Month: June 2018

In 2012, as I was approaching Orthodoxy, my first guide and companion along the way was St John Cassian, a saint revered by both the western and eastern Christian traditions. In the west, his two primary works, The Conferences and The Institutes were both required reading for early Benedictine monks, and Benedict himself fashioned his famous rule upon the precepts laid down by Cassian in The Institutes. It is also said, that his works were very important to the illustrious western theologian, Thomas Aquinas, who supposedly always carried a copy of The Conferences with him in his satchel, along with The Bible. These things, while interesting and speak to his influence on later Christian thinkers, were less interesting to me than the path that he took, in trying to find the best way to know God, and the things he learned along the way, that I could relate with so deeply, and which inspired me to continue on my own journey.

I discovered that Cassian was born in the middle of the fourth century, and as a young adult, he and a friend traveled to Bethlehem, and joined an ascetic community of monks for about three years. Already I was intrigued by his life, because I also had joined an ascetic community in my early adulthood, and had spent some time in and around Jerusalem and Bethlehem. After this, they traveled to Egypt where they studied for many years with the Christian monks of the desert, who were famous for their holiness. This brought back to my mind considerations I had often had, throughout my life, about the value of monasticism, as a model even for laypeople, and as a fountain of wisdom about spirituality, and as a guide towards achieving a deeper relationship with God. I often wondered about my own Protestant tradition and why we didn’t have monks and monasteries helping to inspire and instruct us in the ‘angelic’ life, as it is commonly known. This seemed so strange to me that we didn’t, especially in view of the fact that Christ himself modeled solitude and prayer, fasting, and retreating to the desert to be with His Father. Additionally, John the Baptist (Forerunner) was a prime example of the monastic ideal, and again was a model for all Christians; and he was even described by Christ Himself as the “greatest among all that have been born of women.” But going even further, St Paul also described this path, in his letter to the Corinthians, describing the two ways of living: in marriage, or alone serving God. With all of this scriptural emphasis in support of the monastic life it seemed logical, as a Christian, even if I wasn’t able to be a monk myself, to avail myself of every possible thing I could gain, in my own spiritual journey, from the efforts, struggles, and victories of my monastic brothers and sisters, and to sit at their feet, so to speak, just as St John Cassian had done.

After many years in Egypt, Cassian traveled to Constantinople and served as a deacon under St John Chrysostom, and then went on to Rome, and finally to Marseilles, France where he founded a monastery based on the Egyptian model. It was here that he wrote his books. The Conferences consists of a series of interviews with many of the most accomplished elders that he studied under while in Egypt. This book in particular impacted me because of the topics included, and also the style of writing. Each interview, or conference, addresses a topic of spirituality, such as vice, desire, God’s protection, spiritual knowledge, divine gifts, and repentance, among many others, and almost line by line what is being said is referenced to a verse of scripture. It was incredible to me, the way that practically everything which was said, referred back to a teaching in scripture. I had never read anything like it, something so insightful, and addressed topics about which most Christians I knew, like me, didn’t know very much. And all of the citations allowed me to see the connections between Biblical verses, and the interpretations that these humble monks were teaching. Their teachings were within the context of scripture, but also within the context of the living traditions of the early church; these weren’t just some guys making things up, trying to be entertaining, or trying to be innovative and make a name for themselves. The depth and breadth of the teaching contained in The Conferences, and the gentle and humble manner with which it is written, delighted me and gave me hope that a wise and deep spirituality did exist in the Christian church, it merely had been hidden from me for all of these years, but it still remained even now, and just had to be sought after and uncovered.

I found guidance and discipleship through his writings that encouraged me to keep seeking God intently. He described the vital importance that purity of heart plays in one’s ability to know the Kingdom of God in this life, to participate in the life of God here and now, and not to merely waiting for this participation in the life to come. He described the way to achieve purity of heart through the repudiation of our passions, our vices, through repentance and the development of inner tranquility and most especially through humility before God. As an example, here he writes about this humility:

“If you wish to achieve true knowledge of scripture you must hurry to achieve unshakeable humility of heart. This is what will lead you not to the knowledge that puffs a man up but to the lore which illumines through the achievement of love.”      ~John Cassian

