A Few Propositions #1: Hatred

Hatred is not the opposite of love, but is the absence of love. It may or may not exist in tangent with familiar emotions we often think of as hatred. It could simply be the lack of desire of communion with or commitment to an object, idea or person. We may hate someone without wishing them any ill will. We may hate God while profoundly believing in God. Due to the disorder of the soul -- where everything is out of whack and the body or the emotions or appetite often rule the spirit, or due to some additional injury and its attendant pathology (i.e., the lack of parental love, or other abuses we have suffered), we may simply be incapable of love. The injury to our psyche, the inability to love as an act of the will without contingencies, without derailing into an infantile game of punishment and reward whereby pure self-interest masquarades as love, may result in a life totally absent of love: in other words, a life and soul filled with hatred, which manifests itself in profligate passions, addictions, high drama, manifold insecurities, a condition in which the human person becomes a plaything of its own fear.

No Object Lesson

When I was a child in Oklahoma the other kids would catch fireflies (which they might have called lightning bugs), rip them apart and put the bright chemicals on their fingers as glowing rings. My parents must have expressed some form of distaste for this practice, which I absorbed. The boys do not know about this practice, though Dylan mentioned the idea of collecting them in a Mason jar. I demurred, indirectly.

One afternoon the boys drew Kansas City and its landmarks, including their house here, and neighboring towns and their landmarks (including their other house there) in chalk on the sidewalk that runs from the porch to the street. A broad highway connected their chalk towns, populated with gigantic automobiles with overblown tires that looked like appendages.

When it cooled down last Fall, I gratefully set the electric bill aside and turned off the air conditioner, opened the windows. I had been cleaning and for a while the kitchen smelled like Pine-sol. I lit a vanilla candle. I thought about financial problems and remembered how rich I am, and said to my soul, 'Soul, we are a people who are insanely wealthy, the only people, perhaps, who live in unspeakable comfort, but fill ourselves with dread over the remote possibility of discomfort." In memory of Solzhenitsyn, I tried to take each (metaphorical) cigaret at a time with humility and gratitude, and several moments passed.

When I was a child and snubbed time, incapable of seeing idle moments as idle, but only as the energized space inhabited by all that I saw -- the green Oregon mountains to every side, lush tress and plants; by what I heard, the voice of my parents, the drone of the television, an airplane grinding into the sky overhead, the wail of chalk and the endless chatter of classmates gossipping and speaking of loving each other "in God's way" as opposed to love that is intense, fully embodied romantic eros, traced with shadowy sentiments reflexively borrowed from t.v.; the feeling of clean sheets and new clothes that gave me a sense of solidity, the strange suspension of my heart that seemed to float for a moment when a classmate (most likely, as opposed to an adult) showed me how to do something, how to color inside the lines by tracing the figure first, while I watched and listened in silent, confusing but pleasant elation; the taste of chocolate milk and the goodness of sugar, the firm and pleasant texture of food that is crisp rather than soft, scrambled eggs drowned in ketchup, tuna fish mixed with diced dill pickles; there was the odor of grass in the dry summer air, the rotten uncollected eggs of the hen that had no counterpart to fertilize them, the verdant aroma of wild weeds and ancient fossilized cow shit -- I took all the hours with fulness in and let them drift, my imagination furious and lonely and spontaneously unburdened.

In the field behind our house I made up a name ("Billy Porter") and pretended I was him, that I was on a horse, and galloped, my legs approximating, and ont his day at the age of nine thought of the difference between the city and the country, and imagined a person from the country (played by myself) impressing all the people from the city with his essential country qualities. Maybe this person was Billy Porter, and he had been from the city originally, but moved out into the country and lived there for a long time (not time in terms of months or years, but as a quality of absorption), then was sent back to the city where people do not know anything about rural life. The contrast ennobles him, and he is surrounded by a cloud of awed witnesses, as ethereal and silent in my imagination as saints and angels, awed, it may be implied, into a stupor by Billy's country character and unique down-home qualities, whatever it is that makes him something (a country boy) that they are not.

