I found this story, originally published in the Dallas Morning News, on another Orthodox message board. I can't paste the whole article here but here's part of the story. I found it at: http://euphrosynoscafe.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=582 . You might have to register to view the article. It's found on the forum page under the Monasteries and the Monsastic Life heading.
2003.06.29 Dallas Morning News:
Former Lincoln star now serves a higher goal
When the shots stopped falling, Angela Aycock walked into a new life
Angela Aycock now goes by "Sister Paula", a black convent of the Russian
Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
By BARRY HORN / The Dallas Morning News
High above the playing floor of the sold-out college basketball arena,
Sister Paula of the Protection of the Virgin Mary Convent had to be praying
for a miracle.
All she wanted was to remain invisible.
Draped from head to toe in a black habit, she hardly melted in with the
upper-deck crowd of frat boys, sorority girls and rabid alums.
It didn't help that she stood 6 feet, 2 inches.
A 29-year-old novice nun still feeling her spiritual way, Sister Paula had
come all the way from her convent in western Canada for a halftime ceremony
to retire the jerseys of two University of Kansas women's basketball players.
One belonged to Tamecka Dixon, two-time conference player of the year and a
star guard in the Women's National Basketball Association.
The other jersey that would go up on the wall of honor in storied Allen
Fieldhouse, alongside those of Wilt Chamberlain, Lynette Woodard and Danny
Manning, also was worn by a former conference player of the year.
It belonged to Sister Paula.
Or Angela Aycock, as she was known at Kansas and back home in South Dallas.
Sister Paula didn't want to be there. She didn't want to give up her days
and nights at the convent devoted to prayer. She and her skeptical abbess
had to be talked into it through weeks of delicate negotiations.
In the end, it was agreed that Sister Paula would attend if she remained in
the shadows, attracting no attention.
So when Angela Aycock's No. 12 jersey was honored in February, the
announcer informed the roaring crowd of 16,300 that she could not
participate in the ceremony because of religious obligations.
The announcer did not point out that in an upper-deck portal, Sister Paula
was watching in silence.
Sister Paula was relieved, she later told her former Kansas coach who had
demanded her presence, that not a single soul had intruded on her 15 minutes.
Her only public comment came in a news release issued by the school.
"God willing," she was quoted as saying, "many more young women will be
inspired and challenge themselves as well as others not to limit
themselves, but strive for excellence in all things."
Soon after the ceremony, Sister Paula was off to the next stop on her
journey - a visit to a convent in West Virginia.
There Sister Paula divided her time between prayer and diligently making
chotki, the prayer rope fingered by Russian Orthodox Christians in silent
devotion.
Just what inspired a black, Baptist-born, former All-America basketball
player to walk away from her game to seek a monastic life in the
ultra-traditional Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, Sister Paula
won't explain.
She refuses to talk publicly.
. . .
Tonya Aycock believes an interpreter assigned to her sister in Europe
introduced Angela to the Orthodox religion. She says her sister became a
frequent visitor to churches and cathedrals around Europe.
Angela loved the beauty she saw in Orthodox icons. She covered the walls of
her apartment with them.
When Angela played in Reims, she chose to live across from the city's famed
cathedral, which dates to the 13th century. It was in the Cathedral at
Reims that 17-year-old Joan of Arc stood at the side of Charles VII when he
was crowned King of France in 1429.
Angela told Renate Mai-Dalton she especially liked the Orthodox litany. It
allowed her to focus.
Her calls had a different tone.
"She started telling me how much she wanted to please God," Tonya says.
"She told me she was changing ... changing into somebody else.
"One night she asked me about salvation. We talked for hours and hours, and
we cried for hours and hours. It was that night she told me she received
Jesus Christ as her Lord and savior."
When Angela began asking theological questions her sister could not answer,
Tonya suggested calling her minister at Rhoads Terrace Bible Fellowship.
The Rev. E.D. Charles says Angela wanted to know his thoughts on Orthodoxy.
"She was struggling with the group of believers she was talking to," he
says. "Our conversations were centered on faith. She was looking for a kind
of discipline to keep her life in line. She seemed very vulnerable. I
thought we were connecting. But she found something else that influenced
her in her most vulnerable time."
