The Life of a Country Priest

I’ve been spending the last week with a friend of mine on a farm in rural Wisconsin. I never realized how beautiful Wisconsin is – I could be in upstate New York right now, with the rolling, wooded hills and valleys and the little, oddly-named hamlets nestled among the trees. Right now I am sitting in a room in their rambling farmhouse. Out my window I can see the pasture where their cow is grazing; in front of the house is a riot of flowers and greenery bordering the path that leads to the chapel and the barn.

My friend is a reader (a man or a woman who knows the tones and rubrics of Orthodox liturgical services; necessary for an Orthodox service), and his dad is an Orthodox priest who runs a small mission church built on his property. Every evening the family sings Vespers together in the chapel, and on Saturday and Sunday their few parishioners come     to worship with them. After Liturgy on Sunday, everyone walks up the path to the kitchen, where they sit down to a meal together and listen to a spiritual reading. The congregation has always been small, but it is smaller than it has been in past years, mainly because most of Father and Matushka’s nine children (two of them adopted) have moved away and started families of their own, although all of them have remained faithful (which is no small feat in itself).

In addition to being a priest, Father has worked in a local agricultural factory for the past 22 years in order to support his family. This is very common for convert Orthodox priests in America: their congregations often cannot support them and they take day jobs to survive. Most of the priests that I know do not receive any sort of salary for their ministry. To my surprise, Father also told me that he is an author in his free moments. Any spare moment that comes his way he devotes to the stories that are constantly shaping in his mind.

I write of this because, as a convert to Orthodoxy from a secular background, the sort of life I have been living for the last week seems very idyllic and beautiful. To me, romantic that I am, this humble priest and his Matushka are a brilliant success, a poke in the eye of the arrogant world which demands our conformity to the shiny happy pre-packaged life we see all around us. Here on this farm I see people who are truly happy despite the fact that they have stress and heartache in their lives, who don’t seem to notice how very little they have or how untidy their house is, who must scrape and save to make ends meet, but who are honestly glad to share what they have with whoever puts their head in the door, without pretense or excuse.

So it was significant for me when, two days ago, as Father and I sat at the table talking, he says that he feels like  a failure. “Twenty-two years I’ve been working in that factory,” he said. “That’s what I am, a factory worker. That’s not what I thought I’d be.”

Now I know that Father knows, as any true Christian knows, that here we have no continuing city, that it is our faithfulness to God which defines and guides our lives, in defiance of the world’s expectations. I know that he knows this. And I know too that he must see how truly blessed is his life here, on this little patch of land in the Wisconsin hills, serving his God and raising his children. But that doesn’t change the fact that he was glad to hear me say so. It was striking for me, a young husband and father who wants to raise his family in the faith, to hear this venerable priest who has done just that wonder if he had accomplished anything in his life. How strange that this man and his wife, who by any standard that I value have succeeded abundantly, might wonder whether they had accomplished anything.

I have no immediate conclusion to draw from this, save one. All of us think that we are failures sometimes. And sometimes, or in some ways, perhaps we are. But we often lose sight of the real goodness and beauty that surrounds us and in some way depends on us.

I know that Father does not really think his life a failure. It hurt my heart to hear him even express the thought.  But it did offer me great comfort somehow.

Truly, a broken and contrite heart He will not despise.

I spoke with a friend of mine today who took issue with something I had touched upon in my last post. I remarked that I was deeply cynical about politics, especially on anything more than a local level, as being almost totally irrelevant to my life. My friend told me that she disagreed with that position, and that she believed that there were two extremes: there was the sophisticated news-junkie who knows all the nuances in politics but never talks to his neighbor, and who scorns the bumpkins out there in fly-over country, and there is the obstinately ignorant provinical, self-righteously suspicious of everything out there in the Big Bad World. She believes that there is a healthy balance between the two, and that is what we should be shooting for.

I think that there’s a fair point to be made here, one that Aristotle so wisely made many years ago: everything in moderation. And I hope that I am no snarling militia man railing against the ‘guvment. I am sensible of the liberties that I enjoy, and often take for granted. There are many countries on the Earth where I would not be allowed to blog about my faith in Christ, let alone have a say in how my government is run. I know a woman from Poland who came to the States twenty years ago with a suitcase, two small children, and $25 in her pocket. Although she was a university lecturer in Poland, she left during perestroika, and when she arrived she didn’t know more than a few words of English. Today, she teaches at Purdue University and her two children are equally successful. That is the hope of America.

