The walk

It is very quiet as I set out on the familiar way; only the rough scruffing of my sandals against the sidewalk, the distant roar of traffic, and the whispering of the wind in the trees can be heard. The air is cool and full of scents: pine needles, wood smoke, fresh basil, and the sweet smell of nearing rain while overhead the grey clouds come rolling in.

I mark the way by the flowers I pass. The first of any note are the lavender bushes outside an orthodontist’s office. A few bumblebees make their way from flower to flower. Next are the small orange poppy-like flowers which grow around a telephone pole. Now they are closed for the evening but I greet them all the same. A few weeks ago the next landmark would have been the opulent purple petunias hanging outside a business but they have been taken down and so there is nothing more until the very end of the route: two beds of flowers outside a bank. Quite honestly, I don’t know what a single one of the flowers here is, but I have come to know them quite well this summer and I am happy to see them again.

As I walk, I let the wind blow my skirt and my hair about. I love wind. If I wore tighter skirts and had short hair I would forever feel that I was missing something glorious. I feel a bit as though I was the subject of a Waterhouse painting, “Windflowers” or “The Tempest.” The glory of the rush of the air makes me think of all sorts of bits of poems and they weave themselves together in my brain.

Here is the destination. I go in, return the library books I was bringing back, and check out a few more. Then there is the walk home, during which I think of nothing in particular and notice even less.

Notes from the second talk

Dr. George Bebawi
Christian Witness
My Life in Christ Conference, July 13, 2007

Christianity is the revelation of God incarnate.

If you are ashamed of being human or of God, the Incarnation will be alien to you.

4 facets of human nature:
1. Free will
2. Love
3. Development (of conscience, etc.)
4. Growth

Difference between Christianity and Islam is freedom.

In Christianity, if you start with humanity, you come to God, and if you start with God you come to humanity.

Islam is slavery to the law of God.

In Christianity you are the child of God; God came to save us from slavery.

Christian witness can also be teasing and humorous.

Buddhism has as its goal the lack of self.

In Christianity we witness to the great project of being completely human; sin makes us less human.

Christ is the Lover of Mankind.

God’s greatest desire is to be in each of us.

If God is out of my life:
1. I lose the sense of infinity
2. I am shapeless
3. I lose help
4. I experience inner death

With faith in God we are able to look beyond our being.

Our modern life has succeeded in making us dependent on things outside ourselves.

Solzhenitsyn: they have taken our wives, our cars, our names, and by taking everything they have lost their power over us.

We have a center of life and if we are Christian our center of life wants to be like God.

If we lose God our center of life becomes shapeless but with God we have a shape.

Communists, Nazis, have no God and so they have no center and no aim to become like God.

God is not a Big Brother waiting for you to make a mistake to punish you.

It is a great thing to lean on God Who is our help.

When we pray we look for infinite help.

Prayer opens.

You discover Orthodoxy by listening to the Liturgy; we sing our theology.

If you want to look at the difference between religions, look at the prayer.

The death of the heart, life is dead.

You are ignorant of yourself.
You have an inability to love others.
You have a life without God.
You have the inability to forgive.
You make something material the goal of life.

Christ destroyed death by giving us life.

Protestants only know Biblical texts; they cannot go beyond them.

Most of the Lord’s teaching is in parables.

Keep your eyes on daily life; talk about God, but do it in the way Christ did [i.e., simply and by means of stories.]

We are rich in stories.

We receive the power of divine love through communion.

The secular world is full of war, violence, distrust, greed, etc. all covered up with lies.

We all seek truth.

Truth in Christianity is a person; in the secular world it is a chain of ideas.

An idea is in your head and can be replaced; a person is a reality.

Needs are the most powerful element in the secular world; they make us slaves.

It is fine to secure our needs, but not to be slaves to them.

Needs are a vacuum cleaner that suck you into secular life.

Secular life breaks us but Christ came to make us whole.

Christian witness is about healing broken souls.

You can imagine anything you want about God, but did God reveal it to you?

Sacrificial love is nowhere except in Christianity.

