Arabic Christmas Hymn

This is the Byzantine Hymn of the Nativity, sung in Arabic. Middle Eastern Orthodox hymns give me shivers. Pavel first played them for me over the phone before before I had decided to convert, and that alone might have made me want to.

A Blessed Nativity, and Happy New Year, to one and all!

Props to FDR for the link.

Day by the Bay

We had a fun day in San Francisco yesterday. We did visit the Aquarium of the Bay, and enjoyed it even though it was smaller than we anticipated and much smaller than Monterey's. However they did have a glass tunnel like Barcelona's. I'm all for this method of displaying an aquarium's treasures. It gives you the clearest 3D sense of the creatures and their world. Aquarium of the Bay, as the name suggests, is devoted solely to the marine life of SF Bay. There were several kinds of shark, edible swimmables such as sturgeon and cod, green anemones and starfish, and rays. The small rays were adorable, especially the ones they had in the "touch" tank, because in the shallow water they would come up and breathe and flap their fins and behave somehwat dolphin-like.

The tidy size of the aquarium left us with plenty of time in the day to walk along the piers and around Fisherman's Wharf. We had passed by the Fog City Diner, a spot Pavel had seen on the Food Network, so we went to eat lunch there, but were sent back out onto the street by the one-hour wait. Across the street was the Pier 23 Cafe, which turned out to be more up our alley anyway- funky and less chi-chi, with a heated patio overlooking the bay. We ate seafood, of course: Pavel had an oyster po'boy and I had fish and chips, which is about as exotic as I get with seafood.

After that we walked back to the Ferry Building intending to walk to Chinatown, but came across the California-Van Ness cable car and decided to take that up the hill instead. My knee still has its limits (though the walking felt good), and we ended up deciding to get our money's worth and just take the cable car to its end station and then come back. It's actually a great way to get an overview of the city, and an amazing bit of public transportation history. Looking up those huge hills, it's hard to believe that something so rickety-sounding and -looking can negotiate them, but they sure do. The California-Van Ness line takes you past Chinatown and through Nob Hill. On one side of you, the side streets look down onto the bay, and on the other side, down onto the hills of the city. Some magnificent views, in other words. By the time we were done, I felt like I'd seen a good part of San Francisco, which up til now I've hardly visited at all. You can get a day pass for $11 (a one-way fare is $5) and do the other lines, as well, or hop on and off at some of the sites.

All in all a good day in the city.

Fr. Men- How to get by

I was reading through some old posts and came across this one, an address by Fr. Alexander Men. I posted it a couple years ago in connection with the busy-ness of the holidays, so I think it's appropriate to do it again. It was definitely timely for me to re-read it.

"Each one of us has his own personal and evident reasons for bearing a cumulative fatigue. It is hopeless to believe that by some means- let’s say when vacation comes- things will radically change, since we have gone on vacations before, and have continued to rattle along just as hunched over as ever.

We are all young; in any event, you are. Our era is amazing, in its own way fortunate, and I don’t regret living in it. Nonetheless, its tempo is a heavy burden on homo sapiens. Particularly as we live in a large city. Stress presses upon us like a stone. But what is to be done?

There are all sorts of programs, self-improvement schemes, and so forth. I have examined these things practically and theoretically. I realized that only someone with ample free time can engage in these activities, which in themselves are not at all bad. We may not know all the factors that affect us. We know, for instance, what percent is genetically inherited, what percent is the result of conflicts at work and at home- in general things are tough. And our natural forces of regeneration, recreation, function rather weakly or not at all. This is why I want to remind you of what you know quite well without my saying so- that there are supernatural paths. Only through the force of the spirit can we finally acquire additional strength, can we conquer our spiritual flabbiness, our spiritual weakness. For this we don’t particularly need any special methods of concentration as in those methodical self-improvement exercises; what we need- and I will simply remind you of commonly-known facts- is no less than six to ten minutes a day (I am now speaking of minimums) for prayer, in any form. If you are simply reading prayers, then just read them and do not given any less time to reading the Gospel, and in general Holy Scripture. So too, the Eucharist and common worship are necessary. Four things. This is not theory, it is tested practice..."

Read the rest of the post here.

