Today’s Western psyche can be unaware that deep in the heart of Christianity rests a way handed down from ancient times by those seeking the Divine. Monasticism is the Christian’s way of making a total offering of his or her life to God. For the Eastern Orthodox Church, monasticism is at the heart of its spiritual life, and now that ancient way has drawn near. This is the story of how Eastern Orthodox monasticism came to Northern Missouri.
“I went through a series of losses that kind of turned my world upside down in the late sixties,” says Fr. Alexii Altschul, formerly Fr. Paisius, who served on the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council for about nine years, from 2004 to 2013. “I’d been living a pretty typical white middle-class life until the divorce of my parents when I was twelve, and then when I was fifteen my older brother was shot to death hitchhiking home from a friend’s. That took me and sent me into a tailspin for a couple of years.”
That dizzying despair led Altschul to an encounter with Jesus and his life began to change. After a divorce, the meaning of Altschul’s life focused further and he began to lose interest in typical worldly things. “And that led to the work around 31st and Troost, and my relationship with Thelma, who became Michaela,” Altschul explains. He would marry Thelma, who died in 2012. Her name is now the name of Kansas City’s new pay-as-you-can café at 31st and Troost— Thelma’s Kitchen.
During this time, Altschul was a nondenominational Protestant pastor participating in daily prayer meetings. One day a homeless man recommended Altschul read the Russian spiritual classic The Way of a Pilgrim which describes the Jesus Prayer and Eastern Orthodoxy. “And one thing led to another, and eventually we visited a Russian Orthodox monastery in California and it all clicked.” Altschul and others would become Orthodox, and he would go on to become an Orthodox priest, Fr. Paisius, cofounding St. Mary of Egypt Orthodox Church at 31st and Troost.
In 2012 another moment of sorrow and turning inward arrived when Fr. Paisius’s wife, Michaela, died. Shortly thereafter, Father left for a pilgrimage from Serbia to Siberia and began to contemplate becoming a monk. That desire swelled, he says, and eventually his Bishop tonsured him a monk, changing his name to Fr. Alexii and sending him to Mount Athos, the Holy Mountain of Eastern Orthodoxy in Greece where numerous monasteries and a rich spiritual legacy reside.
The fathers of Athos advised the new hieromonk (priest and monk), Fr. Alexii, to establish a Skete, which, Father says, is a smaller monastic community that is “run more like a family” and derives from the Coptic word meaning “balance of heart.” “When I was in Egypt, they told me that the idea of going into the desert first causes you to experience the awareness that you’ve been weighed in the balance and found wanting,” Fr. Alexii explained. “And so you realize how out of balance you are. But they said after you stay in the desert, you come into a place of balance…eventually, the last state is a state of dispassion, or stillness of soul, that leads to perfect love.”
After his return from Mount Athos, a property ten miles north of Cameron, Mo. was found and Holy Archangel Michael and All Angels Skete was established in October 2014. It sits on eighty acres, sixty-five of which are forested trails, and boasts two ponds as well as a large vegetable garden and even larger grape vineyard. Currently, six nuns and two monks, as well as three novices and two workers, live a life of work, prayer, and community at the skete. The monastery celebrates morning and evening prayers, as well as the Divine Liturgy, Orthodoxy’s central act of mystical worship. Visitors are welcome but should call or e-mail ahead (visit www.archangelmichaelskete.org).
“When you’re in a monastic life, your thoughts become very loud,” Fr. Alexii explains. “And so you have to really pray and keep bringing everything to God for those things to get purified. The path leads to peace but it’s also warfare, spiritual warfare.”
By Nicholas Peterson, Eastern Orthodox Council Director