Prayer Live(s)

In the use of words [during prayer] there are three things we can do. We can use spontaneous prayer, the kind of prayer that gushes out of our souls; we can use short vocal prayers which are very short, extremely intense in content [...] so that they can contain as many meanings as possible; and we can use what one calls, at times in a rather unpleasant way, ready-made prayers.

+Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sorouzh, Beginning to Pray (New York: Paullist Press, 1970), 55-56.

Thanks to a recent spelunking expidition of the Fiancee's bookshelves, I found the aforecited gem of a book by one of my favorite Christian authors. Metropolitan Anthony (1914-2003) lead a unique life, having grown up in Russia, Iran, and France during Nazi occupation. He was an atheist before converting to Orthodox Christianity, and before becoming an archbishop in Great Britain, he was a physician in the second world war.

This essay on prayer has invited me to reflect on the various ways I have prayed, not prayed, or been taught to pray over the course of my life. I think one of the biggest changes in my so-called "prayer life" (shouldn't prayer be our lives?) has been a gradual shift away from "spontaneous prayer" towards what some call "rote," "memorized," "scripted," or Metropolitan Anthony calls "ready-made" prayer (e.g. the Lord's prayer). I call it "learned prayer"--these are prayers we learn over time, sometimes memorizing them. And like training wheels or bumber bowling, these prayers also teach us to pray, they guide us in the finer nuances and motor skills of prayer.

While once I primarily prayed spontaneously, I now find the opposite to be true--I love the memorized prayers of the Church. I am not "against" spontaneous prayer, but I often find myself wondering about prayer in general. The churches I grew up often regarded memorized prayers as less worthy, on the grounds that they constrict our relationship with God. The primary concern, I think, was that if we are not praying out of our own hearts with our own, personal words, then our relationship with God stops being organic and real, and decays into something rote, mechanical--which is to say, ceases to be a relationship at all. I know this concern well, because it was one I shared for some two-thirds of my life. But now, having lived this nonspontaneous style of prayer--inasmuch as my brokenness has not gotten in the way--I see things through somewhat new eyes.

In this post I share exerpts of Met. Anthony's essay, interspersed with some memories and reflections it has spurred. Like Met. Anthony's work, this is not intended to serve as a "prayer manual." Instead, I offer these thoughts from my rather weedy corner of the garden of prayer in the hopes that they encourages a few souls as we all tend to our lives. However and whenever we pray, let us remember that Christ Himself has taught us to do so (Luke 11:1) and promised to open the door when we knock (Matthew 7:7).


~*~
  Spontaneous prayer is possible in two situations: either at moments when we have become vividly aware of God, when this awareness calls out of us a response of worship, of joy, all the forms of response which we are capable of giving being ourselves and facing the living God, or when we become aware suddenly of the deathly danger in which we are when we come to God, moments when we suddenly shout out from the depths of despair and dereliction, and also from the sense that there is no hope of salvation for us unless God saves us. [...] Now if we imagine we can sustain spontaneous prayer throughout our life, we are in a childish delusion. Spontaneous prayer must gush out of our souls, we cannot simply turn on a tap to use at any moment. It comes from the depths of our soul, from either wonder or distress. There are whole periods when you are neither at the bottom of the sea nor at the top of the peak, when you have got to do something about praying, and that is the period when you cannot pray from spontaneity but you can pray from conviction. This is very important, because many people who begin a life of prayer think that unless they feel very strongly about the words and phrases they use, they are not being sincere. [...] The example that comes to me is this. When you work out of doors and are doing a heavy kind of work, you may come back physically worn out. If at that moment your mother, your sister, your father or whoever else, said "Do you love me?" you would say "I do." If the other person goes on investigating, "Do you really love me at this moment?" what you could honestly have said is, "No, I feel nothing but my aching back and worn out body." But you are perfectly right in saying "I love you" because you know that underneath all the exhaustion, there is a live current of love. And when Christ says "those who love me will keep my commandments," He does not say "if you love me you will go form one emotion into another, one state of rapture into another, one theological vision to another." He just says "If you believe my words, then live up to what you have received," and "live up" means always live a little bit above one's means, as it were. To do more than you could have done spontaneously.

