Letting Go of Easter

All my talk about mysticism and writing at the end of January had me groping for my dormant liturgical traditions to see if their structures and rhythms might inform my approach to writing as spiritual practice. And since Lent was nigh, I figured I might as well start by taking a stab at observing it for the first time in many years. And since much of the mysticism of the Western Church began in the East—indeed it was the emphasis on mystery that drew me to the Byzantine tradition—I figured I might as well start by attending Divine Liturgy. Or watching it, rather. But I’m in good company. According to St. John Chrysostom, the angels, too, are mere spectators at the “celestial theater” of the Church. 

***

In 1999 I became a catechumen in the Orthodox Church, a sort of student studying to convert. It meant leaving evangelicalism and a lifetime of distinguishing myself as the AWANA champion, Miss Conservative Baptist of Oregon 1986-87, and Jesus Nerd par excellence, teaching Sunday School and leading bible studies and worship music all the way up into grad school. My family never had the money to create the hermetically-sealed environment of private or home schooling but I certainly tried to shut out as much of the storm of secularism as I could with daily personal bible devotions, youth group, and Christian music—and tried to ignore where these spiritual and intellectual tarps leaked. In graduate school, my academic speciality was American evangelicalism and the Israel-Palestine conflict, which meant spending a lot of time in the bowels of evangelical history and theology. The growing leaks finally became a flood. I could see how flimsy and tenuous the materials of not only my cognitive coverings but even those seals that were airtight, allowing the solipsism and literalism inside to fester into something noxious and idolatrous. Evangelicalism had made graven images of the individual, the text, and even the nation-state. It was also deeply unsatisfying. I wanted God to be more than just my invisible daddy or bestie. 

I’m not sure how I first heard about St. George’s Antiochian Orthodox Church. Maybe during my senior year of college? I was the administrative assistant for Portland State University’s Middle East Studies Center and it involved interacting with local Middle Eastern communities. Upon my first visit to St. George’s, I discovered the priest and his wife were converts from evangelicalism, as were the lead cantor and head deacon. And Arabs are famous for their hospitality. The Orthodox Church was like stumbling into a Michelin-starred restaurant after a lifetime of only knowing milk and white bread. An evangelical friend sneered that it was “smells and bells.” Hell yeah it was! The sensuality of it all—the incense, the chanting, the icons, the bread (especially the blessed bread, baked fresh with a hint of cardamom)—was revelatory. Imagine, worshipping God with your mind and body! Yet if all you wanted was a cerebral experience, there was two thousand years of it. There was Athanasius and Basil and Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Aereopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius) and Gregory of Palamas and even contemporaries like Kallistos Ware and David Bentley Hart who fearlessly plumbed the ineffable depths of the Divine Godhead. And the Divine Liturgy—the Orthodox version of the Mass—was an other worldly synthesis of all this in a way that was both vertically-focused on heaven (as opposed to mere self-improvement and emotional indulgence) and horizontally communal. No segregating children in a nursery or Children’s Church. We worshipped “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1)” in the many, many icons. Were reminded in the Cherubic Hymn that we mystically represented the cherubim—in this moment, in this building—in which those in heaven mingled with us here on earth. 

Except a friend and I started talking about getting married. He was Catholic. If I became Orthodox, we would not be able to share communion. Catholics were open to communion with the Orthodox but the Orthodox refused, insisting they could not have communion with schismatics. I will spare you all my theological angsting regarding the Filioque, papal authority, and the role of the Eucharist. The end result was that I became Catholic (though not married; my friend came out eighteen months later while I began embracing my kinky sexual orientation less publicly). At some point in all this angsting, I learned of Eastern Catholicism. There are actually 24 particular churches, or ways of being Catholic, with varying liturgical rites. One of those rites, the Latin rite (Roman Catholicism), so dominates with its 98% of the world’s Catholics that non-Latin rites are generally hidden. The next largest rite is the Byzantine (Greek) rite, which is made up of Orthodox churches who came into communion with Rome during the 17th and 18th centuries (usually due to less than honorable political machinations on the part of Rome or local families and bishops). And Portland had a Byzantine-rite parish, St. Irene’s*, though it was Ruthenian and made up mostly of first, second, and third generation Ukrainian immigrants. In true American consumer fashion, I could have my cake and eat it too. Sure, it meant Church Slavonic instead of Arabic. But also the ability to attend Mass where ever there was a Catholic parish of any rite. My friend was my sponsor when I was chrismated (confirmed) on Pentacost of 2000. And because this was the Greek rite, it meant he was now my godfather. 

