Memory Eternal!
nicknospamcobb
HOUSTON, TX – The Very Rev. Michael Prokurat died at his home here on
July 23, 2003 after a ten-month struggle with cancer. He is survived by
his wife, Margaret, their three daughters, and six grandchildren,
together with many sorrowing friends, former parishioners, and
colleagues from a 33 year career that included parish ministry, Church
administration, and teaching at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Michael Dale Prokurat was born in Detroit, MI February 8, 1950. He grew
up in the parish of Saints Peter and Paul and studied at the University
of Michigan at Ann Arbor from 1967-1970, where he earned a Bachelor of
Arts degree in Philosophy and Religion. He went on to Saint Vladimir
Seminary for four years, where he was first awarded a Master of Divinity
degree in 1973 and then completed course requirements for a Master of
Theology degree in 1974. He was ordained to the diaconate in 1972 and to
the priesthood two years later. His parish ministry began in California,
where he served as founding pastor of Saint Michael the Archangel
Church, Danville [now Concord], CA from 1974-1983. Other
responsibilities in this period included service as Diocesan Treasurer
and Director of Late Vocations, the latter a program that led to many
ordinations to the diaconate. His work toward the systematic and
consistent support of diocesan missions was surely foundational for the
remarkable later flourishing of the Diocese of the West’s mission
program during the 1990s. In addition to these labors, he undertook
doctoral studies in the Old Testament at the Graduate Theological Union,
Berkeley, CA, receiving his doctorate in 1988 following his successful
defense of a dissertation on the Prophets Haggai and Zechariah. His
related work, from 1980-1983, toward an Orthodox presence at the
Theological Union contributed to the establishment of the Patriarch
Athenagoras Orthodox Institute, which he served as trustee from 1990
until his death. From 1983-1986, he was Chancellor of the Diocese of the
Midwest, and from 1986-1990 he was Administrative Assistant in the
Diocese of the West while serving as pastor of Saint Nicholas Church,
San Anselmo, CA from 1988-1994. He fulfilled a life’s ambition to devote
himself wholly to teaching by accepting the post of Associate Professor
of Sacred Scripture at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston, where he
served from 1994 until his death. His published works include articles,
book reviews, encyclopedia and dictionary entries, book chapters,
essays, the translation and annotation of Nikolai Leskov’s On the Edge
of the World, and The Historical Dictionary of the Orthodox Church, of
which he was editor and primary author.
Father Prokurat’s life was lived in conscious witness to the Gospel of
Christ and in continual awareness of the believer’s responsibility for
the edification of Christ’s Church, to which he contributed greatly and
in many ways. Those qualities of his witness which were perhaps most
characteristic included an unbending integrity, a seriousness of
purpose, an appetite for work, and a thirst for truth and justice which
had little place for compromise. He was in consequence not always as
flexible as some might have wanted, but he was almost always in the
right, and his modesty and wry humor leavened and usually eased the
tensions which his uprightness and dedication to principle occasionally
provoked. Those who knew him and loved him, and were touched by him,
will remember especially that integrity, that honesty, which refused to
countenance lies, evasions, or pretense, and because of which, in the
many things to which he set his hand, he always understood that he was
to serve Christ and the Church with the dedication and reverence proper
to a priest standing before the altar. The witness of his life was and
will therefore remain a rock of foundation, solid ground, on which those
who knew him may with assurance continue to build. While the fact that
he was taken away so early is the sort of hard and bitter thing for
which there is neither comfort nor answer in a perishing world, the
nature of his life’s service, its testimony, points those who mourn him
toward the Kingdom not of this world, and toward that time when “God
will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
ADDENDUM: On Friday, July 25, a Memorial Service will be celebrated at
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Houston, TX at 7:00 p.m. On
Sunday, July 27, a Memorial Service will be celebrated at Holy Trinity
Cathedral, San Francisco, at 5:00 p.m., with the Divine Liturgy and
Burial Service for a Priest, followed by interment, on Monday, July 28
at 9:00 a.m.
May Father Prokurat’s memory be eternal!