to be somebody that gets it – the lightbulb goes on and then the light stays on the rest of your life. The Church and the Holy Fathers tell us they expect us to struggle so when the light gets more dim you turn it up. When the light goes off, you find a new lightbulb – you figure out how to get the light back on in other words. It’s a fall and rise kind of struggle and I think that my understanding and perception is a simplistic way of putting it but God expects us to not give up, to struggle, to be good people, to be forgiving people, to be accepting, loving people and I think that God will reward that effort and that struggle. One of the fundamental teachings of Christianity and Orthodoxy is that somebody could have been an evil person all their life and, as one of the Holy Fathers says, even a sincere sigh of repentance in his last moments could be enough for the Lord to accept his repentance and his sorrow and to give him a place in eternity. So, it’s not our position – whether you’re clergy, a Bishop, layman, board member or whatever kind of authority in the Church – to be dismissive of anybody, to be critical of anybody. That’s difficult but one of the simplest ways of looking at it is we pray for God’s will to be done not what we want so you don’t say ‘God, give me the lottery numbers tomorrow morning.’ That doesn’t happen. You pray for God’s will to be done and then one part of it is that we forgive our trespassers – those who have wronged us as we want ourselves forgiven by the Lord and others so those are the two kind of fundamental things. I mean, they’re words from the Lord’s Prayer (from Our Father) but that’s kind of the very simple essence of what the Church expects from us.
Djuradj Vujcic: You mentioned earlier when things are going well and when things are fine and dandy that God is last on the list of things people think about. Why do you think that this is?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Materialism. Materialism is the fundamental driving force which separates us from God and in the West, in Canada where we live, we live in a country that is materially well taken care of. We have places to live that are good, we have plenty of food, plenty of drink. If you’re kind of a person without major issues you can get by with the fundamentals even on social assistance and if you’re a little bit more sound and don’t have major life issues, you can probably get an education or a job that will provide a decent living for you and others and there’s people that excel significantly above that. Material goods in abundance make us focus on them and obtaining more of them or if we’re comfortable, we want more. If I have a 20-inch TV, I want a bigger one and so it is a downward spiral and what it does is it takes away the fundamental things which are most important in life and those are immaterial things, spiritual things out of the focus in our life whereas if you look at the Eastern countries of the world – and I’m not just talking about Christians in the East, I’m talking about other people where there are mass populations of people – they live a much more humble life. Those people are much more focused on a spiritual life and the spiritual values with transgenerational family units so a household where you see grandparents, parents and children living together is perfectly normal whereas – look at us in current times now even with our kind of closest housemate, our spouses, our children. А lot of people are saying ‘I’m going nuts’ and can you imagine that a lot of these families – I mean even in the Balkans up until recently this is what you had. You had these communal housing units where several generations lived together and this was something which was huge and a provider of huge life lessons. Important lasting life lessons for somebody from the get-go. It wasn’t ‘see Grandma and Grandpa once a week or twice a week for lunch or for hanging out after Church’ or so forth. You saw them every day and so you were immersed in respecting somebody that’s older and somebody that gave birth to your mother and your father and so forth so that’s just a small example of some of the things which we are losing because we have more money. We can afford to have Grandma and Grandpa in one house, Mom and Dad in another and live apart so we lose some of these values.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is that why Orthodox Christians fast?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: One of the reasons that we fast is to relieve ourselves of worldly cares and one of them being our body. The Holy Fathers and I’m not anywhere near some kind of a spiritual father like, you know, some of our monks and more experienced confessors that we have but some of the fundamental teachings are the most challenging to put into practice. The first is that if you hunger your body, if you take away caloric food or drink from your body for a brief period of time – even if it’s just for one day – it will be easier for you to focus on other things. It is a fact that may not be supported by science but it is something that I have experienced on my own body and it is something that not eating meat, heavy food and dairy for a while will leave you more focused and you will have more energy and you will feel much better. This is not me saying ‘be a vegetarian or a vegan all the time’. I eat meat but when I skip having a glass of wine with dinner and I’m having simple food, fruits and vegetables and so forth and I’m not focusing on having a meal and all that stuff – first of all, it gives me more time during the day but it gives your body more strength, more awareness and if you’re doing it for spiritual reasons like we do with fasting it gives you more awareness to focus on spiritual gains, on spiritual betterment, learning and so, in a sense, it is giving up something that is material for spiritual focus.
