In Which My Extremism Makes An Appearance

As I write these entries, I imagine many different people potentially reading them someday. After all, nothing on the internet can really be reclaimed, can it? So I imagine sometimes how these posts would sound to people like, for example, my mother. Perhaps an in-law. My priest. Someone from my church. Someone from my childhood church. Or, perhaps, one of my close friends.

Of course, when I think of many of those categories, there are many things I imagine they wouldn't already know about me. An in-law may know certain things about me but be totally in the dark about others. Someone from my church might only know that I am an Orthodox Christian and nothing more. Someone I attended church with in childhood would likely not even know that, though they would probably be able to tell you who my grandparents were. Of all of these possibilities, the people for whom the fewest of my scribbles here might be surprising are my close friends, particularly those I have known since my teenage years.

I'll be quick to admit that I don't have very many close friends anymore. There are many reasons for this: growing apart from former companions as we choose to form a family and they do not. Becoming Christians, which some friends would not take seriously. Moves across the country. Little spare time to spend together, especially when both parties are in college at once. Add to that the difficulty of making intimate friends as adults -- with all of the forces that either actively pull us apart or passively encourage us to keep polite distance -- and there are only a precious few left who seem to know much about us at all. This is ok... we do not have to be intimately close to other people necessarily to love them!

But for the few who have hung on, I thank God and love very much. Between them they very well may know more about me than I know about myself! That is a beautiful gift. But as I began to think of writing this entry, I realized how strange it is that -- while this topic is SO dear to my heart and shapes so many of my thoughts -- even many of my dearest friends probably don't know this about me.

It's not a deep, dark secret, I promise. Nothing scandalous. But it's deeply counter cultural, and maybe this is why I tend to glide over it without mention, as I don't want to alienate anyone, or make them think I am judging them. You see, it's common knowledge among the people who know me (love me or hate me!) that I am "a bit of a hippie." This is said with a smile and a nod and is quite a charming and acceptable quirk overall in our society. (Some people do say it with more of a grunt and grumble, I admit!) Being "green" is "in" these days, "hip," whatever. I recycle, I like to go barefoot, I know how to can jelly, and my husband and I are known to drag our babies out to tent camp for a week at a time. People know this, and whether they themselves think these things are fun or important or foolish or strange, they at least have a nice and inoffensive file in which to place us:

        Hippies. Green. Hipsters? Young.
But, in this blog I'm going to go where I rarely go in general conversation, and say that those things may point to certain surface features of our life choices, but they really miss the point.

We have a hundred reasons for all of these seemingly strange choices we make, but the deepest, most abiding reason beneath it all is that we... well, for lack of a more precise term, I guess we have found ourselves here as 20-something agrarians. What does that mean? There's the rub, and one of the reasons why we tend to shy away from revealing this part of ourselves. Speaking broadly, those who identify as agrarians tend to feel that living on the land is the only way to be truly free in society. They feel that the work and cooperation characteristic of rural society are ideal for mankind, and that through interaction with and dependence on the soil which God created, we may become closer to God.

It all starts to sound a bit judgy, doesn't it?

But at least for us, that's not the point. Our place is not to judge. As Orthodox Christians, we have the lives of many urban saints to show us beyond doubt that God can make us holy in any place and society, whether in the deserts of Egypt or the intrigue-ridden city of Constantinople. We cannot claim that this is the One Right Way to Live. If God wants to hand that mandate down from heaven, that would be His privilege, but we will not. If the circumstances of our lives required that we live in a studio apartment in the vilest city on earth, we could make good and do good in that place. These things are not in question.

But there is a certain truth, we feel, that God reveals Himself in unique ways through life lived near the land. God Himself has tied our bodies to the fruitful earth, no matter where we make our home: we cannot escape the need to eat or the need to breathe, and both needs are met by the soil and sun on the physical side. Many great saints teach the importance of working with our hands, which is almost entirely lost in the average urban (or suburban, or in many examples even geographically rural) lifestyle. Within agrarian life there is much more space, more space in time and within our minds for the stillness in which we can hear God speaking. It is harder to fall into patterns of consuming, choosing, taking, that dominate so much of modern life, in which everything -- and I do mean everything, right down to the lives of children and the dignity of living human beings -- is for sale. Sometimes I wonder if agrarian life is to modern urban society what the monasteries are to the wider Church: not a choice everyone can make, or that everyone should make, and not a place that guarantees any degree of sainthood in itself, but even so, a pattern to which those "outside" can look for a certain guidance, and a place to which they can retire to refresh and reframe their own lives.

