Ancient Ruins

 

“They will rebuild the ancient ruins and restore the places long devastated…” Isaiah 61:14

I love ancient ruins. My poetic soul sees them as mysterious and ethereal. It is almost as if they were alive and wanted to tell their story.

However, in our lives, ancient ruins are not majestic and beautiful. They are reminders of tragedies or hardship we have endured. They keep us from living the present in peace and do not allow us to dream of the future.

Most people at some point in their lives go through some tremendous hardship. Some people choose to live among the rubble and never heal. Some sweep away the rubble but leave the surrounding area barren. The ruins are glorified as a reminder but nothing new is built. Surface healing has taken place, but new life hasn’t been really restored. Others sweep away the rubble and build many new structures, but a few of the ruins were never knocked down. Perhaps they have been forgotten, but they are still there. Although, new life surrounds them, the ruins themselves were not restored. Then there are those blessed few who have torn down the ruins and have rebuilt the original structure to be a hundred times stronger and more beautiful than before.

However, we need to realize that we can’t rebuild the ancient ruins ourselves. If we do, they will only topple again. They have to be rebuilt and restored for us. Only the Lord Jesus Christ can take what was in ruins and give new life. Only he “can bestow on us a crown of beauty instead of ashes.” (Isaiah 61:3)

My Lord, My God, rebuild MY ancient ruins and restore MY places long devastated!

 

Windows

I have never broken a window,
toys-yes, hearts-plenty, but never a window.

Brokenness is never really pretty.
There is such a small time to fix it, such a small window.

I remember how I wanted you to stare
into my soul like it was a window.

But you preferred distance, separation
Always wanting something between us, panes in a window.

And when it rained, you refused to get wet,
Always hiding behind the glass of the window.

I am realizing that freedom is abstaining from barriers:
no wall, no fences, no doors, no windows.

Brokenness is not the worst thing.
Faith, imagine a world without windows.

 ________________________________________________

This poem is an oldy but goody. I have always enjoyed this poem.  This poem is in a modified Ghazal (pronounced “guzzle”) form.  I believe it is a Middle Eastern form.  Every couplet you have to repeat the same image.

The Gift of Music

There are many blessing that the Lord has bestowed upon me since moving back home with my parents. One of them is the beautiful gift of music.  My mother is a piano teacher.  When I was around 4 years old, she taught me the basic notes.  I was a restless little monkey (as she likes to say) and wouldn’t stay still.  Therefore, piano lessons had to be put on hold.  When I was 8, I picked up piano again but only for a short time.  I finished the 1st grade book.  However, I wasn’t motivated and mom never pushed me.  I never progressed any further.  When I was in my junior or senior year in college, I can home during the Christmas break and decided to buy some piano books and start all over again.  But when I got back to college, I never made time to practicse. My dorm had a piano in the lobby, but I was too shy to practice in front of everyone.  Once again, nothing came of it.

However, around 8 weeks ago, the desire to play the piano once again resurfaced.  Mom had been having some sucess with adult piano students with a series called “the Alfred Adult Series.” This series is amazing. It makes playing so fun.  There are no stupid chidish songs and exercises.  This series captured my attention.  I have played an hour or more a day for almost 8 weeks straight. I have only missed about 2 days of practice during that whole time.   In that short of a time, I am over half way through the 2nd book in the series.

Playing the piano is the only thing that I have been consistent with.  Two of my weaknesses are discipline and consistency.  They have always been my Achilles heel!  My lack of them tortures my soul constantly.  It is what constantly brings me before the throne of God.  Nevertheless, God has chosen to bless me with discipline and consistency in this area.

Music has become a cathartic activity for me.  When I am nervous or up tight, I play the piano. When I am depressed and want to go back to bed, I play the piano.  It has been such a beautiful light unto my soul.

My heart sings for the gifts the Lord has bestowed upon me.

We’re All Related

Lately, there is a habit that I just can’t kick.  I love researching my genealogy.  It is one of my favorite hobbies. Mainly for right now I have been concentrating on my Mom’s side of the family.  Research is never ending. New relatives keep popping up all over the place. On many of the branches on my Mom’s side, I have traced many relatives past the 1600s.  Once you start fleshing out your family tree, then you can find out what famous people you are related to distantly and places like ancestry.com will compare your tree to the famous person’s tree.