Aquariums I have known

My goal this week is to get over the flu so that I can make an expedition to Fisherman's Wharf in the City, to visit the Aquarium of the Bay.

I'm not a great fan of zoos, because if the animals are close enough for you to see them I feel badly for them, and if they're in a natural environment you often can't see them. On the other hand, I love aquariums. I guess I'm not as sentimental about fish as about furry things.

I have some really good memories of aquarium visits over the years.

Barcelona Aquarium has a shark tunnel, a transparent tube almost a 1/2 mile long that takes you underneath their big tank. They specialize in Mediterranean aquatic life, especially sharks. I can't really describe how this made me feel, but it was incredible. Like I could imagine the depths of the secret ocean- the vast areas of the ocean that only God sees.

On one of our first dates (the real-life kind versus the online or phone kind) Pavel took me to Monterey Aquarium. He didn't even know I liked them. The boy was good.

Coney Island Aquarium was one of the places I would go for sanity when I lived in NYC. It was a fun outing from start to finish. I lived along the F line in Queens, at the very opposite end of the line from Coney Island. So I would just get on the train and get a subway tour through Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn. Of course the most interesting part was when the F turned into an el and you could turn around and see the Manhattan skyline behind you, and then watch Brooklyn go by. I especially liked to go down there in the off season when it was practically empty, and you had the place all to yourself. I remember the penguins, and once standing over a tank I thought was empty until all of a sudden a huge walrus swam up and looked right at me. Maybe it was this guy's mama:



I used to work the Christmas Conference in Portland, Oregon a couple years, and one year I went to the aquarium there. It was actually a combination zoo/aquarium, as I recall, because my clearest memory is of a polar bear whose paw was as big as my head.

We lived a couple hours away, so my first aquarium experience was with my family in Niagara Falls, NY. Honestly I don't remember much about the aquarium, but it gets a mention for sentimental value.

I'll let you know how San Francisco's stacks up.

Merry Christmas!

"Mother of Tenderness" in the new Coptic style

I'm down with the flu, but we managed a nice breakfast this morning and will do the rest of our celebrating on Orthodox Christmas on January 7th.

The Human Story

I'm on vacation now, a much-awaited and much-needed one. It's one of my truisms that you need a certain amount of time just to remember you're human. I do, at least. I can't think around people, and I always crave time to just sit and think. I crave the opportunity to be able to interact with people slowly, one at a time if possible, maybe mediated through the pages of a book, and with the option to retreat if I want to. One of the things I enjoy least at my job is that I am partially responsible for the main phone line in our little office. Phones are tyrannical beasts, and it is torment to have to answer one of their shrill cries, especially when all too often it's some poor sap trying to make a living at sales calls.

Nevertheless (I'm going to philosophize now, fair warning), even in solitude I think we're always looking for the human voice. Isn't this what we want to hear when we read, even when we think about God? Not just our own voice, because there is really nothing sadder than a person lost inside his own head. It is the most beautiful aspect of Christianity, in my opinion, that the human story is in God as well as in ourselves. I suppose all religions consider how the divine interacts with the human, but not all of them have a God who actually is a human.

I have said here before that anthropology has been one of the sweetest surprises of coming to Orthodoxy. In the postlapsarian world we all have the impulse to hide ourselves, to wall certain parts of ourselves up from other parts or from the outside world. How pernicious then is the teaching that our essential human experience is one of depravity, that in order to know God we must put away who we are and accept something that is imputed and external to us, alienating ourselves not only from who we were but from humanity, or at least those vast swathes of it characterized as "the unsaved," the "non-elect," or whatever euphemism you choose. Of course, it doesn't seem pernicious to those who believe it's true, but how freeing it is to come to Orthodoxy and reconcile the image of the Jesus Christ I had always loved with a more natural, more integrated and intrinsic, gentler (I struggle to find appropriate terminology) sense of the human. And not to see this as an innovative doctrine, but to recognize it as authentic Christianity. Even if Orthodoxy would seem to draw categories of its own by referring to "the Orthodox" and "the heterodox," it is not the same. So much of western Christianity has forgotten or denied its own soul, or has tried to re-create the native soul in the poor guise of stilted socio-political consciousness or universalism. There are still the elements of the true way, but they are so fragmented and ailing that you have to either struggle hard all your life in ways that we were never meant to, or be extraordinarily lucky, to put them back together again.