He also introduced me to the idea of praying without ceasing, as St Paul tells us to do in First Thessalonians 5:17, and he provided a short prayer, a psalm actually, that he recommended to use in order to always keep the Lord in our thoughts, and in our hearts. It is from Psalm 70: “Come to my help, O God; Lord (Jesus) hurry to my rescue.”  I added ‘Jesus’ myself, when I began to use this short prayer.  Scripture speaks often about keeping our thoughts on spiritual things and not carnal ones, and this prayer, or others like it, are intended to help keep the mind occupied on spiritual things. Through repeated effort, eventually a habit of thought can be developed, and this prayer can help orient us in the direction of God at all times. Of course, maintaining a prayer of this sort, always in our mind, is extremely difficult, but that is the discipline, and the goal.

Adding this ‘prayer of the heart’, as these types of prayers are known, to my daily prayer rule, helped me in every area of life, but especially at work, where stress and difficulty could be a real burden for me.  When I could remember to say the prayer, silently in my mind, I felt a renewed strength to meet the current challenge, and a greater peace within me, enabling me to create loving outcomes more frequently, as opposed to merely reacting to my circumstances. And I felt connected to God, simply put, by this prayer. It reminded me that yes, in fact, God is available to come to my help; I am not alone. So it is also a bulwark against despair, loneliness and temptation.

As with the other components of my prayer rule, praying without ceasing is a skill I am developing, and progress is slow over many years. I wish I could say I created the habit quickly, within a month or so, and that now I pray all the time, silently in my heart, to God. But certainly this is not the case. Even so, now I do pray within my heart much more of the time than I did when I first started seriously attempting it back in 2012. Progress may be gradual, but it is worthwhile, and I sometimes think that the process itself is also as important for us, and to God, as the success or the outcome. Just as the wise man of Proverbs may fall seven times and each time he gets back up; every moment that I forget to pray, is merely the moment before the one in which I begin to pray again.

(to be continued)

~FS

The next month, Patty and I flew to Cyprus to renew our visas for Israel. We spent several days traveling the backroads of the island, and enjoying the relaxed pace of life there, and each other’s company. Not long after returning to work in Israel we received a call from Patty’s mom with the surprising and sad news that Patty’s father had just passed away. We quickly made arrangements to return to the US and after a week or two back home, we agreed that Patty would stay to help her mom, while I would go back to Israel to complete the remaining three months of our commitment to Holy Land Ministries.

One of the most striking features of life in Israel, which Patty and I both admired, was the observance of the Sabbath every Saturday. Nearly everything closed down throughout the entire country, allowing people to rest and enjoy life together, attend synagogue if they were inclined, and spend time on the beach or in the park. Though most of the citizenry isn’t very religious, still they all observe the Sabbath rest; and for those who were religious it was a day of worship and gratitude to God for His many blessings. It was exciting to see such a clear and practical aspect of religious faith permeate life beyond the borders of a church service, and affect the daily lives of people outside of the confines of religion. The Sabbath observance seemed to break down the boundary between religious and secular life and we found this refreshing; it was surprising to see people living a life of faith, uncompartmentalized, and spilling over into ordinary life. We both wanted to live our lives back home in the United States in this way, not literally observing the Sabbath since we weren’t Jewish, but emulating to a greater degree the life of faith, rather than as something to tick off of a to-do list on Sunday morning.

After my remaining three months of volunteering, Patty and I met up in London and finally had our honeymoon. We traveled to Paris and spent several days there and then rented a car and drove through France and Italy, spending most of our time in Tuscany and then back up around through Austria and Germany, and then finally back to Paris. Traveling together, relaxed, and free of any responsibilities, was refreshing and much needed after being apart for three months.

Not long after we returned home, the pastor at our church in the US retired. In his absence I realized that he was essentially the reason I attended that church, and though I liked the other congregants a lot, without the pastor and his teaching, there was nothing keeping me there. Patty had come to this conclusion before me, and didn’t have any problem with leaving this church. We spent several weeks worshipping together on Sundays at home, doing Bible studies, and listening to teachers online, but I wanted to see if I could find another church family.