Djuradj Vujcic: For people who fasted not just during Holy Week but on Wednesdays and Fridays and they want to take Holy Communion – how do they go about doing that?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: So there is something that is wrong with the way the Serbian Orthodox community (I’m not sure if others do it as well) approaches – sometimes, not always – Communion. We will fast seven days or three days and they’ll do it even really strict some of them will fast with only water and boiled vegetables and stuff like that. Very simple – no oil, nothing caloric really and then they get Communion and then they stop fasting until you know six months or ten months down the line when they want to have Communion again. That’s wrong. That is not what the Church wants from us. The Church wants us to during every single Liturgy, every single Eucharist we are supposed to commune and we are supposed to partake of the body and blood of Christ. The more often we do, the better it is for us as Orthodox Christians. Coming to a Liturgy and not having Communion is like being invited to somebody’s house for dinner and not eating. Everything that is there – all the prayers, everything that you’re doing there, everything that the priest is doing to prepare is for you to have Holy Communion. So, the ideal would be that we all fast Wednesdays and Fridays in the fasting periods and not just seven days leading up to Communion, that we commune at every Holy Liturgy and that we receive Communion when our confession (the holy sacrament of confession) and repentance when our conscience calls us to do so. So, if you feel that it’s good to be getting into a habit of having confession regularly, let’s say once a week or once every two weeks, excellent. If you feel that you should do it sporadically, maybe I’ll go a month without having confession but then I’ll have a couple of them and the next month or I’ll have ten of them in the next month and so forth. As long as it’s happening and as long as you have a spiritual rhythm then it should be a healthy Christian lifestyle but the most fundamental thing is that Communion should be often in life and Communion should be something that we strive for coming to church. Standing there for an hour and a half listening to all the prayers to sanctify bread and wine – a miracle happening with bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ – and not wanting to go up there, something is missing.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you find that when people get really into Orthodox Christianity – right after being baptized or if they were baptized for example as a baby and then they start actually doing things the way they should be – do you find that people are very gung-ho and they’re really into it? Then they kind of do everything by the book – the Book of all books – and then after a while they start to get burned out and they slow down a bit and they go back to their old ways?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Yeah. So somebody that’s just been baptized, there’s a term for it (it’s called a neophyte) and that is one of the characteristics – not always – but it is quite often present for somebody that just kind of dives into it headfirst. One can train them in – and that’s usually their spiritual father who can train them in – and teach them that not everything is so black and white and that they shouldn’t be a hundred and eighteen percent into it but maybe they should be only 104 percent. Those people are usually in for a rude awakening once they see some of the human side of the Church or the way that the Church has gone through the ages given all the different circumstances. What usually happens to those people is they see a clergyman, a Bishop or a priest or a deacon or a monk that isn’t the ideal that they’ve set up in their own mind. He doesn’t reflect an icon that they have in their house and the world comes crumbling down so that’s why coming into the Church, it is very important that somebody that’s going to be baptized as an adult is catechised, that they go through catechism, they go through religious education to prepare so that they know at least the fundamentals and it can’t be something that’s done in a two-hour block in a few weeks. It has to be something that’s done over a period – ideally a year – where they can go through a whole year cycle, see what’s going on, how it happens, the upside to downside, the practices which could be better and so forth and that they had learned to accept everything that the Church does and then become full members and so forth. Otherwise, what happens is – there’s a saying in Serbian of ‘he’s a bigger Catholic than the Pope’ – it leads you to failure so it is something that has to be tempered. It is something that has to be gradual and it is something that has to be under the leadership, the guidance of a sound spiritual father and that is not always your closest parish priest. Sometimes and ideally if it’s available, if it’s possible, it is somebody in a monastery that is an experienced monk confessor that can lead you through it and with today’s technology that’s usually attainable but in any other sense just a serious and dedicated priest.
