Becoming Redeemers of the Time

Interview with Sister Vassa Larin

NICK TABOR

Conversations about secularism tend to focus on big-picture questions about history, society, and politics. But the idea of the secular also has a spiritual side. It’s connected to questions about the divide between the sacred and the profane, and about when it’s appropriate for Christians to withdraw from the world and when—and how—it’s appropriate to engage. For reflections on these questions, we spoke with Sister Vassa Larin, who is known to tens of thousands for her “Coffee with Sr. Vassa” channel on YouTube and her Patreon-supported podcast. Sr. Vassa is also a professor of liturgical studies at the University of Vienna and a prolific scholar on matters of liturgy and theology. In April, she joined editor Nick Tabor on a Zoom call from Vienna.

I wanted to start by going back in history. We always say Christian monasticism began in the time of Constantine, when large numbers of people started fleeing to the Egyptian desert to engage in more intense prayer and fasting. We tend to think monasticism is about withdrawal. But does that oversimplify it? St. Basil famously established the first hospitals, near Caesarea, and more recently, St. Maria Skobtsova and Metropolitan Anthony lived as monastics in dense urban areas, heavily engaged in the lives of their cities. Could you speak to that diversity in the tradition?

Well, withdrawal is a concept that you could understand in different ways—but it's really about what one's vocation exactly is. There have been, of course, throughout history, both in East and West, more contemplative monastics, and there are also more contemplative laypeople. And there are vocations that are more active, or more engaged in this world, whether they're monastic or lay. It's easy to say, Oh, she's a Martha or He's a Martha or a Mary. But human beings are more complicated than questions of where they happen to be living. I think all of us will understand when you say something like, Well, I think there's a lot of the Martha and the Mary in me, or I've always sort of looked like a Martha, but I have always been thirsting to be the Mary. I mean, even the original Martha and Mary were not just Marthas and Marys.

Maybe we could approach this by talking about your own model of monasticism. As most of us know, you’re a nun, but you’re also an academic living in the heart of Vienna. This doesn’t conform to the conventional picture of monasticism that a lot of people have.

I can't speak to the image any of you have. You know, some people walk around with an image in their heads about what any layperson is supposed to do. If you're not married and you’re at a certain age, somebody might ask, “Is there a vocation to be single and unmarried and living not in any family?” I was raised to think you had to be either in a monastery or married. So that leaves a lot of people with no legitimate vocation. That's an important question of modern-day Orthodoxy. I understand that we have tradition, we have institutions; but we also have certain things that don't fit into the box. Sometimes we bully one another with some kind of Disneyland perception of what everybody's supposed to be doing.

But time and again, extraordinary people, the ones we have canonized as saints, don't fit into our boxes. The greatest teacher of Hesychasm, Gregory Palamas, spent more time in cities than he ever did in any monastery, and for much of that time he was at the center of political turmoil. That is a fact of his life. He was conducting negotiations and trying to be a middleman in certain conflicts—aside from also being involved in the polemics of the day, writing against the Barlaamites and all that stuff. Gregory Palamas, in that sense, was sort of a bundle of contradictions. Was he actually a powerful example of prayer? He was! Otherwise he couldn't have testified to the life of prayer the way he did. There are many other manifestations of grace connected to his life and his person.

But the point is that God challenges the stereotypes about men, about women, about vocations in general, and about the way things should be done. We see this in the life of the Theotokos as well. God does this with our vocations: He takes us out of our interdependencies, which are merely human, whether of tribe, of nationality, or of gender interrelationships. Vocation liberates us from whatever battles we're having with all of that, because vocation doesn't come from us, and it doesn’t come from other people.

Sure. And if there are different forms of monasticism in real life, and monastics have different levels of engagement with society at large, it seems like this also translates to the internet and social media. Another way that you don’t fit into the conventional boxes is that you’re a nun who is also pretty online. I’m curious about how you integrate that with your liturgical life. Obviously it’s part of your ministry. But do you have any advice for the rest of us about how to use social media without letting it seriously disrupt our spiritual practices?