We lived on the edges of town in a large house with three-and-a-half fenced-in acres of field and a broken-down barn. Dad rented a stall out to someone who had an untamed horse for a while, and the horse would come to the stall at times and accept our apples, but usually we left it alone, and it moved about in the field. This day I went out to visit the horse, tramping through the field, Billy Porter drifting about in the periphery of my interior consciousness repeatedly amazing the city folks like in a repetitive dream during uneasy sleep. And suddenly I stood at a certain distance from the horse, and stopped, staring at it. "Hi," I said. I was just visiting, and had no crazy thoughts of actually trying to ride the horse or anything like that, but the horse didn't know that. Horses apparently are not mind-readers. I took a step forward, and he charged me. He came suddenly and with violence, his nostrils flaring, his eyes wild with crazed fear, his gait long and possibly trampling (a trampling gait), and I watched, filled with my own unleashed breath, my entire body shot through with dreadful adrenaline, and two feet from me he turned, swerving away, while I fell flat on my back, suddenly looking but not seeing the impossibly dark-blue sky. I ran, hoping he wouldn't chase me, heartbroken and betrayed. I did not go out into the field again.

There is no moral here, no object lesson, unless its unintentionally implied. I was nine years old and the horse gave me a warning, that's all. I went back to playing marbles, eating school lunches and trying to stand in line in such a way as to sit across from the right girl, and learning how to do tricks, such as "around the world", with my yo-yo.

Being Serious

I read the following in the short story "A Happy Vacancy" by Stephen Dobyns:

"Seriousness...often exists as something we want to show other people. We want others to think us serious, which suggests a fear of not being sufficiently respected, of not being taken seriously....And what is the opposite of seriousness? Frivolity?....I think the opposite of such a seriousness is love, because love accepts all possibilities, whereas seriousness only accepts what it sees as correct."

Associations sprang out in a multitude of directions upon reading this. First, A. Schmemann, the late Orthodox theologian, who emphasized sobriety, but one that would exclude a seriousness that takes itself too seriously. In this light, what is sobriety?

I thought of fundamentalists that I have known, who seem to share a certain lack of imagination, have little appreciation for humor, or indeed for the liberal arts, for poetry, fiction, literature, and other arbiters of beauty that have the quality of being capable of mirroring and framing in a meaningful way the attributes and character, even the image, of God. Fundamentalism of all stripes -- whether Evangelical, Orthodox, or secular and ideological, seems to have at its core one universal rubric, that is, its quality of being very, very serious, and dealing with serious matters in an intensely serious way, which excludes much of what is real and actual. In this light, what is real and actual?

In my culture, the most common problem isn't one of too much sobriety, or even of taking myself too seriously. I am often possessed by a legion of competing distractions, which lead away from the real and the actual. But an ultimate distraction might be to dismiss the real and the actual in the pursuit of seriousness, to delude and convince myself that my own seriousness is not only virtuous, but that others should take me seriously because of it, therefore making my life purposeful and meaningful. So there is the tension between frivolity and seriousness, two equal errors that lack the quality of sobriety. The antidote is humility, without which one cannot experience authentic love.

The Fear

Years ago, I was bored out of my mind by dull, blank, tripartite sermons which expounded on the elements of fear defined as "holy reverence". Others, who dressed their words in trembling singsong oratory (but who would frown at the chants of high church liturgies), defined it in the same respect, giving God a conceptual makeover, the eyeliner of Zeus, the countenance of Thor, the rogue of Superman, the humility of Clark Kent and the heart of Aphrodite. There was just something about it that was so dry that it rang untrue. How is it that the word "fear" could produce such a stale and abstract notion?

The great revivalist, Jonathan Edwards, syncretist between enlightenment Rationalism and Protestant hysterics, saw fear in considering oneself an inch away from eternal hellfire and destruction as punishment for offending a just, offended, holy and angry God. The human spirit is the shadow of a spider about to be crushed underfoot, and Edwards' audience, besieged with the evils of alcohol and bad language, repented with fervor, some, eventually as "revival" spread, barking like dogs, and others claiming to levitate -- dubious fruits of the Spirit of peace.

So I was taught in my early Protestant experience that the fear of the Lord is mere respect, or dreadfully sensationalistic, depending on the speaker.

Fear God, said Jesus, who can destroy the body and the soul with it, and not merely one's earthly enemies, who can only touch the body. The emphasis to my mind is on the contrast, not the destruction; the capacity of God, not his intent.