I got five years of attending Divine Liturgy, cantoring and even volunteering to teach Sunday School before ME/CFS left me homebound. There were no online services in 2005. I tried chanting the Divine Liturgy on my own, but I was not cut out to be some mystical hermit. I needed other people. The whole point of the Divine Liturgy is that its focus is Communion. And communion in both its little and big C meanings was even more important because I was struggling with the work of making God real. 

Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann argues that even for staunch believers the “idea that there is an invisible other who takes an active, loving interest in your life is in many ways preposterous and takes effort to maintain, even in a community that has never been secular.” It requires what she calls a “faith frame” which guides the faithful in the work of continually shifting attention to the presence of God throughout daily life. Ritual and community are the key ways we do this. 

That all-pervasive mental mist that accompanies ME/CFS meant that abstract thinking, making up and sustaining narratives and characters and now even the faith frame required to access God was beyond my capacity much of the time. This Being who had been so central to my conscious life since I knelt all alone in the corner of our couch one dark morning when I was four years old and prayed for Jesus to come into my heart was now drifting away like just about everyone and everything else in my life. Sundays became painful. Lots of listening to Eikona chant the Service of the Paraklesis. Lots of red swollen eyes and soggy, gooey Kleenex. Lots of feeling a vague sense of abandonment. 

I had read just enough Pema Chodron to know about the Second Noble Truth in Buddhism, that suffering happens due to attachment and clinging. Was clinging to my faith causing my suffering? Could I really just let it go? I was shocked to find that the answer was yes, though Luhrmann would not be. “People can function quite effectively in the world without thinking about gods and spirits, and often they do—even when they are ostensibly religious.” 

Once I stopped working to make God real—or acknowledged that I had not the cognitive stamina to do so any longer—God became less anthropomorphic, less substantial. I still missed the aesthetic, sensual, and communal experience of the Divine Liturgy. When I eventually found a Greek Orthodox parish in Modesto that live streamed their services, I virtually attended when I could. Bought frankincense oil and resin to get a whiff of God and the priest’s censer. I spent one Lent learning how to pray the Roman Catholic MissaI and even kept it up well into Easter (maybe even past Pentacost?) before I ran out of steam. I still longed for a connection to the numinous. Longed to read more about apophatic theology or at least understand Meister Eckhart or Pseudo-Dionysius or the Cloud of Unknowing when I listened to others read their works. But God became misty. Faith became less a frame than a fog—a sort of Cloud of Unknowing, if you will, whether I understood the anonymous medieval mystic who wrote that or not. When friends and family asked if I still believed in God, I struggled with what to say. I neither believed nor disbelieved. Mostly I didn’t know what to believe.  

***

Thanks to Covid, there are now many livestreamed Divine Liturgies. There are even Arabic-speaking Greek Catholic parishes (aka Melkites) streaming their services. I initially settled on one in Birmingham, Alabama. The organized chaos of it reminded me of St. George’ s back when it was still in its smaller building on Holgate Street. People coming and going in front of the icon screen to light candles. Parents shushing their kids trying to climb on the pews. Teenage girls hugging and whispering their latest news to each other—much like their older sittis and tetas. But the mic situation made it hard to hear the priest or choir. It felt like watching a 90s-era CCTV camera. 

YouTube began suggesting services, including an Antiochian Orthodox parish in Grand Rapids where the priest gave a lovely sermon for Forgiveness Sunday. There was that same Greek Orthodox parish in Modesto, now watchable without the Flash application that stopped being compatible with my ancient laptop a decade earlier. 

