The Christmas Story

 

To sacrifice one’s self for the sake of another, this is the greatest gift.  At the end of the famous story, The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry, he writes that the wise men who brought gifts to baby Jesus Christ invented the art of giving Christmas presents.  In the tale, he relates the self-giving love of a poor couple.  A woman with beautiful locks of hair cuts and sells her greatest treasure to buy her husband a chain for his watch.  He, however, sold the watch to buy combs for her hair.  In the irony is the simple and yet profound message of love: self-sacrifice for another in utmost tenderness, with joy and thanksgiving.  This is the essence of each Christmas story—that Christ came to earth, took human flesh, and endured life and death for each whom He loves even more than we might imagine.  Still, in our love for our earthly beloveds, we glimpse Christ, we even have the chance to become like Him in our response to this great love.

Christmastime has always been rich and bright for me.  This Christmas I will turn thirty-one, my sister thirty.  Memories of our Nana (grandmother), red lipstick and strong perfume, my sister’s and my birthday and Christmas gifts wrapped under an enormous pine tree, not unlike the many in their backyard, warm applesauce with cinnamon, Pop-pop, legs crossed, v-neck sweater, slicked silver hair, a chuckle that smelled of peanuts and wine, instrumental Christmas classics on the stereo, my mom and dad in sweatshirts and jeans, mom chewing her cheek, hoping to slip a bit of Christ into this celebration of food and fine things.  There has always been beauty and tinsel, peace and distraction, warmth and cold quiet—tension.  But as a child, the new pink tutu sister and I twirled in, ballerinas performing for the family, was a picture of the faith we naturally had.  We easily opened to the Holy Spirit in child-like joy and excitement, and, in our faith, we unknowingly inspired our family to see Christ’s love in our own: simple and clear, the note of a silver bell.

My husband Dima and I have two sons.  The first was born three days before the Nativity of Christ, five years before this coming Christmas.  It was on our son Viktor’s first birthday that he and Momma and Daddy were baptized into Christ and put on Christ, alleluia.  Our second son Dominik is two and a half, born at Pascha.  Both our children, as all children, serve as living, demanding reminders of life in Love, in Christ.  In many ways, Christmas, like a song, a story, a child reminds us that faith is experience, and that this opportunity is primarily about self-giving, emptying out the ever-present hold of selfish desire, however it manifests for each, perhaps ambition that blinds or laziness that spoils.  At this time of the year, isn’t it easy to obsess with one’s self?

My husband came to America when he was thirteen years old, in 1991.  We met on a blind date in high school at seventeen and have stayed together since that spring day in May, 1996.  His grandmother came to America for Christmas when we were dating.  She came from the former Soviet Union, from secret faith, from silenced Christmases.  She came and stayed with Dima at his host family’s home, an otherworldly experience for poor Grandma.  The gracious host family with whom Dima and I would continue to unite, was foreign to the highest degree for Grandma.  She lived in a small apartment, one room, with worn things.  She had never left her country.  Dima’s host family traveled the world, owned a business, and embraced other cultures, such as the Far East and Russia.  The opulence there terrified Grandma, and, after begging to be flown home early, she returned to Russia after the holiday open house at Dima’s host family’s—the finger foods and fine wines couldn’t coax her from the bedroom upstairs, where she was tucked safely away from family and friends and three enormous Christmas trees shinning as bright as her face when forced into strange company.  Though Grandma was relieved to be home, in less than a decade she would return, and she would insist we baptize our first child in the Orthodox Church.

Grandma represents the coming together of Dima and me.  The absolute determination, fear, and will required to come together, no matter how many times we fall apart, because of love.  True love is always Christmas, the Holy Spirit revealing the sacrifice of our Savior, in great and small ways inspiring one to sacrifice self for another, to give.  For Dima and me, there have been huge opportunities, as his parents have since moved to America, layering family dynamics with new children, my Protestant converted Catholic parents and sister, and his host family.  The chances to love abound, and the failures are constant.  Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner!

There were five years before God granted Dima and me children.  One Christmas, I recall the bit_h boots.  These were high-heeled sexy things, the kind that a mother of two small boys no longer wears, because bunions have grown, because quick access to running toddlers makes walking on toes impossible, because being sexy seems superfluous among so many other cares.  What does it mean to be a mother, a wife, a Christian?  Certainly, there is no answer to offer in brief form.  But we might consider Christmas, the story lived and experienced each year, as reality: God’s great love as presence and miracle and the call to change, to become more loving, enduring, and selfless.

Orthodox Christianity refines my vision of Christmas.  The Nativity of Christ cannot be but in Christ.  As Fr. Nicholas recently said, putting Christ back into Christmas is not the teaching of the Church.  For the holiday, holy day, is Christ and cannot be merely opened and infused with His goodness.  As four-year-olds in the faith, Dima and I seek Orthodox traditions to guide our Christmases, our every days, but often feel clueless as to what these might be and how to implement them.

After baptism, hair still wet, I slipped into the bathroom at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in Mentor, OH with baby Viktor in my arms.  He was trembling, and so was I.  I recall looking in the mirror and feeling more beautiful and joyful in a stilling way than I had since Dima’s and my wedding six years before our baptisms.  Everything was right, if only for a moment.  The parishioners offered us cards and icons, kisses and embraces.  One gave a small placard of St. Nicholas with a prayer on the back that would become familiar with our children.  Not only has St. Nicholas’s white hair and understanding expression served as a touchstone through these recent years, but the brief prayer reminds us of Christmas and its presence through the year: God, our Father, we pray that you will protect our children, keep them safe from harm and help them to grow healthy in mind and body.  Give them strength to keep their faith in you, and keep alive their joy in the birth of Jesus at Christmas time. This was the first prayer that Viktor learned to say on his own, a tiny voice just forming words, and we said it year-long.

Christmas past was Nana’s sweets, echoing the taste of good that I had found in the Protestant churches my family had attended through the years.  It was joy, but it grew less as life transitioned from childhood into adulthood: marriage, multicultural family, children of my own.  Christmas present is full, full of hope and faith that the Orthodox Church is a limitless well, as deep as I might swim, richer than any tinsel, any gold, but as yet still, mostly, unexplored.  Christmas future might be finding more, not by way of intellectualism as much as experience, time, in the Church, among others living the ancient and unbroken Tradition of the apostolic faith.  Christmas future is anticipation for another St. Nicholas Day that my children and their children and their children’s children might someday rejoice in.

Dominik laughs in the stroller as I walk us under autumn trees nearly bare.  Happy birthday cake, Jesus, Momma, Viktor, Dedushka (grandpa), Aunt Melanie (my sister)! We hurry home to fetch Viktor from preschool, to throw together meatless leftovers for Daddy after work, to think about Christmas and what it might mean in light of today.

The Future

Consider others not in what they do or omit to do but in light of what they suffer.[1]

There is a picture hanging in my husband’s host mother’s bathroom: among a splay of colored leaves a mother wears an autumn craft-like sweater, half smile on her lips as the older of two young boys poses before her animated and the younger wears a sweet smile and looks on.  In addition to her own two, she, Susan, became my husband Dima’s mother from thirteen until two years earlier, at twenty-nine, when Dima’s own parents from Russia came to live in America.  Fourteen years before, as Dima and I began dating, Susan emerged as a mother figure for me, too.  This once young mom is in her sixties now.  And as I brushed my teeth after another Thanksgiving dinner at her luxurious home, after swimming (they have an indoor pool) with my two small boys and our three sets of parents, my sister and her family, and Susan’s two grown boys, my eyes misted over staring at the photograph in the bathroom.  No amount of money, will, or effort keeps time still.  The future is change.  The future is my own grown boys, my own aged body and mind, and, ultimately, a soul grown sensitized to God or cool, cold even.

The day before, I’d taken two-and-a-half year-old Dominik and almost-five Viktor to my doctor’s appointment.  Recently, my father had had his gull bladder checked because of his sensitive stomach, though nothing was found to be amiss.  I had called my doctor, asking that a test be ordered, not wanting a consultation to discuss a chronic condition that no amount of figuring out really seemed to figure out.  My doctor is good, thorough, partial to scientifically pin-pointing the cause of a given malady.  She had sent me to a gut specialist, had run some tests, had led me to cut out dairy as a possible source of bowel irritation.  Still, the cycle of discomfort continues.  I leave discussions with her feeling ill at ease, now, because while I believe the mind-body-spirit condition is far more complex than medicine fathoms and that some things are better left to the healthiest natural means a person figures for themselves, it seems she believes medicine would, if not fix, help my condition.  She suggests Paxil, an antidepressant, recognizing the connection between brain and gut chemistry.  She may be right, and in time I may try medication.  Certainly many are helped in this way.

But what is it that has me pause, search, wonder if there might be danger in this?  A pill can help, not cure.  A run can alter brain chemistry.  A prayer from pain is often powerful.  Enduring the conditions of life, the strains and the pressures, can refine us when we face them straight on.  Sometimes we cannot.  But what of the times when we may not want to but do?—When we ride the wave and pass into a fresh, open sea?  Life changes.  Children grow.  I don’t necessarily want to drug myself to get through this process, unless I have to, and no one could say but one’s own very honest heart if this need was in fact not only another want.  For who doesn’t want life to be easier, smoother, without the hard-pressing of broken relationships?  Selfish tendencies inflict the heart with a lack of gratitude and keep us from healing relationships—there’s no pill to fix this.  One’s moods might be another test, another weight upon the cross I must pick up and carry, following after the Lord.  And if I expect a pill to fix my state of mind (and my gut’s response), how might that expectation translate into other hard places as they come into my life?