The Fear for Kierkegaard exists generally in apprehending one's own freedom, the capacity for creative anguish or despair, and the experiential reality of possibility. This seems more in line with what the prophets had in mind. The fear of the Lord contains an awareness of not only the magnitude and capacities of a transcendent but immanent Creator, coupled with one's own awareness of finitude and the encroaching cockroaches of death, but is essentially rooted in the experience of God, and of understanding the possibility of losing that experience.

The experience of knowing God is a gift, one that can be taken away, or occluded through pride, self-righteousness, sensuality, short-sightedness, or mere lack of ardor. It is the fear of losing contact with the source of Being, losing the grace of his energies, losing an awareness of boundless love. Reverence is a side-effect. One fears this loss, and in the Kierkegaardian sense simultaneously realizes who he is as a person who possesses freedom, including the potential for love or for sin, for life or death, and for communion or hell.

So it turns out that the Fear thrives positively in possession, a zealous fear not of death, but of the loss of an interior relationship with an uncreated and undivided Trinity of persons, who exists in a co-eternal relationship of mutual love, always inviting one to share in transcendent love, and to participate in divine modalities that move in the direction of eternal life. One is oriented through such fear away from temporal things, the lusts of the flesh, the darkness of the eye, the folly which speaks in the heart of the fool who proclaims with profound short-sighted indignity, "there is no God!" Such a possession, the invitation of Christ to dwell in the heart of a human person, thereby eventually fulfilling one as a person, the personality of the incarnate God in Christ made manifest therein through the Holy Spirit, may be called Grace, and the romance of his humanifying presence is so sweet and pure that the loss of it cannot compare with any temporal loss -- the loss of a spouse, or of a child, of a job or of a passion (sins to which we are addicted and treasure). For those who know it and nurture it, the thought of its loss, the potential of it that exists in the freedom to sin as well as in the reality of our own sinfulness (an awareness that results in humility), provokes the Fear.

The fear of the Lord in its pure form is thus finally the realization of authentic personality in all its potentialities in the presence of the Holy Trinity. This,a fear which is rooted in love, and not mere sorrow for sin, or fear of punishment, or reverence for things holy (though all these attend to it), the Kings and the prophets tell us, is the beginning of Wisdom.

A Final Word on the Suicide of a Friend

On Friday, February 23, 2007, I discovered the body of my friend. I left work early in order to change a bad tire on the relic Cadillac I was driving at the time, then to drive the forty-five minutes from Kansas City to Lawrence to pick up my two young children for the weekend. I found him in his bed, sunk into the mattress. I had seen him the previous day around the same time of day and thought he was sleeping. Now I found him again in the same position, though I could not be sure. I called his name several times, and he did not respond.

When my first child was a baby, he slept so deeply I sometimes feared that he had become a victim of SIDS, and like many parents have done, would put my ear down to his mouth to hear the consolation of his soft breathing. I did not think of this when confronted with my friend, but instead tried to gently shake him awake. I knew that he was dead, but I did not want to admit it. I called his name. I shook his foot. I yelled, "wake up!" I grabbed his cold arm and shook him. The chasm between the truth and my desire cracked deeply into me, so that I behaved irrationally. For instance, as if being filmed or watched I mimicked what I have seen hundreds of times on television and in the movies, reached forward, and checked his neck for a pulse. As a child might do playing a game. I felt nothing, of course, but then recognized my action for its own absurdity; I did not know how to check for a pulse, a bad actor in bad faith.

After summoning another housemate from downstairs, calling my kid's mom and letting her know I would not be picking them up that evening, calling 911 and, insanely, telling them, "I can't wake my roommate up" even though I knew in my heart that my problem was more metaphysical than any medic would ever be prepared to handle; after the crime scene unit made me wait in the cold for more than an hour, then told me there wasn't any evidence that anyone had come into the house and done this to him (I also knew that already); after they carted his covered body out in silence, leaving behind the overturned garbage they went through, open drawers and even their discarded plastic gloves thrown here and there without care on the furniture; after my friend Mandy checked on me and took me to Tea Drops in Westport where I had a tall glass of bubbly, sweet and exotic green tea, I went back into the house and recognizing that he was dead, that he was gone, slipped easily into a state of shock.