~*~
There was no shortage of prayer in our house growing up. My parents did a good job of instituting daily prayer times--we always prayed before meals, often before bed, and during occasional family devotional times. We probably should have prayed upon waking in the morning, but I generally preoccupied myself by dousing my brothers with water to get them out of bed instead.

Our parents taught us how to fold our hands, and they taught us at the end of prayers, we needed to say "In Jesus name," because it was Jesus who died for us and it is through Him we come to God. When we were scared or upset, we prayed. When we were sad that grandma was ill and living far away, we prayed. So when my two best dolls were fighting with each other, I taught them to pray, too. I found that their bickering subsided greatly.

When it came to prayer, we were taught to pray what was in our heart--spontaneously. To truly pray, one needed to speak with one's own words to God, in the moment. We were "against" "rote" "prayers" like the ones our Catholic friends said in the school cafeteria before lunch; since we had accepted Christ into our hearts and were born again, we could approach Him just as we were, with our own exact words, thoughts, shortcomings, strengths, weaknesses, etc. So, we did not make use of written, memorized, pre-scripted prayers. Not even the Lord's Prayer (which I did not learn by heart, I think, until college or graduate school). Not even when I or my brother were asked to say grace before meals, and we said the same exact thing every single night ("Thankyou for this day, and for this food. In Jesus name, Amen.")  


 The only exception to the non-memorized-prayer were Bible verses, which I memorized a lot of in Sunday school and other church clubs. We learned we could use these verses kind of like prayers once in a while, like if we really didn't have anything to say to God or needed help battling thoughts in our minds. This was because there was power in God's word--it is, after all, sharper than any double-edged sword (Heb 4:12). If we suddenly felt ashamed before God, we could recite Romans 8:31-39 to ourselves. If we felt weighed down by struggles, we could recite James 1:2-4 or Matthew 11:29-30. If we had some serious rage against the Babylonians, we could recite Psalm 137:9. The best remedy for any ailment--physical or otherwise--is scripture, and even if you couldn't "match" your ailment with a relevant Bible verse, if you wanted to invoke the power of God's word over any situation, any scripture would do.

By the time I reached my late teens, I was fairly confident I knew how to pray--you just did. Of course, knowing how to do something and actually having the discipline to do so regularly are two different things. But I felt comfortable praying to God. I felt comfortable attending 2 hr prayer meetings in which the first hour and forty minutes would be spent sharing prayer requests before actually praying. I felt as comfortable praying aloud in a room full of strangers as I did by myself. I felt comfortable with all the words I could use in praying to God.

Sometimes, I think, a little too comfortable.

*~*

So there is a need for some sort of prayer which is not spontaneous but which is truly rooted in conviction. We already have a rich panoply of prayers which were wrought in the throes of faith, by the Holy Spirit. For example, we have the Psalms, we have so many short and long prayers in the liturgical wealth of all the Churches from which we can draw. What matters is that you learn and know enough of such prayers so that at the right moment you are able to find the right prayers. Each of us is sensitive to certain particular passages; mark these passages that go deep into your heart, that move you deeply, that make sense, that express something which is already within your experience, either of sin, or of bliss in God, or of struggle. Learn those passages by heart, because one day when you are so completely low, so profoundly desperate that you cannot call out of your soul any spontaneous expression, any spontaneous wording, you will discover that these words come up and offer themselves to you as a gift of God. [...] But it is not enough just to learn prayers by heart. A prayer makes sense only if it is lived. Unless they are 'lived', unless life and prayer become completely interwoven, prayers become a sort of polite madrigal which you offer to God at moments when you are giving time to Him. If in your morning prayers you have said a phrase, you must try to live up to this phrase in the course of the day. You may imagine that you are capable of taking up a phrase and living it throughout the course of a whole day, but it is extremely difficult. [...] [In doing so,] you will see that gradually all the words of prayer, all the thoughts and feelings the saints express in their prayers come alive in you, they begin to go deep into your will and to mould your will and your body.

~*~
As comfortable as I was with extemporaneous praying by the time I reached adulthood, praying aloud--or talking in general--had not always been a given for me. That in and of itself was a journey...

