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?

On Making Excuses

I have made excuses for so long and for so many things that I no longer know when I am telling the truth. I can't believe the degree to which I am so neurotic. It's compulsive. For every situation that I am presented with in life I offer any number of excuses to dodge telling the whole truth. It's not that I necessarily outright tell lies or anything like that, but I remain defensive in my telling of the truth - I just try to make sure that I still look good when we come out on the other side. 

I'm still trying to figure out what exactly causes this compulsion to defend myself at every turn. It's funny how blind I was (and probably still am) to my own defensiveness. One of the girls I dated in college told me that her mother thought I was defensive, to which I responded, "I'm not defensive!" Case and point. Judgment: defensive. At the time, though, I really didn't think that I was defensive. I had prided myself on being open and generous with myself, and I didn't understand how anyone could fail to see that in me. I think to some extent, I do share a level of openness with friends who are close to me and who I believe will accept me.

And I think that this is the main problem that I run into in a lot of my relationships, even (and perhaps, especially) with my parents. I don't doubt that people will love me. I do, however, doubt that they will accept me. This fear is most likely based in the fact that I have a hard time accepting myself. The amount of the day that I tell myself that I should be doing things differently, I should be more successful, I should be thinner, I shouldn't be living at home, or any other self-defeating and self-judgmental thing I can think of is truly appalling. It's draining to be walking around with a sign over my head that is a giant "F." And to make things worse, no one is putting it there but me. I ran into some financial problems. I am twenty-three and desiring to get things right. I am applying to grad school. All in all, I'm doing things pretty well, but for some reason, I can't seem to shake the negative self-talk nor can I stop beating up myself whenever the mood strikes.

With my counselor's help, I have realized that my daddy-scarring affects me in ways that I'm not even aware of. For the most part, I pretty much considered my relationship with my dad to be a done deal - we don't talk, and I'm okay with that. Those things are true, still, though, regardless of the ways that he has and does affect me in every relationship. For the 16 years I was in relationship with my dad, he controlled me through fear of withholding. I was afraid that if I didn't perform well enough or didn't measure up to what he wanted me to be that he would stop loving me. This was the opposite of what he said was true - that I could never do anything that would keep him from loving me - and I don't think it was necessarily a lie, even still. The truth, however, of what I was learning was "Fall in, or get left." When I was 16, he and I had a final falling out where I told him exactly what I thought about the way he ran his house and the way he treated his wife, after which, he threw me out of the house and I have only spoken to him a handful of times since, usually just to wish a happy birthday or something like that.

I guess that this comprises part of the background as to why I do what I do, and I suggest, why a lot of us make excuses, get defensive, etc. I don't mean that it's because we've had dads (or moms, even) who leave or who mind-play us (though, we have all been mind-played by our parents at some time or another), but because from some deep place within us, we are afraid that once the true "me" is exposed, the true "me" is known, it isn't going to measure up and that it's going to get left. Any excuse that I make, I think, comes from a place of trying to advocate for myself wrongly, saying, "No, see, but I am smart enough," "I am diligent enough," "I'm not as lazy as all that because look what else I can do. Just don't leave me." Excuses keep others at an arm's distance, keeping them from getting to know the real person behind the excuse. We are all desperate to be loved and many are afraid of being known fully, because this vulnerability leaves us susceptible to wounds or abandonment. Because of this crippling fear (there I go again with fear), I am still not ever known, not even by myself, because the excuses that I make every moment of my life become one with me, so much so that I can never get beyond making excuses and just be honest.

As with anything, excuses can rule your life. They rule mine. It is my hope, though, that as I continue to grow and learn that I don't always have to defend my life, but rather, I need to live it and let it be a testimony to who am whether people find that person acceptable or not. My identity is in Christ alone and he is my acceptance. If I constantly try to make a name for myself by offering reasons why I did this, and why I did that, I will only become more and more of a liar, and that's the truth about that.

On Storytelling

I remember that when I was a young child, I would always ask my mom if she would tell me a story before I fell asleep. Without fail: "Mommy, will you tell me a story?" She wouldn't always comply, of course, at least not readily. Sometimes she would just mumble a lot of words really quickly as if she were telling a story at hyper speed and then add, "The end." This isn't to say, though, that my mom failed as a storyteller or a tucker-in, because I also remember that she read The Horse and His Boy to me, each time substituting my name for Shasta's as if it were my story that she were reading. I must have been four or five when she did this, and it still gets me. I think that it was this gracious act that instilled in me the idea that I was important enough to have a story written about me. I learned that stories are not just fictitious accounts of things that we wish were, nor are they a playground for some lesson about morality. The thing that makes stories important is that we live them. We are stories.

While in someway, I think I did learn to value my story above all others' (even if at times I find it pointless, hopeless, or altogether uninteresting), I did, also, begin to appreciate the stories of others, even the ones that I couldn't articulate as readily. This, perhaps, is the constant struggle of the storyteller - to consider all stories equally important. While we may find that the words of the story come to us a lot easier in some cases, and perhaps more eloquently as well, we can't dismiss the importance or latent intricacy of those that don't. Because I think that the more storytelling becomes an active part of our lives, the more we will realize that when we tell someone else's story, we are telling our own story as well. So great is the connection of people to one another.

