The North American Thebaid

A story of photography and pilgrimage

Since I am currently on tour in North America, it seems an appropriate time for this particular guest post. I don’t often ask guests to write here, both because I guard my territory jealously, and because I’m very picky. But sometimes I come across something that needs to be written about, and which I think my readers will connect with.

This is one such time. Some of you may know Ralph Sidway, or ‘Zosimas’, from his comments here over the years. Ralph is also a photographer and writer, and his latest project is a beautiful and original photographic pilgrimage across North America. I will let him tell you more.

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Be careful when you comment here at the Abbey of Misrule. I never expected to be invited to contribute an article to the Abbey, but after I had made a few comments and replies here, and we exchanged a few emails, Paul invited me to do just that. Specifically, I was asked to write about the decade-long creation of my recent photographic coffee table photo book The North American Thebaid - A Photographic Pilgrimage. I really was most chuffed (as I believe the English might say) to be able to take up the invitation.

A definition is in order first: The term ‘thebaid’ denotes the area around the capital of ancient Egypt, Thebes, situated on the Nile River in the south, which became a favourite destination for fourth-century Christian monks and nuns, who fled the world after the legalisation of Christianity in their quest to live out the gospel in its fullness. The term Thebaid became a byword for this early monastic movement.

A thousand years later, a similar monastic flourishing, no less intense, spread across northern Russia, extending east from St. Petersburg through Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. This marshy, cold and forested Northern Thebaid was so named by Russian writers of the nineteenth century, who collected and published the lives of the monks and nuns who spread the Orthodox Christian faith across the vast Russian land.

Now, over two hundred years since Christian Orthodoxy was first planted in America by Russian monastics in Alaska, there are about a hundred Orthodox Christian monasteries across this continent, representing the various local Orthodox traditions (Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, etc). With such a broad monastic movement now sending down roots in the New World, it seemed appropriate to apply the same revered, ancient term to this new spiritual geography: the North American Thebaid.

A seed finally bears fruit

The idea for this project had been with me since shortly after I was received into the Orthodox Church in 1987. My priest at that time had the wonderful practice of leading us on regular pilgrimages to monasteries, in America as well as overseas, and I was so inspired by some of these that I developed the idea of a photographic pilgrimage to monasteries in America. The concept receded into the background and was forgotten, until the winter of 2015, when it returned full force, now even with a title. And it returned precisely when I was staying at a men’s monastery I had been visiting off and on for a decade, testing the life there for three months.

The hour had finally come: as the abbess of one of the beloved women’s monasteries in America said to me around that time: ‘Sometimes things happen according to God’s timing.’ I set out on the first leg of my pilgrimage in September 2016.

What is Photography?

Once I had my bishop’s blessing in 2015, I officially launched my website (which continues to this day and hopefully for a long time to come), and began writing about my vision for the Thebaid Project, as I came to call it, and about photography as a legitimate form of artistic expression, and as a medium capable of pointing beyond itself, as this early passage conveys:

Beyond Photography: the Larger Goal and Purpose

Recognising the Apostolic Work of the Church and the great contribution which monasteries have traditionally made to that holy labour, this photographic pilgrimage must not be misunderstood as merely an opportunity for a fine art depiction of the lives and settings of monks and nuns in North America.

The goal is not merely a handsome photo book. Rather, the book is but a tool in service of the real goal. The point is not to “abstract” or objectify the monastic way, and inadvertently further distance it from the minds and hearts of either the faithful or of seekers.

Rather, the purpose is to help make the monastic life vividly and beautifully present and real, and in the best sense of the word, to challenge our brothers and sisters, especially young people and children, with the radical, martyric — but also joyful — call to follow Christ… which our monastic brothers and sisters faithfully strive to follow every day.

This realisation that the images needed to be published in a physical book has propelled the Thebaid Project from the very start. Although I did post on my web galleries images from many of the monasteries I visited, the goal was always to create a large-format, cloth-bound book, which would present the images with impact, enabling, even compelling the viewer to linger over them, absorb them, wonder over them.