Patty and I attended ten to twelve various protestant and evangelical churches over the next year, and discovered that all of them were very much the same, and all of them left us feeling spiritually empty and hungry. None seemed to offer anything of much depth to believers; they were focused mainly on new believers already in the church, or in trying to water down everything about the faith, so that they could coax non-believers to join. Additionally, these churches squeezed out the little time gathered for worship each week, with announcements and all manner of other distractions, diverting our focus from the primary purpose of praising and thanking God, and of deepening our relationship with Him. There was often fairly good teaching related to scripture, but even in these cases they seemed to focus on the same things over and over again, without ever getting below the surface, or exploring the greater complexities and mysteries of the faith. There is a verse in scripture about beginning our faith by feeding on easier things in scripture, which is equated with feeding milk to babies, but then St Paul admonishes the church to grow up, and move beyond these things to deeper things—solid food. It was as if the churches were only able to provide milk, and wouldn’t, or couldn’t provide anything more substantial. After months of giving the benefit of the doubt, and patiently enduring these services, in hopes of something better eventually happening, we finally recognized the reality and state of things in these churches, called a spade a spade, and stopped our hunt. For the next four years we worshipped together at home, doing our own Bible studies together on Sunday mornings, and then listening to lessons online by RC Sproul, and others later in the day.

The most instructive thing about this spiritual chapter in our lives was taking a series of courses through The Teaching Company, known as The Great Courses. Without going into great detail about any of them, briefly, these courses helped to provide context to my own theological views, expose my theological prejudices and biases, inspire me by the lives of other Christians throughout history, and open my understanding to the long history of the church, the role the early church fathers played in deciding on the canon of scripture, and the value of church traditions in opposing and resisting heretical opinions which would attempt to lead the church down erroneous paths. Up to this point, my Protestant upbringing, and the biases of my faith from this point of view, had seemed self-evident and I lived by them without very much thought; but exposing myself to the historical context of the Reformation and the relative newness and possible fallacies associated with these theologies, helped me to consider more ancient and time-tested options, and to inquire into the ideas of earlier thinkers, great minds of the church, who lived and set about the direction of all Christians long, long before Catholicism, the Reformation or Protestantism had even begun.

During this period I also had taken a new full-time job with a large landscape company north of Seattle. My job was to meet clients, write estimates and do designs for new installation projects, and to oversee the crews and answer their questions about the installation details and methods. The volume of work was exponentially greater than what I had been used to when working for myself, and the stress of the job was difficult to endure. In order to combat this stress I reinstituted a daily prayer rule for myself, something I hadn’t really done with any regularity since my early twenties. It was a long process to create this new habit, but slowly, month by month, and year by year, I gradually carved more and more of my time and attention away from worldly concerns, and dedicated this to spiritual contemplation and prayer. I began with prayer in the evening before bed, then added prayer in the morning just after rising, and then I made daily recurring reminders in my office calendar to pray each day at nine, noon and three o’clock. This is still a work in progress for me, but now the habit is well established, and if I miss a time of prayer, I notice it very much, and find I must satisfy that need as soon as possible; whereas, for years my reminders could pop-up on my phone or computer, and I would mostly ignore them, on the excuse that I didn’t have time for that.

The goal of all of this wasn’t to ignore my worldly responsibilities, but to prioritize them properly, since I considered myself to be first and foremost a spiritual being, a soul, and only secondarily a man with a career. My first allegiance is to God and His commandments, and only after that do I work in the world, and concern myself with worldly things. At least that is the goal, and what I hope for, though the pull of worldly concerns is very strong and difficult to overcome, and they resist any relegation to secondary status. But my daily prayer rule helped keep me focused on my relationship with God, and my dependence on Him; and on a practical level, it also reduced or eliminated feelings of stress, and gave me a clearer mind, and a more generous heart, in response to difficult people and situations.

As I continued to read more and more of the works of early Christian writers, from the first few centuries of the church, I began to consider that perhaps my path was really to be found outside of Protestantism.  Though I had attended an Orthodox Church briefly in my hometown of Santa Rosa years earlier, and had experienced several others since then, while in Jerusalem and in Cyprus, I hadn’t seriously considered this as a real option for me, because I always saw the Orthodox Church as being for other ethnic groups; for people different than me, and not a place I could call home. But one thing I knew was that the brilliance of these early Christian thinkers, was still known and cherished among Orthodox believers and that Orthodox were still fed spiritually, even today, by the wisdom and insight that these church fathers have passed down. This spiritual heritage and lineage I could claim as my own, even if I wasn’t Greek, or Russian or Serbian, or any of the other nationalities I normally associated with Orthodoxy.

