Little by little it goes

We had a really nice lunch out today,

vegan fare and great lemonade!

Well, today was up and down.

I am still having some throat unhappiness but am working on 

various things to make it better.

***

Those who have read my blog along time, will know that

years ago, shockingly nearly 20 now, I worked at a Bible Camp in 

Connecticut.  A place I loved deeply and remember every grain of sand,

every thing is so clear and so loved in my memory.

I found out of it's ending and an astounding new beginning there. 

I wrote the following two things about it. 

God works in mysterious ways! I worked at Mountain Lake Bible Camp from 1995 through 2000 and was profoundly influenced and shaped by my time there. Anyone who knew me either at Calvin/RBC/TWU during that time knew I worked there, the camp was my first spiritual home and when Aunt Elaine died in 1998, I felt like I lost my spiritual Mother; the loss of her was one of the hardest things I ever went through, though God brought fruit out of it.. The first seeds of what became my later decision to become an Orthodox Christian were laid in these years. To learn that this camp is going to become an Orthodox Christian Camp is incredible. I will do my best to add my prayers for this new venture and also for the ministry that Uncle Al's son is going to do (I remember meeting him years ago, he has Aunt Elaine's deep brown eyes). Of course I will be praying for Uncle Al, I am sorry to hear of his struggles. The beauty of this land and camp is unparalleled and will always be part of where I wish I was and a firm part of understanding the Lord as the source of all Beauty.

***

As I was reading my Beloved Husband the news of Mountain Lake Bible Camp passing the torch to Camp Saint Paul, I could barely read it for the tears, for both the end of Mt Lake, and the beginning of Camp Saint Paul.

Mountain Lake Bible Camp was my first spiritual home, one that I felt with me during the year, one that I could not wait to return to the next year. One, like many things, I never dreamed I would one day leave. It was a place that I brought friends to work with me, one that all my friends knew about, and professors I was close to, esp at TWU. God used Mountain Lake Bible Camp in my life in powerful ways, healing a confused teenager, helping me into my early 20s, Creating patterns of prayer and commitment to God that are still with me today.

I am moved to see the schedule of Camp Saint Paul's daily camp:

Wake-Up
Orthros (another word for Matins, a morning prayer service)
Breakfast
Cabin Clean-Up
Rotation Session I (Orthodox Life)
Rotation Session II (Diakonia: a session to focus on service projects)
Flextivities!!
Lunch
Rotation Session III (Liturgical Hour)
Rotation Session IV (Greek Cultural Appreciation)
Free Swim and Activities
Vespers
Dinner
Evening Activity (Camp Fire, Olympics, Scavenger Hunt, Skit Night, etc.)
Devotionals
Lights Out

Other than a bit more Christian (Orthodox) education + cultural celebration, and not having rest time (actually I would add that to their day!), it's very similar.

What moves me here is how much prayer, devotions and Christian teaching will continue on this land that I will always know as Mountain Lake.

I can assure my dear friends who were at Mt Lake with me that the man who began this camp, Archbishop Demetrios is not only a Biblical Scholar who loves God's Word, but is himself a man of prayer. I've met him about 6 years ago and he is unforgettable.

I think as I process the end and beginning, I am going to have a lot more tears, both of grief at the ending and rejoicing at the beginning.

****

So I am full of memories today... 

That place, that camp, meant so much to me, I could go on

for days just telling you all the stories, the memories, the pictures

I have it in my mind. 

And that it is going to be an Orthodox camp, how surreal, astounding, wonderful.

I am sure some of my friends from camp may be a bit more bewildered,

as Orthodox Christianity is not familiar to most of them,

but glory hallelujah! that the camp is going to continue and the first thing on the

to bring list for the campers was the Bible and then a prayer book.

I am so excited about it.

I miss that place greatly, it will always be some of my 

happiest memories, while yet there was sorrow too, yet the happiness,

that is what remains.

***

And I guess that is what I have to remember about this time in my life also.

There's a lot of hard times and disappointments, uncertainties in our

life right now and sometimes they overwhelm me.

But yet God is with us, we are being taken care of 

and one day, 

only the happiness will remain. 

A Friend in Suffering

St. Phanourios is not only a Saint

who has become a 

friend in suffering,

but helps one find their way 

through the darkness.

His candle reminds me of the light of Christ

and the Lord really uses His Saints to 

help give us light.

***

I've just published my second essay on St. Phanourios

on just this...

It begins like this....

***

As it is for many, we often spiritually grow through suffering. Elder Sophrony, when writing to his sister Maria, writes about what suffering can give us:

Do you really think that my in my years of monastic life I have escaped periods when the vision of my ruin was so petrifying that it is not permitted to speak of it? But, strangely, when these visions were transformed into an opening up of NEW horizons, into manifestation of the INFINITE LIGHT of another world, could not find words to express my gratitude to God for my experience of hellish torments, because these spiritual events occurred in a sequence such that precisely these intense sufferings were an indispensable condition for the development of the very capacity to receive eternity.

I would never claim to have the level of suffering and consolation that God granted to Elder Sophrony.  But I did go through a period of suffering in my thirties that was incredibly pivotal in my life.  I began to see how St. Phanourios’ prayers and presence were part of what God used to save me.

