a sketch of the assumption fresco at Monastery Gracanica

I’ve been drawing. A lot. I’m slowly learning to copy the forms and lines that are the foundations of good Icons. After six hours, I end up with something like this ^.

I am honestly surprised at the result. The pencil-and-paper part of my studies are just half (and certainly not the more time consuming half) of a long-distance learning situation my teacher and I are working out. He has also given me a reading list.

Having just finished all the reading, I’ll be focusing more on drawing.In one week I’ll be leaving for a two-week trip to California to learn from Fr. Patrick in person.

His website is here.

Let’s have a look at the picture at right. The captions are EVERYTHING. I don’t intend to do a lot of things. I didn’t intend to get a degree in Journalism from Ohio State. I was going to go to Michigan and become a doctor. Despite my intentions, here I am. I think its pretty fair to rule out current intentions as any sort of insurance against a future event’s occurrence. All too often, our culture focuses so much on the “do what feels good at this exact moment. If fact, disregard the rest of your life for it,” that we regularly forget that we do not control each aspect of our lives, present or future.

When, in this society, that itch arises, it is easy to take this secular advice and scratch (When I get that feelin’, I want sexual healin’…)! It is a jagged pill though, one that, even when taken with a dose of self-justifying intentions, hurts the whole way down.

I can’t speak for the ladies out there, but we men are visually stimulated, by cars, sports, and of course by women. Our sexual arousal often starts solely with our eyes, and often, our partner doesn’t even know the encounter happens. We look at a butt, or boobs, or whatever as a woman walks past, and we start the wheels turning. Every guy has to fight with this temptation, including me!

Christ augmented the Jewish teaching of his day that a man would always be lustfully looking but his test was in whether or not he touched, with these words; “You have heard that it was said, `Do not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27,28)

He does not say “any man who is married.” Nor does he say “any man not yet married but who will eventually.” EXTRA-marital sex is what Christ is speaking against here, not just PRE-marital. (All premarital sex is extramarital sex, but not all extramarital sex is premarital. Although, it’s all adultery.) Any sex outside of marriage is a rupture of another’s trust, even if you haven’t met that “other” yet.

A Priest I know told me that when one has a sexual relationship, they will either reap the benefits of that eternally, or they will suffer from it eternally. He pushed the point that wandering eyes (which lead to wandering hands, etc.) are essentially borrowing against the future, against that “other” you haven’t yet met (and for some, don’t intend to meet).

You see, every time I let my eyes wander and wheels turn, I begin to store these little experiences in my mind. Down the line, I will inevitably and unconsciously compare my wife to these fantasies .  That is the harsh truth…

Decisions…decisions…decisions.

The past few weeks have been a crucible. I have had two parallel and COMPLETELY dissimilar opportunities presented. Ha! Here I was praying for a lead, any lead, no matter what it was so that I might make something of myself other than a highly educated mover of furniture.

I worked at moving companies through college to pay for my “other” expenses. I got pretty good at carrying sofas, mattresses, enormously heavy steel gun safes, pianos, doll houses… I could move it all. It was hard humble work. It still is. I suppose though, that my current station makes it more humbling. I have a college degree.

I did what I was supposed to. I stayed in school and off drugs. I was active and involved. I graduated. Yay! Yay? Yeah, right. It was back to the drawing board as I held down part time jobs waiting tables and moving furniture again.

For two years this was my life, and my prayer was to a) accept God’s will and  b) to be shown what that would be. Yet for two years, I was certain only that moving furniture wasn’t what I wanted. I had certain expectations of myself and of where I would be as I rounded the corner toward my 25th year. I had dreamt and planned, and then whined and stomped when all my plans left me on my face, in the dirt. I fell short. This brings me to two weeks ago.

On the same day, one friend set me up with his HR department at a sales firm in Chicago and another put me in touch with an Iconographer he knows (picture above).

Anyone seen Evan Almighty? This is a quote I find especially relevant here.

“When you pray for patience, do you think God makes you patient or gives you a situation to be patient. When you pray for courage, does God grant you courage or put you in a situation to be courageous. When you pray for a close family, does God zap you the warm fuzzies, or give you the opportunity to show love to each other.”

