Film Is Our Art

Art despises us and we despise art. At least, this is true of everything that we have been taught to call art. I’ve more or less come to believe that film is our own true art form, the artistic language of our present society.

Film is the one form that nearly everyone in our society interacts with. Not everyone reads books, and fewer and fewer people look at paintings or listen to music. True dancing by itself is a curiosity. The examples that are being made have been divided into “art” and “entertainment.” Serious examples are inscrutable and inaccessible to most people, which means that these art forms have become the domain of the initiated, who talk to one another and to themselves instead of to the larger culture. Old paintings and music, from times when these forms were more generally followed and appreciated, still resonate with most of us. However, their conventions have been adopted and built upon by film.

Twentieth-century “serious” music abandoned the conventions of all previous music, effectively cutting off the people of that century from any means by which they might have appreciated that music. The same happened with painting. But when we go to the movie theater and see a well-made film, whether epic or intimate, we see landscapes and sets that harken back to Vermeer or Carvaggio. We hear music that, while it may fall short of Beethoven and even Wagner, still leans heavily upon the conventions established by those composers.

Furthermore, the beauty and meaning of these images and this music are immediately communicated to us, without the intervention of museum guides or professors of art. They are not only self-interpreting, but they interpret one another, effectively preserving convention and meaning in a world where “serious artists” attack them. And it shouldn’t be a surprise that people flock to see such films. They talk to one another about the films they’ve seen, on the internet, and in personal conversation. They develop a sort of folk-criterion by which they judge and evaluate films. And the people who make movies and TV must listen to their viewers to some extent. In this way, the artist and the public “talk” to one another, back and forth, in a massive, ill-defined conversation about what is important to each. That is why film, as an art form, lives in a way that no other art form lives.

To say that film is an art form does not mean that every film rises to the level of art. Sometimes there are certain aspects of a film that do, and certain that don’t.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of having film as our primary art form? Well, probably more than I can name. I’ll talk about one each.

I’ve already touched on one important advantage. Because a movie is a combination of elements that used to be considered separate art forms, such as music, image, acting, and narrative,  a film can be considered a sort of fortress of artistic convention. It’s hard to deconstruct. The music interprets the images; the images interpret the music. The narrative is communicated by all and in all; the acting does not stand alone but is fit into an overall design that includes all the other elements. By thus clinging together and interpreting one another, these various elements of art are mutually protected from the dismantling that is occuring everywhere else in our culture, to every other form of art. It’s possible that the rapid, multi-trillion dollar developement and celebration of this form is a reflexive act of self-preservation by ourselves as a culture. We do not want to break apart and our serious artists have embraced the breaking aparat that is coming upon us. So we have gone to an art form that was not considered “serious” except by people who made movies that no one watches and in this form we try to cohere.

The disadvantages are moral. If you are writing a novel and you want to portray an evil person who uses language unfitting for human ears, all you have to do is write the character as using that language. You don’t even have to directly quote the words he uses if you don’t want to. In a movie if you want to portray such a person, you have to get an actual human being to actually pronounce those awful words for you.

In painting or sculpture, if you want to portray a nude individual there’s the comfort of knowing that the nakedness is not the nakedness of a real person. In a movie, you have to procure, for money, a human being who is willing to walk into a room full of people and cameras, naked, and then allow the resulting images to be distributed throughout the nation. Some don’t mind this, of course. Probably more people mind this than they let on. But even when they don’t, it could be argued that their profession has purchased and disposed of a large part of their human dignity.

Of course, computer animation is an intriguing possibility in dealing with such questions.

And what about the very fact of acting? Why has theater, where acting originated, always been such a center of immorality and self-indulgent living? Is there anything to the idea that by regularly pretending to be something you aren’t, by speaking and acting and even feeling as someone other than yourself, someone who may or may not exist, you chip away at your own precious person? And if so, what can we say about an art form that requires such sacrifice? And what about a culture that requires such an art form?

I have many more questions, some of which have to do with what this form is capable of communicating and what it is not. You’d think that a composite art form, made of so many elements, would be versatile beyond any other form. But I don’t know.

Furthermore, There Is A Link Between Byzantine Chant and Iconography

Byzantine Chant is stark for a reason; it eliminates all the excess in the music and cuts to the core. Constantine Cavarnos has written of its “inner essence…its pureness…its mystical quality, its power of evoking contriction.” One may compare harmonizing chant to colorizing Ansel Adam’s photography. It may add visual richness, but there is a unique beauty found in his black and white photography: starkness, definition, and clarity. There is a contrast between light and shadow, which disappears when the element of color is added.  Furthermore, there is a link between Byzantine Chant and Iconography. There is a beauty in holy art beyond aesthetic beauty. The iconographer uses strict conventions to create art that invokes a spiritual experience, not a sensual one. The same is true of the Byzantine hymnographer.

- Stanley Takis

Not only is this idea fascinating, but if it is true, then perhaps the Orthodox world’s widespread return to and growing preference for Byzantine Iconography is the precursor to a similar return in the area of music.

Take note, you parishes who wish to build young converts into your body: young converts want authenticity above all else. That’s why we bothered to convert.

Quick Link

For those of us interested in learning traditional Orthodox Music, here’s an online tutorial for learning specific troparia and so forth in Byzantine (Greek) Chant.

Hi, Everyone

We are in the throes of house-buying, and that is the main reason why I have neglected this poor blog and all my blog friends of late. Apologies, and I’ll see you on the other side!

Short Stories, and My Limited Experience Thereof

I’m just discovering the stories of Ray Bradbury.  What a fascinating mind. His imaginings are weird and textured. He saw the possibility for horror in everything from a twelve-year old boy crossing a ditch in the dark to a middle-aged man’s desire to put up a hot-dog stand on Mars. He lucidly illustrated, in one story I will never forget, the old saw about not wanting someone if they were the last person in the world. A guy gets left behind when the settlement on Mars is abandoned. After a while he meets up with the only woman left behind. She’s repulsive. And he drives to the other side of the planet as fast as he can. The scenario is impossible but necessary  – what makes it Ray Bradbury is the detail about the ringing telephones.

It reminds me a bit of my old struggles with Flannery O’ Connor. The Bradbury stories give me a bit of context, that I didn’t have before, for the market that O Connor was working in.

My previous experience of the short story form is fairly limited, I suppose. As a teen I loved O Henry. He always wrote optimistic stories, in which the twists of fate work to human advantage – or at least reveal humor, or something redeeming within man’s nature. As a body of work they are unrealistic I suppose. Human life can’t always work out quite so well. However, as a teen I believed that the times when it didn’t work out were merely events, while the times when they did were stories, microcosms of a world in which God comes to the rescue, eventually, in which man comes to his senses and repents, eventually, in which the evil lasts for a time and then is forgotten in a weight of glory.

My own short stories were always quirky. If one of my faults is to dramatize myself, the corresponding virtue is that I can (or once could) dramatize anything. I laughed myself silly turning the arrival of those Japanese beetles (do you remember how annoyed we all were those first few years?) into an actual plague. I dramatized the fact that different people have different hair colors, a mean rooster we had, and the question of what women hide under their makeup. No one else ever understood the humor in my stories, so I guess my artistry was poor.

