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Blessing of the Waters

6 Jan

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This past year, we’ve seen the power of water when Hurricane Sandy hit, devastating homes, businesses, and even lives. And yet water remains critical to our existence:

  • About 57% of our body weight is water.
  • Approximately 88% of 1.8 million deaths a year is attributed to unsafe water supplies and sanitation and hygiene issues. Most of these deaths are in children.
  • Water covers about 70% of our planet.
  • Africans spend 40 billion hours just walking to get water every year. It is usually women and children who have the responsibility of fetching water, and this arduous task keeps them away from school.

Water is a dichotomy of life and death.

I once saw a priest in Brooklyn throw a cross into the muddy waters of the Hudson.  It was a frigid January day, yet a bunch of boys jumped into the river to save the cross.

What would possess a priest to throw a cross into the river?

Theophany; or, as most westerners call it, Epiphany.

The word “Theophany” comes from the Greek “τα Θεοφάνια,” which means “appearance of God,” and January 6 is the feast day that commemorates the incarnation of Jesus.  It celebrates His birth and baptism.

When St. John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, the heavens opened up and the Holy Spirit descended like a dove.  God spoke from the heavens, saying, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matt 3:17, NIV).  It marked one of the very few times that all three characters of the Trinity—Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and God—revealed themselves at the same time to man.

Jesus’ baptism marks His first step toward Crucifixion, according to Orthodox theology.

And so, on January 6, Orthodox priests throughout the world throw crosses, symbolic of Jesus’ crucifixion, into bodies of water, symbolic of His baptism.  This is called the Blessing of the Waters.  Volunteers jump into the water to retrieve the cross.  The priest, according to tradition, prays a blessing on the person who gets to the cross first and brings it back to him.

Here’s the Troparion (tone 4) from the Eve and Afterfeast hymn, which has some powerful imagery:

The River Jordan receded of old by the mantle of Elisha when Elijah ascended into heaven; and the water was separated to this side and that, the wet element turning into a dry path for Him, being truly a symbol of Baptism, by which we cross the path of transient age. Christ appeared in the Jordan to sanctify its waters.

Parts of this post were first published on my blog in 2011 and 2012.

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Does God Laugh at Our Resolutions?

3 Jan

I’ve often heard the phrase “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans” intended as casual advice but come across as bitter warning.  Even though it’s usually said as an off-hand, humorous quip, it seems like it usually comes along with underlying resentment.  The not-so-innocent adage implies that God laughs at our goals and our ability to achieve them.

You can read the rest of my article here.

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Christian New Year’s Resolutions

2 Jan

I’m tempted to write a satire called Christian New Year’s Resolutions.  It would go something like this:

  1. Pray without ceasing.  Ever.
  2. Don’t watch secular television.
  3. Become a physically fit Proverbs 31 woman.
  4. Read the bible every day and nothing besides it.
  5. Go to church every Sunday.

Is there such a thing as Christian New Year’s Resolutions?

You can read the rest of my article here.

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I Am Crowned

27 Dec

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Have you ever noticed that Greek families all seem to be named after the same relative? It’s customary in Greek culture to name the firstborn boy after his papou, the father’s father, and the firstborn girl after her yiayia, the father’s mother. Subsequent children are named after the mother’s side of the family.

According to the Greek Orthodox faith, though, children are supposed to be named after the saint whose feast day they are born on.

A child born on December 27 would be named after Saint Stephen. Stephen was one of the first deacons of the Church. However, after a vicious argument, he was accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death by stoning. Standing up for himself and his beliefs, he said that those Church leaders were the very people who persecuted the prophets. He is now recognized as a martyr.

The name “Stephen” comes from the Greek word “stephanos,” which translates to “crowned.”

My birthday is not December 27 nor was my yiayia’s name Stephania, so my name is a bit of a break from the Greek culture. I’m actually named after my father’s stepfather.  And yes, family reunions can get a bit confusing, with my cousin Stefanos and I both responding to “Stef.”