Once the book came out, I took down the web galleries. One simply cannot do justice to still images by viewing them on a screen. In fact, the opposite happens. The sheer volume of images, coupled with the pace of modern life and the unceasing feed across all our screens, serves to fragment our attention and impair our ability to truly appreciate the beautiful or mysterious image, to allow the image to open to us hitherto unseen worlds, and, like a seed of light, to slowly open us up, to grow within us, and perhaps, to begin to change us.

Unlike our ubiquitous screens, a physical book requires concentration, stillness, and a wholly different approach to viewing images, just as it does when reading texts. When approached with thoughtfulness, and even a prayerful intent, a book of fine photographs can have a similar effect to that of a good novel, slowing us down, penetrating, converting and exalting our mind, heart, soul, and conscience. Certain photographers have long recognised this potential within the medium.

Ansel Adams emphasised a ‘way of seeing’ as his essential consideration in making photographs. In his view, a photographer senses and sees, and tries to ‘pre-visualise’ (his word) how to render a scene, so that the resulting photograph is as close as possible to his or her original vision; the tool is subservient to the vision.

Even more important than Adams’ approach to making photographs was his life-purpose in doing so. John Szarkowski, Director of the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1962-1991, appraised Adams’ unique role in modern photography, and his towering influence on the cause of wilderness preservation, but emphasised, ‘Adams did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul that he was trying to save,’ adding that ‘Ansel Adams’s great work was done under the stimulus of a profound and mystical experience of the natural world.’

Going even further, Szarkowski asserts of Adams, ‘He was confessing to a private knowledge that is almost surely incommunicable but that he was nevertheless obliged to attempt to photograph.’

Szarkowski backs up his startling claims by pointing to what we might literally call an ‘epiphany’ which Adams experienced as a young man in the early 1920s on a camping trip in the High Sierra. In Adams’ own words:

I was suddenly arrested in the long crunching path up the ridge by an exceedingly pointed awareness of the light… I saw more clearly than I have ever seen before or since the minute detail of the grasses, the clusters of sand shifting in the wind, the small flotsam of the forest, the motion of the high clouds streaming above the peaks.

This numinous vision reminds one of the theoria (the direct, experiential ‘vision’ or ‘perception’ of God's divine energies) of St Porphyrios of Mount Athos, who could see things far away as if they were near, and in great detail, even the depths of the sea and all the creatures. Perhaps, indeed, Ansel Adams had been granted some profound glimpse by God’s grace of the luminosity of the created world. ‘Consider the lilies of the field… for even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’

A final quote from Ansel Adams seems to indicate that he was transformed by that glimpse, and it helps us to appreciate his words if we call to mind a saying from an Orthodox mystical saint, Isaac of Nineveh: ‘Silence is the language of the age to come.’ Adams writes:

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

John Sexton, Ansel Adams’ assistant towards the end of his life, and long established as one of the great landscape photographers in his own right, with several award-winning books to his credit, writes movingly of the transformative effect photography has on him, implicitly inviting us to share in his journey. In the preface to his book Recollections (2006), Sexton writes, ‘I feel privileged to communicate through the medium of photography, to pursue the magic of light as it transforms the silver emulsions of my film and paper, as well as the emulsion of my heart, mind, and soul.’

Another important photographer of the twentieth century, Minor White (who also worked with Ansel Adams for a time), articulated a symbolic, philosophical approach to photography, as this quote of his reveals:

When a photograph functions as an Equivalent we can say that at that moment, and for that person the photograph acts as a symbol or plays the role of a metaphor for something that is beyond the subject photographed… One does not photograph something simply for ‘what it is,’ but ‘for what else it is.’

One biographer of White notes that ‘White was a deeply religious man whose whole life was a spiritual journey. His photography arose out of this and was an inherent part of this pilgrimage.’

Time and word count prevent me from more than mentioning other remarkable photographers, who truly see beyond the arc of this world to that which is beyond sight, visionaries like Michael Kenna (minimalist seer of the Tao), Paul Caponigro (known for his intuitive symbolism), Henri Cartier-Bresson (master of the ‘decisive moment’), Joseph Sudek (called the ‘Poet of Prague’), and others.