O Connor doesn’t have that problem, her artistry was great.

Ray Bradbury found scope for horror in a baby’s improbable memories, in shooting stars that are really lost astronauts. As far as I know, Flannery O Connor had one stage, she found horror in one place only – human sinfulness. She talks about the subhuman way in which we experience life, the continuous indifferent punishment we recieve for our forefather’s choices, about death without dignity and most of all, about petty evils spewing from human minds.  The sin she talks of is so often Original Sin, something that no one could do anything about if it existed. Ray Bradbury’s horror is the other side of a wonder that he never quite lost sight of. It always comes with a sense of consolation: insanity set against sanity, fear against love, loss against eternity, horror against humor. You get the sense he actually loves the folk he creates. O’ Connor achieves this far more rarely.

There’s one O’ Connor story I admire in a way.  I won’t say which one. It simply happens to speak of my own brand of sinfulness with great accuracy. I read it once and I will never need to read it again.

Yet after all, how very redundant!

Perhaps if Flannery O’ Connor were in a Ray Bradbury story, she’d be cast as a freak of nature with an endless ability to perceive people’s sins and to show them up mercilessly. As a body of work her stories are unrealistic. Human life can’t always be that devoid. (And the remnants of my teenage self persist in asking, what makes these stories and not just happenings?)

Ray Bradbury’s stories are unrealistic in their individual details, but as a body of work they are rather hopeful, for all their horror. He tells of a “spaceman” who stops believing, first in the Earth he’s left behind, then in the other levels of his “rocket,” then in the men he can see and touch, and finally in his own body. The man puts on a suit and quietly floats off into space, “nothing above, nothing below, nothing on either side,” driven to enact his own madness. The story isn’t told from the mad astronaut’s viewpoint. If it were we might think his viewpoint was valid. It’s told from the viewpoint of someone who cares, who tries to stop him. That alone is enough to remind us that the “spaceman” is wrong. The blackness of space is not our home because we were made to be filled and to fill. However much of our human destiny has been squandered, there is some of it that we still “hold in our mind” like the sane astronaut held the memory of Earth.

Of course, Bradbury is very much a modernist. Most of his stories don’t end well. Of what I’ve read so far, only one does, and it’s religious. It’s a story about a priest who goes to Mars, full of love and curiosity, looking for new sins and new sinners to convert, convinced that without bringing the Martians communion they will burn in hell. Instead he finds beings who have been given their own path to communion with God and now live in a state of grace previously unimagined by him. As he goes back to minister to his own kind he ruminates on the fact that he found Christ on Mars. It’s enough to choke up any Christian. Sadly, it contains heresies. The state of grace achieved by the Martians came by shedding their bodies and becoming a-physical.  And by “Christ” he does not necessarily mean Jesus, for he says that God gave us Christ “in Jesus, in the shape of a man” while his own intentions were to give the Martians “Christ” in a different shape.

As I think about the fact that modernists found hope through a “liberal” revised Christianity, and as I think about fundamentalism, trying to retain what the liberals were letting go ( seemingly unaware of why the liberals needed that hope so badly and why the fundamentalist version of Christianity was denying it to them) I seem to see the story of the last century a little more clearly. It’s funny that a man who claims to have found his inspiration in lunatics, in circuses and sideshows, in Buck Rogers radio shows and Lon Cheney films and dinosaurs, should have come out with something that provokes so much reflection. Once again I recall that reflection cannot really be directly provoked without great tedium. It’s through enjoyment, through delight, that our minds open up. However sinful, petty, and undeserving we are, it remains a fact that Love alone saves us.

A New Link: Yudhie’s Heart-Beat

I’ve added a new link,  Heart Beat, to my blogroll. Yudhie, a young Indonesian Orthodox Christian, has been inspiring many of us lately with his honest relations of the events of his own life, a truly Christian life. I don’t wish to endanger his peace with undue praise, but thanks be to God, through this lad he is encouraging many of us.

I wanted to explain why I refer to his blog (in the link description) as “Christianity Uncomplicated.”

I think there is something that really does complicate our Christianity, and our lives, in the case of most of us, at least most of us that blog. It is a bending of the mind in which we constantly evaluate our own state of consciousness, not in a helpful way but in a self-absorbed way. I at least am subject to this complication. It keeps me at a few step’s remove from whatever I am experiencing.

To illustrate:

Today my son and I will go to the zoo. There, we will take a ride on a little train. Johnny is obsessed with trains right now. Every time I take him I watch him in wonder. His delight with the train is not only intense, but it is free and uncomplicated by any consciousness of himself as a subject of that delight. He does not project an image of himself enjoying the train, as he rides the train. He does not say “I am on the train” he simply says “The train!” I’ve learned to encourage such uncomplicated delight. Too soon, no doubt, he will learn to watch himself think, feel, and know. Then he will begin watching himself watching himself. Eventually he will doubt that he is even capable of true  knowing. Then he will write languid blogposts describing himself going through this process.

Well, I hope not, but there’s every probability, you know. This is the postmodern disease.

On the other hand, Johnny is not afraid to talk about himself. If he builds a train out of his blocks he says, “I building train!” He contemplates his own acts in the same uncomplicated delight with which he approaches external objects. They are all given to him with the same joyful freedom. Nor is he so aware of the impression he makes that he feels a need to imply his own humility through self-deprecation.

Sadly, my son does not blog.

There’s an image in my mind of a scene I’ve seen in the scriptures and other ancient writings, but I’ve never seen in real life. Something curious or unexpected happens, and all the people nearby take off pell-mell, running together to get a good look at it. Didn’t they know how they appeared, doing that? Apparently that’s not what was on their mind.

So what I  wish is that one day I would stop saying, “I am approaching God” and say, simply, “God!”

Now that I’ve explained what I mean by ‘uncomplicated,’ there remains only to say that Yudhie’s writings seem to me an example of someone whose Christianity has retained a lot of this uncomplication. If many of us prefer his blog to more sophisticated journals, it’s probably because you get the sense there of being closer to a real human being than you normally get in the course of everyday life.

God bless you, Yudhie.

Here is part of a poem Yudhie posted recently.

Thou giveth me sound, sound story to tell
This is so fragrant like the smell..
of wild cherry in the mountains
and wonderful like
young lion roaring in the night dessert

This also a story about man of Thine
comes from North, West, Far…
His name once was Dew in my ear
But now he is Rain
Maketh green, clean and seen
the young leaves of forgotten forest

Update

I finally finished The Monk of Mount Athos. It is not the sort of book that it’s wise to gobble up at a sitting, though I could have done so as it is rather short. It’s more like the Gospel, that you can slowly absorb a few paragraphs at a time.

Needless to say, and no insult intended, I recommend it.

Johnny and I are memorizing the Paschal Troparion in Greek. That is, I’ve already done so, and the more I sing it, the more Johnny is able to sing along. Johnny’s going to learn Russian and Greek, we’ve decided. He can choose his fourth language himself when he’s older.

