Papouli once said…

“… these are things that belong to the grace of God. There is nothing of my own. God gave me many gifts, but I did not respond; I proved myself unworthy. But I have not abandoned my efforts, not even for a moment. Perhaps God will give me His help so that I can give myself to His love.

That’s why I do not pray for God to make me well. I pray for him to make me good.

…

It doesn’t concern me how long I will live or whether I will live. That is something I have left to God’s love. It often happens that you don’t want to remember death. It’s because you desire life. That, from one point of view, is a proof of the immortality of the soul. But whether we live, or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.”

+St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, Wounded by Love
(I think it’s from the section “On Illness,” but I can’t remember)

the close of February

St. John Cassian (the Roman): feast day 29 February, transferred to today, 28 February

February has been, of course, such a short month! Being in grad school means time flies by, moments skip on the surface of life, and Lent is somehow just around the corner again.

I have been knitting a lot; I am coming close to finishing a shawl I have been working on for a really long time (it is the Find Your Fade pattern by Andrea Mowry; I love her patterns and eventually want to make them all). I am really excited to finish the shawl because for once I am actually excited to wear something that I’ve made (that isn’t a hat!)

I have been reading a lot this year so far. I think that having a bunch of required reading (about a specific subject like theology) has ironically made reading non-theology books/novels seem so much more appealing! According to Goodreads, I’ve finished 13 books since the beginning of January, but they have all been very short and I truly do not believe in reading success as being counted by number of books read. It is still a bit of a marvel to me, though!

I’m really excited for Lent! The number of services on my calendar added with the classes listed feels a bit overwhelming, but with God’s grace everything is doable, and the services themselves usually help us do them. I’m trying to figure out if I should pick a book to read during Lent, or just let my theology reading suffice, and let the ascesis be in doing it with as much attentiveness as possible. As usual, the solution is to ask the priest (a most wonderful and generally safe method of conducting the spiritual life).

Good strength, everyone, for Lent and for all other aspects of life going on right now! It is sometimes helpful for me to remember that we do not in fact live in particularly remarkable times, we are not special in our afflictions, and that no matter what God is with us (we have a whole hymn about it in Great Compline). I hope that might ease any burden you might feel, knowing that we are never alone in anything, and that the angels and saints always surround us with their prayers.

Keeping the thought of God always present before you, this form of words for your devotions is ever to be put first: “O God, make haste to save me: O Lord, make haste to help me.”
St. John Cassian, Selected Writings
(St. Paisius Monastery, 2000)

International Orthodox Christian Charities is doing relief work in Ukraine, I’m putting a link to donate if you can or are inclined to; I know things like this are going around the internet and you’ve probably seen a lot of requests for help, but these things do help relieve people’s very real suffering and it is something very tangible even if it is something small

-Odds & Ends-
A youtube channel I have been loving recently (her videos are so peaceful and beautiful and Christ-oriented)
If anyone is interested in resources for any kind of Byzantine studies, here is a link for a bunch of open access databases; I think my favorites are the Athos Digital Heritage one and the Manuscripts of St. Catherine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, Library of Congress one (I would recommend exploring these if you have some time on your hands, these database websites can require a lot of clicking through)
Paraklesis to St. Paisios the Athonite, because we all need a lot of prayers for peace right now

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather’s remarkable novel Death Comes for the Archbishop is a book I never thought I would pick up. If I remember correctly, I started reading My Antonia several years ago and couldn’t really get into it, so I put Cather aside and went a different way. Then, a friend reached out and wanted to reinstate an on-again-off-again book club that has clung to life for a few years now, and the book chosen for this iteration was Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Although I picked up the novel with reluctance, I was very quickly drawn into the story of the intertwined lives of Father (Bishop) Jean Marie Latour and his assistant and faithful friend Father Joseph Vaillant. What struck me most at first were the place names — it was so odd to be reading a “classic” novel that mentions the Pueblos of Pecos and Isleta and Taos; the cities of Santa Fe and Albuquerque and, later on in the novel, Denver. These are places I have grown up around and in; I have seen road signs for some of these towns and I have driven through others; their names are familiar and their landscapes are comforting.