After skimming the first few pages and being mesmerized by the photos of a little village on the edge of the Exmoor, I've decided to pick up Eamon Duffy again, this time his Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. I imagine I'll also blog some of what I read, for the benefit of interacting with the material and for those of my little band of readers (whose Heatheresque names I shall not mention :>) liked what I wrote of Duffy before but haven't had a chance to read him yet. I think the title of this book is appropriate. Like many of the history books I enjoy the most, Duffy has a way of drawing out the human voices from the past. He relies on primary sources, for one thing, and has as his aim to reconstruct the religious consciousness of the laypeople rather than of bishops and kings. I am not sure that this explains why I find his writing so moving, however. I think that, rightly or wrongly, I see this time right before the cataclysms of the Reformation as looking back into the womb before a rather unnatural birth into modernity. I have sometimes tried to understand why I favor the Middle Ages so much. One of the reasons I've come up with is that the idealism of the time appeals to me, because it is how I tend to see the world. It seems to me that when modernism elevated the human to the center of the universe (whether it be in humanism or individualism or other forms), it actually lost true humanity. That's why so many of our books and media seem sentimentally trite, or graphically base, when they try to recover it. Christianity, meanwhile, wavers between the embrace of humanism or the pendulum swing to monergism and "total depravity."

One thing I believe moves me in Duffy's work is recognizing, in the experience of medieval English laypeople, that Orthodox sense of the human. Too much of Catholicism since then has been- I say this with not a little sadness- ruined by modernism. I find it a relief to realize it was not always this way, since wherever else my or your ancestors came from, England is in many ways the ancestral home to Americans. We've wandered far from home in more ways than one. It is a kindness to hear the voices of family and recognize in them a quieter, saner, and stronger sense of the human story than we often are assaulted with in our daily lives.

Short Stuff

Somehow, while searching for something else, I ended up reading an article on the state of the short story. I won't bother linking to it; it was basically hand-wringing about what literature is coming to. However short stories and novellas (I'm not sure of the difference myself) have always been one of my favorite forms of literature, so it got me to thinking about whose stories I've appreciated over the years. In no particular order:

Isak Dinesen. The pen name of the Danish author Baroness Karen von Blixen, a name you might recognize if you watched the film "Out of Africa." She wrote a book by that same title about her experiences in Africa, although the film goes above and beyond her own autobiographical writing. She also wrote stories, mostly set in misty European locales, in a Romantic style. One of her more famous novellas is "Babette's Feast," which you can also see on film, though as usual I recommend reading it instead.

Guy de Maupassant. His stories tend to be sad, showing people on the margins. He was one of the first short story authors I started reading.

Roald Dahl. If you're used to his children's stories, don't be shocked if you come across one of his darker ones. He seems to have been able to write well for both audiences. I recently mentioned that I was reading a collection of ghost stories he edited.

Stephen King. I used to be a big fan in my teen years. I haven't read him since then, but my favorites of his works have always been his novellas, which aren't necessarily of the spooky genre. One of the more famous is "The Body," which morphed into the film "Stand By Me."

Edgar Allen Poe. Another early favorite of mine. For some reason I was reading Poe long before I could understand his prose. It was kind of interesting to go back and read them later and "get" more of the story. I can't pick a favorite- maybe "The Masque of the Red Death."

Arthur Conan Doyle. I had the Complete Sherlock Holmes when I was 12 or something. There's a theme here... maybe I like short stories because I had literary ADHD as a young lass?

G.K. Chesterton. I came to the Father Brown series much later than Sherlock Holmes, but usually like them more. They have more heart. I appreciate Holmes' melancholia, however.

I suppose the masters of the genre in English are O. Henry and Saki, the latter of which I picked up at the library recently for holiday reading. I'm not going to wax philosophical about what makes a good short story. First of all, I don't know; second of all, I don't think it's any different than the sort of thing that makes a good any kind of story.

Who am I missing?

Prince Caspian trailer

I'm not a huge fan of the Narnia books (sorry, I know that's akin to heresy in some corners) but this trailer looks really lush and I'll definitely plan on going to see the film, which comes out in May.