We made an offer on a house today – our first house. The market is so depressed here that we were able to get literally everything we wanted in a home for no more money per month than we are already paying for this tiny appartment we rent. Rent prices are inflated because of all the foreclosures, which produce renters.

Borrowed a lovely CD from the library – a Cambridge/Rutter affair called Lighten Our Darkness. It’s the Latin service (in English) for Compline and Vespers, really splendid, we fell asleep to it last night. Well, Scottie did. I stayed awake till the last “Amen.” Well worth it.

I also found a song called Tota Pulchra es, Maria (You Are Wholly Beautiful, Mary) that kept me rooted to me seat throughout. Sadly, inspection of the Latin revealed that the song is a celebration of the Immaculate Conception, something I don’t believe in and don’t even have much sympathy for. “The original stain is not in you” the song says, and I saw in a flash why the Orthodox don’t hold with a sentiment of that sort. Not because it’s too good for Mary, perish the thought! No, it’s because we don’t hold with the idea that Adam passed down a “stain” which in religious terms implies a punishable guilt. God forbid, not so unjust! No, it is a “seed of corruption” that we bear, a division from God and our fellow man that inevitably gives rise to both death and the failure to arrive at God’s glory that is sinfulness. To put it another way, we lack, at birth, what is productive of human unity with God (and no human being can escape sinfulness while disunited from the source of his own goodness.) Human beings are given whatever belongs to their created nature, by means of inheritance. And we failed to inherit this unity with God that was part of the original human construction because our parents did not have it to give us. You cannot give what you don’t have. Adam couldn’t give through inheritance what he himself had lost.

I bought the song, at ClassicalArchives.com, anyway. There is much in it that is divine.

And finally, I’m overjoyed that my sister is coming to stay with me, possibly for a number of weeks. Just in time to help us move. I’ve been without a kindred spirit in this place for too long.

A’ Kempis and MacDonald: Something for Me and my Readers From a Couple of our Favorite Western Christians

Poetically this verse doesn’t really sing, does it? But the thoughts expressed, and the economy of words with which they are expressed, have been just what I needed this morning.

After Thomas Kempis

by George MacDonald

I.

Who follows Jesus shall not walk                                             Read the Gospel
In darksome road with danger rife;
But in his heart the Truth will talk,
And on his way will shine the Life.

So, on the story we must pore
Of him who lives for us, and died,
That we may see him walk before,
And know the Father in the guide.

II.

In words of truth Christ all excels,                                Obedience alone gives
Leaves all his holy ones behind;                        understanding of the Gospel
And he in whom his spirit dwells
Their hidden manna sure shall find.

Gather wouldst thou the perfect grains,
And Jesus fully understand?
Thou must obey him with huge pains,
And to God’s will be as Christ’s hand.

III.

What profits it to reason high                                           Why Reason Fails
And in hard questions court dispute,
When thou dost lack humility,
Displeasing God at very root!

Profoundest words man ever spake
Not once of blame washed any clear;
A simple life alone could make
Nathanael to his master dear.

IV.

The eye with seeing is not filled,                           Why Reason Disappoints
The ear with hearing not at rest;
Desire with having is not stilled;
With human praise no heart is blest.

Vanity, then, of vanities
All things for which men grasp and grope!
The precious things in heavenly eyes
Are love, and truth, and trust, and hope.

V.

Better the clown who God doth love            God will judge us by our deeds,
Than he that high can go                                       not our profession merely
And name each little star above
But sees not God below!

What if all things on earth I knew,
Yea, love were all my creed,
It serveth nothing with the True;
He goes by heart and deed.

VI.

If thou dost think thy knowledge good,               How to Seek the Humility
Thy intellect not slow,                                         That Bestows True Knowledge
Bethink thee of the multitude
Of things thou dost not know.

Why look on any from on high
Because thou knowest more?
Thou need’st but look abroad, to spy
Ten thousand thee before.

Wouldst thou in knowledge true advance
And gather learning’s fruit,
In love confess thy ignorance,
And thy Self-love confute.

VII.

This is the highest learning,                       The Path and Fruit of Humility
The hardest and the best—
From self to keep still turning,
And honour all the rest.

If one should break the letter,
Yea, spirit of command,
Think not that thou art better,
Thou may’st not always stand!

We all are weak—but weaker
Hold no one than thou art;
Then, as thou growest meeker,
Higher will go thy heart.

VIII.

Sense and judgment oft indeed                  The Path and Fruit of Pride
Spy but little and mislead,
Ground us on a shelf!

Happy he whom Truth doth teach,
Not by forms of passing speech,
But her very self!

Why of hidden things dispute,
Mind unwise, howe’er astute,
Making that thy task
Where the Judge will, at the last,
When disputing all is past,
Not a question ask?

Folly great it is to brood
Over neither bad nor good,
Eyes and ears unheedful!
Ears and eyes, ah, open wide
For what may be heard or spied
Of the one thing needful!

Today I’m Full of Wonderings

Today I wonder:

Why is my scanner not working?

Will I ever finish the plays and stories I’ve started? Do I really have it in me to be a writer or am I just a dilettante?

What is the next step to getting the mold smell out of that one area of my carpet?

Should I give up writing completely and just focus on music? If so, should I audit a college course on conducting or seek a private instructor in keyboard?

What can I make with pork chops, mushrooms, and a can of cream-of-mushroom soup? Add rice perhaps? Sauteed or baked?

Where can I find the Psalter in Greek? Will it help me to be a better Liturgical Musician if I memorize Psalms and Hymns in Greek?

Will we get this house that we want at the price we want? If we buy a house will our lives get easier or harder?

Is it possible for me to start a neighborhood children’s chorale? Are my ambitions leading me toward a healthier state of being? Or they really just distractions from the one thing that matters?

What are my best options for childcare next year?

Will God find a reason to remember me in his kingdom?

Should I set up that Extended Family Camp Meet for this summer or next summer?

What is man that Thou art mindful of him?

Quiet In the Evening, and a Memory of Field Corn

The night in its darkness communicates with my darkened room by way of french doors, through which pass cool air and a singular evening scent. It makes me think of adventures. I’ve just spent a long time playing with Scottie and Johnnie on our bed – it’s really as much the family trampoline as much as a bed – and I suppose a little of the childish way of thinking awakened in me. Such a night, when I was younger, would have been inducement enough to take to the out of doors, playing “Bear” and “Spy” or even “Horse”, which, unlike the other games, is actually a form of basketball played between two people. Bear and Spy involve hiding, running, and the exhilaration of make-believe terror.

It calls to mind an image. A party made of two families (the eldest girl of the other family is the one who saved my life in the pool) is sitting on the front lawn of our house, surrounded on all sides by corn fields. Lawn chairs and one picnic table are all the furniture. The adults are sitting there because that’s where they were when night fell, and night is no reason to move from a comfortable seat or break up a comfortable conversation.