Orthodox mentor
Father Dositheos, the Greek Orthodox abbot at the Monastery of the Holy
Archangels in the Texas Hill Country town of Kendalia, thought it odd when
he took Angela Aycock's call in 2001.
"I said, 'Wow, what's a basketball player doing calling me from France?' "
he recalls.
Angela explained that she had been using the Internet to help her study
Orthodoxy.
Her research initially led her to a convent in northeast Pennsylvania. The
abbess there told Angela that because she was from Dallas, she might be
better off calling someone closer to home and suggested Father Dositheos'
monastery about 40 miles north of San Antonio.
Father Dositheos was impressed with Angela's questions. He liked her
sincerity. The two talked on and off for about a year.
Angela told Father Dositheos she was beginning instruction to convert to
the Orthodox faith.
"She said she had read extensively about the Orthodox religion," he says.
"She felt it was right for her. She said she was tired of other
denominations and how they preached the Gospel."
Back from France last spring and living in Dallas with her sister Tonya,
Angela traveled to Kendalia to meet with Father Dositheos.
She told him that as soon as her conversion was complete, she hoped to
enter a convent.
Father Dositheos disapproved.
"I told her I thought she was rushing things," he says. "I wanted her to
convert and live in the Orthodox church, live the Orthodox life for several
years and then make a monastic decision.
"She didn't want to hear it. She said she was ready."
Except for a Christmas card, that was the end of their relationship.
"There are two things you can't tell anyone," Father Dositheos says. "You
can't tell somebody who they should marry, and you can't tell somebody
whether or not they should become a monastic."
By this time, Angela was spending many of her waking hours deep in prayer.
"She told me there has to be prayers going on all the time," Marian
Washington says. "She said that if it weren't for prayer to combat sin, she
didn't know where the world would be."
When Tonya returned home from work, she'd frequently find her sister
standing in a large walk-in closet reading a Bible or praying.
Angela would pray for hours, standing rigidly, never slouching, never
resting. All the discipline and physical training from basketball were
serving a different purpose.
It was about that time Angela turned her full attention to another church
she had found on the Internet - St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church.
Housed in a tiny white building behind All Saints Episcopal Church off
Abrams Road, just south of Mockingbird Lane, the smallest Orthodox
congregation in Dallas-Fort Worth, unlike its sophisticated Web site, is
not easy to find.
Father Seraphim Holland, its pastor, says the church has about 30 regular
parishioners, most of whom, like himself, are converts to Orthodoxy.
"We believe everything in life should be done to know God intimately. ... A
large part of what we practice is contrary to the American lifestyle. ...
There is something very permanent in Orthodoxy that attracts true believers."
There is no official communion between the uncompromising Russian Orthodox
Church Outside Russia and other Orthodox churches, let alone other
Christian denominations. The ecumenical movement is considered heretical.
"They are our Bible Belt fundamentalists," says Professor Paul Meyendorf,
academic dean at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, the suburban
New York training ground of the more liberal Orthodox Church of America.
"People who convert there and then enter the monastic life are usually
people who want to escape this world," he says.
Father Seraphim says members of his church simply believe "everything in
life is to know God intimately. ...We are not a Wednesday night and Sunday
afternoon religion. The idea is that anything worth having is worth working
at."
Father Seraphim says he saw nothing unusual in a young professional
basketball player searching for life as a monastic.
"It was a very personal thing for her," is all he will say specifically
about Angela. "I can tell you that she has found true peace. What's
important in a person's life is not their past. My job is to care about her
now."
Father Seraphim gave Angela a key to his church, where she spent countless
hours alone in prayer.
Angela's family says she became so enthralled with Father Seraphim and his
teachings, they didn't know what to expect when it came time to meet him at
Angela's catechumen, her public acceptance of Orthodoxy, last summer.
All they really knew was that Angela had told them she would be leaving
soon for a faraway convent.
She told them that she didn't know when she might see them again and that
she would be dividing all her worldly possessions among them.
