A Labor of Love, Part 1

I have come to the realization that I am not the most prolific blogger. For someone with as much time as I have to sit around and think, it should be much easier for me to spend a few moments of the day writing down something that I spent hours thinking about. But the truth is that most of the time I prefer to think my thoughts and then let them go rather than saving them for posterity. After all, some of my thoughts are best left forgotten. But it seems to me a shame to have this blog and not really use it.

So this will hopefully be the beginning of a series of posts which should go on over the next few weeks and months. Lisa attends Holy Transfiguration Antiochian Orthodox Church, a small mission parish in Boise, Idaho, and while she would very much like to be married in that Church because of her close friendships with everyone there, when she visited me in Pennsylvania she remarked that she would rather get married in my church because it is so much more beautiful with all of the icons that we have. I told her that I had a solution to her dilemma which was that I could make her Church more beautiful.

In all the years that I have been working as an iconographer, I have done a lot of work in Churches, but it seems like every commission has to match the other icons in the church. I have yet to paint an entire iconostasis because I keep getting work at established parishes. I am certainly not complaining about the work that I have been given, but part of me wants to do something from start to finish. So I have an opportunity to fulfill a little bit of a dream for myself, give a wedding gift to my future bride, and give a small Mission something that they could never afford (and I get a tax deduction out of it to boot...)

So a few nights ago I began the first icon for the iconostasis. It is an icon of the Pimen Mother of God, and in the next few days I hope to draw up the icon of Christ to match it. I have decided to document the work, and use it as fuel for my blog. The added benefit of that is that the people of the Church can check in and see what is happening. In addition, there are plans underway for me to teach a class on iconography (more details in the next couple weeks hopefully) from June 9-13 in Boise, and we will be painting the same icon in the class, so this will give me images to use in advertising for the class, and hopefully I can use this blog to get better coverage and fill up that class since part of the profits from the class will be used to support this parish that will be my spiritual home in a few months time.

My Life Lately

Once again, it has been a long time since I have posted anything. The truth is that while there is a lot I want to say, I have held back because most of it is about my personal life.

In late November of this past year, I received a message from an Orthodox woman named Lisa through a social networking site called Orthodox Circle. She wrote to tell me that she really likes my icons, and that we have some common tastes in music, movies, and books. She went on to tell me a little bit about herself, and asked a couple questions. Now normally I read messages from people and barely respond if at all. I might just send a little note thanking them, but rarely anything more elaborate than that. But she had taken the time to write quite a bit, and so I responded point by point to what she wrote, more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. She then responded again with more detail, more questions, and so I responded again. This continued for a while, and she would usually say something like "I am really enjoying our correspondence, and I hope it can continue." At first this was slightly frustrating. You see, I don't really like email. And our correspondence seemed more like a laundry list of information rather than a real personal exchange. And the other thing that made it difficult was that I had decided that I was not going to pursue a relationship. At 31 years old, I had concluded that God did not have a relationship in store for me, and I had decided that I would just accept that and stop letting it frustrate me. I decided this the day before the first email I received from Lisa.

As time went on, instant messaging was added to the emails, which was a little more natural, and helped me to see Lisa's personality just a little better. At one point we were talking on the catbox (or chatbox to the uninitiated) at desertcalling.com and she sent me a message telling me that I was a "kick in the pants" and that I should give her a call when she got off of work. Being shy and nervous about sounding like an idiot (I hate talking on the phone) I declined and decided that my time would be better spent working on a project I had to get done. But I continued with the emails and IMs.

In late December, Lisa put her feelings on the chopping block, and told me how much she liked me, and said that if I was interested, she would really like to expand our friendship. For me, this was a difficult decision. While I knew that I liked her, and enjoyed talking to her, I didn't really feel like I knew her well, and I was also wary of long-distance relationships (she only lives about 2000 miles away from me). Ultimately, I told Lisa that I was interested, but that I didn't know enough about her and that I had to proceed with caution. So the next time we were talking on IM, she asked me what I would like to know about her. So I started asking questions. this didn't go on very long before she asked me if I would want to talk about it on the phone rather than typing everything. So I bit the bullet and called.