We kids are restless; my Dad, for some selfless reason I don’t know, offers to take us all on tractor rides around the property. In the half-lit front yard it just sounds like an offer of a ride, but we kids, eager for any diversion, take him up on it. We pile in the little trailer hitched to the back of a riding-mower. The trailer is already half-full of field-corn cobs, waiting to be shucked of their hard yellow kernels. We settle uneasily on them and wait for the ride. The mere act of waiting releases all the giddiness we’ve been holding back, and as we pull out at five miles an hour, we shriek and fall over on one another as if we were riding a roller-coaster.

The ride becomes strange and silent as we reach the outer regions of the 4-acre estate. Out here there are fields and a strange little land known as The Rock Pile, where ancient boulders form a naturalistic stair-case leading to a large mound from which one can watch the sun setting. In between the smaller rocks, trees have long ago sprouted, and we children imagine that we have found paths among them. The paths we imagine are enough to imply meaning – The Rock Pile is a house, a country, almost an altar. Whole civilizations have risen and fallen there in our play.

We pass the Rock Pile and experience the sense of traversing the edges of organized society. Beyond us are the fields – the places where children who get out of sight of the edge wander for days until they die – unless they are intelligent enough to follow the rows out to an edge somewhere and ask the first passerby for help, but the mothers do not wish to lessen our fear of them by telling us that part. The silence there is not a dearth of sound. It is the product of something governed by inhuman laws that spring from within its own nature, at once the free-est and the most brute nature we encounter. We ourselves hush, trying to follow the dictates of that law, which nevertheless are inaudible to us. We are confronted by the nearness of expanse – immensity and immanence joined in humming warm invisibility. It is the strength of all those negatives that quiet us for a few moments.

Then my father swings around and we are heading back toward the party. It is impossible that we should go back to that human circle of sharing without taking with us something of the nigh we have visited.

Fireworks, I decided. Not of fire but of corn. The effect of fireworks. I show the other children how to husk the corn and we begin to collect kernels in the laps of our dresses and the pockets of our trousers. My hands have, days ago, passed the phase of being chapped and skinned – now they are callused (like my feet that run on gravel without trouble) and I shuck as quickly as I can, just to see how quick that is.

We arrive back to the party – we shout to the adults to watch us. We throw the kernels in the air, just out of the circle of the porch light. Falling random as rain, the yellow kernels catch a gleam of light that would otherwise disappear in the blackness. They are deep yellow flashes, scattered, leaping and falling, adorning the night, proving that it is not empty. That is the image that I see as I scent this air, which is not so very lake-ish tonight after all.

Movie vs. Stageplay

What’s the difference between the two forms?

In movies, directors and producers are allowed to change the script, sometimes drastically. They can even put out multiple versions of the same movie. What they are crafting as artistans is the final experience of watching the movie. The writer of the screenplay works within this overall purpose. His screenplay does not exist as a distinct work of art, but is rather one step, literary but fluid, toward the real work of art, which is the movie as experienced by the consumer.

The case of the stageplay is somewhat different. Each production is an ephemeral, subjective representation of the stageplay, which is published in book form because it is considered a solid independent literary work of art.

The difference isn’t absolute, because even in the case of the stageplay, it has failed as a work of art unless an audience views a production of it on the stage. (It may have failed as a work of art even then, but anyways…)

However in the first place the script generally serves the production while in the second the production generally serves the script.

Why did it turn out this way? Possibly because Shakespeare, whom we know only through his treasured and revered scripts, towers over the playwriting scene to this day, while in the genesis of the moving picture, it was studio executives who dominated everything.

But it’s also because of the nature of the thing. A movie only needs to be produced once, but that one production is recorded and becomes the movie ever after, watched over and over again by millions of people. The stageplay continues to exist in script form, being produced over and over again, differently each time, by companies of greater or less abilities and funds and creativity and skill. One production will never suffice because it’s presented to an audience, not a camera; the script outlasts the production.

Orthodox Worship With a Toddler

I’m trying to get back in the habit of writing every day but I feel that I have less to say than ever before.

My days are busier now. My husband rises at 7:00 and naturally, so do I. He used to get up at 8:00 but in the landscaping business summer is busier and the hours are longer. Johnny usually wakes up as he hears us moving about. Breakfast and lunch are put together in the fifteen minutes or so before Scottie gets picked up for work. Then Johnny and I are free to do whatever needs done until Scottie gets home at 6 or 7, or until I have to leave for work around 1:00 pm, if it’s a working day. Usually there are financial matters or groceries or other household duties to take care of.

This morning we went to church. I chose a nearby Greek Church dedicated to the Assumption of the Theotokos. I was fearful that the church would not be very worship oriented because I had lit a candle there once and found that though they have a beautiful iconostasis, the walls and ceiling are completely unadorned. I don’t know why: perhaps they haven’t gotten around to it yet. Unfortunately many churches in this area are regretting that they built halls and cultural centers, leaving the house of the Lord till last, and now their children don’t come to church anymore.

(Note: I looked up this parish’s history and found that they once had very beautiful original icongraphy on the walls and ceiling but they suffered a fire a few years back that destroyed it all.)

However, attendance was good for a weekday Liturgy, and moreover, I found the priests to be warm and fervent both toward the people and the Lord.

We walked in at 9:30, the scheduled time for Liturgy to begin, but found they were already reading the epistle. Apparently Orthros had gone very quickly and they were ahead of schedule. The shortened timespan was a good thing because Johnny struggles to behave in Church with a tolerable degree of unobtrusiveness.

We entered in the narthex and lit candles; I paid extra for mine (should I offer to the Lord what cost me nothing?) because I was praying especially for my son’s behavior in Church and for my husband’s troubles to be eased. I always try not to make my prayer too specific; rather I make a mental motion of opening my heart to God while thinking of my need, and thereafter I pray repeatedly, “Lord hear my prayer.”

Then Johnny and I walked in, rather timidly. The dome is massively oversize, much like Lloyd Wright’s design for the Assumption Church in Milwaukee (West Alis, actually) and also like that church it has windows all around the base of the dome to let sunlight in. Although the doors were open, the priest stood praying with hands raised to heaven, his back to us. Sunlight streamed down all around him.

According to the Greek custom following Palm Sunday, fragrant dried leaves were strewn over the floor and mingled with the smoke of incense. Johnny seemed awed for a moment and stopped in the doorway. When the epistle began, we entered.

Johnny did not behave well at first. Then, during the Great Entrance, I held Johnny in my arms and took him out to the central aisle, and when the priest passed by I touched his robes and whispered, “Lord hear my prayer.” Johnny’s behavior improved gradually throughout the service. I tried to chicken out at one point and take him into the crying room, but it was locked. He never wanted to stay in the narthex as he often does; he insisted on being in the beautiful nave. However he did want, very badly, to gallop up and down the aisles, and stomp on the pews. He admired the booming noise that echoed through the vast church when he did so. My feelings were somewhat different.

None of the people in attendance paid any attention to us and I learned a new principle of Orthodox child rearing: take them to church during the week. It is a great way for them to learn how to behave, and no one expects the same level of behavior out of them during the week as on Sunday.

And then, there is the grace that comes to them.