So, here I am, at a fork in the road. And as has happened before, Fr. Thomas Hopko helps me decide which turn signal I’ll engage. (Full article here)

“Some will sanctify their lives being married; others will be single. Some will do it in clerical orders, others as lay people. Some will be monastic; most will live in the everyday secular world. Some will work primarily in a physical way, others will work intellectually. Some will be artists, scientists, business people, professionals. Others may have no particular job or profession.”

and then further…

“To find one’s vocation demands that one really wants to do so. It sounds simple. And it is. But, to quote the Lord once more, “few there be who find it” (Mt. 7:14). The reason is that it takes courage to allow the Lord to speak, or rather, to hear the Lord when He speaks, and to follow Him. It is also quite painful. Our own will has to go. Our egocentric desires have to be denied. Our ideas about ourselves have to be abandoned. Our personal plans and projects have to be discarded. Our agendas of action have to be thrown away. We have to say to God: Speak Lord, your servant is ready! We have to respond to God: Let it be to me according to Your word! And we have to mean it. If we do, we will find our way. But if we fight it, and keep craving the things that we want, we will be miserable and unhappy. We will realize, as the song says, that we “can’t get no satisfaction.” For the heart of the human person is made for God – for truth, for love, for life itself, and not for mere “existence” – and is inevitably unsatisfied, frustrated, confused, distressed, angered, bored…until it comes to rest in Him.”

At this fork, neither of my options are “straight on ahead.” Each will be a marked change from what my life has been. In the sales route, I could make the money I’ve always wanted. I could have the nice place, the nice furniture (you get quite a bit of inspiration moving whole households of other people’s stuff). But, I feel as though I would merely exist. As an Iconographer, I pray that I may come to “rest in Him.”

Dusting
by Marilyn Nelson

Thank you for these tiny
particles of ocean salt,
pearl-necklace viruses,
winged protozoans:
for the infinite,
intricate shapes
of submicroscopic
living things.

For algae spores
and fungus spores,
bonded by vital
mutual genetic cooperation,
spreading their
inseparable lives
from equator to pole.

My hand, my arm,
make sweeping circles.
Dust climbs the ladder of light.
For this infernal, endless chore,
for these eternal seeds of rain:
Thank you. For dust.

I could talk about my dislike of his sexual display (homo- or otherwise, no matter), but my opinion probably doesn’t carry much weight.

I could compare the American culture to Orthodox Christian patristic teachings, but my knowledge of the latter is admittedly fleeting compared to than that of the prior.

I could even compare the differing responses from the American IDOL runner-up’s fans, but it is not the differences therein that I am interested in.

Instead, I am most concerned with how so many people, so many thousands have spent so much time concerning themselves with the singer and his show (and yes, I do understand that now, by this post, I’m one of them).

It is during this time of fasting that my own preoccupations become so clear. I, as a product of my raising, am very American. I like to be entertained. I like my TV, filled with a barrage of images and messages, always changing depending on what I want to see, or what’s on next (when I decide I don’t want to change the channel). I like my sports. I like a tall glass of cold milk with my steak dinner. I like a beer on the front porch. When I fast, I try to avoid all these things because I like them so much (see why in link just above).

The hunger pangs caused by the break of my routine, physical and spiritual, make some of my reality more clear.

I worry that we, the American youth, unquestioningly buy into the constant artificiality of the engineered and programmed “entertainment” provided us everywhere.

I’m pretty sure that in their attempts to keep us entertained (and themselves in business), so-called “entertainers” must keep things new and exciting. In a cultural maelstrom where there is nothing new under the sun, or on TV, the envelope keeps getting pushed and TV gets more “edgy.”

It is in this environment that Adam Lambert surfaces as nothing more than another push. I don’t blame him or the choreographer or the AMA’s or the network that carried the show. It is all just a response to a people which places as its premier desire entertainment; with media, with their lives, even so far as with their churches.

We spend so much in this netherworld of the artificial that I am afraid we are actually losing touch with reality.

I think of the caricature of Americans in the Disney-Pixar film Wall-E. How, in the constant search for entertainment, the people become, by their reliance on their technology, completely and entirely entertained. They never have to leave their floating chairs complete with Big Gulp dispensers.

I just hope that we might at some point be like the one fat space-goer from the film who, having fallen from their chair-o-gratification, realized that there is something completing to the human condition beyond the contented entertainment from the screens in our faces.

As a member of a generation so bored with our constant entertainment that our entertainment has morphed into shock-and-awe campaigns, I can only hope that we can see beyond our bubble and begin to comprehend that REAL life is more than entertainment-provoked complacency.

+May Christ our True God and King have mercy on us and save us.

Some further and tangentially related reading can be found below:

A great blogger making use of a truly great poem

An Orthodox perspective “On The Modern World”

Of Battle Lines…

That post also inspired me to start this blog, so that I might have an outlet to express, from a first person perspective, what it means to be a recently converted, young, male Orthodox Christian; what it looks like from here.

The blog won’t rely only on church and religion. It will be a collection of my thoughts and will be colored by my experiences. Most immediately, this will be a product of me being young, being male, and being an Orthodox Christian.

I am a 23-year-old, male, Orthodox Christian. These three adjectives will serve, for now, as a sort of foreshadowing of what this blog will be. I am, as the title proclaims, A Callow Youth; a bald hatchling, completely unable to fly, nearsighted, always hungry. The title is deliberately a little harsh and undercuts what little experience and know-how I do actually possess, but I think it is more truth than anything else.