I like to think I was a shy kid, but "shy" doesn't really begin to describe it. So shy was I that any time I needed to tell teacher something (e.g. that I wanted to switch from white to chocolate recess milk), my mom used to have to come in after school to help me talk--and this after hours of coaxing me through tears and fears the night beforehand. Accordingly, I only trusted other children who were just as quiet as me--the conversations of my best childhood friend rarely rose above a loud whisper (I'm pretty sure she really existed but now that I stop to think about it...)

Things began to change in seventh grade, when this expert social-phobe decided she wanted to be in Forensics (the competitive public speaking team at school). Coach M. slated me for the "Non-Original Oratory" competition, in which you deliver a speech written by someone else. At one of our Thursday night practices, he handed me a photo-copy of excerpts from Abraham Lincoln's 1858 address to the Illinois Republican State convention (the famous "House Divided" speech). "Memorize it by next week," Coach M. advised me, brusquely. From the well-informed perspective of a budding seventh-grader, it was (of course) about the dumbest thing I'd ever read. Whither? Augmented? Construe? Who came up with all these silly words, I scoffed to myself. Too shy to protest, however, I memorized it quickly. Nursing the more awkard phrases like "avowed object," "cease to be divided," and "squatter sovereignty" until they could be plucked from my mouth at any time, I gradually wrapped my mind around every one of those long, Lincolnian sentences.

Soon, the competition season started. Every saturday for a few months, I delivered that blasted speech three rounds in a row. If this were a movie, the upbeat "taking care of business" music would cue up, and footage would show a montage of me rising up like David, thwarting my oratorical opponents with the proverbial sling of my rhetorical prowess. Since it's not a movie, I'll be frank with you: I kind of sucked. I never once rose to the level of even average scores from the judges, and certainly never advanced to the fourth "lightning" round like the older, eighth grade girls (who all got to write their own speeches).

But one thing I did do: I lived and breathed that speech until it was my own. Yes, there was nervous pandemonia inside me every round of every Saturday, but instead of cowering behind anxious silence, I flew to the refuge of Lincoln's words--the same ones I'd once deemed silly and inane. At times, I felt so alive inside of those lines, that the life of it all spilled out of me, my voice echoing brazenly off the construction-papered, bulletin-boarded classroom walls, floating past my judges, rising outward, inward, upward. In these moments, I felt my self to be uncurling, like a shaving of wood or rose petal stretching out and away from its core of dark hiddenness. When I think of slavery abolition, I remember Lincoln's words--and the words are not just intellectual facts for me, they are a part of me. I cannot say this experience fully tamed the monster of shy insecurity within me, but borrowing and living inside the words of Lincoln did something that was life-giving and long-lasting.

I think some thing similar has happened to a lot of us who were given the tedious task of memorizing obscure historical speeches in grade school. In the past five years, two dinner parties among friends have spontaneously devolved into the recitation of such texts, all of us trying to piece together the fragments we remember from the preamble to the constitution, the declaration of independence, and the emancipation proclamation. Watching my friends recall the lines of nearly forgotten prose, I am starting to understand the power of memorizing speeches. Perhaps it's the common cultural and political heritage behind these texts. Perhaps it's the great ideas of history-changing speakers, their thoughts having stood the test of time and social memory. Perhaps, too, it's the vocabulary words and rich rhetoric behind them; "fourscore" and "endowed" and "posterity," words that ordinarily would remain aloof from our active vocabularies, now flow through the reciting mouth like an unobstructed stream. Visions of god-given freedom, liberty, universal rights waft about a room that otherwise would be occupied by talk of recent youtube clips or the silence of group iphone checking. Whatever the case, when I see my friends in the full thrust of recitation, it's almost like their entire persons expand widely to encapsulate something much bigger than themselves. It occurs to me that they appear in those brief moments as though transfigured--caught up to something wholly beyond themselves, and yet wholly within and apart of themselves. And it occurs to me that this is a beautiful thing.

Abraham Lincoln's speech is not a prayer, but it did teach me something of how to pray. It taught me, namely, that to make someone else's words your own--to let your self rise into words bigger and greater than you have yet learned to muster alone--is not necessarily a rote, mechanical thing. It can, indeed, be a dynamic, stretching, taming, living thing too.

