Metropolitan Jonah leads St. Vladimir’s Seminary into season of Great Lent
His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah, entered the season of “Bright Sadness” with the St. Vladimir’s Seminary community by offering spiritual counsel and leading the community in its annual observance of the first days of the Great Fast. The entire community of St. Vladimir’s Seminary enters into the season of Great Lent with the Rite of Forgiveness, and then a withdrawal into silence, fasting, and the powerful rhythm of the liturgical services, which is initiated by an intense and demanding two-day retreat for students, faculty, and staff.
Metropolitan Jonah served as retreat master for students, faculty, and staff in the seminary community for their annual lenten retreat, March 2-3, 2009. During the Divine Liturgy on Sunday, March 1, he also ordained seminarian Dn. John Vitko to the priesthood and seminarian Sean Levine to the diaconate. |
In his four retreat presentations, His Beatitude concentrated on the ascetical practices of inner silence, mindfulness of thought patterns, purification from passions, and freedom in Christ Jesus. While teaching classical methods of monastic struggle, he nevertheless noted that “the doorway to authentic mystical life is ultimately practical,” and he illustrated to the student body the value of personal spiritual struggle and its application in the home, parish ministry, the diocese, and the wider church.
His Beatitude Jonah began his seminary campus visit on Sunday, March 1, 2009 by serving a hierarchical Divine Liturgy and ordaining Deacon John Vitko, a special-category student, to the priesthood and second-year student Sean Levine to the diaconate. Anticipating the evening service at which the campus community would ask and receive forgiveness of each other, His Beatitude based his homily on the premise that “all spiritual life is conditioned on forgiveness.” The following two days, during the retreat, he extended the theme of forgiveness, identifying it as an initial step in likening ourselves to God.
“Each Great Lent is an exercise in ‘bridge building,’” he began, “a time to add a building block to our spiritual lives. And, the elimination of resentments toward our brothers and sisters is the first step to a living synergy with God.”
The two students newly ordained, who joyfully participated in the somber services of the first week of Great Lent with Metropolitan Jonah and St. Vladimir’s chapel clergy, possess remarkably rich backgrounds.
Fr. John graduated from the Late Vocations training program of the OCA in the 1980s and has been a deacon for ten years. Here at St. Vladimir’s for a one-year special program, his curriculum, where possible, emphasizes courses that would have the largest pastoral impact when he returns parish life. Currently, he serves as a pastoral care intern at St. John’s Riverside Hospital in Yonkers, and, as well, he gets plenty of practical experience as head of the campus Chapel Maintenance Team, which is his volunteer community assignment.
Fr. John says he and his wife Kitty (Katherine) “have both loved our time here at St. Vladimir’s and also the opportunity it’s given us to be near to our family, most of which lives within an hour’s drive of here. I am also eternally grateful to Frs. Michael Prokurat, Basil Rhodes, and Alexander Golitzin for my Late Vocations Training—their enthusiasm, knowledge, and love of God and His Church were instrumental in my starting down the path leading to my priesthood.”
Fr. John holds a B.S. in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1968) in Troy, New York, and an M.S. and Ph.D. (1975) in Physics from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. From November 1974 to January 2008, a little over 33 years, he worked for Sandia National Laboratories, a Department of Energy laboratory, first as a researcher, then in various levels of management, up through senior management. He has had the opportunity to work on many of the technical issues on the national agenda for the past three decades—alternate energy sources, solar energy, strategic defense, global climate change, environmental protection and biological and chemical defense. For the last five and a half years of his career, he was on loan to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). He had the distinct opportunities to help start up the DHS Science and Technology Directorate and then to direct the Biological and Chemical Defense Division in that organization. In January 2008, he retired from Sandia so that he could devote himself full-time to the Church and, in August 2008, he entered St. Vladimir’s Seminary. “God willing,” he said, “I hope to become a parish priest.”
During the Divine Liturgy on Sunday, March 1, Metropolitan Jonah ordained seminarian Dn. John Vitko to the priesthood and seminarian Sean Levine to the diaconate. [From left] Matushka Jennifer Levine (holding Andrew), Dn. Sean Levine and son Ethan, Metropolitan Jonah, and Fr. John and Matushka Kitty Vitko. |
Matushka Kitty also has been very active in the Church, having served in the past on the Metropolitan Council of the OCA. She has also had a long-standing and ongoing role in the OCA’s Department of Christian Witness and Humanitarian Aid and the Mission Board of the Diocese of the West.
Fr. John and Matushka Kitty have two major parish families in the OCA: St. Michael Orthodox Church in Danville, California, under Fr. Michael Regan, where he and his wife have been parishioners from 1975-2002; and St. Mark Orthodox Church in Bethesda, Maryland, under Fr. Gregory Safchuk, where they were parishioners from 2002-2007. Fr. John acknowledged further, “Fr. Michael and Fr. Gregory have been superb mentors to me, as had been Fr. Michael Prokurat and Fr. Victor Sokolov, both of blessed memory.”
Dn. Sean, his wife Jennifer, and two sons Ethan (10) and Andrew (3) hail from San Antonio, Texas, and were members of St. Anthony’s Orthodox Church, where Fr. Leo Poore is the rector. They entered the Orthodox Church while Dn. Sean was on active duty in the Army at Fort Lewis in Washington State and spent a lot of time with the faithful at St. Athanasius in Nicholasville, Kentucky, where an SVS alumnus Fr. Justin Patterson is rector.
Dn. Sean received his undergraduate degree from Oral Roberts University in 1993, a B.A. in Theology with a major in New Testament Studies and a minor in Pastoral Care and Counseling. He also earned two M.A. degrees in Theological Studies and Biblical Studies from Asbury Seminary, in 2002 and 2008 respectively.
He was Protestant pastor for thirteen years before converting to Orthodoxy, and spent three of those years as an Army Chaplain. He deployed to Iraq from March 2004 to January 2005 and again from November 2005 to November 2006 in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Perceiving a call to both the priesthood and military chaplaincy, Dn. Sean said, “I hope to return to active military service as an Army Chaplain upon completion of my M.Div. (2010).”