Djuradj Vujcic: How important is it for someone to have not just a confessor but a spiritual father as well?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It’s fundamental. It is one of the basic things that you have to do and if you are doing anything without it you’re wrong so having a blessing, having the spiritual permission and the spiritual authority of a confessor father in your life is one of the very basics. If you don’t have it, you’re doing something wrong.
Djuradj Vujcic: How important is it for people to remember that this is their spiritual father and not a friend or a buddy but someone that they should look up to as they would, for example, their own father?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: One of the most basic things is that clergy are not friends. A priest is not a friend to his parishioners. We can share a beer, we can have a meal together but we’re not buddies, we’re not Super Bowl buddies, we don’t hang out non-stop and so forth unless it’s in the capacity of priest-parishioner and so there is a barrier where there are priests that are very jovial, friendly and open. I’m one of them. I push the border of being happy, tell jokes, be very open to everybody and so forth but it doesn’t mean that you’ll be at my house Monday to Friday and we’re going to be hanging out from morning to night, that you’re going to see me in my shorts or we’ll go to a beach together and that kind of stuff. I do that with my family and with my very close circle of friends but in the capacity of priest-parishioner that is not something that should be widely practiced because there is a distance which gives responsibility. It’s mutual. For example, why do priests have a kind of distinct look? Why do we have these beards and long hair? In one way, people are looking at us and so they act in a more respectful and a different way when they see a clergyman but it’s for me. If I’m walking around like this, I can’t behave however I want. It is a constant reminder to me that I have a greater burden to bear and that I have a certain set of criteria imposed on me which I chose. Nobody stuck me with it and I have to abide by this for the greater good and for my own person.
Djuradj Vujcic: Isn’t it important for people to remember that the faith itself is perfect and people are not perfect? Do you think that maybe in this sense, priests are held to an unfair higher standard?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It is paramount, it is paramount. How many times have I heard people say it about me: ‘I don’t like that priest, I don’t like that he does this or he does that and I’m not going to church’. That is absolutely wrong. The priest has deficiencies as a human being. As everybody else, the priest has deficiencies, mistakes, some wrong habits, you know, that are a part of who he is and that he’s struggling with probably. Sometimes these mistakes are not so obvious but the Church, the grace that the priest carries through his ordination, through the laying on of hands of a Bishop making him a clergyman is perfect. It is infallible. The grace of the Church is something that cannot be tarnished by the sins of a Bishop. All the Bishops in the world, a priest or all the priests in the world…the grace of the Church is impeccable and our love for the Church should be towards this grace which is the presence of God on earth and every priest has it through ordination. He has the Church’s (God’s) blessing to have this grace and so the deficiencies of an individual clergyman should not be disqualifying factors in diminishing our love toward the Church or towards God.
Djuradj Vujcic: How important is it for young people to be involved in the Church in your opinion?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It is fundamental. I use that word a lot (laughs). We’re not a fundamentalist church but I think it is one of those crucial things where the Church even sometimes bends what is perceivable to be acceptable in our community just to draw the young people in toward the Church. For example, a church will often give its hall or organize a youth party so that they come there, they interact on church grounds, the priest is there and he finds a way to talk to somebody. We’re on these Facebooks, these Instagrams, these Facetimes – all this new stuff we try to follow and sometimes it’s onerous. I’m telling you, man. Learning Instagram when you’ve never even heard of it takes time but you do it so that you’re present in the mannerism which young people communicate. You have to learn the slang sometimes which – I’m not an old man, I’m 34 – but some of the things that 25-year-olds are using as common words goes over my head because when I was their age we spoke differently. So, you learn these things, you throw it in in kind of a half-humorous manner but the fundamental thing or the most basic thing is that you build trust. You build trust with young people and they see that you’re just a normal person with a firm set of beliefs and if you build that trust then you can get into serious religious conversation on the faith and get them involved in sacramental life.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you find there’s a gap when it comes to age groups? That it’s little children and parents but then people – for example, I’m almost 28 – people my age don’t really flock to church? If so, do you know why?