Of goats and names

We were invited by a family from church to go out to their property and have a barbeque last night. They live about half an hour out of the city, in beautiful country. They've got five acres which is filled with flower gardens, a vegetable garden gone to seed (Iley hurt his back at the wrong time this year), a goat pasture, a small barn, and trees. They have goats, chickens, two dogs, and two cats. I love the cats. I wanted to take them home with me, especially Mushka, who we had renamed Tweedledum. Her brother was Arkasha or Tweedledee.

When we were informed that the goats had no names, Kaitlin M and I proceeded to name them, at Iley's request. So now they have:
Harriet (Vane)
Gherkins
Mary (Bennet)
Charlotte (Lucas)
Jo (March)

It was a wonderful time. We played badminton, we ate dinner, we talked while standing in the goat field and staring at a bush in the middle distance. The adults drank champagne that had been left over from a wedding on Sunday.

Good friends, good food, and a beautiful setting. What more could you want?

Notes from the first talk

Relationships with God and with each other
Fr. John Koen
My Life in Christ Conference, July 11, 2007

Our relationship with God will determine our lives and our relationship with others.

We need to be sure of our relationship with God to have healthy relationships with others.

Relationship is a tie or connection.

We exist within God; He is everywhere although we cannot know God’s essence.

Can’t get away from Him even though we try [I thought of the movie and play “Wit” and the Runaway Bunny here.]

We have to look within ourselves to find God.

God must come first in marriage.

God blesses marriage.

The image of God is a given; since the Fall, the likeness of God is not a given.

Christ has called us all together; he calls us each to seek the uncreated light.

Modern churches have lost the goal of transfiguration [substituting in its place the goal of salvation].

We are called to a state like that before the Fall.

Orthodox halos are a symbolic representation of the uncreated light [which certain saints exhibit even during their lifetime].

[Uncreated light] is real and real for us.

We are called to be like the saints.

Spirituality should be real and practical.

How do we attain that state? Through the Church, not the organization, the network of believers throughout the world. West made a mistake in separating ourselves from the saints; they were ordinary people; they are still alive and with us.

“God became man that Man might become like God.” [St. Athanasius]

For those of you who are called to be married, you will find the right person.

Put God first. Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you.

Joyful martyrdom and suffering.

If you truly seek God, you will find what you need.

The keys to salvation are baptism and communion; these are the strongest interfaces of God and man; we partake in the energies of God when we partake of communion.

Saul persecuted because he thought he was following God and giving his whole heart to Him.

We have to seek God passionately and intensely; you need passion and intensity to master anything [Here I thought of Dorothy Sayers: Jobs, if you’re not taking trouble with something, it’s not your job.]

Church is full of sinners; it’s a hospital searching for the Physician.

The Church is not a social club or an organization; it is an organism.

We are all called to serve, not just priests, monks, choir leaders, etc.

With the fullness of intent and desire to follow Christ.

Trusting in God is a challenge.

No false monasticism [within marriage].

Seeking actively is good, but remember God first.

Don’t let troubles fester in your heart and become bitter.

Confess regularly.

Have a spiritual friend, someone in whom you can confide.

Some things take awhile to heal; you must be patient with it and struggle on.

[Fr. John talked about saints who are special to you so I made a list of some of mine.]
St. John Maximovitch
Grand-Duchess Elizabeth
Fr. Seraphim Rose
The Royal Martyrs
The Theotokos
St. Seraphim of Sarov
St. Ephraim of Nea Makri
St. Herman of Alaska

Home again, home again, jiggity-jig

I am back from the conference! I had a wonderful week filled with friends old and new, good talks, and grace. I hope to type up my notes from two of the three talks in the next few days. In the meanwhile, I've got to get back into the swing of things in the real and online worlds.

Now I'm going to go and try to get my things put away and some recipes copied into my recipe notebook!

Au revoir

Tomorrow my sister and I leave for the My Life in Christ Youth Conference in Indiana. We'll be gone until July 17th and I really doubt I'll be updating until then. The only chance of seeing me about is if I get very bored in the airport late at night. And I probably shouldn't be updating then anyway. When it's late at night I get a little weird.

I'm looking forward to the conference and looking forward to being in the Midwest again. I spent most of my life there and the West still feels a little odd.

