A Prolonged Absence

It's been a very long time since I posted anything here. At first it was because life was busy, I had just been ordained as a deacon and had a child on the way.  Then I didn't post because I couldn't remember my login information. I would periodically sit down to think about writing something only to be called away and forget to ever go back to it. 

Well a lot has happened since my last post. My son Ioan was born a little over a month after my last post. We named him after Saint John of San Francisco whose intercession we sought throughout the time that my wife was pregnant with him. I anointed her with oil from the vigil lamp at his tomb each day. His icon has a small vial of rose water with which they washed Saint John's relics before re-vesting him, a gift from our priest who was there for this occasion. Ioan has grown into such a wonderful young boy and a terrific big brother. 

Then a couple years later his brother Theodore was born. He is named after Saint Theodore the Studite, the great defender of icons during iconoclasm. Teddy is probably the most like me of any of the kids, he is always doing things that I remember doing as a child (even the bad things). It is amazing to me how children can act as mirrors of our selves. He is a very sweet boy and is very smart and clever for his age.

A few years later, our daughter Maria Joy was born. She was a bit of a surprise. I gave a talk at a Pastoral Conference about the icon of The Joy of All Who Sorrow. When in the process of preparing a homily on the subject the next year, my wife didn't want to tell me that she suspected that she was pregnant until after I had given the homily. I told her that if the baby was a girl she would have to be named after the Joy of All Who Sorrow, and sure enough that's what happened. She is now 17 months old, she's walking and babbling up a storm. She adores both of her big brothers.

These three children have been such a blessing to my wife and me. None of them have been "easy" children, they don't believe in sleep or rest or any such thing. We are constantly on our toes. But they have brought joy, consolation, and a sense of God's love and providence to us.

I have continued teaching workshops on iconography and lecturing from time to time. We have been blessed to travel with the children and have made life-long friends with many of the amazing students we have encountered. This past year I completed the Pastoral School of the Diocese of Chicago and the Midwest (ROCOR) It was a two year program that took me roughly five years to complete. I finished a well-recieved thesis on the subject of iconography which helped me to re-examine much of what I thought I knew about iconography. It has helped me in my teaching and in my own understanding of what icons mean for myself and for the Church.

On November 13, 2018, seven years to the day after my ordination to the diaconate, I was ordained to the priesthood at Saint Nicholas Cathedral in Seattle for continued service at my parish in Boise. I am greatly blessed to be able to serve alongside Father David Moser at Saint Seraphim's Orthodox Church as his assistant. I also have the great joy of having my son, Ioan, as an altar server with me.

I felt that it was important to post here again for a number of reasons. The first being that I still get the occasional email about the loss that my wife and I suffered so many years ago. It has been a part of my life since, and am glad to know that others can sympathize with our loss. But I also want to encourage others that life does continue. Sometimes with the blessing of other children. Sometimes with other blessings. My wife and I responded to our loss by throwing ourselves into the life of the Church. This has born plentiful fruit in our lives. It does not take away the loss but can transform and transfigure grief into something beautiful. It can turn sorrow into joy if you will.

I also know that I have more to say about icons, about theology, about the Saints. Some of this comes from my studies, some of it from my work as an iconographer, and some of it from homilies that I am giving at my parish. I can't claim great wisdom or insight, but a desire to share what I have learned with others.

Christ is Ascended!

So I haven't been blogging much lately... It would seem to be a fairly consistent pattern with me. The icon above is the reason for my absence. I have been working long hours to get this done in time for Ascension. It is now done, but sadly will have to wait a little while for the installation. This icon took up almost an entire wall of my living room, and required me to use a ladder to paint the parts at the top. At some point I am hoping to finish assembling a video from all the still photos I took along the way. Anyway, I'll keep this short since I still have lots to do before my trip to Idaho next week, but I just wanted to wish all a Happy Feast Day and thought that this icon would be a nice way to do that.

Last night was the first meeting of the Executive Board of my church's Parish Council. As the new chairman of the council, it was the first of these meetings that I have attended. At the conclusion of the business portion of the meeting, I started to tell them about some things that are going on in my personal life lately. It was so nice to spend just a few minutes of time talking about who I am as a person, what is going on in my life, what my hopes and dreams and aspirations are. Since then, I have given a lot of thought to what it means to share these things with people at Church. And the conclusion that I have reached is that not sharing is a monstrous distortion of what it means to be a Christian.