I have no idea what it would be like to read this novel and not know in my bones what the land feels like in New Mexico, but I imagine that even from just Cather’s words one can pick up a clear sense of the land, in its harshness and its beauty. She can depict a landscape better than Tolkien, down to the sound a sunset makes. Similarly, she can capture a human soul in a few clear strokes, whether she is showing the simple faithfulness of an illiterate Catholic or the complex cultivation of an educated Cardinal.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

In many ways, this book reads like a hagiography. It is a work of fiction, even if it is based on the actual bishop who was first sent to the New Mexico territory to take care of a burgeoning and unguided flock. And yet — Cather truly captures something of holiness in the struggles and sacrifices made by Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant as “the rivers of their tears cultivated the barrenness of the desert” (as the general apolytikion for an ascetic so beautifully says).

In a year when Bertrand Russell published his essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” and existentialism reached a peak in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, how could a small novel by an American author contain a line that better fits the Akathist to the Mother of God than it does contemporaneous literature?

The nursery tale could not vie with Her in simplicity, the wisest theologians could not match Her in profundity.
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

You should read this book.

(This is 3/50 for my 50 Classics in 5 Years Challenge.)

late beginnings

*Monastery memories: summer 2017, Greece*

*Church of San Felipe (built 1706; 264 years before the monastery pictured above started being built),*
*Old Town Albuquerque, mid-November 2021*

Months since last post: 6
Books finished: 18
Poems written: two halves
Knitting projects finished: who knows
Crochet projects finished: um…… none?

The last six months have been, as the prophet says, “a time to keep silence.” I ended up not starting graduate school, thought I wasn’t going to go to graduate school, felt really stuck and lost, prayed a lot, started teaching Sunday school (which I love so much), and now today was my first day as a graduate student! (I’m in the program I originally applied to, for theology).

In order to commemorate and celebrate this day, this big grand impactful promise of a day, which honestly felt almost disappointingly normal, I got a Starbucks cinnamon dolce latte. Let me just say, cinnamon dolce complements iconoclasm beautifully. (The study of iconoclasm, not the practice of iconoclasm. I don’t want to be anathematized, that would be really not good for my salvation.)

Starting school again has brought me out of my time of silence and filled me with a wonderful sense of energy and peace. It is a blessing to have a direction. Thank God for everything!

I have some book reviews stashed around on my computer, some thoughts on the “idiosyncratic school of reading,” a whole rant on the nonexistence of the Fates (Moirai) in Homer, and hopefully a bunch of new thoughts on old thoughts inspired by school. Basically, I will do my best to post more, and with pictures! (I take a lot of pictures with the thought, “That could go on my blog!” And most of them aren’t here. C’est la vie, I suppose.)

For a final thought, there is probably some kind of spiritual meditation to be had that the actual lived out version of the “straight and narrow way” is often more wiggly than any of us might like, especially when pandemics hit. (And God knows I fall off that bandwagon far, far too often.) But God is always good, and to quote something I said to a friend in early December when we were talking about maybe not being able to go to church on Christmas, “Christ is born anyway, because He’s like that.”

I hope you all had a wonderful Nativity and a blessed start to the new year! I have nothing but good wishes and prayers for you all.

-Odds & Ends-
An album I’ve been really loving (isn’t it so inspiring that he made an album with songs about all these specific astronomical events?)
A poem called “Thirst” by Mary Oliver that I have been rereading since October
An account of the life of St. John Maximovitch, with his mailing address (in case you need to write to him; he responds very quickly)
The good translation of On the Incarnation (sorry SVS)
St. Isaac the Syrian’s Homily on the Nativity (I know it’s mid-January but this is really short and also absolutely beautiful; I also insist that there is never a time that we shouldn’t remember and celebrate the Incarnation, so there)

moving onwards and upwards

*St. Birgitta stitch, part 1: in which I still have sanity*

*St. Birgitta stitch, parts 2 & 3: in which I’ve totally lost it*

*Visiting family in Albuquerque and taking the Sandia Tramway for the first time*

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

This past year or so since I graduated with my BA in Classics has been very strange. Certainly covid contributed to its strangeness, but there were other things that compounded the strangeness.

I had been planning to go straight from my undergraduate to a masters degree in theology. All the classes would be online, and the community experience would of course be extraordinarily lacking. However, it was a conversation I had with someone about the future viability of my research interests that made me come screeching to a halt in this plan, causing me to withdraw my application a week before classes were to start.

Then I got a job working at a pharmacy, which was really nice, because I had some money for the first time since I graduated high school. I was working through treatment (I think a more accurate term might be management) for my mental health and starting to feel stable, more confident in myself, and a lot less anxious than I had in a very long time. But throughout this time, I kept questioning the decision I had made to not go to graduate school.