As the epiclesis drew nearer I began to whipser to Johnny, “It’s coming. Now you will eat the food of Jesus.” His face lit up. I tried to explain parts of the service to him, which is something I can’t do at our home church because I am always leading the choir.

“Now Jesus is coming in. Now he is in the bread and in the juice” I said. Johnny does not know the word “wine.”

We went up and were among only five people, of the thirty or so attending, who communed. The priest remembered our names, although we had introduced ourselves the day before not to him but to his fellow priest. He instructed me to close my mouth, which is not how we do it at our church but it was much easier.

Johnny behaved beautifully, as he always does, while communing.

We kissed the priest’s hand and took bread afterwards, and the priest spoke comfortably and warmly to us though he knows we belong to another parish. It made me so glad I laughed aloud.

Afterward, in the car, Johnny sat thinking. “It was good” he said. “The food of Jesus, and the singing.”

I explained that the food of Jesus went in his mouth, and now Jesus is “here and here and here…” in his belly and his arms and hands, and his head and eyes, and his arms and feet. (There is a post-communion prayer that says “enter into my members and my joints…”) He looked delighted.

Later, at home, we were eating cake and he stopped eating to look at me and say again, in wonder, “It was good. The food of Jesus. I eat it.” For him to remember that while eating cake was enough of an answer to my prayer to make me very grateful. I was glad then that I had not  made my prayer more specific. It is much better for the service to benefit my son than for my son to behave perfectly during the service.

This is what it is like for me to be religious, at this point in my life.

Reflection

The more that happens and becomes clear to me, the less there is to say. It would be easy to speak of the unease I feel at certain trends in the Church; far more difficult to speak of the immeasurable river of grace I find there. Easy to criticize individual or parish or even jurisdictional examples of Orthodox Christians forgetting to some extent that they are the Church (and not a social club or a foundation for the preservation of culture or a center of activism for some favorite “issue” somewhere in the world); much more difficult to explain why I think they are the Church, nonetheless.

My parish priest finds himself unable to put on services this Bright Week, primarily because our elderly parishioners are too exhausted by Holy Week to attend. Our dear Fr. G reports that he will attend services elsewhere, and today I have decided that I will do the same. The week is, indeed, too Bright – too much of Pascha lingers in the heart and in the mind – to stay at home all week attending to mundane affairs while area Churches celebrate Divine Liturgy.

Interestingly enough, this Pascha marks a transition for me in that I finally feel comfortable using Orthodox terminology. As if I now have a right to do so; as if these logoi have a lodging in my own heart now and I am not being merely imitative when I say “Pascha” instead of Easter, and “Nativity” instead of “Christmas.” In the ancient Church people were only baptized on Holy Saturday and took first Communion always on Pascha. I have to wonder whether my own initiation into the Church is only now complete.

What else has changed since that first Orthodox service two years ago when we walked out because we skipped ahead in the service book and saw the phrase “I believe that this is truly your own most precious body and blood” and we were afraid and felt that it was no place for us?

So much has come… and there’s so little to say.

Bless the Lord O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy name. What shall I render to the Lord for all his bounty to me? I will lift up the Cup of Salvation and call on the name of the Lord.

Remember Me

I suffer death
his hard blue sting
his theft of breath
his hammering

Yet though worlds fade
before my eyes
I’m not thus made
the thing that dies

I am the wounds
I am the tree
I am the sin
Remember me

A Snowy April Day

Gray and white, gray and white and gray;
That which has died should not so frisky play
The winter’s ghost ought not so lightly fling
Snowflakes as in Autumn, now in Spring.

Green can be the color of a blade of grass;
The liquid tint of antique glass;
A hue that hovered in our glade
Upon the trees, between the trees, the last day that we played;
Green can be revealed by a waking April dawn;
Or just another color that the Gray Ghost dumped upon.

Gray are the walls of life inside The Fish’s Mouth
Jaws that close on lake-dwellers who left The South.

Four Lines and a Mystery

Lying on the westward side,
Frozen and steely
Listening to our leader
Till rage and unreason seem divine

I can’t recall the first four lines. I composed them all swift as thought in that space between waking and sleeping, this morning. I’ve already noticed that my mind is more fertile during that time, and that spiritual perception is heightened.

It makes me wonder who, and what, I really am? And what clogs it all up when I’m fully conscious?

The first lines, now lost, were something about a deserted stone church building in a Southwestern style, somewhere in a stubbly empty country place. It’s all come down to this place and this time of night, and odd place where two small armies just happened to meet because one was coming along more quickly than the other. A group of twenty-year-olds is prone, one group on each side of the church, on ground hardened by unseasonable cold, getting ready to attack one another for something that seemed desperately important earlier in the day. Everything before that is dream – a dream, if I recall, of a fiesta that grew ever more hilarious and colorful, where women vied for the distinction of having the best handmade-costume, while in otherwise deserted office buildings on either side of the street, ambitious young men drank percolated coffee from coporate mugs and plotted against one another and sent their younger sisters back and forth with messages.

A Return of Cheer

***

The image above would perhaps be more appropriate at the end of this letter, dear readers. But I always find it so cheering to open my blog and see an image on the front page, so there it is. I will now address you on the subject of The Flute.

***

Mr. Galloway, a star of the modern flute, once recorded a a few Mozart concertos for that instrument. Having bought the CD, years ago, on a hazard that it might be good, I discovered that it was perfect background music for my mom’s antique shop, where I then worked. I went in at 9 o’ the clock, morning after morning, and pressed first Play and then Repeat on the CD player. In the year and a half I worked there I conceived a decided dislike for both the flute and and for that genius, Wolfgangus Amadeus Mozart. (Not always expressed as Amadeus: sometimes called Theophilus, as at his baptism, and sometimes called Gottlieb in his native German tongue. Oddly, I find this fact fascinating, more so than anything he ever wrote.)

I am digressing and I am not apologizing for it. Digression is one of the great pleasures of writing, and as I am at the moment taking up again my reading of The Anatomy of Melancholy, my model is Robert Burton, a glorious digressor and piler of phrase upon phrase.

Something has come to my door to remedy my dislike of the flute.

One of the lovely things about this city (I say little enough about this city that is happy so I want to give it its full and just due) is its classical radio station. It’s supported in part by the government, in the guise of an otherwise useless school system and public television station, and partly by listeners who understand better than denizens of other cities how much is at stake if everything beautiful is lost to the general population.

I was bumping along on the freeway one day, and a lovely flute melody began winding about my head in flourishes and flowers and brambles. I listened intently to the announcer who said, in a starchily amused voice, that Alison Melville had “rather naughtily” named her album She’s Sweetest When She’s Naked and that the melody I’d heard was a James Oswald variant of Greensleeves. It hadn’t sounded anything like Greensleeves as I knew it, but the sound had indeed been so sweet that I could well believe anything the title might tell me.

Alas, the album could not be purchased on Napster so I had to order it from over the river at early-music.com for a rather expensive price. The CD arrived today and I listened to it all the way through twice, now very much in love with that ancient and best of instruments, the flute. The cover, never fear, shows only the slightest sliver of a bare shoulder and one gleaming eye. The music is mostly about flowers though one number advises the reluctant to get on with it and roll “her” about in the hay a bit. This is the attitude, you see, about sex before it was sex. Dang Victorians spoiled the whole thing, I’m certain. Before them there was nothing dirty about getting dirty.