We are created in the image and likeness of God. And specifically, in the image and the likeness of the Holy Trinity. Just as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct Persons, they are in perfect union with each other. To be truly human is to be in union with other humans and with our Creator. Furthermore, we believe in a God who became a man, sharing in our humanity so that we could share in His Divinity. We also believe that the Church is the Body of Christ, that our salvation lies in our being one with each other with Christ as the head of the Church. To choose to exist as isolated individuals is truly to deny all of these things in practice regardless of whether we agree to them in theory. This isolation, it seems to me, is the very essence of sin. If we truly practiced unity with one another, we could not lie about our neighbor, steal from them, murder them, use them for our own gain, or abuse them.

So tonight at the first meeting of the full Parish Council, I shared the abridged version of how God used financial ruin, and a stay in the hospital to bring me back home to the Church, and how I vowed to return to the Church as a servant which is why I agreed to be on Council and why I agreed to run for Chairman despite my fears and trepidation. And once again, I saw how this little bit of sharing is what begins to tie us together as Christians.

For a while now, I have been sharing things through this blog, and on various other sites I am on, but there is something very different about sharing things in person. What I write here may be read by many people, or no one at all. People may be brought to tears by what I write, or they may roll their eyes. This is not a personal medium, even though there are people writing and people reading. There appears to be a connection between writer and reader, but in most cases this is little more than an illusion. I don't know most of the people that will read this, and so while it might make me feel good to write things down, and it might help someone to read it, we still are not united together in a substantive way.

I have been doing much more sharing in person lately. I have shared my joy, my sorrows, my struggles against temptation, my sins and my faults with people, and in return I have received love, forgiveness, acceptance, encouragement, and consolation. The truth is that if we are even a little bit serious about being a Christian, we have this desire within us to share, and to have others share with us. It is imprinted in us as beings in the image and likeness of God. We have just forgotten how because we live in a fallen world that encourages us to stay separate from each other.

We may start by sharing bits of information about ourselves, but over time we begin to actually share our whole self. And I am finding that the more I do this, the more blessings I have to be thankful for, and I spend more time sharing myself with God.

Spiritual Hibernation

"My soul, my soul, arise! Why are you sleeping? The end is drawing near, and you will be confounded. Awake, then and be watchful, that Christ our God may spare you, Who is everywhere present and fills all things." Kontakion from the Great Penitential Canon of St. Andrew of Crete

St. Andrew, who really should be the Patron Saint of people who talk to themselves (like me), gives us these words with which to wake ourselves up the first week of Great Lent, and then again toward the end of Lent. These words have been in my mind for several days now. I seem to be in a spiritual stupor for the last few weeks, and I only wake up from this for small moments in time, and then my soul goes back to its slumber.

So why is my soul sleeping? It seems I am always fighting this battle this time of year. The days get shorter, it gets cold, and I usually have more work than I have time for. And in the midst of this, the Church prescribes a fast for the Nativity of Christ. Great Lent is so much easier for me than the Nativity Fast for a number of reasons. The first is that Thanksgiving is during the Nativity Fast. My birthday is also during the Nativity fast. I usually end up breaking the fast at least a couple times just because of celebrations. The other problem is that there are not nearly as many Church services during the Nativity Fast as there are during Great Lent. The first week of Lent, there is a service every night. This time of year, I feel cold, and tired, and it feels like I am being asked to practice asceticism without a safety net. So I plod along through the Fast in the hopes that it will pass by quickly and I can get on to other things.

I often wish that I could just hibernate through the winter and wake up when the weather gets warm again and the sun comes out. I figure if my soul is gonna take a nap, my body might as well get a nice long sleep as well. But since that is not plausible, I need to pray for my soul to awaken. I need to struggle to make this a period of preparation, because the end is near at hand for all of us, and I should not be wasting my time in sleep anyway.

A Pet Peeve

I've grown accustomed over the past few years to hear people opine on various issues in the Orthodox Church, and heard just about every opinion I'm likely to hear. There are a number of issues that seem to come up time and again. I can't tell you how many appeals I have heard from people who want to tear the pews out of their churches because the proper way to worship God is standing up, not relaxing in a pew. The same tactic is suggested for the few churches that have organs. "The human voice is the greatest instrument because it was made by God, and we ought to worship with our voice, not with organs." Or there is the frequent refrain, "Orthodox Christians are not supposed to pray with heretics." So naturally, everything from a prayer before a meal with your Protestant family to the Patriarch of Constantinople saying a prayer with the pope must be wrong. "Orthodox Priests shouldn't dress in Catholic style Clerical clothes, they ought to dress in a cassock."

Now I won't pretend like there aren't good reasons why these rules or traditions exist, but what I find truly astonishing is that when I say that God the Father ought not to be depicted, I will inevitably hear one of these same people say "But I grew up with them in my church, and I like them, and aren't there miracle working icons that have God the Father on them?"