And then I had a different sort of flash: why not St. George’s? Surely they will have virtual services by now. And since I won’t be there in person, the issue of not being able to take communion will not matter. I found their YouTube channel and settled into Lent on the Orthodox calendar, each Sunday morning just before Orthros (Matins) lighting a candle under my incense burner piled high with chunks of frankincense and tiny chips of mastic gum, the smell of the numinous quieting my mind.

Since I was observing Lent to see what I might glean for my writing practice, and since Lent is most famous for fasting, I wanted to try fasting from the Internet. My plan had been to unplug my modem on Wednesdays and Fridays, the traditional fast days in the Church. I managed it for Ash Wednesday and spent the day in the account I long-ago set up on my laptop just for writing. But on Friday, I had to plug the modem back in and switch over to my normal “administrator” account to attend to Mom Shit, my short hand for the bureaucratic labyrinth through which one must wander, march, and even crawl to coordinate care for an elderly parent. And I had to do that again the following Wednesday. It quickly became clear that an Internet fast during the week would be untenable. Too much of my life (and now my Mom’s) was mediated by it. I compromised by spending the weekends in my writing account when offices are closed but still left the Internet plugged in as I needed it to talk with my boyfriend and stream Divine Liturgy. 

What about traditional fasting? Abstaining from food or certain types of food is among the most traditional of practices in almost every religion. In the Eastern tradition, it means going vegan. No meat, dairy, or alcohol. At first I was only going to do so on Wednesdays and Fridays. But after a week or two, I began pushing myself to see if I could go full vegan—like some sort of extreme sport. I not only did, but went really old school on Holy Friday and did just bread and water with a fresh, homebaked loaf. Initially it didn’t feel particularly self-abnegating. Indeed I liked the way it took me out of Ordinary Time and into a more unconventional period that forced a certain mindfulness about food. But no cheese was hard. And by the week before Holy Week, I was really missing meat and eggs. 

By Holy Thursday, I was prepared, eager to witness, if not participate in, the drama of Holy Week. I watched the Reading of the Twelve Gospels, three hours of chanting the twelve passages of the Passion found throughout the texts of the four Gospels. I caught the tail-end of the Removal of Christ from the Cross at the Antiochian parish in Grand Rapids before tuning into the Service of Lamentations and Vigil at the Tomb at St. George’s a few hours later. But the screen was black on Saturday night when I showed up for Easter Vigil fifteen minutes late (I can sometimes have an Arab sense time). Did they forget to take the lens cap off the camera? They had forgotten to turn on the microphone for the choir during Divine Liturgy a few weeks back. Could it be I would miss seeing the resurrection? I would only hear it? 

A speck of light. Then two. Four. Oh right. The church is totally dark at the beginning of Easter Vigil. Soon a couple hundred candles filed outside. The camera did not follow, nor did the mics. I knew it was too much to hope that they would. But now I got a back stage view. After a few moments, the overhead lighting came to life. A man with a long pole began agitating the chandeliers and another flicked the pendent candle holders in front of the icons so they, too, swung back and forth. I did not remember noticing when I attended Easter Vigil in 1999 this special effect of sorts simulating the earthquake of the resurrection. We never did anything like that at St. Irene’s. Maybe I was too overwhelmed back then with the theatre of the procession around the church, the struggle to keep my candle lit in the wind, the priest responding to the reader’s question “who is the king of glory?” with a resounding “the Lord strong and mighty” while banging on the doors of the church (which momentarily stands in for the tomb), the question at the center of it all, “why seek you the living among the dead?” followed by the first chanting of the Easter refrain “Christ is risen from the dead/trampling down death by death/and to those in the tombs he granted life” and then the doors opening to what seemed like blinding light in the darkness of 11:45pm.

