The character and content of Orthodox 'spiritual fatherhood' is something which might well be of enormous interest and value to those of us in the post-religious West who have mourned the loss of spiritual foundations in our collective life, and who search, often in vain, for inspiration for our own spiritual lives. I somewhat regret that this book is not the place to find that nourishment: Nicolas Stebbing seems completely transfixed by a presupposition that the Romanian Orthodox heritage is intrinsically superior to our own (and he glides, I think, too quickly over the political compromises of the half-century of communism); what seem to me to be the platitudinous insights which he ascribes to the spiritual fathers themselves do not substantiate the weight of his hopes in them. I wonder whether this book is more the projection of the author's own exasperations with our western situation than a reliable guide to the realities of contemporary Orthodoxy. ( )

Using a familiar voice, Nicolas Stebbing depicts his visits to monasteries and parish Churches inside Romania starting in 1990. However, this book is not a travelogue with juicy anecdotes about the people and places Stebbing visits.

Instead, Stebbing explores Orthodox teaching concerning Christian living in lengthy quotes from his interviews with well-known contemporary Romanian Orthodox spiritual fathers. The author approaches his task with the reverence of a Christian pilgrim, providing his own witness of Christ whom he encounters first-hand. Endorsed by Archimandrite Roman (Braga) of the Romanian Episcopate's Holy Dormition Monastery, Orthodox Church in America {Foreword, vii-xi], the book should appeal to a wide audience of Christians--East and West, as well as readers of international relations that include Dacian, Moldavian, Wallachian and Balkan cultural and historical studies.

I add these comments about Father Stebbing, because the author is a monk-priest of the Anglican Community of the Resurrection (Benedictine) and native of Zimbabwe. He resides of late in Mirfield, UK--located in West Yorkshire between Manchester and Leeds--at the order's mother-house. As part of an engaging Benedictine vocation, Stebbing teaches biblical languages on faculty of The College of the Resurrection, also in Mirfield. In addition to these biographical elements, Stebbing identifies several significant links between the Community of the Resurrection and Romania, as well as high-level dialogue between Romanian Orthodox and Anglican Churches in the 1930's [xxiii-xxvi].

Besides describing the Romanian customs of lay-monastic interchanges along his journey, Stebbing's principal aim is to introduce ancient and contemporary spiritual fatherhood in Romania. Perhaps a comparable term to spiritual fatherhood with greater familiarity to western readers would be spiritual direction or spiritual guidance [book description Back Cover].

Spiritual guidance is a relationship shared between two Christians. The spiritual father guides another Christian, because the father has been steeped in the practice of curing souls [153], "...like a doctor who takes immense trouble to prevent people dying" [120]. In that way, Romanian Christians seek expert doctors, whom they perceive to be close to God [192].

There are varying levels of expertise acknowledged by Stebbing. However, rudimentary to defining expertise is the spiritual father's knowledge of self [144]. The practice of prayer combined with personal study, as prescribed by a spiritual father, provide future spiritual fathers with knowledge of self [145]. Rules of prayer and study comprise the prescribed 'science' of spiritual guidance. It is the relationship of freedom between spiritual father and child, which identifies the art of spiritual guidance in Orthodox Romania [147]. Combining science and art, some spiritual father become masters in practice.

Masters of virtue in Christ bear the Holy Spirit (Spirit-bearer), which is variably identified as 'duhovnic' (Russian) and 'pneumatikos' (Greek) [119]. However, spiritual guidance also includes broad historical, social and cultural esteem attributed to the Spirit-bearer by others who are not in direct contact with him. For example, Stebbing describes how he first learned of Father Cleopa of Siha'stria by word-of-mouth from Christians who had never received individual counsel from him [7].

The historical component of esteem for Fr. Cleopa [45-86] requires information about Romanian Orthodoxy, which Stebbing provides in the first two chapters [1-32]. Following a revolutionary overthrow of Nicolae Ceauescu in 1989, Stebbing notes a resurgent interest in 'ascesis' for all Romanian Christians, as well as re-populating neglected or abandoned monasteries and establishing new monasteries [41].

Stebbing notes that every Orthodox presbyter in Romania, whether monastic or not, provides spiritual guidance to others [133]. Spiritual fathers hide alone in mountains, live in monasteries, preside in parishes, and a few wander here and there. The degree to which a spiritual father is "an organ of the Holy Spirit" [134, quoting Fr. Ilie Moldovan], determines how well he can read the souls seeking his guidance.

Benefit for the soul inspires Christians to undergo hardships in finding a "good" spiritual father in Romania today [149]. Stebbing explores reasons for these hardships. State-controlled theological education during the Ceauescu years suffered isolation, mediocrity, reduced access to texts and spiritual fathers providing instruction, and contrived ideological comparisons between Christian doctrine with national and international politics from the period [compare 149 and 249]. Therefore, urban universities produced graduates with little understanding of Orthodoxy, while spiritual fathers retreated to rural places where a monastic revival had begun to flourish in post-war Romania [29].

There are additional features of publication that I appreciate. These include an endsheet sketch map of Romania, which includes locations on scale for principal monasteries and cities, identifiers for the country's regions/provinces, major geographic features, along with location and names for bordering countries. Far to the right lower margin on the map lies Romania's southeastern edge abutting the Black Sea. A brief end-text glossary will find use by western readers. Words such as staretz, and Romanian variants for morning prayer (Utrenie) and evening prayer (Vecernie) appear in the glossary.

There is no index of names or subjects for this book. However, readers are rewarded by 22 black-and-white photographs, collected midway through the book, which serve a hearty meal of landscape and architecture for major monasteries. Certainly these capture the grandeur of the Carpathian Mountains. Even greater in stature are numerous never-before-seen photographs of Orthodox and Anglican faces that have become transformed by synergy. An appendix [329-32] explaining synergy has been added with attribution to "a young Orthodox theologian," Clin Smrghian.

A bibliography [333-43] concludes the text. As best I can tell, abundant sources in Romanian disclose the author's fluency as well as critical need for translations to reach English-language readers. Of notable interest to me were Pcurariu's 'Istoria Bisericii Ortodoxe Române' and four publications by Father Cleopa, dated 1993-97. ( )