Today I’ll be celebrating my name with my family!

How did you get your name? Do you celebrate your name day? 

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Merry Christmas! …Or Something Like That

25 Dec

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“Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” ~Luke 2:14

From the bottom of my heart, I want to wish you all a merry, merry Christmas!

May your holiday be bright, full of merriment, and whimsical!

In the past few month, I’ve heard from friends and fellow writers who find the holidays a difficult season. Some people have lost loved ones, and no matter how much time has passed, they still miss spending the holidays with them and grieve over their loss. Some have experienced recent tragedy so great due to Hurricane Sandy, the Newtown school shooting, gang rape and violent protests in New Delhi, and air strikes in Syria that the holidays may be far from their minds. Some suffer quietly with extreme poverty that doesn’t make the news because it’s no longer news. Some come from broken or dysfunctional families, and being altogether for Christmas just brings out the drama. Some wish to see their families but cannot afford the time or money to travel, and some are thankful for good friends to spend holidays with but wish they had a spouse or children to share it with. My heart goes out to all of you who feel dejected, stressed, depressed, scared, and lonely. May you find peace, may you spread good will toward others who may also be experiencing a difficult holiday season, and may you find hope.

This is the first year my immediate family and I will be all together in more than five years. I don’t even remember the last time the five of us were together for Christmas. It must’ve been the year before my parents moved to Greece, my sister to France, and my brother to Boston, while I remained in New Jersey. Since then, there have been other moves within the family, and we’ve sometimes missed each other at a destination by just a week. Some of us have spent holidays together, and most of us have experienced Christmases where we were on our own, spending the holiday with extended family, significant others, friends, or even colleagues. Sometimes I feel sad that life is so full of changes and that I’m not the one deciding and controlling all the changes. I’d like to scoop my family up  and put them in a snow globe, freezing us in a moment of joy and togetherness. But life’s not like that. Part of the beauty of a snow globe is turning it upside down, shaking it up, and watching a great torrent of snow swirl throughout the globe.

Maybe that’s why the Christmas story means a lot to me. As a child and an animal lover, I loved the picturesque scene of gentle-eyed barnyard animals looking ever-so-tenderly at the baby Jesus wrapped in swaddling cloth. As I’ve gotten older, though, the story really does seem more like something ripped from the headlines or something out of Law and Order: SVU. A young unwed Middle Eastern woman finding herself pregnant. Her fiance not a wise man but some dude who builds things with his hands. A politician systematically having babies killed. A weird natural phenomenon (the star of Bethlehem). It’s a really dark, strange story in many ways, and when you view it from that perspective, it kind of messes with the idea that Christmas is the “season to be jolly.” When you think of God not as some puppet master who isn’t doing a good job of spreading peace on earth but of this God sending “His only begotten Son” to be born into this mess of a world, it really makes you think. Maybe life isn’t all Christmas cookies and eggnog. Maybe it’s not even just a sweet story of angels and a baby born in a manger. Maybe hope isn’t simple. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe just because it isn’t simple, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

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Thanksgiving and Lamenting

22 Nov

image via Burnside Writers Collective

Super impressed by all of you who were already posting photos on Facebook last night of delicious-looking Thanksgiving food.  I saw “papou’s stuffing” and “maple-glazed brussels sprouts” and pie galore.  My family was always in charge of bringing dessert and liquor.  We’d pick up the cake — no pie from us; it had to be chocolate cake — along the way.  The Glenlivet was already in the closet.  I’m carrying on the tradition.  No measuring and mixing going on over here.  I’ll stop and pick up some wine along the way to my aunt and uncle’s.

This Thanksgiving season, I’ve been seeing a lot of daily posts on Facebook on what people are thankful for, which is a great practice and quite beautiful. However, I also have a lot of friends who are going through significant struggles. It’s okay to feel sad, hurt, angry, or frustrated. It’s important that we acknowledge that our lives don’t always go as planned and that we don’t pretend that our lives are perfect. Sometimes on Facebook, it’s easy to get the impression that people’s lives are so much better than our own, but we don’t always know what’s going on behind the scenes.