~*~
A last way in which we can pray is the use, more or less continuous, of a vocal prayer that serves as a background, a walking stick, throughout the day and through out life. What I have in mind now is something which is specifically used by the Orthodox. It is what we call the "Jesus Prayer," a prayer which is centred on the name of Jesus: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me and save me a sinner." It is the prayer of stability, becuse it is a prayer that is not discursive--we do not move from one thought to another--it is a prayer that places us face to face with God through a confession of faith concerning Him, and it defines a situation concerning us. [...] We profess the Lordship of Christ, His sovereign right upon us, the fact that He is our Lord and God, and this implies that all our life is within His will and that we commit ourelves to His will and to no other way. That is the name of "Jesus" in which we confess the reality of the Incarnation and all that the Incarnation stands for. [...] Then the perfect profession of faith, that He is the Son of God. [Met Anthony goes on, describing at length the etymological connection between the Greek term for mercy and the word for "olive" and "olive oil." He sums this up by stating we are not praying for mercy because we must sedate God's wrath, but rather when we do so, we acknowledge that:] since Christ the wrath of God has come to an end, that forgiveness is freely given, that time and new possibilities open up ahead of us. However, we cannot always follow in this new way, because it is not enough to have time and possibilities if we are sick at heart, if we are broken in will or if we are incapable in mind or body either of discernng or of following the path. We need healing, so remember the oil which the Good Samaritan poured on the wonds of the man who had fallen victim to the robbers. The healing power of God will make it possible for us to take advantage of the cessation of his wrath,or the gift of forgiveness that is offered and, indeed, of the gift of time and space and eternity.

~*~
I prayed the "Jesus Prayer" for the first time in a highschool bathroom stall.

People assume that I began to frequent pre-written styles of prayer because I encountered Orthodoxy. In truth, the development began long beforehand, and I think one reason why Orthodox churches appealed to me at first was because I could finally come out of the (prayer) closet with this part of myself.

No doubt every life has its share of crucibles, of crosses, in the midst of which it sometimes seems all but impossible to pray. In those types of seasons, I often find myself numb and speechless before God, the words having leaked out of me through some wound, some gash in the deepest corner of my heart.

The first time I remember this happening was on September 11, shortly after the second plane hit the towers. I had retreated to the bathroom, away from the television sets endlessly blaring CNN in every classroom, in order to pray--but suddenly, I found I had no words with which to talk with God. While there is a time and place for silence before Him, and while we are promised the Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf, the silence with which I was afflicted on 9/11 was neither that of awe nor stillness, but of vapid fears, cluttered confusion and exhausted despondency. It was the muted captivity of frantic anxiety holding sway within myself. By some blessing, my gut instinct on that day was not to give up on prayer altogether, instead I scraped around in the depths for some words--any words--to make my own before God in that bathroom stall. What came out was the prayer of the pharisee, over and over again that whole day and the days to come: "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!"  (Luke 18:13) and, later, "Lord have mercy on us!" I didn't know it at the time, and wouldn't find out for years, that this was a famous prayer known as the "Jesus Prayer" by whose who have integrated it in their prayers, a practice as old as Jesus' parable and frequented by the ancient Church fathers. As I repeated that prayer over and over again in that bathroom stall, and as I held the prayer silently with me in the coming days, I had the almost physical sense I was being carried by God through those words and closer to Him. 

Some years later, during another life-cross, it was the Lord's Prayer that became my supplicationary go-to. Like a bedraggled teddy bear, I mentally took that prayer with me on walks, to the grocery store and to bed with me. Sometimes I'd switch out the pronouns "my/our" for "his" or "her" and pray it on behalf  of others ("Give [person X] his daily bread, help him to forgive his trangressors..."). Sometimes I'd just say it real slow, letting my mind settle on particlar people, trying to remember them before God.  From there, I found other prayers of the Christian heritage: Luther's prayer books, and the Common Book of Prayer.

Slowly, all of these seasons of crosses began to add up and bleed into each other. The times when I stood without words before God became more numerous, my reliance on nonspontaneous prayer rising to fill them. When I did pray spontaneously, it seemed more exhausting than before--I missed not having to think about what words to use. I missed the way I could stop doing and simply be before God, in what I call a full-emptiness: empty of my own intellectualizations, my mind and heart felt most free to be filled by Christ. This, more than anything I know of, embodies the Romans 12 mandate to renew our minds. 

