If the Lord moves in mysterious ways, his monks here at Holy Protection Monastery see no reason not to follow his lead.
Every morning, now that spring is almost here, a curious ritual takes place. Two of the monks, clad in the flowing cassocks traditionally worn since the 4th Century, pull a large, heavy black plywood box over themselves. Looking like a four-legged bunker or a foot-powered tank, they creep up on an unsuspecting ostrich and snatch its eggs from under it.
The egg rustling is to help save ostriches from extinction. The box is for protection from George, perhaps the meanest redneck that Oklahoma ever produced.
”We pray a lot while we are inside that box, believe me. George is a real dangerous bird. It isn`t any fun at all,” says Father Arsenios, 35. Ostriches can grow to 10 feet tall, can weigh 450 pounds, and as a sign on their pen warns, ”Ostriches are dangerous. Their kick can be fatal.”
”Georgia laid two eggs yesterday,” adds Arsenios, who is also the monastery spokesman. ”The time is nigh.” Georgia, Georgene and Georgette all share a pen with George, who`s the sharp-eyed, sharper-beaked big daddy of the ostrich operation.
Holy Protection is in the ostrich business. And the icon business. And they also run a bakery, Brother John`s Bread, about 2,500, loaves a day of wheat, date nut, honey raisin, two kinds of white and a rye sold to some 60 area groceries under a trademark which shows a beaming, angelic monk and the motto ”Simply heavenly.”
In addition, the eight monks in residence at the monastery actually provide protection for tiny, well-to-do Forest Park. They are the paramedic service and much of the volunteer fire department for this suburb of 1,450, surrounded by Greater Oklahoma City. ”We just hike up our cassocks and go fight fires,” Arsenios says proudly.
”It`s the craziest sight you`ll ever see,” a neighbor says. When the firebell rings the monks on duty take the most direct route to the fire station–not through the front gate of their 14-acre estate, which was built by the oil-rich, politically connected Kerr family. The gate is too far. The monks go over a stone side wall across the street from the station.
”They just take off running and jump that wall–with those long black robes, their crosses bouncing on their chests, their beards flying. It`s something, I tell ya, really something.”
Township trustee George Klopp praises their efforts. ”They are very well trained. Despite those long robes they are able to jump into their fireboots and helmets just like all firemen. I have a high level of admiration for their endeavors, both civic and commercial.”
Klopp also praises the monks for not being ”evangelical” and trying to push their religious tenets off on others, and he praises them for being
”obviously well-educated young men, good conversationalists, worldly, to the extent they probably read the Wall Street Journal and are informed.” But, he admits, the monastery and the monks are still something of a mystery. Klopp, a state official, says that people who learn he lives in Forest Park always ask him about the monks.
Holy Protection is a wholly indigenous American religious order of the Eastern Orthodox faith, begun in 1968, but allied with a 1,600-year old monastic tradition. Its founder, Abbot George, 43, is George Burke, of Normal, Ill., who at 9 was preaching sermons in his hometown Church of God.
Arsenios is uncomfortable discussing the backgrounds of his brothers because, he says, ”becoming a monk is entering a new life. You look upon your own life as dead. You take your earthly life and end it and become a new man.” It is unseemly, he says, to even recall it.
Though new, Holy Protection Monastery is a mainstream orthodox order. But the monks are hardly mainstream. One was a college professor by the name of Goldstein. Another, a farm boy from Ponca City, Okla. ”One brother was offered a football scholarship by the University of Miami,” the robust, Miami-born Arsenios says laughing. ”It`s embarrassing. I`m not going to tell you which one.”
Arsenios sounds like many of his Pepsi generation cohorts, circa 1960s, a seeker of religious meaning. He was born Jeff Coolik. His grandfather wanted him to be a rabbi. He remembers ”seeing a station wagon full of nuns and going across to the other side of the street” because he was so mystified. His image of monks ”was cute little brothers making jam or baking bread.” He felt ”a great lack of the spiritual in this country.”
Unlike other dissatisfied young people who drifted off to join the Moonies or other cults, he studied comparative religion at the Universities of Florida and Colorado, but majored in ichthyology, planning a career as a fish scientist. Instead, he left college to be a fisher of men.
”God had mercy on me,” he says simply. As for his family, ”they came out and visited and my mother said, `Thank God, I have raised a son who has done something worthwhile in his life. When she hauls out the pictures and says, `I have a son who`s a priest,` it`s a very great thing in Miami,” he adds with a chuckle.
”They sound real eccentric,” a neighbor explains. ”Those long black robes in 100-degree heat is a little bit insane, but they aren`t fakes. They care about their ostriches. They care about their community. After all, getting up at 4 a.m. to pray after a 2 a.m. ambulance call takes a lot out of you.”
For the monks, it`s all part of serving God. As monks, they still live the quiet lives of reflection and prayer begun by St. Pachomius in Egypt 300 years after Christ`s death. But no longer do they live in the desert, Arsenios points out. ”There are light bills and all the other trappings of modern life to pay for. The ostriches and bakery help us support ourselves. With the bread that`s returned we can help feed the poor. It all falls into place in terms of what a monastery should do. We needed to do community service and the fire fighting and ambulance service was God`s way for us to do it.”
They do it in what they consider God`s way, deep in the fundamentalist Bible Belt. ”In addition to us taking all the medical training and the by-the-books service we do as paramedics, we say prayers and anoint the victim with holy oil.” And, Arsenios adds, ”Everyone in Oklahoma City knows we do it. I`ve seen it bring people back to life.”
