This photo is of my new parish assignment (I serve as the assistant pastor), St. George Orthodox Cathedral in Charleston, West Virginia. When one mentions "Charleston" to folks not from around here, they usually say, "Oh, what a beautiful city!" I then ask them if they're thinking of the coastal city in South Carolina which shares a name with West Virginia's capital, and they usually are. Both cities are beautiful, though in entirely different ways. South Carolina's Charleston is stately and Southern in the classic, "Old South," plantation sort of way. Most of what people know about the capital of West Virginia, however, if they know anything about it at all, is a brief view of various industrial sites along the interstate perhaps enhanced by a view of the gleaming golden dome of the state capitol building.
Charleston really is a beautiful city, honestly. It's huddled along the Kanawha River (the last ha in the name is essentially silent, so it's pronounced "ka-NAW"), with various bridges and interstates criss-crossing the town. Both cargo barges and paddle boats navigate the river throughout the city, and its east-west orientation here in this part of the Appalachians supplies a fine sunset right over the river on many nights.
The architecture of the city is a combination of late 19th century along with some mid-20th century boom. Thanks to a fine job of upkeep by the municipal government, the city is clean and filled with just enough flora to keep it from feeling so cold as many cities do these days. It's a small city, with a population just over 50,000 people (around 300,000 in the "Greater Charleston" area), and with the impressive mountains that line the edges of the Kanawha River Valley, the terrain makes it almost impossible for the area to become subject to the suburban sprawl which affects so many other American cities these days.
Because of the limitations on its growth, Charleston does not host the massive variety of exotic restaurants and shops that a city like Raleigh has, but it nevertheless has its various treasures. And of course it has everything we really need.
A lot of folks are frankly surprised when I tell them that there are around 400 families at the cathedral and that most Sundays here see several hundred folks at church. Everyone knows that Charleston is historically a coal-dependent area, and with the lessening of the importance of coal (though coal still accounts for some 50% of America's power generation), one would think that a once-large parish could no longer boast so many people. After all, the ethnically Carpatho-Rusyn parishes of northeastern Pennsylvania have been demographically decimated for the same economic reasons.
In order to solve this mystery, one needs to know something about the culture of the mainly Lebanese people who first began meeting together in Charleston for liturgical services back in 1892. The community was officially founded a few years later by St. Raphael of Brooklyn himself. The first generation came to work in the mines, but within a generation or two, many of the people became entrepreneurs, which is almost genetically encoded into people from the Mediterranean. A generation or two after that saw many of the families of the cathedral becoming professionals of various stripes. So, even while the manufacturing and mining industries have suffered over the years, the people of St. George Cathedral have nonetheless found decent employment, and many have become quite wealthy.
Further, because of the strong familial emphasis of Lebanese culture, the children of the church's families often have a powerful incentive to come back home after finishing college. Today, the cathedral has hundreds of families, spanning across numerous age groups. The majority are of Lebanese-American extraction, and over the years traditionally Arabic names have been repronounced in rather distinctly and delightfully West Virginian sorts of ways.
St. George has only been a cathedral since October 29, 2006 (which is incidentally the same day I was ordained to the priesthood), with the relocation here of Bishop Thomas (Joseph) of Charleston and Oakland, the Antiochian bishop for the Mid-Atlantic states (WV, VA, PA, MD and DE). But as you can see from the photograph and from the brief description of our demographics, it was probably only a matter of time before the elevation took place. And the bishop loves it here.
So this charming Appalachian river city with its bustling cathedral is home for us now, and we pray that it will be home for many years to come.
8 comments:
His Grace, Bishop THOMAS, was here in Toronto this past weekend. I didn't have a chance to speak with him, but it was good to see him again.
And, to pick a nit, the churches in NEPA have been more than decimated. It's probably not much of a stretch to say that one out of ten remain.
You're right, of course, on the technical meaning of decimate ("to eliminate 1/10th"), but its meaning in actual usage has shifted (at least here in the US) to "wiped out" or "almost completely eliminated."
I'm actually in Charleston not-infrequently, and have grown to really like the city, so I can understand your finding it "beautiful", even if others are confused. (Even if my real loyalty is to that "other" Charleston, which is the city of my birth.)
May God bless you in your new assignment.
My husband's family is from West Viriginia. Huntingdon to be exact. Hubby went to college in Philippi.
Nice state. Never been to Charleston.
May God bless you in your new parish.
If you have time, might I suggest a chaplain role with the local Fire Department. I am not sure if they have someone but they coulde use you for sure.
My first view of Charleston was driving up the Interstate in the middle of the night from the south, over mtns, down to the river and around a bend when I saw the dome all lit up. My first thought, after the "gasp" was of you diving down there (you'd mentioned it in a post or else on a comment on my blog). My second thought was "what a beautiful city"!
Many years, Fr. Many years.
hello father:
I was referred to this site via chuck at rublevsdog.blogspot.
I went to school in Beckley, WV, so Charleston was our big city for a night on the town. One of the happiest moments of my college life was spent with friends in a Charleston restraunt of a late evening watching snow fall thickly and softly through the lights on one of the city's main streets (I cant remember which street, but it was beautiful, the city and the snow)
I was recently confirmed in a traditional Anglican parish, after looking at Rome then Orthodoxy. The reasons not for Rome you probably know better than I. Orthodoxy? I'm looking foward to learning more, but bottom line I am too much a thomist and an american, to ever feel intellectually or culturally at home in the Eastern Church.
not that Anglicanism is just a default position; although we obviously have our problems (particularly with respect to discipline), I believe that we have preserved an inculturated, orthodox Catholic church in the West.
And many of us feel a kind of kinship with the Orthodox, but it doesn't seem to be reciprocated. "where the bishop is, there is the Church." The Catholic Church subsists in the local church. we seem to have a similar ecclesiology. is the Orthodox ambivalence towards Anglicans simply a reflection of Anglicanism's own inherent ambiguity?
Andrew,
The current general lack of relationship between the Orthodox Church and Anglicanism (though there are exceptions, such as the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius in the UK) is due, I believe, mainly to the severe doctrinal disintegration of Anglicanism in the 20th century. Relations, as you may, used to be fairly warm, and there was even some talk of establishing communion, but from the point of view of the Orthodox Church, we were in some sense left standing at the altar, while the Anglican Communion went off to wed something else (in many cases, such as ECUSA, the groom is the spirit of the age). In general, when the Orthodox look at the Anglican Communion, in many cases they don't even see something recognizable as Christian, much less catholic or Orthodox.
I myself am a Westerner, though not a Thomist. My intellectual and spiritual training has been entirely in a Western context, particularly in studying English literature in college. In becoming Orthodox, I haven't found Orthodoxy to be particularly "Eastern," to be honest, despite the common appellation. My choice to become Orthodox was based on a belief in the truth of Orthodox doctrine.
That being said, there is of course the recent multiplication of Western Rite Orthodox parishes, which are Orthodox in doctrine and follow a liturgical tradition historically found in the West.
It is interesting to me in speaking with many Western Christians who have looked into Orthodoxy or become Orthodox, that the ones who usually find Orthodoxy too "Eastern" are ones from a Western liturgical tradition. Westerners from non-liturgical churches don't typically find our liturgy to be "Eastern," but rather simply so very different from anything they've ever known that to put a broad cultural label on it would make no sense. Rome's Novus Ordo might as well be "Eastern," too, in that context.
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