Wedding photos

Hugging Grandma; Gina's mom; Pavel and Abouna with the wedding certificate- it's official (sacramental) now!; Pavel's dad Joe

With the Mosko clan

Pavel's former roommate, Fr. Stan, gives the toast

With Gina's grandma, mom, aunt, and step-aunt as we're getting ready to leave the reception

It was a perfect day, a wonderful honeymoon- couldn't have been better. Thanks be to God and to all our family and friends who generously gave of themselves. I might post a few more later but here's a starter!

Home

What am I doing blogging when I have a wedding to plan?! Good question, but I did want to pause as I mind the printer spitting out wedding programs to post what will likely be my last entry before my family starts showing up from the East Coast and then the big day on Saturday.

I think we've chosen a very auspicious time to get married. Friday is the Feast of Epiphany on the Egyptian calendar, with a midnight liturgy on Thursday and the Blessing of the Waters. I'm going to try to go to the liturgy after our family gathering Thursday. Sunday is the feast of Christ's miracle at the wedding of Cana. When Christ was baptized, He sanctified water, and when He chose a wedding to perform His first miracle, He blessed and sanctified the sacrament of marriage. He is Emmanuel, God with us, and that in all of our lives.

On my mind a lot this past month is what a joy it is to have a home and to be making a home for my soon-to-be-husband. Single women, if you can find yourself the love of a godly man, it is much to be recommended. Beyond all the butterflies and zinging heartstrings, there is the simple satisfaction of just sharing life with someone. A friend of mine who recently got married has been telling me how much I'm going to love being married. Though we'll have a lot of adjustments, I'm sure, I think she's right. I'm going to enjoy taking care of someone, and especially taking care of a man.

At my confession this past weekend, Abouna reminded me that marriage is about making something new that was not there before, and that this is part of the meaning of the marriage crowns. A "normal" man becomes king of a home, a normal woman a queen. The home is more than just four walls, it is a kingdom, and a holy kingdom at that. In Fr. Schmemann's journals, he put it this way:

I love my home, and to leave home and be away overnight is always like dying -- returning seems so very far away! I am always full of joy when I think about home. All homes, with lit windows behind which people live, give me infinite pleasure. I would love to enter each of them, to feel its uniqueness, the quality of its warmth. Each time I see a man or a woman walking with shopping bags, that is, going home, I think about them: they are going home, to real life, and I feel good, and they become somehow close and dear. I am always intrigued: What do people do when they do not "do" anything, when they just live? That is when their life becomes important, when their fate is determined. Simple bourgeois happiness is often despised by activists of all sorts who quite often do not realize the depth of life itself; who think that life is an accumulation of activities. God gives us His Life, not ideas, doctrines, rules. At home, when all is done, life itself begins. Christ was homeless not because He despised simple happiness -- He did have a childhood, family, home -- but because He was at home everywhere in the world, which His Father created as the "home" of man. "Peace be with this house." We have our home and God's home, the Church, and the deepest experience of the Church is that of a home. Always the same and, above anything else, life itself -- the Liturgy, evening, morning, a feast -- and not an activity.

Please pray for us in this week of joy upon joy!

Eye on Africa

This is either pathetic, or the coolest thing I've ever seen- I can't decide which. Someone has set up a live webcam at a watering hole in Africa, complete with sound. Warning- it could become addictive!

Props to an Oozer for the link.

The Nature of Worship, Continued

Just noting that the discussion on my recent post, The Nature of Worship, has continued. Feel free to join in, late or not.

Our new baby!

I had to post this. This is our new huge bed. :) I'm ridiculously proud of it and pleased. It sleeps wonderfully, but also I'm thrilled because it's the first big purchase Pavel and I have made together. So, it's sort of like our baby. When they delivered it I thought, "look what we did!" Then I realized that's sometimes what new parents say.

The sheets were a shower gift from our sponsor Samia, and it's awaiting an Ethan Allen bedspread my mom is sending us.

The best part is, we get to make some actual babies in it...

(I had to say it before anyone else did.)

Merry Christmas to us!

  

Becoming human

"How then will you become a god, when you are not yet made human? How perfect, when only recently begun? How immortal, when in mortal nature you did not obey the Creator? It is necessary for you first to hold the rank of human, and then to participate in the glory of God. For you do not create God, but God creates you. If, then, you are the work of God, await the Hand of God, who does everything at the appropriate time- the appropriate time for you, who are being made. Offer to him your heart, soft and pliable, and retain the shape with which the Fashioner shaped you, having in yourself his Water, lest you turn dry and lose the imprint of his fingers. By guarding this conformation, you will ascend to perfection; the mud in you will be concealed by the art of God. His Hand created your substance; it will gild you, inside and out, with pure gold and silver, and so adorn you that the King himself will desire your beauty. But if, becoming hardened, you reject his art and being ungrateful towards him, because he made you human, ungrateful, that is, towards God, you have lost at once both his art and life. For to create is the characteristic of the goodness of God; to be created is characteristic of the nature of human beings. If, therefore, you offer to him what is yours, that is, faith in him and subjection, you will receive his art and become a perfect work of God. But if you do not believe in him, and flee from his Hands, the cause of imperfection will be in you who did not obey, and not in him who called you. For he sent messengers to call people to the feast; but those who did not obey deprived themselves of his royal banquet." -St. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies

Fr. John Behr comments: "Rather than hardening ourselves, trying to become what we want to be, we must remain pliable, open, and responsive to the creative activity of God; we must learn 'to relax in the hands of God, to let God be the creator.' Such also was the wisdom of the desert fathers. When Abba Agathon was approached by someone suffering from the temptation of fornication, his advice was: 'Go, cast your weakness before God and you shall find rest.' Abba Poemen likewise stated that 'to throw yourself before God, not to measure your progress, to leave behind all self-will: these are the instruments for the work of the soul.' "

Books hitting the dust

This makes me want to run to the library and start checking out books, just because:

"For Whom the Bell Tolls may be one of Ernest Hemingway's best-known books, but it isn't exactly flying off the shelves in northern Virginia these days. Precisely nobody has checked out a copy from the Fairfax County Public Library system in the past two years, according to a front-page story in yesterday's Washington Post.

And now the bell may toll for Hemingway. A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded--permanently. 'We're being very ruthless,' boasts library director Sam Clay."
Checked Out, Wall Street Opinion Journal

I wonder, what are your library habits? Do you go to the library and if so, what do you bring home? My library choices tend to be nonfiction books like cookbooks, how-to guides and history, and the occasional novel. I admit I rarely check out the classics.

Economics probably does play a role, but I disagree that amazon.com has made books cheaper. I for one am astounded at the price of new books, and it certainly is worth a library trip to try to find newer titles. Classic books are the cheapest, they're presumably the most likely to be found in used bookstores, and they take longer to read, making them inconvenient library choices. However, I agree with the article that libraries should not get sucked into the consumerist vein with their regular stacks. Libraries should be research centers primarily. Expand the used book sale area, and let that be the prime place in the library for people to get popular novels. The money raised should help fund more shelf space.

The bit on Andrew Carnegie is wonderful. I've often thought that if I were a millionaire, one thing I would fund would be libraries and bookmobiles in rural areas. As a child I quickly swept through all the school and local libraries in my little town, and would have read even more if I had had access. That was, of course, in the Dark Ages before amazon.com and abebooks.

Props to Touchstone blog for the WSJ link.