American actor Jonathan Jackson publicly confessed Orthodoxy at the Emmy Awards. After receiving the award, he crossed himself, praised the Holy Trinity and, among others, thanked the Athos monks for praying for peace.
Jonathan Jackson’s journey to Orthodoxy was difficult and long, and his account of the faith and the Church was profound and instructive. We publish fragments of an interview Jackson gave him on the air of the American Orthodox radio Ancient Faith Radio.
My parents are Seventh-day Adventists, probably in the fourth generation. I was raised an Adventist until I was 9, and then my parents started moving away from that denomination. We moved to L.A. and I started playing General Hospital.
In Los Angeles, we didn’t have a temple, so my brother and I listened to different sermons, which is how we had a spiritual life. Until 16 I listened to sermons and read apologetic books about Christianity.
Some sermons touched me deeply, and God took a very important place in my life. I started reading C.S. Lewis, Just Christianity, Dissolution of Marriage, and other books.
I didn’t see the point of going to church. I loved God, I loved Christ, but I didn’t know what the church was for. If I can listen to sermons and read books at home, why go anywhere else?
But on the other hand, I had this sense of the cosmos.
I never wanted to belong to any denomination. I wanted to belong to all of Christianity! I did not know what the Universal Church was, but I felt that I was very close to Lewis, an Englishman and an Anglican.
At the age of 17, I began to interact with different church groups – more charismatic, non-denominational. We even had a church at home, pastors came to visit us, and 15-20 actors came to worship on weekends.
I got married as soon as I turned 20 – in June my marriage was 10 years old. My wife was in General Hospital, but we spotted each other on Emmy. I thanked Christ for the award, and it struck her. It was a time of abandonment from God and faith. We have three children.
I have been in the charismatic movement for about 10 years, and I am sure that many charismatics will discover Orthodoxy because much of their movement deviates from the Holy Spirit (they deny the mystical and the supernatural), but most of them sincerely want to meet God and know Him.
Charismatics do not have a church tradition, so they create new traditions, but in their own way they seek God, and I am sure many will find answers to their questions in the ancient faith, in Orthodoxy. It’ll be like going home. It was so for me.
My path to Orthodoxy was like this.
I went to Romania to work on a film and lived in Bucharest for three and a half months. I had a role in a great movie called Dawn of Darkness, but in the end the studio cut out my character completely.
I think I ended up in Romania for something else. I was with my wife and two children. But it was not there that I discovered Orthodoxy. Everything ancient seemed overwhelming and very religious to me.
I went to Orthodox churches, very small, everything inside was in gold and completely unusual for me. For me and my wife, Orthodoxy was a strange cousin of Catholicism. And for the first time, we were robbed by gypsies. Such a warm welcome…
My wife is from Italy and we decided to go to Rome. And what I saw in Rome could be described as «Wait, it’s so close to Christianity — I never imagined it!»
I thought Rome would crush me with its ancient religiosity, but it turned out the opposite. It was Palm Sunday, said Pope Benedict, palm branches lined the streets.
We were three blocks from St. Peter’s Cathedral and it was magical — really deep. We saw a cross in the Colosseum, and my wife and I were amazed that we were very close to the martyrs for Christ. It’s one thing to read about it in a book, it’s another thing to be physically in that place and aware of it.
So I decided that I had to learn more about Christianity, so I started reading Gonzalez’s book The History of Christianity. But there was not a word about Orthodoxy, only about Catholics and Protestants.
In three years of intensive reading about the history of Christianity, I found almost no mention of the Eastern Church. And so I decided that the ancient church goes back to Rome. I read Chesterton, I read 15 books by Pope Benedict. Remarkable books, but many things in Catholicism I could not accept, for example, the infallibility of the Pope, especially considering that it was very late officially recognized, about 1870.
My wife and I went to Catholic Mass, we were probably at 12, and it was interesting, and I felt it was a historical faith.
The question then arose whether to accept Catholicism, but there were many things I could not share. I prayed to God for the third door. I said to God, “I don’t understand Protestantism, because for me a house divided against itself cannot stand.” In America alone, there are 23,000 denominations. How can we relate this to the fact that in the first centuries there was only one faith? Yes, there were many heresies, but the universal Church was one. Even after the secession of Rome, they still considered themselves one Church.
Even Luther was an attempt to return to the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
I prayed and I remember many dark nights that were so like the dark night of the soul, and I was so desperate to find the one ancient Church.
Three years of searching, and I decided that since I could not fully accommodate Catholicism, I would be a stateless Protestant. Suddenly, I don’t know how it happened, I thought, “Before I give up all this and just become a Protestant, I have to read more about the Great Schism.”