Well, for me, there are ups and downs in trying to rein in, or implement, the instruments that I have for communication with others—according to the gentle discipline that is the presence of God. I have my rule of integrating the liturgical hours according to their meanings. I'm writing a book about this right now, actually: about praying the hours as a layperson. I have my own system that I use throughout the day. It's not a matter of stopping what I'm doing and praying the hour; instead I pray the troparion of the hour wherever I happen to be and whatever I happen to be doing—whether I am taking my power walk, doing the grocery shopping, or sitting at my desk and preparing a podcast. 

I’m constantly integrating. I have a traditional framework of hourly prayer, and then I have my responsibilities. Sometimes they're unpredictable, and they unexpectedly come into my life. Laypeople have more of these unpredictable moments, especially people who live within families—they don't belong to themselves, or their time is less under their control. Some people have their small children jumping up and down in their beds at 7 in the morning, so that's when they get up; it's not like there's some church bell and they get up and pray. 

There are different vocations, and we are called to rise up to the challenge of what is known as redeeming the time, according to St. Paul. That means to buy the time back. Redimere, the Latin root of “to redeem,” literally means to buy back. So time is sort of under someone else's control. And the idea is that you pay the price and you buy back the time. The price you pay is carrying the cross, right? How do you do that? Well, acceptance of things you cannot change, the courage to change the things that you can, according to the Serenity Prayer…

“And the wisdom to know the difference.” Also known as the Alcoholics Anonymous prayer.

Right. So you have to have humility, in the case of the children jumping up and down on your bed, to not to flip out, and to roll with the punches. But whatever your situation, you have to practice a certain diplomacy that is connected to everyone around you. How can you redeem all of the madness? How do you rein it in? In my specific situation, it’s about constantly opening the windows to God's grace. That's my job, and I think that's what we're here for. That's what we're supposed to be doing, becoming redeemers of the time.

It’s interesting that you say that, because the word “secular” originally referred to time: to chronological time, as opposed to liturgical time, or sacred time, which is cyclical instead of linear. And then it started being used to describe this general distinction between the sacred and the earthly, or the mundane, which has never been totally accepted in Christian thought. But tell us more about how you try to redeem the time on a daily basis; for instance, how do you do that when you have social media and a smartphone?

Smartphones are a mixed blessing. People have different problem moments, but for me, the evenings are the most difficult. That's where there's a lot of temptation to stay up too late and to disrupt your sleep time. I like to think of it as breaking the fast. It’s a no-no. We have to respect our rest times as much as we respect our work times, just like we have to respect our eating times as much as we respect our not-eating times. We have to affirm life through our healthy choices, right? As I said, not everybody has the luxury of having control over their daily schedule, but there is still something we can do. 

My strategy with my cell phone is to turn it off at the same time, every evening, and then to turn it on, at the same time in the morning. My sister has a friend who's a seamstress, and we're making sleeping bags for phones, with crosses embroidered on them. I want to sell them as part of my merch. It closes with a string, and then you can recharge the phone. I thought that might be an additional kind of inspiration to put it away.

It’s tricky when something's going on—say someone close to you is really ill, and you're waiting for news, or you have elderly parents who live far away. But I try to resist that pressure to be on, 24/7. I'm biologically not set up to go 24/7. I read an interesting book very recently: The Hunter-Gatherers Guide to the 21st Century. It argues that a lot of things about our lives now are too much for our actual physical makeup. We have to know how to turn off the lights, literally. Our bodies work according to cycles of light and darkness. In ancient times, before electric lights, there was candlelight in the evening. But there was also ritual. Our Vespers service, in the Byzantine rite, is all about the lighting of the lamps. Candlelight is still dimmer than electric lights, and then it would be extinguished, and people would sleep. 

So this book was fascinating to me because of the way light and darkness are greeted and thematized in our daily liturgical services. We're enlightening everything with prayer. Transitions, with God in the picture, help us not to go insane. When life becomes “something that happens when you're not paying attention,” as John Lennon said—or at least the quote is attributed to him—this breeds fear. In the liturgical cycle, you have hourly moments, where you’re reminded, “Oh, OK. This is what this is, this is what this means, and I'm buying it back according to my faith. This is what I say it means.” Every day has meaning. That way you’re not just chaotically tossed to and fro. This prayer adventure is what keeps me sane. 