I once read a book called God’s Funeral, in which the author commented that many Victorians developed strange fetishes that had to do with the regular switchings they experienced at school and which they were constantly watching their same-sex fellow scholars undergo, usually with howling and dropped pants. In this case, sweetness and nakedness did not at all accompany one another. It all had something to do with the Death of God movement, which had its flowering in the Victorian era – but I don’t remember exactly what. And then of course there was Freud.

Ish. Do not buy the line that the Victorians were extra-virtuous, my friends. No, they were engaged in a deadly experiment to see how virtuous they could be without worshipping and that is why their virtue was ridiculously exxagerated and it is also why successive generations have castigated their hypocrisy but, unable to regain what they threw away, have instead completed the process and thrown away the virtue, too. At least that’s the part of the story I know.

Reading Robert Burton is a slow and oft-interrupted process. Everything he says is delightful and instructive and he draws from endless sources, most of them ancient. He recommends understanding one’s limits so as not to throw away one’s life on vain ambitions. Take what you can get and let it be enough for you, he says. He is quoting Democritus, an old Greek philosopher who sat in his garden cutting open animals to discover the physiological causes of manic-depression, or melancholy as they called it then, and laughing at his fellow men for their folly in running about exhausting themselves with pursuits which they would only lay aside the next year, or with loves and enthusiasms which they would later revoke. Robert Burton originally published Anatomy under the name Democritus Junior, so you can see where he might be going with all this.

To see where I am going with all this may be a bit more difficult.

Dear readers, you must excuse me; I’m in high spirits tonight. I finally got a call from Scottie, the first since he arrived at his destination. The training, he says, leaves off where – well I am dangerously close to discussing the kind of thing that we are not supposed to talk about on the internet (not that my regular readers can’t figure it out, but that I can’t use words that could be search terms for certain subjects.) Let’s just say “they” are doing their best to weed out anyone not quite qualified for the position he seeks. Scottie has a hurt knee but he refuses to have it looked at because the training is so tightly paced that if he misses a day he has to start over, which would mean being away from us longer. I didn’t get the chance to let him know that would be all right, for his health. I only got to talk to him for about two minutes, and only by the kindness of a high-ranking officer visiting down there from here, so there was barely time to assure each other that we were well and to say I Love You. I didn’t even get to explain that I hadn’t sent any letters because I had failed to catch an important number in his address, which he gave me over the phone the last time he called for two minutes, about a week and a half ago, when he first arrived. A few minutes later I rued my thoughtlessness. Greatly daring, I called the officer whose phone Scottie had been using (Hi, this is Frank, he answered) and got that dang number.

I let Johnny talk to Scottie for a moment, just so he knows his Daddy is still alive and loves him. Then it was goodbye and I sat on the floor crying in a release of anxiety that I had never quite acknowledged. Scottie’s spirits are high. He is a slight man, who didn’t get quite enough to eat when he was growing, and although he’s a natural runner, in most other ways the training doesn’t appeal to his more native virtues. My brother is a different sort. He said the training was like summer camp on steroids. Not everyone feels the same as my brother, who is a very large and well-knit man with a loud voice and a massive grin and thick dark hair sprouting from his head in a profusion that aptly suggests the steadily-surging strength of all his energies. When my brother was in pre-training, they brought in a bunch of city cops, and my brother’s unit was supposed to simulate a riot so the cops could practice quelling it. My brother led the charge screaming, his face monstrously distorted, his clothes rearranged to give a sense of madness. He was the only person the cops never caught. Apparently they were laughing too hard to get near him. My brother betrays a relish for all such heightened and hard activities. My husband is in high spirits for a different reason. This is his third training – he goes every year. At the first one he shed his fear and came back a man who scoffs at death and effort and suffering. He taught me to run, and as I learned to push against my own fear of the pain and effort and shortness of breath that comes with running, I grew in my ability to push against all sorts of other fears. With the result that, nearly three years later, I can actually wash my own dishes (as I previously chronicled – and by the way, dear readers, the order has spread – who knew! – and I am now keeping up on my laundry, too!) When my husband is in training, he lives in a different world, one where there is no stress about subsistence and the only thing required of a person is to do what his superiors direct him to do, with all his heart. In this mood I catch a glimpse of what it would be like to live as Democritus recommends.

But ought you not to be seeking to live as Christ recommends, someone will ask. Well, yes. “Do not worry about tomorrow: what you will eat or drink or wear, because your heavenly Father knows that you need these things.” The life Scottie lives when he is away from me (and of which he brings back some essence when he returns) approaches this one. To live under authority, without stress, knowing that one’s superiors have one’s life in hand, a life that can be sacrificed at need but will in the meantime be well maintained, this life approaches that in which you realize at last that your life does not consist in the things you aquire or in the bread you eat or even in the continuance of your own body on this earth. For man lives by the decree of God and not by bread. Not really by bread.

I recall reading a book about a Christian in China. The church, any church, had all but died there, and Christ came directly to this man after he had passionately and steadily searched for a Bible. He had evangelical antecedents and so his Christianity had a somewhat evangelical cast, although in many respects it was more apostolic than otherwise. Through his efforts many were converted to faith in Christ and he did many miracles. At last he went to prison, where he fasted for I think 160 days, not as a hunger strike but as a testimony to God’s power. At the end of that time, in which he had eaten and drunk nothing, his body had withered away till he was the size of a small child, and he sat in the corner of his cell praying, leathery and still. Still his body and soul remained united. How many others there have been who fed and watered themselves tenderly, risked nothing and heaped up medicine and riches to ward off death, and yet they died suddenly through accident or chance disease or some other cause.

(I sounded almost Burtonian, there.)

Enduring hardness can teach some of this. Sometimes certain pleasures can teach it as well, if the heart is in any respect wise toward the instruction. To contemplate what is offered to our view in a work of human skill can be an excercise in discerning that human life consists in something more than that which fuels our body.

Have you danced recently, dear reader?

Tonight I learned why it is that, though nowadays we talk of toe-tapping, in times past people tapped their heels. Music dictates certain movements of the body and early music teaches me to tap my heel and not my toe. I am learning dance steps that may be quite ancient. Skipping and hopping and wheeling. And there is one my son loves, in which I swing him from arm to arm. When he is in the right arm, I fling out my left. When in the left, my right. All the while half-hopping in the opposite direction. He giggled joyously the whole time, and if the steps became too boring through my shortness of breath, he’d beat me on the shoulder and beg, “Round-a- round” and I’d swing him in circles.

There is some music that you have to listen to with your whole body, not just your ears.

What’s interesting is that not all of this early music (in Melliville’s album: Scottish music published in 18th centry Scotland, but of course much of it was merely collected at that time and was composed far earlier) is metrical. That is, it does not always have a steady beat, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, etc. Much of it has a more natural shape, like vines or clouds, which do not have measured symmetry but find balanace in a different meandering manner. This music is much like the kind of music that our Liturgy has historically been set to, and if Orthodox Christians are going to write new settings to the Liturgy in an effort to have an American Orthodox music, they ought to study the early music of the British Isles because those are our musical roots.