The basis for all iconography is the Incarnation of Christ. In spite of the protestations of iconoclasts, we still adhere to the Second Commandment, and we are not permitted to depict what has not been seen. We can only depict Christ because He became a man, He took on flesh, and He became depictable. To depict God the Father is to undermine the very foundation of iconography. The Orthodox Church puts so much emphasis on preserving proper theological teaching, and yet when it comes to the visual proclamation of the gospel, we have often have such a cavalier attitude.

I rarely see this anywhere else in Orthodoxy, and it seems to me to be completely backwards. I would rather sit in a pew looking at an icon that properly expresses that only the Son of God became incarnate than stand in the presence of an icon that makes a subtle statement that perhaps God the Father did as well. I would rather sing along with an organ(and I really don't like organs in church) in a church where the invisible God is invisible and the Incarnate God is depicted than sing A Capella in a church where both are depicted. Even issues of who we ought or ought not to pray with pale by comparison with what we pray. We try to keep our ears safe from hearing heresy, why do we not want the same for our eyes? We care more about a priest in the wrong clothes offending our eyes than a false image offending our eyes.

And believe it or not, my position is not as harsh as what people suggest for pews. I don't advocate that we tear all these images out immediately. What I advocate is that we listen to what the church in council has suggested, which is that when they are replaced they should be replaced with something proper, and that no new ones should be made. But in order for this to happen, we need to be aware that these images are not correct, which requires someone to say that they aren't correct. Or maybe we can make a deal, I'll get rid of the pew that I like to sit in from time to time, and you get rid of that picture of Christ on an old man's lap with a bird that you like to look at. Deal?

See how they love one another?

Four years ago, I followed the Presidential election very closely. In my eagerness to vote, I paid attention to every little bit of news that came along. Polls, sound bytes, and political analysis filled my days.

This year, I have tried to stay away from politics as much as possible. I don't have TV, and have a short attention span for reading things on the internet, and so I kept clear of all but the broad strokes of what was going on. And yet, I knew enough to make my decision on who to vote for.

For the last few months, I have seen otherwise wonderful people turn on each other over this election. I have seen outrageous claims, not just about the candidates, but about those who would vote for one or the other candidate. I have seen a peaceful forum degenerate into bickering. I have seen back-stabbing, snide comments, and idle talk come about as a result of people's obsession with what has become our national sport. And I guess I foolishly thought that this would subside once the election passed. And yet, if anything it has intensified.

Now I won't pretend that the issues at stake are not important. I won't make that it makes no difference who is in office, but what I would suggest is that politics as it stands today stands at odds with Christianity. Despite attempts on the part of some people to associate one party with Christianity, the truth is that both parties are good on some issues and bad on others. Both parties make promises that they don't keep. But more than anything, both parties seek power, influence, and control, none of which are Christian ideals. Whether one party or the other is more closely aligned with Christianity is beside the point. It is beside the point because it sets at odds one Christian with another. I make my decision on who to vote for with my conscience, as do the people that vote for the other guy. As Orthodox Christians, we share the same beliefs on everything. I find it hard to believe that Orthodox Democrats believe that abortion or homosexuality are acceptable. I find it hard to believe that Orthodox Republicans don't care about the poor or the sick. I don't think that Orthodox Democrats are Socialists, and I don't believe that Orthodox Republicans are warmongers. I believe that we fundamentally agree, and the system sets us at odds with one another on how to achieve what we want.

We are not meant to create a perfect world through politics. Democracy holds out the hope that we can vote our way to utopia. This will never happen. As Christians, we are not called to create a perfect world, but to be perfected in a fallen world. The election of Barack Obama will change the world, there is little doubt about that. Whether it will be a better world or a worse world does not change our role in that world. We are still called to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow Christ. Had John McCain been elected, our call would be the same. I have heard a lot of speculation about how Christians will be persecuted, but Christ told us that we should always expect to be persecuted as He was, and indeed to rejoice in it. Frankly, it disappoints me to hear Christians lamenting their lot in life, as though it is not an honor to suffer with Christ.

We can affect the world through our actions, and indeed, we should vote as we see fit in order to affect this change. But we should never lose sight of the fact that we will never create a utopian society, we will never be loved and adored by the rest of the world, but what is within our grasp is to love one another as Christ commanded us. We must never forget that anything that sets our hearts against our brothers and sisters is not from God. We must keep a proper perspective, and to be charitable with one another even when we disagree about the workings of our government. In the words of the Liturgy, "let us love one another, that with one accord we may confess: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit! The Trinity, one in essence, and undivided." We can't risk getting too wrapped up in the things of this world and forgetting about our unity as believers.

Please forgive me if at any time I have forgotten this in my zeal.