At first I tried a local Catholic church since it was more familiar to me culturally, and shared the same history and could claim the same leadership as Orthodoxy up until the great schism in 1054. The service was fine, but I was surprised to find in so many ways it hardly differed from the Protestantism I had already experienced, and was beginning to reject. There were of course theological differences between the two, but in terms of approach, other than being somewhat more liturgical, I hardly would know the difference between one service and the other.

Because of this, I finally took the next step, a step which today looking back seems so obvious and almost inevitable; I attended an Orthodox liturgy with a serious interest and openness to learning more about their faith, and to possibly converting to Orthodoxy.  All of my previous paths, all of my experiences in life seemed to be leading me to this decision; whether explicitly or implicitly through my seeking for true faith, true Christianity, for a fullness of worship and discipline, for a deeper understanding of the ascetic, spiritual warfare, and for a life dedicated to prayer and stillness in pursuit of relationship with God, and through my desire to give myself to God as completely as possible having given away all my money, my possessions, and desiring to give my time, my body and my life; all of these paths I had previously taken and those I still hoped to fulfill, all of these were understood and supported by the Orthodox Christian life of piety as it is still practiced today in our modern, post-Christian, seeker-friendly, watered down world.

(to be continued)

~FS

About this time I was contacted by a defense attorney in San Luis Obispo who was defending MD in his upcoming trial. He asked if I would fly down and testify on his behalf, which I agreed to do. Basically, he just wanted me to describe for the jury various aspects of the training course, and give my perspective on the whole experience. I answered his questions on the stand, and explained as I saw it, the rationale and purpose behind it all, and also tried to illustrate for the jury the many good aspects of our time together, and the reasons it was beneficial in my life’s journey. After returning to Seattle I never learned the exact findings or outcome of the trial, but I deduced that MD lost, because I heard several years later that he was still being held in the facility in Atascadero. This really saddened me because he remained my friend, and I loved him, and all he had done for me. I wished I could have done more for him, and hoped still that a better outcome would arrive.

The following year I met someone through a friend and we began to date. A year after we first met I asked her if she would like to visit Israel with me, so we took a three week vacation, visiting friends I had made while serving there, and then driving around the country visiting all of the important and well-known sites, as well as those lesser known places special to me. When we returned to the US we got engaged, and about six months later we married. Instead of a honeymoon we decided to return to Israel and volunteer together for six months with Holy Land Ministries.

Our first home together was not far from the women’s shelter in a Jewish neighborhood, down a narrow alley. The apartment was simply furnished but with several unexpected features. For one, we had bunk beds. So my new wife, Patty, took the upper bunk and I took the bottom. Secondly, many of the electrical outlets and switches were missing covers or were broken, and inside these openings in the walls one could discern the antennae and little exoskeletal bodies of our new housemates—congregations of cockroaches. In frustration one evening, Patty defied the law of conductivity, and poured a container of water into one of these outlets, in order to drown out a group of cockroaches living there, and surprisingly it worked pretty well without shorting out the circuit or electrocuting herself. But perhaps the most unexpected thing about the apartment was that the bathroom and shower had been painted black; only the upper third of the walls and the ceiling were black while the lower parts were white and tile. It was a strange choice of color but we grew accustomed to it after a few days, but then grew suspicious, and upon closer examination, realized it was actually a thick layer of mold, rather than paint. Once I scrubbed the mold away, which took a long time, the room, actually the entire apartment, smelled a whole lot better.

There are many new challenges in combining one’s life with that of another person and navigating these changes. Living in a foreign country is also a challenge, as is working with people who are in distress, which is common to homeless shelters. Learning to navigate our new marriage within this framework was eye-opening. Patty had never lived outside of the US before and on our previous short vacation, hadn’t really experienced some of the difficulties of life in Israel. It is a small country and everyone is trying to stake out their place, so some of the common courtesies one expects, such as stepping aside to let another pass on the sidewalk, or saying ‘excuse me’ didn’t come into play very often there. The lack of these social graces took some time, and some tears, for her to work through, and it required of me to be more thoughtful and understanding towards her, to do my best to make our relationship as safe and secure and joyful as possible in order to counter some of the blows coming from our new environment. It was helpful to practice forgiveness on a moment to moment basis, expect not too much from people, and be grateful when kindnesses were offered to us.

