collage

bright voices

For a year I stood in services at the Orthodox church and listened. There is a sense in which it was like standing in my back yard, taking everything in.

The difference was, I had never planned nor desired to enter into the particular “yard” of Orthodoxy.

From my earlier vantage, from before February 2011, the Orthodox appeared like those churches in which people group in order to venerate an institution. I had done my share of that kind of grouping and venerating. My wildest dreams didn’t hold a picture of a gathering around an organism, a living Person, in the midst. That was supposed to happen in the future, in the Kingdom still to come. For me to believe there was a nascent way in which it happens now was against the rules of reality as I interpreted them.

Yet I stood listening for a year, and I pondered. There were voices in the corner, in the area of the room the Orthodox call the cliros. Human voices expressing not only whole passages and books of Scripture but the context, the story, which was going on in the landscapes and times those books and passages were penned. As if the wildlife and plant life and solar and lunar life and texture and wisdom of the nonfiction account continued to live.

As if the history that followed a certain century were also caught up in and carried along, new leaf on deep river, with the events of one story. As if what I’d only ever before known were chapters fragmented from the true telling, scorched and shriveled by bonfires licking the hem and the bone.

A few years back I wrote an essay about my Dad and his friend, the writer Richard Brautigan. In it I expressed my regret that no photograph remains of the two of them together. There are only stories. Knowing my dad, having grown up in context with his person, I have no doubt of the veracity of any of his tales. I hear his heartbreak and his joy and I naturally believe.

This is how it happens, whether the offering of an account comes from rivers in the Willamette Valley or from roads traversing the Mediterranean world.

Even when the first ones to relate the amazement, back in a certain century, are people of lowest societal standing. Even when they are women who approach a tomb bearing myrrh.

Their voices still ring.

(not quite) escaping tyranny

6 Replies

Above is a meeting of creatures Tim and I spied on our first joint bike ride of the season.

Below, a Camas flower beckons James and me toward the first uphill hike I’ve done in a while.

I have spent several weeks in withdrawal from the internet. Not from email, and not fully from my blog here, but I stepped away fully and completely from Facebook. (Okay, I’ve peeked over Tim’s shoulder at FB a few times, but that’s it.)

With finches nesting once again on our kitchen’s outdoor blind, with neighborhood women walking regularly, with the world doing its burst of green and other colors, and with church continually spreading banquets for my inner being to partake of, I’ve been able to step aside from my desire to “catch up” on social media.

I’ve expressed to people my concern that I am truly a Facebook addict, and therefore I should not return to it. On the upside, if I don’t return I’ll have freedom in many respects. On the downside, if I cancel my FB account I won’t get to post pictures of my outdoor adventures or our expected grandchild. How, I’ve wailed, can I be a grandma and not be on Facebook?

Of course many grandmas do fine in life without FB. Many other people, too. In fact, I think more of my close friends have no Facebook account than have one.

Also of course, most people who are on Facebook are not addicts like me. My problem seems to stem from the tyranny of the immediate. This is what I’m calling it. While regularly using Facebook, I simply couldn’t make myself browse the social network site without stressing over answers, responses, and likes that I felt I must give people. I also stressed over seeing how much of this “currency” I had received.

What I would really like is not to worry over the social stuff. In real life, I’ve realized, I don’t worry like I do on FB. My friends who use FB seem to fall roughly into two user categories: those who post a lot but don’t “visit” others very often; and those who spend most of their Facebook time chatting, liking, and socializing with others but don’t put up much of their own pictures, etc., unless something significant happens. I think I tried to do both, and it sucked away too much time and energy.

I’d like to operate on FB in the first category, using Facebook as a tool, first, to share pictures. While I’ve looked into photo sites like Flickr, I recognize the “need” there to friend people and so on, same as Facebook, except there the folks are more discerning about photography than I. Secondly, I enjoy using FB as a link here to my blog, my little hut on the vast virtual prairie.

I might as well stick with one site. The alternative would be to delete my FB account. That’s definitely an option. But, as with my blog, I have a history there. It’s only four years long, but a four year journal is a journal nonetheless. And Facebook has given me comments and likes from a couple of people who are no longer living. If I delete my account, I lose those bits of remembered contact with them.

If my choice to try again on FB stands, you will likely be reading this post because you saw that I shared this photo*:

The flower’s called a cat’s ear. My son, James, informed me of this on our hike. I wanted to bring it back and not keep it to myself, but I have waited a few days, anyway, to share it. So maybe I have made a move toward an online practice that is slightly less compulsive, less addicted, and more healthily social.

* Postscript: I returned to my FB page to link to this blog post, and I was blocked from using the cat’s ear photo in the status update (FB gave me three photos to choose from as the “thumbnail” and none was the one I wanted). After wasting, hm, a half hour, forty-five minutes? I gave up. Sigh.

The assembly of the humble is beloved of God like the assembly of the Seraphim.
~ St. Isaac the Syrian

Those who erred in spirit shall know understanding, and those who complained will learn to obey, and the stammering tongues shall learn to speak peace.
~ Isaiah 29:24

Kindness is one of God’s many qualities, therefore it always spreads joy, drives away the clouds, opens up hearts like the spring sunshine which makes the earth blossom.