~*~
The day when God is absent, when He is silent — that is the beginning of prayer. Not when we have a lot to say, but when we say to God ‘I can’t live without You. Why are You so cruel, so silent?’ This knowledge that we must find or die — that makes us break through to the place where we are in the Presence. If we listen to what our hearts know of love and longing and are never afraid of despair, we find that victory is always there on the other side of it.
  
~*~

It has now been some 12 years since I first started praying "nonspontaneously," although this practice itself has grown, expanded and changed over time--and that's a good thing. Still, if I could speak with the Me of ten years or fifteen years ago, I think she would want to know if this whole learned-prayer thing is really going okay... "Like..." she would begin, in her usual 16-year-old tone, "isn't it kind of... Boring? Isn't it kind of meaningless after a while--vain repitition? Are you actually in a relationship with God?"

Well, self... Boring, yes. Meaningless, no.

I remember writing to one of my priests one time about a problem I was facing in prayer. I feel too restless, I told him, to pray. I had never felt so restless in my (prayer) life. The whole problem resulted in me often begging off on my prayers-just skipping over them for the day. This was never because I truly forgot to, though. I's always be contemplating whether to pray, but when I'd try, it simply felt like an exercise in futility. The restlessness, boredome, distraction--the were like weeds. My prayer garden didn't stand a chance.

So I wrote to one of my priests. I half hoped he'd be able to give me some tricks to spice things up a bit.

Tough chance. His response was a quote from Macarius of Optina: “Offer to God, with humility, your dry and arid prayer.” There is no real solution, he said, to the restlessness inside of me other than to keep praying; it is never a waste of time to pray, no matter how distracted we might feel.  In fact, by immersing ourselves in prayer, over a period of time, we gradually learn to halt our rushing thoughts and subdue some of that restlessness of mind that our prayer suffers from. In short, he encouraged me to struggle on.


This restlessness is undoubtedly not unique to me, nor unique to memorized prayer. Whatever one's prefered style of prayer, it is hard work--any real relationship, sustained over the peaks and valleys of an entire life, is hard work. 

But, in my case, I think I needed memorized prayer to meet my monster of restlessness face to face. Memorized prayer, more quickly, brings me to the end of myself. The demon of boredom, of dryness, of dissipation before God comes out sooner and more starkly when I can no longer hide behind new words and whit in my prayers. 

As arduous as they sometimes "feel," the prewritten, memorized, repetitious prayers continually provide a space in which I am confronted both by my restlessness and by God's real presence in the midst of it. There is no longer anywhere to turn to besides prayer; you have only two options: to turn from God to whatever activities one's mind fancies, or to turn toward him--restless tossing and turning and all.

So, in short, yes memorized prayer can be "boring" at times. But so is waiting for a friend at a coffee house. So is making dinner and cleaning out the trash. So is weeding the garden. But my character is proven more in those moments than in the interesting ones. 

Isn't it then the boring times that are the task of any kind of prayer? In those boring dry spells, your mind seeking something--anything--to fill itself with besides the things of Christ, that is when the true fight begins. That is when we learn the difficulty of being still--to stop thinking, synthesizing, articulating, pondering, categorizing, analyzing. To stop doing, and to start being. To offer one's whole self, not just one's words. And to find that there is something deeper than the ceaseless acrobatics of the mind: the heart, that quieter spiritual self buried within, whose joy it is to rest in the quiet, simple knowledge of God, His Grace, our need, His Son. Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own (Phil 3:12)


~*~


 

Spaces in Between: Picking up the Pieces of Hope, Sorrow and Orthodoxy

O how all things are far removed from one another

and long have passed away.

I do believe the star,

whose light my face reflects,

is dead and has been so

for many thousand years.  

--Rainer Maria Rilke

The incense stung my eyes as I walked for the first time into the Preobraženjska crkva, the main Orthodox cathedral in the capitol city of Zagreb, Croatia. The only country in the Balkans with an overwhelmingly Catholic populace, I had assumed I was just walking into another Catholic church to snap some pictures and leave. But as soon as the incense hit my nose, the icons hit my eyes and the silence hit my ears, I knew this was Orthodox. It was the first time I'd been in an Orthodox church in months. But this church felt somehow different.