I have seen my aunt medicate herself quite literally to death.  Against this, I see my children wrestle with Daddy, howling with laughter, eager and passionate.  I see Dominik ordering Viktor off Momma’s lap, Too big!  And Viktor’s drawing Dominik away from me to build a fort with every pillow we own.  I imagine the future.  The times when Viktor, so like me, might veer off the happy course he’s on and journey through dark roads of deep thinking, realizing the pain in life, his own, others’, of times he may feel nervous and distracted by the blessing of needing relationships in his life that challenge what his mind begins to understand and his heart painfully responds to.  I see him weep even now for his Daddy gone too late, for a friend who takes the Lord’s name in vain, for himself as I hold his brother instead of him.  We must learn to deal with what we feel however each can best do this.  Some may need the softening of medicine, but, perhaps, most do not in fact need as much as want the pain to go away.

I return to the future.  To the fact that nothing can obscure the acute reality of grown children for whom I am certain to fail in ways I cannot now see.  Viktor’s tooth is lose, the first.  His legs are longer, body stretching thin and hairy, nose changing from a baby’s to a boy’s.  He stands before the mark on the basement post of four years old, over three inches taller now, nearly five.  Dominik talks in chopped sentences, holds my leg as I walk, wrapping his strong arms around it as though it’s his.  He hugs me as a baby, though he ferociously insists, Baby not!  Name, Dominik!  Big boy.  I consider Viktor and Dominik next year, in school, taller, more aware of the material things we do not have—of few vacations, no T.V., of second-hand clothes, and groceries from Aldi’s.  There’s a mix of pride and embarrassment in me.  Efficiency, creativity, frugality, having enough and not needing more is good.  Yet, when we experience the luxuries of flat screen T.V.s, of endlessly expensive cheeses and wines and name brand juice, of swims indoor in a spacious pool with a slide, I see a future where our boys will want as their own things that wealth can buy.  Will they long for what money cannot buy, be sensitive enough to feel the pull for love and peace that happens in brokenness before a sparsely peopled church with incense and icons and holy music that warms cold hands?  What can I do now for their future longings?  Of course, I could show them.  Unfortunately, they see my pain, often manifested as anger and impatience with them, but do they see my otherworldly joy and recognize from Whom it comes?

I watched a movie about a dying mother saying goodbye to her family.  The son videotaped his mother, and at one point she says not to judge them too harshly, that they did the best they could and there was nothing more than this.  She said not to think too hard about what might have been done differently because having one’s own family will show how each can only do the best that they might.  It seems good advice.  I recall six or so years earlier, before children of our own, Dima and I were over Susan’s for grilled chicken on the patio.  Summer breeze pulled the sweet scent of life about us.  In few words, we wondered about having become adults from the children we once were.  We wondered about Susan’s two sons, struggling with adult relationships.  There was no answer, no finger to point as to why young people choose the paths they do.  I thought then of the verse in the Bible that says to train a child up in the ways he should go and when he is grown he will not depart from it.  I think now of this promise but realize that the path each journeys may have any given detours along its way.  One mustn’t judge by what another does or does not do, but by what he suffers.  To see another’s pain allows love and unity, while to see their lack elicits anger and self-righteousness.

Even with ourselves, to consider why we do what we do is the surest way to break through and change our behaviors, to face our sufferings and pray for mercy.  I realize, in a small and fuzzy way, how far away my gratitude has been—for my family, my home, my own body, mind and opportunities before me.  It happened as my husband and I stepped into our small home and I smelled dust.  It was Thanksgiving night.  The day had been richly blessed with laughter, good food and mellowing wine, with making love in my brother-in-law’s old bedroom, children in other mothers’ arms—free.  We had stepped away from the stained roof, the stuffed to the gills, dilapidated garage, bulging with bits of life: toys, rakes, car, plant and garden things.  I sniffed around, Dima, can you dust the basement?  Can we please call about cleaning the dust from the vents?  Maybe you could use a Q-tip to dust the vents….   A small chuckle grew into a full laugh as my requests were absurd, neurotic.  Go to bed, he laughed.  My habit of speaking before thinking, of worry without ceasing was comical against the goodness of the day.  Perhaps in the future we’d have money, more time, more energy.  We’d have grown children, this was certain, and what would this mean—who would they and we be?

It seems that in the course of busy days and nights we lose sight of what will be and instead worry over what might be.  For example, if I realize the children will become men, than my priority should be teaching them all I can about life—to love, to learn, to be strong in body and mind.  While I haven’t an answer to what this means in practical ways, the truth proves that to worry about success in a career, earning more money to have better, bigger things steals my attention from the most important question at hand: How does one grow a family in love, in Christ?  Sin distracts us from God and redirects the mind and heart on selfish desires: vanity—I want to curl my hair, apply the perfect eyes, my two year old is in the way as he sifts through necklaces trying them on with a smile for me; greed—there’s never enough: after Thanksgiving dinner, one more slice of cherry pie, one more gift to buy, my four year old can’t stay still long enough and watch his movie, can’t leave me to check email one more time; envy—a young mom whose blog reaches over six-thousand makes me nauseous, I am not happy that she helps others, helps me; pride—justification of my selfishness keeps me from the pain of facing who I am.  Stringing along the sins most natural to me leaves me depressed.  The present can seem awful, the only hope I contrive in a future I perceive with veiled eyes.

The gift of the Holy Spirit, though, is Presence.  We are not alone.  Even in a mire of increasingly bad feelings and down-heartedness, the song of Liturgy happens inside my heart.  In the midst of worry, I long to pray.  With a heavy body, I slip to my knees before the icon of Christ in our bedroom, crying small, squeezed out tears for help.  And then the miracle that becomes my faith.  The next morning at Liturgy, so undeserving was I, and yet, holding my son’s warm body against my own, still as held breath, the flood of tears, of tenderness, of His Presence.  It was Peace, but more.  Peace and pain—all that had kept me from God, feelings of unworthiness and self-loathing transformed into accepting my life once again in Him.  I am nothing outside of Christ.  I wonder if a bigger audience, if more worldly success might take me away from this needful place in which I root for the Sustainer of all.

Take the light you have willed to receive here and share it with your families, our priest said.  That Thanksgiving Day it was easy, not merely because the food and drink and place were rich and pleasing, but, mostly, because the Kingdom of God is within and what had kept me from that place was a broken self that no external thing can remedy, even the finest and richest, because even among the finest things in this life, a critical, unloving eye finds fault.  However, inviting God into the heart doesn’t erase the hard realities of imperfect life.  No, it can be clearer, even in calm-hearted times, where there is a lack of goodness, where lifestyles and ambitions lead away from eternal blessings.  I listen to Susan’s husband talk of three travels he has before their New Year’s trip to Las Vegas.  I watch the one grown son detach from those around him and the other son’s hunger for his father’s held-back approval breaks my heart.  There is real pain, confusion and blindness.  Susan’s husband takes pictures with a fancy camera before my son Viktor leads us in a sing-song prayer for Thanksgiving dinner.

We love each other, though, in a warm pool, flipping around in deep water, children wearing water wings, Dima flying down the slide and tidal waving it into the shallow end, back scrapping the tiles.  I hold my husband in his pain, both laughing, and see my family beyond what they do or do not do.  We suffer and rejoice together.

To be soul-soothed is to realign with God in going to Him in prayer and services of the Church.  Then, to take a better self and better love others, especially family, is the call I finally did not fail to heed this past Thanksgiving.  That night, I kissed the holy icon of Christ, Lord, You heard my prayers.   And there is more, He seemed to say.  The future is good, as good as the present moment.

---

[1] Recently heard on Ancient Faith Radio, November 27, 2009.

 

Nasty Little Dragonzzz

Why write?

A mother.  Wife.  Teacher.  A thirty-year-old no longer on the cusp of life but in the suit, swimming in what can seem an odd fit.

To write is to seek.  To breathe deeply, silently, and hope the stasis of days They say is fleeting is really going somewhere.

We feel so much.

I write.

From Donald Miller’s blog:

There is something in me that wants to be known by others.  I share my life to have other people read about it, put down the book, look me in the eye and say ‘you exist.’

By exploring my own feelings about life, I am actually exploring the human condition, and in writing I try to find something interesting about ‘us’ rather than ‘me’ and so by reading about me, people are actually reading about themselves.  I believe this is actually true of the memoirist.  If they really wrote all about themselves, nobody would care.

What do we feel?

When I was little, my evil was less checked.  I let fly fast fury, competing, challenging obstacles to myself.  Guilt was less; Mom hugged me anyways.  My sister really did steal my Life Savor comb and mirror set.  It was red plastic and rainbow.  Sister smirked, full lips red as the plastic.  I twisted her small tit.  Mom’s smack, teeth clenched, hiss, hardly fazed me.  I was happy to hurt.

My almost five-year-old hides the baby’s pants, squeezes baby’s diaper, screams.  I rave at the top of my lungs, baby’s blankey over one shoulder, snack bags in hand, one shoe on.  In the house, I order the baby slipping out the side door. Palms in a cold sweat, dull stomach pain, Bible and journal unopened, three days.  Impatience, intolerance, everything a distraction, a race.  Inhale soup, bread, fill up on anything to empty the truth.

But now, a new day, though problems carry over and worm their way into the apple of life, I crunch the tart skin, work jaw muscles, teeth.  Chew into the softer place where there is once again feeling and realizing and digesting the reality of myself.  Tense eyes, hair unwashed, narrow shoulders, flat chest–the mirror, distraction to laughing children, toothbrushes poking from lips.

Life tests everyone.  Breaks us from the stronghold of me-me-me.

My home is warm: banana bread, vanilla candle, icon corner.  Angels, here too.

What can’t be changed?

Poem by Jack Prelutsky:

I’m a nasty, nasty dragon,

I’ve been nasty since my birth,

When it comes to nasty dragons,

I’m the nastiest on earth.

I’ve a nasty, nasty temper,

And my breath is nasty too,

I was nasty to my parents,

I’ll be nastier to you.

It’s my nature to be nasty,

Nasty, nasty night and day,

I will act completely nasty

If you’re in my nasty way.