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: There are several reasons I have. One which is not very popular but I believe that some of the people who are the leaders in the church are older just kind of because the church is such a traditional structure. The older people are the ones that set the tone. They’re the ones that we look to and from generation to generation in the last fifty years I believe things have changed so dramatically in the way the world functions especially in the West versus fifty years prior to that and that’s because of the technology, because of people’s lack of attention, lack of reading what people found entertaining etc. Fifty years ago if somebody sat down with you and started talking to you about the surface or the population of a country in the world and its geographical topography – that’s somebody that’s educated, has read books and so forth. Now we start talking about that and if I’m lying, you’re going to pull out a phone, Google it and you’re going to call me on it and so things work at a much more expedient pace. Young people these days do not have the attention span that people had before and we have to move with this. If the Church is run by people that are Bishops 60, 70, 80-years-old – it’s not easy for me as a 35-year-old to catch on to all of these things, can you imagine then how much more challenging it is for them? I think this is something that has always been present in the Church. I think it’s something that always will be present between the late teen years (seventeen or eighteen) kind of until you get married or maybe even have children you don’t find many of those people in church and the reason being they’re struggling. They’re trying to figure out who they are, a lot of them are partying, having fun doing whatever but when life becomes real and when it stops being clubbing in downtown Toronto or hanging out at soccer games or whatever else and people – that’s just kind of passé – but when you start marrying, when you have children then life changes and now the things that were interesting to you when you were twenty-one are no longer as interesting and you start reading, introducing these questions into your life where hopefully you have a good enough foundation from your youth so that in your early teen years when you were forming your mind from your parents, you have enough of a base that you come back to the Church’s teaching when you’re looking for some of these answers and if the parents do it right, if the parents leave room for questions which can be answered by saying ‘I don’t know the answer or I’ll find out’ or ‘I’ll ask somebody’ then people have the children build a trust for the Church and its teachings. One of the worst things you can do is tell a child ‘that’s just the way it is, we’re Serbian, you’re Orthodox and that’s just the way we do it.’ That’s terrible, that’s dismissive, it seems shallow and it is a very lackadaisical approach towards something which should be a compass through all of our life.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you find that churches in the diaspora have to take on more roles than a church normally would? Does this maybe make people forget that this is a church and not for example a cultural club?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Yeah, that’s something that we struggle with a lot in the diaspora. That the churches have become congregational places, soccer teams, folklore groups, ladies’ organizations, retiree organizations and so forth. It has its place and it’s good because people gather around the Church, they use the property (a certain portion of people that aren’t very churchy) and spend their efforts organizing a soccer field we’ll keep on the church ground. If you give them a field to kick a ball and so forth it has mutual benefits but there are also downsides where some churches become bingo centres, Friday fish fry centres, places that we hang out and play bocce ball, poker or our kids dance but they don’t have any or minimal interaction with the spiritual life which is really why that place exists. If your church ground is more focused on Serbian dance or soccer or roasting meat and beer and the church is empty on Sunday then everything is upside down.
Djuradj Vujcic: Do you find that it is maybe more challenging to be a Serbian Orthodox priest outside of Serbia? Do you find that it would be easier maybe to be a priest back home as they say?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: I can’t say easier. I think it’s different. They have things over there which are quite hard. I understand when living in Canada or the US it is difficult to find political support there – government support for some of the things that we stand for and I completely understand that. Imagine being a priest in a country that declares itself to be 90% Orthodox Christian baptized and they don’t have understanding for some of the basic things that we stand for. That’s a heartbreaker and you know the clergy there have their own challenges. We don’t have material challenges here. We have a basic pay, we have housing usually or an allowance for that and our wives usually work and so we have a decent life as far as the material side of things are concerned. Over there it’s not so easy. There are very poor clergy families and then you have all sorts of places that have real daily threats just because they are clergymen or Orthodox Christians. We don’t experience that here, thank God, so it can’t be as simple as “more difficult here”. It’s more difficult in some ways but some of the things that I experienced when I go back home and I see what the clergy deal with and – God help them because they have some challenges and issues that we certainly don’t here in Canada.