After making my way around all the icons, I finally realized why: it was all that gold. And, as may not be clear from pictures, we're not talking golden-rod paint here. We're talking solid, gold plating--the kind that gleams and glimmers in the least bit of light. And it was everywhere.

...All that gold.

It's not like I'd never seen a lot of gold before. 

For people who aren't acquainted with religious icons, or art history in general, it may come as a suprise to learn that images and artwork have a language of symbols that is just as rich and communicative as words in a poem may be. And in the language of icons, gold surfaces tell the viewer that the person in the image is bound up not in the time and space of this world but that of the divine world. In many pictures of saints, or Jesus and other biblical figures, there is often no background--say, that of a landscape or architecture like one would find in famous secular paintings like the Mona Lisa. To paint that kind of background would necessitate depicting some kind of depth or perception--dimensions of this life. Instead, Jesus and the saints typically "stand out against a plain gold-leaf background, with neither decoration nor background scenery. Viewed in such a way outside of either time or space, they command our attention by their spiritual presence" (http://nazarethstudio.com/index.php?icons/i_symbol). They stare out at us from a heavenly place, subsumed in God's endless light in a place where there is no night--or, apprently, time as we know it.

In short, icons call out to us from eternity, penetrating into our world of time and space to remind us of the eternal which lay beyond.

So I'd seen single saints and icons surrounded by gold before, but this... This was somehow different. Why did all this gold leave me filled with both grief and a quiet, inner joy?

Sets of doors leading out the side of the nave into the various receiving rooms of the metropolis next door. Note the depth and perception--the spatial dimensions of this world.

As in most of Europe, Christianity in Croatia--particularly Orthodox Christianity--is not without its pitfalls and scars.  As far as Christianity in general, we shall save the term "Post-Christian" for the cultural philsophers. So too shall we save the definition-izng of what Christianity even is and whether it is even possible or laudable for a country, culture or society to be a "Christian" one. My mere experience, however, is that there is a lostness in European culture I don't sense anywhere else. It is a lostness, and a latent hopelessness--as though something, or many things, have been unhinged. It calls to mind the 1882 words of Nietzsche's Madman:  

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?

Since those words were written, Europe has become a continent that scourged by countless revolutions, two world wars and the political attrocities that caused them, and Cold War of communism and its aftershocks. Whether by their own doing or not, the 20th century has traumatized Europe in a way that the US hasn't been. Something in Europe has been broken that, in the US, still remains somewhat intact, and I don't really know what it is. And I am not the only one who feels this. A French friend once summed it up by saying, "You [Americans] still know who you are. We [French Europeans] forgot who we are a long time ago." And I wondered if what she meant was that in America, it is still a little easier to remember that people are icons of God, that they have dignity because God has dignity. Because in the same conversation, she also said that she admires people of faith and wishes she could be one. "I am the most devout atheist I know," she laughed, "Because I want God and I want to know Him, and I want to believe He exists. But, I can't, you know..." She made a gesture as though gazing at all her surroundings. It is what I call her "historical gesture," by which I understood her to be pointing out every single war fought, past or present. The French friend is a military historian who spends her day wading through the blood of past wars, and waiting for history to repeat itself as it all too often does.

So what do you make of the churches that still exist in Europe? I don't pretend to know all the theory and answers. What I do know is the Orthodox side of things, the experiences I've had for over a year and a half. The nameless churches with little to no address, that are impossible to find even with GPS. The insular, cultural cliques who refuse to even converse with a non-member of their culture. This is the legacy of communism--people have forgotten what church really is, and remember only something that vaguely resembles a secret society.  I've shared my perceptions now with several people who know Europe even better than I do, and one is a missionary in Eastern Europe, only to find that yes, this is really the way it is. Yes, Orthodox has some brokenness. Yes, it's very sad. People who are missionaries in Europe tell me that Europe needs churches more than third world countries do, and they need missionaries who will not just talk to them about the Bible and Jesus, but about existence. About how to live and not kill yourself in despair. About hope.

The Holy Trinity. Chilling in heaven.

The day I stepped inside the Cathedral was the feast of the Transfiguration of Christ--coincidental since the church was named "Transfiguration."

