foreigners

...the fig tree:When its branch has already become tender, and puts forth leaves, you know that summer is near.

1. anticipating my own adventure

As I'm sure I've said before, my longing for summer makes spring my favorite season. Drippy though Oregon Aprils are, they offer previews of extended daylight, aromatic flora, and unencumbered shady afternoons in a lawn chair reading. (I can dream, anyway, about time for books in the backyard--we'll see if this year allows for such things.)

What I'm mostly looking forward to right now is a June trip to New York to visit Victoria, Alex, and Edmund (who's almost two). I'm a little nervous about being such a foreigner to my grandson. He hugged me as we said goodbye last August, but for him that was eons ago.

Lately I ponder, as well, the foreignness between people living together. Tim and I have a lot in common, but we are also exceedingly different. My bent for anticipation and savoring often bumps into Tim, who by comparison charges past me, plugging in and unplugging the modules of his existence.

If we were traveling together this summer there would be many short trips to plan and accomplish during the week in and near NYC. One reason Tim isn't going is the funds don't exist for us to do things. All I can expect is to hang out with people, which is precisely my desire. To enter into their world, take each moment as it happens. Of course I'll be learning Victoria and Alex's schedule and doing things with them, like going to their church, maybe grocery shopping, folding laundry. I expect I will babysit a time or two.

Tim hard at work on a security light for a house our church owns.

There isn't a thing wrong with Tim's way, his event supervision. If, for example, we both were in New York, planning to visit a museum, and Victoria and Alex's refrigerator broke, Tim would alter the schedule, visit parts stores, make the repairs. My husband takes life in at a glance, understanding physical needs and caring for people. I, on the other hand, will be clueless if anything breaks down, unable to diagnose. I can hold a toddler's hand for a long walk, but I can't process the unexpected until long afterward.

2. this faith adventure, separately together

It was Tim who first recognized, when we went with Victoria to her Orthodox church, that here existed something he as a believer had been seeking his whole life. He proceeded to explore, to learn, to listen, and to probe. There was no holding back on his part and no restraining him. His launch into the foreign wasn't because it was different, but rather because he saw something compelling, and he had to know more. This is my husband.

Back then I, of course, thought Tim was seeing things. He after all has been mistaken more than once. I've grudgingly let TV series run there courses that he enjoyed and I loathed. These days radio talk shows he listens to for hours drive me batty. Not that I can't see value there somewhere, but for me the problems outweigh any goodness.

Tim and I traveled to this Orthodox "country" from very different points of origin. For me things started with a slow examination, followed by an extended entering in, absorbing, until finally recognition has dawned, and it continues to grow, to build.

On a spring morning after Matins.

I follow Tim inside the church's back door--he has his key out, ready, holding it briefly til I catch up, then he's off to lower bell ropes, check the service books, turn on the speaker system he installed. I wander inside more slowly, pausing to inhale, to observe anew.

My mind and heart linger over scripture passages, people, and the teaching woven throughout the prayers and services. There is a single, momentous thing pervading all aspects of this life that at first seemed so foreign. It is that single thing to which we each draw near, differently, missing notes and fumbling something, somehow every time. But toward each of us love's welcome keeps shining. Even from the demeanors of other foreign bodies rotating fumblingly with us, experiencing another spring.

Every facet rings true to the one thing, exuding freedom with the love. Though it can be rejected, this is a rescue story. Every aspect of what we travel in and to together in its own way glimmers, like the depths of Tim's gaze, like a blessing.

light, sound, and home

Optina Monastery today. Photo by ncosmin at Trek Earth.

I've been reading the life of Elder Nektary, who spent most of his days in the Russian monastery of Optina, until the communists closed his home. This quiet, faithful man of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appreciated art and literature. Some ponderings of his got my attention:

There exist sound and light. An artist is someone who is sensitive to these sounds and lights which others are unable to perceive. He takes them and puts them on canvas and on paper. They become colors, notes, and words. It's as though the sounds and lights have dissolved.

A book or a painting--these are the tombs of light and sound. A reader or viewer comes, and, if he is able to creatively apprehend or read, a "resurrection" of meaning takes place. And then the circle of art is completed. Light flashes in the soul of the viewer or reader, and his hearing becomes awakened to sound. For this reason an artist or poet has no particular cause for pride. He's only doing his share of the work. In vain do they suppose themselves to be the creators of their works. There is one Creator, and man only dissolves the words and images of the Creator and then revives them by the power of the spirit given by Him.

 Elder Nektary also recognized the need for writers to consider every word:

Before beginning to write, dip the pen into the inkwell seven times.

Sometimes I think I'll spend my whole life dipping my pen...