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is the Serbian Orthodox Church outside of Serbia a way for people – for example like me who were born here in Canada and have only been to Serbia once – is it a way for us to be connected because we’re spiritually close but physically far away?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Yeah, it is. It is. That’s one of the plus sides of being an ethnic church is that the Serbian culture, the Serbian language, the Serbian music, food, all of this folklore is intertwined into the Christian Orthodox message. That has its downsides as well. Sometimes people focus more on being Serbian than being an Orthodox Christian and a church is not here primarily for this but its primary mission is not to teach your child the Serbian language. You should do that at home with your kids. The Church’s primary mission is not to make your kid a good dancer (although that’s good if they become a good dancer) and it is not a place for you to congregate and play bocce ball and cards. It’s good if it gives you some of the social relief and companionship but its fundamental, primary and lasting goal is to bring people to salvation. It is a religious goal and spiritual goal and so all of this other stuff piggybacks on it but it is not the body which carries the Church. The body which carries the Church and sometimes the knapsack on the back piggybacking is heavy but the body which carries the Church is Jesus Christ and that is what we need to grasp onto. Everything else that the Church has had thrown onto its back is extra and it’s most often here that the language barrier is quite often a topic. If somebody doesn’t speak Serbian or they have a very basic understanding of Serbian and they’re twenty-two years old and they were born in Canada and they have a very, very basic conversational knowledge of the language and their mother or father is standing there insisting that the priest speaks Serbian to them then something is wrong there. I am NOT there to teach you the language. The priest is not Serbian Rosetta Stone. The priest is there to teach you your faith and so if I see the youth can communicate at a higher level in English then I will speak to you in English or Russian or Greek or Swahili or Hebrew or whatever language I feel you would get it best because that is what Jesus Christ did. He was all things to all people. St. Paul said: I was all things to all people. If he went to a Greek he tried to make him understand who and what Jesus Christ is and his message. He didn’t fight for him to become a Hebrew or a Roman or whatever else and so it’s good but the place for your child to learn Serbian is in a Serbian classroom in a Serbian textbook and with you at home. Not in church, that is not our primary goal.
Djuradj Vujcic: Does this tie into the important role parents have in educating their kids at home? For example, not just bringing their kids to you once a week on Sunday for Bible study and then expecting you to do their job for them?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: If the parents don’t have Church in the home seven days a week, it fails. The priest becomes this guy with a big beard and a long black dress that the kids are in awe of. They will turn thirteen, they will hit puberty and nothing will awe them. They will think they’re smarter than Mom and Dad, they will think they’re smarter than the Church and they will think they’re smarter than everything in the world and then that awe factor is gone and if they don’t have a sound understanding of the Church and it wasn’t present at home and they don’t have a close relationship with the priest then it is moot. So, the parents that are bringing somebody into the Church – it has to be in the home and it can’t be in the home three-four times a year, it has to be in the home every day. The more it is in a home, the more chance you have of your child being a good Orthodox Christian.
Djuradj Vujcic: I wanted to touch again on live streams. Is there an official Serbian Orthodox Church stand on this? I noticed some priests do the live stream and some don’t?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: There is debate or a difference of opinion on live streaming. I understand both. I’m one of those people that is for live streaming because if you’re – I feel that the good – the presence that it gives of the Church in a person’s life with our liturgical life in absentia occurring these days – outweighs the negative aspects. The basic understanding of a liturgy is that you’re there physically and you’re going to participate and you’re going to commune so if we were going in some ways strictly by the efforts of the Church, when the priest or the deacon says ‘catechumens depart and those who aren’t baptized depart’ we should all be shutting down our screens and/or the priest shutting off the camera that’s transmitting the service but the goal in live streaming at least for me – and I think for my fellow co-celebrant in Kitchener here Fr. Goran – is to just bring something to the people. They’re not participating in the real way that we are meant to participate but we’re bringing it to them in some way at least and so we don’t have a period of two or three or four months where they’re not going to have any kind of access to their own live community where they would go and pray. So, watching from home, the radio, over the Internet is in no way participation in the Liturgy however it is a level of involvement which is better than nothing.