I found out that I am very distantly related to many famous people.  For example,  I am related to Laura Welch Bush, wife of President George W. Bush.   I am her 8th cousin, 4 times removed.  I know that this relation is so minute that it is almost no relation at all. However, I still find it fascinating.  When you get down to it, everybody is related to everybody else. 

Being a writer, I was thrilled to realize that I was related to so many famous writers. Some of them I am related to more than once.  For example, on one branch of my family tree, I am the 5th cousin, 11 times removed of Percy Bysshe Shelly.  On another branch of my family tree, I am his 5th cousin, 6 times removed.

Just for the fun of it, I would like to name some of the famous writers to whom I am related.  I like to think that some of their writing talent may blossom in me.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, Laura Ingalls Wilder, e. e. cummings, Percy Bysshe Shelly, John Steinbeck, Willa Cather, William Wordsworth, Helen Keller, Clement Moore (wrote “The Night Before Christmas”), Lucy Maude Montgomery, Robert Louis Steenson, Richard Lovelace (English Poet), Sir Walter Scott,  Robert Graves (English Poet), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, and Jane Austen.

Also, one more amazing discovery. I am the 10th Cousin, once removed of Lucille Ball. I have always admired so many things about her.

Great Lent, IV

I can’t believe it, but Holy Week is finally here.  In the Orthodox Church, the week before Pascha (Easter) is called Holy Week and each day has a distinct purpose and service.  In fact, if you add up all of the services of Holy Week, it ends up being of a total of more than 25 hours. 

I am a little sad.  I haven’t been able to truly experience Holy Week this year.  I currently live over 100 miles away from my Church and there really aren’t any other Orthodox Churches much closer to me. My family and I attend every Sunday, but there is no way that we can go to all of the services of Holy Week.

This is only my 3rd Pascha as an Orthodox Christian and the first year, my church didn’t have all of the Holy Week services because we didn’t have a full time priest. So last year was my only real experience of a full Holy Week.

During Holy Week, we live in real time of the gospels and walk with Christ every moment until resurrection.  Holy Friday, which is tomorrow, is my favorite day of all.  There are three long services.  There is Royal hours where we keep vigil with Christ on the cross.  Then before the next service, the children of the church decorate Christ’s funeral bier with flowers.  Then there is the burial service when we take Christ off the cross and put him in the funeral bier and march around the outside of the church.  Then in the evening there is a Lamentations service. The funeral bier is in the center of the church and many Psalms and laments for the crucified Christ are read. This can go as long as 3 hours, but the whole church is dark and lit only with candle light, and we focus on lamenting the death of Christ.  There is even a vigil and the Psalms are read over His body every hour until the service the next morning. Parishoners sign up to read the Psalms by the hour.  Supposedly when an Orthodox person person dies, their body is brought into the church and Psalms are read over the body all night. However, I have never been part of an Orthodox funeral and don’t know exactly how it is done.

There are many services on Saturday.  Then the matins for Pascha starts at 10:30 pm. We have our Pascha Divine Liturgy around 12:00 am. This will last for a couple of hours.  Around 2:00 am we will have a huge feast of all kinds of meat and dairy items since we have been abstaining from them for almost 60 days.

My family will get to go to the Pascha services Saturday night.  By the time everything finishes up, it will be around 3:00 am. Then we will have to drive 2 hrs home. Maybe we will sleep on someone’s floor for a couple of hours.

I am sad, but happy that I will get to go to Pascha. This certainly has been a trying Lent and I have learned so much. I have also failed in many ways, but it is important to find out my weak areas.

May the Lord bless all of you my dear readers and my prayers will be with you.

I haven’t disappeared yet

Whew! Time seems to fly by so fast.  I used to keep up with writing for my blog. Now I often find myself going a week or more at a time without writing.  It is just that life is so fast paced even for those who are unemployed.  There is always something interrupting me or some other responsibility that I have to take care of. 

However, I do want to announce that I finally got a job. It starts Monday and I will be teaching Business Communications at a local career college.  The job is M-Th 3 hrs a day for a month.  Not bad. Nevertheless, much preparation will be involved.  I hope to teach in June also. That way I can get 2 months of work in before my trip to Romania in July.   When I return in August, I hope to get on at the local community college for a semester.  We will see what happens.  Life is interesting that way.

Hopefully, I will still continue to write on my blog.  I like being part of a community even if it is virtual.

Unhindered

The streets outside
fill with a sweet, musty, smell
as the rain pelts the pavement
causing the children to
run out from their small houses
into the cemented streets
eager to catch
the dashing drops
that tingle
their outstretched tongues.

