What Do You Mean by "Indigenous," Gabrielle? Are You a Pretendian?

Pretendian: Someone claiming Native heritage falsely in order to either overcome an identity crisis about having mixed ancestry (Native and non-Native) or for personal gain

     Am I a Pretendian because I use the word "indigenous?"  Um. . .no!  First of all, I do have some ancestry from Iroquoian tribes and the Pamunkey tribe of Virginia, but it's not my dominant ancestry, which is Celtic, German and a wee bit Norse.  Secondly, the word "indigenous" is not only applicable to Native peoples of North and South America.  There was a time when all the peoples of Europe were indigenous, and I happen to belong by ancestry and marriage to two groups.

     By blood, in terms of European descent, I'm descended from three indigenous Celtic peoples called the Irish, the Scottish Gaels, and the Welsh.  By marriage, I belong to my husband's tribe from Montenegro, the Njegushi.  The tribal peoples of the Balkans are some of the few indigenous peoples who survive in Europe.  

     Why do I separate the terms Eastern Orthodox Christian and "indigenous" in the description of my blog?  That's simple.  My faith is one single tradition for me, a tapestry of woven of many traditions from both my European ancestors and the ancestors of my husband's people.  But I find it important to point out the indigenous thread of this tapestry, because many earth-honouring traditions are present in indigenous practice of the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith, and these traditions have often been misunderstood and vilified by three groups within the Orthodox Church today. Those three groups are: (1) new converts to Orthodoxy who come from evangelical traditions, and think that many indigenous Gaelic traditions, for example, are New Age or Pagan; (2) a pan-Slavic movement in Orthodoxy today largely fueled by the Russian expression of the faith, in which there are many zealous individuals who think that indigenous cultural traditions have no place in the life of an Orthodox Christian; (3) a Greek Athonite movement, made up largely of laypeople attracted to the Greek Mount Athos traditions of Orthodoxy and traditions popularised by Elder Ephraim in America, which also tends to misunderstand and demonise anything that seems different, including Western Rite Orthodox traditions. 

     So, I draw attention to two things: (1) The indigenous traditions both of the Balkans and of Celtic people are so deeply woven with Orthodox spirituality that you can't extract those traditions from the practice of the Orthodox faith without doing serious spiritual damage to these faithful; (2) the cultural appropriation of Gaelic practices and what survives of Welsh traditions by the New Age has caused so much confusion that people who demonise these ways, from an ex-evangelical perspective, are out of their depth and frankly quite wrong in their opinions.  When I was newly Eastern Orthodox, I was influenced by two priests who were ex-evangelical converts to jettison the Gaelic culture which I had rediscovered and adopted in my life, because it "wasn't Orthodox."  I was told that replacing it with the prayers in the Jordanville Prayer Book would be enough.

     Submitting to what those two priests told me caused me to tear a huge hole in my soul, a terrible rift in my spirit.  Becoming the kind of Orthodox Christian those guys expected me to be was NOT enough AT ALL!  It did me such great harm, giving up essentially what was part and parcel of daily life in which every moment was hallowed by prayer, even household activities like turning on the oven, that my spirit withered up and I almost left the Church.  Since that time, although I have a very good father confessor now in my current Orthodox parish and I've left those other two priests way behind, I still feel fundamentally distrustful of Orthodox spiritual fathership. I went back to my Irish anamcara (soul-friend, spiritual father) who comes from the Gaeltacht, and when it comes to deep spiritual questions about the Gaelic aspects of my practice of the Orthodox faith, I turn to him. As a Gaelic-speaker, he understands these things and why it makes a difference to chant the Our Father, the Angelic Salutation, and the Breastplate of St. Patrick in Irish.  A Gaelic-speaker understands the necessity of saying special blessings through the prayers of the Theotokos and St. Brigid when lighting the first candles and incense of each day, or when lighting the stove.  He understands the importance of creating my own sacred songs, not only singing the set hymns of the Church. He understands the place of artistry and creativity in home paraliturgical worship. An ex-evangelical or ex-Catholic who is a product of the American educational system, which is essentially founded on WASP notions, just doesn't get it, not in my experience. 

     "But it's all one faith!" exclaims my current pastor.  "The idea that the faith is all divided up along ethnic traditions is a fallacy."  That's both true and untrue. It's true in terms of all Orthodoxy holding the same dogma and doctrine.  But it's not completely true when it comes to daily practice of the faith by ordinary people, or to variety in liturgies.  It's not true, not when certain cultural and social traditions being used--be they Serbian, Russian, Greek, or (insert Eastern European ethnicity here)--are being hailed as "truly Orthodox" while traditions from the Western Orthodox side are being looked down upon and discouraged. It is not true, when Celtic-descended indigenous people in the Balkans, like the Vlachs, are being condemned by certain Orthodox jurisdictions as being practitioners of witchcraft.  It's not true when American converts look at my celebrations of seasonal festivals from my ancestral traditions, or look at the colourful stones and Trinity knots on my Irish-style icon shrine to St. Brigid of Kildare, and accuse me of being "pagan." Nobody has accused me of that for a long time, because they found out quickly that I am a fierce defender of my ancestral heritage in Orthodoxy, but the times they did accuse me of that really smarted.  The two priests who tried to rip all of my heritage out of me in the name of making me "purely Orthodox" did damage that has taken years to heal.   

