Allan Appel Photos
Father Westerberg beside a rendition of the Last Judgment.
Michael Westerberg will preside over Christmas services one last time next week, then step aside after 38 years overseeing the transformation of the Holy Transfiguration.
On Dec. 31, the beloved priest of Westville’s Holy Transfiguration Orthodox Church plans to retire after 38 years. He will preside over the congregation’s Christmas services for the last time this coming week.
The childhood memory emerged this week as Father Michael reflected on his tenure at the Russian Orthodox church on Alden Avenue, as we sat in the beautifully lit sanctuary decorated from nearly floor to ceiling with vividly shining golden icons of saints and religious figures of the Orthodox rite and tradition in North America.
Over his nearly four decades, Father Westerberg completed the installation of the church’s icons with walls and ceilings of glittering religious paintings that are considered a silent form of preaching.
He also presided over the congregation’s dis-assembling, repair, and reinstallation of its 14-foot gold-leafed cross and 5‑ton copper cupola, after they were battered and damaged during the winter storms of 2011 and 2012.
Asked to select a particular achievement that stands out over the years, Father Westerberg said simply, “It’s all been a gift.”
Drawn Early To “Truth & Beauty”
The “Pantocrator” high in the church’s central dome.
Asked about his favorite icons, he said the Pantocrator — an image of Jesus holding the New Testament with one hand and offering a blessing with the other— in the dome of the church “speaks to me a lot.”
“For us truth and beauty are totally interwoven,” he added.
He suggested that as a boy, he was drawn to the Orthodox Church’s visual, sensual (lots of incense), and ethereal music atmosphere. He still is.
“The beauty of it was beyond this world,” he recalled of those initial experiences. A number of priests were also role models.
Father Westerberg described summers spent at his grandparents’ modest bungalow in southern New Jersey. “The church was walking distance from the bungalow,” he recalled. You couldn’t keep his older brother from sports or his younger brother from the lake. But for young Michael Westerberg, there was the church.
He attended daily services. “It was an oasis of sanity, calm, beauty. My life was fine, no gripes at all, but it [church] opened my eyes. I experienced something bigger, something beyond.”
His parents, average churchgoers, acknowledged the need for the church to have priests (married ones, with families). They just didn’t want the priest to be their kid, he recalled. “My family did their best to discourage it: A clerical collar hurts. You live in a fishbowl. You don’t earn a good living.”
Father Michael’s grandmother was the only member of the family who liked the idea of his becoming a priest. “She didn’t push it,” he recalled. She simply said, “I hope to live long enough to come to you for confession.” (Unfortunately, she did not.)
While she she cooked, washed, and cleaned alone on those long summer weeks and weekends for all her grandkids, including the future priest, Father Michael’s grandmother always took time every day to pray. Michael noticed.
As this long-ago memory emerged, Father Michael surveyed the walls of the sanctuary. He said there should be space on the walls of glittering saints for his grandmother!
As he grew up, Westerberg stuck to his spiritual guns, as it were. Drafted into the army at the height of a build-up during the Vietnam War, he landed a job as a chaplain’s assistant. His father died while Westerberg was on leave. So when he got out of the army in 1968, he needed to support his mother while she sold the small family business.
He worked briefly taking reservations in Manhattan for TWA airlines, the old-fashioned way, on a sheet of paper and with a pen. There was also a brief stint with a brokerage firm. When the family was settled, he returned to Salem College in West Virginia to finish, and then went on to St. Vladimir’s Seminary in Yonkers for his training and ordination.
From Slavonic To English
The rest is Holy Transfiguration history, and a very positive chapter, recounted by a very modest man.
When Westerberg arrived in 1980 with his wife Lydia, they both expected the initial interview to be polite, and then they would return to New Hampshire. As they got in their car to go home, they both turned to each other, he recalled, and said, in effect. “This seems it’s of God. It’s the right thing.”
But he got the job. So after serving happily as priest for six years in a small northern New Hampshire town, he landed in New Haven, for good.
At the time, much of the service at Holy Transformation was performed in Slavonic, a language adopted by early church missionaries and close to 9th-century Bulgarian, he explained.
Today, with 150 members, and few of those old-timers left who know Slavonic, the services are mainly in English. “You worship in the language of the people,” he said.
One parishioner, Marha Lee Asarisi, gave Father Westerberg credit for “switching things up and doing most of the services in English, which allowed me to fully understand what church was all about,” she wrote in an admiring email.
She also credited him with providing her guidance without which “I would be lost in so many matters of my life.”
The Gift of Time
By the panel with the North American saints, including St. Herman and Peter the Aleut
Part of the “gift,” the word that Westerberg uses to characterize his tenure, has included the opportunity to be the Orthodox chaplain at the Veterans Administration hospital in West Haven and at Yale University (where he learned how to text).
Plans for retirement? They certainly don’t include golf or going to Florida, he said. He last played golf 50 years ago — miniature golf. As to Florida, he said he and his wife are New Yorkers by birth; winter and the change of seasons are in their blood.
He said he has been blessed with 70 years of good health. But he does have acute spinal stenosis, a condition that makes it difficult for him to stand during the often long services and visiting sessions with hospitalized parishioners. So he concluded it was time to retire.
The new priest, Father Steven Votoyvich, is a man Westerberg knows well, having attended his wedding. Votoyvich previously served as the priest at St. Alexis in Clinton and and as dean of one of the Orthodox seminaries.
Westerberg, who lives about a mile from the church, said he plans on working until the clock strikes midnight on Dec. 31. Then on Jan. 1 Father Votoyvich takes over.
Westerberg has made plans only through that date, Jan 1. That day is not only the civil new year; it’s also the Feast of St. Basil, as well as a church holiday.
“What happens eight days after a male child is born?” he asked rhetorically.
“It’s the Circumcision of the Lord,” Westerberg answered.
“Time is a gift to be sanctified,” he concluded. It was time to light the candles and meet with Father Votoyvich. “We talk about killing time, saving time, wasting time. But time is a gift, and none of us know the size.”
The outgoing and incoming priests.