From the very beginning of my Thebaid pilgrimage, I embraced this strange paradox innate to photography and made it my goal to convey through visual means glimpses of the unseen life of monks and nuns of North America. Put another way, the Thebaid Project is not really so much about what is seen, as what is unseen.

What is Pilgrimage?

The recently martyred Orthodox priest, Fr. Daniil Sysoev of Moscow (†2009), prolific writer, preacher, missionary, and church builder, was certainly quotable, and one of his sayings has stuck with me for fifteen years or so now: ‘If you want to see miracles, you should become either a missionary, or a martyr!’ Fr. Daniil was being both prophetic and ironic, as the young priest himself would be martyred in front of the altar in the church he founded in southern Moscow not long after speaking those words.

I would add one category to his short list: ‘If you want to see miracles, you should become either a missionary, or a martyr… or a pilgrim.’

In his article, ‘What is a Holy Pilgrimage?’ (featured in my book), Schemahieromonk Ambrose (Young) touches on this aspect of the way of a pilgrim in a quote from Henri Troyat’s book, Daily Life in Russia under the Last Tsar:

Generally [the pilgrim] was silent, but when questioned he would tell of churches, monasteries, tombs of saints, and icons of special sanctity which he had seen; he would tell of saints and sinners, of spiritual life and spiritual death, of both common and extraordinary incidents along the road.

Fr. Ambrose continues, emphasising deep, personal repentance as the essential goal of any true Christian pilgrimage:

Very often the pilgrims of old went on pilgrimage specifically in order to find some good priest or wise elder to whom they could make the confession of a lifetime, the kind of confession that literally would open up well-springs of repentance from within. Without seeking this spirit of repentance, a pilgrimage is barren and stillborn, without fruit, not satisfying to God or to our own human hearts.

In my travels I have heard of such ‘confessions of a lifetime,’ from pilgrims stunned to have some elderly, stooped, and in one case blind, priest tell them their sins! ‘And sometimes you did such and such…? And sometimes then…?’ They each told me they could do nothing other than nod their head with tears, saying, ‘Yes, yes,’ as the list grew. But the shock at confessing before a clairvoyant elder soon gave way to a feeling of being totally cleansed after the sacrament of repentance was completed.

Fr. Ambrose concludes his message on Holy Pilgrimage:

During any kind of pilgrimage, we must struggle to keep our hearts from anything and anyone that does not lead us to God. This is the lesson we can learn from the great Orthodox pilgrims of old, those for whom the whole of life was one zealous and focused pilgrimage—the journey from this life to the next, from earthly life to eternal life.

Fruits of Pilgrimage

Not surprisingly, everything I have received during my pilgrimage has been largely subtle and unseen, in a way, similar to the goals I set for my images. They are not so much seen, as experienced, or as the recently sainted Mother Gavrilia, the ‘Ascetic of Love,’ might say, they are ‘encounters.’

I remember visiting St Anthony the Great Monastery in Arizona the summer of 2018, and receiving a blessing from Elder Ephraim there about a year and a half before his repose. He was a monk from Mount Athos, the disciple of Elder Joseph the Hesychast, who died in 1959, and was recognised as a saint in 2020. Monk Ephraim went on to become the abbot of Philotheou Monastery on Athos, then in the 1990s began founding monasteries in North America, transplanting the rigorous Athonite rule of life and prayer on this continent; he founded seventeen monasteries in all, seven for men and ten for women. Many believe he will be quickly recognised as a saint.

I encountered the Hawaiian Icon of the Virgin Mary (the Theotokos, or Birthgiver of God, in the Orthodox tradition, a term which points to the Incarnation) many times in my monastery pilgrimages and in my visits to parishes in between the monasteries, beginning in 2012. The icon has been streaming fragrant myrrh continuously for about 18 years now, and travels all over the world to encourage the faithful. Her guardian, Nectarios, who was a simple Reader when the miracle began, has since been ordained to the priesthood, and travels with the icon.