I was a little worried that I would call and show myself to be an idiot. I was a little worried that she would have an annoying voice. I was worried that we would have nothing to talk about. What I found was that she has a lovely voice, and that she is so easy for me to talk to, and that she has an intoxicating laugh. And so 2 days after Christmas, I found myself starting to fall for this woman who lives almost on the other side of the continent. We spoke again on the phone on New Year's Eve, then a few days later, and we gradually started to talk for longer periods of time, and more often. It got to the point that we now talk on the phone for a couple hours a day.

Lisa had a trip to Pennsylvania planned for sometime after Christmas, and was hoping she could meet me in person during that trip. I was a little worried about meeting her, for much the same reasons that I was worried about talking to her on the phone. I agreed to meet her, but was anxious about it. As it turns out, the trip had to be rescheduled for mid-February. By about mid-January, February started to seem like a really long time to have to wait to see her.

By the end of January, I got tired of mouthing the words "I love you" at the phone after hanging up, and decided to tell Lisa how I felt about her. After a really wonderful phone call with neither of us wanting to hang up, I wrote a long email telling her how much she has meant to my life, and I told her that I didn't want another day to pass without telling her that I love her. The next day she told me how much that meant to her even though she didn't think she would be able to say those words until she met me in person. I felt a little saddened by that, but when she told me the next day that she printed out the email and carries it with her, it made me so happy to know that whether she said the words or not, I knew she loved me. It only took a few more days before she was able to say it anyway...

So the weeks leading up to February 13th were some of the longest weeks I have ever had. She only had 3 full days in Pennsylvania, but we tried to make the most of them. We were both so happy to meet in person, and were pleasantly surprised that the connection we had on the phone transferred just fine to our connection in person. On February 14th, being Valentine's Day, I had a present for Lisa. I painted her an icon of her patron saint, St. Elizabeth the New Martyr, and wrote a very long inscription on the back. She cried when I gave it to her, and then held it in her arms for most of that day. She gave me one of her favorite prayer ropes which I now take with me whereever I go. We had so much fun together that she almost missed her flight back home because we just didn't want to say good bye.

So then we waited. We continued talking on the phone daily (thank you Verizon for free calls between Verizon phones), and we continued emailing. On March 18th, I flew out to visit her for her Birthday which was on the 20th. I spent the first two days of my visit cooking food for her Birthday party to which she had invited her friends and family. It was a wonderful night for her, and for me as well. I was able to meet her dad, her aunt and uncle, her best friends, and most of the people at her church.

On Monday evening, I took Lisa to one of the nicest restaurants in town, where we had a delicious dinner. We then took a walk along the river next to the restaurant. I told her how much her love has meant to my life, how she was able to reach past all of the obstacles and barriers I had built up around my heart, and to help me to find love when I thought I never could. I then asked her to be my wife, and gave her the ring that I had bought that morning. Before I could finish asking she said yes.

I have never been happier in my life than I have been the past few months. She is sweeter to me than anyone I have ever known, and I feel so blessed to have her in my life. I know that God worked wonders to bring her into my life, and I am thankful for every moment with her. There are still many things to be worked out, not the least of which is the fact that we live in different states, but we are working toward a future life together, and we are both grateful to have found each other. Please pray for us as we work out the details necessary to make this possible.

Having eyes, see ye not?

Mark 8:18

When I was about 12 years old, I went to the eye doctor for the first time. I had been having trouble seeing the blackboard at school, and so I was past due for a pair of glasses. As part of my eye exam, I was shown a set of plates like the one above, and asked if I could see a number in each plate. Naturally I thought the doctor was crazy. Why would he show me a plate with no number in it and expect me to see a number? Of course my diagnosis of crazy doctor turned out to be wrong, and I was told that I was colorblind. Apparently the number 6 is in the graphic above, but I can't see it for the life of me.

