From Elation Regarding The Holy Orthodox Church

Christ is in our midst!

I just love that so much. I wish I began conversations like that all the time. What a way to set the tone for the interaction that is to be had. I wish that I had something eloquent or mind boggling to say about the Church, but I don't. I guess I'm just remembering lately why I was so drawn to Christ's Church in the first place, and I remain so continually grateful that he led me to her doors.

Today our parish celebrated its patronal feast - The Chains of St. Peter - and it was a joyous feast! The only thing that would have made it better, though, is if the St. Peter diaspora could have returned. Regardless, though, the beauty of the Church is simply overwhelming.

Man. I wish that I could say something intelligently right now.

I guess that what it comes down to is that I'm pumped that I get to make it to church twice this weekend and receive the holy Body and Blood of our Lord. What a blessing!

Perhaps this is one of the more sentimental posts I've made, but my gratitude and joy is all I feel that I can express right now.

I wish everyone could find such joy and encounter the Lord in such a steady, powerful way.

Lord, have mercy.

Glory to God in the highest!

On Magnanimity

My step-father told me today that he read that being magnanimous means pursuing a worthy goal as well as trying to become worthy of the goal. Poorly explained. It means that someone has courage to do something great and they themselves become worthy of doing the very thing worth doing. It sounds like a scary prospect to me. I guess because rather than just doing something awesome, the pressure to become awesome oneself adds a serious degree of self-worth to the equation. I’m using the word (and variations) “worth” a lot right now, but I guess that’s what it all comes back to - so maybe not totally a bad thing. I guess this is where I need to take a post and be almost entirely self-disclosing to actually work through my thoughts on the matter. It’s so easy for me to talk about things theoretically, but when it gets personal and specific, it’s also really easy for me to shut down, go elsewhere in my mind, talk about what a failure I am since I haven’t realized any of my potential, or any other thing that keeps me from doing work on the situation at hand. Embarrassing, really. So let’s get down to it.

It’s so easy for me to do things that I’m not afraid of doing and they’re most often things that I don’t believe I should be doing. It’s easy for me to not be afraid of smoking, for example, because it doesn’t say anything about my worth. It’s a bad habit and it makes me smell bad (well, did), but there’s nothing personal about it. It’s just a habit. The idea of being a teacher, a counsellor, a director, a pastor - whatever - terrifies me because there is a matter of worth in each of those things for me. Have I instructed well? Have I gotten through this person’s tough exterior so we can do that inner work necessary to make sure that they become the person they are meant to be? Were my actors good enough? Did I save my congregation? Ugh. So many ugly questions and doubts and fears come along with doing something that, to me, is worth doing. I hate waiting tables - fact - but it’s impersonal and without risk. Even though much of me dies inside every time I step foot inside a restaurant in a uniform, I keep going because I can still walk away from the job and, deluded, tell myself I’m a pretty worthy and alright person. With the constant surrender to fear and avoidance of worthiness, I doom myself to a worthless occupation because I have not pursued my vocation - not that waiting tables is a worthless occupation, some people are meant to be waiters and get fabulous meaning out of it and are truly magnanimous.

We’ve all been told that a vocation is “a calling” - what we were meant for. Some of us are less afraid of this word than others, and those are the people the I want to be friends with. Well, I like you people who are afraid, too, so I’ll take you as friends as well. Come to think of it - let’s just all get along, yeah?

I digress.

We all have a calling to some thing or another. I am afraid of mine. It is obvious to me that my vocation is towards something that involves people. Specifically, I believe that I am meant to encourage them towards magnanimity themselves. I don’t know that I have any sort of prophetical gifting, but I do think that I understand people really well and, by God’s grace and gifting, am able to speak into their lives offering the encouragement that they need. When I don’t depend on him for this guidance, however, I often give terrible advice that can lead people into the complete opposite of what they need to do/hear. That possibility, however, cannot be what keeps me from pursuing what I believe I was intended for. I was not meant to sit in my room and write until my hands fall off. I was not put on earth to sit in a lab and research the mutation of red blood cells and see if we can figure out exactly just how we’re to unmutate them, now. I was put here to love you in, probably, a pretty annoying way. You know what, though? I’m okay with that, more and more.

While I think my operative functionality was “Be liked,” it is slowly morphing into “See, love, and help others.” I think these things have the same basic drive; the problem is one is totally inwardly serving and the other is what God intended for my extraordinarily deep-seated need to be a part of people’s lives. And yes, I do think it’s a need of mine. I need to be involved with people. I need to know what makes them who they are and what they're built for. Then, I need to attach myself to whatever those things are and do all I can to build them up even more and then send them out.

