I don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook. With work, Church, my children, elderly parents, most of my day is already loaded. And while I enjoy seeing pictures of my friends’ vacations and kitten videos, the animosity I often see in ethnic and faith-based groups is disheartening. So when I see people get angry, typing in all caps, and disrespecting each other, I feel the need to say that we need to be better at empathizing with others and respecting each person’s journey.

When I was growing up in Pennsylvania during the 1970s I was told that my family was Russian. At the time, this wasn’t a great thing to be. The Cold War was raging and anything Russian was automatically Communist–in other words, bad. There was no immigration from or trips back to any part of Eastern Europe. The only other Slavic people around were an older generation who had arrived as Displaced Persons after World War II. I had never met anyone my age who had ever been to my ancestral homeland or spoke the language of my grandparents.

My grandmother spoke what sounded like Russian to me. She said she came “from Europe” which was incredibly vague, but I knew from history class that there was an actual empire called Austria-Hungary that no longer existed and that she came from somewhere there. My mom would say she was from Galicia, but that wasn’t a place I could find on a map, and I certainly never heard about it in school.

Both my parents were sent to Russian School as children. Their parents chose to send them because they belonged to Russian Orthodox Churches which offered Russian language classes. My dad was able to move easily between по-нашому at home, Russian in Russian school, and Polish with the neighbors, but my mom was confused because her father spoke Belarusian, her mother spoke Rusyn, and the language she learned in Russian school was different from both of those. As a result, she spoke English at home except when my Baba was visiting. At that time, it wasn’t cool to speak a language other than English. American society wanted immigrants to join the melting pot rather than create a beautiful mosaic, so the idea was to assimilate to American culture as quickly as possible. Multiculturalism was a wave of the future, and no one envisioned a time when speaking the language of our grandparents would be of value.

After the Berlin Wall came down, we began to meet new immigrants who came from Russia. My father kept pointing out that they were Russian, and they spoke differently than “our people.” As a result, my father became more interested in his genealogy and began identifying himself as a Rusyn. My parents went on a Carpatho-Rusyn Heritage tour in 2000. While many of our family’s villages were destroyed and the people had been deported, the trip really opened my eyes to the fact that we were Rusyn and not Russian at all. For one thing, I saw pictures for the first time of Rusyn landscapes and villages. We studied the maps and found the towns of my grandparents and great-grandparents. My dad started listening to recordings of services in the Cathedral in Uzhhorod, and I realized how different the music was from what I knew growing up in Russian Orthodox churches.

After spending my life in OCA (Orthodox Church of America) churches, I was living in New Jersey and still driving back to New York City for Church. I can’t say that I was suddenly overwhelmed with ethnic pride and sought out a parish that included Rusyn traditions. While many individual clergy and laypeople in the OCA are interested in and knowledgeable about their ethnic background and the origins of Orthodoxy in America, the OCA as a whole always stressed being American with roots in Russia. While the immigrant Church’s hierarchy was Russian, the people who built many of those Churches were often not. ACROD, both in its name and in its history, emphasized that we are North Americans with roots in Carpatho-Rus.  The reason I switched Churches in 2003 was that driving into the City with five young children, tolls, and feeding the parking meters (New York City started requiring paying the meter Sunday mornings at that time) was less than ideal. So we started going to our local ACROD (American Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Diocese) parish because it had a parking lot. But not only was this a wonderful spiritual home for us, but it was also a part of a diocese where we could learn more about our heritage.

There are probably two points you might be thinking. For one, there are those of you who believe that ACROD parishes are overly Russified, but I will tell you that we found some obvious differences from our experience in the OCA. In addition to the tones and plain chant singing, the use of the troitsa and the caroling traditions were specific to Rusyn people. My kids went to Camp Nazareth, and they learned that we were not the only Rusyn-Americans around. In church, we learned about the saints of Carpathian Rus’ and which of our family’s traditions were actually Rusyn and which we had borrowed from other Orthodox cultures. Rusyn-American immigrants built most OCA and ACROD parishes, but ACROD allowed us to acknowledge the fact by keeping the music and traditions of our ancestors. The fact that the name of our diocese refers back to Carpatho-Rus reminds us where we really came from. My faith has been central to my family, and finding a parish where we can be both Orthodox and Rusyn has been a blessing.

The second is that some of you probably think that my family is a bunch of idiots–how could we look at a map and not clearly see that we did not come from Russia at all? To that, I would say that my family is not alone. In fact, you will find plenty of Rusyn-Americans born in the twentieth century who talk about being Russian–or who have simply become “American.” Things are different today when immigrants can travel back and forth and you can find all the information you want on the internet. You can check your DNA for $199 and find out exactly who you are and where you came from. Back in the 20th Century, we relied on our family’s information which was shaped by the people and society around them. Some of this was Russian/Soviet domination, taking over churches founded by Rusyn people in America. But there is also a problem with ignorance in the United States–a very myopic view of history and complete ignorance of all non-Western cultures.

The point of this story is that there are many people like me (including my 12 cousins) who are still growing in knowledge and appreciation of all things Rusyn. It is great that there is so much information available about Rusyn history today, but not everyone had this information when I was growing up. So, don’t type in all caps on Facebook and tell people that they don’t know who they are. Perhaps some kindness and empathy will encourage their self-discovery rather than incite an argument.