     Eastern Orthodoxy is rich, nuanced, and varied in the cultural expressions of its practice. People who try to say that this variety doesn't exist are simply adopting Russian or Greek expressions of Orthodoxy and declaring those to be a standard that must be adhered to, rather than allowing for a rich tapestry of dress, language and hymnody in the various expressions of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.  Western Rite expressions are actually part of that richness, including Celtic traditions from Gaelic and Welsh people and Old English traditions from seventh, eighth and ninth-century Saxons.  To be sure, surviving Gaelic traditions have Catholic and Protestant influences that anyone with discernment and education knows how to spot and adjust for Eastern Orthodox practice, but for the most part, pure Gaelic Christian tradition is founded in the golden age of the saints in Ireland and Scotland, before the Great Schism of 1054.  In general, the Celtic traditions in Ireland, Scotland and Wales are also more influenced by Eastern Christian spirituality than other Western traditions before the Schism. So, dismissing them as "Papist" and therefore "not Orthodox," as one Greek diaconissa (deacon's wife) did once, is the true fallacy. 

     So, to return to my answer of the titular question in this article, I'm not a Pretendian. I honour my Native American ancestors, but I don't pretend to belong to their particular cultural traditions since I've not been raised with those or with Iroquoian or Algonquin people. I can, however, connect with the indigenous Saxon, Gaelic, Welsh and Norse traditions of my northern European ancestors. I also inadvertently end up doing many things that are Balkan, things that would be recognised by my husband's people, like censing the house and gardens every day at home, because of some similarities between Balkan and Celtic traditions. 

     These, then, are my indigenous ways.  Indigenous does not just refer to Native peoples in the Americas or Africa.  It refers to any people with their own deeply embedded culture, language, religion and societal/familial traditions before being conquered by an invading or colonising group which tried to eradicate them. The Christians of pre-schism Britain were indigenous before being conquered by Germanic invaders. Then, those people, the descendants of the Saxon invaders, were indigenous before being conquered by the Normans. 

     Both Celtic and Saxon cultures blended beautifully with pre-Schism Christian teaching, which was what we call Orthodox. The Saxons, Gaels, and Britons blended their languages, artwork and many other earth-honouring traditions with the New Faith.  This is what I have found in my own research over several years. It was only after the Norman conquest and its support of the Roman See in the Great Schism that wisewomen started being doubted and demonised, priests were forced to celibacy, churches were taken away from married priests and their families, monasteries were more segregated between men and women and from farming communities, and misogyny took root in the Western churches.  

     Separate women and motherhood from the Church, and Her heart grows cold.  So do the hearts of people belonging to tribal and clan-based societies where women are honoured and viewed as equal to men.  That is my observation and my experience. 

Celtic Cross from my back garden shrine

Choosing My Free Time Activities Wisely: The Art of Self-Care

 

Meme from 1998 film Practical Magic

I just left a couple of Facebook groups and here are the reasons why. This is not a rant or complaint, just speaking the truth.  Why did I leave these groups?

SHORT ANSWER: There's only so much of me to go around, and what little time I have outside of work, school, church, and home responsibility needs to be spent in ways that give me optimum peace, joy, inspiration and energy. I need to be careful to avoid draining situations.

LONG ANSWER (TDLR Alert, but I make some points worth considering here):
     I just left a group that was dedicated to the works of a particular author because I haven't really read her books and don't have time. I also just left a Protestant group that I had joined in support of one of my classmates at seminary because I don't have extra time to contribute to her group or go to her events, though I care for my classmate. Here's the thing: in terms of my time and energy, my plate is full between school, work, my responsibilities at home (particularly supporting my husband in the caregiving of his younger brother), and doing what is necessary to maintain my own faith and practice in the church of my choice (in which I was received in 2004), the Eastern Orthodox Church. With all of that, I have very little time or energy for anything else. When I choose groups or activities outside of these four areas of my life--school, work, marriage and my faith tradition--it is vital for my soul's peace that those groups and activities are such that I will be comfortable emotionally, socially and spiritually. 

     I will not go to group events with a lot of people I don't know because I find it draining and I already have enough events of that kind that I attend as part of work and school. I stay within my own faith tradition and my own tribal and ancestral cultures (Montenegrin and Celtic) for events during my free time because generally, l experience acceptance there, whereas in other situations I often have not been accepted or understood because my culture is indigenous and as such is different. When I go to seminary events (at the school of theology I attend for my Master of Divinity degree), I'm very selective about those for this reason. I'm even selective and cautious about women's events in my own faith tradition, because of many times in the past where I felt that I had to mask too much; masking is very exhausting. 