Yet I largely pass unnoticed

As I nastily go by,

I’m a nasty, nasty dragon

Just a nasty half inch high.

What is the antidote to life’s trials and tribulations?

Poem by Dima Povozhaev:

A special world for you and me

A special bond one cannot see

It wraps us up in its cocoon

And holds us fiercely in its womb.

Its fingers spread like fine spun gold

Gently nestling us to the fold

Like silken thread it holds us fast

Bonds like this are meant to last.

And though at times a thread may break

A new one forms in its wake

To bind us loser and keep us strong

In a special world, where we belong.

 

Love is.  Love gives when life seems empty.  A promise, perfect acceptance, flexible, foiling pain.  Love sings her Nasty Little Drangonsong and laughs, shares, enfolds the world within her.

Relatively Absolute

What the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world.[1]  The Faith isn’t merely opinion or fact.  The fullness comes from the reality of experience.  The Faith has no limits and is found through science, emotion, simple observation and deep, concentrated study because it is for all people.  And each one is unique.  For this reason, the only need is to seek Truth with all one’s heart, mind, and soul.  When we do, it is revealed, however the seeker would best understand at that given time, in that given situation.  Of course there are misunderstandings.  Of course pride interferes and sidetracks.   Still, if the heart is open and one’s life allows for goodness to manifest, it will.

I teach composition at a community college.  The course is on argument, and I encourage students to think critically, questioning more than assuming easy answers.  Gathering my notes and papers after class, a student lingered behind and began talking with me.  During class I had mentioned students often seem to resist education.  The preferred mode is to hang on tight to what is understood, rather than wade through confusion and wonder why.  For example, in the seven colleges and universities I’ve taught at and or attended, acceptance of homosexuality and alternative family life is predominant.  When I ask students about family, faith, culture, there is a surge of response, mostly liberal, mostly easy.  When I challenge students to evaluate good and bad, it seems impossible to move beyond relativity.  Even in discussing success, happiness, luxury students’ bottom line is that such experiences are unique for each one.  While I agree, I continue asking if they notice patterns or find any touchstones among us.  Often, resistance is on.  Students don’t understand what I’m getting at, looking for, asking them.  I’ve begun to think about this.

My overly confident, almost-thirty student sat on the top of a desk and asked me how long I’d been teaching.  My hands went cold.  Nine years, I offered to his surprise, sharing my path of high school to teaching assistantships to part-time instruction.  He then explained his plans to teach sociology at a college or university.  Some of the strain we shared seemed to lessen as he saw a bit of my life matching his own.  He said students think they have to agree with their teachers, but it isn’t about sharing the same opinions.  I wondered if he realized to learn it can be critical to suspend personal opinions, to rethink assumptions, to question ourselves.  A favorite quote from our textbook suggests: “It’s a cop-out simply to think that everyone’s entitled to an opinion, however stupid and uninformed it might be.”[2]  I routinely tell students they may write and argue anything, if they ground their support in specific examples and illustrations from real life, theirs and others’ and experts’.  When life is examined, many times patterns are found that lead us toward unity. 

For example, the student began, you believe in God and life after death.  I believe no one knows until death.  I corrected him by agreeing we cannot know.  He quickly added, sure it’s about faith, and if good things come from whatever a person believes in, God the Devil, anything, then that’s great, then faith is good.  I didn’t press matters, but mumbled it’s all about love, fading from my student so full of life and will to press on.  Observe what is actually good, what love looks like—in families and any relationship.  Faith in one’s self results in pride.  Pride is irritating and selfish and cares mostly for the self.  Faith in gods teaching hate and intolerance is an extension of pride, worship of a prideful god demanding service that divides people.  But the God of love and unity draws together, even when it seems impossible.  This isn’t my unique opinion but an accurate observation from the empirical evidence of each life I’ve ever seen.

In ancient Israel, the bride would bathe and dress and be escorted to the bridegroom by his friends.  In the Church, baptism “bathes” and “dresses” us, we put on Christ.  Christ, the Bridegroom, escorts us.  He escorts us not merely to meet and depart, but He remains with us, in us, changing us to become as He is—love.  In the Church, the baptized are one humanity, one flesh with Christ.  In marriage, the husband and wife are one flesh.  The joining together physically happens in a moment, but the bleeding together of life, of hope, pain, love, sacrifice, this process is a lifetime.  We are gifted to the other, just as an ancient bride once was, but the luxurious fullness is not found on a honeymoon.  Instead, becoming soul mates happens through the years.  We learn to question ourselves first and then others not merely by our relative opinions but as each life is found and made known in Christ.  We don’t know, we seek to know.  We don’t have, we aim to obtain.  We don’t get it all at once, but hold out for the rich reward we experience bit by bit, even now.  

This isn’t the world’s teaching.  My husband and I watched Something’s Gotta Give.  Jack Nicholson (Harry in the film) makes me laugh just to look at his square-squished face, especially when his hair is ruffled and he takes on a crazy look.  In the film, he often appeared this way, suffering heart-attack and anxiety, running after young women and finally finding his soul mate, Diana Keaton as Erica Berry, an uptight playwright.  She wore turtlenecks until he finally cut one off her, freeing her “flinty” personality and allowing her to love.  I laughed throughout the film, leaning against Dima, content to have him fold our clothes as I slipped away.  I felt his joy in my joy and laughed harder.  Still, the movie’s shallow message is capsuled in the mother’s advice to her beautiful daughter.  In tears, the mother tells her daughter to really love, to stop holding back and protecting herself from true emotion.  The message is common: feel and do what you will, what you need, what you want.  But it becomes relative without a center.  Only God’s love, guiding us as it never leaves us the moment we put on Christ, is compatible with our love enough to unite us, truly, to another.  In the film, Erica and Harry connect beyond the physical: he calls her forth from hibernation in work and into femininity; she draws him past women and parties into his real age and purpose, to love her.  The underlying message of men and women loving each other and letting go of self is there, but there is shown absolutely no means to this end.  I wonder how truth might be funny and entertaining, for it always seems eliminated for a beeline to drama and unreal satisfaction.

Emotions are marvelous.  To be a human being is to be fragile and changing, just as green leaves turn colors, fall and decompose into the earth.  What we feel can become reality when everything’s relative.  I feel much, it’s from this place of frequent pain and rejoice that I write, but reason and reality also must temper my work or it’s a rambling mess conveying opinion and emotion, only.  My husband’s not a writer.  As we work to grow together, I increasingly wonder how I would deal with thoughts and feelings if I didn’t write.  Sometimes Dima lashes out at me believing his fear and doubts are reality.  He feels I don’t love him, so I do not.  He feels I will find someone else, I have.  He feels we aren’t compatible, so we mustn’t be.  Coupled with my impatience and explosive emotional nature, we can become as a bomb.  What saves us time and again is not a church, a religion, but a loving, living God whom we seek together in Christ.

It was the second Sunday in a row he’d threatened to turn around and go home, saying that he wasn’t in any state for Communion.  The air was thick and bitter.  I begged him to get us to church, whispered I’d do whatever he decided we should do (it was back to the D-debate), but that our only hope was to take Communion.  Left to relative emotion, we’d be destroyed and so destroy each other, all day long. 

We slunk behind the small gathering of adults there for discussion led by the parish priest before Liturgy.  We dropped our boys off in their class to cut and color leaves.  The priest said that saints are often from families of saints.  He mentioned Jesus and his cousins, the saints of the day (brothers), and I thought of my parents’ long-time friends, now missionaries, who had been a main reason for my and Dima’s baptisms.  The priest asked what is most important to do for our children to teach them God.  He mentioned knowing the teachings of the Church, demonstrating awe of God, forgiveness.  My whole body felt on fire, far too emotional to speak or to think through what I felt.  I offered that forgiveness was the concrete way our children could see love of God.  I continued, awe of God sounds like an abstract notion, but to hold a hand in forgiveness was concrete.  Another woman disagreed with me, suggesting the importance of teaching our children the awe of God.  Though quiet would have been a better response, I fired back: no.  That I was a convert to the faith, and the teachings of the Church, all the practices, everything should increase our love, effecting concrete life experiences which almost always require forgiveness—of self, of others, of what God allows us to endure.  In truth, all the attributes offered were important, maybe equally so, certainly it could have been argued and supported.  Depending on one’s situation that morning, on the season of life one was in, a particular attribute might have seemed more persuasive.  After all, my children were small and my husband and I fighting.  The woman discussing with me was middle-aged, with two grown children, and perhaps in a quieter place with her husband, able to practice silence and reverence and need less active forgiveness.

The Church keeps us from relativity, not pragmatism.  Life should make sense and changes are reality, not to be ignored but embraced and learned from—all centered on the reality of Christ’s love, which changes us and helps us really love our beloved.  What the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world, and what Dima and I become will be the greatest testimony of love or lack to our children.

 

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[1] Heard on the Ancient Faith Radio, 2009.

[2] Andrea Lunsford, John Ruszkiewicz, Keith Walters, eds., Everything’s An Argument, New York, St. Martins, 4^th ed., 2007.

Happily Ever-After

Everyone’s path of salvation is different.  There is no way for man to see the full picture, not of his own life or the life of another.  In the specifics of loving each person and our own lives, we love God and are changed as He wills.  This is one’s path to becoming holy, to salvation.  It is all through the cost of love.

On the way to church my four year old asked: How do we know God’s love?  My husband had a hockey game and opted to attend a nearby parish, leaving me with our two and four year olds.  It would be another day juggling responsibilities, distracted by wiggling little bodies, too-loud giggles in church, my own hunger for peace and rest and quiet that wouldn’t come for days.  Budding irritation for my husband Dima’s last minute decision not to help me would grow as the week pressed on.  Tuesday night the children and I cozied together on the couch for our library movie, the story of Anne Frank.  Daddy wouldn’t be home until past bedtime.  Dinner was a conglomerate of ease and fridge-cleanout: noodles and turkey, fruit and bagels, blue yogurt.  Dima’s silenced complaints over feeding the children artificial coloring and allowing them a too-late bedtime left me feeling a mix of hallow and happy.  My baby, who calls himself big-boy, scattered the family room with blocks and balls and entered a world of creation, possibility.  I, too, fell away from reality, drawing into a haunting story of judgment.