I have been in physical shock before, and have the scars to prove it. The accidents of childhood sent me to the hopsital on several occasions -- a deep cut in my brow, my big front-toe nearly dismembered, the gash on my lip from when the Malamute lashed out at my throat -- and each time, though bleeding, dimly aware of sensation, I did not panic. I remained calm, stoic, cognizant of small ebbs of pain, but derailed from participation in my own existence, doubled, an observer only marginally inhabiting experience. The mind seems to clear, facts differentiate between themselves, variables are assigned degrees of significance and value, a clear course of action determined -- all apart from the pain, the loss, the full dimensions of suffering. One's sensory perceptions of the tragic become numbed and are malfunctioning. One seems more in control, able to cope, to "stay cool in a crisis", or "work better under pressure".

I made arrangements to see my kids, made phone calls. I informed our mutual friends, and other friends of his. I spoke with his family members, bundled up his sheets and blankets to hide some of the travesty from them. I cleaned our section of the house meticulously, except for his room, which still held all his things. His father came the next day, a large man who reminded me of the archetypical farmer, broad and sweeping and somehow connected to the earth, yet disconnected today, his countenance clouded. His older brother, a pastor, generous and full of questions, not understanding what had happened. And another brother, stern and distant, angry in his grief. His presence seemed to linger. I spoke to him.

I asked him, I asked the empty room, why? I asked, what happened? The questions seemed to float up from the floorboards, hang in the air. I spoke his name. I said to him, to the empty room, I love you, and I'm sorry, and pray for me.

My friend was diagnosed as schizophrenic, but he was responsible and to all appearances, sober. He worked a full-time job, paid child support for his two young children (visited them monthly in another state), paid his mortgage and the bills on his house, acted as a landlord to myself and three others (including tenants of a front apartment and a basement apartment), and saw his psychiatrist at least twice a month. He was prescribed an anti-psychotic pill, an antidepressant and Xanax, all of which he took regularly, but against which he also struggled. The drugs paralyzed him. He had very little personal energy. I would sometimes be writing at my computer, and turn around with surprise to discover that he had been sitting in a chair behind me. When I asked for how long, he might say, a while, or thirty minutes, or, not long. He would creep in silently and sit and say nothing. He sat on the back porch and chain smoked cigarettes. He died of a drug overdose, having swallowed all of his medication at once.

Small insinuating accusations gradually presented themselves. I had complained the day before, perhaps even after he had died and was so far undiscovered, to a friend on the phone that his mere presence totally drained me. Had he heard? He asked me to pray with him at an inopportune time, and I was too busy, invited to a banquet but I had other plans. He had written to a mutual friend that he and I didn't do much together, and that 'Eric is in his own little world." I betrayed him through my own omissions, by not reaching out to him as often as I should have, by not being as faithful as I could be, by not being the person who I ought to be. All the various sins of pride, or selfishness, seemingly small acts of neglect, acts that I considered trivial, personal and private collect themselves into an army that defeats me, and through omission, destroys my brother. Would he have not murdered himself had I behaved otherwise? There is no way to tell. I am to blame, however, not for the destruction of possibilities or exigencies in an inscrutible could-have-been future, but for the destruction of the possibility for love and redemption through my own carelessness.

I am to blame and I am not to blame. We are all responsible for ourselves and for each other, it all connects, and if that isn't true in this situation, then I do not know where it might ever be found to be true. Yet, I am not to blame. I did not cause or create his mental illness, nor suggest to his sensibilities the notion of ending his life, nor make the decision, in whatever skewed or layered dimension of thought it lay, for him. We are all responsible for each other, but we are all responsible for ourselves as well.

The day of the funeral arrived, a day to slide from shock, remember him, begin to grieve. My friend was interested in becoming Orthodox, and had attended services at my parish, but he had not; he still struggled, he said, with a few issues. His parents were lifetime members of a Protestant church which I took to be Dutch and Reformed and Evangelical, though I was never sure of the exact denomination. I prepared to let go, to mourn the loss. The memorial service began, the pastor spoke of my friend's childhood, his antics, narratives designed to highlight the facticity of his life, sharpen the loss, open the doorway to grief.