So there you have it. I'm not hip. I'm extreme (I guess... at least in this age). I really believe there is something valuable in a life of "rural ideals" that extends deeper and beyond mere personal preference. I truly do. I do not wish anyone to feel I think THEY need to stake out a homeplace in the country, though I would be glad to share in their joy if they do. We do not wish anyone to think that we feel they are somehow lesser for choosing (or in many cases having to choose) a more urban life, any more than I should want to be thought of as "lesser" for choosing to live in marriage than in a monastery. As for ourselves, our time living in the joyful silence of the woods may itself soon be at an end, and I pray that God will lead us where we need to be -- understanding that it may even be a city, and that we would be okay. But all of this would never stop me from believing that there by the quiet pond are the songs of the frogs and the calls of the geese and the Voice of God.

Holding Our Breath

On Holy Saturday (April 11 for us Eastern Orthodox this year), every member of our little family began to cough. Oh, it was that dusty fan we turned on for the first time this spring, we said, and since only confirmed flu or vomiting would keep us from Pascha services after all the trial of Lent and Holy Week (the spiritual trials built into these seasons and more besides for us this year), we carried on: dyeing the eggs rusty bloody red, packing the Pascha basket with prosciutto and chocolate, gathering cameras and candles and our two daughters in beautiful dresses, and packing all of this -- plus blankets for the sleeping girls and plates of food for breaking the fast in the middle of the night -- into our tiny car. I remember we hardly fit everything in, shoved in between my husband's giant textbooks and strange chunks of metal for his senior design project, and rode through the darkness so excited. (Well, we did. The girls were fast asleep within 5 minutes of pulling out onto the road.) We sang "Christ is Risen" and shouted "Christ is risen!" and the children of our parish slept on the floor like piles of puppies. We were in an empty storefront building for that week, and our procession took us at midnight before the garish neon sign of the tanning salon next door, and we ate obscene amounts of bacon and cheese and ice cream on paper plates in the back of the otherwise silent building at 2am.

It was beautiful, as Pascha always is. But the coughing...

I think everyone feels like they've been in a train wreck when they wake up on Pascha morning. Most of us get only 4 or 5 hours of sleep, those of us who are parents have probably spent hours wrangling kids full of excitement and lack of rest, and nearly everyone has made at least one regrettable decision when breaking their fast with their friends and church family in the midst of the night. (Bacon, cheese, ice cream, remember? And sticky bun cake. And sausage. And...)

But this was something else. A cold had hit us all so bad it was difficult to lift our heads from our pillows, and every one of us was suffering to a greater or lesser degree. That day the baby and my husband had the worst of it, and as the week went on we all cycled in and out of feeling like death and simply feeling puny. We missed the Pascha picnic with the barbecue and bounce house... we missed all sorts of things. Nearly two weeks have passed and while we're all well into recovery, it really feels like life has just passed us by for all of this time. Add in my husband pulling some all-nighters to work on a group design project (we're too old for that these days, I have decided), and family life has been very much on its head. Instead of the rich delicious dishes I'd planned for Bright Week (the week following Pascha), we ate convenience items and frozen juice bars to scrape by each day. Instead of reading through all of our books on Easter and the Resurrection accounts, we lay in the bed watching Edwardian Farm while I begged my brain to stay in my poor throbbing head. (My 4 year old wants to go to England and meet Ruth, Alex, and Peter now.) Instead of picnics we gathered under the blankets in the bed fighting various stages of fever for days on end.

So, this is how life is. We have the best of intentions, and they come to nothing (or at least not much). We think the joy of the Resurrection is reliant on steak pies and Scotch eggs and wonder what it will be without them. And to be honest, it hasn't felt like much of a celebration, and I regret that, but at the same time we know -- we have to know -- that this joy is not reliant on us. We didn't call the dead out of the grave, and we never could have, and we never will. We don't even have control over a tiny virus, too small even to see invading our entire family at once, just in time for the holiest days of our year. All of this control we think we have is fleeting and feeble and not worth very much, when it comes down to it. And yes I feel this is deeply a spiritual message, about trust in God and confidence in His plans for us and for this earth, but it's not only that. Even if you don't feel there is a God who is in control, or do not know Him, eventually you have to realize that, at least, you are not the one in control of it all. Nor I.

And learn how to fill your lungs, and hold your breath, and move through it.