Father Athanasisus Kone is an Orthodox priest in Honolulu, Hawaii, in a parish that is home to the myrrh-streaming Iveron Icon of the Mother of God. He and Matushka Sophia have three children: Elizabeth, Seraphim, and Ambrose. They experienced an extraordinary conversion to the True Faith, which Father Athanasius shares with us, together with a bit of his experience.
I grew up in Portland, Oregon, with no Christianity in my life. My parents were very much like hippies, very wild, and not Christian at all. I hadn’t really heard of Christ. So in 1986, while I was in high school, somebody explained to me about Christ and His dying for our sins. I just remember being astounded by this, and that it broke my heart to hear about it. I remember being profoundly moved by this idea that Christ was real. And I started becoming very spiritually hungry. I became very sober-minded, and I kind of put away all the silliness of youth, even though I lived in a very permissive environment where I could have done pretty much anything as I didn’t have much oversight. But I was very strict with myself, and I lived very soberly in high school. I went to church on my own accord and would ride my bike to Bible studies—I did everything I could to become spiritually attuned. I even decided that I was going to be a pastor, and so I went from high school to college and I began to prepare myself to be a pastor. I was part of a community church, what you consider a modern, kind of, charismatic Christian, which is a softer, lighter version of Pentecostalism, more acceptable in American culture, since Pentecostalism has a more negative connotation.
Alaska
I ended up getting married in 1996, and I was doing work as a pastor in a place where my wife is from, which is Kodiak, an island off the coast of Alaska, where the original Russian missionaries who were Orthodox came from Russia to do evangelism among the native Alaskans. My matushka is part Alaska native (Aleut) and part Russian, but when she was little, her parents got divorced and her mother took her to a Protestant church, and so she became unaware of her own family’s history of being Orthodox.
But the work as a pastor didn’t go well, and so this was very disappointing for me because I had prepared so hard and long to be a pastor. I stopped doing this work as a pastor, but I started working for the tribes, because in Alaska the federal government provides healthcare and mental health and different services for the various Alaskan tribes, and they have villages that are old sites. And one of the things that I began to encounter by traveling to these villages was that each one would have a very old Orthodox church; in fact, they are the oldest Orthodox churches probably in North America that were established by these initial missionaries, but the condition of spiritual life in the village from my view as a Protestant was pretty dismal. I had much disdain for Orthodoxy. I looked at it as kind of a dead religion, and I saw just nothing but problems in the villages. I saw too much isolation, and too much drinking, and dark things that were happening. But I realized that all the people I was working with were Orthodox, and they had this deep-seeded spirituality.
A part of my job was doing a camp for kids on Spruce Island—of all places!—where we were bringing children from the seven different villages on Kodiak Island. We’d bring elders and we’d bring adults and we’d try to do something spiritually and physically fun, so that we could help restore healthy communities to the children. And we’d do it for one week at a time, we’d bring 50 people, and we’d do it again the next week and the next week. And since all the people were Orthodox, one of the activities that we’d have during the day was that we’d walk from the beach where the camp was for about two hours over to Monk’s Lagoon, which is the place where St. Herman of Alaska lived. Everybody there calls him "Father Herman.” So, we’d take this beautiful walk through the mountains and down through forests that are 150 feet tall, spruce trees and moss everywhere, it was extraordinarily vibrant. And we’d take this walk to Monk’s Lagoon, which is a place that even if you’re not a Christian, when you go there you feel a spiritual presence, you feel something holy. You can’t put into words what’s going on in this little small part of forest there in Alaska, because there’s so much forest that this one part of it stands out because it’s so extraordinary the way it feels.
