yeah, the monastery was a big pull for me
Actually I really love ROCOR, the OCA and Antioch and the historical connection the three churches have. Unfortunately Antioch does not have a monastery in North America as far as I am aware.
There are really interesting permutations of the historical relations between the three churches however. For instance, in Los Angeles there is Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral, which mainly uses Church Slavonic and operates according to the Julian Calendar (I have heard this is also how things are in Alaska, where ROCOR has almost no presence, IIRC). Then , in New Jersey I think, there is St. Philip’s Antiochian Orthodox Church, which recently had a Vespers that intentionally was themed around using music from Church Slavonic composers translated into English, that one would otherwise normally hear at an OCA parish. For their regular liturgy, they use a four part harmony setting the composer of which I don’t know, but I have only heard it at Antiochian parishes, and also on one occasion at a Greek parish; I don’t think it is Tikey Zes unless it is different from the version of Tikey Zes I am familiar with, so I have no idea who wrote it, but I particularly like it.
Also historically these churches operated as a single unit, back during the era when Orthodoxy in North America was led by St. Tikhon of Moscow, when he was Bishop of New York, with St. Rafael Hawaheeny as his suffragan, in charge of the ethnically Antiochian parishes, which later became the AOCNA.
Due to communism there was actually a four way split, between the AOCNA, the OCA, or the Metropolia as it was then called, ROCOR, and the small number of parishes that opted to remain under the Moscow Patriarchate (one of them, Holy Trinity, on the East Coast, I forget where, has very beautiful English language liturgies on YouTube - it sounds a great deal like some OCA and ROCOR parishes).
And then with GoArch there was further confusion, in that the Carpatho-Rusyns who had been joining the OCA led by St. Alexis Toth instead started joining ACROD, which for reasons I don’t understand has a Greek bishop, but their cathedral has very beautiful music, although it is also the only non-Byzantine Catholic church I know of that uses “Now and forever” instead of “Unto ages of ages” at the ending of prayers. And likewise the UOCNA, although there were political reasons for that. However GoArch also gives us St. Anthony’s monastery, which together with Holy Trinity in Jordanville and St. Tikhon’s, is one of my three favorite monasteries.
However, despite these schisms, and also the unusual situation where half of the Romanian and Bulgarian parishes in the US are part of the OCA and the other half are under their own bishop, yet from what I understand there is no enmity, and also the presence of the three parishes of the Church of Georgia, which is the smallest jurisdiction in North America, and also the interesting case of the Serbians who managed to be independent yet have good relations with several other jurisdictions.
I have to confess that while the situation of overlapping dioceses is technically uncanonical, I actually don’t mind it; it is the artifact of unusual and unprecedented situations, and also I feel like the OCA has done a particularly good job minimizing the amount of overlap by, for example, containing within it the Albanian Orthodox parishes led by Archbishop Fan Noli when he was exiled under the nightmarish regime of Enver Hoxha, and other groups of Orthodox Christians who would not conveniently fit into another group.
The Oriental Orthodox in North America seem to be pursuing canonical order in a more practical way, building it from the ground up, in that they have SCOOCH, the Standing Committee of Oriental Orthodox Church Hierarchs in North America (whoever came up with that acronym, I would really like to meet by the way, as that was clearly the work of someone with a sense of humor.