     In short, what I want when I go home from school, work or church services at my Orthodox parish is peace and quiet. What I want more and more, the older I get, is to go into places where neither my culture, my individuality nor my personal power feel like a threat to anyone, where I can just relax and be me. If I have the slightest suspicion that I won't fit in a certain environment or event, I engage in self-care by staying away. If I have to hide my light under a bushel to make other people comfortable or shrink to avoid them feeling threatened by my gifts or vibes, then the place or event where I would have to do that is NOT where I need to go! I do neither myself nor anyone else any good in such a situation. I'm studying to be a lay healthcare chaplain. As such, I have learned the hard way this summer that I don't need to insert myself into situations where people might be uncomfortable. The same concern about other people being uncomfortable also needs to be applied to myself. This is why I'm cutting back on groups, and being very selective about where and with whom I spend my free time. If I come around you, feel honoured! It means that I see you as respectful of me and safe to be around.

ONE MORE NOTE: Some people have said before, "But Gabrielle, you should branch out in other groups to be an indigenous voice and to take up the challenge of stepping outside your comfort zone." Here's what I have to say to that: I spent the whole first half of my life outside my comfort zone, trying to fit in with people who fundamentally were not interested in accepting me or investing in my presence. My indigenous voice was UNHEARD because people didn't want to listen. They wanted instead to shape me into their own images and make me what THEY wanted me to be so that they would be more comfortable. So, I now sing my songs to those who want to hear them. 

     Granted, I took up the mantle of being a healer during the pandemic. Healing gifts are for helping everyone. But we must remember something important: people whom we might want to heal must be willing to undergo that process. A lot of people like to walk around unhealed because it's more comfortable for them. At 55 years of age, I'm done forcing my gifts and skills into spaces where they aren't desired. God does not force help or grace onto people; they accept it or move towards it of their own free will. The same is true with someone of my calling, though I will always pray for everyone regardless of what behaviour I encounter from them when I'm out and about. That still doesn't mean that I walk willingly into a potentially hostile forest; doing that is not wisdom, but foolishness. Does a bird fly into a cage, or does an antelope wander into a lions' den?

Celtic cross with harvest colours, designed by Ava, purchased and used with permission

Some Advent Thoughts On Welcoming the Stranger: Who Is the Stranger, and What If It's You?

 

Our Lady of Sorrows, Cuzco School

     Good afternoon to all my readers!  Greetings after two years of not writing! These past two years have been very busy with some major changes in my life, mainly that I am now attending seminary to become a lay healthcare chaplain. I got accepted to SMU Perkins School of Theology in the fall of 2022, on a full tuition scholarship for a Master of Arts in Ministry Degree.  If I continue that plan, I will be finished with my degree in May of 2025. However, I am in the process of trying to switch to a Master of Divinity degree plan so that I can take courses in the Healthcare Chaplaincy concentration offered in that degree. If I switch to an MDiv, I will probably not graduate for two more years at least.

     I also have changed jobs since the last time I wrote in this blog. I started a new job at St. Francis Anglican Church as their Music Director and Organist in January of 2024.  I also serve there presently as a pastoral care intern, as part of my internship for my degree at SMU Perkins.  The job is a great fit for me, especially as an Eastern Orthodox Christian.  St. Francis Anglican Church belongs to the ACNA, the Anglican Church of North America. The ACNA is a conservative Anglican branch that holds the same family and Biblical values as those in my own faith tradition, Eastern Orthodoxy. It is not easy to find employment as a church musician with traditional values, so St. Francis Anglican Church is like a breath of fresh air after years of working in environments that caused me stress because of pressures to compromise my beliefs. St. Francis Anglican Church is also Anglo-Catholic, which resonates with me because I have a deep love of the Western Rite liturgical tradition, and I pray the Rule of St. Benedict as my prayer rule. 

     Other changes in my life over the past couple of years include the sad fact that my brother-in-law Theodosios, the youngest brother of my husband David, died at the end of May in 2024. My husband David has taken care of his two mentally and physically disabled brothers, Theodosios and Chris, for most of his life.  Theo died of multiple medical complications after a long battle with congestive heart failure and lymphedema.  Chris is now bedbound, in a hospital bed in our living room, with his own multiple medical conditions. My husband stays at home and takes care of Chris, 24-7.  In the meantime, I work and go to school.

     As my readers can no doubt see, I live a very busy life, both personally and professionally.  I work at my internship, and I play musical performances as a sacred musician. In the midst of this work, I end up attending events, and sometimes these are church receptions and dinners.  I observe a lot of human behaviour, and I experience a lot of different situations.

     One situation I recently experienced, where I observed and participated in the social dynamics at a large church reception I attended, caused me to start thinking about what it means to show love towards strangers and visitors in church communities. Sometimes we are the hosts of these events, and other times, we are the stranger who enters the room.  What approach should we take as Christians, if we are either of those?  Here is a reflection I wrote about it a couple of days ago, considering the positions of stranger and host from both sides.  

What does it mean to welcome a stranger? Welcoming a stranger doesn't mean just saying hello when they come into the church hall and telling them to have a seat. It means helping that person find a place if he/she is the only person in the room with no table. Being a stranger in the room means you don't know anyone, and you don't know where to sit. It means that when you are wandering around alone in a reception hall, you are visible to everyone and all can see that you are not being immediately welcomed at anyone's table. It means that if you just randomly sit somewhere, it may be at a table where nobody wants you and their platitudes will be hollow at best. We, as the hosts who invited you to the event, should help you find a place and introduce you to people. If we are not willing to do that, then we might want to ask why this is a struggle for us. If the answer is that we're too busy to deal with it because we've got a room full of people to attend, then, is there someone else we can delegate who can help find that stranger a place?

