I can't answer all of the questions raised here, but I can speak to some issues. The calendar: it is true that the Greek Church follows the New Calendar (for the fixed days of the month, this is the same as the Gregorian Calendar now followed by the Western world in general), while the monasteries on Mt Athos follow the Old (Julian) Calendar. However, Fr Ephraim's monasteries in the USA are on the new calendar; this is a concession to the Greek Archdiocese in North America, which, like the Church of Greece, is New Calendar.

In North America, the bishops were originally all from the Moscow Patriarchate; the Russian mission in Alaska gave them dibs on the continent. However, the revolution that put the Bolsheviks in control in Russia caused a chaotic situation too complex to describe here; the Russian bishops in the West split into several rival "jurisdictions," and non-Russians were unwilling to stay with them and got their own bishops. This is absolutely against the rules, but it happened, and now there are a number of different "jurisdictions," existing on an ethnic basis and also to some extent on different reactions to the crisis of the twentieth century. We Orthodox don't really like to lay so much weight on "jurisdiction"; we can be as nit-pickingly legalistic as anyone if the occasion seems to demand it, but we cannot forget--we are constantly reminded by our liturgical services--that the real issue is one of *being*; law is the handmaid of ontology. We are conditioned to think in ontological terms, and only secondarily in legal terms. But this situation is with us; even though the Church now contains many converts, one still goes to a historically Russian church (conceivably with not a single ethnic Russian member, although in my experience there are usually at least a few Russians), or a Greek church, or a Serbian church, or whatever. Some of these jurisdictions adhere to one calendar, some to the other, and some allow the parish to decide which to follow. Do you find this confusing? Believe me, so do we.

Monasticism is a great influence on us, because the monks have single-mindedly dedicated themselves to the task that the rest of us have to balance with worldly cares. By comparison to the monks, the rest of us are in a sense "part time" Orthodox--the world, as one of the greatest of English poets said, is too much with us. Monasticism produces some very gifted charismatic figures, and this is in general a positive thing--they counteract the distraction of worldly cares and call us back to our spiritual work. There is, as several have pointed out, a danger here also; people have always gone to such figures for spiritual guidance, and there have been several cases--I am *not* referring to Father Ephraim here!!--in which a monastic leader of this sort became a sort of demigod to his spiritual children and then led them astray, breaking from their bishop and ending up in an isolated splinter group or even with an imitation bishop. These situations right themselves in time, but they can cause a great deal of turmoil and grief until peace is restored. There are parallel phenomena in Protestantism and in Roman Catholicism and probably in all religions and in all other sorts of human communities; it is important for those who accept the spiritual guidance of such a person not to make him into a cult figure. It is dangerous for him and for us to do so. But let us look at the plus side: such occurrences are rare; they are possible because of the assaults we have endured during the twentieth century, and to recover from those assaults we need a lively monastic presence. Fifty years ago there was one fully-functioning Orthodox monastery in the United States. Now there are so many I can't keep up with them. Their presence deepens the faith of the parishioners, who might otherwise take Orthodoxy as a cultural form that was theirs simply because they were Greek or Romanian or whatever. Monks visit parishes and give talks; people visit monasteries and speak with the monks or nuns. And this is part of a world-wide revival of Orthodox monasticism; in the former Soviet Union, monasticism flowers after three-quarters of a century of repression had brought it nearly to extinction; in Greece, monasticsm restores the traditional norms that had eroded during the centuries of Turkish rule, leading to corruption and decline. Within living memory, it would not have been unreasonable for an outside observer to predict the extinction of Orthodox monasticism. Now no one would make such a prediction, and the result of the revival is a vibrant spiritual life in parishes as well as in monasteries.

For most of us, there are a number of things about the current state of the church that we don't like much. But compared to the spiritual life that it opens to us, they are insignificant; they are superficial blemishes that arise in the interaction between the Church and the World; in doctrine and worship and spirituality we can come into contact with the unblemished essence of Orthodoxy. We don't believe in works righteousness, but we are don't believe that God wants us to be sitting on our spiritual backsides either; to move your ego out of the center of your motivation is an unending struggle. Well, it certainly is for me. This is not something we must do to satisfy the offended justice of God, or to win brownie points; it is something we must do to heal ourselves (and we always know that it is not really we who heal ourselves, but as they say in the Black churches, "Pray like it all depends on God, work like it all depends on you"--God compels no one; he opens the door, but doesn't frog-march us through it).   

Mark and Emmanuel have explained most of the issues raised in this thread (Christos anesti, Mark and Emmanuel! Emmanuel, may your vocation be blessed!) Just so I don't get entirely off topic for this forum, or at least for this part of it, let me say that church singing is a great thing in Orthodox life, and that it has always interacted in complex ways with folk singing. Even so highly specialized a thing as the Byzantine chant, the _psaltiki_, of the Greek churches has in common with Greek folksong non-Western scales, methods of ornamentation, and so on. Those of us who are Orthodox and love folksong find a natural compatibility that might seem odd to those who go at folksong from the Marxist angle.

Stephen