Category Archives: books

Elder Zosima and his brother

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In my reading of The Brothers Karamazov, I came this morning, Monday of Holy Week, to the part “From the Life of the Elder Zosima.” The elder first relates about his older brother, who only at the age of seventeen and sick unto death, turned from anger and scoffing toward a path that might lead to repentance, and seemingly only to please his mother. But that is not an entirely bad reason.

…on Tuesday morning my brother started keeping the fast and going to church. “I’m doing it only for your sake, mother, to give you joy and peace,” he said to her….But he did not go to church for long, he took to his bed, so that he had to confess and receive communion at home. The days grew bright, clear, fragrant — Easter was late that year. All night, I remember, he used to cough, slept badly, but in the morning he would always get dressed and try to sit in an armchair. So I remember him: he sits, quiet and meek, he smiles, he is sick but his countenance is glad, joyful. He was utterly changed in spirit — such a wondrous change had suddenly begun in him!

The young man asked forgiveness of everyone and talked about his great sin, but at the same time was so happy and full of thankfulness and exhortations, that people thought he was going mad.

Thus he awoke every day with more and more tenderness, rejoicing and all atremble with love. The doctor would come — the old German Eisenschmidt used to come to us: “Well, what do you think, doctor, shall I live one more day in the world?” he would joke with him. “Not just one day, you will live many days,” the doctor would answer, “you will live months and years, too.” “But what are years, what are months!” he would exclaim. “Why count the days, when even one day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dears, why do we quarrel, boast before each other, remember each other’s offenses? Let us go into the garden, let us walk and play and love and praise and kiss each other, and bless our life.”

This older brother died a few weeks after Easter, when the teller of the story, the elder Zosima, was only eight years old. He talks, now near death himself, more about his childhood, and how it was also during Holy Week that he began to see more when he went to church.

But I remember how, even before I learned to read, a certain spiritual perception visited me for the first time, when I was just eight years old. Mother took me to church by myself (I do not remember where my brother was then), during Holy Week, to the Monday liturgy. It was a clear day, and, remembering it now, I seem to see again the incense rising from the censer and quietly ascending upwards, and from above, through a narrow window in the cupola, God’s rays pouring down upon us in the church, and the incense rising up to them in waves, as if dissolving into them. I looked with deep tenderness, and for the first time in my life I consciously received the first seed of the word of God in my soul. A young man walked out into the middle of the church with a big book, so big that it seemed to me he even had difficulty in carrying it, and he placed it on the analogion [lectern], opened it, and began to read, and suddenly, then, for the first time I understood something, for the first time in my life I understood what was read in God’s church.

The reading was from the book of Job. And tonight I myself plan to attend this liturgy, and though I haven’t seen the program for the service, I now have confidence that I will hear this same reading. How many times have I also watched the beams of light shining down when I stood in church, and even felt their heat on my face, like the warmth of God’s Holy Spirit?

The Elder Zosima is a fictional character, but he is believed to be based on a real-life monk in old Russia. In the novel, where I am reading, Zosima goes on in his very moving fashion to tell his life’s story: “– and over all is God’s truth, moving, reconciling, all-forgiving!”

Isn’t it sweet that God should arrange for me to read this passage this morning, to help me in an unusual way to become even more receptive to His being with us tonight by means of hymns such as, “Let my prayer arise in Thy sight as incense….,” and the Psalms of Ascent — and the Holy Mysteries!

Last week our bishop was present with us, and he gave us a good word about the last days of Lent — well, technically Lent has come to an end, but we are still in the anticipation and preparation that is Holy Week. He said that Lent is not about finding every bit of dirt in our souls, but about the bridal chamber, about discovering the great love that our Lord Jesus has for us.

Perhaps Zosima’s brother went to a Bridegroom Matins service on Tuesday; we have three of them this week, and tomorrow I hope to attend at 6:30 in the morning. The Lord Himself has been filling my lamp with the oil of His Holy Spirit!

Looking isn’t always seeing.

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St. Symeon the New Theologian

“How can one be fit to handle the divine teachings of our Lord if he or she has not first submitted to them and been transformed by them?”

“In Orthodoxy faith is activity, not passivity.”