The Gospel passage in Matthew 25: 41-46 makes it quite plain that we are called upon to clothe the stranger. I equate this with welcoming the stranger as well. There are many other passages in the Gospels that deal with welcoming people at our table. Reading verses Matthew 25: 41-43 should give us pause and make us wonder if, at church events, we are really being welcoming to the stranger.

Matthew 25: 41-46

41 “Then He will also say to those on the left hand, ‘Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels: 42 for I was hungry and you gave Me no food; I was thirsty and you gave Me no drink; 43 I was a stranger and you did not take Me in, naked and you did not clothe Me, sick and in prison and you did not visit Me.’

44 “Then they also will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?’ 45 Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’ 46 And these will go away into everlasting punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

While we've all been the stranger at some point, most of us have also been the host at some point too. Sometimes it can be much more comfortable to sit contentedly with our friends than get up and invite a new person to come sit with us. We fall into error through the illusion of conformity and contentment when we have a place, and we forget what it's like NOT to have a place, like that stranger who just entered the room. Such forgetfulness can happen to anyone. We've all experienced it, but it's worth pondering for our edification.

It is even more challenging if the stranger who enters does not fit into our category of how someone should look or act, or if the stranger is really not a stranger, but rather an acquaintance who annoyed us greatly the last time we saw him/her. I am, of course, assuming that we are talking about a fairly normal stranger, not someone dangerous. So. . .how can we see Christ in the stranger?

If we are the stranger, what can we do that is best for our salvation and that of others? What are we called to do? How can we overcome the invariable embarrassment of not being able to find a place at a table, and then turn that in a direction for the flow of God's grace? I have been thinking that perhaps there is a point where, in such a situation, the stranger becomes a host too.

My personal response to this question and the Gospel passage above is threefold:

(1) If I'm the host, I will endeavour to treat newcomers better if they come into a place I frequent, be that my own Orthodox parish, the Anglican church where I work, a reception I attend, or even my local grocery store. 

(2) If I'm the host, I will try to talk to people if they want to approach me at a reception, but if I'm tired, I think I can also be honest with them about that. It's okay to tell them that I need to sit down, that I'm not feeling well, or that I can't stay long to chat.

(3) What if I'm the stranger? It's easy to feel unwelcome if you are at a large event and everyone is sitting at tables with family and friends, and you don't feel like you can intrude. But maybe instead of going to a negative place, it might be fruitful to look for someone else who is alone in the room.  Who is sitting all by themselves with nobody to talk to? Who is sitting over in a corner crying because he/she had a sudden moment of remembrance about someone who recently died in the family?  Who is sitting by themselves fretting over a life situation that has them worried? Do they need company? It might not hurt to check and see.

     Once personal feelings are set aside, which is NOT easy to do, we can focus on how God is calling us in a given moment. When we unite our minds and hearts with God and follow His lead on how we can best navigate a situation, then we have opened up our hearts to Divine Grace. 

     

     

A Difficult Year and Consolation through Faith and Seasonal Celebrations

Dear Readers,

     I hope that you all have gotten through the past year with your hearts, minds, bodies and souls intact. I have not posted on my blog in a long time because this past year, 2021 through 2022, has been full of unexpected challenges.  Because this is a public blog, I won't go into detail except to say that this year, a family member's health greatly declined to the point that my husband and I had to transition that family member into a nursing home, after the family member almost died in the fall and became more and more disabled.  I also faced a lot of other challenges in other areas of my life, such as falling on the stairs of my house just before Holy Week when I was supposed to play the organ for Holy Week services, and some things not turning out the way I hoped they would.  I managed to play the services and accomplish all that we needed to for Holy Week at the church where I work, but it was painful and I am still in physical therapy with a probably torn rotator cuff. (We are waiting on MRI results).  A lot of things were hard this past year. But I had blessings too along with the challenges, such as the support of my loving husband, and friends and family who stepped up and helped out when times got especially difficult. 