Even still, between all the language barriers--English --> Croatian --> Serbian-- it took me a few tries to figure out when the next liturgy was. I finally resorted to writing a letter in Croatian via google translate in my travel notebook and showing it to a lady that was managing the library/book store. "Hello," I wrote, introducing myself by name. I explained I was from the US/ Germany and wanted to attend liturgy. In an Orthodox church, it is common practice to introduce yourself before taking communion. People want to know you are Orthodox Christian and taking the Eucharist seriously. She was overjoyed and called over two more people to help draft a letter back to me. When I got home, I translated her letter back into English:

"Dear Nicole--we have services at 5PM on Saturdays and 9AM on Sundays, please feel welcome! And yes, of course, you are welcome to take communion! Thank you so much for yur letter and God's blessings to you!!!"

I wondered if, finally, I was going to be able to attend a service that was welcoming rather than exclusionary, warm rather than secretive, and reflective of the love Christians are to have for God and their neighbors.

 

Standing in the pew-less church the following Sunday, my expectations once again were obliterated by the reality of Orthodoxy in Europe.  The friendly bookstore lady was nowhere to be found and when it came time for communion, no more than four of the hundred or so parishioners partook. Before doing so, they all had some kind of thirty second pow wow with one of the 4-5 priests. The chalice itself was only out for a few seconds--not even enough time for me to walk briskly up to the front of the church before it was taken away again. It all happened so fast--like a conveyor belt or something. I wanted to scream at someone. I wanted to tell someone how important it was for Christians to be united in Christ, in communion. That's the one thing we have that we were commanded to do by Christ, it is the staple of our lives. But no one understood English or German or even the little bit of Russian slavonic I'd picked up in the last 2 years. 

So I didn't scream, I just stared up. And up. At all that gold. And wondered what it's all there for.

And I wondered what all that gold was there for. It was not like in other single icons, where the gold just stays in the background and the icon itself is framed in wood. In this cathedral, the gold was everywhere--behind and in between every icon. Was it supposed to harmonize all the biblical events and people and saints from the ages depicted in the icons? That is, was the gold making the Church one unifed tapestry joined into eternity together? Or was it isolating everything--was each icon just an island unto itself?

I realized the gold was doing both, and that to be a real member of Christ's Church, one has to see both--one had to see the harmonizing potential but isolating realities of eternity. One has to see the wholeness of life when it is joined to Christ in eternity, but one also has to see and bear witness to the scars of sin, history, attrocities--all of which break up, fragment and isolate us from one another and from the eternal. 

 

Now that I've been back to the Western Hemisphere, I find myself thinking back on that Zagreb Cathedral fairly often. I am thinking not of how angry I was at that parish's attitude toward communion, but rather of all that gold.  Here I am, transitioning back into life on this side of the ocean, transitioning into writing a dissertation, into living in a new city surrounded by new people, new things and, essentially, a new life. I find myself sewing one more tattered rag onto the "places I call home" patchwork quilt. I find myself wondering about the verse that Christ talks about putting new wine inot old wineskins, and I wonder what it means to be sewing a new patch onto an old garment. I find myself wondering if all of the places and people in my life are a harmonious whole or just separated islands on the verge of dissolution. I find myself praying that even if I must see and experience both brokenness and wholeness, that the wholeness one day will win out. I find myself back in North American culture, my feet firmly on the ground, wondering if my European experience was a dream. 

I find myself wondering if those haunting gold-plated spaces in between the icons at the Zagreb Cathedral were real, or if they are just an optical illusion my camera happened to pick up.

Well, either way, someday they will be.

 

The Split Survival Guide

One of my main reasons for visiting Croatia was to see the Dalmatian Coast, i.e. the southern part of Croatia, a thin strip of mainland and more than one thousand islands that sprinkle the Adriatic Sea (not unlike the spots of a dalmatian dog, which were first bred here). Even though Croatia's coastline is more than 500 miles long, Dalmatia is no wider than 30 miles and sometimes as narrow as a mile or two--which basically means that, when it came to getting ports, every other eastern Balkan state got shafted after Yugoslavia fell in the early 1990's.

  
Originally, I had really wanted to visit the southern-most city in Croatia, named Dubrovnik. There are no train rails, however, that go that far south--and the bus coverage is too spotty to be able to plan ahead. Before seeing Croatia, I assumed the lack of transportational infrastructure that far south had to be because of its status as an emerging developing economy. That was before I saw the coast for myself, which basically consists of steep, sheer rock mountains. I wouldn't want to build a train track through that, either.