Speaking of John Lennon: I’ve sometimes thought that when evangelicals came up with the term “secular music,” they were actually using the term “secular” in a way that was historically correct. It’s distinct from church music, or music that’s specifically about Christian spirituality. 

Years ago, I had a friend who was in catechism, and we both loved The Velvet Underground. A lot of their lyrics deal with the druggy art scene of New York in the ’60s, and my friend asked, “When is it OK to listen to something like the Velvets?” I know you’ve expressed a love for the Rolling Stones, so I wonder how you would have responded.

That's a question that's impossible to answer with a blanket answer. That's like saying, ‘How do you incorporate Netflix or YouTube? Or a museum of modern art? Or a museum of any kind of art into your life?’ It’s very case-by-case. You have to find the right time and the right place to enjoy something like art, or even literature. Really, my answer is this: Don't lead a dualistic life. Don't put your so-called Orthodoxy into one compartment, and then everything else that isn't dressed in a long black dress, donning a long beard—don’t start thinking that everything that doesn't look like that is something else. It's impossible for you to sustain that kind of dualistic Orthodoxy.

I had a video chat with Fr. John Behr recently, and he’s come up with this definition of church that is amazing. He said the Church is the whole of creation, seen eschatologically. That sounds a little bit too intellectual, because of the fancy word “eschatological.” But it’s just seeing all of creation, basically, as headed toward God's goal for it, which is what “eschatological” means. So whether you're enjoying a work of art, or you're reading a book that's not about Orthodoxy, or written by the Orthodox, or even if you're buying a nice dress, or in your case a suit.

Fr. John’s definition certainly challenges the idea of a secular/sacred binary.

We also have the examples of the Basils and the Gregorys, who went to Athens, to the center of pagan—not Christian—education, studying things from astronomy to natural sciences. They were very proud of this education; they couldn't mention it enough. They will talk about how much they learned about philosophy, pagan philosophy, and the various systems of thinking that were non-Christian.

Literature, and music, and art are created by human beings. In some cases we don't know if the human being was responding, in some way, to God's call. They did have gifts, obviously, since they created something. Scripture mentions certain voices throughout salvation history who were not believers, but who had a prophetic voice. Remember when Caiaphas said, “It is better that one die for all the people, so that not all the people die”? And St. John, I believe, says, “He didn't say that of himself, but because he was the high priest that year, it was sort of given to him to say something that needed to be said—because Jesus was to die for all the people.” There are other examples in Scripture when somebody who’s not a believer plays a prophetic role. 

Music is a tricky thing, because some music might have associations for you. When I had only recently entered the convent, I wouldn't have listened, for example, to the music I listened to in my teens. But now it doesn't weaken me. We don't have the same pitfalls, and the younger you are, the more you have to watch out. If I sound reckless, like “Sister listens to this and that”—well, I really would not have said that 15 years ago, maybe not even 10 years ago. I certainly wouldn’t if I were a novice. You have to be good to yourself, but also be honest with yourself, and also not be dualistic. Because the problem is not some of these great artists that actually do bring us a lot of good. 

Actually, the Stones are coming to Vienna, and I can’t afford the tickets, but I would definitely go if I could afford it. Even though Charlie is dead—although, of course, they'll never die. But I've never seen them live. I think they have a prophetic vocation. There's a reason why such large crowds will go to a concert of great artists, more than almost to anything else. There's a vocation that great athletes have as well, and I don't think it’s a demonic or bad thing. I think there's a place for these things. Extraordinary talent has the touch of God. To be a genius, people who are ingenious in something, they're often absolutely un-extraordinary and underwhelming in anything else. But when they're doing what their vocation is, then we’re touched by God, when we learn from them. Well, we’re healed by them.

I’d have to say that’s been my experience.

So we have art. We have poetry that’s, I think—it goes beyond just, you know, your usual—which is what art does: it’s ecstatic. It stands out from our usual reality, and we have all of that in our liturgy. It’s human—it’s very human. It’s human-slash-divine, because it’s our reaching out to God in this way. So I think it’s a matter of discipline as to where are the places for it, but we don’t reject, dualistically, everything that doesn’t come directly out of our faith tradition.

Sister Vassa Larin is a scholar of Orthodox liturgy and founder of Coffee with Sister Vassa. She is a nun in the Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.