Father Herman
Island , she had never been to Monk’s Lagoon. This was in 2003. She came on a small boat. Monk’s Lagoon is a small little lagoon that’s hard to get to through a very secluded forest; there’s a path that goes from the beach up to the cabin, to the little skete that St. Herman lived in. There is also a church up there. So I’m walking up the path with my wife and my little daughter, who’s about two years old, and there’s a big group of people behind us but they’re far, far behind us. All of a sudden a wind happens, and inside the wind is this beautiful smell of myrrh. And it happens again, and it happens again. And it’s astonishing. And my wife says: "Are the monks burning incense?” to which I answered: "No, the monks live five miles over that mountain, there’s nobody around here.” The warm wind was full of the most beautiful smell that you can imagine. By this time, we had stopped and there’s a bunch of people coming up behind us on the path, and we turn to them and say: "Can you guys smell this?” and they couldn’t smell it. It was just the most obvious, beautiful smell. And one of the elders, a lady, said: "Well, that’s Father Herman, he’s talking to you—your faces are glowing.” And we were thinking that these things didn’t make any sense, they had no place in our theology as Protestants. Yet, we could tell that the Holy Spirit was here and that St. Herman was obviously filled with the Holy Spirit. There was something going on there.
Also, my wife suffered from an illness, and as soon as she drank from the spring where the water is considered to be holy from St. Herman, she said there was this pop in her head, and everything just went away, she was healed.
But still, in my mind, I’m a Protestant—what does this mean? I wrestled with my own inability to put this into action, I didn’t know what to do with it. I knew that St. Herman was holy at this point, but I still didn’t know what to do with the Orthodox Church.
The dream
About a month later, I’m dreaming. And in my dream, I have people whom I know, who are Orthodox and who lived in the city of Kodiak. They were praying for me. I began to weep, with tears just streaming down my face, inconsolable tears. So I grab something to wipe the tears away, and I look up and there’s this monk come walking towards me. He’s luminous, he has a strong beard, and I have no idea who he is; I hadn’t even read anything Orthodox. And he walks up to me and tells me that his name is Fr. Seraphim Rose, and I had never heard this name in my life. He begins to tell me that I’m going to become Orthodox. And then he tells me many details about my life and that I’m going to become an Orthodox priest. So while I argued with him in my dream that I was not going to become a priest, I was not going to wear that stupid black hat, I woke up covered in tears. I didn’t know what was going on because I’d never heard of Fr. Seraphim Rose. I thought I was going crazy. So I said: "I’m going to go find a priest.” I walked into his office and I said: "I think I’m going crazy,” and he said: "Well, join the club. Why?” I asked: "Have you ever heard of Fr. Seraphim Rose?” He just started crossing himself. When I told him about the dream, he was astonished because there was no way a person can come up with this face and this name and have this encounter.
Just as it had happened with St. Herman’s miracle, I didn’t know what to do with this dream either. But now there was something inside me that I couldn’t not pay attention to, there was something so obvious that I had to follow. I can’t explain it. It just utterly changed me. I was not the same after this dream. I had much confidence that God was moving me towards the Orthodox Church. I had such a profound encounter that it absolutely changed my life. I remember opening up (finally) an Orthodox prayer. Like I said, I was pretty disdainful of Orthodoxy, but I opened it up to the noonday office and I read the closing prayer of St. Basil: "Nail my flesh to the fear of Thee.” I realized as I was reading it that I could not have said this much profound theology in 25 lines as this man could say, and I realized that I had missed everything, so I just began to dive into the Orthodox Church.
Struggles for a convert from Protestantism
Protestants struggle with a couple things when they convert. They struggle with the Mother of God, they struggle with icons, and they struggle with the weight of tradition.