Listen to the Canadians; they have the edge on this sort of thing in the New World.

I wonder if all the classical music (Italianate, Mellville calls it) that we generally listen to, with its strict meters, is more or less dance music. And if we have lost the ability to hear the beauty of clouds and vines and only hear the glory of numbers now. Numbers can, of course, be ravishingly glorious in their own way. And so can dance music.

But oh! for gentle, deepening entrancement of that which ripples and courses and makes its way down happily to the sea whether it can be strictly divided into wholes or not!

And since we are talking about the flute – we are, really – let me recommend Chris Norman “and his wooden flute” as players of wooden flutes seem always to be introduced. (It helps because there are other musicians with this name.) It’s a sort of novelty instrument but it shouldn’t be. No, it should not. Just as the flute is, for me at the moment, the only instrument, the wooden flute is at the moment the only flute.

And I find I have come to a stop. Good night, and good morning as well, dear friends.

Alana

And For Today, Mein Liebeduders

Hofflesheesch mein gerter mieu
Wasffelbrachten du.
Laverrness, eh der rater ein
Bedech, bedech. Ah, flein!

 - Written just now

What does it mean? Nothing, of course. I don’t know German. Neither does the following poetry mean anything and yet it has the appearance of meaning.

Shiver when you slice a fish
Lest the heart forget its holes
Never has the ancient dish
Lashed itself to such repose.

 - Written in a time of torment and deadness

Yet it comes from somewhere and in this sense it must have significance. I believe there were poets who experimented with this sort of thing in a serious way. There is something about this excercise that fascinates beyond the studies it provides of the music of language. Probably any of these nonsense poems fascinates the poet more than it does others because it provides a mirror view of part of himself he can’t usually observe.

In true poetry effect must be married to meaning, and when it is done succesfully that is the miracle of poetry.  This kind of verse has only effect. I consider it a mere excercies, albeit an interesting one.

Help, help, all drenched harbors heavenside
Let no foment unwarranted subside
Bells and bovines all have moven 
What have warrants proven?
Nay nay, sweet hundred, lay aloft and ride!

 - Written likewise just now.

If I had any matter, Oh my song would be sweet.

Some people’s lifework (Emily, would you please coin me the German equivalant of ‘lifework?’) is this sort of thing. They write and give speeches which have only the seeming of sense, the music of meaning without any actual content. Politicians and evangelists and car salesman: all gain power (or car sales) through such empty talents as this.

 ***

Joel calls good writing the fruit and harvest of good reading habits, which he compares to the planting and watering and weeding of one’s thoughts. I admit it, this is what I largely lack. I am always reading many books and I so rarely finish one because I lack application and diligence.

My reading at present:

 - Desperate Measures
      Some criticism by William Logan
       and
 - Counterpoints
       articles from the New Criterion

Hitler’s Beneficiaries
    a book about Nazi Germany in which the author contends that ordinary Germans, no more selfish or evil than the rest of us, aquiesced to Hitler’s war because of the welfare benefits.

The Gosepel of Luke

The Sacred Wood
 T.S. Eliot

An account of ancient and medieaval music (next I’m borrowing a history of Russian music because I’m trying to understand the nature of the music of my church which no one seems able to explain to me)

A Charles Wesley Reader
   I’m fascinated by his very well-kept journal, which is an amazing primary source of history. It’s rather self-conscious. On returning to England he showed his journal to the very people he’d written about in it.

    His description of the society at St. Simon’s Island is interesting to me because the Golden Isles area is one my favorite places in the world. Apparently while there he was persecuted by harlots and Presbyterians. His descriptions of the land are as full of admiration and longing as my own. On slavery he is shocking. I think there is a large contingent of conservative people in this country (ahem! ahem! Bob Jones University!) who are propogating the idea of a genteel Christian south unjustly persecuted by Northerners who never understood their Christian values, but Wesley’s descriptions do nothing to support that picture.

   “I had observed much, and heard more, of the cruelty of masters toward their negros; but now I received an authentic account of some horrid instances thereof. The giving a child a slave of its own age to tyrannize over, to beat and abuse out of sport, was I myself saw, a common practice. Nor is it strange, being thus trained up in cruelty, they should afterwards arrive at so great perfection in it that Mr. Star, a gentleman I often met at Mr. Lasserre’s should, as he himself informed Lasserre, first nail up a negro by his ears, then order him to be whipped in the severest manner, and then to have scalding water thrown over him, so that the poor creature could not stir for months after. Another much-applauded punishment is, drawing their slaves’ teeth. One Colonel Lynch is universally known to have cut off a poor negro’s legs; and to kill several of them every year by his barbarities.
     It were endless to recount all the shocking instances of diabolical cruelty these men (as they call themselves) daily practice upon their fellow creatures; and that upon the most trivial occasions. I shall only mention one more, related to me by a Swiss gentleman, Mr. Zouberbuhler, an eye-witness, of Mr. Hill, a dancing master in Charlestown. He whipped a she-slave so long, that she fell down at his feet for dead. When, by the help of a physician, she was so far recovered as to show signs of life, he repeated the whipping with equal rigour, and concluded with dropping hot sealing-wax upon her flesh. Her crime was over-filling a tea cup.
      These horrid cruelties are less to be wondered at, because the government itself countenances and allows them to kill their slaves, by the ridiculous penalty appointed for it, of about eleven pounds sterling, half of which is usually saved by the criminal’s informing on himself. This I can look upon as no other than a public act to indemnify murder.”

I don’t think we can possibly understand our present situation until we think deeply about these kinds of events in our past. Popular conservatives don’t dare, because they are trying to preserve institutions, and public anger directed at the foundation of those institutions seems counter-constructive. I think more serious conservatives are a different breed, who want to fix what we have without throwing everything away. They understand we can’t simply start over.

Charles Wesley’s account of his famous conversion is also instructive. I cannot understand it in any way except as the self-inflicted delusion of a very sick and emotionally wrought-upon man, and he relates that many of his friends were grieved by the same apprehension. Charles’ brother John experienced a similar conversion two days afterwards. They were part of a crowd of people who all went through the same thing at the same time, each insisting that he would not rest till he had recieved what he sought.

I know intimately the kind of experience he describes and I am glad to have escaped the domination of such experiences as well as the ascendancy of the passions that is their inevitable result. (These results are usually mixed with an actual heightening of spiritual devotion because the seeking of the experience is usually mixed with actual seeking of God.)

The consequences of Wesleyan soteriology to American religion are vast. No American Christian of any stripe can afford to ignore it because it has helped to form the atmosphere in which we think and if we don’t recognize it conscously it will bleed into our minds unconsciously.

I’m still working away at Flannery O’Connor’s stories and I recently finished a book of critical articles on her work. I now know what people see in her, at least second hand. I have to say, I found her admirers were more perceptive and honest than were her detractors. I still cannot escape the fact that her stories evoke little more than loathing in me. Maybe they are meant to but I don’t know if I accept that.