Ah, yes, I can see now why my younger self became an Orthodox catechumen two weeks after Easter Vigil. A line from Eliot’s “Little Gidding” floated up: And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place the place for the first time. Writing. Thinking. Making God real again. Am I returning to where I started? Knowing the place for the first time? But there has been no exploring. No expansion of my horizons. Only twenty years of contraction. Of darkness. Days and days of not being able to open the shades, curled into the fetal position while narcotizing myself with audiobooks that my mind could do nothing with. A sudden internal earthquake. And then, dear reader, I totally Lost. My. Shit. 

Earlier it had been one of those days when my neural networks were humming. I started reading political philosopher Omri Boehm’s Radical Universalism, delighting in footnote rabbit holes like I used to in my grad school days. I finished listening to theologian Willie James Jenning’s The Christian Imagination while making mini strawberry-rhubarb pies to go with the Easter feast I was planning the following day, understanding his academic prose with more ease than when I started the book. And in the evening I finished a short book on St. Gregory Palamas I had started on the Sunday he is commemorated during Lent (noting some thoughts about it in my journal is what made me late for Easter Vigil). 

This was exploring. Wandering the world of ideas. Finding unexpected trails. Discovering new insights. Making connections. A memory as I lay here in bed blubbering while the priest and deacon still chanted on my television: me, an undergrad ebullient with connections from my research, my advisor smiling, shaking his head slightly and resting his head in his hand. “You are probably going to create your own field and be publishing like crazy.” My blubbering now turned to full body keening. Not so much because I regret never getting to be a Judith Butler or Patrick Wolfe (academia is far too grinding and competitive to feel confident that would have actually happened) but because language fails me to explain how much I have missed my mind. And now it appears to be returning, the lights turning on after years holding a lit candle outside in the dark. Menopause has further impaired the biology of sleep for me but on many nights I don’t care because as I lie here at 2am there is the sheer exhilaration in moving my mind after so many years of being cramped and atrophied. 

Yet imagination has always been a double-edged sword. It’s the juice of insight but it also feeds me visions that are rich and clog my emotional arteries. And it has been feeding me a future again. For months I’ve been telling myself to not think of where I might go with writing. To be like Mary who, in contemplating Jesus instead of helping her sister Martha with dinner preparations, had “chosen the good part (Luke 11:42).” Simply write. Contemplate. Don’t think about publication credits. Don’t think about all the essays you might publish. Don’t think about where your hale and hearty mind might be in five or ten years. Don’t wonder what happens when you turn 67 and get switched over to regular Social Security (especially given that it may not even be there at the rate things are going). 

Well, we all know what happens when you tell yourself not to think about something. Before I knew it, I was gorging on fantasies of following in the footsteps of Maggie Nelson and winning a MacArthur Genius grant and having the resources to marry my Long-Distance Lover after decades spent apart, just in time for us to finally be together for our twilight years. But as I lay here in bed heaving up twenty years of grief and longing, hearing “Christ is risen…to those in the tombs he granted life” chanted over and over, those imaginative indulgences sat heavy and hard in my emotional bowels. I want that grand story of resurrection and redemption so badly that even typing this now, weeks later, it has triggered a fresh wave of sobbing. 

Hope is the hummingbird with a broken wing, easily crushed if clutched. 

It’s a line I wrote near the end of the essay I mentioned in that post on mysticism and writing and “Little Giddings” and it came to me again in that moment. I argued with Emily Dickinson in that essay about whether hope is much of a comfort. But also used strawberry-rhubarb pies as a symbol of the effort, pleasure, and transience of hope. I had had practical reasons for making them earlier in the day for my Easter feast, namely, I still had rhubarb and strawberries in the freezer from last year that needed using up. Maybe I was grokking too much with Jennings and his fascinating interpretation of the decent of the Holy Spirit at Pentacost while making the pies, but I forgot to drain my defrosted fruit before spicing and sugaring it in a saucepan. The filling wasn’t setting. And, damn, how did I not see that it needs to cool overnight? Now I would have to finish the pies on Easter in addition to making dinner. I added some extra cornstarch and hoped it would set in the end. Not only is there effort, pleasure, and transience with hope, but there are no guarantees. 