Disbelieving the Predestinarian God

I know, posting a link to something and telling you to go read it is a cheap blog post; I should be producing profound blog prose of my own. However I did like Fr. Al Kimel's post on why the Augustinian predestination doctrines have left western culture with a ghoulish God.

If I had to rate Christians in terms of who makes the best beer buddies, the Reformed would be high on the list. However, their "doctrines of grace" scare the hell out of me and always have. Fr. Kimel ably explains why, and why you don't have to know much about Christianity to say, in the words of the 90's, "that's just wrong." Fr. Kimel cites Hans Urs von Balthasar:

"Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the 'work' of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it; to believe against all the evidence of experience ('credere contra fidem' like 'sperare contra spem'), against every 'rational' concept of God, which thinks of him in terms of impassibility or, at best, totally pure goodness, but not in terms of this inconceivable and senseless act of love." *

There is also some discussion of the post at Fr. Freeman's blog.

* I'm aware that Reformed Christianity has worked out its own view of God's love and justice, etc. No need to post the arguments- I've probably heard them all.

Winter reading

A bunch of bloggers are doing something they call a Winter Reading Challenge, including the estimable Deb and Heather.

I'm not sure what a Reading Challenge is, but it appears to be people telling others what they plan to read in the coming months and then posting reviews afterward. I suspect that making public what I plan to read is the same sort of kiss of death I invite on myself if I make public in any way, even to one person, what I plan to write. Black ogres rise up and choke the baby before the bathwater is even hot.

Nevertheless, I do have vague plans of things I might read over my much-awaited holiday vacation and beyond. Let's see if all those equivocating words trick the ogres.

Early Medieval Philosophy, An Introduction by John Marenbon. I bought this last year and attempted to read it once. I blush, I blush, that I didn't manage getting past the first chapter. It is an "introduction," after all, and a slim book, but my excuse is that I had just finished David Bradshaw's Aristotle East and West. Philosophy, like theology, is something I must chew off in very small bits. I think I've digested enough to try it again now.

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino- I am eager to read this, if I can find it. I'm hoping the library can help, since it is out of print and I'm not sure I want to pay premium for my own copy.

The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga or The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village by Eamon Duffy. One of these, I haven't decided which yet. I really liked Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars, as my regular readers already know, but it made me mad. I might have to wait a while to pick up the other. Huizinga's book came recommended at Touchstone. I'm still casting around for recommendations on the Byzantine and Hungarian Middle Ages.

The Gormenghast Novels by Mervyn Peake. I've already started these, and though the book is perilously long (it's actually a trilogy) and I didn't like it at first, I'm the most confident about finishing these. I didn't like it because it is so depressing, not a single one of the characters is likeable at first read, and they and the setting are so grotesque. However, it draws you in. Somehow, through all the unreality of the characters, they are real, and there is humor and pathos amidst the absurdity. We'll see how it goes, but I am intrigued enough now that I suspect I'll actually finish them.

I don't really have any "spiritual" reading lined up. I ordered The Meaning of Icons by Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, and that's the likeliest candidate, although I also have several John Behr books in the wings. However, I am actually reluctant to read anything Orthodox right now. My Orthodox head knowledge has gotten far out ahead of myself and I'm just play-acting. I may just tinker with some readings from The Orthodox Prayer Life, the Interior Way by Matthew the Poor.

Hug a pillow

I tend to carry a lot of tension in my neck and shoulders, the curse of the pencil pusher I suppose. But worst of all is waking up that way. A co-worker made a suggestion she heard in a professional sleep clinic that really seems to help- hug a pillow to the side of your body while you sleep, keeping it high enough so that the pillow touches your shoulder. Wrapping your arm around something while you're sleeping apparently helps keep the neck and shoulders from tensing.

Of course, you could hug your significant other instead, but they have a tendency to squirm away. :) A big floppy teddy bear might work, however!



This pillow is also a lifesaver, though not pretty and not cheap:



Therapeutica pillow

Last year this time

Just because I got a new laptop and have access to my old files AND to the internet at the same time...

And just because I'm so glad that I'm not in the thick of wedding planning like I was this time last year...

And because I snapped up one of the good men out there (they do exist!) and can't believe it's been nearly one year already...

