proud

On a walk the other day I thought about why I like spring best. Spring comes slowly, from "nothing." From the brown, the gray and lifeless. It begins to peek through, to clarify the surroundings.

Not that there isn't beauty in empty, gnarled branches reaching skyward. Even without spring we're never left orphans.

Reality is interesting in its feast and famine aspects. Seasons aren't distributed in micro-balance, with a layer of winter, spring, summer, and fall for each day. Nope. We receive a time for this, a time for that. Now is the time when green begins to stir.

In other areas, those amid the world of humanity, now is a time in our land for posturing and speeches. We don't receive, politically-speaking, a daily balance of governance and changes in such. We get seasons. Some of us (probably most of us at different times) feel orphaned and almost never see beauty in these.

I can only imagine the courage needed to put oneself out there and run for office, seeking to serve our country's people. As with many other types of career, this one demands (so people say) a voice that is confident, fearless, proud. Let us have no peeking through the brambles in order to clarify.

I'm just not so sure being proud is the best way to serve the people.

Almost home the other day, I walked into a blustery moment. The wind grasped dead leaves that had clung all winter to trees along River Road, tossing them past my blowing hair and into swirls above. The rustle, the swish, the decaying leaf-scent, each of these spoke beauty. Even though they lacked a flash of color -- even while only the temperature hinted spring.

objections, observance, and odd things

This week I notice first flowers granting spots of color to winter. The fig out back has plumpy bits atop its branches, promising green.

A friend of Tim's and mine is staying in Victoria's old room. We talk about this being temporary, but I'm thinking this friend, this man our age, may need an extended visit. I noticed the day he moved in that he has changed (I hadn't spoken with him in person for at least a year). He obviously has developed some sort of condition -- maybe neurological. When I brought up with him my concern that he's unable to form sentences correctly, he said he hadn't noticed; then later he described his sense of blame toward someone else for these frequent occurrences. Today (nearly two weeks in) I'm recognizing his behavior in some ways as that of a child. I wish to continue treating him as the adult he still is (being functional in most things), but I guess I'm writing this for my "blog bottle" because I know my post won't trouble him in his present state. Rather than following blogs, he's trying to stay afloat (whether consciously or unconsciously).

I have to admit, I prefer his personality now. He has become meeker and milder than the man I knew. But sometimes I have to shadow him and make sure he's not throwing garbage in the recycling bin. Will Tim and I convince him to see a doctor? We shall see.

Early Thursday I drove to appointments in Portland (and Vancouver, the one across the Columbia from Portland). Kimi fed me scrambled eggs in her and James' lovely new apartment. We three could have visited all day, if not for her work shift starting at 11:00 and my need to make it home.

Now I can fully picture the apartments of both of my children and their dear ones. This is important, despite our easy creation and posting of pictures. (By the way, my camera's kind of wonky at present and so is not my constant companion. The second picture in this post was taken by someone from my church.)

Back in June, observing life at Victoria, Alex, and Edmund's home, I pondered the difference between seeing the whole of a place and trying to piece it together via images. Pictures help me learn about certain spaces, but to truly understand them, to learn of them in fullness, I must enter and inhabit them as I can. This concept applies to other realities -- you probably know where I'm taking this...

When I first came to Orthodox services, I carried ideas about this church's "space" from my snapshot-like experiences with it, and (especially) from my lifetime of experience in church. I had put everything together and was settled on what the Orthodox "denomination" must look like. Then, just as on my first night in Victoria and Alex's real place, I began discovering differences. I began to gain the true perspective of life here.

At my daughter's apartment it was simple. I contrasted within myself what I had expected with what I saw. Easy. At St. John the Wonderworker Serbian Orthodox Church I began -- rather than with eager expectations -- with a set of assumptions which were objections. I objected to everything. Very difficult.

And yet, today I'm happy I came into this church with my objections. While, as I said in my last post, I have recognized myself as the criticizer (not so good), I have also recognized my friends and family's objections -- which I naturally shared, coming from them -- as granting me critical thinking skills (better). I would, therefore, approach an aspect of Orthodox practice, such as the central example of believing communion to be truly the body and blood of Jesus, with healthy objections (wait a minute; don't you know this sounds crazy to Protestants?).

I took on the project of observing this practice of particular beliefs, without dismissing my objections, but at the same time granting the Orthodox the benefit of the doubt, as though reading them in a book. Suspending my disbelief on many subjects (and on a few subjects, I still do), I began to enter and inhabit their actual spaces, seeking to truly understand them.