It was like a flash of lightning. Everything began to converge – I don’t even know how it happened. But I downloaded the book “Orthodox Church” by Fr John McGukin. I couldn’t pull myself off. It was the culmination of my four-year search. Then there are the books of V. Callista (Weir), F. Alexander Schmemann, F. Peter Gilquist …
Then, on Google Map, I searched for Orthodox churches, found several Greek churches, and went to one of them. There was an old woman, an employee, and I knocked, and she opened the door and let me in.
I said, “I just wanted to see the temple, but I don’t know much.”
She said, «Come in!» No one’s here. Just come in and inspect everything.” I was alone, I was silent, I was surrounded by icons completely unfamiliar to me, and Christ the Almighty was there. And you know, the first word that came out of my mouth was abusive. That was wrong. But I was so amazed, I was so scared… I knew I had found the true church. And so I was in the middle of the icons.
I also realized that I had been dreaming of an Orthodox church long before I first visited it. And then I went to other temples, and they were only slightly different from what I saw in my dream. I kept searching the internet and I found the Church of the Blessed Virgin in Silverlake.
And it was that temple! There were no benches! And I remember in my dream that there were no benches in the temple! Light streamed from the windows, people came out of the temple, everything was mystical. «That’s it!»! That’s it!!!
I called the abbot, Father John Strickland. He converted to Orthodoxy himself, and he is also from Washington. We met and started talking.
And then there was the first service. My first thought when I entered the temple was, “Go away.” Run! Just go! Don’t. You can’t be here! It was strange, but I thought it was the voice of God. «Wow!» I almost sweated. It was a very strong feeling.
I didn’t know anyone in the temple, I was uncomfortable, I was a stranger. But then I felt like the Holy Spirit said, “Stay to the end and then you’ll understand your feelings.” But the first 45 minutes were terribly uncomfortable.
And 45 minutes later, something happened. The room was transformed after the sermon, after prayer for the catechumens. Everything’s visually transformed. The Cherubim…
During that time, I went from «Go, get out of here» to tears pouring down my cheeks.
I have never seen people pray with such a single heart. I just never saw it. People were baptized: “Lord, have mercy, Lord, have mercy” – I just took my breath away. And this was not self-deprecation, repentance of the «I-worm.» It was a joyful repentance. It’s like a direct connection to God.
I’ve never seen that, tears pouring down my face, and I was praying, «All I want to do is just be here, and the rest doesn’t matter.» I want to be here with this one body…the body of Christ.
It wasn’t easy. But that was a turning point.
My wife was not with me at the time, but later I introduced her to Father John. He showed us the temple, she saw the icons, and it scared her – they judge us. Yeah, it’s scary… And it should be understood that for those who grew up in a Catholic or Protestant environment, all this is perceived through the prism of what was Catholic or Protestant.
I respect Catholicism, I am friends with Catholics, but there is a difference. The legal perception of salvation, for example.
I shared everything with my wife, everything I read. And she started warming up. It was a great fast, and I decided to fast. We had a third child at the time. And she couldn’t fast like that. It was stressful and we didn’t have the best Easter, but it’s part of the way.
My wife is already involved… She was about to go to Forgiveness Sunday and couldn’t because of the baby, so she called me and just cried, so she wanted to be in the temple.
The hard question for me was that I was an actor. Because I’m depicting people… But I am comforted by what Christ taught through parables and stories. And so I treat acting as an art of storytelling, trying to reflect life honestly, to bring people to the mirror, to show them a certain experience. For example, if there is revenge in history, it can be very ugly. But it can be very Shakespearean, very biblical.
What’s great for me is that if there’s a seed of anger or rage in a person’s heart and they see the consequences of that on the screen — exaggerated — and they realize, «Wow.» This is what anger can do to a person.””
Or drug addiction, for example. Maybe if a person sees a true movie about a drug addict, they will think twice whether to try drugs.
I was very influenced by Dostoevsky, I began to read him as a teenager, and he wrote about really terrible things, but he wrote about it from the point of view of the world. As an actor, I played serial killers, suicides, heroin addicts. In general, most of my roles are dark, but I’ve always tried to portray the darkness from a position of light so that it becomes an enlightenment for other people.
It struck me that at the first service I attended, Father John came out of the altar, bowed down and said, «Forgive me brothers and sisters.» It just turned me – in the West, the priest is a clergyman, he is above everyone. He is the mediator between man and God. And it was completely different. Man and God. It is a priesthood based on humility, service, being a reflection and an icon of Christ. It’s not about the individual, Father John is humble, it’s about the system, it’s about tradition. I was struck by the words of confession – not “You, a miserable sinner, and I forgive you”, but it is like “We are in the same boat, we stand before the Judge who will come again”.
I am grateful to the Orthodox Church. Here I found a home, here I learned humility, and this is a real battle.
This story was told by prot. Nikolai Agafonov:
Charity fund
Holy Land.
Orthodox stories from life
Soul investment!