At the time I was getting into painting a little, having watched just a bit too much Bob Ross on PBS. Knowing that I was colorblind meant that I had to find a spotter to help with my paintings. I needed someone to tell me if I was using the right color for things. So I turned to my little brother who was also my best friend at the time, and I would seek his advice. I would later discover that he was colorblind as well, and it would seem that he is even more colorblind than me. So I gave up asking his advice.

A couple years later I started studying iconography. There were a few missteps early on. When I first mixed Sankir, which is the base color for the face, I was a little heavy-handed with the green, and after hours of painting, I showed the icon to my dad, and he asked me if it was supposed to be Kermit the Frog or the Incredible Hulk.

It's been years now since I have heard a comment like this, and more often than not it seems like I hear people compliment me on the colors in my icons. I have to laugh a little because half the time I can't even see what it is that I've done. In times past I refused to tell people about my colorblindness for fear that no one would want to order icons from someone who couldn't see the colors he was using. But in recent years I have started to tell people about it.

Of course everyone likes to quiz me on what color shirt they are wearing, but once that novelty wears off, everyone wants to know how I do what I do without being able to see what I do. So I thought I would share a little of that. The first thing to remember is that tubes of paint have labels. This is very helpful to me. I have also spent a fair amount of time studying color theory. I not only know what happens when you mix yellow and blue (thank you ziplock), I also know what happens when you mix yellow and orange (a trade secret I am not willing to share). I can't necessarily see what happens when two colors are mixed, but I know what is happening. I know a lot about which colors are strong colors and which ones are weak colors so I can gauge proportions when mixing colors. I have also come to depend on technology to a certain extent. I will sometimes use the color picking tool in photoshop to see what color something is. Once I have done that I can try to replicate the formula using what I know of theory. But more often than not, I just paint. I don't think a whole lot about what color something is unless there is some particular significance to the color that is being used.

In the rules for an iconographer that I was given, there is a rule that states "When you have to choose a color, reach out to the Lord inwardly and ask His counsel." While I can't say that I always do this consciously, I don't think a lot about what I think would look nice. I prefer instead to pick a color without thinking about my preferences. An iconographer is supposed to be guided by the Holy Spirit. I have a hard time saying that my work is the work of the Holy Spirit given my struggles to remain prayerful and attentive, but I also know that there is nothing that I can do personally to insure that my colors will appeal to anyone. All the theory and practical considerations aside, there are so many times where I just can't see what I have done. I can't tell you how many times I have been asked what colors I used on something, and if I can't remember I usually can't even make an educated guess. So I am left thinking that the Holy Spirit must be doing something through my hand. And my prayer is that as I continue in this work, my influence will diminish and the influence of the Holy Spirit will increase.

For the arms of the wicked shall be broken

Psalm 37:17

As I mentioned in the last post, I told the Parish Council at my church an abbreviated story of how I returned to the church after a prolonged absence. I mentioned that I had written about this on my blog, and I was asked for a link to the story, but when I looked I realized that while I had talked a lot about my stay in the hospital in a previous post, I had not gone into details about what got me to that place in my life, or how it has impacted me since then, so I will try to go into more detail here now.

I've been Orthodox since infancy, and while most of that time I have attempted to be pious and good, I never really realized that I needed the medicine that the Church provides during most of the first three decades of my life. Piety and goodness seemed like enough. So I served as an altar boy, I sang with the chanters, I went to Sunday School, I crossed myself when I was supposed to, I learned to paint icons, and in all honesty, I enjoyed the Church, I just didn't feel like I needed it. And in reality, I have not been as good or pious as I appeared to other people, but I was good at hiding behind a facade that I created, and I didn't feel deceitful because I did like Church.