The thing that I struggled with the most, paradoxically, is the Mother of God. But I decided to prove the Orthodox Church wrong, so I decided that I was going to read all the original texts from the first centuries of what was written about the Mother of God. So I started going to original sources to read how they described the Mother of God, how they dealt with this. And I got all the way up to St. Athanasius the Great. When I read his words about the Mother of God being the tabernacle, I had this thought: "This saint from whom we got the canon of Scriptures, books that we consider holy and inspired by God, here I trust that God gave him the wisdom to put these books down, but I don’t trust the way that he prayed, I don’t trust the other things he says? This doesn’t seem consistent.” And I began to read it with great depth, and it so profoundly moved me. By reading St. Athanasius, I was convinced that the Mother of God was completely as she was being portrayed in the Orthodox Church. I had just been very ignorant and almost deluded about how I saw her and how I even read Church history. I realized I was completely wrong about the Mother of God, and I began to have reverence for her and even began to ask for her intercessions.
One of the fundamental problems that all Protestants have to wrestle with is the idea that you would ask for prayers from somebody else besides Christ or God the Father. And this is one of the constants, the idea of icons. They don’t understand the Incarnation, they don’t understand that Christ redeemed not just this spiritual world, but everything, the whole person and all of Creation.
The Mother of God has been so clouded, and the way you deal with Protestants there is you show them what the earliest Protestant fathers talked about the Mother of God. They were astoundingly Patristic in how they approached the Mother of God themselves. John Calvin and Luther and all these early, early Protestant fathers held to the Patristics about the Mother of God. They prayed to her, they had reverence.
Walla Walla
We were kicked out of the Protestant Church here because people thought we were insane, and so we were going and trying to become Orthodox and our whole lives were just squashed. It was a pretty difficult catechism process, to say the least.
Unfortunately, the spiritual life in Kodiak, even though there’s St. Herman there and there’s a long history of Orthodoxy, was at a place of a lot of turmoil because of politics and just different kinds of things. So eventually, to find a healthier parish, in 2006 we moved away from Kodiak and went to a place in the state of Washington. We were baptized in a parish of the Russian Church Outside of Russia named after St. Silouan the Athonite in Walla Walla, which means "many waters” in an Indian tongue.
When we were baptized, we felt much grace for maybe three months. My wife said she had such profound grace that I would go off to work, and she’d take the kids to school, and she’d come home and sit down and read a spiritual book, and next thing she’d know, she’d look up and it was time to go pick up the kids six hours later. She was so full; she couldn’t even imagine how she had lived without Christ all these years. She had never been able to do that in her life, but now she was doing this for months, where she just lived in this spiritual, everyday communion with Christ, with God. It was astounding to her. And at the same time we were going through great struggles and tribulations. It was tough economically as well because we had moved, and it took some time to find the right kind of employment.
Orthodox formation
In these years between our baptism and my becoming a priest—I was ordained on December 19, 2013—I struggled. It’s really hard to become Orthodox from being a Protestant, and one struggles with so many things. I had to learn how to live an Orthodox life: I had to learn how to do my prayers, I had to learn to go to Confession, I had to learn to take Communion and live in an Orthodox community and raise children. I was doing that for many years and not thinking about seminary or about going off to become a priest. I thank God I didn’t get rushed into becoming a priest because I would have missed out on some important Orthodox formation, and this is essential. We especially have this problem in America where we can read for two weeks books about prayer, and we think we’re experts in prayer, and we begin to lecture everybody about how to do prayers. We don’t realize that it takes so much time to become, organically, people who pray and not talk about prayer.
This is a challenge for converts, and as a convert you’re going to go through many, many things that you do in extreme, and you have to come into finding a middle path, a fine balance that you don’t become out of balance and become an extremist on either side. The priest at the parish was very helpful and he very much directed and helped us to stay in that middle path and develop prayerful lives.
I had studied economics and computer science, so I was an economist for the state of Washington. I had a government job and I had to travel and do speaking, and I was a dad and doing seminary. And then I did computer programming, economic modeling and information before I was a priest.
Obviously, St. Herman of Alaska is our family saint. And I have deep feelings for St. Silouan the Athonite, and I find the story of his life and some of his writings to be so helpful and inspirational. And then St. Athanasius the Great, St. Porphyrios, St. Paisios. I love the fathers of Optina, especially St. Barsanuphius. I find his book very helpful, I read it all the time, I’m always reading it.