Of course I didn’t regret choosing to avoid online classes, but I missed the environment where I had felt so comfortable and where I had found my closest friends. At the same time, I didn’t want to go back just because I missed chapel and my friends. I didn’t have a viable research interest (the history and development of the typikon, while interesting to me, is not exactly the stuff of tenure).

Then the papers came.

The paper ideas started coming in droves. I would pick up the Iliad and suddenly feel that I needed to write a paper about vocation versus identity through action or inaction in the Iliad using Achilles as a case study (and maybe throwing in Euripides because let’s face it the guy was a genius). This paper started as a very specific idea frantically scribbled down before bed and turned into a complex, multilayered set of thoughts that I’m still figuring out. I also wanted to write a paper about the whole process of Patroklos’ death, which is quite possibly my favorite scene in the Iliad (followed or preceded by Hector and Andromache, I’m not sure).

Finally I got to the point where I found the thesis idea that I want to write about an pursue for my graduate work. I’m not going to name it specifically here, because unfortunately academic paranoia is usually justified, but it is very generally about Orthodoxy and mental health. I am so excited to write it, and to be honest, even if it doesn’t go anywhere it will be worth doing.

I suppose this is a really long-winded way of saying God willing I will be actually starting grad school in the fall. I’m still not quite sure exactly how I’ll manage all the details, but as my spiritual father once pointed out to me, God has not let me down yet. I am thankful for my “gap year,” and I am thankful that all my saints have found me a way to go. (I have a posse – St. Catherine of course, St. Xenia of Petersburg, St. Phanourios, St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, and most recently St. Paisios of the Holy Mountain.) Without them I’d very much still be lost.

-Odds & Ends-
Video explaining the St. Birgitta stitch pictured above (also Morgan Donner is wonderful)
Video Recording of the Akathist to St. Porphyrios (in Greek)
Onesimus, the blog of Dr. Bill Black, an OCMC missionary serving in Nairobi who I had the great honor of meeting when he spoke at a retreat hosted by the missions committee at my college (please pray for him and his work, and if you are interested and/or able to, please go here to support him financially)
I just finished this book about St. Paisios (I know I’m a little late to the bandwagon on it, but it really did come into my life at the right time). A couple of my dearest friends have such a good relationship with him, and I am so glad that I started having my own relationship with him as well.
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger has completely disillusioned me of the notion I’ve had since high school that Salinger is terrible. He is not.

the end of an era

As I am writing this, I am approximately two weeks away from being done with all of my classes of the second semester of my senior year. In other words, I’m almost done.

This, as you can imagine, brings up all kinds of feelings, especially because I have to finish my degree in quarantine (or whatever we are calling this situation right now). I am nostalgic for my campus, stressed about finishing all my work, at a point where I am apathetic towards my work, and basically terrified about what comes next.

The great big future is before me after this, and there are no right or wrong answers about what to do. I have done what is socially acceptable, and now (young) adulthood is here on the very visible horizon.

Of course, I have been working towards going to grad school, but at this point it is not in my immediate future, and I have a year to fill. A year of reflection and solitude, a refresher year after this degree I just finished. (If you can’t tell, I’m a big believer in gap years.)

I’m excited to read a lot. I’m also excited I found a platform which supports local bookstores (bookshop.org). I’m also excited to announce that I registered for an affiliate link on bookshop.org. You can find my shop here if you feel like supporting it in any way. I made some shelves with books I like and a few books I want, but go ahead and explore the whole website. Support those indie bookstores! (…and maybe support me too, if you want…)

I suppose I should mention that I was (and still am) really opposed to registering for an affiliate program with Amazon, because of the monopoly they hold on Internet shopping. Basically, the fact that this exists makes me happy, and I am glad to support them (and I probably would link to them now anyway, so there’s that).

I might do a book review and updated TBR comparing what I have read with what I want to read. That will definitely happen after May. I also have some project updates and some other things in the works that should be coming along soon after I get some abundant quantities of free time.

Until then, God bless, and I will see you tomorrow on Pascha!

-Catherine

hush

There comes a point sometime towards the end of July that I like to call “deep summer”.

Deep summer overlaps a bit with the dog days of summer, which apparently last from mid-July to mid-August (as I just learned from Google). However, deep summer is less of a date-oriented time and more of a feeling.