Because the Church was just a hobby for me, it was easy to drift away for a time, and to come back when I felt like it. In 2003, I worked on a very big commission that had to be done in a very short amount of time, and I found myself with a lot of money all at once. I took some of that money and I got myself a house about 35 minutes from where I had been going to Church. The house was a fixer-upper that I got for a good price. Since my neighbor was a friend of mine and a contractor, he did a lot of work on the house. He could only work on weekends because of his schedule, and so I didn't go to Church so that I could stay and supervise and help out. It was not something that I felt particularly guilty about because it seemed like it was an honorable and temporary reason to miss Church.

This went on for maybe a couple months. When the work stopped on the house, I had a new reason not to go to Church. I've always been a night owl, and the thought of getting up early in the morning to go to Church was in no way appealing to me, and now that I lived even farther away from Church it was much easier to just stay in bed and sleep in. Sure there was another Church five minutes away that I could have gone to, but I didn't really know those people, and I'd still have to get up early. So I gave in to my laziness and stayed home.

I stopped praying. After all, what is the point of praying when you aren't a churchgoer? Fasting seemed pointless as well. Even taking a minute to think about God would just make me feel guilty, so it was best to just shut that out of my mind. Truth be told, the one thing I didn't stop doing, which I should have, is painting icons. It was my sole source of income, and so I set about the technical act of painting while my soul was far removed from it. I have heard it said that the act of painting an icon is in itself a prayer, but if this is true, I tried very hard to not hear my own prayer. I am ashamed at what I replaced God and His Church with in order to fill my free time.

It is no wonder to me now that God's blessings seemed so far removed from my life during this time as I had run as far away as I could from Him. I ran out of commissions and had to struggle to find new ones, I ran out of money, and accumulated debt, when my car died I had no way to fix it or replace it, so I only left the house to walk to the store or when someone could pick me up. I felt depressed and alone, but I still didn't want to return to God because I thought I could still fix my situation if I could just think of how...

Then one day, I broke my arm. It was a particularly nasty break, and it required three days in the hospital. I spent most of that first night in tears reflecting on my life. A few years earlier I had felt like I had everything, and suddenly I realized that I had nothing. I had squandered everything. I never felt more alone than I did that night. I had not been to Church in years, I hadn't been to confession, and I was worried about going into surgery with my soul in the condition it was in. I felt like the Prodigal Son eating the food meant for pigs, covered in filth, alone, worried that I couldn't even go back home. I made up my mind that, like the Prodigal, I would return to my Father and say "I am no longer worthy to be called your son, but make me as one of your hired servants."

It took me several months before I got back to Church. I wish I could say that I was a transformed person that night on the spot. But this was the beginning. I was headed back along the road to my Father. During my journey back, I was checking the statistics for my website, and I saw that someone had linked an image from my website to a message board called Christian Forums. I followed the link and found that there was an Orthodox section on that forum. I spent a great deal of time reading things there, and learning things about my own faith I did not know. It helped to pull me along the road back to the Church even when I was tired and didn't want to keep walking. At Pascha of that year, I sat and watched a video of the Paschal Divine Liturgy that someone had linked, and cried that I could not be there.

It was not much later that I finally got a car again. The first opportunity I had I went back to Church, and I have been there as often as I could ever since. As if to welcome me back, I finally found my baptismal cross that had been missing for months if not more than a year the very day that I returned to Church for the first time.

Not long after returning to Church I was asked to start singing with the chanters again. I happily agreed because it is such a joy to me to sing in Church. A little while later I was asked to teach Sunday School. I was much more apprehensive about this since I didn't feel like I related well to 9th graders when I was in 9th grade, but they told me someone else would help me, and so I agreed, remembering my promise to be a servant. Last year I was asked to serve on Parish Council. This really frightened me because I had heard horror stories from my Dad over the years, but it was important to me to do what I was asked to do. I was nominated this year for Parish Council Chairman, and wanted so badly not to do the job that was set in front of me, but I know too well the many blessings God has given me, and so I accepted.