The story of Anne Frank has become common knowledge.  But as I watched a passionate girl with sensitivity and faith in life, birds and love, with curiosity in her changing body, as I listened to her question the meaning of life, first holding her father in their warm, safe home, and later her dying sister, a course piece of wool about her own naked, withered body, I absorbed the essence of Anne.  I find her in me.  I experienced the picture of hell, viewed it in my heart, and mourn still.  That night, I lay awake, holding the cross around my neck, thinking about Anne Frank.  I prayed for her.  How could a God of love possibly have let the Holocaust happen?  It seems impossible that such cruelty actually happened, that it happens still. 

Dima often watches documentaries depicting history and politics, foreign and American.  He is on fire when he talks of Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan—of the potential for another world war.  When he talks of Russia and WWII and the suffering of his own family, I shudder and wonder at the atrocities that I am afraid to believe occur.  When he rages, the revulsions seem impossibly big.  Yet, when I see Anne, when I watch her falling in love with a boy, staring into the sky, still grateful for stars even in the worst conditions of a concentration camp, then her suffering, our suffering, is real to me.  Fear is unrelenting.  Death, even misery, I can accept with less horror, I think, but to imagine the cruelty that one person might have for another, the ways power corrupts, the ramped rule of evil throughout the ages, in all places, this I cannot reconcile against my son’s question: How do we know God’s love?

Though still I haven’t a response that budges beyond the obvious to this question—that we know His love in knowing love for each other and all created things, protopresbyter Thomas Hopko[1] writes about what each might be certain of: “We can cooperate with God.  We can share His holiness.  We can become, as the saints themselves teach us, all that God Himself is by His gracious action in our lives.  We can become loving, peaceful, joyful, good, wise, true, patient, kind, compassionate, powerful, pure, and free.  Or we can refuse to cooperate with God, never find our true selves, and perish” (4).  He continues, explaining that some will suffer and others will suffer much, much less; some will be tempted with great burdens, some will marry, some will stay single, some fight bad memories of abuse and still others will come from and create healthy, happy homes.  “Each must find his or her own way and glorify God through it.  Ultimately, this is all that matters.  The rest is detail.”  Though it may seem unfair, even grossly unjust, merciless and terrible, the world’s notion of equality, namely sameness, is untrue in the context of the spiritual.  God knows.  I do not.  I cannot understand, but I might accept life as it is, for me, for others.

Perhaps Anne Frank lived the best she could.  I wonder how God would receive her.  Had she ever been taught of Jesus Christ; had she enough life to show her the love of our Savior?  Facing unutterable hate from man, how could she know, accept or grow in faith?  Did God seem abstract when the birds had all died, along with her family?  Jesus was crucified, but it might seem his suffering was over quickly compared to Anne’s fate.  Yet, if He is love, then He, too, suffered with her, aching for the hate that his creature endured.  I know in my head that God’s plan will prevail, that there is nothing that can separate us from His love, no present suffering can compare to the Kingdom of God prepared for those who love the Lord….  My heart cannot settle the sadness of one who, perhaps because of blinding pain, may not have had room to see Him.  Anne Frank was a child when she died.  What would I have felt, thought, believed at sixteen, in a concentration camp filled with rats and lice?  

It is true that suffering opens the heart to God.  When Dima returned from hockey, I told him I liked not having his voice over my shoulder with the boys, thinking of blue yogurt and lax rules.  The tender pain of last year is re-felt with as little as a glimpse across the room at his hard face.  We have come so far these past two years, nine years since our marriage.  Just last year, my hands had been cold and numb with the feel of impossible union.  In our kitchen, through tears and silent prayers, the green plant on the shelf grew strong.  Through the strain of doubts and lovelessness, there were moments I’d felt the increase of peace, strength, and joy—but I hadn’t known how to communicate this goodness to Dima.  A counselor had helped.  Our babies had grown.  His parents, moved from Russia two years before, had settled.  The fights come still, but the cold is warmed, and the way to mutual peace is less buried.  We sift through feelings, both grabbing for what will bring us into each other’s arms.  We are hungry for the other’s love, and even know it better through the fear of loss.  Our suffering was limited, though at the time it seemed impossible to bear one more bout of screaming that tore at the other’s emotions and to pull from the bog of thick silence.

God’s goal is that we live happily ever after, Dr. Philip Mamalakis[2] commented on a recent Ancient Faith Radio podcast.  Happiness is the experience of peace, the feeling of patience and ease of mind.  God’s will, he continues, is that each would seek the Kingdom of God.  This seeking is unique.  There exists no formula—the expression of God in each life is revelatory, just as it has always been.  The mark of a God-given path is growing peace, strength and joy, regardless of countless circumstances through which people endure.  This seems nothing more than an abstraction when I think of Anne Frank, and others like her, children, woman with babies, people like me called to endure suffering that I cannot fathom.

Expressing one’s great suffering relates another in the common bond of humanity, even when life situations may vary on most other levels.   In this way, hardships can serve as catalysts to unity, to love.  Like meaningful movies, good books unveil mysteries of life.  In The Brothers Karamozov, Mitya (Dimitri) falls in love with Grusha.  His love for this woman becomes a perversion of passion, instead of true love as redemptive and inspiring of self-emptying.  His love is wild because, at this time, he is wild with lust and avarice and need.  It is thought he kills his father in such a frenzied state because of his father’s love of Grusha and coincidental murder.  In the experience of realizing his love is shared by Grusha, Mitya changes, though, and the extent of his change of heart is revealed as he confides in his brother Alyosha (a former monk) awaiting accusation of their father’s murder:

You know, in these past two months, it’s as if I’d found a new man in myself, as if a new man had arisen in me!  That man was locked inside me, but he would never have come out if it hadn’t been for this terrible blow of fate.  It’s frightening!  What does it matter if I spend the next twenty years in the mines, knocking out the ore with a hammer?  That’s not what I’m afraid of.  What I’m terribly afraid of is that this new man within me may desert me!  I’m sure I could find, underground in the mines there, a true human heart within another convict, a murderer working next to me, and I could befriend him, for in the mines, too, people can live and love and suffer!  It would be possible to bring back to life a heart that had long been dead and frozen.  I could work on it for years, and finally, out of that infernal den, a soul would emerge that was noble for having known suffering. […].  Oh, I realize, we’ll all be wearing chains and we’ll be deprived of our freedom.  But then, in our great misery we shall arise again and know the joy without which a man cannot live and God cannot exist, because God gives us joy and giving it is His great privilege.  Oh Lord, may man dissolve in prayer!  But what would I do there, underground, without God?  (711)

Dostoevsky is said to capture the essence of the Russian people during the nineteenth century.  His characters are philosophical, troubled by conflicting natures of good and evil, and highly emotional.  It is said that his novels depict the redemptive nature of suffering and the ultimate potential for unity among humanity and within man towards God.  Even Mitya, a fictional character over one-hundred years old and from another country, shows God’s changing grace in life through suffering that breaks one’s self will.

I can see that marriage is a path to holiness, taking a child and growing her into a woman, allowing a choice for love that breaks her from the binds of infantile self knowing.  Marriage challenges two people from different homes to become one, and through such unity to love God.  Love is redemptive.  It unmasks sinful nature and one longs to be better.  Scales fall.  One off, and I see that the lack of joy in me is a need to love those in my life.  Another loosed, and I sense the vanity that delights and then insults me, so on and off, so unpredictable, so controlling.  The scale that comes off and returns, plastered on: depression, anxiety, my strong will that often counters good.  Most recently, I notice ambition is escape.  The nervous flutter inside as I check e-mail, hoping to “hear” from someone, drones out the crying baby, the laughing, jumping toddler.  My four year old answers the phone because I’m “conversing” in silence, in my head, with the distant, deep and winding thoughts of un-answering nobodies.  To change takes time and energy and perhaps is never complete in this life, which is why I question the assurance I’d once assumed of salvation.  And if pain is constant, there isn’t enough within to move beyond despair.  Miracles happen.  God could save one.  Does He always?  He has said he will only allow what one can bear.  In the film on Anne, the women arrive at a concentration camp.  One says that she thinks of Job, but another says their situation is not the same, that Job could talk back to God and the world wasn’t against him.  Job didn’t have to squat like an animal in front of monsters.  It is clear, faith ebbs.  Suffering doesn’t always allow it growth, but can kill it.

Relationship with others is a constant chance for faith.  Our choice to love is independent of the other’s.  I remember feeling Dima was impossible during our coldest moments.  He wanted my love but crossed his arms over his chest and refused my embrace.  I was lost on how to express love.  Then, the feeling of love would leave.  I no longer wanted to reach out and heal us.  However, I was most free, most able to talk with the Lord, when my conscience was clear.  I had to love him, with silence or kind words, through dinner, a walk, accepting his pain as my own.  There were moments when I knew my choice for love was independent of Dima—that my love had to be free of any expectation.  Fearless and clear.  Because of this experience, I understand when Mamalakis says that the choice to seek to serve Christ is independent of our spouse.  I would add that to a degree seeking God is independent of our situation, our suffering, for it is a choice that we must make and God, if He is Love, would provide the way in each and every situation.  He uses an illustration of a marriage where there is lack of emotional connection but there isn’t overt tension either.  He says that it is better to stay together, to endure, than to divorce.  This may be one’s path of salvation, to love without passion.  For the path of salvation costs each his / her selfishness.  It is about replacing self-love with love for others, and so God.  However, in abusive marriages, it is better to divorce, Mamalakis explains the Church’s teaching on economia—the practical application of God’s saving love. 