I have spent a lot of time in the spotlight as a friend and an actor, and though I love being in the spotlight, my deeper desire is to push others into self-realization - to encourage them to become the people that they truly are to the fullness of themselves in the grace of God. My patron saint, Andrew the First-Called, did this very thing. He was the first to follow Jesus, but he was not the one that Christ established as the Rock of the Church. It was his brother, Peter, whom Andrew had led to the Lord, that was chosen for this. Andrew pushed Peter into a deeper relationship with God, and by that encouragement from his younger brother, Peter became the “chief among the apostles.” Amazing. Also, this is not to mention that Andrew’s very name means, “manhood; warrior; valor; courage” - magnanimity, dare I say?

What a beautiful calling, then! I wish so badly that I could perfectly follow this bright, holy man’s example and walk fully in the glorious countenance of the Lord, encouraging my brothers to actualize their respective callings. I want to know others so I can learn how to encourage them. It’s my instinct and I love that about myself. I guess the trick, now, is learning how I can hone that skill, embrace that desire, and actually do something about it.

I guess I’ll end with this prayer:

“O glorious St. Andrew, you were the first to recognize and follow the Lamb of God. With your friend, St. John, you remained with Jesus for that first day, for your entire life, and now throughout eternity. As you led your brother, St. Peter, to Christ and many others after him, draw us also to Him. Teach us to lead others to Christ solely out of love for Him and dedication in His service. Help us to learn the lesson of the Cross and to carry our daily crosses without complaint so that they may carry us to Jesus. Amen.”

Amen.

On Taking Risks

There is a certain comfort in not really amounting to anything. I have been a server for the last four years. For a year and half, it is pretty much the only thing that I have been. Except for recently, I completely fell off the map as an writer, a reader, a thinker, and certainly as an actor. As I have continued to sit in the familiarity of my own life, a growing dissatisfaction has begun to rear it’s head. I’m pretty sure that the source of this self-disappointment comes from knowing that I am capable of so much more than what I have been doing and have done so far. Sometimes, the possibility or potentiality of my skills and self almost seem to suffice for accomplishment, but as I get older and grow more dissatisfied and disillusioned with the life that I have established for myself so far, I become less content with not taking risks.

Sure, I could wait tables forever. I know how to do it. I’m good at it. But this is not what my gifts are for. I get by at doing it with relative ease, but remain miserable. My unrealized potential tells me that I’m gifted enough to do anything I would want to do (not that I could do anything - but anything that I desire to do I believe I’m equipped for), yet the longer I stay dormant, the less energy I have to put myself out there and try to find something I believe in doing.

It’s this damn matter of the learning curve that has got me sitting on my ass. My perfectionism astounds me. With my overdeveloped intuition, I have gotten used to understanding things readily, but this normal blessing has become a curse for me. It’s like if I can’t get it right immediately, it’s not a problem with me, it’s a problem with the thing - it’s un-gettable - so I figure, “Screw it. I’ll try something else.” When I examine my life over the last 23 years, I find that most of my frustration and the things that have led me to give up on something has stemmed from this perfectionistic pessimism. Of course, when I was younger, even this perfectionism led me to try different things. I couldn’t get the piano right away, so I started playing guitar. Not only have I learned to quit things once they prove difficult, but I’ve also picked up the nasty habit of not trying anything at all lest I should have to try at something that doesn’t come readily to me. “When the going gets tough, Christian gets gone.”

It’s as if each new experience - potential risk, let’s say - feels like jumping off the high-dive. I stand at the edge of the board, looking at the water below, seemingly a mile away. Sadly, this is as far as I get to the act of jumping. And this is what everyday feels like to me. I’m so tired of standing at the edge of the board, and the longer I stand here and tell myself that it is only my fear that makes the dive seem so perilous, I start to believe that, in reality, the fall is no more than 6 or 7 inches to the water, and I’m not on the high-dive at all. It's that first jump that is the scary one. It's before the leap that I'm in trouble. But what about afterwards?

There may be some residual fear on the other side of finally taking the jump, but the experience has also taught me that it's not really that bad. I remember one time when I actually was jumping from a high point. The cliff was forty or fifty feet high, it took every ounce of courage that I had to throw myself off the edge, trusting I wouldn't be smashed against the water below - an irrational fear, but a fear nonetheless. I jumped. I survived. The thrill was indescribable. Of course, I climbed back up the cliff to get ready to jump, charged with the energy of the first success. When I got to the top, I was reminded of how scary the leap was initially, but quickly, I was able to convince myself that it hadn't been too bad the first time, and that was enough for me to do it again. I guess the point is that while it's going to be scary every time, and my feet may sting more sometimes than at others, the jump is still worth taking. This is the thing that makes life worth living. If I had stood at the cliff for too long, I never would have jumped, and I either would have been stuck up there forever, or had to climb down (always harder than climbing up).

When we get to the place in life where we see that we need to take a leap, it is important to not let the terror take over and cloud our judgment of the situation too much. It's right that it should be terrifying and that we should be anxious about throwing ourselves into some sort of oblivion, subjecting ourselves to the indifferent law of gravity, however, this fear cannot get the last word. It is what leads to deadly inertia.

The longer we, I, stand atop the cliff looking at the water, the harder it's going to be jump.

Why wait?