Djuradj Vujcic: Why is it that when someone really wants to go every Sunday to the Holy Liturgy – why is it then that they find sleeping in on Sunday is the best time to sleep in and they find all sorts of excuses not to go but they want to go?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: It is very simple: because the devil doesn’t want you to succeed. The devil is a liar and the devil will fill your head with any kind of lies that it knows you’re weak to. So if you have an issue with food, the devil will say ‘why don’t you just have a big family breakfast and it’ll bring everybody together and you’ll all feel great’ and you’re gonna say ‘yeah that’s a good idea’ and then the most important meal of the week which is having Communion in church is what you’ve deprived your family of for some eggs and sausage which you can have seven or six other days a week. Or if you’re somebody that, you know, works six days a week at a difficult physical job, the devil will say ‘you’re tired, you’re providing for your family, just sleep, rest, God understands, trust me, God understands’ but it’s like saying ‘oh the doctor knows what’s good for me’ and then not doing what the doctor would tell you. It’s like saying ‘yeah he wants me to exercise and eat good food and take my insulin because I’m a diabetic’ but then you say ‘nah, forget it I’m not gonna do it today because I’m gonna sleep in because I’m tired’ well that’s not the way it works and nobody can chastise you for it. I have lots at church regularly. I’m not gonna beat them with a Bible stick but the responsibility is something that we cannot escape that will catch up to us and maybe it will not catch up to us in this world but it will certainly in the next.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is this why it’s important to have spiritual counsel? To tie in to that, we have a monastery in Milton. Do you think that maybe one day we can fulfill our dream of having monks that we can learn from?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: So, we do have monks. We have two full-time monks there now and a Bishop being the third I guess but it’s difficult for a Bishop to be involved in day-to-day kind of stuff but we have two full-time monks. Оne of them is fluent in Serbian and the other monk in English – he’s a fourth-generation American born of Serbian heritage – so if you aren’t proficient in Serbian you can go there where you have Fr. Sava if you’re not proficient in English and if you prefer speaking Serbian you have Fr. German and both monks have had an extensive life experience. The Milton monastery is something that the Serbian community has made into a very untraditional monastery. A monastery is not a grounds where you should be having picnics, where you should be having singers coming in with bands, you know, 100 yards away from a cemetery, soccer games and stuff like that. There’s a lot less of that – less and less thank God – but that is not really what a traditional monastery does and I understand that it was a congregation of Serbian people for a time and so it served its purpose for that but those times are over. There’s no bombings, there’s no wars back home, there’s none of this stuff that we all need to get together and commune that we cannot do in our Church so the monastery needs to become an elevated place of spiritual life. It needs to become – look at the most successful monasteries on this continent. Holy Trinity Russian Monastery in Jordanville, St. Anthony’s Monastery, the Greek monastery in Arizona, in Canada we can go to Bolton which is a convent of the Greek Orthodox Church also started by Elder Ephraim (Moraitis). Those are places of spiritual silence. You walk in there and nobody’s wearing shorts, nobody’s walking their dog through the property or biking through there or roasting chevapi or sausages. It is a place where you come for a spiritual need, you fulfill it and you leave. It is the place for people who have left this world where nuns or monks live a life of spiritual, prayerful solitude fulfilling the vows which they took. Not a place where they need to be emptying garbage cans on Sunday night or Monday morning because 300 people came to have a birthday party. That’s wrong and that is something that we need to fix. It is not anybody’s fault, it is not the former Bishop’s fault, the current Bishop’s fault, it is not the priests’ fault. It is all of our fault and we all need to work on bettering that and making that because the benefit will not be to the monks that will be living there or to the Bishop. The benefit will be for all of us. Every single one of us will have a benefit if we have a strong, serious, spiritual monastery that we can go to when we need that in our life and we all need it more often than we like to think.
Djuradj Vujcic: Is this something Bishop Mitrofan is working towards?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Oh, definitely. We’re all working towards it. The focus and the lifestyle up there honestly is changing day to day more and more in that direction. Every morning, every evening, there are church services. Every day Saturday and Sunday there’s liturgies, the monks are always in the monastery – at least one of them. If one of them goes to the store or something the other one is there on duty available so if people walk in then the monastery church is open all the time. You know, there’s a more present spiritual aura, environment, activity and I work in the office there several days a week every week and it looks more and more like a traditional monastery.