But his eulogy shifted, turned sour by his tenacious and discursive allegience to theological fairy-tales. Most of the congregants were not well acquainted with my friend, but knew his family, and they were there for them, so the pastor, he seemed to feel, had a duty to instruct. This was a suicide, after all, an act which elucidates human freedom, our capacity for destruction, the great and terrible responsibility of freedom in the face of which we might tremble in humility, or run from in abstraction and fear. The pastor chose the latter route, and his refrain became, "...what happened to the joyful boy we knew? how did he go wrong?" Obviously, the notion that he had a mental illness beyond his control and for which he was not at fault never occurred to the man.

His presumption was clearly that my friend's suicide (assuming it was a suicide) was proof that he had backslidden from faith, that he had plunged himself into the decadence of his own darkness. His words and arguments did not gel well, became ethereal and patronizing and self-contradictory as he sought to balance a doctrine of "eternal security" against an error of antinomianism. Finally, with great bravado and indignity, he held his Bible up Jimmy Swaggart-style, and roared that my friend's problem was that he "started hanging out with a group of people who do not believe in this!" By this he meant myself and our mutual friends; he meant the Orthodox Church. What was meant to be a eulogy turned quickly into an accusation against my friend's character that Satan himself would heartily approve, slander of my friends and myself, and a glaring misrepresentation of the Orthodox Church and its understanding of the holy Scriptures.

My grief turned quickly into anger and disgust. My friend was mentally ill, a sickness that preceded any interest he had in Orthodoxy, and manifested itself long before he started hanging out with the likes of me or our mutual friends. He struggled in courage, but in the end lost that fight. But this pastor followed the gist of his religious fervor, which is to turn life into abstraction, God into an object of discursive theologizing, prayer itself into a privatized validation of personal doctrinaire tenets and beliefs. The church of my friend's family, the church of his childhood, even the sickness of his soul could not be culprits to his downfall, none of these could be blamed for the audacity of his tragic ending. So we were blamed out of fear and for the sake of doctrinal propriety. At least the pastor could protect and defend his beliefs and himself, escape blame for this final act that ought not have happened given the "correct doctrine" in which he was raised. So he ran in rhetorical fear to slander a dead young man, thirty-two years old, in the rabid defense of sola Scriptura.

I was angry, but I did not want to respond directly to the pastor because my friend's brother worked with him, and I did not want to cause him any further pain. Instead, I responded more indirectly by posting a heartfelt message on the funeral home guestbook webpage. I recieved grateful responses from my friend's mother, his ex-wife, and other members of his extended family, and friends as well. I merely pointed out the good qualities he exemplified, tried to give a more complete picture of who he is without trying to make a "theological" point.

Various people respond differently to suicide. The Orthodox Church is lenient and understanding towards those who murder themselves when it can be shown that the person was not mentally sound. It is less lenient (i.e., will not provide an Orthodox burial) towards those who are of a sound mind, but believe that suicide is a viable option from a philosophical basis. We do not have the right to murder anyone, nor to take our own lives.

I do not know what happened in the case of my friend, what went through his mind, whether or not it was an accident, or what happened to him beyond death. None of that is any of my business or within the purview of my knowledge. I think of him often, and I pray for him, my requests for mercy on his behalf hopefully reaching beyond the gates of time and space to broach the timeless Day that is not a day, that of judgment, in the eternal presence of God.

Some scientists believe that memory works by remembering memories; gradually, we no longer really recall the initial event, but our memory of it. Because my sweet, dear friend was significant to me, and had died, my mind, clutched in the fist of my heart, began to quickly remember various moments in the time we spent together, conjure his presence, his aloof demeanor, the light in his eyes, a repressed humor.

I tell others about the many times he would walk out of his room, and my two children, four and two years old, would cry out with joy, “Philip!” and run to him, and as children do, grab his arm or his legs, tell him what they have been doing, a pure greeting from which I can learn.

On one occasion, he looked at me with genuine bafflement, as one child wrapped himself around Phil’s leg and the other pulled on his hand, and said, “I wonder why your kids like me so much?” I laughed at him, but didn’t reply because I thought the answer was obvious. Maybe I should have said, “because you are a likeable guy,” or something to that effect, but I didn’t. I did not realize that he didn’t know.