I have encountered many monasteries across America which venerate Fr. Seraphim Rose of Platina, California, whom Paul wrote about this past spring. He is deeply respected by monastics the world over, including on Mount Athos. Of course, being at St Herman’s, the monastery he co-founded, was a great highlight of my travels. We (my editor and I) actually chose a quote from one of Fr. Seraphim’s letters to include at the end of my book as the Epigraph:

‘An American Thebaid could be, if there are souls to match the mountains.

From what I could tell in my travels, the monastics across this land are ‘great souls’ indeed, and are suited to their calling. Whether in small hermitages with one or two monks or nuns, or medium size brotherhoods and sisterhoods from eight to a dozen or so, or larger communities of twenty or more, the Orthodox monastic movement is flourishing right now. Interestingly, two monasteries I visited and photographed closed a few years ago when their last residents reposed. But in both cases, the respective bishops soon established new monasteries on the same grounds, installing seasoned superiors and making sure those sanctified places continue as monasteries. The reposed monastics, in addition to making the very ground holy through their prayers and labours, now serve as seeds planted in the soil of North America, and we can only imagine the harvest that will be reaped.

Final Thoughts

Before closing, I do wish to share a few observations which bring all this back to Paul Kingsnorth’s writing, his new book, Against the Machine, and his recent series of conversations, The Machine Sessions. These observations stem quite naturally from Paul’s conversation in August with Caroline Ross, who speaks with a grounded wisdom consonant with Orthodox monasticism and spirituality; she even mentions the Desert Fathers in her comments.

The first regards the centrality of beauty, and of using simple, physical tools and techniques to create beauty, whether in art, or gardening, buildings, or what have you. As you would notice visiting any of these monasteries, beauty is innate to them all, each in their own unique setting and way. To give just one specific example, traditional icon painting (practiced at many monasteries) involves real, physical tools and skills, preparation of the board, the paint; applying the paints in a purposeful sequence both practical as well as symbolic. And of course all this is infused by unceasing prayer.

I was delighted to hear beekeeping come up and of Paul adopting the practice. It is no accident that many monasteries practice beekeeping and honey production, both as a modest income stream, but also as a way to be literally grounded in their environment, for to help their bees and other pollinators, they have to protect certain wild growth areas for their home ecosystem to thrive. Bees are naturally industrious, and how amazing what they produce and how we love the sweet honey which flows from their incessant labours. They are a living symbol for monastic life.

Another observation concerns the role of effort, of working through the process of learning or deepening or growing, whether in an art form, a craft, use of a tool, or in a relationship, or any meaningful facet of life; of suffering through the process of living an authentic life. This is one of the virtues or truths at the heart of the monastic way, and indeed, that is much of what an abbot or abbess strives to instill in their brotherhood or sisterhood: a tenacity and generosity of spirit which does not shrink from challenge, trial, work or learning, but grows in humility, obedience, and a healthy form of freedom which is the fruit of a community joined and of one mind in their shared life.

The last observation is from late in the discussion, and has to do with Caroline’s description of the Tao as not meaning ‘going with the flow,’ but living like the salmon swimming up stream to mate and spawn and ‘do what it does.’ We need such challenges, such ‘resistance,’ as she terms it, to be able to fulfil ourselves, to be healthy, to enable our life, or in the case of a monastery, our brotherhood or sisterhood, to fulfil itself and sustain a healthy Way.

For me now, looking back at my photographic pilgrimage in its completed form as a printed book, I am startled to see it not as I originally imagined it at all. And I am amazed that it is somehow pregnant with message and meaning which goes way beyond the images and my original purpose. Nearly a decade ago I wrote that the Thebaid Project was ‘not so much about what is seen, as what is unseen,’ but I never would have ascribed to it the import, the potential I see in it today.

In fact, I never realised until the process of writing this article just how unseen much of it was; how much of my own inner work still had to be accomplished, and how much potential there is for a healthy Orthodox monastic movement to spread across America (and elsewhere), and to offer a helpful, corrective example to the Machine mentality which has had us in its grips for so long. Just like the earlier Thebaids did in their respective epochs.

You can read more about Ralph’s project on his website, where you can also order a copy of his book. It’s both a beautiful object and the story of a profound journey, and I highly recommend it.

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