But nonetheless, I am just not that into politics. I used to be. There was a time when I worked for the Gore campaign – as much as a lazy, college-age pot-smoker could be said to work for the Gore campaign, which is very little in the way of actual work, the point being that I cared passionately for certain issues, in my articulate couch-potato way. A bit later on, I touted myself as a proud neo-conservative, and read The Weekly Standard and National Review Online and eagerly sought out those for whom those publications were anathema.

But anymore, I find the talking-heads boring. Maybe it was the four-years I spent in an Orthodox Christian commune in Alaska. Maybe it was the grand entry of Sarah Palin onto our great national stage, whatever the reason, I stand by my former statement – the plaudits on the Capitol just don’t figure in any significant way in my day-to-day life. I think that the obvious lack of change, despite the grandiose promises of our beloved leaders, has something to do with it. If I have learned nothing about politics in the last ten years, it’s that money talks, and we have it on good authority that the love of money is the root of all evil. The fact that Wall Street has bilked the average American of several billion dollars, throwing millions of hard-working Americans into severe economic distress; the fact that the Food and Drug Administration will do next to nothing to promote real health in our nation’s food supply, but will zealously defend the corporate agenda of the behemoths who are ruining our environment and our communities; these things also factor into my apathy.

I suppose that I should clarify my position by stating that I am, after all, intensely interested in politics. But only if by that one means the public life of our community. But a community must necessarily be made of persons, and it must be on a personal level that we conduct our politics. The Greeks believed that the polis must be only large enough for a man to walk across it in a day. It is only by knowing one’s neighbors, it is only by sharing the passing joys, sorrows, and labors of our fellow men, that we will actually draw closer together as human beings. I have nothing in common with Sarah Palin, or Donald Trump. I should not like to know them personally. I feel that I am entitled to make that judgment insofar as they duplicitously present themselves as persons who care about me, when in fact their actions indicate that they only care for themselves. I feel that we have lost any meaningful sense of community in America today, and what we have been given in its stead is hype and advertisements.

What I am interested in is persons. I am interested in knowing the man who grows my food, or at least in knowing where he grows it and in knowing that he lives there. I am interested in knowing what my neighbors believe and what they teach their children, and trusting that he will watch out for my kids as I would watch out for his.

This sounds idyllic moonshine, but I believe it’s doable. We just need to work a little harder to be human.

My next post will be some of my thoughts as to how we can go about doing that.

Places I’ve been

 I remember a time, when the world was young and full of possibility (or maybe when I was young and full of something else), when I thought that big things were important. I am an Indiana boy, and I come from an Indiana town (cue “Last Dance with Mary Jane”) where it seemed like nothing much of importance ever happened, unless you happened to think that the 4-H exhibitions at the County Fair were major events. I can remember that I couldn’t wait to get out of my small town, into the wide world of “culture.”
“Culture” was, for me, the stuff that was done in New York and other important places, like, say, London or Paris, or any other place that was talked about in The Economist. Simply being in one of those fabulous places – or even simply reading The Economist – was in itself a cut far above the humdrum fare of my bumpkin Hometown, Indiana. (Best of all was when I would read The Economist while riding the metro in Paris during my study abroad. If I had ever actually earned any money prior to that point, I would have made a go at retiring, as there was almost no topping that.)

I think it likely at this point that I am revealing more about my own particular brand of snobbish, pseudo-sophisticated immaturity then perhaps I bargained for, but so much the better, a little unforeseen humiliation will only serve to strengthen my current moral superiority.

But for all my youthful idiosyncracy, there were many like me. Most of my friends, especially in college, held their Midwestern communities in low regard, and most of them aspired to live and work in Important Places, or at least to be seen in their vicinity. For those of us that were not just posers and actually followed the news - we were, alas, a smaller crowd than one might think – we tended to focus on national or international events and personalities while remaining carelessly ignorant of even the most basic local information. I suspect that this is still the case on many college campuses. 