Worms and Men

While living at a monastery in California, there was a period of time during which the Abbot and I found ourselves alone with each other, and were sometimes forced to converse. The only monk there at the time, along with the only novice, were both on a pilgrimage to Mt. Athos, leaving the hieromonk and myself to our own devices.

We entertained each other with stories. I spoke briefly of my own conversion, and he of his. I remember him telling me that while he was a student at an ivy league college on the east coast, he, as an avowed agnostic, took a class on the history of Christianity. His idea of Christianity was one that denigrated the human person, an idea that he loathed and did not believe in. In his view, Christianity taught that the human person is a worm, not merely stained by sin, but totally and thoroughly corrupted to the point of a complete absence of spiritual resonance. The heavy burden of guilt, both inherited from Adam as well as attained through one's own actions, proved the human being to be depraved in every faculty of his miserly existence, even down to the marrow of his very nature.

(Although the abbot was not a Calvinist, this is one of the main ideas of Calvinism, from which follows the notion that one is so demolished by guilt and sin that one is incapable of his own volition of wanting to know God, or choosing to embrace Christ, unless he is overpowered by God and spiritually regenerated -- but all that is another story.)

The Abbot, before he became a Christian, felt a particular distaste towards the faith that was focused on this idea of the repugnance of the human person. Then, in the class he was given assigned readings and confronted with the writings of the Church fathers , and found something else entirely. Instead, he discovered that the early Christians believed that the human person, created in the image of God, is good, has intrinsic value, is not de facto guilty of sin from birth, nor so engorged by the presence of sin as to be incapable of seeking salvation from God. He was particularly stricken, and angered, by an article regarding St. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330- c.395), who wrote that although stained and darkened by the presence of death through sin, the human person shares through his higher faculties a reflection of the qualities of divinity.

"He who created human beings in order to make them share in his own fullness so disposed their nature that it contains the principle of all that is good, and each of these dispositions draws them to desire the corresponding divine attribute. So God could not have deprived them of the best and most precious of His attributes, self-determination, freedom...." (Catechetical Orations).

The Abbot told me that the early saints of the historic church, particularly St Gregory of Nyssa, infuriated him because they did not describe that which he knew as "Christianity". Instead of describing the human person as at core a hopeless wretch, justly guilt-ridden and deserving of nothing but punishment, they described him as stained and corrupted and darkened by death, yes, and therefore given over to deep-rooted sinful addictions -- but also, they described the human person as in his very nature glorious, the very image of God, of such weight and tremendous value that not even death could totally eradicate his worth.

Angrily, after reading an encyclopedia article about St Gregory of Nyssa in which he described the human person in the latter manner, the student who would later become my spiritual father (for a while, anyway) wrote to the author of the article, someone named Georges Florovsky, a Russian who taught at a nearby university. In response, Florovsky invited him to come and visit him, which he did, and together they visited the writings of the fathers, the Scriptures, and Orthodox services, which he described as a liberating experience, and through which he himself embraced Christ.

I am reminded of his story on occasion, usually when I come across people who are not Christians, but who see us as morose, guilt-ridden and neurotic hypocrites, forever caught in a tangle of self-deprecation and inevitable human longing. This is not the Christian story; it is an unfortunate and deceptive distortion.

File Under Gratitude: My First Parish

After church in Santa Rosa, California, someone would inevitably approach me to share the afternoon Paul would want to go to a "pub", and we'd invariably drink pints all afternoon, maybe see a movie, talk about his desire to return to Finland forever ("you just like it because you only go there on vacation," I would tell him. "It would be different if you moved there"), various women, our mutually discordant but similar protestant pasts, the time the Abbott in Calistoga falsely introduced him to the local press as his novice, and the years he spent living in Ben Lomond before everything fell apart. We might take off for a few days to Santa Cruz, visit Abbot Jonah and the monks and their birds in Pt. Reyes, or crash for the night on the church grounds of St. Nicholas in San Anselmo.

Or, Dylan and I would hang out, maybe go to Berkeley, talk about his adventures at the various monasteries of Mt. Athos, or go to his parents' house where he and his mom (on drums) and dad (guitar, lead vocalist) would play music until the cops came; when Dylan played he made a funky guitar-face.