They knew, too, she would be taking a new name, Paula.
For a while, they suspected Angela had fallen in with a cult.
"We had heard so much about Jim Jones and David Koresh," says Tonya Aycock.
"We all went to the service to see if it was legitimate."
What the Aycocks witnessed was a traditional Orthodox service in the
icon-filled, one-room church. Their fears were assuaged.
Not long after, Angela was off to Bluffton, Alberta, to sample life at the
Protection of the Virgin Mary Convent.
It was there that she chose to be baptized Paula in reverence for St. Paul.
Father Seraphim traveled to Canada for the baptism in December.
Father Seraphim says he is "touched by how deeply and sincerely Paula wants
to change her life.
"And that's not from profligate to good, but from empty to fulfilled."
Sister Paula has since returned twice to Dallas. She was here in February,
driving down from Lawrence before the jersey retirement ceremony for a
one-day visit.
"She told me this is as close as one could get to God and still be of this
earth," her mother says.
She returned for several days in April, staying mostly in her mother's
apartment, while in the process of transferring to another convent.
She seemed different this time. More spiritual. More distant.
A Russian Orthodox priest who is a former monk, explained that in the path
Sister Paula has chosen, she would "give up this world, including
ultimately her family."
It could be five years before Sister Paula's hair is cut in a tonsure
ceremony, leading to her becoming a full-fledged monastic nun. Washington,
her Kansas coach, is comfortable with Angela's decision but wishes Sister
Paula could use her talents to work with children. Father Seraphim says
that is not an alternative in his church.
When Angela left Dallas two months ago, she didn't give her sister a
forwarding address.
The only indication Angela gave of what she believes is to come is when she
told her sister, "This is the beginning of the end of time."
When they hugged for a final time, Angela squeezed so tight, Tonya is
certain she knows what it meant.
"I don't believe we'll ever see her again," Tonya says. "But I really don't
know what to believe anymore."
Her family simply hopes their Angela is happy and has found the peace she
has been searching for.
Before she left, however, their Angela made a special request. She asked
for some pecan pie to pack away on her journeys.
"In our world," Tonya says, "it was always her favorite."
E-mail bhorn@dallasnews.com
2003.06.29 Dallas Morning News:
Former Lincoln star now serves a higher goal
When the shots stopped falling, Angela Aycock walked into a new life
Angela Aycock now goes by "Sister Paula", a black convent of the Russian
Orthodox Church Outside Russia.
By BARRY HORN / The Dallas Morning News
High above the playing floor of the sold-out college basketball arena,
Sister Paula of the Protection of the Virgin Mary Convent had to be praying
for a miracle.
All she wanted was to remain invisible.
Draped from head to toe in a black habit, she hardly melted in with the
upper-deck crowd of frat boys, sorority girls and rabid alums.
It didn't help that she stood 6 feet, 2 inches.
A 29-year-old novice nun still feeling her spiritual way, Sister Paula had
come all the way from her convent in western Canada for a halftime ceremony
to retire the jerseys of two University of Kansas women's basketball players.
One belonged to Tamecka Dixon, two-time conference player of the year and a
star guard in the Women's National Basketball Association.
The other jersey that would go up on the wall of honor in storied Allen
Fieldhouse, alongside those of Wilt Chamberlain, Lynette Woodard and Danny
Manning, also was worn by a former conference player of the year.
It belonged to Sister Paula.
Or Angela Aycock, as she was known at Kansas and back home in South Dallas.
Sister Paula didn't want to be there. She didn't want to give up her days
and nights at the convent devoted to prayer. She and her skeptical abbess
had to be talked into it through weeks of delicate negotiations.
In the end, it was agreed that Sister Paula would attend if she remained in
the shadows, attracting no attention.
So when Angela Aycock's No. 12 jersey was honored in February, the
announcer informed the roaring crowd of 16,300 that she could not
participate in the ceremony because of religious obligations.
The announcer did not point out that in an upper-deck portal, Sister Paula
was watching in silence.
Sister Paula was relieved, she later told her former Kansas coach who had
demanded her presence, that not a single soul had intruded on her 15 minutes.
