A Unity of Vision

A Tribute to Dr. Albert Raboteau

ADEDOYIN TERIBA

“Have you heard about Albert Raboteau?” a friend asked me after Divine Liturgy. We were in the sanctuary at Holy Trinity, the Greek Orthodox cathedral on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. I was still wearing my cassock, basking in the afterglow of the service. The room was almost empty, yet felt full—as if the invisible members of the whole church were still there, even as the other parishioners had left for coffee hour. 

I told my friend the name was unfamiliar.

“Here, take this,” he said. He handed me a copy of Sorrowful Joy: A Spiritual Journey of an African American Man in Late Twentieth Century America, Dr. Albert Raboteau’s spiritual autobiography. It narrates the way Dr. Raboteau, who was born into a Catholic family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and became a pathbreaking scholar in the field of African American religion, came to embrace the Orthodox Church midway through his life.

Over the next few days I devoured the book. I was spellbound by the way he told the stories of enslaved people in this country who became Christians during their bondage. It was as if I could hear the slaves’ voices. Dr. Raboteau—or Panteleimon, as he was known in church—argued persuasively that those Christian slaves were part of the suffering church. In other words, he said, they mystically took to heart St. Paul’s words about completing the sufferings of Christ.

I was inspired to scour the internet for more information about him. I learned that he was a professor of religion at Princeton University. As it happened, I was in the process of applying for a doctoral program at Princeton, studying modern architecture. Some months later, I was accepted at the school, and I moved to the Princeton area in the fall of 2008. 

Panteleimon and I became acquainted, and soon he became a third father to me—after my biological father (in Nigeria) and Father Daniel Skvir, the priest at Holy Transfiguration Chapel in Princeton, where I became a parishioner. Over the next several years, during my most difficult times at Princeton, Panteleimon was a stalwart for me. He comforted me when my mother passed away, while I was writing my dissertation. “My mother passed away too, before I completed mine,” I remember him saying. “I went to her funeral and then returned to finish it.” Those words gave me the strength to continue. In other moments of distress, he would sit with me at the Frist Campus Center, Princeton’s student union building, and listen to my concerns. When I talked about wanting a “big, juicy” academic position after I finished my degree, he’d remind me to focus instead on the joy of learning, and to find topics I loved.

Panteleimon had great love for others, despite the harm that had been inflicted on him. I heard him speak at least twice, in public presentations, about how he never met his father—who was murdered by a white man months before he was born. Panteleimon was forthright about his personal struggles. I admired his commitment to repententance—his willingness to always return to God. It explained his patience and gentleness with me.

As he explains in Sorrowful Joy, he was a devoted Roman Catholic for much of his life. He attended college at Loyola University in Los Angeles, a Jesuit university. The stated mission of the Jesuits is to “find God in all things,” and the lessons he learned from his professors clearly stayed with him for the rest of his life. They spoke about a “unity of vision,” he wrote, wherein all human knowledge and experience fit into a pattern of meaning that we rarely glimpse. “At the core, tying everything together, we learned, was a simple and yet profound belief: the insatiable desire of the human spirit for knowledge is an expression of our profound yearning for the infinite reality of God.” It was at Loyola that he felt inspired to become a teacher. 

Over the next several decades, he rose to become a towering figure in the academic world. His book Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, which was published in 1978, remains the definitive study of the spiritual lives of America’s enslaved people. Its impact has been incalculable; it has inspired works in history, sociology, and literature, as well as in Panteleimon’s own field of religious studies.

His conversion to the Orthodox Church happened in the 1990s, following a painful divorce. Sorrowful Joy describes profound experiences he had in churches, at a monastery, and at an exhibit of Orthodox iconography at the Princeton Art Museum, all while he was still an inquirer. The hymns he encountered in services moved him the most. “They had the same sadly joyful tone which I associated with down home and with slave spirituals,” he wrote. After his chrismation, at SS. Peter in Paul (in Manville, N.J.), he played a central role in establishing Mother of God Joy of All Who Sorrow Orthodox Church, in Princeton. 

The sense of unity between his scholarship and his faith is remarkable. In Slave Religion, for instance, there are passages that resonate deeply with Eastern Christian theology—which is all the more striking because he had not yet joined the Orthodox Church when he wrote it. He argues, for instance, that when enslaved people sang hymns like “Go Down Moses”—which describes the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt, with the refrain “let my people go”—it was a form of liturgical, sacramental worship. A “sense of sacred time operated,” he wrote, echoing the scholar Lawrence Levine, “in which the present was extended backwards so that characters, scenes, and events from the Old and New Testaments became dramatically alive and present.”

It’s not hard to see a connection with the Orthodox services—for instance, those of Holy Thursday and Friday, where we mystically partake in the Last Supper and the crucifixion of Christ. “During the Liturgy,” the theologian Paul Evdokimov wrote in 1959, “through its divine power, we are projected to the point where eternity cuts across time, and at this point we become true contemporaries with the events which we commemorate.”

The integrity between his professional life and his faith was reflected in other ways as well. Like his patron saint, the third-century martyr, Panteleimon was a healer. He infused his academic discipline with Christian virtues, such as the recognition of the dignity of every human being—grounded in the understanding that each person bears the image of Christ. He exemplified what it means to be a scholar: he knew that if he could pose the right question, it would usually lead to collaborations with others who had expertise that he lacked. He had a knack for bringing scholars together and creating a collegial atmosphere, not unlike the Body of Christ.

Panteleimon was also a master teacher – a teacher’s teacher. He told me once that teaching a seminar was like breaking open the “bread” of the texts that he and the students read. I would venture to guess that from his perspective, the professor and the priest were one. Each invites people to share the joys of being in the kingdom through God’s creation, which is offered to God in thanksgiving. The professor knows that everything is sacred, and that to “break” open a text is to be reminded of that more permanent world where all things will be glorified and transfigured by the One Who Is.

When Panteleimon retired in 2013, Princeton convened a conference in his honor, and scholars came from around the world. One former student called him “Saint Al,” recalling his gentle and caring mentorship and sweet demeanor. Another, who teaches at Princeton now, recalled receiving a “happy birthday” phone call each year from Panteleimon, who had the same birthday. As a member of the Princeton Georgian Choir, I had the honor of serenading him with Georgian polyphonic songs during a reception.

He fell asleep in the Lord in the fall of 2021, at the age of 78. He’d been suffering for several years from Lewy body dementia. He was laid to rest at the church in Princeton that he helped establish.

Thank you, Panteleimon, for being my third father. Thank you, Panteleimon, for showing me what a true Christian scholar should be. Thank you, Panteleimon and pray for us.