    One of the biggest challenges in a year full of trials on and off is to continue observing celebrations such as Church feasts and seasonal festivals.  But I managed to do so, and thus, my Celtic-Saxon indigenous strain of Orthodox Christianity became a great consolation to me when hardships were almost untenable.  We celebrated Whitsuntide, Lammastide, Haligmonath (September with its big feasts of the Nativity of the Theotokos and the Feast of the Holy Cross), Hallowtide (which includes one of my favourite feasts of the year, All Hallows Eve), Advent, and Christmastide (which included Yule, which I celebrate as a commemoration of the appearance of the Nativity Star). On February 1, Imbolc and St. Brigid's Day, I tied clooties on the St. Brigid Tree in our house, asking the saint for her help in many things, mostly things having to do with the family member who was, at that time, transitioning into long-term care.  The next day, Candlemas, I attended Divine Liturgy at my Orthodox parish.  From Brigidstide (my term for the Pre-Lenten period), we transitioned into Lent.  Lent was about as Lenty as the season can get, because we were buffeted with constant challenges both at home and in other areas of life.  The earth began to awaken with the spring between St. Patrick's Day (March 17), the Spring Equinox (which was on March 20 this year!) and Lady Day (March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation).  As the earth awakened, so did my hopes that things would get better.  Sometimes they got better, other times they got worse. Sometimes I felt like my prayers were not being listened to at all, and other times it seemed that our lives were full of miracles big and small.  I continued to light my candles and incense in the back garden shrine dedicated to St. Brigid of Kildare, chant my Benedictine and Horologion canonical hours and my Regina Caeli devotions, and attend Divine Liturgy when I could at my Orthodox parish. I was able to attend Pascha, the term for Easter in Orthodoxy, THE major feast of the year, at my parish because my boss kindly let me have the weekend off.  That was one of the greatest blessings of all this year.  My husband and I both were able to attend Pascha, and I sang in the choir.

   The month of May has just ended. During May, we celebrated the following: (1) Beltaine (May Day) and St. Walpurga's Day on May 1, which for us as Christians is three things: a Marian observance, the feast day of St. Walpurga of Devonshire/Heidenheim, and a day to honour marriage and family; (2) our family patron saint's day (called a Slava day, a Montenegrin and Serbian custom) on May 12, and (3) the continuing blessed days of Pascha, both weekdays and the Paschal Sundays with their special Gospel themes.  

    Today is June 4, the Saturday after Ascension in the Orthodox Church.  I put up the Paschal flags for the outside of our house today, and put out the flags for upcoming Pentecost and Whitsuntide as well as a Midsummer flag.  We transition into the fullness of summer as the earth gets greener and we prepare to celebrate the new life found in the Holy Spirit as Pentecost approaches on the Orthodox calendar (June 12). My prayer is that the burgeoning greenery will become synonymous with a similar burgeoning of new life and hope in our lives, and that the coming year may be much improved.

    The one thing I know for sure is that the Christian life is no guarantee against suffering, and that it's easy to despair when one is pelted in life with one thing after another. But as my husband says, we also must look at the positive things and remember that life is never all bad.  There is much beauty: hearts that love us, our own hearts opening like flowers when we are able to love others, and the beauty of the earth. . .shining stars coming out on a summer twilight, and the moon rising and shedding her white rays upon the new growth in the prayer garden.  There is music, both music we enjoy listening to, music we play and sing, and the music of creation itself as the land sings "Holy, Holy, Holy art Thou, Lord God of Sabaoth! Heaven and earth are filled with Thy glory! Hosanna in the highest!".

    Christ is ascended in glory!  Alleluia!  God bless everyone who reads this post.

In Christ's Love,

Gabrielle

(Photos in this post: The top photo is of my graphic I made of the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Church Year as I celebrate it personally. The bottom photo here is of our Marienbaum, a tradition of my Bavarian ancestors in which we have a tree shrine in honour of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Her Divine Son.  You can also see, tied to the Marienbaum, which is German for "Mary Tree," literally, our Midsummar cross from last year).

 

Some Thoughts on Being an Eastern Orthodox Christian of Indigenous Traditions

 

 Some Thoughts on Being an Eastern Orthodox Christian of Indigenous Traditions

     I am unapologetically indigenous as an Eastern Orthodox Christian! I belong to the Montenegrin Njeguši tribe (my husband's tribe), various indigenous groups from Britain, Celtic lands and northern Europe, and last but not least, I have Iroquois blood. All of my British and European ancestors were originally Orthodox Christians until sometime around 1200, except for my Culdee ancestors, who, though supposedly no longer extant by Reformation times, actually stayed Orthodox and just went into hiding in the mountains and in the Hebrides. So, I practice the Orthodox faith with a generally indigenous approach that is mostly comprised of northern European traditions, in particular Celtic.

I had some zealous clergy in the past who tried to strip me of those indigenous aspects of my faith, but I reclaimed them and now practice my faith as a whole person, instead of as someone who has parts of me torn away. Fellow Orthodox Christians, do me a favour: kindly don't try to make indigenous people into modern Western Americans, nor try to make us into Greeks or Russians or any other people that we aren't. Especially don't try to do that in the Name of Christ, Who made each of us in His image as we are and who we are, and Who transforms and transfigures us in His own way and time, without asking us to pretend we're someone else. Nor should we be told that who we fundamentally are, in terms of our culture and basic personality, is bad or wrong. Orthodoxy doesn't accept the doctrine of total depravity, though I've run into people who forget that sometimes.

Each of us has a sacred personhood, a mini-hypostas with individual fullness like the full individuality of the Holy Three Persons of the Trinity. God made us each unique, and fundamentally good (Genesis 1:31), though we and all creation are victimized by the fall of man. We are imperfect and incomplete, and have a tendency towards sin, therefore rendering us in need of Christ and His uncreated Light and Grace. ("Uncreated" means that these aspects were always in and of Him, and a free gift to creation). Unlike the All-Holy Trinity, our sacred person--our individual selves--must be cleansed, redeemed and brought into Communion with God through baptism and living the sacramental life.

