TRIGGER WARNING!!!
Fr. Herman kissing me, took me from asleep to wide awake very quickly. The first thing i did was roll out from underneath him saying as brightly and unromantically as possible, “Good morning Fr. Herman!”
How does one process something like this?
Well, if you are fifteen and a holy man does something inappropriate, you rationalize it. This is how I coped. The guru, the living saint, my spiritual father, could not have been doing anything wrong. Even though it made me uncomfortable, it couldn’t be wrong. I immediately banished these blasphemous thoughts from my mind.
“He’s the holy one, so…this must be a European thing, waking someone up with kisses. Those Europeans are weird like that. Ya.”
He must have figured out that this prairie boy wasn’t yet ripe for the picking because the atmosphere cooled betwixt us and we jovially climbed down from the loft.
The possibility that Fr. Herman was a sexual predator who had been grooming me for whatever he was grooming me for, was unthinkable for me. If I had faced that, my whole world would have shattered. The alternative to my entire life falling down was rationalization.
He can’t be a pederast, so it must be cultural. In the back of my mind I thought of the kiss of peace popular in many traditional Orthodox settings, where two people kiss one another on the cheek thrice. The Europeans do something like this too. This must have been like a super affectionate version of that.
When placed in that position I could not do anything else. My entire world revolved around Fr. Herman. Everyone of consequence in my life before and after this had, or at least demonstrated, the same awe and veneration. I may as well have thought that Jesus Christ was a pedophile, than think such blasphemy of Fr. Herman. And so I went on with my youth and he went on preying on other young men just as he had done for at least the preceding fifteen years.
That is the narrative my subconscious constructed for me. I would not tell anyone this or even think of it myself for almost two years until Fr. Deacon Paisius DeLucia asked me a rather odd question…
Well. That’s a story for next time eh?
caz and little: speaking the unspoken 
You present this almost as a kind of inner thing. But it was likely governed by outward conditions as well. There can be fear owing to the group you’re part of: what if you accuse someone who is held in such high esteem by many people of some serious moral transgression, then you turn out to be wrong? Will you not have alienated yourself from them, perhaps having caused them to suspect an innocent person of wrongdoing? These are thoughts that go through people’s minds in these sorts of situations. In hindsight, having additional data and knowing others who experienced this and more with him, it’s easy enough to refer to it as justifying something to yourself. But at the time, it is not clearly justification.
Oh, and by the way, this phenomenon has to do with group pressure, conformity, and simply fitting in. It’s not a specifically religious or Orthodox phenomenon. In fact, those sorts of feelings–of not wanting to be the one who upsets the apple cart–are built into all human social situations. This looks like one in which the perpetrator knew, to some extent, about these social conventions and who used them to his “advantage”– meaning, he used it to try and satisfy his sexual impulses under the guise of some sort of monastic eldership.
But look outside the religious context and you’ll see similar dynamics everywhere. To cite a non-religious expression where this natural human tendency has been perverted, it’s written all over the Nazi experience in Hitler’s Germany, for example.
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I am still listening.
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The victim in this case sounds like someone under cultic mind control. They are not allowed to question their leaders, so they justify all his abominations.
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To follow another post I posted earlier, I can still see why there may have been difficulty here with this issue in these kind of situations. Although you were 15 years old, which appears to be the age of consent in Alaska, the difficulty may be the actual conduct described doesn’t fall into ‘easy categories’ legally. The entire area of mere ‘touch’ and emotion is grey and hazy legally, and something that may not be entirely successfully redressed under the legal system in any common law system. Only the spiritual/church tribunals have Immediate jurisdiction here. See for instance here:
http://touchngo.com/lglcntr/akstats/Statutes/Title11/Chapter41/Section436.htm
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Correction above: sorry 15 is NOT the age of consent in Alaska :). 15 is below the age of consent there.
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Definition of sexual assault under Alaskan criminal code: http://touchngo.com/lglcntr/akstats/Statutes/Title11/Chapter41/Section410.htm
If not ‘sexual assault’ than what? I am still looking for a definition of ‘sexual contact’ – although I have a suspicion that it must mean contact below the belt… The next issue might be to establish ‘attempts to enhance’ which would require looking at the case law and I can see ot would be very tricky…
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Correction above: ‘attempts to engage’
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Here is another one fyi: http://touchngo.com/lglcntr/akstats/Statutes/Title11/Chapter41/Section438.htm
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Another thought to leave you with: http://www.nij.gov/topics/crime/rape-sexual-violence/pages/welcome.aspx#note1
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In the United States, the definition of sexual assault varies widely between the individual states. This is because there is no federal sexual assault laws in the United States due to the supreme court ruling of United States v. Morrison which ruled parts of the Violence Against Women Act unconstitutional. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network defines sexual assault as “unwanted sexual contact that stops short of rape or attempted rape. This includes sexual touching and fondling.”[5]
The National Center for Victims of Crime states:[6]
“ Sexual assault takes many forms including attacks such as rape or attempted rape, as well as any unwanted sexual contact or threats. Usually a sexual assault occurs when someone touches any part of another person’s body in a sexual way, even through clothes, without that person’s consent.
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