“The Orthodox find sin to be a much more serious problem than just personal guilt….there is also decay. It is not enough to treat sin as a category that Christ saves from; sin is a power that kills spiritually.”

These quotes are from Benjamin Harju’s blog series of reviews on Robert Koester’s book A Lutheran Looks at … Eastern Orthodoxy, in which Harju does a useful work in explaining Orthodox life and practice, as a response to a book written from one Lutheran’s point of view.   Read the first of five parts here.

Anastasia posted about this offering from her godson, a writer who is respectful and careful in his discussion and clear in his use of the language, all of which endear me to him. The review can be found in its entirety on the March 5-7 posts of his blog.

Comparing and contrasting one thing with another is an excellent way to refine one’s understanding of any subject, and the method works for me in this case, as Subdeacon Benjamin compares the East with the West, the truth of Orthodoxy with some misconceptions, and scholarly writing with propaganda.

All in all, Harju has to conclude that Koester did not “look well into the matter,” (my quotes). The reviewer himself, one can learn on his blog, converted from the Lutheran church to Orthodoxy, so he is familiar with both traditions, and points out on this post the context and starting point of Lutheran theology, that it “arose by seeking to reform Western, medieval, scholastic theology,” unlike the Orthodox tradition which is continuous from the apostles, and that he “learned to love Orthodoxy as the fulfillment of my Lutheran goal.”


Love and Language

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Over my car’s radio yesterday morning I caught the end of an interview with an author talking about her husband’s aphasia and recovery from it. As I drove into the Target parking lot the women were still talking, and I hadn’t heard any names of books or people yet, so I sat in the car a little longer, digging around in my purse to find a tiny black notebook to write in.

Eventually the host mentioned that we were listening to Diane Ackerman talking about her book 100 Names for Love, which tells the story of her husband Paul West’s recovery from a stroke, and the ways in which she was able to help him in the process, though their relationship was challenged and changed. The 100 names were the new pet names he came up with for his wife, when he could not recover the old ones. One of them that she mentioned was My Bucket of Hair. (She has a good head of it.) Many of the nicknames were as unusual and poetic, like My Remains of the Day, and My Residue of the Night.

I have tried reading Ackerman before, and there is too much about her prose and perspective that makes her tedious, but the things she said on the radio about love and care-giving and language recovery made me think I really wanted to read this particular book. I came home and put it on my Amazon list, but then I went on to read about Paul West, and found an excerpt online from the book he himself wrote, The Shadow Factory.

In the interview Ackerman had shared that, when he was depressed about not being able to write — and writing had been his profession — she suggested that he write a book about his experience, and he agreed to dictate to her as he labored to find each word and phrase in the rubble that was his brain. The following day he would rework the text, and the whole project became a huge part of his rehabilitation both emotionally and mentally.

I heard Ackerman describe her husband’s book as a “free associative dream version” of how it felt to have a stroke and to heal from it. Those words gave me the impression of it as the type of writing that I find hard to endure. But now that I’ve read this small part, I’m not sure I agree with her description. Here are a couple of paragraphs from the article I link to:

There was a bewildering assortment of false starts and incomplete sentences for the mind only. I no sooner thought of something to say to myself than I forgot it, and I was lucky to get beyond the second or third imagined word. Of course no one in his right mind overheard any of this, the dumb speaking to the silent in a reverse image, so no one was upset. But if this happens 50 or 60 times, one wants a little revenge of some sort. Of course, one was in all probability speaking no kind of written English, so this meant that whatever you said was relevant and you could not say anything irrelevant.

…

Reading, at which I used to be no slouch, now gave me the most incredible, disheveled experiences of my print-bound life. Now print jigged toward me, then it hung back. The one part of it that was readable swam backward or forward to render the reading experience at best incomplete, or subject to the vilest, maddest vagaries of a proofreader’s nightmare.

So far I am thoroughly enjoying West’s post-stroke prose, and find it much more focused and readable than Ackerman’s, so perhaps I’ll be content with having heard her radio voice, which seems to absorb better, and in my Amazon shopping cart I’ll trade her book for The Shadow Factory.