As an indigenous person, I can also tell you that communion with God's creation and remembering its sacredness also helps a lot with sanctification. This is something known and understood by the Celtic fathers and mothers of the Church. So, in my practice of my faith, you will see things like flowers, stones, herbs for a sweet savour to the Lord, used together with icons in my garden shrine of St. Brigid of Kildare, where I practice my prayer rule. You will also see my observance of seasonal celebrations such as harvests and turning points of the year, which in my faith often coincide with the feast days of saints and date back to the early times of the Celtic, Saxon and Norse branches of the Church. All of these are done within and through my Orthodox faith. Don't let anyone tell you that you can only be Orthodox if you practice it through the auspices of ____________ (insert ethnicity or national origin here), or that you're not truly Christian if you retain indigenous culture.

As an indigenous person, I'm a bit unique. Not very many people realise that Montenegro, the country of my husband's ancestors, is comprised of tribal peoples; nor are very many people aware that the very nature of several northern European cultures, of which Celtic is only one, is tribal. A lot of people think that you have to actually belong to one of the Native North American, South American or African tribes to be considered indigenous, but there are indigenous people of Europe as well as many other places in the world.

People have said to me before, "Why do you care so much about your indigenous traditions? Is not Christ more important than your culture?" But anyone who is honest will admit that all Christians practice their faith within some type of cultural context, and that often these cultural contexts add rich and beautiful small traditions to the rich tapestry of people in the Church. To say that one cultural context within the practice of the Faith is valid while another is not? This is patently wrong and unjust. And yet it's done quite often in my experience: things that don't quite fit into someone's cultural perception of how we should be gets labeled "heretical" or "erroneous" or "non-Christian." But I have cast off the negativity of critics, zealots and anyone else trying to remake me and mine in their own image. I practice my faith in creativity and love, in a way that hopefully honours my ancestors and brings me closer to Christ through their wisdom and that of the saints.

Cristos voskrese! Tha Crìosd air èiridh! Tá Críost ar éirigh! Atgyfododd Crist! Christ est ressuscité! Kristus är upstånden! Christus ist Auferstanden! Críst sé elléann! Allélúˇa! Christ Is Risen! Alleluia!

 New Life in the Spring of 2021

     I have had some new changes since St. Brigid's Day on February 1 that have been a true blessing to me.  The Lord in His mercy finally broke the pattern of constant despair and fear that had beset our family since April of 2020, allowing me to get a job with a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church as their Director of Music Ministries and Organist.  It is the nicest job I've ever had with the nicest staff I've ever had the pleasure to work with!  This is in 30 years of working in church music.  The commute isn't bad either, only thirty minutes from my house straight down a road that is not a highway or tollway. I got the job first as an interim position on February 23, 2021.  Then, on April 11, the administration of the church decided to make my position permanent, deciding to renew my contract for the next year.

     I do a variety of music at the Lutheran church: the traditional high liturgical music that I love in the classical style, leading a Praise band (which is quite fun and uplifting), and music for a Spanish service that ranges from contemporary to indigenous folk.  The whole way of handling music--when choirs sing, etc.--is done in a more healthy and balanced way in this church than in many of my previous experience.  So, I am thankful to God for His manifold blessings and to the Mother of God for her unceasing help, protection and intercessions.  I am also thankful to St. Basil of Ostrog, our family saint, for his intercessions, to Tsar Martyr Nicholas II for his help, and to St. Brigid of Kildare for the many miracles she has worked for our family this past spring. 

    When I am not busy at my job, I still have time to attend services as I am able at my Orthodox parish of St. Sava.

    Christ is Risen!  Amen.

The Year 2020: One Big Dark Night of the Soul

 

One does not have to be a mystic to experience a dark night of the soul. Sometimes, life's circumstances and hardships can be enough to make us feel a palpable and painful absence of God.  This past year, 2020, was a year of hardship for people worldwide because of the Covid-19 pandemic.  Millions of people suffered physically, emotionally and economically.  To say this in one sentence sounds like an understatement, because we had a year not only filled with sickness, fear, and job loss, but also political turmoil.  This blog post is not about what the world experienced at large, and it most certainly isn't about politics.  What I seek to address in this article is my own personal experience, to the extent that I'm willing to do so on a public blog, and address concepts about the absence of God and the dark night of the soul.

This past year, I went from being mildly optimistic and reflective about renewal (as you will see from my posts in January and early February of 2020 before the chaos of the pandemic hit the United States), to being almost at the brink of despair spiritually and personally.  Basically, I started out the year of 2020 watching a dear friend of the family lose his job, and seeing him and his family go through turmoil and difficulty as an almost twenty-year career ended for him.  Then, just after watching my friends go through all that, a member of the choir at the church where I worked died after about a ten-month struggle with cancer.  I was supposed to play the organ for her funeral, but my wrist was injured in a physical therapy exercise.  I had to hire a substitute organist to play for the funeral, while I still directed the choir.  By the time I recovered the ability to play the organ, the pandemic hit and the church where I worked was closed down temporarily because of the shelter-in-place directive.