There's too much to write on what I've found so far regarding communion. There have been many interesting moments. One morning the words of the apostle Paul bubbled up in a new way: Paul wrote about there being two kinds of human bodies: the natural and the spiritual. I'd never before considered "receiving" Jesus' flesh and blood to be partaking of the as-yet-unseen-by-most reality of himself as spiritual. And yet this is what Jesus himself spoke of on the subject in John 6. How could I have missed this? How could I have never imagined that maybe one can interact with spiritual flesh and spiritual blood in a very unusual way.

Well, of course it was because I hadn't yet dwelt in a place where they do business with the possibility, where they believe this is the understanding the first Christians inhabited as they studied and reflected on Christ's teachings.

I can't come close to saying I fully picture or understand the Orthodox Church yet, but living in it is becoming my life. Even when I'm startled by unexpected revelations: I haven't been speaking complete sentences; I'm in many ways a child; I need with all my being a hospital, a haven, and a home.

criticism and confession

One evening a couple weeks ago, Tim and I relaxed in front of a recent sci fi movie (which I won't name -- but spoiler alert for reading further). Afterward, Tim categorized it as belonging to a trend. This trend involves people seeking aliens, but the twist is the aliens are us. I noticed the same feature in the new X Files series (we just saw the first episode), only, the movie we'd watched made the idea positive, while in X Files the revelation of humanity carrying out alien activity was a dark development.

How like my pondering journey this is. As obsessed with truth-seeking as Agent Mulder, ready to lift off into space if ever I could (yet I'd likely lose my lunch in orbit), I've been alternately enraptured and enraged by recognizing we are not (nobody is) alone. Something views me from a different plane of existence. Is this dimension of which I'm so ignorant the natural world of plants, animals, earth/space/time? Is it the chambers of angels, the dominion of God? Perhaps somehow it's all of these. I wish to understand.

But I'm engaged here and now, in traffic and on the computer, with the broken blindness of mankind. From early childhood, my psychology has found a way to cope with other humans. I fear them picking, probing, bullying, ramming me -- and of course it's been only rarely that someone has physically or even verbally abused me, seeing as I grew up in a grove of kindness -- but those outside my shelter; well, I've experienced hurt myself, or I've watched those I love maimed by some of their thoughts and internalizations. These dark inner ideas mainly have come out as criticisms, words that are supposed to never hurt me but are only another form of hurled sticks and stones.

I learned a way to cope, analogous to Jack London's "law of the wild": Eat or be Eaten. I learned to criticize first. Mostly inside myself rather than out loud. But mostly all the time and with everyone.

This way of reacting to other human beings, this learned (and imitated) defense system, takes a lot of time and energy. A lot. First I must analyze the other person crossing my path and imagine what they've done, are doing, or may do that offends me. Then I have to deal with my whole self in reaction, often in justifying blame. This habitual process may be instantaneous or drawn out, but it's always draining.

No wonder I lose out on what I'd much rather be doing: studying reality; putting the evidence I've discovered/been given to the test; seeking to draw near to the Ultimate.

As clearly as I'm seeing my criticalness today, I have only begun to become aware of it due to an amazing gift: the Orthodox Christian mystery of confession. For nearly five years I've practiced speaking my failures aloud to God in the presence of an ordained witness, my priest. And it's really something.

Like the Old Testament practice of animal sacrifice which prefigured New Testament confession, I have "killed" the bull (I've first repented in my heart), and now I drag its carcass to offer up. Like the old sacrifices, this practice isn't for God's benefit; it's for mine. Over time in confession I hear myself repeating things, such as anger and more anger. I yelled...I swore...I criticized.

Five years in, I can finally see something new regarding my sudden choice to study the Orthodox (made during a prayer I breathed, repenting of -- what do you know -- anger, in which I was flabbergasted to recognize this church might contain something real). The new thing involves my grief over losing my friends, the people I shared ideas in common with for eleven years. I've felt like they rejected me -- not because anybody said anything to me about what I chose, but because I imagined their rejection, their criticism of me as a person.

But today I recognize the alien, the criticizer, and it is me. Before I became Orthodox, I thought critical things about people who, becoming Orthodox, deviated from my views. When I took that same turn, I was hurt by my assumption that others were thinking the same negative things about me. Whether anybody was or not doesn't matter now; I forgive them if they were. It's easier to forgive the complexities in another person than to be cleansed of self-inflicted pain, the soul-destroying type.

This pain is eased at last, though, by help (and, so help me, I believe this fully now) from another dimension: the creative space of goodness where hearts and minds are revealed; a Personal, rescuing reality comprised of love and freedom.