I hope to return with book reports and maybe conference reports and thoughts and all sorts of things. Hopefully some of them will actually happen. But until then, I leave you with this thought from St. Herman of Alaska:

"From this day, from this hour, from this moment, let us strive to love God with all our hearts and to do His holy will."

In case you missed it...

All the fuss about words.

For me, words are judged by two criteria: beauty and precision.

Most of us know that there are certain words and combinations of words which are extremely (almost ineffably) beautiful to the ear. For instance, my favorite word is silver; I find most tree names lovely as well: ash, poplar, beech, brich, elm. This is not because of something in their meaning, although I like silver and most trees quite a bit, but simply for the pleasant sound that they make when spoken or read. Like Lord Peter Wimsey, I find it very easy to be drunk on words, just the sounds of them. If, as is proposed, language is reduced to the lowest common denominator, all beauty is ruthlessly stripped from it. No more Shakespeare, no more John Donne, no more King James Version, no more Dylan Thomas, or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or Tolkien (perhaps especially him because of his love of the archaic) or even e.e. cummings. Even if their works were "translated" into a more "acceptable" form they would not--could not--survive because they would not remain themselves.

This is partly because the precision of them would be gone. Take, for instance, the last line of Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover":

and gash gold-vermilion.

Nothing terribly difficult about that--gash, perhaps--except for vermillion. That's simple enough to fix. Vermillion is just a sort of red. So, stick red in and there you are:

and gash gold-red.

Or there you aren't. Because, aside from completely and utterly destroying the rhyme and meter, the precision of the sentence is lost. Red is a broad word--it is quite likely that someone reading the amended sentence would think of a glorious rich, dark red; a very lovely color to be sure, but not the intense orange red that is vermillion and so not the right word. To reduce language to the lowest common denominator is to lose the ability to communicate accurately.

Words matter. Theologically speaking, the changing of one word or part of a word can very easily mean the difference between right belief and heresy. Thus, it is the difference in 'Theotokos' and 'Christotokos' which separates the position of the true church from the Nestorians. King Solomon, all those thousands of years ago, knew that words have power for "a word fitly [my emphasis] spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." We cannot take lightly any attempt to wrest them from us.

The Deputy Headmistress brought up a comment which posited a sort of conspiracy theory. I agree with her that it is probably overstating the case, but this sort of idea about language is indicative of a mindset which is deeply disturbing; one which desires, consciously or unconsciously, a dumbing down of the general populace and a lack of independent thinking.

Just because I'm feeling protective of my words, here's the full text of "The Windhover." Hey, they'd even have to change the title of that one! It's full of lovely words.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on a swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

~Gerard Manley Hopkins

A hidden glory

Summer evening. The sun has set and the air is chilly. City sounds are around us: banging car doors, voices calling, traffic passing. We have listened to the Academy perform folk music for some time. Then we begin to sing, all of us together, Paschal* hymns. "Christ is Risen" in Japanese, in Yupik, in Georgian (the country, not the state).

Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tomb bestowing life.

And finally, the triumphal hymn to the Theotokos: "The Angel Cried."

The angel cried to the lady full of grace: Rejoice, rejoice O pure Virgin! Again I say rejoice! Your Son is risen from His three days in the tomb. With Himself He has raised all the dead. Rejoice, rejoice, O ye people.

Shine, shine, shine O New Jerusalem! The glory of the Lord has shone on you. Exult, now exult and be glad O Zion. Be radiant, O pure Theotokos, in the Resurrection, the Resurrection of your Son.

And in that moment, as we together celebrate the glorious Resurrection here, in this city, in this time, we know that we are brothers and sisters in Christ. We sit in the backyard of the church united in fellowship while the world goes by around us. This is real. This is life.



*Pascha is the Orthodox term for Easter, deriving from the Hebrew word for Passover.

Dan Pettigrew's Romance

I wrote this for a writing contest at Arwen-Undomiel.com's forum. It ended up winning second place (yay!). The theme was romance. You can guess what most people's entries were like. Here's mine.