It is in this pragmatic vein of God’s love that I wonder about deep suffering, for might the worst situations also be enough to allow one salvation in enduring the situation until death, crying out for God who seems all but gone?  To put this thought in a context, how could Anne Frank be expected to convert from Judaism to Christianity, to study the teachings of a loving Savior and embrace Him in such a time?  Maybe He visited her.  Maybe the stories we hear are nothing compared to the spiritual realities of such suffering people.  For we know from various accounts that Christ has appeared to people in dreams and visions.  In fact, today, October first, the Church celebrates the Mother of God and her protection over people.  For she was seen holding a banner of protection above a gathering of faithful in the six hundreds.  Still, what of all those who do not know Christ?  The Mother of God visited me in Russia, before I knew her.  She held me.  It was a feeling that I’d had and now believe was the beginning of my relationship with her.  But it has taken years to understand that amazing feeling, to look through myself and see love for the Mother of God protecting and guiding me throughout life. 

Life is a process of gaining wisdom—sorting through thoughts and feelings and realizing the natures at work in us.  Through marriage, Mamalakis explains, we love who are spouse really is, not who we think he / she is.  In the same way, we learn who we are and who God is, as far as each allows the redemptive nature of love to clear delusions.  In the Orthodox marriage ceremony, Christ, in the person of the priest, unites a man and woman.  Marriage is a sacrament, a means through which God’s saving energies work in us, change us, and ultimately save us.  It is God’s own love that unites two in marriage, but each must be receptive of this love in order to be changed and to offer true and transforming love to one’s spouse.  We bring God to our beloved, just as the Church, God’s bridegroom, brings His love to all people.  This may sound abstract.  It is not.  In marriage, we are called to love a person more than ourselves, to exchange martyrs’ crowns, as is done in Orthodox Christian wedding ceremonies, symbolizing death of self. 

This death may not be literal.  I e-mailed Dima at work and asked if he were sad.  I told him to take his half day (a weekly benefit, despite the loss of money, the nation’s economic strain allows us) and come home.  Our children were with my mother, as it was a day I teach, prepare lessons, write.  Dima came home.  We fried tuna fish and potatoes in my yogurt sauce.  We shared love in the quiet afternoon sun.  Dima stood before the window in our kitchen, slight smile on his handsome face, clad in his ancient St. Petersburg tee-shirt.  I said, “There’s nothing we can do about it—we need each other’s love.  Which means we need each other.”  It was good to face the truth of love: we have to give in, give over, to experience the oneness for which we so long.  Dr. Mamalakis explains that marriage forces us to notice the unhealthy patterns of intimacy we have and to choose to be open to the grace of God that can change us to be loving of another.  He admits that many complain of the impossibility of change on their own, but it is in this weakness we know the power of our loving God.   

I have experienced healing in the Holy Spirit through suffering.  Tears flood the heart.  We cannot escape ourselves, no matter how acute the pain, no matter how great the urge to abandon.  And, ironically, in great pain is the mystery of learning great love—lessoning care for the self and turning to Peace, despite it all.  Of course, one might also choose hell: faithlessness in man and God.  It seems, in truth, we each vacillate between these extremes, but with the increase of love actively changing one’s life, the natural response of loving comes easier.  This is healing, in marriage, in the Church, in the world between all people, indeed, within each person.  This was easier to believe before I sat still and experienced the life of Anne Frank.  For, if I compare two years of her life in hiding and concentration camps, in wasting away and watching her family, friends and most around her grow diseased and barbaric, to my own emotional barrenness with a man whom I love, suffering, though of the same nature, has definite degrees.  And consequences to the soul along with the body and mind.    

Fr. Hopko says that one must will to know God’s will, and the sign of this is being faithful in whatever conditions of life.  Life’s conditions are unique.  Some will use their bodies, others will use their intellect, some perhaps both or neither.  I was on a walk at the metro-park after teaching a long class.  It was raining, steady and soft.  My body was yet again tender, mind troubled.  Recently, in a talk with the counselor Dima and I visited, the doctor offered: “You are a nervous person with a nervous system.”  Though I’d known this, having it articulated pin-pointed the reason for my perpetually upset stomach.  Irritable bowel affects one in five, but despite this common condition, it can depress me to constantly feel ill—too empty, too full.  In such a state, I hid behind a tree, grateful the rain kept the park mostly empty.  Returning on the path, I walked up to an elderly man.  He was stooped with neat white hair and a wiry body, like my grandfather’s.  I slipped by, laughing, we won’t melt, noting his serious response.  I hope not.  I caught up to a creeping lizard a few feet beyond him, calling back.  He came up to the tiny, slithering reptile and together we marveled.  He wondered aloud about the earthworms that had disappeared.  I told him of a student’s essay on going-extinct monarch butterflies.  Neither of us had an answer to why animals seemed fewer.  But we were both bothered by this.  It opened us to talk of life.  He said he’d owned a drywall company, that he worked with his hands.  I said I was a writer and teacher.  He said that his brain never worked very well for him.  When I told him it was often difficult to turn my mind on to the immediate things around me, that I was somewhere other than with my husband, children, he countered my concern and suggested that mental energy might move me to do things.  I hadn’t thought of it that way, for it could seem a hindrance to doing other things.  Unlike the other, it was easier to see a part of the picture of unity the Lord intends.  Each one, His.  Each one, unique.  Each needed and purposed. 

We know God’s love because we feel it.  We think it, smell, taste, touch, hear, see—experience it.  Though marriage can be a journey to perfect love, Mamalakis paraphrases St. John Chrysostom in saying that the goal of a Christian’s life is not marriage.  The goal of each one’s life is to seek the Kingdom of God at all costs.  For many in this world, the sacrament of marriage becomes the way of life through which holiness is the goal.  However, whether single or married, happy or hurting, holiness, the redirection of self-love to God-love, is the ultimate end.

For everywhere there is goodness, there is God.  Since God is in and through all, goodness also is always with us, even in suffering, even in not obtaining what we will, like a spouse, an occupation, or even release from illness or abuses of a concentration camp.  No one can kill the soul.  It belongs to God.  There is absolute power in that, and the power is shared between God’s allowance and man’s choice.

 

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[1] Finding One’s Calling in Life, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, Crestwood, 2008.

[2] Marriage and family therapist and professor at Holy Cross Theological Seminary, recent guest speaker on Illumined Heart, hosted by Kevin Allen, topic: Marriage as a Path to Holiness.

Happiness is a Virtue

Happiness is a virtue.  Many people, in many places, from ages to ages, endure difficult lives.  Indeed, each one will have challenges in life.  Though longing for peace, for joy, love, and faith, many of life’s situations are a rough surface against this smooth, fluid desire.

In the twenty-first century, technology shows us one another.  I see that whether near or across the world, young people today are like the characters in Blueberry Nights, my cousin in New York, my friend from Russia, and myself.  Young people push hard to find meaning, maintain it, against the energy of ambition, individualism, and modernity—a postmodern world that pushes against tradition, antiquity, and the constancy that runs through the ages, relating all and comforting all with its revelation of our “roots”.  In other words, we try so hard to see what has already been seen and to make meaning that has already been made.  As a result, we loose personal responsibility to learn, to understand others, to appreciate what is beyond us.  We end up narrow-minded, in the name of liberalism.  And, worse, we learn to look merely at the ephemeral and lose faith in the eternal.  We grow angry with those still hoping.  We try to explain their ignorance, to justify our misery, and dismiss the wonder that allows confusion to turn to wisdom.  This way of life fails to allow happiness.

In the recent film, Blueberry Nights, Jude Law (Jeremy) and Norah Jones (Lizzie) fall in love after Lizzie travels, “soul searching” along her way.  In her journey across the country working as a waitress, she meets characters suffering life.  There is no depiction of her seeking understanding of the deeper meaning of life; instead, she concludes that it is better to be herself than any other, because she trusts people.  The film is a snapshot of being young today in that one learns to like his or herself.  One becomes less concerned for and with others.  One sees others suffer but makes no connection with his suffering and theirs, with times past and present, with what it means to be human and go through life as one of a vast many—all connected.

My cousin works in New York, in fashion.  When she visits, I note the next trends that will eventually trickle through Ohio.  She last came with smudged eye-liner.  Now, I smudge mine.  She and her husband had some difficulties recently.  He is from Israel and has decided to probe Judaism, where before it was an impersonal, small part of his cultural heritage.  Before, the differences between my cousin’s Christian upbringing and his Jewish had seemed hardly to figure in.  His more recent interest in the eternal spooked my cousin, and she called me.  She was desperate, and since I’m married to a man from another culture (Russia) she may have hoped I’d understand.  I did.  I clearly felt her confusion and anger with the seemingly irreconcilable differences between them.  But I did not see it as a cultural divide.  He was attending to a need that is in us all, and she wasn’t ready.  Attention to the spiritual dimension of living is a choice that becomes near impossible to move away from once drawn towards it, as an adult, with all of one’s own heart and mind.  If a child is told what to believe and it doesn’t become personal and real, then it hasn’t taken root.

My cousin said, in that one-time phone conversation, that her husband was happier.  She didn’t want to take this away from him but felt cornered into finding happiness his way.  He wants their children to be raised in the Jewish faith.  She wants choice, theirs and hers.  He wants to share prayers and services with his wife.  She wants to be her own, to do what she wants, to maintain and protect the freedom that she has carved out for herself through her adult years.  Yet, what is freedom?  What is equality?

It was after reading the gift of broken English my girlfriend from Russia sent me via email that I began this essay.  She shares of her troubles with her young son, overwhelmed under the weight of single-parenthood.  She cooks healthful food to counter his newly developed allergies, swims with him to strengthen his back (scoliosis), loves him in quiet for he is a boy without a father, a boy who needs to grow strong.  My friend is very, very strong.  She is very, very bright.  She has the money for a nanny, for horses, for time to get her nails done.  She is independent, but she is not free—no more than I am in my small home with a dying car and a phantom writing career.