I'm going to post some gratuitous wedding photos. These are the ones that didn't necessarily make it into last year's round-up.




It was me who forgot to buy a cake topper. Oops!



Is it sacrilege to do Devo in front of the altar?



My mom, my grandma, Pavel. This is just the cutest picture ever.



This is when I was all ready to leave and Pavel was nowhere to be found.

Somehow, through all the craziness, we ended up married!

Kassai Lajos

In my recent post on the miniseries Attila, I mentioned the impressive scene of duel by horseback archery in the film. Nosing around the web I saw mention of Kassai Lajos, a Hungarian who has devoted himself to preserving the old horsemanship and horseback archery of the region. Watching videos of Lajos and of his students in competition is pretty cool.

Here is one, accompanied by some sort of drums and chanting that I assume is also supposed to be traditional (sorry cannot embed the video). Here is another of Lajos himself. I would hate to be those men holding the targets, no matter how good the guy is. Below is another of Lajos in demonstration which I am able to embed.

Some of you may remember that before my most recent bout of knee troubles, I had started taking horseback riding lessons. Just watching these videos makes my body ache. :) It is a lot harder than it looks, I'm sure. But also looks like a lot of fun!

Free Will in Conversion

This is an excellent presentation.

"An important question, for many people, is whether man can in any way cooperate in his own salvation.

Part of how we answer that question will of course depend upon what salvation is. For example, does it include what the non-Orthodox call 'sanctification'? Is it a merit system?

For the Orthodox, yes, it includes roughly what others mean by 'sanctification' and no, salvation is not a merit system. That means merit is not what saves us and demerits are not what condemn us. Thus salvation neither can be nor needs to be merited at all. Not only we ourselves cannot and need not merit it, but even Christ cannot and need not earn or merit it for us, either, for salvation is pure gift. We would consider it a slur upon God’s magnanimity to suppose otherwise.

Even if the right exercise of free will were meritorious, so what? Merit does not save us. We are saved by union with God in Christ. Rather, union with Christ does not get us into heaven; it already is heaven, for Christ Himself is our heaven. Union with Christ is not a means to an end (His merits getting us to that end); for anybody who loves Christ, union with Him already is the goal. And union with Christ is not by merit, but by grace through faith.

Similarly, demerits are not what condemn us. Separation from God condemns us – or rather, separation from Him does not send us to hell but already is hell, for in Him is everything good and true and beautiful – and we are separated from God because we walk away from Him, not because of our failure to collect merits (although, having rejected God, we do fail in that, too).

That’s why the Orthodox don’t worry whether the right exercise of our free will might imply we had done something meritorious. In the first place, to use our free will rightly is what we were made for, the same way a fish was made to swim or a bird to fly; and we get no more 'merit' for doing what we were made for than they do. Secondly, even if we did gain some merit by making the right choice, what would the merit be FOR? It has no more use than Monopoly money; it's strictly for playing games.

Those, and only those, who implicitly assume salvation is about merit will feel the need to avoid assigning us any, in order to give God all the glory. They are right that we have none. But then they go on seeking to avoid assigning us any merit by denying that we are able to cooperate in our salvation in any way. They tell us fallen man’s 'free will' is able only to choose evil, meaning it is not actually free at all. The natural man can only resist God, and actively does so.

From an Orthodox point of view, this teaching appropriates several rather egregious misunderstandings of Scripture, but that subject is for another post, as are about four or five serious theological objections to it. For now, I’d just like to point out that except in Calvinism, this doctrine of free will does not seem to accomplish what it sets out to do...."

The Twelve Days of Christmas

Moyen Age lays out the history of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Beowhat the?!

Rather than spend a few precious hours and dollars of your life watching Angelina Jolie's cleavage, you would likely be more entertained if you simply read the summary of the film at Got Medieval.

For a slightly more serious though not un-humorous, and thoroughly scathing, review, see what the Sci Fi Catholic has to say.

A while back Pavel and I watched an earlier attempt to film Beowulf, Beowulf and Grendel, which has no redeeming feature besides the scenery of Iceland. If you are in the mood for a dragon movie, I recommend Reign of Fire instead, which I quite liked.

And I will get to talking about something other than movies...