Mark and I drove the twenty minutes to the Napa valley to taste wine; I was working as a valet at a car dealership, and though he was an accomplished artist, he was working as a substitute teacher for the local school district. The attractive girl planted and weened in the California air asked us as she handed us each a glass of sweet dessert wine what we did for a living, and I was about to tell her, but Mark interupted me, "I'm an artist, he's a writer," and that worked well enough. Mark is now the monk Ephrem and writes icons in a monastery in the wildwoods of northern California, and I have not seen nor heard from him in ten years.

James was about twenty-five years older than me, a one-time Roman Catholic monk, ex-hippi rebel, and he lived near me in South Park, and after church he would sometimes give me a ride home, or invite me to dinner. A fool-becoming-holy, known for her mental incapacity, called him James the Lesser, or the Second, because he was baptized after me, which made me James the first, though I could have been his son (some people, usually visitors or newcomers, thought it was the case).

My godfather, Patrick, ever busy, might have me over for dinner amid his bustling family, or more often meet me for coffee at Dennys for serious talk, then always, glancing at the placard by the register that said, "We Do Not Accept Personal Checks" would ask, "Can you take a personal check?" I shook my head, and said, "I can't take you anywhere."

When I first started to attend St. Mary's Orthodox church in Santa Rosa, the services were held in a small building with blue trim, now a chapel, that, lacking pews or chairs, would quickly fill until there was barely room to move. During my first Holy Week, when my legs felt like they were made of steel bolted to the dloor, everything began to shake and my girlfriend looked at me and cried out, and I felt myself falling; I fainted, someone called 911, and I was brought quickly into the dining hall, surrounded by a clutch of older ethnic women, one of them waving smelling salts in my face. The paramedic asked me, "do you know what time it is?" and I automatically looked at my watch, and everyone laughed.

The first day I attended my girlfriend and I walked several miles from Sonoma State, where she was living in the dorms, in order to make a catechism class, which was occuring outside in the beautiful California summer of 1994. We met the priest, Fr Michael, who had so much energy he seemed to be twenty years younger than his actual age, which would have made you think he was in his mid-fifties. The first thing he ever said to me was "are you going to work at the Glendi!?" His request was insistent but honest, truly fervent -- you couldn't hold it against him; he was possessed of some deep bottomless well of energy that forever manifested itself, whch also tended to cloak the true depths of his wisdom. "Go sign up to work at the Glendi!" Fr. Michael was totally outside of himself, gregariously hiding his wisdom; he knew more about what was going on than he let on to know, and was a true shepherd whom I grew to love, who called me, on occasion, "Hemingway".

During the time I was there, a new building was built on the land, financed to some large degree , I think, by the aforementioned "Glendi" ( an annual food festival). It is a huge traditional Orthodox building. The older blue building was named St. Mary's "chapel", the temple called "St. Seraphim of Sarov's", and the parish called, "Protection of the Holy Virgin", a mustard seed that has burst out voluptuously, ironically but appropriately named after the recluse who hid himself in the wilderness and in the shelter of his tearful prayers. A few years after moving away, I went back for the dedication of the temple, a daylong service and celebration, which was enormously beautiful, and the new building, five times the size as the old one, was filled the way the old blue building used to be. I nearly wept with emotion when i saw the old building, the place of my baptism, the ghosts of myself and my friends at catechism class outside in the shade. There were so many new people that I hardly recognized anyone; and some of the people I did reocognize had forgotten me. I saw Paul and Dylan, and Ephrem, who had helped to paint the Byzantine icons, a student of Ouspensky.

After the long service, everyone went to eat. Multitudes of tables were set for a true feast, which we ate in fellowship with each other until we were full; the old women and men broke out their bottles of vodka, wine was passed around, a meal was served. James the Lesser and I sat drinking wine and vodka until we were drunk, and closed the place down, and I drove off with new friends, Juliana and Anna, and have never returned.

These were the saints during that personal era in my private unwritten hagiography, my sisters and brothers, the progeny of apostles and martyrs.

Orthodox Christian

I have been an Orthodox Christian for fifteen years, and am still becoming one. (The Orthodox Church is the ancient Church of the east, which divided from the Roman see over a long period of time, culminating in 1054.)

I started out as a vaguely religious secularist, and lived that way up until I was eighteen years old, when I experienced a dramatic conversion. I felt immediately at the time that I was called to ministry, and many friends and acquaintances started to attend church -- several were baptized by my Protestant pastor in the swimming pool in my back yard.