While Patty helped the women and children in the shelter, I worked in the office writing the monthly newsletter, which went out to donors around the world, and helped take care of other administrative issues, as well as continued repairs on the facilities and on the vehicles. We had an older van that was used to shuttle people to various appointments and which I used once a week to pick up a load of bread that was donated to us by one of the large commercial bakeries, about an hour away. I enjoyed getting out of the metropolitan area of Tel Aviv and exploring some of the back roads on these little excursions. I found the Israeli countryside intriguing with its little villages, rugged hills, synagogues, mosques and minarets as well as the signs of its troubled reality: the barbed wire fences, road blocks, barricades, warning signs alerting travelers about possible unexploded mines, or not to pass due to kidnapping or other terrorist activity in the area. Along with these things I might also encounter a herd of goats being shepherded by a young boy from one side of the highway to the other, or a group of camels grazing alongside the road, while their Bedouin caretaker smoked a cigarette and gave me a nonchalant wave as I passed.

At Christmastime Patty and I rented a car and drove up to Jerusalem. This was visit number five for me, my influenza visit. It was lightly snowing outside, and I spent a good part of the first night in bed with chills and aches throughout my body. I didn’t want to waste our time off together however, so we drove down to Bethlehem to see what was happening there. It was Christmas Eve so the place was packed with visitors. We drove through the checkpoint in the security wall and then continued winding our way towards the center of town. Having never been to Bethlehem before I wasn’t sure exactly where to go and where to park. It was night, and this was before the time of mobile GPS, so I just continued to follow the crowds. Eventually I realized that ours was the only car on the road as more and more pedestrians filled the street, packing it from side to side. We were carried along from street to street as the crowds grew thicker and I knew now that we probably weren’t supposed to be taking our car in this direction, but there was no way to turn around and nowhere to go, the crowds were so dense.

I continued to drive at a walker’s pace until eventually we found ourselves at Manger Square, the heart of the festivities, and a roadblock preventing us from going any further. Inside the vehicle that blocked our passage was a sudden hustle of activity and several police got out and looked towards us. At the same time men in a different type of uniform came across the road and all of them conversed while gesturing towards us. Eventually one of the officers came down and explained that we weren’t supposed to be there. Apparently they were in the midst of a joint operation between Israeli police and the security detail of the PLO, because the head of that organization, Mahmoud Abbas, was about to pass by and they needed to keep the area secure. I explained that we couldn’t turn around and I gestured to the crowds behind us. He left us and the combined group of Israeli and Palestinian officers discussed this a little further and then he returned and said hurriedly that they were letting us pass to enter the square but we had to hurry, make a sharp right and drive as quickly as we could out of the area. I had no idea where we were going, but I did what I was told and soon we found ourselves alone, on unlit streets driving away from the square. Only we weren’t alone at all. This was the route Abbas was about to take so stationed every fifty yards or so, along both sides of this dark alley stood black-hooded PLO security guards, holding their rifles and standing at attention. The only way we saw them was as our headlights briefly lit them up as we hurled our way past. It grew increasingly uncomfortable as we found ourselves farther and farther away from anyone, alone in the night with these faceless guards, armed and looking very insidious in the darkened gloom.

Eventually I turned off this alley and found my way to a lit street and I could see a way back up the hill to the security wall. I was still quite shaken by the unknown aspect of this adventure, not really certain of what might happen, and Patty was in tears sitting beside me, so I felt pretty bad having subjected her to that. Unfortunately the adventure wasn’t quite over yet. As we approached the security detail at the gate we stopped and waited for them to gesture to us to come closer. I’m not certain what they gestured, but it appeared to me they wanted me to drive towards them so I did. In that moment so many things happened it is difficult to remember them all, but suffice to say they weren’t gesturing to me to come towards them. In a panic, several guards drew their rifles and aimed them at our windshield, and others screamed at us, I assume, telling us to stop. Which I did as quickly as possible. Patty was nearly hysterical by this time and I just wanted to understand what they wanted me to do. I couldn’t see very well as floodlights drenched our car and blinded me. We didn’t move, waiting to see what would happen next. The guards lowered their weapons and one of them walked up to my window and in a grumpy tone of voice said something I didn’t understand. He waved us past and we drove gratefully back to our room at the hostel. We spent the remainder of Christmas Eve safely in our room, far from the madding crowds.