Hawaii
After I was ordained a priest, I was an assistant priest in Walla Walla and then we moved to Greece for a while (2015–2016), and then we were sent to Hawaii in 2016. Our parish is a very unique parish because it’s in the Russian Church, but it has people from all sorts of backgrounds and ethnicities. It has people from Jordan and Palestine and Egypt, we have people from India, we have people from Japan and Thailand and Indonesia and Russia and American converts, and so it’s a very unique kind of parish because it’s such a mixture of people from everywhere.
New converts
We do catechism in our parish. People who are not Christians or maybe they’re Protestants or they’re Roman-Catholics go through the process of catechism, and we’ll baptize them and bring them into the Orthodox Church. And this is a constant labor, but it’s something very blessed to have new members coming into the parish and experiencing the faith. It’s very wonderful for the parish to experience that, it’s needed.
There’s no rhyme or reason to how somebody will end up walking into an Orthodox church at times. They’ll read something; they’ll be curious. I had one young man who was into—I don’t know if you know, they have this kind of fighting where they don’t use gloves, but they put people in a cage and there’s a Russian fighter who has an Orthodox cross on his back. Well, this young man was reading about Orthodoxy based on this guy fighting, and he encountered St. Paisios on the internet, on YouTube. He wasn’t really a Christian, he’s a local boy, and came to the church with all sorts of modern struggles faced by our youth today. St. Paisios began to talk to him about Orthodoxy, and he was astounded. He was baptized a couple years ago, and he got married in the Church. But it takes a couple years to catechize a person. It takes patience, you have to do much teaching, but you also have to get them to come to the services, because if a person converts and they don’t go to the services, they’ll miss everything. You can’t learn by book alone, the parish has to start doing services during the week and not just on the weekends. People should be taught not just to read about prayer but to do prayers as part of the Orthodox service and life, how to live the Orthodox life.
How can we help our dear ones who experience troubles?
All we can do is pray. We ask especially the Mother of God to help us, and this is very much our consolation and our hope is that we have her help. Drugs, addictions, divorce are heartbreaking things and there’s no magic to fixing them. But if we’re always trying to unite ourselves to Christ, if we’re always moving towards Christ, He directs and the Holy Spirit moves us, and we end up becoming able to say things that are helpful. But if we don’t do that, we’ll say something out of our fear, our own anxiety, and we’ll make a mess out of the situation and we’ll make it worse. And we have to learn to really let Christ be so alive in us that we actually have something graceful to say, and that only happens by living deeply the Orthodox life. There’s no other way to become holy. What can we say? How do we tell people what to do about these struggles? Well, we can pray for them.
Our stance before God
I think that our problem in Orthodoxy is that we take the wrong stance before God, we don’t rightly stand before God, we get lost in that fundamental thing. If we fix our stance before Christ, then so many of our problems just go away. This is the Orthodox life. It’s that simple. We just have to learn to take our fall to Christ over and over again. In that, we learn so much about how to live and how to be humble, we and learn how to love God and people. It’s so simple. That’s how we attract grace—by taking our fall to Christ and realizing that our stance before God is usually the source of all our problems.
Confession is essential for people to take their fall to Christ, their own prayers. But praying should not be just to do the rule but learning to realize that Christ is always trying to put inside us what He wants to put inside us. Then we have to learn to live the life of the Church, with confession, and frequent Communion, and prayers and spiritual readings. This is something that’s essential, so that we can continuously take our fall to Christ; otherwise, we get distracted, and we get hurt, and we get turned off to faith.
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O noble Virgin, truly you are greater than any other greatness. For who is your equal in greatness, O dwelling place of God the Word? To whom among all creatures shall I compare you, O Virgin? You are greater than them all. O [Ark of the New] Covenant, clothed with purity instead of gold! You are the Ark in which is found the golden vessel containing the true manna, that is, the flesh in which divinity resides.