I had a dream last weekend.  I was worshipping in a mosque.  I have never actually been in a mosque, so my imagination created a scene.  In it, the caliphs (leaders of the ummah, the community of Islam) were speaking to the people with passion.  I was frightened and taking notes, scribbling something on a notepad hidden beside me.  There were people around me, but it felt as though we were all on our own, each in a separate realm.  In my dream, I felt an urgency to tell something about what I felt in this place, and what I overwhelmingly felt was law without love.  Then, a different caliph stood before the people.  He had a funny appearance, gray hair in sparse tufts by his ears, a smiling face, thin and energized.  He spoke with lightness and ease, and I felt his joy and love.  It was then, in my dream, that it seemed love and joy was in and through all.

Most people love their family, friends, religion.  I believe God is love.  I believe in the Trinity, that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Yet, if there is one God, no matter what is believed, there is one source of love.  It is the same for all; it is within, throughout, and beyond all understanding.  He is in Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, folk religions of African tribes and New Age religions of American youth.

Happiness is seeking Truth with all our hearts, minds and souls.  For I believe Truth is revealed to the seeker in countless beautiful ways.  St. Paul spoke to the Jews regarding their criticism of Gentiles seeking Truth: “For I speak to you Gentiles…if the root is holy, so are the branches.  And if some of the branches are broken off and you, a wild olive tree were grafted in among them, with them partaking of the root and nourishment of the olive tree, do not boast against the branches” (Rom. 11:13, 16-18).  Who are any of us to even dare describe Truth?  For in describing we define and definition excludes.  If God is Truth, it is only He that can and will unveil the source of light, Love, that reveals I am.  Though He does so through creation, people included, it seems we must be silent to hear, patient to become, and willing to obey in order to understand, in part, and for ourselves.  If another takes the echo we might offer, that, too, is not by our own will but the will of God, the source.  On the back of last Sunday’s church bulletin, my priest quotes Fr. Vladimir Berzonsky who tells of St. Paul’s admonition to the Jews.  “The gospel, or good news, was that nobody could be excluded from God’s grace unless they rejected it themselves.”  While the Jews excluded the Gentiles, God would not.  Saints through the ages internalized love through the law of love, the Faith, relgion.  This made them joyful despite the unhappiness of much of life, and gave them great desire to love others and God.

My four year old just ran upstairs from his morning movie and milk.  He excitedly told me that the “good robots love God.  Everything can love God,” he said.  He brought the DVD case upstairs to show the bad robots.  “They roar!” he said.  He doesn’t read into their hearts but simply hears the roar.  Good and bad is obvious to a four year old.  Similar to a child with clear knowing, Christian saints help me see how love endures, though often quiet, often hard to hear in the roar of post-modern life.

In the three hundreds, Saint Helen, mother of Saint Constantine, journeyed to Jerusalem to find the cross upon which Christ had been crucified.  On Golgotha, where Christ had died and been buried, the Emperor Hadrian had ordered a temple to Aphrodite built.  Helen demanded the statue destroyed and unearthed three crosses.  She didn’t know which was Christ’s (and which were the two thieves’ also crucified with him).  The archbishop of Jerusalem, Saint Macarius, suggested an ill woman, nearly dead, touch the crosses.  She was healed by the cross of Christ.  The people cried, Lord have mercy! The Church remembers the life-giving cross on September fourteenth, three days before remembering martyrs Sophia and her three young daughters Faith, Hope and Love.  Sophia means “wisdom” in Greek, and this mother was a very wise widow.  She dedicated her life to raising her three children to know and live in Love, according to the Orthodox Church.  They lived in Rome in the time of Emperor Hadrian.  When the girls were twelve, ten and nine, they were ordered to make sacrifice to the goddess Artemis.  They refused, and the girls were tortured and executed before their mother’s eyes.  Their mother had them buried and mourned at their graves before falling asleep in the Lord beside them.  The lives of these woman: Helen with power and age, the girls with faith of children, and a mother, strong in her resolute dedication to raise her children in Christ, demonstrate enduring love of God.  Love that took them beyond personal concerns as they embraced purpose and meaning for their lives in Jesus Christ.

I wonder if it is too easy today, in nations free to worship whom they choose, to realize what it means to have active faith, faith that seeks with the mind, does through the body, and serves with the heart.

“Remember that the flesh is like grass and every glory of this earth is like a flower that grows in the grass.  When the grass withers, the flower also dies” (Isaiah 40:6-7), spoke the holy martyrs Isaac and Joseph in the face of denying their faith and living, or remaining faithful and suffering death under the Arabic commander, the emir of Theodosiopolis.  These were two brothers born into a Muslim family but raised by their mother as Christians.  They were respected by the Emperor in Byzantium and allowed to live and practice the Christian faith there.  The emir heard of this and wanted to know why the brothers had traveled to Constantinople.  When they honestly spoke of their faith, they were told to deny their Lord or be executed.  Though their father pleaded that they deny their faith, they refused.  Before they died, they knelt to the ground and prayed: O Holy King and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, look down upon Thy servants with mercy and receive us as a holy sacrifice.  Number us among Thy martyrs and make us worthy of the crown of righteousness, for every good and perfect gift is from above and comes down from Thee, the Father of lights (James 1:17).  The executioners chopped off their heads, but that night their untouched bodies shone with a radiant light.

The saints, whether before death or in the fullness of life, live according to love.  Their prayers and actions speak to this miraculous way of life, and it is truly beautiful and inspiring.  This is true freedom, to love so fully and fearlessly.  To be equal with all others, with all nature, is to be mindful of the importance of all created things, and to see yourself as not superior to it.  To be free and equal is to be as each is made to be, a part of a whole, nothing more and nothing less, doing what each has to do, believing that it is always enough, finding purpose full and real in each day, even with things that, separate from this perspective, might seem frivolous.  For walking the children to the park on a turning-autumn afternoon, feeding them corn and hotdogs from plastic baggies, cautioning them against swallowing the acorns they hunt and throw and scrape their knees running for—this is an important time, one piece, all that time can ever be.

Happiness is a virtue.  Life, a choice—to serve as a catalyst for virtue or vice.  We tug-of-war our way through states of being, often in trying for balance in relationships, with spouses, with children, with God.  It is nice when neither “side” is overpowering but working, hard and steady, to stay in the game.  However, as in the real game of tug-of-war, we are more often leaning over or leaning back, winning or losing, feeling ready to fall over or back.  It is the way of this life.  Hold on.

The Nativity of Theotokos

Today the Virgin Theotokos Mary

The bridal chamber of the Heavenly Bridegroom

By the will of God is born of a barren woman,

Being prepared as the chariot of God the Word.

She was fore-ordained for this, since she is the divine gate and the true Mother of Life.   (Forefeast hymns, tone three)

She spoke to my heart, and I long to speak of her heart, as far as I understand her Love.  Theotokos, God-bearer, is Mary, the Mother of God.  Years before I would become an Orthodox Christian, I studied in Russia for one semester.  My stomach hadn’t adjusted to the food and way of life Russian-style.  I was in the hall of an old building in the dead of winter.  I had come with an American group of students traveling through Russia, studying the language, culture, history and people, and on this particular occasion, we’d settled into the basement of an old building for church—Russian Evangelical church.  A young pastor was in training, and, as an Evangelical, our Protestant group wanted to encourage his hard-to-follow efforts.  But I’d left the basement where orange chairs and young passion were too loud for the toilet and hot water pipe heater, curled up in a ball, praying to feel better.  In a moment was a flood of comfort and ease, a wash of warmth that came from the inside and permeated through me.  It was as though the greatest motherly love held me in her arms, love even greater than my own mother’s, and this is hard to top.  Such love wasn’t laced with worry and so comforted me in a divine way, free completely of earthly cares.  This was my first palpable experience of Theotokos’ love, which I’d realize years later.

In the gospel reading from Luke for this day is the proclamation of Mary’s blessedness, as the one who suckled the Lord.  And in response, Jesus says the one even more blessed is the one who hears the Word and keeps it.  Common with Christ and His teaching, the Word reveals correlation between the divine and the earthbound.  It isn’t far away but near, always near is the reality of life in Christ; the response of the Lord and all people is, ultimately, one.  This response is Love.  Theotokos’ love isn’t other than God’s own.  It is, just as all true love, a witness of God’s own love.  As the mother of Christ, her love is particularly full and revealing.  To know her is to know God more.

This means something when running at five in the morning and falling to the cement.  The family was to go to Niagara Falls, leaving by six-thirty.  My husband Dima and his parents kindly allowed an additional half-hour after I’d complained in my non-collective, very American, individualistic manner that I’d never be ready on time.  Set to leave by seven, I got up for a jog at five.  My shoes were too big.  I’d taken the boys to Famous Footwear and after their running through the store and my chasing them between shoes I’d given up on fit and bought the pair in hand.  These shoes nearly caused my death.  It was early and I was groggy and lacking in many ways when the too-big shoes grazed the road without my knowing it.  I lost balance and in a split second the road seemed to float up to my face.  I rolled from the side of the road onto the curb and felt the cool, wet grass, the dark, high-pitched silence.  I had thoughts of a bear looming over my form in a ball on my side, eating my arms (there’d been news of a bear in a neighboring city).  My vulnerability was red in black, was silence in noise, was thin air, and in it my body was second to my spirit. I have never felt alone in such moments.  Within me, though beyond me, is God, and I have always sensed His nearness in my need.