The monks are technically ”first responders” to nearby emergency calls. They start cardiopulmonary resuscitation, take vital signs and attempt to stabilize a patient while awaiting a fully equipped ambulance. When they`ve done all they can with oxygen, CPR and prayer, out comes the holy oil.
At least once, possibly twice or three times, the olive oil, blessed by their bishop, Abbot George, has been responsible for miracles, Arsenios said. One patient was ”clinically dead–heart and breathing totally arrested. The heart hadn`t been beating for several minutes. When the ambulance got there and they put monitors on him, we`d done five minutes of CPR but there was no electrical activity in the heart.
”Then I remembered, `Hey, we forgot the holy oil!` I got it out, anointed his head and heart, and within 30 seconds the monitor showed extreme electrical activity. The heart had just come to life. CPR just does not do that. So we know it was a miracle.”
As a result, Arsenios says, all 27 AmCare ambulances in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area carry Holy Protection holy oil. Jill Mohler, director of community relations for Amcare, part of the Central Oklahoma Ambulance Trust, discussed Holy Protection`s contributions to AmCare`s fleet.
”Do let me explain about the holy oil. Whereas Amcare provides rather traditional medical care, the monks are authorities in many, uh,
nontraditional medical methods. They say they have had some really wonderful results with their holy oil, and they have graciously given us some, and have even anointed our ambulances, and well, who`s to say?
”I mean, we can really neither negate it or substantiate it, can we? As long as we are allowed to administer physical care to the patient, and if without interfering with the patient care they administer holy oil, it`s fine. But it`s really out of our area of expertise.”
Their holy oil and bread have made them celebrities in Oklahoma, but it is still their ostriches that have made them, if not famous, at least well-known in the rest of the world.
Neiman-Marcus offered a pair of ostriches for $1,500 each as a ”his and her” gift in its Christmas catalogue two seasons ago. ”Normally, the ostriches go for $300. Neiman`s took quite a markup, to say the least,”
Arsenios says. ”We sold them only 10 or 12 pairs, although they had orders for hundreds. There was some trouble from people in the California humane societies who were worried that millionaires would keep them in their condo bathtubs.” The monks also supply the U.S. State Department, which makes gifts of the birds to foreign countries such as Jordan, where the ostrich once flourished but is nearly extinct.
The reason Holy Protection Monastery began what is thought to be the largest, most successful ostrich raising business in the country is ducks.
”It started about four years ago. We were in church praying. It was hot so the windows were open. And some type of female mallard duck landed on the lake and started screaming every morning. Quack! Quack! Quack,” Arsenios said, doing his best duck imitation. ”Well, we all are vegetarians. And here we were either going to have to catch her and give her away to someone who might eat her, or, well, shooting her was out of the question, but we finally decided it was shoot her or mate her so she`d keep quiet.”
But when they went to buy their lonely duck a mate, their compassion for the ducks remaining to be sold, and probably eaten, overwhelmed them and they bought the store`s entire duck population. ”Then we had 10 times the problem. The females all quarreled over who`d get which boy duck.”
In spring the problem solved itself. ”They all had kids, or rather, they had a big flock of ducklings. And we were doing a real good job taking care of them–don`t ask me how, I grew up on pavement–but a friend of mine at the Oklahoma City Zoo said, `You guys seem to have a propensity for working with animals. Why don`t you take care of our ostriches? We just don`t have the manpower.”
After two years, the monks were so successful they began their hatchery.
”A lot of it can be attributed to the fact that we sprinkle the eggs with holy water and ask the saints for intercession. Of course, we also anoint the chicks with holy oil. We`ve had a 95 percent hatching rate,”
Arsenios boasts.
The egg-laying season for Georgia, Georgette and Georgina has started slowly this year. ”We`ve been getting just one egg every two or three days,” Arsenios says. ”But soon it will be one a day, then three a day, until each bird has laid about 50.”
Ostriches normally are not so fertile, but the monk`s egg rustling keeps them producing egg after egg after egg. In nature, ”once a bird gets a clutch of eggs, she`ll sit down and hatch them,” he explains, adding that he and the other ostrich keepers relent toward the end of egg-laying season and leave some eggs in the nest so as not to frustrate the poor birds` maternal and paternal instincts.
”Oh, I wouldn`t do that to them, after all their good work. Unfortunately, it usually doesn`t work.” The egg laying season coincides with Oklahoma`s rainy season and eggs left in the pens with their parents do not hatch.
Once Arsenios and crew have retrieved the eggs, they are placed in
”pyramid mothers”–incubators which the monks have built to miniature scale in the configuration of the Great Pyramids of Egypt. Ordinary incubators are too unnatural, they believe. Pyramid incubators have a kind of magical quality, the monks believe.
”They are so conducive to life. Babies hatched in pyramids are so much healthier and lively. They hatch out with an awareness of life as opposed to ones hatched out without a pyramid.” Besides, he adds, pyramid incubators don`t need cleaning as often. Mold and other bacteria ”simply will not grow under a pyramid.”
The monks of Holy Protection Monastery feel a little sheepish about becoming famous because of their ostriches instead of the ancient traditions they practice.
”The ostriches are, really, kind of extraneous. But we do it, and we do it well. And birds have souls, too. And feelings. Even the monks in the deserts took care of their animals,” Arsenios says. ”I`d rather be in the desert praying, but God put us here in Oklahoma City, so we`d better make the best of it.”
