An American Monk in Sinai

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HERSHEL SHANKS: Tell me a little about your background.

FR. JUSTIN: My parents were Baptist missionaries. I was born in Texas, but when I was two, we moved to Chile. I lived there until I was nine. That’s why my accent is not a Texas accent.

I grew up in El Paso and went to school at the University of Texas at Austin. Three years after I graduated, I entered a Greek monastery in Boston.

HS: How did that happen?

FR. JUSTIN: I became Orthodox and when I became Orthodox, the Church became the most important thing. When you become a monk, the Church becomes your life.

HS: What led you to the Orthodox Church?

FR. JUSTIN: Since I was brought up Protestant, I knew a lot about the New Testament and a lot about the Reformation but nothing about what happened in between. So I began to read medieval history and later Byzantine history. After I read a great deal of Byzantine history, I began to study the early church, and from that I began to attend Orthodox services.

HS: How did you happen to become a monk at Mt. Sinai?

FR. JUSTIN: I read about Sinai [when I lived] in Texas. I read a National Geographic article that featured Weitzmann and Forsyth’s Princeton-Michigan expedition,¹ and I read Skrobucha, a German scholar who wrote a book about Sinai in 1959, published by Oxford University Press with photographs in 1966.² From all of my readings I became enthused about Sinai. When I first thought about becoming a monk, I wanted to go to Sinai. Friends of mine said, “You can’t go to Sinai. You’re not Greek.” So I took a 22-year detour and went to the Boston monastery first.

HS: Was there something in your background, some experience, that led you to think this way?

FR. JUSTIN: I’m just in awe at the heritage that is in Sinai, going back to the theophanies of the Old Testament and 17 centuries of continuous history. I think everyone at Sinai has cause to revere the history of the monastery, and then, by living there, you become a part of that heritage.

HS: What is your assignment at the monastery?

FR. JUSTIN: There is a rule at Sinai that you must be of Greek descent to live there. So a monk from England and I are there by exception to that rule. When I first went there, because I was familiar with computers and scanners, I was taught the skills necessary to photograph the [ancient] manuscripts. Then a year and a half ago, the librarian retired. To my surprise, I was selected to succeed him. I’ve been librarian there for a year and a half, but I was photographing the manuscripts before that and want to continue doing that even now.

HS: You say you have to be Greek by descent? Does that mean Greek Orthodox or Greek nationality?

FR. JUSTIN: Greek nationality.

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HS: What is life like as a monk at Mt. Sinai?

FR. JUSTIN: It revolves around the services. We do the complete canonical office. We start at 4:00 in the morning until about 7:30, and we have a service at noon and we have vespers at 4:00 in the afternoon. So the whole daily cycle revolves around the services. It’s all a balance between communal prayer, private prayer, activities done together and activities done when you’re in your own room.

HS: You have to work, too?

FR. JUSTIN: Oh, yes.

HS: When do you work?

FR. JUSTIN: After the morning service, we start work around 8:00 and work until 12:00. Then we have quiet time and vespers and a meal after vespers. And then we have another work period, say from 5:30 ’til 8:30 in the evening.

HS: When you went there, the Sinai peninsula was occupied by Israel.

FR. JUSTIN: I first visited there in 1978. Sinai was under Israel from 1967 until 1982. And then as part of the Camp David accords, it was returned to Egypt, but the roads there were built by the Jews for defense purposes. They were the first to encourage visitors who came to Jerusalem to continue on to Sinai, so they opened up the monastery to the public at large. After the peninsula was returned to Egypt, the Egyptians paved the roads and put in hotels to continue this support for visitors and pilgrims.

HS: Are there hotels there now?

FR. JUSTIN: In the area, yes, but not within the vicinity of the monastery. You can take a taxi, and about a 10-minute drive from the monastery you come to a village where they have the police headquarters, hospital facilities, and hotels and restaurants for the visitors.

Some people who visited Sinai in the 1950s have said that they do not want to come back because they want to remember it when it was extremely isolated, very seldom visited and it took real heroism to reach the monastery.

HS: What is the attitude of the monks toward this opening up?

FR. JUSTIN: The older fathers remember it when it was seldom visited, and they would like it to be like that again. The younger monks have never known it any other way; For them, that’s how the monastery is. It’s the older monks who tend to resent the intrusion. But people remind us that since the fourth century you had monks living in great isolation, but you also had pilgrims.

HS: Egeria?^a

FR. JUSTIN: Egeria, yes. So you can’t think of Sinai without visitors.

HS: I suppose you become a monk because of the silence, because of the contemplative conditions.

FR. JUSTIN: Yes, but [there is] silence in a relative sense. We only have visitors in the morning, from 9:00 to 12:00, so before 9:00 and after 12:00 it is still profoundly silent.

HS: How many tourists do you have every day?

FR. JUSTIN: Over a thousand, especially in the winter. Hundreds of thousands in the course of a year.

HS: What benefit to the monastery are all of these tourists?

FR. JUSTIN: We’ve never charged admission to the church, so there’s no financial benefit to the monastery, but we are reminded that if you come to know each person, each one has a special reason for being there, and we believe that each one receives a blessing by being there. We come to know just a few of these people, but many times those few that we come to know turn out to be very special people. So that’s why we have confidence that everyone is blessed in some way by being there.

HERSHEL SHANKS: Tell me a little about your background.

FR. JUSTIN: My parents were Baptist missionaries. I was born in Texas, but when I was two, we moved to Chile. I lived there until I was nine. That’s why my accent is not a Texas accent.