I began seeking a relationship with the Mother of God at a pivotal point in my life.  I was a first-time mother of an infant.  My husband’s mother and father had just moved to America from Russia, and his mother was particularly impenetrably foreign.  The woman that had been my husband’s mother in the States the past half of his life seemed cooled by her desire to control and my unwillingness to be controlled.  My mother seemed to grow smaller, just when I expected more than I ever had from her.  What it meant to be a mother, to understand a mother, to allow a foster mother a place in an already confused web of motherhood—in the midst of turmoil, Theotokos helped me draw to Love.  To be sure, looking back now, these four years past, I can see how important it had been to have her as my motherly guide.  She inspired a tenderness and understanding that I hadn’t known in me before.  Though it was rare that I responded easily in this vein, within my aching heart was the recognition of such a change happening.

I remember my husband and me visiting a monastery in Jordanville, NY.  We drove six hours to meet a woman I’d made acquaintance with via the internet.  I wanted to publish my memoir through her.  I needed to validate what was happening to me, about me, but the greatest story would be what was happening within me, which absorbed time and silence, growing within a sense of endurance.  While there, my husband and I fought worse than we had up to that point.  He seemed absolutely impossible to communicate with.  He was closed to me.  I was hurt and afraid and held myself aloof from him.  The cycle of lovelessness was dangerous.  I cried out to the Mother of God, staring at an icon of her and her Son.  Help us, my soul groaned.  It was our sixth year anniversary, and I’d never felt so far from love.

Life’s heaviest times are meant to mature faith, not flatten it.  Yet, it seems what happens from life’s hardships depends greatly on how one responds.  Last night my husband and I were together in bed.  After nine years of marriage and two children, sex changes.  Passion deepens, is beyond emotion, beyond physical energy—although emotional and physical draw certainly help in the expression of love.  Still, the passion between two people who have decided to stay together, no matter what, two people through whom God has given children, parents, friends, a mutual life, this passion grows as love, Christ’s love.  As is typical, I was weary, distracted lying beside my husband’s warm body.  It is marvelous the way he gives.  He takes joy in simply loving me, holding and caressing, being my husband.  I wanted to love him selflessly.  I prayed.

I prayed for desire, for love to be felt and expressed, not merely intended.  That night, making love was crystal blue water.

Faith is not abstract.  It is not merely about believing in a faraway God.  Faith is lived in concrete particulars of life.  Specifically, faith is seeing that good things will be, can be, are made to be, good.  Sex.  Relationships.  All of life: church, changing seasons in nature, even growing older.  Lacking faith is to assume that a person, place, time, situation will be bad.  Faith is the chance seen for good and the choice to work for it, towards it, to bear fruit from it.  When goodness is, one is inspired, encouraged, and the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control, are.  Another senses God through such states of being, there is no other way.  While pride, vanity, egocentricity can attract, they are drawing one to things of this world and not otherworldly peace.  I am often led astray in my ambition and pride, attracted to others that offer successful ways of this life.  I am paused, silenced when I sense the Holy Spirit.  In this silence I see the most, and sometimes words approximate what it means to me (however inadequately).  For this is God, alive and real, the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, and the Father, being in and through all, even me.  Even you.  Even those who assume god is another name.  Seeking Him leads to the fruits of the Spirit, the centering truth that guides us through an imperfect world where there is always confusion.  The Mother of God, the first among the saints, helps and protects the Word, alive now and always, in us.

Mary was born to aged parents, Joachim and Anna, in answer to many years of prayers for a child.  She was conceived in their physical love, the natural way.  She, the Mother of Life, was a long awaited baby.  They endured, waited, believed that good would be and was, whether or not they had a child.  After her birth, her parents only spent three years with her living in their home.  Then, she was taken to the temple to be raised there by the holy, which was not unusual for people of this time.  In the temple there were three main courts: the Holy of Holies, a mystical inner chamber where the High Priest alone was permitted once a year, and two courts—one for the priests and the other for the people.  When Mary came to the temple, John the Baptist’s father, Zacharias, greeted her and led her into the Holy of Holies.  For she would become the living sanctuary of Jesus; she would carry Him within her stainless womb, becoming the “Heavenly Tabernacle”.  The miracle is that a woman is united with God.  Jesus took her flesh.  Humanity is physically and spiritually united to the Lord.  We, too, are Temples of God.  There is enormous responsibility when one realizes this.  We must love, must serve, must be as we are created to be.  For in this relationship—an echo of the intimacy of Mary’s own womb bearing Christ—is all purpose, meaning, and goodness.  In this way of life is faith found and worked out, producing divine fruit.

Mother of God, forgive me for having little awareness of the meaning of this day, your nativity.  Please teach me the Love of God.  Help and protect me.  Amen.

Universal Care

Do everything for God.  Love replaces law, but is shown through law—the law of love.  Putting others first, enduring bad feelings instead of projecting them, finding thanksgiving in the midst of want, life is constant application of love, and my failures attest to the process required in truly becoming better.

I am not afraid of change.  In fact, I embrace change, need change.  It is more challenging for me to endure the sameness of life.  When something becomes easy, I want to kick it up a notch—perhaps discomfort is a good reminder of purpose.  We aren’t created to stay the same but grow kinder, wiser, more aware of ourselves and all others as creatures made in the image and likeness of God.  However, a simple truth is that change, when genuine and lasting, is process oriented.  Furthermore, change, when for the universal good, must be grounded in something beyond one’s self, and that something harkens back to God, to love.

In a culture that compartmentalizes everything—school, work, family, friends, church, state, work, vacation, health food, junk food, black and white, even American clothes are more of one pattern and fabric than some other cultures’ whose stripes and dots appear eccentric and mix-matched to my mother—there can seem little unity weaving through all.  Our individual consciousness as Americans is proud and strong.  Even of the same faith there are countless denominations, and I have often wondered what grounds us.  What is the law that balances self interests?  How are we taught?  How do we teach future generations?  With different factions in our lives it is confusing to find a center.  The postmodern world is fragmented, and the splintering affects politics, religion—and universal healthcare.

Still, despite our imperfect systems of caring for each other, America is the best place to live—the safest, most dependable, and best healthcare, as a whole, comes from or to the United States.  Some argue that those opposed to universal healthcare are simply afraid of change.  It seems to me, though, more a matter of doubting change will come all at once and endure.  In particular, what or who will govern the distribution of “equality” that some believe would result?  I am afraid of becoming calloused to the needs of others in the name of common good.  I believe competition is good—a means to a more fair ends where people work and those that succeed find reward, then have the responsibility to take care of those with less.  While it is a shame that some do not, that greed is very real and active in most lives, there is still more charity and goodwill in the United States than anywhere else.  Morality cannot be crammed into a law and expected to survive, not in the leadership or the people.  For, love is free, which means the balance and law that follow are too.

My husband is from Russia and still recalls breadlines.  In his childhood there were limited toys, the few he’d had wooden and plain.  He had one pair of sneakers, the same as all his peers’.  Children were Pioneers, trained to serve the Communist Party, and the brightest and most talented would work within the Party, having more than all other people.  The people did not vote.  The people did not start their own business.  If they were “of worth”, they were absorbed.  It was a system that allowed selfishness to rule, unchecked.  A lack of competition urged those in power to abuse and maintain status.  The standard of living was poor, and most dreamed of coming to America where they might make money by working hard—and fix their teeth, birth their children in safe, clean, good care, free from bribes and spending their savings.

Maria Donilova, a writer for The World, 2007, shares a story of a Russian man who lost his leg in a car accident.  He, as all Russians, was entitled to free medical treatment, but doctors strongly urged him to donate $4,500.00 into their hospital bank account.  Pain medicine wasn’t administered, and the man suffered greatly until family finally gathered the money.  Another journalist, Alex Rodriguez, Chicago Tribune, 2008, tells of an old woman hospitalized in Moscow.  Her family was bribed and the care, even after spending thousands, was barbaric.  She was elderly and the family realized that the hospital staff dismissed her as ready to die instead of tending to her needs.

Of course there are countless tales of hospital horrors anywhere, including the States.  But universal healthcare diminishes the individual responsibility between patient and provider, and it seems to me this would create a very dangerous lack of balance and law.  A physician friend of mine recently mentioned she feels like her patients come to her with Burger-King-like health requests.  They don’t want to listen to her medical advice but insist on their own treatment.  However, she thinks universal healthcare would make things even worse, aggravating already frustrated doctors and rewarding them even less for their hard, important work.

Yet, what might be done to change our lacking healthcare system?  Roman Catholic bishops recently held a healthcare reform debate to address the increasing need for affordable healthcare for all people, Dan Gilgoff, God and Country, 2009.  Its position was ironic: support for universal healthcare and insistence on a tougher ban against government funded abortion.  The problem, as I see it, is not in a split between Democratic and Republican goals, but a loss in the centering of what ensures universal care—for all, anywhere.  It can’t be about one group assigning “equality” because, whether the Catholic bishops or the Communist Party or Barack Obama, power with a few clumps all others in a common category of need and unfair treatment.  Better to have competition check all.

The natural world is balanced: lion eats zebra, sun sets and moon shines, leaves fade and snow falls.  Would we dare question the fairness of earth’s splendor, though we may observe its lack of “equality”—as we’ve perverted the term to suggest sameness instead of unity, purpose, and meaning.  The sunset last night was a gift.  Though it is always there, glowing into the dying day, fading into the calm of night, I do not always see it.  As I watched orange-pink-blue bleed together, blanketing what appeared beyond me and was also around and within me, a sense of total unity and love was palpable.  Even the remembrance is a gift, a blessing.

I didn’t want to go to the Captain’s baseball game.  My husband had lured me from home after a busy first week of teaching under promises I imagined false.  A date: good food and drink, quality time together without the kids.  Recovering from the trauma of a rocky year of marriage, I went with my husband in the hopes that we might sustain the give-and-take required for any relationship to survive.  I was surprised by the joy shared in the moment.