Djuradj Vujcic: That’s very good to hear and to cap off, what message would you have for us to continue on during this pandemic and to not lose faith?
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Obedience. One of the fundamental things which you learn as a seminarian – so, I went to a Russian seminary. When I showed up there, not far – I wasn’t in Moscow – at the end of my education but it was just in upstate New York. You show up, you think you know everything, that you know everything better than everyone, you’ve got a beard, you go, you do your prayers, you’re doing everything, you know, the “best way” and sometimes it takes a year, sometimes it takes three-four years or sometimes you realize some things once you’re gone five-six years out of a monastery or seminary lifestyle and the basic thing is obedience. You are not the top deciding factor and if spiritual life is something which is present and our faith is something present that is why it is so important to have a spiritual father. Somebody that is already in your life above you. You are not the one that gets to decide, there are people older than you so you have a priest, the priest has a Bishop, the Bishop has a Synod, the Synod has the Council of Bishops, the Council of Bishops has an Ecumenical Council so the Church always has these steps or hierarchy which is not something that is there to make sure we are punished or that we strictly follow these rules. No, it’s there as a level, as an implemented guidance system for all of us which leads to these people on top of the Bishops who are the successors of the Apostles who have the greatest grace among us and who have the greatest knowledge. This is why it is usually older people because they’ve seen more, they pray more, they fast more and so they’re wiser and this is why you want them to be at the top of that church pyramid trying to trinkle down the right instructions and if everybody on the way down to all of the lay people who have just children and a basic family then people are following the instructions of the Church. The Church in general, not just your community church in Kitchener, Toronto or wherever but the voice of the Church in general, then we can get through anything. This pandemic is nothing new, there have been other pandemics. Unrest in the United States is nothing new, it’s happened there and it’s happened in other places and there’s ways to get around it. Wars – nothing new, it’s happened before and there’s ways to get around it. The fundamental thing and you can call it a million different things, you can have different strategies – the Church’s approach is always love and that is the only thing – you do work which can solve any kind of a problem whether it is a pandemic, whether it is human rights issues whether it is war, conflict and anything in the world and those are big picture things it could be just something in your day-to-day life, the solution to it is love because we do all that in many different ways, it takes different forms but the Church’s teaching is love and everything that the Church wants us to do, everything that the Church tries to implement in our daily life, everything that the Church gives us of itself – its lowest common denominator is love. God’s endless, self-sacrificing love to better us. That is why Jesus Christ is the epitome of love in the world that’s passed and the world that will come. God took on the form of man, He took on our body which hungers, which thirsts, which feels pain. Jesus felt all of that and it in the end, He was killed and shamed and He took all of that, wrapped it together, defeated it and resurrected giving us hope and that is the most fundamental, most basic paramount and an important virtue of an Orthodox Christian is having this hope in the resurrection.
Djuradj Vujcic: Thank you so much, Fr. Jovan, for taking the time and I hope we can do this again sometime.
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Likewise. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure having a chat. Usually I have to do bilingual which sometimes is entertaining but it is always nice to speak to somebody that is young, relatively close to me in age and has a sound knowledge of the Church and thirsts or hungers for more. It encourages a priest to do more and to be better.
Djuradj Vujcic: Thanks again and Christ is risen!
Fr. Jovan Marjanac: Indeed He is risen! God bless you, thank you.
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Photos
courtesy of UBC archives. |
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Fr. Jovan Marjanac on why the Orthodox Church is Essential
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Last updated on October 13, 2023.
Published by Urban Book Circle on May 31, 2020 Urban Book Circle® (UBC) |
· Edited by Djuradj “George” Vujcic, Danijela Kovacevic Mikic and Prvoslav “Pearse” Vujcic ·
· Design & Artwork by Prvoslav “Pearse” Vujcic and Djuradj “George” Vujcic ·
All rights reserved. Copyright © Urban Book Circle®
· Design & Artwork by Prvoslav “Pearse” Vujcic and Djuradj “George” Vujcic ·
All rights reserved. Copyright © Urban Book Circle®