(to be continued)

~FS

I returned to the United States in January 2005 and began working for myself again as a landscape designer. I was living outside of Seattle now and too far away to regularly attend the messianic congregation I had been attending when I first went to Israel so I found a new church to attend closer to home. It was a good church, with a good group of people and a pastor I respected and enjoyed. I appreciated that he wasn’t afraid to live and preach truth from scripture even in the face of worldly opposition; and he did it with humility and with a degree of consideration of the human frailty to which all of us are subject. Several months later I was hired part-time to work with him as the youth pastor. From this job I found that I cared a lot about the lives of my students and wanted to help them in their relationships with God, but I also discovered that it wasn’t a natural fit for me to teach. I didn’t really like it very much, and in many ways I felt more like an activities director, or an entertainer, rather than a teacher or a guide, and this role was very distasteful to me. Even so, my desire to help the kids and be a positive person in their lives kept me at it for several years.

I recall a conversation I had around this time, with my former landlady, who I rented my first house from in Seattle, and in that conversation I said something about being a Christian, to which she reacted with shock and amazement and said she had no idea I was a Christian. It was a stinging indictment, though she didn’t mean it as such, but I was horrified to discover that my faith and allegiance to Christ was so insipid, so obscure, hidden and lukewarm, that someone I was in close contact with for several years had no idea I even had that faith and allegiance. I wasn’t sure at the time what exact change was needed in me, and I didn’t plan to suddenly be something I’m not, nor pretend to be something other than what God made me to be, but this woke me up to the fact that whatever I was, whoever I was, needed to be less afraid to show others the truth.

My faith is the essential thing about me, and yet somehow she didn’t know about it at all. This was a revelation. I remembered my time in the garden at the Mt. of Beatitudes and how my faith, the truest part of my faith, this relationship with Christ Himself, I had always considered a private matter, and one I lived privately, away from prying eyes. Perhaps my faith was too private. Though I served others in many ways and was visible through my service, there was nothing particularly Christian about serving others; any person with good will and natural love for others does this, and many non-Christians do this better than I do. But what is essential and different about a Christian, is his or her relationship with Christ, the Son of God, and by extension everything else that this relationship entails: obedience to His commands, faith in His claims to be the Son of God, belief in His statements that He is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and the only way to eternal salvation, and all of the additional things He proclaimed and taught. These are the things that set a Christian apart, that make him different from the rest of the world, and make him the object of ridicule and derision; and these of course were the things I kept most under wraps because I don’t like being ridiculed and derided.

There are whole volumes written about the centrality and importance of derision and ridicule, of suffering for the Lord, and how instrumental and necessary these things are for us to lead a productive and fruitful Christian life. After all, Christ Himself suffered a humiliating death on a cross, and suffered all sorts of mocking, and He calls on each of us to take up our own cross and follow Him, and endure the same things that He did. These volumes exist, but for the most part they have been lost to history, and obscured by the modern trends that Christianity has taken in recent times, such as a gospel of prosperity, or a gospel of peace, or a gospel of social justice, or any number of other things that are practiced and that have some basis in scripture, but that aren’t the essential gospel that Christ Himself taught, or that His church preserved down through the ages, or that the early church fathers wrote so eloquently and instructively about.

But most of these things I hadn’t yet considered at that time, as my brand of Christianity was predominantly about serving other people, and about my personal struggle against vice and towards virtue—aspects of a Christian life, to be certain, but not the entirety of it. In becoming more honest with others about who I am and what I’ve done, I have found it important to remember who the ruler of this world is and what he does. Scripture states clearly that Satan is the ruler of this world, and that through his cunning and deception he has corrupted and brought about the downfall of man. He is our great enemy and our accuser and his intent is our destruction. So it is no wonder that we fear one another and hide ourselves from each other, as his spirit operates freely within each of us and we are prone to slander and to accusation and all manner of evil thought and speech against each other.