Deep summer happens when everyone realizes that in a month or so, school and “normal” life will start again, and in response, go into a sort of slower mode of existence in order to preserve as much as possible the luxurious feeling of not having a million things to do. Deep summer means the last chance to go on vacation and the last chance for a family cookout.

Deep summer means autumn is almost here.

With the arrival of autumn comes the arrival of classes and books and groups of people asking everyone in the cafeteria to sign up for intramural flag football (no). The arrival of autumn means I need to make sure I have notebooks and erasers for my mechanical pencil, and also a decent handle on the amount of work I’m going to have to do.

What on earth possessed me to become involved in student government, the leadership of a multi-seminary movement to promote brotherhood and Orthodox unity, the foundation of a creative writing group, and more or less sole responsibility for the proper order of chapel services, in addition to two part-time jobs and 15 credits of classwork, 6 of which are at a different college, the beginning of my undergraduate thesis project, and doctoral applications, in addition to getting a healthy amount of sleep, exercising a little every day, eating properly, having friends, doing hobbies which calm me down and keep me going creatively and introvertedly, and maintaining a decent spiritual life? What possessed me?

Deep summer is here. Hush.

I haven’t yet mapped out my complete class schedule yet because I do not know what it is, which frustrates me rather a lot. I don’t know if I’m even going to get into the classes at the other college, and yet I need them to graduate with my beloved classics major. I’m also not sure yet what graduate programs I’m going to be applying to yet. Simply looking at the list of all I will have going on is overwhelming to me.

Deep summer is here. Hush.

Now my question is, how do I keep this beautiful slow creative happy feeling with me when I start doing all of that stuff? How do I maintain my sanity after the craziness starts?

I think the best answer I can come up with is something my advisor frequently says to me when I am stressed or exhausted: Take care of Catherine for me.

I need to take care of Catherine, and Catherine likes quiet and being creative and cooking and reading every good classics fanfiction book under the sun. Catherine enjoys the profound freedom in reviving her inner toddler and saying no and sticking to it when asked to do something she is not interested in doing.

Catherine loves the hush of deep summer.

summer

It’s been a while since I have posted anything on here. There are probably myriad reasons for that, but mostly I think because it is summer.

To me, there is a conception out there that summer is supposed to be relaxing and fun, maybe an opportunity to do some things one would not normally do, and a time to do projects that one does not have time for in the more rushed times of fall and winter and the impending school year.

I find that this is categorically false. Summers are stressful and hard, particularly emotionally, and I live the same meaningless day on repeat until classes start and I again have something to do. Projects go undone and unfinished because I do not have any kind of deadline or reason to finish them, especially since more often than not projects run into the school year when I do not have so much time to finish them.

Perhaps I lack focus or self-discipline; this is most likely the case. However, given my normal schedule during the school year, somehow I doubt this. I have plenty of focus when I want to, and self-discipline, although hard, can be come by when needed.

The worst is probably when I start to question the meaning of everything I am doing. What is the point of researching a random of word usage in Sappho to check on the specific definition of colors when that question literally has no direct meaning or importance to my life?

More deeply and frustratingly, struggles with faith run rampant for me in the summer. What point does church have when every time I try to open myself up to God it seems that He asks of me something that I cannot do? If I cannot change for Him, then why bother going or even praying?

There’s a part of me that feels that one can entirely circumvent the path of spiritual struggle by just not doing it, and this is to some degree true. One does not have to struggle if the demons do not have to fight.

So here I sit on yet another Sunday morning having slept through Liturgy. I think I’m at three weeks running of not having gone specifically to Sunday Liturgy, but more broadly to any Liturgy. I keep sleeping through them. Perhaps I need to go to a real parish (with real people with real lives) and not to the school chapel, but I have no method of transportation. Perhaps I need to pray more on my own, or go to confession, or something.

I’m really not sure what to do, since life without God is loveless and awful, but right now life with God hurts too much for me.

Perhaps I shall write another post about why the summer has been so difficult. This is quite cathartic, and feels less isolating than writing in a journal. Also, as hard as it is, I think that it also is in keeping with the name and theme of “even Thine altars,” because it is easy to think that Christians do not struggle with their faith. The one-and-done confession-and-salvation Protestant mentality is quite pervasive especially in the U.S., but the real question is not “are you saved yet” but rather “are you living your salvation”.

Am I living my salvation?