I bring this up because of the curious and amusing fact that, in the wisdom of my years, my position on the matter has completely changed.

Now, I find that I have to overcome something inside myself to avoid almost total cynicism for what is served up in national and international media. I remain more than peripherally aware of the “big” news – my years of shameless gorging have done at least that for me - but I find that I cannot quite believe that it is actually at all relevant to what I now know to be important. And what I know to be important is human beings. They’re really quite extraordinary, and they’re all around me, almost all the time.

And God is important – even more important than human beings, but that’s kind of obvious since He was one, and He told us all this. And – inextricably intertwined with all of the above -even I am important.

But I’m kind of getting ahead of myself.

I think the best way to describe the change that has happened to my perspective is that I have begun to pay attention to the life I’m actually living, as opposed to the life that I would like to show everybody that I’m living. And that means that I need to take real care for the people that I live with, in addition to having a care for myself. Having a care for…that’s a signficant phrase. I sort of get the feeling that, during those years when I wished that I lived in Paris, or New York, when I assiduously followed the important headlines, et cetera et cetera ad nauseaum, that I was cultivating a persona, an image, a mask, because I didn’t have a care for…myself.

But I was never taught how to do that. I was never taught that I was infinitely beloved, that I was imagined in every detail before the stars hung burning in the sky. I was never taught that to tell the truth - especially when it might do your future chances of success or popularity harm to do so - or to sacrifice yourself for someone else, especially someone who could never repay you, and especially when nobody would know about it - were the most noble things that could be, were the very essence of manhood.  

I am nearly sure somebody might have said something very distantly related to what I am describing, or that I read these things somewhere – literature is a rich vein even for those who don’t know what gold looks like (and it too is rarely taught on campus anymore). But when I say taught, I mean “taught with your life”, “taught with the whole spiritual power of your heart.” I had never been exposed to that lesson. And as a consequence, I, in my ignorance, in my weakness, picked up the glittering pieces of the world and tried to make them stick to me. I think I knew deep down that something wasn’t right – my deep, unspoken unease was testament enough to that. But as I did not know that something better existed, I was constrained to play the game as best I could.

The trouble is, that once you’ve been playing the game for a while, if you’re any good at it, you risk losing whatever connection to Reality you might have had in the first place.

I think if I go much farther, I will lose all hope of returning to my original point. Which is that in order to appreciate what is around us, we must first know ourselves. And in order to know ourselves, we must first know our true purpose. Once we know our purpose, we can get busy with being happy with our lives, with infinite  joy to follow.

Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dogs’ Tails…

This morning as I dressed for work, my wife told me about a couple in Canada that have decided not to reveal the gender of their four-month old child. She was watching a talk show online in which several “experts” debated the matter, including a woman whose young child, a boy, liked to wear dresses.

After the talking heads had said their piece, my wife told me that if our son wished to wear a dress once in a while, or to paint his nails, she would allow him to do so, because he is a child. She described to me a neighbor of hers when they were growing up, a little boy of six or seven, who, despite being the biggest and toughest boy on the block, took an occasional fancy to pink tutus. He would run with the best of them in the mud down by the creek, wrestle and play guns with the neighborhood boys, and waltz around out-of-doors with an oh-so-pretty circle of pink gauze around his waist. (He being larger than the average whipper-snapper, one doubts that he received over-much guff for his fashion tastes.) She said that her own mother had bought dolls for her two sons when they were of a certain age, and that the boys expressed their appreciation for this by lighting them on fire. I have heard of a study (which I am too lazy to search for online), in which youth in Sweden were given toys that are traditionally considered to belong to the other sex – guns to little girls and baby dolls to little boys – and the girls swaddled their rifles in blankets and gave them adorable names, while the boys shot each other to death with their anthropomorphic machine guns.