We see the devil’s methods on full display at every moment when we see people out of control, slaves to their passions, acting in rage and anger, in sexual abandon, unable to control their desires. He is a spirit, not a physical creature, but a powerful spirit, and his servants are likewise powerful spirits, and their methods are to lure men into evil, trapping them by their own natural desires and tendencies, tricking them into sin and then crushing them under the law. Some are caught here in this world, exposed in their crimes, accused and destroyed, but most are given freedom to fall deeper and deeper into vice, farther and farther from God, until there is no belief that God even exists, nor certainly any belief that there will be a penalty or a payment to be paid in the end.

This isn’t to say that I am not responsible for my thoughts and actions, because the devil made me do it. I am responsible for everything I do and think, and without taking responsibility for everything, and then repenting and seeking forgiveness, there is no hope for me, but it is very helpful to remember that there is someone, a spirit, and many spirits, behind the scenes offering a lot of assistance to me in all the wrong directions. And it is helpful also to recognize that everyone else we meet is struggling with the same battle that we are, falling victim to the same things as we are, and probably these same people are the ones most vocal in accusing us when we fall, and are our most vehement critics and accusers when they discover we’ve committed the same crimes or bad actions as they have done in secret. It is not the innocent that clamor, but the guilty; it is the innocent that are gentle and meek, and who witness the world in silent simplicity and generosity of spirit.

After returning from Israel that year was a particularly lonely one. I missed my relationship with V still, and I missed the excitement and adventure of living overseas in such a dynamic place as the Middle East. Throughout much of my life, since the time I was a teenager, I had been in a relationship, and while I could see a lot of value in this time alone, I yearned still for a partner. Out of this yearning, I succumbed for a short time to the deceptive attractions of internet pornography. I had no interest in anything graphic or depraved, but I wanted to see and experience beauty, physical beauty. This at least was the initial attraction and the basis of my superficial interest in the internet for this purpose. However, very quickly I could see the hypnotic power of this vice and how easily it could trap a person, like a fast current in a river, swiftly taking them downstream to places they hadn’t intended, almost against their will and beyond their power to escape.  After three weeks of dabbling in this lascivious undertaking, I saw the writing on the wall and what danger it presented to me, so I stopped immediately, making a definite and final break with it, never to return again—God willing, I pray.

That experience, though shameful, also filled me with rage against myself and against the evil behind all vice. I was angry that such opportunities exist in our world, and angry at myself for having indulged in them. But it also gave me a huge amount of empathy towards others who have also fallen to this scourge, and especially for anyone who hadn’t been able to fight free of it. But mostly I was just angry that I went looking for this trouble intentionally; and equally frustrated at how pervasive very similar images are on so many magazine covers, in every grocery store, on so many television shows, movies and advertisements. I was angry at how much effort it took to look away, to avert my eyes from these images that the world has decided are innocent and fine for public consumption, but that I could see were not so harmless, and could stir up desires in people that could easily lead to promiscuity, and end in a degrading of the human form, a debasement of sexuality, and a fracturing in relations between men and women.

(to be continued)

~FS

There is an expression, “third times a charm” but for me I needed to double that number. On my sixth attempt visiting Jerusalem I was finally able to spend time there without an injury or an illness. My previous five visits all ended prematurely and with convalescence required. For my first visit, I got a case of food poisoning and spent several days in bed and on the toilet, and lost fifteen pounds. My second visit gave me a mild concussion when I hit the crown of my head up into a steel doorjamb accidentally, while exiting a low doorway onto the rooftop of the Petra Hotel in the Old City; this also required several days’ bedrest and nausea. On my third attempt, I missed one of the bottom steps of an outdoor staircase while watching a cat, and twisted my ankle badly, probably breaking it, since I still have daily pain or discomfort even now, almost twelve years later. My fourth go at Jerusalem was another head injury, and my fifth effort garnered influenza. But my sixth time was the charm; I managed to enter and exit the city limits, and enjoy my entire stay there, without a single mishap.

I don’t believe this is normal; so have no fear in traveling to Jerusalem if that is in your future plans. I should think it is very unlikely you will meet with the same string of misfortunes as I did. However, despite these misfortunes, all of my visits to the holy city also yielded rewards and joys. My food poisoning trip was while serving with Hands of Mercy, helping victims of terrorist attacks and their families. Ye’shi, the director, worked almost singlehandedly to provide enormous support both materially and emotionally for folks that had suffered through these traumas. Nearly every penny that was donated went to help these victims, to the degree that Ye’shi himself made his home in a donated office, and slept in a sleeping bag under the stairwell, so as to save more money to give to those who needed it.