Her only public comment came in a news release issued by the school.
"God willing," she was quoted as saying, "many more young women will be
inspired and challenge themselves as well as others not to limit
themselves, but strive for excellence in all things."
Soon after the ceremony, Sister Paula was off to the next stop on her
journey - a visit to a convent in West Virginia.
There Sister Paula divided her time between prayer and diligently making
chotki, the prayer rope fingered by Russian Orthodox Christians in silent
devotion.
Just what inspired a black, Baptist-born, former All-America basketball
player to walk away from her game to seek a monastic life in the
ultra-traditional Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia, Sister Paula
won't explain.
She refuses to talk publicly.
. . .
Tonya Aycock believes an interpreter assigned to her sister in Europe
introduced Angela to the Orthodox religion. She says her sister became a
frequent visitor to churches and cathedrals around Europe.
Angela loved the beauty she saw in Orthodox icons. She covered the walls of
her apartment with them.
When Angela played in Reims, she chose to live across from the city's famed
cathedral, which dates to the 13th century. It was in the Cathedral at
Reims that 17-year-old Joan of Arc stood at the side of Charles VII when he
was crowned King of France in 1429.
Angela told Renate Mai-Dalton she especially liked the Orthodox litany. It
allowed her to focus.
Her calls had a different tone.
"She started telling me how much she wanted to please God," Tonya says.
"She told me she was changing ... changing into somebody else.
"One night she asked me about salvation. We talked for hours and hours, and
we cried for hours and hours. It was that night she told me she received
Jesus Christ as her Lord and savior."
When Angela began asking theological questions her sister could not answer,
Tonya suggested calling her minister at Rhoads Terrace Bible Fellowship.
The Rev. E.D. Charles says Angela wanted to know his thoughts on Orthodoxy.
"She was struggling with the group of believers she was talking to," he
says. "Our conversations were centered on faith. She was looking for a kind
of discipline to keep her life in line. She seemed very vulnerable. I
thought we were connecting. But she found something else that influenced
her in her most vulnerable time."
Orthodox mentor
Father Dositheos, the Greek Orthodox abbot at the Monastery of the Holy
Archangels in the Texas Hill Country town of Kendalia, thought it odd when
he took Angela Aycock's call in 2001.
"I said, 'Wow, what's a basketball player doing calling me from France?' "
he recalls.
Angela explained that she had been using the Internet to help her study
Orthodoxy.
Her research initially led her to a convent in northeast Pennsylvania. The
abbess there told Angela that because she was from Dallas, she might be
better off calling someone closer to home and suggested Father Dositheos'
monastery about 40 miles north of San Antonio.
Father Dositheos was impressed with Angela's questions. He liked her
sincerity. The two talked on and off for about a year.
Angela told Father Dositheos she was beginning instruction to convert to
the Orthodox faith.
"She said she had read extensively about the Orthodox religion," he says.
"She felt it was right for her. She said she was tired of other
denominations and how they preached the Gospel."
Back from France last spring and living in Dallas with her sister Tonya,
Angela traveled to Kendalia to meet with Father Dositheos.
She told him that as soon as her conversion was complete, she hoped to
enter a convent.
Father Dositheos disapproved.
"I told her I thought she was rushing things," he says. "I wanted her to
convert and live in the Orthodox church, live the Orthodox life for several
years and then make a monastic decision.
"She didn't want to hear it. She said she was ready."
Except for a Christmas card, that was the end of their relationship.
"There are two things you can't tell anyone," Father Dositheos says. "You
can't tell somebody who they should marry, and you can't tell somebody
whether or not they should become a monastic."
By this time, Angela was spending many of her waking hours deep in prayer.
"She told me there has to be prayers going on all the time," Marian
Washington says. "She said that if it weren't for prayer to combat sin, she
didn't know where the world would be."
When Tonya returned home from work, she'd frequently find her sister
standing in a large walk-in closet reading a Bible or praying.
Angela would pray for hours, standing rigidly, never slouching, never
resting. All the discipline and physical training from basketball were
serving a different purpose.
It was about that time Angela turned her full attention to another church
she had found on the Internet - St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Church.