It is only fair to give a brief run down on who I am and what has brought me here, to this new nest (and what I could possibly mean by that!); so here goes.

Mom and Dad got married just after Mom graduated from high school in 1983. My sister was the first addition to the family in ’84, and I followed in ’86. We were raised on a dead-end in the shadows of the old Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio. That was home. We moved just before my eleventh birthday to a bigger house in a better school district. We went to a non-denominational/pentecostal/charismatic church all the way up until around fourth or fifth grade. Here, my sister and I were constantly teased by the other kids, mostly by the PK’s (preacher’s kids).  This would set a pattern in me and in my life, a deep feeling of the spiritual and a strong faith in my Christian beliefs, undermined by an overarching effort to gain the approval of my peers.

Being the “new kid” half way through fourth grade didn’t seem so bad though. After all I think that title itself landed me my first girlfriend, a pretty girl in my class who actually asked if I would be her boyfriend. Cool, right!

Anyways, it didn’t take the kids at the new school long to figure out what my classmates at the old one had known for a while, that I am a nerd. Quirky, smart, skinny, and just different. I played football during elementary and through high school, an effort I suppose, to shake that moniker. I would say that it half-way worked. I got set on a mission to identify with the cool kids sometime late in elementary school and it continued to grow in its ferocity and control over my life up through and beyond my high school graduation.

In this effort to become all things “cool,” I earned two varsity letters, was academically successful, and hung (by very thin and stretched strings) with the in-crowd. But, I also came to rely so much on fabrications and lies which I thought sounded “cooler” than my real life that I became, by trying so hard to be cool, the opposite. I was the constant liar, the fraud, the guy who was trying way too hard. I carried this on with me to college.

“No one, when looking back on their life, remembers the nights they got plenty of sleep.”

I started classes at Ohio State in September 2004. There, in Columbus, the dichotomy within me of the God-loving, smart and quirky kid and the approval-craving, impulsive and lying adolescent at once went away and at the same time became more pronounced. In seeking the in-crowd, I very naturally joined a fraternity. This one step was both the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adult life, whence from I write this blog. In so many ways, in pursuit of my vices through the fraternity, the very same fraternity inspired forced me to change.

I joined the fraternity first for the obvious and stereotyped reasons: parties, friends, girls, etc.. I stayed in the fraternity through college because of the change it forced in me. The bullshitting was done with, and not easily, when my brothers (a dear few in particular) sat me down and smacked me with the burning truth. My lies were as clear as crystal and I was in very real danger of having no real friends. This shocked me. I had never seen myself and the mess of a liar I’d become until that day. Once the shock wore off, I started some soul searching.

I would, throughout the remainder of my time at OSU and even now,  struggle, falling back on old crutches not for their utility, but for their comfort, all the while pushing myself to become the man I should have been all that time. It was during this time that the inner dichotomy was at its most pronounced.

Summer 2008 (going into my 5th year at OSU) found me living in a small and musty apartment just below ground level, off of an alley near the fraternity house I called home when classes were in session. I was alone and lonely, working my days away at either my internship at a local TV news station or at a moving company, putting in up to 80 hours a week (20 and 60 respectively). After work on one of those summer days, my Dad called me and said he felt the need to tell me to get back into church, open my Bible and start praying more. Dad and I had a shaky relationship since I hit high school, so I brushed it off. Meanwhile, I’d been having some trouble sleeping at night, so I’d stay up late and in fitting with my nerdy self, I’d learn. Whatever came up on a random article on Wikipedia, or whatever had come to mind that day, I’d Google it and just soak up whatever I could.

It was here that my Journey to Orthodoxy began, with my father’s request.

My conversion (which will surely be the topic of another post, complete with all the details) was a quick one. At the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Columbus, I was Chrismated on August 24, 2008 and tonsured with the name (my middle name from birth) Patrick. I have tried and failed to live an Orthodox life since. I have fallen back on my crutches of fraternity, beer, acceptance, etc. I have gone on a mission trip. I still struggle with my faith. I graduated, then moved to Tennessee.

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

This is my new and still uncomfortable nest. From here I chirp, nearsighted and almost completely featherless. Another new start in another new place. I live with two new friends outside of Nashville. I often feel helpless, hopeless and always hungry. I’m not sure where I’ll be next year. I know that that journey, my journey started on January15, 1986 and hasn’t stopped long enough for me to prepare for the next day, not even once, not yet. That is why I am A Callow Youth, unlearned and unprepared but zealous and humbly faithful that each and every eventuality fulfills His holy will.

It is now 2 am, so I hope that is enough of a wrap sheet for you. I’m going to bed. Good night!