Note: that tiny thread-like object in the center of the picture is not a snake. It's the road.

So, I finally settled on visiting Split (on the mainland) and Bol (on the island of Brac, a 1.5 hour's ferry ride from the coast). My first impressions getting off the train in split were: a.) HOT; and b.) BRIGHT. And that was at 7AM. It's a good thing I did not know in advance that temps in this part of Europe linger for most of the day (and evening) right around 40 degrees Celsius (that's 104 for my Fahrenheit folks)--and let's not even get into the humidity measurements. The hotness and brightness were multiplied in Split due to their fondness for paving absolutely everything in polished, white marble: roads, sidewalks, buildings, parks, household pets... It all goes back to Emperor Diocletian, who in the third century made Split the site of his retirement palace. I'm guessing he had a really could 401K, because the palace was absolutely huge--so huge that much of Split lays within the boundaries of its ruins. When you walk around, you have all these layers of architecture--from 3rd century stone arches with rogue grasses growing through the cracks in the mortar, to modern low-level sky scrapers and mysterious little alleys and promenades and churches, and all with a generous helping of cafes sprinkled everywhere.

 Other than the millennia old late-Roman imperial palace, Split is pretty much your average harbor town. The key is not to let the garish sunlight, stifling heat, pore-suffocating humidity, or overwhelming stench of boats and seawater get to you. You have to come up with a survival plan. Mine was

I found Figa at about 10:30 AM, purely by accident, wandering in from some narrow, arched alleyway or other during my disorienting hike through the city. I felt a magnet pulling me in through the shadowy, open doorway--the Croatians are like flies, attracted to light in everyway. Their cafes, restaurants, shops and everything else is done in no less than direct sunlight at all times. So when you find the rare instance of an indoor restaurant--one that is practically carved into what seemed to me 600 or 700 year old, roughly hewn brick--you linger. And linger. Over coffee. Over breakfast--a crepe stuffed with rucola and freshly cooked salmon. Over another coffee. And maybe some water after that. And then maybe you ask the waiter if you can charge all your portable electronic appliances. And then maybe he is generous enough to spend 10 minutes searching his office for a plug adaptor for you, all the while teasing you that you are just like his girlfriend--you carry around that big, heavy purse that has everything in it but the things you really need. Yes, you explain, but you have two varieties of wet wipes. And vitamins. Surely those are necessities, too. And you just keep lingering, because you don't want to go back out into the heat. But, at some point, the lingering must end. And you must find another way to survive the humid, fish-smell-soaked heat.

 Water come to mind.

 

This is the closest thing to a watering hole I've ever seen. The people of Split flock to this synthetic waterfall in the middle of the city square and unshamedly dunk their hands, feet, faces and children into the water--which is clean enough to fill up one's water bottle with.

  

Yes I photo-stalked this little girl. She was standing by that fountain for ages and did everything I felt like doing--just lounging by water and practicing some form of ancient aqua-boredom calisthentic thing. Cute!

After locating water--which is easier said than done in a HARBOR TOWN SURROUNDED BY THE SEA for heaven's sake--I felt I had more energy to explore the things that Split is famous for: one of the biggest and oldest fruit/vegetable market in Europe, for example, or discover even more architectural wonders. I managed to survive--and get to experience walking a piece in the life of another place and culture, something that I consider to be invaluable no matter what the cost (or degrees celsius). By the time I caught my ferry to Bol/ Brac, I had started to get a glimpse of the beauty and "different-ness" I'd heard about in regards to Dalmatia. I hope you can agree!

Setting the table in a 1,700-year-old dining room?

 At first I thought the boy was just trying to show off for the gaggle of cute girls standing 'round the fountain.

 To my horror and surprise, he and his dad and his little sister put the fish in a plastic shopping bag filled with water and took it home... to eat?

 One of Empreror Diocletian's windows.... Overlooking the harbor.

 This is with the white balance and brightness settings on The Fiancee's camera turned way down low! Needless to say, it is not easy to take good pictures in Split! Too much darn light!

By the time it was time to take the ferry to Bol, I was interested to see what lay next on my journey.