You can read the rest here, 

on Conciliar Post

or on my blog of publications, found here.

Pondering beauty means pondering life

 

I took this picture on my phone
when I was walking in sunshine
on a beautiful day
one of those days that you wish would
be all the days
a day you think
this is summer to me
and I went to the local yarn shop.
*
It's funny,
after being sick and relapsing many times
just walking places like this
doing new things
is a huge achievement instead of just a normal
what you do when you are still new in a city/place.
*
I loved very much reading of this miracle.
*
This video from Ira's blog
is beautiful:

Kinfolk Magazine: Issue 4 (An Ode to Summer) from Kinfolk on Vimeo.

*
I have known this beauty.
The one thing I can say about the video is that I have had
a lot of the beginning of it ~ the alone-ness but also the beauty.
But there is more to it,
at the same time.
It hints of what one is looking for,
but does not capture it,
though it does show culture and beauty and all in one
the wish for community, roots and the door to summer
that they write of opening everything.
I understand it, it is beautiful.
*
This video I watched many times from Mat. Anna:



I showed it to Mr. Husband...
*
So I finally got my computer-typed journal that I began over 8 years ago.
When my last computer died
I could not find my Windows MS CD to install MS Word
and thus did not have access to my files,
including the journal there.
This morning I found it and found my journal and wrote.
*
I am reading Flannery O'Connor's letters.
She writes in a time when it was still more common to be
Christian.
She has a steadiness and a determination that I really like.
*
I began reading Elder Paisios' Book
and now I understand more of why this priest finds it a
living book.
It is actually one of those books that makes me think
my goodness! Elder Paisios is a poet!
He captures our lives!
He sees what we struggle with!
He understands! He gets it! 
Oh, he sees! he really sees!
and yet
he gives hope! 
*
Really,
Mr. Husband grabbed the book to read,
took the plastic off it,
as we had just gotten it at the local Greek monastery
a few weeks ago and had not yet begun reading it
and so it was that I began reading it and there it was ~
the feelings of stress that we experience,
the lost-ness, the sense of isolation, abandonment,
the things I have seen in my friends, in myself,
the stress of it all.
 But at the same time he writes giving us hope,
a way forward,
as if suddenly we are given something under out feet
and while we still feel like we are floundering lots of the time,
yet there is this memory that there is something
stable and with God somehow things are still possible,
endurable,
even blessed.
*
As I was looking over my journal that I have kept all these years,
before I even had this blog at all,
I can see how in the last years,
with all the transitions and then marriage,
moving, sickness and life as we
have it,
that I am still in this tumbler that I have yet to see how it will
settle into and what that means for what
my life is now.
*
But somehow,
when I think of Elder Paisios' book
it's all OK again,
in the sense that
Jesus is the same today, yesterday and forever.
*
I read to Mr. Husband about a miracle in Russia in
our times in the Everyday Saints book
and that it is because Christ is always the same
that miracles still occur.

This church we go to
often as not
as it is nearer to us.
It is a vast beautiful church,
one that when I first entered
and saw the gleaming candle stands and the beauty
of the green carpet and unity of it all,
I immediately thought of Elizabeth Goudge books and that
it is one of her churches.
You know that before the crazy times of the 1960's
this church was standing room only?!
Must of been over 1000 worshipers here!
*
Something that I did not understand
in my undergraduate years
and that somehow everyone failed to tell me
was what had happened in the past century or so.
I had a good inkling of it,
saw how the likes of writers such as
Virginia Woolf,
whose command of language I liked at the time,
was really messed up and lost.
But back then I was really distracted by
earnest feminist questions
that once I discovered the Orthodox church
just fell away.
Simply are not there.
Not questions that are suddenly
denied, repressed or ignored,
literally just not questions I have any longer.
They were answered and yet not there.
Back then,
  I was also really taken by
post-modern literary criticism
but did not realize that this often meant that
novels and literature itself were not the thing studied.
Or they were studied in a way that was never discussed
on what the text was saying or what it may be missing
or the intellectual history and what had changed
and was this change for the better?
I loved reading philosophy;
it made me feel alive somehow, back then.
Yet I knew then that some of the literary criticism
was absolute nonsense.
How one can not understand any words or
signification of anything
yet the very words saying
it's all meaningless were understood and sadly believed.
*
But it was never said ~
how Christ was being hated, denied.
Or how humans were being abused by the very
philosophies of the times.
Or how things would be more and more strung out,
with broken families,
and families moving to various parts of the world
and mothers struggling to raise kids without
the help of their Aunts and Uncles or Mothers & Fathers near by.
Or that we have lost a lot of traditions and what
the world is looking at now as spirituality or traditions
is not an equal replacement.
*
Back to the video ~



When I showed it to Mr. Husband
he understood it immediately and said
early Christians did the same thing,
taking children in Roman times that were abandoned 
in the dumps and Christians would go and find them
and raise them and teach them of the 
life in Christ
and how the Christians cared for the poor.
*
Christ is the same today, yesterday and forever.
*
“Stand in the ways and see,
And ask for the old paths, where the good way is,
And walk in it;
Then you will find rest for your souls.
But they said, ‘We will not walk in it.’
~Jeremiah 6:16
*


*
God is with us.