I’ll confess that I was a bit “jealous” of my colleague, Emily Timbol, who wrote this article on lament and thanksgiving: “Let’s Have a Kvetch Fest.” Her writing career is going really well. She writes for the Huffington Post, has participated in radio interviews, and has made great progress with her book. I’m happy for her, but at times frustrated with my own writing. In this article, she shares her frustrations with her writing. This does not bring me joy. I think she has an important story to tell and has an engaging voice, and I want her to succeed. Her honesty, though, was a good reminder to me not to compare myself to others and not to be so hard on myself. I share all this because I believe it’s important to be thankful even in the difficult times, however I also believe that when we’re open with each other we learn that we’re not alone in our struggles, our fears, our frustrations, our sadness, our loneliness, our insecurities, and on and on.

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She Threw Out Her Cell Phone and Packed On the Road

13 Nov

This young woman gets up to the microphone.  She speaks confidently but not in a rehearsed manner as she tells her story.   She’s been in New York City only for a few months now, since sometime this summer.  Unlike many people, she wasn’t intent on staying here.  New York City wasn’t her dream destination.  She had run away from home.  Her plan was to flee the East Coast for the West.  Californ-i-a.  She packed her bags and hit the road.  Along the way, she met a guy and became involved with a church in Manhattan.  She decided to stay.  She decided to share her story with others.

Afterwards, I approach her.  I want to know more.  Why had she left, throwing out her cell phone so no one could even get in touch with her?  Has she reconciled with those she left behind?  She answers my questions and asks about the book — Burning Furiously Beautiful — I had read from at the same microphone as her.  She tells me that of the few possessions she packed with her when she left home, one of them was Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

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Election 2012: The White House Landscape Artists

6 Nov

In honor of the upcoming election, here’s a bit of trivia:::

The grounds at the White House in Washington, D.C., were designed by Calvert Vaux and Andrew Jackson Downing.  While Downing was American, Vaux was British.  After Downing was killed in a steamboat accident (I kid you not), Vaux went on to work with Frederick Law Olmsted.  Together they designed Central Park and Morningside Park in Manhattan and Fort Greene Park and Prospect Park in Brooklyn.  Is it any wonder that he cited the Transcendentalist author of “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, as one of his influences?

I took a group Church Hopping to the Church of the Intercession in Washington Heights, part of New York City, where Calvert Vaux was commissioned to to do landscape work on the cemetery grounds.  You can read about it here.

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Election 2012: Church of the Presidents

2 Nov

As we gear up to Election Day 2012, one of the main considerations voters have is: how do the candidates’ religious beliefs influence their leadership?  Do their economic plans care for the widows and orphans?  Will extending money to those in need unfairly take away the rights of others to the money they worked hard for?  Do their healthcare plans help all people?  What do family values really mean?  Do they look out for the poor in spirit, the disenfranchised?  Do they protect all people’s rights?  Do they try to play the role of God?  Does their faith make them weak?  Do their beliefs do more good or more harm to the country?  How should we vote when it seems that upholding one of our values leads to hindering one of our other values?

A few years ago, I visited what’s become known as The Church of the Presidents.  St. John’s Church Lafayette Square has had every president of the United States come through its doors since its first service in October 1816 was held.  You can read about it in my Church Hopping column on Burnside Writers Collective.

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Clip: Church Hopping: Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes

12 Oct

 

A car packed with teenagers was speeding down the street at the exact moment we were approaching the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on foot.  It was an unseasonably warm October day in 2011, and the car window was rolled down.  Or maybe the rebellious, rowdy passengers rolled it down when they saw us, a group of about twenty-five people, looking eagerly toward the Stations of the Cross.  ”God sucks!” a teenager yelled to the support of his peers.  The car vanished down the road as we turned around.

 

Read the rest of my article Church Hopping: Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on Burnside Writers Collective and discover how Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, JFK and Jackie Kennnedy, and endangered languages are connected to this place.

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