There she sits, pretty as a picture, sewing at something or other, and here I sit, with my tongue all stuck to the roof of my mouth, not knowing how to say what needs to be said pretty, the way I reckon every woman should hear it so as to know that the man she’s hearing it from means it. Somehow I just can’t say it. The words came easy enough earlier, when I was alone, but the sight of her put them clean out of my mind. Don’t reckon any of ‘em were as pretty as what I thought then anyway. Dang it, I’ve got to say something. Anything. “The weather we’re having sure is good.” Dan, Dan, that’s purely the stupidest remark you’ve ever made. She’ll think you don’t know your own mind. Oh, if only I wasn’t such a clumsy oaf—wish I were one of them fellows who writes the poems they print in the newspaper. Seems like then I wouldn’t have a lick of trouble at all. What’s she sewing? Oh, a quilt. Looks mighty nice. Reckon I couldn’t make one of them things even if I’d all the time and patience in the world.

Now you look here Dan Pettigrew. What’s to be ashamed of? You’re a fine, upstanding man. You’ve a farm that’s been farmed by your family as far back as anyone can remember. You work hard and you can sing just as well as the next man. You haven’t got the best education and you haven’t got bushels of money, but you ain’t poor. There ain’t anything in all that a young woman could rightfully stick her nose up at, but somehow I know in my bones she won’t say yes. S’pose I could come back later. Maybe take her out for a buggy drive. It’ll be a fine night. Maybe if it were dark and I didn’t have to look at her at all I could say it all. If the moon were up there a-shining and the birds were a-singing, surely I wouldn’t be so shy and all. But then I’d look silly sitting here all this time as if I’d nothing better to do than chat about nothing.

And anyhow, it ain’t as if she was some city girl all dandified up and looking down her nose at us. Why, I’ve always known her. I helped her father with his haying when I was ten. I threw mud in her face once when we got mad and had an argument. Must a been a dandy of an argument. Can’t rightly remember now what it was about. “Do you remember when I threw mud at you once when we was young? What was that argument about anyway?” I don’t recollect ever trying to drown kittens, but women is supposed to have better memories about those sorts of things. “I wouldn’t drown them now, that’s for certain. I’ve got five cats to home, and they multiply often. Oh, I leave the kittens round with folks I know will give ‘em a good home. Well, I hope I’d have changed. That were a long time ago.”

Now she’s getting up. Reckon I’ve stayed too long and made a nuisance of myself. Oh, she’s giving me some pie. “Mighty good pie. Strawberry rhubarb always was my favorite. No, one slice will do me up mighty fine. Thank you kindly.” I wonder how often she would make pies. This really is the best pie I ever have tasted. And the glass of milk washes it down real nice. Better ask how her ma’s doing. The old lady’s held up real well considering that stroke she had. Bit poorly? That’s a real shame. I’ll go up and see her before I go. Drat. I shouldn’t have said that about going. Now she’ll think I’m raring to go and shoo me out the door before I get it out. Better say it now. Can’t hurt none.

“I know this is a bit sudden…I’ve always held you in the highest regard…well yes, and your pies…But I ain’t a-asking you for your pies. Well, I would be mightily happy if you would wed with me, that’s all. I suppose I do love you. I know this ain’t the most romantic of proposals…You mean you will? Really you will? Sarah Jane, I am the happiest man alive, I reckon. Well I surely am glad you’re happy too—I’ll try to make you happy all our days. Yes, I will kiss you, if you don’t mind.”

A whirl of gaiety

We've been quite busy around here.

Wednesday night Fr. Adrian from St. Herman's Monastery in Platina, CA came to our church to deliver a lecture on the Georgian Saints. It was quite fascinating. I had grown up knowing about St. Nina and also by extension Queen Nana and King Mirian but the history of Georgian Orthodoxy goes far beyond them.

Thursday night St. Innocent's Academy from Kodiak, Alaska came through on their trip throughout the U.S. We gave them dinner and they sang for us. Then the students and young adults from the church danced. It was a lot of fun and I didn't get home until very late. I saw a few old friends which was lovely.

My family also picked strawberries and made two batches of strawberry jam, in addition to organizing the meal for the Academy. So we've been on the move!