We sipped sodas and whiskey and softened.  The crack of the baseball, the cooling fall air, the slight sweet of my bran muffins—emergency purse food to counter the junk food I’d assumed we’d have at the game—each detail was a drop in smooth water, a calm sea that comforted me as promise.  A promise that goodness is beyond me, but at times I might know it.  A promise that law and balance are natural, as natural as sky and earth, inhaling and exhaling, the giving of my laughter to my husband’s gentle smile.  A promise that while things on earth, in America, during this crazy twenty-first century might appear a mess, there is order.  There is harmony and it is reciprocal and everlasting, it is semiotic—seeing with the same eyes as God—and teaches all who open to loving life, even in its imperfect relationships and failing banks and broken American dreams.

Finding a solution to America’s healthcare system is about opening our minds to the balance and law that governs the cosmos.  Simple.  Profound.  These are often one.  Look at what’s good: long-lasting marriages, healthy bodies, respect, acceptance, and care for others.  How are good relationships forged?  How does the naturally slowing, lazy body stay active?  How can one truly care for another who is different?  The law of love: self giving, hard working, impossible on one’s own but taught through life in Christ.  Such is a way of life that changes one to know love and seek to become it.  Then, in whatever one does, whether teach, write, mother, lead the country, solve the healthcare scare—then, and only then, would the work become truly universally caring.

The Moment

Consciously loving life happens in a moment.

To love through the journey of disappointments, through the physical sufferings; to love through the selfish ambitions, through the constant divisions–like grapes pressed to wine, love comes from life’s pressures.  The pressure of responsibility, desire, depression, anxiety and boredom against what one longs to feel: peace, joy and love, creates emotional tension and can result in the realization of love. 

Or not.  A glance around and one notes the obvious unrest of hungering people, full on all things but peace.  Another glance.  A child laughing in the sunshine.  Flash inside–what is there, beyond the emptiness, the cobwebbed confusion, the fear that another notices your inner attention.  Weave the grass into the fabric of your flesh.  Blood waters the dulling blades.  Sunshine darkens skin and warms the whole starving body, for a moment. 

A flash: late afternoon under a rainbow umbrella.  Your grandparents listen with their eyes, beckoning, you imagine, your endless flow of words.  Words bleed together and you wonder what you actually say against what you really mean, wonder why reality cannot cooperate more honestly with the truth inside.  You see their love, just as you see the gulf between you, thirsting to quench their needs while hardly moving past your own.  Stories of your family, bright and ill, a great-grandmother with a small waist and man’s belt, with eleven children, with haunted eyes.  Is she really in you, you wonder, but your grandmother implies that she is.  Do what you like to do, Grandpa’s wisdom comes.  Include your loved one’s in your world, no matter how far apart the span…

A flash: peanut butter and figs in a silent kitchen.  Outside, evening wraps families about you, the presence of loneliness folds into the sun-rough skin of the fig.  Your children are bathed and sleeping in another home.  Your husband is somewhere, not calling, wanting your worry.  Emptiness grows and you do not feel love.

But loving is in a moment.  Is it a choice?  A rush of endorphins that flood the brain, drowning the mind’s anguish?  Is depression situational or chemical, or is one the other also?  To feel down is to perceive the ugly, and life can always appear as one chooses.  Love and lovelessness is always present on this earth.  How does wine gladen the heart without making it drunk?

Balance.  Stepping closer, leaning nearer, to good in and through all, to the mystical and very real Lord.

Faith isn’t a cop-out.  Faith isn’t foolish.  The depth of truth is a well of wisdom.  Pressing the sweet juice of ripe fruit releases its goodness.  What rots is wasted fruit, wasted efforts, misguided intentions and actions.  In this world it seems there is always a Guide.  One must vigiliantly watch, taste, the fruit of the moments at hand.  What becomes of the work, the hard labor and still thinking?  What is passed between the inner world of a man and the grass under his feet?  Around the sunshine and the child is a glowing light of love that might seep into the moment, or it might not, blocked by pain and earthly struggles.

Like a penny in a fountain, the moment is let go and added to the others.  What it all amounts to is a choice to gather what was given and be thankful.  Then, I think, the fountain grows, deepens, becomes a wellspring of questions that flows into a sea of knowing how little one knows…

My grandfather’s knees are knobby and dark, like his fingers.  His forehead smells of oil and peanuts.   A slight tremble in his touch that soon withdraws.  Words couched in full silence.  

A humble old person is wise.  Pride interrupts communication and blocks understanding, binding one’s insights to this world.  A mix of humility and pride, of spirit and flesh, of the present moment and memory.  When will I see you again.  Old blue eyes return, soon.  And we speak of eternity without the words because nothing can offer what’s inside, not against the noise of children and dishes and baths, not against the silence of dark afternoon, not against the longing that stretches between two hearts and wraps the entire cosmos.

The moment is a feeling, fleeting and always, returning as sorrow and as joy, the nature of loving in this life, in this moment.

The Fragrance of Love

In Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamozov a bitter character (Rakitin) foils Alyosha, a character becoming the hero of the novel.  The bitter man cries, “People love people for something, but what have either of you two done for me?” (427).

Another character, a seductress (whose soul “has not yet found peace, and it must be treated gently, because there may be a treasure in it” (430)) is in the middle of these two men and comments, “So you must learn to love for nothing, like Alyosha” (427).

Orthodox Christians just celebrated the Dormition of the Theotokos, her falling asleep in the Lord.  I went to church with my two small boys on Saturday morning for liturgy in honor of the Mother of God.  In the foyer with my two year old, I labored, pleading with him to quiet, to still, to leave me in peace so I might listen through the cracked door to the sanctuary.  Our priest offered reflection on the first miracle Christ performed, turning water to wine at the wedding in Cana of Galilee.

Jesus’s mother told him that the guests had run out of wine.  He responded: “Woman, what have I to do with thee?  Mine hour has not yet come.”  His mother told the servants to do whatever her son asked.  He listened to the needs of the people as expressed by his mother and changed water to wine.  My priest said Jesus obeyed his mother on earth and he obeys her still, in the Kingdom.  Christians pray to the Theotokos, God bearer, because she takes the pain and needs of humanity to her son and beseaches him to act mercifully.

Some Christian traditions do not believe in praying to or through Mary.  (Which I understand, having been Protestant twenty-five of my thirty years.)  They think that praying straight to Jesus is the only way, as he alone is the Savior and Lord.  While it is true that his mother is not divine, we might consider why Christians have always, since her falling asleep and resurrection on the third day, prayed to Mary.

The whole pattern of Christianity reveals the truth of humanity.  Simply on account of our gender, men and woman are different, emotionally, physically, even spiritually.  (And of course each man and each woman is uniquely made.)  Men and women are different and equal–our equality realized in our unity.  Understanding, even in small part, the importance for relationship between man and woman, between God and us, is possible in considering Jesus and his mother.

Her compassion and selfless devotion to her son and Lord and his response to her love with his Love teaches the very essence of humanity: the need to love without self interest.  Unfortunately, many good, Christ loving people love even Jesus with selfish love.

Dostoevsky writes, “He who loves men loves their happiness” (436).  His mother presented the people’s need for wine out of love for them.  Christ responds mercifully, showing care for the happiness of people and his mother, enough to begin the attention and awe that would follow his first miracle (though it had not yet been time).

I turned from the cracked door to the sanctuary to an approaching young woman with autism calling my name.  She has grown up in our parish, but the many sounds of the liturgical music upset her and she stays outside of the sanctuary until Communion.  For the past five years I have attended the parish, she has become a symbol of love.  Often, I am busy with the boys, busy with fixing my skirt, distracted with a bad mood, with a desire to get us back in the sanctuary, and then she is there, asking me for a hug, for a child to hug, for a pause from myself to listen to each animal she saw at the zoo.  She teaches me love.  Love that is not self seeking.  Her hug was warm, soft, very big.  She smelled of soap and the feel of her cheek was against the top of my head.  My son was in my arms, still and quiet.  She took my boy, kissed him over and over.  He looked away, without an expression on his face, but remaining open to what she might do to him.  That’s good, I said.  I’ll take the baby, I said.

We moved into the sanctuary and my son was strangely calm in my arms.  Holy Communion began, and we waited together for the moment we would have to accept the body and blood of Christ, the reason we’d come.  In this sliver of time, time was finally not.  Deep goodness filled my heart and prepared me to love my children, no matter what they’ve asked of me or might ask.  I sensed then, goodness in life is ever-present, despite the craze, and there would always be moments to notice.  I kissed my son as he began to wiggle.  We drew to the chalice, moving under the Pantocreator, an enormous icon of Christ, the creator of heaven and earth, spread across the ceiling, looking down on us.  He is always seeing, though not always do I see.

“For we are to God the fragrance of Christ among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing” (2 Cor. 2:15).  We are, like any natural thing, weathering seasons of life.  All flowers fade.  All nature changes.  The living God is not static, and, as he desires we become like him, we are to always change, always grow more in goodness, even as the external shell of our lives fade.

I have befriended an amazing woman that challenges me to calm envy, egoism, and self-seeking love.  It is natural to be attracted to beautiful, intelligent, accomplished people.  My flesh wants nothing more.  But my heart fills with vanity, pride, and the desire to devour, and Christ in me is not happy with such a state of being.  I find comfort, eventually, in learning love through the autistic woman in the foyer at church because through her I finally lose the stronghold of self interest that guides me away from true Love.

It’s hard to discern love in our confused world–especially as many captivating people say truth is relative.  Many others, myself included, sort out a complicated cosmic portrait that applies perfection on such a scale that one might feel overwhelmed.  Instead, maybe, as my husband recently said to me, start with yourself, simply, understanding that the soul has not found peace, that it must be treated gently, that there may yet be treasure in it.  Do I love another’s happiness?  Do I love the unloveable?  Am I patient with my family, those whom God has delivered into my life?  Do I love for nothing–or worry over what another can offer me?