The Petra Hotel is located just inside the Jaffa Gate, across from the Tower of David and provides cheap accommodation to a very eclectic, international clientele. For even cheaper rates you can sleep on the roof, on mattresses scattered about under the stars. One night we ended up on the roof searching for a couple mattresses for the night. Most were already taken, but we managed to find two available on our second pass around the roof, and we bunked down for the night. In the morning, I awoke to see the sun peeking over the Mt. of Olives, and casting its warm, golden glow onto the ancient stone blocks of David’s Tower, just across the road. It was a gloriously peaceful and beautiful way to start the day, in this most beautiful, and glorious of cities.

Later that day I must have eaten something not so peaceful, and I ended the day with a less glorious view of the inside of a toilet. Eventually, I was evacuated from the city and returned to the shelter in Jaffa, but not before I had evacuated every square inch of my stomach and bowels, including, it seemed, things I must have eaten years earlier.

Depleted but not beaten, I recovered my strength in Jaffa, and enjoyed continuing to serve the men and women of the shelters, as well as the homeless population of Tel Aviv with our soup kitchen, which we set up on the beach every Saturday afternoon. Tanya, who had started this ministry, and was dedicating her life to serving her fellow Israelis, had begun with this soup kitchen years earlier. At the time, she just made sandwiches using her own money and handed them out to anyone who needed one, but in time the ministry grew, feeding more and more people, and then finally including the shelters as well.

The team of volunteers at Holy Land Ministries: Tanya, the founder, Michel, the pastor and his wife Ingrid, and including so many other dedicated and loving individuals from around the world, became family—encouraging each other, arguing at times, misunderstanding at other times, but for the most part caring for one another and working together to serve. To serve together with others was one of the great joys in my life and to do it in such a place as Israel, in the geographic heart and soul of my faith, was a true blessing. Before leaving to return to the US I made tentative plans to return to Israel again, perhaps several times, and to do so for longer than just three months if possible. Upon leaving Holy Land Ministries I rented a car and traveled to several locations I hadn’t spent much time yet: at the Dead Sea and in particular Masada, and again up in the Galilee region, and also in the Golan Heights overlooking Syria.

My understanding of religion, based on my experiences in various churches up to this point in my life, had been that church is the place one goes for good teaching (hopefully) about Christ and the gospel, but if I wanted an actual experience of God then I needed to look someplace else, either in my own personal prayer life, or out in nature. Actual experience of God, genuine relationship with Christ, I had never really experienced in a church, and I don’t mean a good feeling, or an emotional event, because church did seem pretty good at manipulating emotions. What I hadn’t found there though, was the depth of experience that the scriptures allude to in the verse, “be still and know that I am God”. It would be quite a few years before I found the Orthodox Church in which this door was finally opened to me.

In the meantime, I sought out quiet places in nature to pray and develop relationship with God as best I could. The Negev desert was an excellent environment for this, as was the Dead Sea, and on the Masada mesa; but the place that I found the greatest and deepest peace in my entire time in Israel was in the gardens overlooking the Sea of Galilee on the grounds of the Church of the Beatitudes. As I sat here and read my Bible, my whole being was gradually washed over by an overwhelming and total wave of peace; and this was not just a small wave, but was one of great size and duration.

I didn’t consider it at the time, but as I looked back on that experience several years later, I felt as though I was being shown a foretaste of the spiritual life to come, the one that is available even in this life through the fullness of church life offered by Orthodox Christianity. And the particular location this experience occurred was significant to me because it was both in a garden, which was my natural place to seek relationship with God, and also on the grounds of a church, which is the place the body of Christ meets together to foster relationship with God. Though I didn’t really understand this corporate aspect of our faith at the time, or see a great deal of spiritual value in church participation, I think this was an opening for me, and a glimpse of what was to come in my future. I felt as though God was meeting me where I was, literally and figuratively alone in a garden, and at the same time showing me a glimpse of what additionally could be added to the spiritual life I was then living, this being a fuller and richer spiritual life supported and fulfilled in communion with other believers, and enriched by the wisdom and tradition of the eternal church.

(to be continued)

~FS