Is everyone tired of hearing me wrestle with this snickering Catholic cripple?

A Quick Idea

I’m always trying to think of ways to contact and minister to the inner city folk, without hosting Operation This-Time-We’re-Hip-Enough or whatever. What are we, after all, if we can’t help the worst off ones?

It struck me that we might hold events in which Priests bless inner-city children. We could let mothers know that they can bring their children to be blessed at a certain time and place. And women and priests can be there, maybe some fathers since most of these kids don’t have any. And the children could sit on the priest’s lap and he could put his hands on their heads and pray for them like Jesus did. And we could serve them lunch like Jesus did, and the priests could teach them like Jesus did. If the place was beautiful and the ministrations lovely and genuine, I don’t see why there shouldn’t be some seed falling on some good ground. And maybe it would provide pro-life contacts: meaning, such ministration could help spread the pious attitude toward life and family and children, plus if girls and women get to know some people they trust, maybe they will turn to the church instead of getting an abortion.

What does everyone think?

My Dear Patient Readers,

I’ve finally got him off – Scottie has betaken himself to the south for two months and suddenly I’ve got time on my hands. Time that could be well spent in many ways, of course. I need to scour my appartment in preparation for the house blessing I haven’t signed up for yet, and Scottie wants me to write him a letter every day. And then there are all those improving things I meant to do like take a night course, read some of these books, finish potty-training Johnny…well maybe I don’t have as much time on my hands as I thought, but at least nothing is urgent. Everything for the last few weeks has been urgent. It is stressful. (Scottie left on Friday and I’ve already lost five pounds.) I’m back to keeping up on my dishes, which had fallen off a bit, and now my laundry is under control, too. Which reminds, me today was going to be laundry day.

This concept of having time on one’s hands is turning out to be rather an illusion. Still, if I can’t sit down and talk to you all for a few minutes what’s the point in being all grown up?

I believe it is customary when beginning the sort of chatty letter this is meant to be, to describe the view from one’s window or balcony, whichever happens to be in sight. As it happens I have in view a balcony on the other side of a window, which works out nicely. The view is foggy: I suppose the snow is melting. I know it is snow because the bottom third of the window is blocked in white. Through the fog I descry what might, when night has fallen and assuming a few streetlights have burnt out, be mistaken for terraces and lattices but which are actually a series of carports and that old chicken wire Scottie put up on the balcony last summer to keep Johnny from falling off. (I never let Johnny on the balcony regardless. I have great faith in his ability to fall from things chicken wire or none.)

How different from the winter scenes to which I am accustomed. Even last year I looked out on a pleasant neighborhood, and every winter before that from the time I was six, it was the sight of uncounted ice-silvered trees stretching upward from the undulating landscape of the Kettle Moraine that I gazed on as I wrote in my journal of a morning. When landscapes such as that are present, even to the mind, phrases like “of a morning” come naturally. Here it sounds pretentious.

My heart is heavy as I think about the implications of this change, which might very well be permanant. It is coming to me that we cannot hope to work toward the building of the Church in any way but to dedicate ourselves to the health of some individual parish. And we begin to think of staying here, trying to strike down roots through the sooty blacktop and occasional fancy-pants manicured lawn, and help rebuild this parish in which we now find ourselves. Financially this is the best situation we’ve ever been in. This state has a dreadful economy yet we seem to have it by the tail with plenty of room for advancement. As a piano teacher I work for honest and savvy employers in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the nation, providing a service that every parent there wants for their child. As a landscaper Scottie provides a service that is indespensable so close to the lake, and as the son of the business owner, he has a chance to become a landscape architect and invest in the business. And then there’s his other job, which is probably one of the most secure to be had, assuming our new President is not a complete lunatic.

And this church presents the ideal situation for us, both to continue our growth in Orthodox Christianity, and to put to use the learning and talents and interest we have in rebuilding it. Nothing has ever seemed so right. It’s quite painful.

Well, this is not a case for pity. As I write about the circumstances in which I am caught I often feel that I am a person outside the pain, turning a curiosity over in my hand and wondering about the nature of it. Suffering is truly a mystery to me. I especially do not understand those who must suffer physically. Is it really true, I wonder, that they must suffer the destruction of their bodies in order to learn compassion and love? Thus the stories of Flannery O Connor are detestable to me: she sounds like someone who is constantly talking (in the stark modern language of her time to be sure, but with a veiled Victorian smirk) about the sort of gross violent spankings that fundamentalists inflict on their children for their own good - excercises which are little more than an occasion for satisfying the darker passions of parents upon their helpless children’s terror and humiliation, all in the name of God.

When I stub my toe I am lost in bewilderment.

Yet my patron saint, Elianus, froze to death naked on a lake.

While wondering about this on my bed, it was shown to me that I myself learn compassion and love through suffering, not physically, but suffering shame for my own sins and failures. I fail a lot. I’m conscious of failure every moment and I believe the people around me also see my faults and transgressions. Certainly the demons do not allow any failing to escape their notice. And though I experience a sort of visceral fellow-anguish for the bodily pain of other people, it is for their sinfulness that I truly pity them. I know the net in which they are caught and I am tumbling around in it with them. It is completely believable to me (now) that God could not be good without seeking to save this wretched race.

Ha Ha! upon thee, despair. Despite the fact that this is my first blacktop winter in twenty years, it’s also the first winter in which I’m not depressed for as long as I remember. Yes, even surrounded by my beloved Kettle Moraine, I lifted my eyes to heaven winter after winter and was appalled by the density of the colorless dome above me. If I dared to venture from behind the protecting glass and confront those lovely icescapes in person, I felt the life being leached from my bones, never mind how warmly dressed, and was terrified at the slipping away of my my tenuous pretence at being.

When we were baptized, our godparents and our priest and others gave us gifts. We recieved baptismal crosses which Scottie and I wear always around our necks. We were given two icons and a little money and some cards and a dinner and some toys for Johnny. After a few weeks it became clear that it was not only our fellow-parishioners who had given us gifts upon our baptism.

He ascended on high and gave gifts to men.

Of course any Christian will know that when God gives spiritual gifts, he gives them for the building of his body. So here we are in this parish – the parish in which we were baptized and annointed with the Holy Spirit, the parish in which we were given the gifts which are already fitting us so neatly into the little group of people struggling to rebuild their parish after long years of mistakes and trouble and misfortune.

I don’t know but it would be unsurprising to me if we stayed here for a very long time.

At some point I suppose we shall have to buy a house and manicure our lawn. If so, it would be good if Scottie were prepared to do the work himself. Maybe later if I have time I’ll go and look around the area for night classes in landscape architecture.

***

Dear readers, what do you think? Why do people suffer pain, of any kind? Do you really believe that the slightest experience of a person’s life is ordered and allowed by God? Or are we to look at Providence more as an ordering of the general direction of life, with always the possibility of random sparks being thrown off by the grinding of the mishapen gears of fallen human nature?

My thanks for your time. Godspeed.

Alana