The memoir project I started last fall has reached three chapters and is being read by several friends. My daughter was the first to comment on what I'm doing. Victoria critiques well; she consistently and kindly tells me what she really thinks. She likes the third chapter. Not that she doesn't like the first two, but by the third she's on board with where I'm heading and thinks I'm doing all right. This is helpful.

Noting her comments, I guess my other volunteer readers are finding it a challenge to get into the work. If light and sound have been resurrected for them, I've yet to hear it. So it may well be I've only got one actual chapter done--the third may become the first. I'm already beginning to think through how to make changes. Part of the toil and joy of writing, of course, is solving problems.

Thankfully, nobody's kicking me out of house and home anytime soon, as far as I know.

the Paschal crescendo

Though I've spent uncounted hours the last couple months in hospital rooms, emergency departments, and doctors' offices, I have also lived a lot (as has been true the past four years) at church. Now I'm experiencing my fifth Paschal feast in Orthodox Christianity. Here, "Pascha" (which is a translation of "Passover," for the Orthodox the Passover of Christ) often falls on a different Sunday than Western Easter. Calendar changes in history are responsible for the discrepancy, but thanks to both celebrations' connection with the lunar cycle, they can fall on the same day.

This past Sunday I joined the hike up Spencer Butte, in south Eugene, to watch our Pascha sun rise. This was after our celebratory service, which began at 11:30 Saturday night and ended between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. I was, literally, the last one of the group boosted up the butte. I couldn't pull myself any higher on the boulders for the pic, below, taken by a friendly hiker from another group.

I was all in. But my smile was genuine. I'm grateful to have participated as much as I've been able to this year. This participation--what it consists of--is quite difficult to capture and express. Especially for someone who, up until four years ago, thought following a faith interpretation rooted in creative human ideas and rationality was as good as it gets on this boulder-strewn globe.

(I now appreciate more deeply the apostle Nathaniel's first reaction to being told by Philip that a man called Jesus was the longed-for Jewish Messiah. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" Nathaniel asked, to which his friend responded, "Come and see.")

Last Pascha (which coincided with Western Easter) I didn't hike but remained more rational, crawling into bed before dawn and dozing. My mind found words of expression, though, which kept me awake enough to record them in my notebook:

"Pascha," I wrote, "is entering into the crescendo of what is lived and expressed every month, week, and day of the year in the [Orthodox] Church.

"The elements of Pascha are always present: the aspects/tools/expressions of life in Christ (which is life "hidden" with Christ in God). No matter how fervently the bells ring, no matter how brightly the candles glow, this is a hidden life. It cannot be broadcast; it is not desired by the masses, or even by any group of people.

"It is personal. Yet it is community in a profound sense, one into which each member is born rather than initiated, having no sense beforehand of what will come, no preconceptions (at least, none that are accurate). Like siblings, the family members make room for each new child. As in any family, nothing is executed with perfection; there are many growing pains.

"Pascha, the Resurrection of Christ, is always present, ever central. Life in this household (or, if you prefer, the voyage on this ship, the journey along this path) is the memorial to Christ until He appears, until He comes. It is what continually goes on. It is the food and drink, the exercise, the therapy, the struggle, the way."

pondered

Sunrise over the Three Sisters, Oregon, on April 12 (Orthodox Easter) from Spencer Butte, Eugene

My break from blogging and social networks took an unexpected turn when my dad underwent open heart surgery February 27. But the timing was good. Now Dad travels new roads of healing and hurting and recovery and decline.

How fragile the body which ages. And yet also how strong. A lot of years turn beneath the atmosphere, amid the stress, engaged with tragedy and with beauty. These decades of inhaling sweet breezes, for those of us who receive decades, are long but limited. Every heartbeat is another tiny descent, another spending of the allotment. Ah, glorious transaction.

Green-yellow "chicklets" on the front maple have arrived again. Today crimson leaf-babies shine in the rain. Around the tree's girth lie piles of old gray ones, their bodies once having ridden high, now composting below, nourishing fruit and flower.

Though so familiar, each fresh leaf is unique, distinct; only the process repeats itself. In nature, in creation, there are no reused entities. "My" maple will someday join its leaves in repose, and there won't be a copy saved, but the essence of treeness will continue.

Yet what is man? In "his" essence, in humanity, a unique twig and leafkin comes to be, to exist and to flower, and sometimes to undergo surgery. There is more in each human being than meets the eye. More, I believe, than sense can apprehend, and so the day of reposing in "sleep" will have more to it, as well. It's unknowable right now, a mystery past understanding, but it awaits this withering leaf. I tend to be one pondering such things.