To make a long and complicated story short, my husband and I lost our jobs because of the economic hardships caused by the Covid crisis.  I lost my job in April, and my husband lost his in July.  I had a brief interim job as a music director at another church, from July of 2020 until the end of November of that year. Since I had not yet found a permanent job, I was out of work again by the beginning of Advent 2020.  I fortunately got some freelance work at another church, playing harp and French horn in Advent and Christmas services that December. That successful start of a freelance business in church music gave me much hope.  By the first of the year in January of 2021, however, things were looking bleak again.

On top of all this, my husband's mentally and physically disabled younger brothers, who live with us and for whom he is the main caregiver, developed escalating health problems that rendered them even more disabled.  This, in turn, made our situation more desperate since we could not seem to land permanent jobs. My husband could not get a job at all, and as I mentioned, I couldn't get permanent work in my field either.  Other options, like teaching music at schools, were not open to me because of issues I had wearing masks and face coverings with my severe asthma. By January, our situation with my husband's brothers was worse than it had ever been.  Our Orthodox Christmas on January 7 was one of the hardest Christmases I had experienced since the death of my mother back in 1992.  By the beginning of February, exactly a year after my last blog post here, our house was an absolute disaster because of the health problems of the brothers and the caregiving issues, and we had no income at all. We were ineligible for unemployment insurance because of having worked for churches, which are exempt from paying unemployment insurance.  

I had been through almost a whole year of questioning whether God was present, whether He still wanted me in His service in church music, and indeed whether or not He wanted me at all.  Even though my faith tradition does not believe in the theology of Calvinism, I had somehow gotten Calvinistic ideas embedded in me about some sort of pre-destined calling in God, whereby if I followed His will for my life and strove to fulfill that calling, things would work out for me. The fact that I found myself continually in situations where I would build up hope, and then have it dashed to pieces when things didn't work out for whatever reason, made me in turn think that maybe I had sinned in some way and God had therefore rejected me and my gifts for His service.

Things then shifted after two Orthodox feast days: St. Brigid's Day (Feb. 1) and Candlemas (the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple, February 2).  I asked the intercession of St. Brigid for the healing of my husband's youngest brother, who was home from a recent stay in a nursing home for rehabilitation, and who had come home without hardly being rehabilitated at all.  He was downstairs in our living room, in a hospital bed, almost completely unable to walk.  Well, exactly three days later from the day I prayed, this brother WALKED up the stairs to his room and was able to be moved back up there to his bedroom.  Yesterday, March 8, 2021, he was discharged from physical therapy by the home health PT who had been coming out to our house.  So, that was a definite miracle of God, Who is wondrous in His saints!

Shortly after that, however, I experienced another dark night of the soul in which I went through a time when I could not connect with God at all. I wondered, did I sin in some way? Did I pray the wrong way?  Was He rejecting me to show me that I had messed up?  It was a terrible feeling of being in a dark abyss without His presence.  However, at the same time, I came to know that the Holy Spirit was with me down in that abyss and that I also had more help from the intercessions of the saints. I won't go into specifics because those are between me and my spiritual father (the Orthodox Christian term for a spiritual director).  But suffice it to say that I discovered that the feeling of God's absence was just that. . .a feeling! So, I posted this on Facebook about when we think God is absent. It is worth reposting here:

At the time that you think most that God is absent, He's actually there. Sometimes, we can't always sense His presence when we pray, especially when we are praying during hard times. But He's never "out to lunch," nor is He ever really cut off from us, though at times it seems like the flow of His grace gets turned off like a water spigot. But that is just a FEELING, and feelings do not necessarily bespeak truth, nor reflect reality. God is always there. He is the God Who neither slumbers nor sleeps, and Who ever keepeth Israel. When we are blessed with the perception of His presence, it is a true blessing not to be taken for granted, and a reminder that He hears us, especially when we most think that He does not.

There was also something else that I had posted shortly after that, about surrendering to God and not giving in to our own personal ideas about how we think our lives should be. That is worth revisiting also, because by February of 2021, I had decided to quit fighting against the whole pattern of hope being built up, being dashed to the ground, and things being stable one minute and unstable the next:

Well, I think it is time to stop fighting against the tide of chaos, difficulty and unraveling of my desires for my life, this tide that has been pummeling me since February of 2020. This does not mean I just give up. It means I need to calm down, go with the flow, and let God work through all of this. Two things are immediately apparent: (1) This is part of a certain level of initiation in my life. (2) My calling in this world is shifting, and I am being asked to live that calling in fullness and truth. Will I continue to serve in church music? I don't know. I might end up getting a grant and going back to school to become something else entirely, such as a music therapist. I might end up doing both. But it is clear that I am being asked to step outside of these difficult situations emotionally and look at them on the spiritual plane. Trying to swim against this tide of everything being turned upside down, prevented and delayed is pointless. I may as well swim with the rapids, and if I get dashed upon the rocks, so be it. Sometimes, things within us have to die so that better things within can be born. Often, we are called upon to let go of the way WE think our lives are supposed to be or the things we most desire. I gave myself to Christ as a musician and singer of healing prayers and hymns! I gave my life to His service, and asked His Mother to be my model. Guess what? That means my life no longer belongs to me: "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Be it done unto me according to thy word." So! I shouldn't be surprised or dismayed when what I want most in life suddenly doesn't work out anymore, or that I am placed upon a path not of my choosing. I wanted just to serve Him in His Church and have a house out in the woods. But maybe that isn't what HE wants. NOTE TO FRIENDS READING THIS POST: If you don't want to experience this sort of unweaving and unraveling like I have, don't give yourself like that to God. It might feel great when you first do it and you might think yourself oh-so-good for having done so, but it is in fact a sure way to get Divinely knocked down on your arse and getting the stuffing slapped out of you. Run from your calling and you'll end up in the belly of a whale. Embrace it and arrogantly say, "Here I am, I'm ready!" and you'll end up reduced to a grain of wheat fallen to the earth and ground into the dirt. The words of Yoda to Luke Skywalker come to mind: "Ready, are you? What knows you of ready?!".

Not long after I had that horrible dark-night-of-the-soul experience--and recovered from it, I got an e-mail out of the blue from the pastor of a Missouri Synod Lutheran parish who was looking for an interim music minister. I talked with the associate pastor not long after that, as well as a ministry support pastor for the Spanish-speaking branch of that congregation. I ended up in a job interview with all of them by the end of February, and immediately after the interview I signed a contract with them for three months as interim music director. After I signed the contract, I felt great peace of the Holy Spirit within me. It is definitely the place I'm supposed to be right now, at this time in my life.

Will it end up being where I'm supposed to be long-term? I don't know. With the positive experiences I have had there so far, it well may be, but this is entirely up to God.

What I have learned from all of this are the following things:

(1) God gives us gifts and callings, but the way in which those callings are fulfilled and gifts are used is not a path set in stone; it is greatly affected by man's free will and the fallenness of the world, and that includes our own choices. As I reflect upon the past year, I am able to look back and see choices I made that could have been better. I am using what I learned to make wiser choices now, as I and my family enter a period of hopefully positive change, healing and restoration.

(2) We may be called to this, that or the other at various points in our lives, and the ways in which we serve God will go through times of ebb and flow. But one thing we are always called to do, no matter what, is die to ourselves and our notions of how our lives should be. We are called upon to let go of expectations, which is deuced difficult to do. I quote John 12:24: Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain. (NKJV)

(3) The Dark Night of the Soul, while very real, is also quite often based on our feelings and perceptions.  Guess what?  We are fallen, imperfect beings and those feelings and perceptions are flawed.  God is omnipresent, which means that He is there even if we don't think He is.  Why do we sometimes feel He's absent?  Well, sometimes, like myself in the past year, we have expectations that don't work out, so we conclude He's absent. That feeling is caused by an erroneous idea about Him being some sort of big Santa Claus in the sky Who always blesses us and keeps us from suffering.  Um. . .no.  To be sure, all good things come from Him. But following Him does not mean we will be somehow protected from suffering. Even though we intellectually know this, often our hearts can fall back into the Santa mode when dealing with God.  

Other reasons for the Dark Night of the Soul can be acting or thinking in ways that cause our spiritual water faucet to get turned off. Our access to God's grace is free, but within our hearts and souls it operates like a water faucet that we can turn on or off by our own free will and responses to situations in our lives.  God's grace might be trying to get through our garden hose, so to speak, but we have turned off the spigot in our ignorance, heedlessness, self-absorption, whatever.  So, maybe I turned my spigot off.  But it's a simple matter to turn it back on by crying out to God. Psalm 130 (129 LXX) comes to mind, verses 1-7: 

1 Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord.

2 Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications.

3 If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand?

4 But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared.

5 I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.

6 My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.

7 Let Israel hope in the Lord: for with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.

Whatever reason we may have for going through a dark night of the soul, that dark night remains a mere perception of reality.  Just because we feel like we're in the abyss and cut off doesn't mean we really are.  The other thing about the abyss is that sometimes we have to venture into the womb, so to speak, in order to be reborn. The Gospel passage comes to mind, where Jesus tells Nicodemus about the need to be born again.  There is also this passage from Isaiah, chapter 42, verses 14 through 16:

14 14 For a long time I have held my peace,
    I have kept still and restrained myself;
now I will cry out like a woman in travail,
    I will gasp and pant.
15 I will lay waste mountains and hills,
    and dry up all their herbage;
I will turn the rivers into islands,
    and dry up the pools.
16 And I will lead the blind
    in a way that they know not,
in paths that they have not known
    I will guide them.
I will turn the darkness before them into light,
    the rough places into level ground.
These are the things I will do,
    and I will not forsake them.

  I could go on about these matters for many more paragraphs, but to sum up what I've learned in this past year of 2020, a single verse of Scripture suffices: Psalm 139 (LXX 138) verse 12.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

   And one last image is worth considering as well: the wise men following the Star of Bethlehem to find Jesus.  

9 When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.

10 When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy.

May God help us to find the Star of Bethlehem within ourselves, leading us to His Son as He led the Magi, especially in times of hardship and darkness.

In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.