(Me watching Easter Vigil from my bed along with the angels, though they probably had a better view.)

All in all I spent a solid half hour sobbing, the kind of crying that leaves you sore and exhausted the next day and beyond (like, a week beyond). But no worries. Easter Vigil lasts for three hours. I still had close to another two hours to go. And more tears to cry in the hours afterward. Even if there is resurrection, the memories of what it took to get there remain. Did Jesus spend his time before his Ascension with flash backs to having his back ripped open during his flogging? Of the spikes pounded between his ulna and radius bones and into his achilles tendons? Of each breath forcing him to press his weight down against his nailed feet and drag his flayed back up and down that rough wood while birds and bugs pecked at him, the crowds hurled insults and more, and the sun scorched all of his exposed parts? 

Ah, listen to me talking like a believer again. Certainly Lent, along with months of reacquainting myself with evangelicalism again for some essays I’m working on—even hauling out my battered old NIV Study Bible—have awakened my long-dormant Jesus talk. And I have missed him. Not necessarily the invisible daddy/bff of my youth (though he was usually pretty cool). I’ve missed that connection to something vast, mysterious, and sublime. And yet as I made my way through Lent this year, I found that the question of whether I believed in God—whatever is even meant by that—was now wholly uninteresting to me. The point of the Divine no longer seemed to be about my intellectual assent to the existence of some hard to define being but simply my attention to reality in both the mundane and the ultimate. 

“God, rid me of God,” prayed Meister Eckhart, echoing that famous instruction of the Buddha a thousand years earlier that if you ever meet The Buddha on the path, you should kill that Buddha. I suppose ME/CFS has rid me of God as I understood him (and younger Jesus Nerd me is doubled over in agony just writing that, her worst fear come true). Mystics of many faiths would argue it was not biology pulling me away from God but God withdrawing himself to purify me for union with him. Christianity has called this “the withdrawal of grace” or “the dark night of the soul” or, in the words of an even more recent Orthodox mystic, “godforsakeness.” Did not even Jesus himself cry from the cross, “my God, why have you forsaken me?” 

It would make such a tidy narrative of meaning for all this pain, wouldn’t it? Some glorious story where there is value and significance to my suffering. But I’ve learned to be skeptical of constructing meaning out of coincidence. Shit just happens. It feels far more honest to simply acknowledge there is no essential meaning. Does this make me a nihilist? 

And what did I glean for my writing practice from Lent? I suppose I had fantasies of developing some Lectio Divina, some Liturgy of the Hours centered around daily freewrites and readings of poems and prose. But I am too sick for that. Perhaps I have been inadvertently creating a more pared down liturgy over the years. There is my poem of the month (a long poem/collection of poems I listen to every day for a month). My Shakespeare of the month (in which I choose a Shakespeare play to watch every Sunday night for a month). My “write at least one sentence a day” in my journal (and if I’m lucky, a few more sentences here or in an essay). My switching to my writing account each night before getting ready for bed, invoking The Muses in the hope they might visit once I’m between the sheets or upon waking the next morning. I’ve continued with the practice of staying in my writing account from Friday at bedtime until Monday noon-ish when I switch over to my normal account. It’s helped to detach myself slightly from the spectacle of our news cycle, the greatest distraction from writing after illness. 

I said to my soul, be still and let the dark come upon you/Which shall be the darkness of God…I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope/For hope would be hope for the wrong thing… T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”

Lent always culminates with Easter. And yet my greatest act of renunciation turned out to be Easter itself. Of relinquishing writing as a means of redemption. Of remaining still and letting the dark remain upon me.  “If all time is eternally present” begins Eliot’s Four Quartets, “all time is unredeemable.” The last twenty years are not sitting in a pawn shop somewhere waiting to be claimed. There is only here. Now. Always. 

*Alas, it appears that St. Irene’s has closed? But our former priest is now a bishop.