One of my friends told me recently that her priest, when explaining what it means to "Love your neighbor as yourself," said that often the translation is lost, and what actually is written is along the lines of, "Love your neighbor who is yourself." This is the dramatic beauty of storytelling. As we learn to embrace and see the stories of others, we begin to understand ourselves more fully because we become reconciled to parts of ourselves that perhaps we couldn't otherwise. If we look at a murderer and only get that far, we have failed to truly hear his story. If we hear his story, we see that we too are murderers, we just haven't found the motivation yet (luckily). A great disservice is done to ourselves and others when we think of our stories as isolated. Life is not just a random, individual account of absurd events that occur in some sequence. Life is the coming together of all people who have shared existence until and including now, and how we respond to the world that surrounds us and how we try to change it in some way.

I mean it this way; if I were to suddenly break this computer over my knee, besides being a stupid impulse and pretty pointless, it would change the world forever. It wouldn't save or ruin the world, but it would change it nonetheless. There is one less functional computer in the world thanks to my work. That's something different and irreversible. That event has happened and will, for the rest of my life, be etched on the script of history. It has, in someway, changed the human experience forever. 

Not to draw too heavily on Dostoevsky's writings all the time, but I think he is right on when he writes, "All is like an ocean, all flows and is contiguous, and if you touch it in one place it will reverberate at the other end of the world." This is truly a beautiful and keen observation, and must remain in the heart of the storyteller, for the storyteller's calling is one of love. Whether they accept that calling or not, however, is up to them. We may either learn to love through these stories, or reject that calling and fall simply into entertainment or even cynicism. 

Storytelling is a lofty calling. It is a humble vocation, but a powerful thing. It unifies us. It brings people together and ultimately teaches us what it means to be human, hopefully with the end of learning to love our neighbor who is ourself. 

I Made One Choice

I'm applying to Northwestern University.

On Becoming Oneself and the Necessity of Honesty

We all lie. We lie to others. We lie to God. We certainly lie to ourselves. But what's behind this? I have been pondering the importance of being honest with oneself lately and how that relates to the "self" one presents in everyday life. We exist always between the reality of our lives and some fabrication that insists "everything is just fine." At least, I know I do. In The Brothers Karamazov, the elder Zosima reminds papa Karamazov to quit lying to himself, as if this were the source of the man's pain and dissatisfaction with himself and his life. I don't really even know what this means - do not lie to yourself - though I'm sure I have done it just about every day of my life. I hate the confidence with which I can say that. I am a liar, plain and simple. How, then, does one fix this? Am I, are we, just destined to live forever in this dishonest and disconnected manner? What keeps us in this paralyzing cycle of continually lying to ourselves and those around us? 

Perhaps we are afraid that we will not be loved. This itself is a dilemma because if we are hiding our true selves in order to maintain some image of a healthy, functional, non-real person, we still fail to be loved. We hide behind the mask of this non-self and become so uncomfortable with the thought of the face behind the mask encountering the world, that we let few get a glimpse of the real us. More often than not, unsurprisingly, the face behind the mask isn't all too shocking. It's broken, yes, but indisputably lovable. Through habit, however, we remain behind the mask, and it always gets more difficult to let our guard fall from our faces. It really is sad.

If, however, we could begin this process of being honest to ourselves, we might begin to see that there is hope for us as individuals and as a world. I know that I can often get into a groove of thinking about how messy I am and how no one would want to associate with me and blah blah blah, out come all the lies that I have told myself for twenty-three years. Enough is enough. Yes, I am messy. No, my mess is not scary. It is something to come to vis a vis, and not run away from thinking that the real me has nothing to offer. And this is what the heart of existence is - to integrate who we are called to be with who we truly are, not with who we think is the winning face of ourselves, our false selves. This fear of not being loved, living in shame of the things we have done and the person we've become, is crippling. It is bound to lead to a long, lonely, loveless life. How can we have company or love if those around us are constantly interacting with someone, some face, that doesn't really exist?

All we want is for people to be honest with us about who they are, and that is really all others want from us. People aren't nearly as interested in our lies as we think they are. I know I'm not, so I guess I can only assume that others aren't. But if they truly aren't (as I suspect), then why continue this charade? I ask myself this question as much as I ask anybody else. Why do we keep up this masquerade? My true desire is to be seen for who I really am. What a freeing life that would be.

Christians, especially, should be on this never-ending quest to become their true selves. Of course, we've got an upper hand on the whole ordeal. The only key to healing is a relationship of love with God. It is only his love that can work this out in us. We must, however, be receptive to that love. We must be willing for this integrating, painful work to be done. I say painful because when we realize and see through the lies that we have told ourselves for years and years, it is not going to be a pretty picture. There is some serious work to be done in tandem with the Lord, but it is all necessary work. And to kick it all off, we need to get real. We need to stop lying to ourselves and know that we are loved. Christ, who knows our deepest darkest secrets, who knows our true identity, who knows us for who we really are, loves us and by that we are made lovable. Accepting that truth, believing it is what prepares us for the hard work of letting false faces fade and enables us to live in truth.