I am not a very good servant, and I don't know that I ever will be. But God accepted me back after I denied Him and sought to live my life without Him, and how can I ever repay Him for that? And He continues to bless me far more than I could ever deserve in this life. For every half-hearted attempt to serve Him and to serve others I have received more in return than I could have imagined.

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.

Putting My House in Order

This past week, Fr. John came over for my annual house blessing. The act of sanctifying the space in which I live nearly all of my life and dedicating it for God's work is a profound and wonderful act, and yet I dread it every year because it means that I feel like I have to clean my house.

I have not posted a blog entry in just over a month now. This blog was intended as a way for me to take some of what is in my head and expose it to the light of day, to share with others my struggles, my triumphs, my joys and my sorrows. I wanted it to be a means for me to spend more time outside my thoughts and to let others in. But in order to do so, I feel like I have some cleaning and rearranging to do. It turns out that this is harder for me to do than I had expected.

For the better part of my 32 years on this earth, the part that I can remember at least, My life has been lived inside my head. I let very few people in to look around, and I spend very little time outside of it. I keep people at arms length because it is easier than trying to fix what I don't like about myself, and easier than taking the time to clean up and set my life in order. The one thing that never occurred to me in all this time is that there are actually people that might want into my head even though the place is a mess.

The real reason I have not posted anything in a month is that I have been busy doing a little cleaning in my head and in my heart to welcome an amazing new friend in. And like any good cleaning, it kicks up a lot of dust, displaces a lot of things temporarily, and occasionally looks like more of a mess than before I started cleaning. My head has been more of a mess than usual, making it hard to write about my thoughts in a public forum, but it has been a mess in a way that hopefully will make it a more inviting place to be on a regular basis.

Just like my priest doesn't ask if my house will be clean before he schedules a house blessing, this person didn't ask me to clean house, but I feel compelled to put my house in order before I invite someone else in. I find my head a more peaceful place to be now that I have done some cleaning. I like opening the doors and letting the sunshine in. I like bringing this visitor in to have a look around. I like being able to share my life with another person who for some reason doesn't seem to mind that I haven't finished cleaning yet and probably never will. And when the dust settles, I am hopeful that I will start spending more time outside my mind, and be more willing to let others inside.

In God We Trust?

I got an email last night from a person at my Church suggesting that I go to some website and vote in a poll on whether "In God We Trust" should stay on our money. Presumably, the proper vote for an Orthodox Christian should be in favor of keeping that slogan. But the more I think about it, I don't understand why it is on our money.

My objection is not with the word "God" but with the implication that somehow we trust Him. Simply put, as a nation, we don't trust God. And our money is as good an example of this lack of trust as anything. We aren't happy just to be provided for, we look to "Get Rich Quick" schemes to make more, or we say to ourselves, "When I win the lottery...." Then when we get a little bit of money, we want to make that money work for us. So we invest it, we set some of it aside for our retirement, for a rainy day, for a nest egg. Then when we have some investment that is paying off, we defend that investment so that it keeps making money for us. We buy things on credit because we don't have enough money for what we want, but we are certain that we can make more later. We don't trust in God, we trust in money. There is no problem that can't be solved with just a little bit more money, right?

God asks us to rely on him. "Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you." Christ tells a parable of a man who has a very good harvest, and so he stockpiles it so that he can relax and enjoy himself and eat, drink, and be merry. That night he hears the words that all of us will hear one day, "This night your soul is required of you." We can choose to trust God, or we can choose to trust in money, but in the end, we will have what we chose. We will either have a relationship with God that extends into eternity, or we will have stuff that we can't take with us.

Our Christian struggle in this world is not to keep God in everyone's faces, but to keep God in our hearts. If we live a life of trust in God, others will see our example, and will flock to God in response. If, however, we push for our money to proclaim God and then deny God with our actions, we will be seen as hypocrites who want to force arbitrary beliefs on everyone else. I am not advocating for the removal of God from the public square, and I don't mind if our money keeps this slogan. I just hope that we can learn to live as people that trust in God, and not just fight about our right to say that we do.