I do not wish to assert that boys (that is to say, smaller versions of homo sapiens who are born with a penis and testicles) must always and everywhere exhibit ruthless machismo, or that girls must be delicate creatures who shy away from dirt and like pastels. I do not believe that to be true, and I think an overrigid committment to an idea will very often prove disastrous to human flourishing. But that is rather my point. Why on Earth would parents refuse to acknowledge what genes and the whims of Nature (speaking in non-Theistic terms) make plain to the dimmest observer? If a boy of a certain age inclines to pastels; if he is no great hand for sports; if he loves opera (and I fit the latter two categories – even if I have never been a great one for pastels), why must we automatically assume that something is amiss?

I find it ironic that these enlightened, post-modern Canadian parents (and of course, it would be Canada), in the very act of attempting to free themselves from gender stereotypes, have made themselves all the more beholden to it. For it is only in the insistence that a little boy who likes pink is not, truly, a boy, and that therefore he must be something else, that we confirm those very stereotpyes that we claim we are attempting to avoid. I can only presume – and God send that I am wrong…I do not wish to malign anybody – that these parents want their (suspiciously masculine-looking) little darling to avoid the snares and pitfalls of fitting in with this big, bad world; that they want to spare him/her the shame of what he/she might desire in the eyes of the scoffers of the world. But I think that any common-sense person can predict that they are plunging their child into neuroses and confusion beyond anything that might otherwise come his/her/its way.

There is, after all, such a thing as childhood. It has been observed to be a time when small human beings are delightfully unaware, blissfully insouciant, of the rigid theoretical lines that hold the rest of us poor, older saps in line. My five-year-old loves to rough-house. He is constantly running around our apartment attacking dogs and couches and the legs of larger beings with improvised weapons of every conceivable type. (I think he might have a bright future in the weapons-development industry, which God forbid.) But he also loves Verdi’s Rigoletto, delights in the smattering of French at his disposal, and has been clamoring this last age for a doll. He is too busy enjoying life to mind the self-conscious formalities that bind the rest of us.

But that enjoyment, I believe, is founded on the fact that he knows who he is. He knows that he is beloved, by his parents and by God. He knows his name and his address. He knows what pronouns to apply to himself, even as he slaughters the finer points of syntax. (He seems to have a mort of trouble understanding the fine differences between feet and foots, for example. Children – small children especially – delight in knowledge of any kind. And knowledge implies definition, limits between this thing and that thing. It is cruel and (quite literally) inhuman to deny any person these fundamental bases for self-knowledge and well-being.

As Christians – that is to say, as a people who believe that the Lynchpin of Reality is a crucified and resurrected 1st-century Palestinian Jew – we know that there is a definiteness to reality. It is yet another sign of the fundamental disconnect of our age that we refuse to acknowledge even the most elementary of concrete realities.

Of course, I cannot in good conscience pretend that this definite quality of reality (and Reality itself I think is the sticking point for these post-modern Canadian parents) lends itself to an easy resolution. After all, I don’t know if I would be quite comfortable if our little boy were to become a man who wished to carry dolls or wear dresses. If we are to acknowledge reality at all – and I think common sense and common sanity demand it – we have to acknowledge its real costs. But it is in shouldering the burdens of that reality, it is in struggling to attain to Truth, and to accept necessary compromises with love, that we become real human beings.

In any case, I think that we are fast approaching the ne plus ultra of the post-Christian society. We have lost our compass, and we are willing to sacrifice even our children on the altar of our ideologies.

God help our children.

The End of the World and the Beginning of Stardom

Today is the day that I begin my blog. Which happens to fall two days after the end of the world. Pretty momentous.

I have decided to start a blog as a substitute for fame and fortune, and as a handy outlet for all the hot air I am constantly producing as I pontificate to those around me. So I shall now pontificate to the world at large, instead of just to my lovely wife and those who happen to be within earshot.

I intend here to record the passing thoughts of a man who is trying to follow Christ in our topsy-turvey world. I don’t expect to much in the way of readers (although reason and vanity both declare that one doesn’t blog altruistically). I am writing mostly just to satisfy the urge. In my folly, I actually believe that my thoughts are worthwhile, and I would like to have something to show for them. Of course, having a job and a family is quite enough for a rich and satisfying life, but inasmuch as we are made in the image of God, it is in our nature to create.

So here goes nothin’. Brace yourselves for an inconsistent journey through the mind of Niphon Andrews.

Let’s hope this pans out better than that whole end of the world thing…