~ Elder Paisios of Mount Athos

James (center) interns at Excelsior Farm

James (center) interns at an organic farm (click photo to read story in Eugene’s Daily Emerald).

[Man] has become accustomed to relying only on himself; he has split off from the whole and become an isolated unit; he has trained his soul not to rely on human help, not to believe in men and mankind [...] The truth [is] that the security of the individual cannot be achieved by his isolated efforts but only by mankind as a whole [...] An end to this fearful isolation is bound to come and all men will understand [...] and it is then that the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the heavens… But until that day we must keep hope alive, and now and then a man must set an example, if only an isolated one, by trying to lift his soul out of its isolation and offering it up in an act of brotherly communion, even if he is taken for one of God’s fools. This is necessary, to keep the great idea alive.
~ Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamozov

walks with buds

2 Replies

The doorbell rings, and when my son answers it, a neighbor lady stands in the driveway, asking, “Can Deanna come out and play?”

Up to five of us have ventured forth together recently, a graying brigade of pleasant companions. Our memories span the streets, schools, parks, and homes in our area. Some of us know where certain blocks have cut-throughs. Some know the newest paths to the river. Fleet-footed and slow, we surge and dally. For about an hour, whichever days we can.

Other excursions continue my way of solitariness (in my camera’s company), usually along the river where buds and even blossoms begin to appear.

Thursday I leave my car at Maurie Jacobs Park and walk the rest of the way to our church’s bookstore for my volunteer shift. It’s about five minutes of river and 15 more along streets near where my dad was born. I pass Dad’s elementary school, the one Grandma Edna attended nearly a century ago.

I greet wealthy people and homeless people, skirting a mechanic’s shop near the train tracks. The Eugene Mission operates a few blocks over. Next to the church, Ninkasi Brewery’s new processing facility is being constructed. The city is finally beginning much needed street repairs on Blair. Above machinery hums and dump truck beeps there are bird sounds. Dust rises but doesn’t obscure fresh scents on the warming breeze.

Late Friday afternoon the perfect slant of light calls, flowing water beckons, wings tip against blue sky, and I know I’ll walk a long while. Tim will be riding his bike home, so I go his direction first, and, just at the point where my path turns off from the one he travels, we spy each other. I don’t get his picture; too late I think about it, after he has stopped and we’ve chatted and I’ve traced his coat’s pattern with my glove and then toodle-ooed, he to cross the Owosso Bridge and I to traverse this opposite side of our waterway and cross the Greenway Bridge farther downstream and discover what adventures I may.

iconic impressions

Leave a reply

I recall a morning early in my Orthodox Christian experience. My hands folded in my lap, I waited for the Sunday service to begin. I watched people entering the room, greeting one another in ways I was accustomed to from my life in churches. They smiled, they said hello, they hugged. I noticed a few greeting with kisses, which wasn’t the usual form from my past, but I figured those folks were the Russians.

Nearly every person began their entrance into the church by crossing themselves in front of, bowing to, and then kissing icons. These painted pictures of Jesus, of Mary, and of saints hung all around the room, but the ones most people bowed to (or venerated, as I heard the term being used) were set on three stands, which looked to me like pulpits. One was near where we entered, and the others were up front on either side of the double doors (called the Royal Doors) that led to the area containing the altar.

I knew next to nothing about icons. My experience with them so far hadn’t been great. Perhaps no other aspect made attending an Orthodox worship service feel so foreign as icons being there, and then everyone was interacting with them.

For my daughter’s sake, I had earlier tried to follow what seemed a prescribed ritual. Months ago, when visiting St. John’s, I tried. After the service ended that day, I went forward, fumbled making the sign of the cross, and bent toward the icon, lips puckered. I bonked my nose. The kiss failed. That was it. I would never make such a humiliating attempt again.

Now I’d changed my mind. This morning I had arrived with Tim before most other people. Determined, I made my way carefully to the first icon, the one of St. John the Wonderworker, for whom this church is named. Taking my time, I touched my forehead, then my midsection, and last I touched my right and then my left shoulders. I repeated this action. Then I took a breath, tilted my chin, and lowered my head until my lips touched St. John the Wonderworker’s robe. Once more I crossed myself and slowly moved to the other icons.

My outer person is a timid one, but the state inside of me this morning wasn’t the state of someone being shy. I existed in a complex space, but it was mainly one of interest. By my usual forms of reasoning this should not be. Months ago I had, in this building, dismissed what I saw going on.

I was uncomfortable with a dogma — a basic tenet of the form of faith held by the people pictured in the icons and the people bowing to them around me — the belief in the Trinity. This was due to my most recent interpretations of Scripture. Years earlier as a Christian I had accepted “God in three Persons” to be true. For about a decade now, I hadn’t been sure.