So I left and became a missionary for Youth With A Mission for a short while. In reaction to what I deemed to be an over-emphasis on experience to an exclusion of love for truth, I left and worked in a sawmill for several months, saving money to attend Bible College. There, I went to the other extreme and became a staunch five-point Calvinist. I bought and read all the contemporary Reformed books, the Puritans, Edwards, Warfield, Van Til and others. After becoming disillusioned with this, yet still strongly believing in it, I discovered the Orthodox Church through correspondence with a famous Protestant who had converted.

Two years later, after memorizing the inquirer's class of an excellent priest and teacher that I had on video tape, reading Bp Kallistos Ware's books and the books of others, I knew I wanted to become Orthodox. I entered into the life of a local parish in California, and after attending a catechism class and going to church regularly for a couple of years, experiencing the dogma (and having the living dogma as passed down through the centuries as the context of my experience), I was received into the Orthodox Church through baptism.

This initiated a journey of the spirit, one of vital life, which is ever changing and transformative, both a struggle and a joy, one that exposes my wickedness but also reveals the true good nature, the humanity that underlies the stain of sin. Christianity in the Orthodox Church for me no longer consists solely of either a series of varying experiences meant to bless or edify me, nor does it remain an abstract and academic series of discursive ideas that I am to strictly adhere to and then apply to my life. Rather, it is personal, living, often distressing and difficult, but always rich and fertile with the possibility of and often unexpected manifestations of joy, even in suffering, which has as its goal the actual, real, in space-and-time as well as timeless reality of personal change.

One gradually becomes not super-righteous or judgmental or puritanical, nor sappy and witless and ineffectual, but more real, intoxicated by sobriety, more deeply in tune with intrinsic meaning, closer to one's own unsoiled nature, alive and fully human.

I haven't arrived at any serious penultimate fulfillment of humanity in union with Christ, riddled with addictions as I am, but I am grateful to be on this path of being a Christian and constantly still becoming one.

Days Are Passing

Reading yesterday the book, View from 80 by the late poet Malcolm Cowley, he mentioned the common perception that years fly by more quickly the older you get, and that from age 79 to 80 passes like a week for a child. There would seem to be a combination of double perceptions at work here, since time for a child (at least for me when I was a child) often seemed elongated and possibly endless. "How long is five hours?" I remember asking my mom.

We were visiting my great-grandparents who were very old (at the time they were in their late 70s). Their house smelled of powder and yellowing paper, and old wood furniture that has been overused. I recall distinctly pondering the blue veins that were prominent in their hands, the dark splotches covering their knuckles. They both lived into their nineties pretty much self-sufficiently. I was bored. They talked, motivated by my dad's questions, about how they met near the turn of the previous century, how he worked on the train, how they lost control of a Model T. Their voices were brittle. My heart felt pressed. I wanted out, to go and watch television, to be in the fresh sun, to eat junk food and drink Coca Cola.

"How long are we going to be here?" I asked my mom.

"A while," she said.

"How long is that?"

She likely guessed, but I took it as prophecy, "five hours."

The hours stretched, and seemed long, like hours you might experience at work. I found a dead bird in the front yard, and somehow associated this with impatient waiting. "Don't touch it," I was told, "you might get sick." And so for years I imagined that the bodies of birds somehow carried some sort of toxic poison that could infect you by touching them. I wasn't a particularly bright child. So intermingled in my subconscious is the short flight of a dead bird, the toxicity of passing time, the boredom of age and of impatience.

So now I wait as well. On the horizon I have a meeting that I am waiting for that tends to trump other things. In November, Shannon will be here. I anticipate this the way I used to wait for Christmas, but have greater hope than I ever had for the things I might unwrap.

The days also sometimes seem to shuffle sideways when you are trying to make ends meet, as the common parlance has it. I am trying to write more, force myself to write even amid all that I lack and all that I have (such as numerous vain worries).

I work, I come home, rest. Write. Go to church, pray. Play with my kids. It is all moving along forward towards some indistinct culmination, something maybe tinged with hope, other than certain age or death, an expectation. Maybe this is the impulse behind authentic ambition.