Housed in a tiny white building behind All Saints Episcopal Church off
Abrams Road, just south of Mockingbird Lane, the smallest Orthodox
congregation in Dallas-Fort Worth, unlike its sophisticated Web site, is
not easy to find.
Father Seraphim Holland, its pastor, says the church has about 30 regular
parishioners, most of whom, like himself, are converts to Orthodoxy.
"We believe everything in life should be done to know God intimately. ... A
large part of what we practice is contrary to the American lifestyle. ...
There is something very permanent in Orthodoxy that attracts true believers."
There is no official communion between the uncompromising Russian Orthodox
Church Outside Russia and other Orthodox churches, let alone other
Christian denominations. The ecumenical movement is considered heretical.
"They are our Bible Belt fundamentalists," says Professor Paul Meyendorf,
academic dean at St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, the suburban
New York training ground of the more liberal Orthodox Church of America.
"People who convert there and then enter the monastic life are usually
people who want to escape this world," he says.
Father Seraphim says members of his church simply believe "everything in
life is to know God intimately. ...We are not a Wednesday night and Sunday
afternoon religion. The idea is that anything worth having is worth working
at."
Father Seraphim says he saw nothing unusual in a young professional
basketball player searching for life as a monastic.
"It was a very personal thing for her," is all he will say specifically
about Angela. "I can tell you that she has found true peace. What's
important in a person's life is not their past. My job is to care about her
now."
Father Seraphim gave Angela a key to his church, where she spent countless
hours alone in prayer.
Angela's family says she became so enthralled with Father Seraphim and his
teachings, they didn't know what to expect when it came time to meet him at
Angela's catechumen, her public acceptance of Orthodoxy, last summer.
All they really knew was that Angela had told them she would be leaving
soon for a faraway convent.
She told them that she didn't know when she might see them again and that
she would be dividing all her worldly possessions among them.
They knew, too, she would be taking a new name, Paula.
For a while, they suspected Angela had fallen in with a cult.
"We had heard so much about Jim Jones and David Koresh," says Tonya Aycock.
"We all went to the service to see if it was legitimate."
What the Aycocks witnessed was a traditional Orthodox service in the
icon-filled, one-room church. Their fears were assuaged.
Not long after, Angela was off to Bluffton, Alberta, to sample life at the
Protection of the Virgin Mary Convent.
It was there that she chose to be baptized Paula in reverence for St. Paul.
Father Seraphim traveled to Canada for the baptism in December.
Father Seraphim says he is "touched by how deeply and sincerely Paula wants
to change her life.
"And that's not from profligate to good, but from empty to fulfilled."
Sister Paula has since returned twice to Dallas. She was here in February,
driving down from Lawrence before the jersey retirement ceremony for a
one-day visit.
"She told me this is as close as one could get to God and still be of this
earth," her mother says.
She returned for several days in April, staying mostly in her mother's
apartment, while in the process of transferring to another convent.
She seemed different this time. More spiritual. More distant.
A Russian Orthodox priest who is a former monk, explained that in the path
Sister Paula has chosen, she would "give up this world, including
ultimately her family."
It could be five years before Sister Paula's hair is cut in a tonsure
ceremony, leading to her becoming a full-fledged monastic nun. Washington,
her Kansas coach, is comfortable with Angela's decision but wishes Sister
Paula could use her talents to work with children. Father Seraphim says
that is not an alternative in his church.
When Angela left Dallas two months ago, she didn't give her sister a
forwarding address.
The only indication Angela gave of what she believes is to come is when she
told her sister, "This is the beginning of the end of time."
When they hugged for a final time, Angela squeezed so tight, Tonya is
certain she knows what it meant.
"I don't believe we'll ever see her again," Tonya says. "But I really don't
know what to believe anymore."
Her family simply hopes their Angela is happy and has found the peace she
has been searching for.
Before she left, however, their Angela made a special request. She asked
for some pecan pie to pack away on her journeys.
"In our world," Tonya says, "it was always her favorite."
E-mail bhorn@dallasnews.com
That is beautiful.