I was in an intriguing spot. When someone came into my Protestant, Bible studying community and mentioned the Trinity, I felt awkward. This sort of person would be welcome to speak his or her mind. But I would hold inside myself the sense (though unarticulated) that this person wasn’t one of us. I would have considered them ignorant of church history. Or possibly just superstitious. Mind you, I had never thought through very carefully my view of God’s nature for myself. But I would have sensed these things nonetheless.

Today I began to see myself bumping up against a habit of accepting the Trinity as untrue. I was, in a sense, safe here at St. John’s to consider what I really thought, because no one from my dearly loved Christian community was present. If anyone from my group had walked into the service, I would have felt like a 14-year-old caught smoking behind the barn. Why was this so? I’d never considered the question of my conformity to that group. Why had I, maturing believer that I hoped I’d become, been unwilling to think differently from the group? I had assumed I was a free agent; now I recognized I held at least one belief — my views on the Trinity — simply because my friends did. This was disconcerting; it wasn’t even what my Protestant teachers encouraged. It was hard to know what to think about myself.

All I knew was something had happened at the core of me (as I’ve recently recounted in another post). Because of this, today I needed to inspect, to partake, and to hold nothing back. At the end of the morning’s Liturgy I once again venerated the icons.

Later, after the church’s communal meal called Trapeza, I helped Tim and our daughter on the clean-up crew. People bustled back and forth from tables to kitchen to cupboards. Other church members lingered at their places over coffee and tea, conversing in earnest, laughing, reminding active children to slow down or head outdoors. Such a scene could have unfolded at any church I’d ever attended — time together following worship, study, and prayer. (Here, though, of course, hung a few icons, even in the dining room.)

While I wasn’t at all eager to go through the process of meeting everyone in this new context (I hadn’t been looking for another community; I’d had my own, thank you), I recognized the feeling of home. St. John’s appeared doable. I thanked God for this, as we finished the intense, light work of setting things right in good company beneath faces on the walls.

overheard from shore

6 Replies

Hm. Hum dee, doh.

*cough*

I really need to ask you…

Yes?

Okay. So. Just. Wanted you to tell me…

I’m listening.

Can you give me some idea…I mean…

What exactly are your feelings?

Feelings? I don’t have feelings.

How can you say you don’t have any feelings???!

I’m an intellectual. That’s how.

Okay. Well. What does your intellect tell you?

It tells me that I think you’re pretty cute. Is that satisfactory?

Um, well yeah. I guess so.

an everyday connection

2 Replies

I opened the book to its preface. It was a large, thick tome. I’d heard that many Orthodox Christians have read it; in fact, in Russia the original version has become popular, selling well over a million copies.

I had no idea if it would interest me. After reading the brief introduction, however, I had to buy the book. And, yes, it’s about (among other things) life in a monastery. Half a world away. The stories begin in the 1980s; then they reach backward and forward in time. They assume some knowledge of Russian life. They often express miraculous happenings in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

A few weeks ago I started posting bits of my Orthodox conversion story. More posts are slowly taking shape in my writing files, and I’d like to hang them up here on the blog. The past two years have been an amazing time in my life, in largest part due to Christianity of this sort. When I read Archimandrite Tikhon‘s words at the beginning of his sharing of stories, my heart related to what he described:

Why had we come to the monastery? And why were we planning to stay here for the rest of our lives? We knew very well. It was because, for each of us, a new world had suddenly opened up, incomparable in its beauty. And that world had turned out to be boundlessly more attractive than the one in which we had previously lived our young and so-far very happy lives.

You can read the rest of the preface at Every-day Saints.com, and there are links to selected chapters.

Despite my enthusiasm, I don’t expect American readers to make the book a best-seller. I can just hear folks saying, “Hm. Rather obscure, quaint, even eccentric stories, these.” Perhaps I’m getting used to this kind of reaction to my whole life. It’s all right.

Recently I heard a (non-Orthodox) friend of mine described as eccentric. I realized I agreed that the term fits; in fact, I’m sure it fits me and, maybe, a majority of the people I know, because I’ve never run with a conventional crowd in any setting. I also mused that I think becoming Orthodox doesn’t automatically make you eccentric, but it sure makes you look eccentric pretty fast.

Anyway.

American Christians might take an interest in historical aspects of these stories. Many concern people who survived the Soviet era with their faith intact. I find here an awe-inspiring legacy. Because there were Christians to be found throughout the USSR, inquiring young people like the book’s author could connect with the Church, with the faith of Christ, years before communism fell.

His education gave the author his first nudge in this direction:

Gradually we came to a surprising revelation. All the great figures of world and Russian history with whose philosophies we became acquainted during our studies — all those whom we trusted and loved and respected — all of them had thought about God in a completely different way than we did. Simply put, they were people of faith. Dostoyevsky, Kant, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Goethe, Pascal, Hegel, Losev — there were too many to list. [...] Of course, these people’s perceptions of God might turn out to be quite different from ours. Even so, for most of them, the question of faith was the most important, even if perhaps the most complicated, question in their lives. [From "In the Beginning," p. 5-6.]

No matter the origin on the map or in history of thoughts like these, they meet me on the street where I live. Such is the gift of experience in story.

slow to speak

deanna hershiser's blog