Wait until after this date – Christmas

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Tolkien’s Northern Lights

One of our children has a birthday on Pearl Harbor Day, which is today. So as not to take away from the specialness of that child’s celebrations, in the past we didn’t get into the swing of Christmas until the 8th, and even St. Nicholas Day passed without any notice, because in that era even I wasn’t cued in to feast days.

Now I’m thankful for that habit of delaying, which makes it easier to practice my present Orthodox unwillingness to jump ahead too much. And every day, every week in the church calendar holds a rich and festive remembrance of a person of faith or an event in our salvation history, so that the Waiting for Christmas period is full of bright days that make the time pass quickly. St. Nicholas, for example. But that holy man was at the center of much childlike fun yesterday, and we are moving on already!

Following our family traditions, then, Mr. Glad and I give ourselves permission to get and decorate a tree as early as tomorrow. Still I drag my feet, so as to nudge the bulk of merrymaking toward the Twelve Days of Christmas, the old-fashioned time to rejoice and feast. Our son-in-law fondly remembers Christmas in Ireland when for two weeks after Christmas many people were on vacation, and shops were closed. So much for the cash-register noise.

As we decorate the house, there are a dozen childlike joys to partake of, often involving memories of Christmases of 20 or even 50 years ago. And some of those are bittersweet, as memories can be. When Gus the Cat was still alive he made us laugh, the way he stalked the tree lights. This picture is a little bit sad for me, because we don’t have him anymore.

I like the tradition of keeping back the Baby Jesus from the crèche until Christmas Day; the manger waits empty until then. But in my Nativity set, the baby is glued to the manger, so He is forced to “arrive” way early. At least, these Santas are alone and in this photo they are sort of in the dark so far. Their situation changes when the Light of the World comes to earth.

Some of the participants in Pom Pom‘s Childlike Christmas party have written about their own memories of Christmas when they were children. Though it didn’t occur to my philosophical mind at first, it seems obvious now that what each of us retains with fondness of our own most distant Christmases Past will influence the definition of childlike for us.

Waiting for Christmas – GJ on the right.

The black-and-white photo below shows a glimpse of Christmas as it was for me before I can remember, and it was taken at my grandma’s house in Berkeley, where we never gathered for Christmas the years that I can remember.

The important thing is that the picture is connected to my maternal grandma, and without fail we knew that Christmas had arrived when my grandma and grandpa’s car announced their coming by the crunching of the driveway gravel, and the trunk was opened to reveal its overfull load of wrapped presents, pies and sweet rolls. My siblings and I helped carry all the gifts from that bottomless hole into the house, and we piled them under the tree, from which they spread outward like an extravagant wave across the living room rug.

The pies and breakfast goodies were set out on the service porch where the temperature was cool enough to keep them for a day or two; after Christmas Eve dinner a slice of pie would always be set on the hearth so that Santa could have a snack that night when he stopped by.

My grandma and I are not in this photo.

The photo shows my mother at right, holding a doll that I imagine was given to me that year, when I was only two. I like seeing that my grandpa, my cousins and my spinster aunt were there with us. And my grandma’s beautiful furniture that I loved!

Now about the colorful picture at the top of this page: I have an edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) of the collected illustrated letters that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote to his children from Father Christmas, and I’d like to tell about them even though I haven’t even read them all myself yet, much less to any children or grandchildren.

For over 20 years the Tolkien children received letters from Father Nicholas Christmas, often near to Christmas Day, but sometimes as early as October 31st. For all the ice and snow pictured, the drawings give the impression of a very cozy group at the North Pole, including Polar Bear and other helpers.

illustration including Polar Bear

This year, several of my grandchildren will be around in advance of Christmas Day and for a full week ! so perhaps we can read a few together. Or perhaps not, as I already have a long mental list of all the lovely things I can do with the children whom I haven’t had with me at Christmas for so many years.

Some of the pretty stamps

I’m looking forward to an abundance of time to “waste” just being together for the Blessed Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. This year I don’t have to have a long-distance Christmas relationship such as Father Nicholas Christmas had with the Tolkien children. But I bet I am just as busy as he before The Event as I scurry with my ribbons and lists around my cozy winter house.