An Evening Vigil: A Reflection on Culture Immersion and Language
Photo of Naval Cathedral of Saint Nicholas in Kronstadt by Arti Kh on Pexels.com
By: Alessandra Cabrera
This was a cultural experience reflection written for EDUC 365, a course called Foundations of Instructing English Language Learners. We were tasked with spending an hour in a space that operated in an unfamiliar language to contextualize the experience of an English language learner in a foreign classroom.
When we arrived at St. Andrew’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, the sun was midway in the afternoon sky, with beams of light reflecting on the vibrant blue of the glittering dome. I was surprised to see such a beautiful monument basically smushed between two non-religious buildings. Our trip was greatly expedited, since we took an Uber from campus to 5th St. and Fairmount Ave, but from the view of the window, I was greeted with the sight of familiar venues in the area, like Franklin Music Hall and Yards Brewing Company. I realized that I hadn’t spent much time exploring this part of the city, unless it was for entertainment purposes.
We tried to look up things on Google Translate that we might need to say to others at the church (or церковь, for that matter). Although I had previously spent a half a year studying the Russian language, I didn’t really know much beyond добрый вечер or спасибо. I was familiar with reading the Cyrillic script, but that wasn’t really that much help when a religious service is generally communicated orally to the audience. We timidly opened the doors to the church, not really knowing what we would witness the other side. After traipsing over carpeted stairs, we entered the main worship space, which was dimly lit, but decorated with an ornate wooden gate and iconographs of various religious figures. There were a bunch of gold objects and tapestries embroidered with beautiful depictions of saints with gold circling their heads. All around the church, there were yellow candlesticks illuminating the way.
We were the first people who arrived at the vigil, so we decided to respectfully sit down in the wooden chairs. The luscious sounds of a three-part harmony came from the choir — everything was sung through, and it was some kind of chant that was completely in Russian. Steeped in the music and atmosphere were little things that were vaguely reminiscent of the Catholic church that I had grown up in. I quietly wondered to myself if the priest’s green robes also signified that we were in ordinary time, or if the musical melodies that graced our ears had once been influenced by the same thing.
The priest entered and exited through side doors in the gate. I kind of expected him to lead the ceremony, but he didn’t tell people when to stand up, sit down, or when to sing. In fact, the priest was standing with his back facing the audience, bent over in prayer. And then he would disappear, and the chanting would happen again. Older women came into the church with long skirts and dresses with their heads were covered with a shawl. At the sight of them, I became self-conscious of what I was wearing, even though I had tried to dress more conservatively. I thought to myself, “Am I wearing the wrong thing?” I realized that this might be a common thing that an immigrant student might think, if they have a physical identifier that marks them as “different” from their peers. To them, it could feel like a mortifying and isolating experience.
People were wandering around the church, which struck me as a bit strange. The women would touch the floor when they did the sign of the cross, and they would do it at multiple different images around the church. It was normal to go up to the framed pictures and kiss them. At some point in the middle, the lights got turned off, yet the chanting continued. It was cool, but I kind of started thinking, “When is this going to end?” Since the priest and choir didn’t really interact with the audience that much, it felt like they were just singing really fast for a long time, but I couldn’t really tell what they were saying.
The lights came back on, and the priest did the sign of the cross on people’s foreheads. Then on himself. Then on the painting. That was probably the most climactic moment of the mass. Then, it back to chanting. The man’s voice. The woman’s voice. The priest would come out for a moment and do the incense, and then he’d go back in. I could not predict when it was going to end. The songs they were singing were really long and it would be this long stretch of music and they would say amen and still not be done. In the Catholic church, people usually do the sign of the cross to signify when they are done, but the singing just kept going on and on.
We’d been just sitting there in the wooden chairs for an hour and thirty minutes, but other people were standing the whole time. We weren’t sure what to do. Should we have done something when he put the incense on us? Nobody had any expectations for us. We realized that we should probably go. It was not really what we expected at all. We didn’t have to recite anything or do anything, and nobody talked even talked to us, but I still felt kind of lost. I was participating in a very detached way. My brain was thinking things like, Дети, means children, and человек, means human and I would hear these familiar words scattered in, but I couldn’t piece anything together. For students with a lower proficiency in English, it can be helpful if the people around them communicate slowly and clearly with simple words. Content-specific words, such as religious terminology, can be very daunting to interpret, when you don’t even know the basics.
It wasn’t a negative experience, but I had no idea what was happening or why Venerable Sergius of Radonezh was important to the Russian Orthodox Church. I had this irrational feeling that everyone was assuming for me to know what to do, but I felt like a fraud because I couldn’t even do the most basic things. I can relate to the experiences of the children in Cristina Igoa’s classroom. Although this experience was not on the same level as transplanting myself to another country, I still felt immersed in a different culture and admittedly felt pretty tired afterwards. It was cool at first, but if I were to imagine that I was supposed to go back there every day for hours on end, I would probably start to get really frustrated and start counting down the minutes until I could go home. I can understand how those children feel. There was an expectation for things to be more familiar, but there was no one to really follow along with.
If I had someone I knew or had someone who could help integrate me into the culture, I might have more of a personal connection to the traditions of the church and feel more comfortable. I wasn’t really confident in my Russian language skills beforehand, but I think this experience showed me that I really have a long way to go. For a lot of immigrant students, their main point of connection and socialization is with their teacher. I think that as future educators, it is extremely important for us to have experiences which allow us to step out of our own skin and remember what it is like to feel unknown. Unknowable. And in doing so, we can propel not just our students, but the people around us to become more empathetic towards the inner worlds of others.