The board of Axia Women is proud to present our latest Woman of the Week: our very own President, Patricia Fann Bouteneff!

“In college, when I wasn’t dreaming about being a writer, I was planning to become a scholar and an academic. I’m still a scholar: I have a little-known website, called Cyberpontos.com, where I continue to post esoteric pieces about Pontic Greek folktales. But that didn’t turn out to be the focus of my career.

“I was sure it would! After all, I’d studied ancient Greek in college, modern and Pontic Greek as a Fulbright scholar and as a doctoral student. I even found a couple of teaching jobs for a few years after moving back to the US from England. We took a hiatus in Switzerland, where we started a family and my husband worked at the World Council of Churches. Our time abroad made it hard to reignite an academic career when we returned to the US. So I shifted into the high-octane corporate world of a Fortune 20 company, working in communications, archives management, and organizational management. Who knew my introvert self would love juggling projects—up to 45 at a time--and working with all sorts of people? I was creating narratives, writing and researching, managing clients, managing freelancers, managing cross-disciplinary teams, targeting pieces for specific audiences. As chief of staff, I was also coordinating three separate teams into a functional unit. It all taught me that nothing happens in a vacuum, and how much collaboration benefits from a variety of talents and perspectives.

“I started my Orthodox life about the same time that I started my career. Culturally Protestant, but unbaptized, I was received into the church by baptism in 1986 in Thessaloniki, where I was living as a Fulbright scholar. Soon after, I was a member of a Greek parish in Houston (where my family was), a Greek parish in Oxford (when I studied at the university), then at parishes or mission churches in various Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions in Geneva and New York City. Since 2012, I’ve been part of an OCA parish in Yonkers.

“These days I am a consultant and do church things—which lets me juggle lots of projects! At any one time, I usually have an organization or communications project in the works, and am lucky to be able to pick and choose the editing projects I undertake. I’ve also ended up with an unexpected church career, if you can call it that. I’ve been writing pieces about women in the church online and in print, guest-editing a well-regarded magazine, advocating for women in the church, and, until mid-2019, spending endless hours as president of my parish council. Recently, I’ve been organizing a group of outstanding Orthodox women into a new network. We hope it will soon be coming to a neighborhood near you. You might have heard of it: Axia Women!”

Axia!

More from our Woman of the Week, Patricia Fann Bouteneff!

“In 2016, the Holy and Great Council–the first church council in over a thousand years was scheduled to happen on the Greek island of Crete, and no women had been invited as delegates. I had just left a job in corporate communications at a Fortune 20 bank and thought it would be worth trying to see if others would publicly support women participating. So I put together an online petition, pushed it out, asked others to push it out to anyone who might be interested: over 2000 people signed it, including priests and bishops. That led to my receiving a fax from the Ecumenical Patriarch encouraging me to continue working to support women in the church in any way consistent with tradition. 

"So I started looking around to see what women were doing in the church. I started with the names of women trustees at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, because I knew some of them. Then I looked at the names of trustees at other Orthodox seminaries, then at other Orthodox organizations, at parish council members, and kept going down rabbit holes and talking to friends, and pretty soon had a 20-page single-spaced list of women doing significant work in the Eastern churches. I only stopped taking those names because I just didn’t want to type any more. 

"I still wanted to learn more, so I asked a new friend, Jennifer Nahas, who is a policy expert and knows how to create a survey, if she would help me poll these women leaders along with the women who had graduated from accredited seminaries in the US to find out how they got their jobs. (The Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham generously agreed to underwrite the costs.) We left space after almost every question for women to write their stories. 

"We learned a lot, and not just from the data! So many women wrote that they felt isolated and needed ways to connect with one another that we started working to create a network–Axia Women–and the stories that they told us helped shape our emphasis on supporting women who are struggling, who are looking to learn about spirituality, to share their experience, and build a community. So here we are."

We asked our Woman of the Week, Patricia Fann Bouteneff, to share her morning routine with us.

“Three times a week, I set the alarm for 5am. I drink 20 oz of water, take my thyroid replacement meds, get dressed in workout gear, and eat a banana. By 6:30, I’m in the gym, where I have an hour-long bootcamp workout with a professional Muy Thai fighter. I’ve been doing this since the summer of 2017 and it took until nearly now for me to feel like I was really back in shape. More than anything else I’ve tried, intense bag work, weight exercises, and cardio circuits help keep my anxiety disorder and panic attacks at bay. (If you're in the area, come check it out: https://www.914kravmaga.com/.) Afterward, I go home, eat, make a chai latte, and shower. By 9am, it’s time to settle into the day’s projects, usually at my home desk overlooking the raised garden we designed and built last summer.

“I am a Companion at New Skete, so I receive the readings that they send out every morning. (They have a well-rounded program for people looking to have a regular connection to a monastery: https://www.companionsofnewskete.org/ .) I can’t say that I manage to read them every morning, but it’s a goal!

“Sunday mornings are different. I get up around 7am, dress, and putter around the house until my husband rises. A little over a year ago, we decided that we weren’t hearing as much about the Gospel readings as we wanted, so we expanded our pre-liturgical routine to include a shared reading practice. We turned to a structured meditation called lectio divina, which I had learned on retreat at New Skete. Lectio has brought us into conversation with God and each other in ways we could never have foreseen. Around 8:30, we faithfully settle down with three Bibles (we use a different translation for each read-through), go through the meditations, and record our insights. Time is always too short! By 9:10 we have to rush out the door: my husband is the choir director, so we can’t be late.

“Lectio has become so important to our pre-liturgical process that we continue it even when one of us is traveling, either by email or video chat.”

Thank you, Patricia!