Heads roll back
and laughter erupts
and squeals of delight escape
from tiny, wriggling, bodies
swaying to the rhythm of the rain
that renders
their souls free
and their spirits
unhindered.

 

Big Project

Recently I have been cleaning my attic out and I found many of my old journals and old folders from my Poetry Workshops from my college courses.  I managed to put all of them in one big crate. I have a desire to go through all of my folders and journals and find works of my writings that can be edited.  Going through a part of the stack today, I realized that this will take a long, long time.  I also realized how my writing has greatly matured through the years.  So much of my work I want to toss out and never let any body look at it; it is that silly and immature.

I am slowly embarking on a project to unmask these dusty “diamonds in the rough” and hope to post some poems and other works when I polish them up.

 

Great Lent, III

Sometimes we fool ourselves. We fool ourselves into believeing that we don’t have problems in a certain area.  We are joyful.  We find oursevles calm.  But we never really know what lies beneath. We never really know what passions are hidden deep inside ourselves.

Great Lent is a time for digging. For discovering what is underneath and laying it aside. However, often during lent, one doesn’t really have to work at digging.  For some reason, things seem to errupt.  Lately, it seems like my heart has been lying on earthquake fault that has been dormant for quite a time but has suddenly become active.

For the past several weeks, we have had major problems with our internet service provider for various reasons. There has been several days when we have had not internet at all.  Then when we did have it, it would either be slow as a slug or very sporadic. (off 3 hrs, on for a few hrs, off for several more hours.)

I had a reason to be frustrated. There is nothing wrong with frustration.  However, this deep dark anger swelled up inside of me. I found my self seething and fuming. If you know me, this is very much unlike me.  I don’t get angry often, and when I do,  it doesn’t last very long.

The anger that welled up inside of me over something that to most of the world is so trivial bothered me.  I never knew a volcano of unerupted anger was inside of me. 

Another thing the jerked my world is a selfishness that has come over me.  Recently I watched, “Idol Gives Back.”  They showed so many videos of children starving and dying not only in countries like Africa but also in America as well.  I guees I never really understood how tragic and devastating Hurricane Katrina really was.  You would think that after watching something like this that I would be filled with compassion.  On the contrary, the opposite was occuring.  The passion of self-centeredness burst forth.  I often got upset when seeing material things that I couldn’t have.  This is also unlike me.  If you know me, then you would know that I am not a very materialistic person at all.

Great Lent is indeed a battlefield. It is something that helps us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling like St. Paul says.

With weariness and joy, I look forward to Pascha when we celebrate the true sacrificial Lamb. 

Romania, here I come

When I visited The Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration at the end of February, the Lord really touched my heart in many ways.  While I was there, I felt a constant link to Eastern Europe, and I knew that I was to return there for mission work.

 I have done previous mission work in Ukraine in the summer of ‘99 and from August 2001-June 2002.  However, I was a Protestant missionary.  At the time, I was not acquainted with the Orthodox faith. Since then Eastern Europe has always captured my mind and my heart.  That love and desire for the people of Eastern Europe has grown even more since I have become Orthodox because most of the countries in Eastern Europe are Orthodox countries.

 While still at the monastery, I contacted my priest with my desire to go back to Eastern Europe to do mission work.  After I came back, we came to the conclusion that I needed to fill out an application with the Orthodox Christian Mission Center (OCMC).  The OCMC is the official mission and evangelism agency of the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in the Americas (SCOBA). I filled out an application with the OCMC and was accepted to go on a summer mission trip to Romania. The fact that I am going to Romania has significance.  The Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration was found by Mother Alexandria (now deceased).  Mother Alexandria was formerly known as the Princess of Romania, Ileana.  She and her family were forced out of Romania by the Communists.

 I will be gone July 16-August 9.  The first few days will be spent in St. Augustine, FL at the OCMC headquarters.  To go on this trip, I need to raise approximately $4,000.  I need to have all of the money raised 3 weeks before my departure date.

 During the trip, my teammates and I will be working at two youth camps for Orthodox teenagers.  I will be teaching some English, but I will also be teaching some about the Orthodox faith. I am sure that we will also be involved in the normal summer camp activities such as crafts and sports.

 I would appreciate your prayers for my trip. If you feel led to contribute to my trip in any way, please e-mail me at oilofgladness2004@yahoo.com and I will let you know the specifics on how you can donate.