Saints Peter and Paul
Monthly Archives: June 2014
Tuning my heart with St. Joanna.
The robin outside my window this morning had his priorities straight. Before there was light enough to see by, before he even thought of going about his necessary business of sustaining himself by eating, he spent an hour and more in praise and song. I was unusually awake and he helped to me to tune my heart to the same frequency. 
That happy hour I spent with him was like a special gift I opened first thing on the occasion of my name day. In addition to Myrrhbearers Sunday, which is a movable feast, St. Joanna is commemorated on June 27 every year. It’s a good day to head over to church and do a little garden work along with some celebrations in the church.
This blog post contains a good overview of what we know of St. Joanna. It is from a man who was planning to name his daughter Joanna, though he admits she is a “relatively minor saint.”
I had my own reasons for choosing Joanna as my patron saint when I converted to the Orthodox Church in 2007, which were not exactly the same as the following that an anonymous Christian listed in a comment on that blog in the same year, but I am grateful for her thoughts and have added them to my personal list:
1. She did what she could. She couldn’t stop the beheading of John the Baptist, but she could give his head a decent burial, and she did that.
2. She went where Christ was–the cross and the tomb. She didn’t go alone–she was part of a group. I want to go where Christ is, and I need to go with the Church.
3. She had a name we can pronounce in English.
4. She died peacefully.
One thing I can definitely relate to in Joanna is that she needed the angels to tell her not to seek the living among the dead. These lines from a hymn for Myrrhbearers Sunday will be good for me to sing all day:
The angel came to the myrrhbearing women at the tomb and said:
Myrrh is meet for the dead;
But Christ has shown Himself a stranger to corruption!
So proclaim: the Lord is risen,
Granting the world great mercy!
We slip and fall.
Here’s an example of the kind of thing I find on the Orthodox Church Quotes blog (including the photo). I just brought the whole thing over here today:
“All of us sin constantly. We slip and fall. In reality, we fall into a trap set by the demons.
“The Holy Fathers and the Saints always tell us, ‘It is important to get up immediately after a fall and to keep on walking toward God’. Even if we fall a hundred times a day, it does not matter; we must get up and go on walking toward God without looking back.
“What has happened has happened – it is in the past. Just keep on going, all the while asking for help from God.”
+ Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica, Our Thoughts Determine our Lives
Wedding shoes to the background.
When our oldest children were very young, our church was an often-outdoor meeting on top of a mountain and the children usually came home with quite a bit of dirt and scuffs. For that reason I dressed them in play clothes and we saved the fancier stuff for weddings. That’s how whatever little patent-leather Mary-Janes Pearl had in her closet came to be called Wedding Shoes. She was always very happy to have a reason to dress up in them.
In the last several years I have wanted to wear a special sort of shoe to weddings, specifically something with a bit of a heel when I have held the office of Mother of the Bride. In my daily life and for every other fancy event I normally require foot gear that keeps me closer to horizontal, and I’m not even very skilled at walking in the most moderately elevated pumps.
You are probably guessing that this is all an intro to the news that I am going to be Mother of the Bride again. Yes! Glory Hallelujah, Kate our youngest is getting married this summer, and the whole family will gather from East and West to celebrate.
Not just the shoes, but the dress, the jewelry, etc. etc. have been a major challenge for me this time around, which promises to be my last MOB event. Soon I’ll be moving on to Grandmother of the Bride, and I won’t feel the same kind of pressure. Grandmothers are allowed to be invisible or at least to go off and play with the children which is lots more fun.
Anyway, wedding attire and other related and unrelated business have kept my mind occupied elsewhere than here in my beloved Blogland. After weeks of shopping, one of my least favorite activities, I have my Wedding Shoes and everything else for my person and I have breathed a sigh of relief and sunk into a chair — but I jumped up again pretty fast to start in on the housework that had piled up, and the garden.
My cousin came from
PA so in preparation I cleaned up the weeds and trimmed the dead flower heads and deadwood and swept the spiderwebs off the pool fence. I spent one whole week getting ready for her and my dear cousin-in-law and it was well worth it.
The other upcoming big event, for which I won’t need heels, is a trip to Greece and Turkey that Mr. Glad and I are taking after the wedding. We haven’t ever traveled abroad together, and neither of us knows any Greek — or at least, we didn’t know any until we started studying the Pimsleur Modern Greek (short) course. Now we are pretty good at saying “I don’t understand,” which we expect to use a lot, maybe exclusively if we don’t get on with listening to the remainder of the CD’s.
We’ll be spending most of our time on the island of Crete, so if any of my readers has any tips regarding that long and warm island, they would be most welcome.
The next couple of months will be busy with all these preparations for travel and celebrations, and they aren’t the kinds of things I usually cover in blog posts, but I wanted you to know what is going on in the background that is actually the foreground. In my mind subjects will be playing Musical Chairs in a more chaotic fashion than usual, but I pray to keep them all gathered together serenely in my heart.
Gladsome Lights 