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Beauty walks the Strip and lights up the night.
All day Nancy deals with her tragedy. Somehow she sees Beauty through
the veil: The existential lie. The cosmetic cover-up for death. Nancy
serves her children.
The young girl ended up at our shelter. She'd been placed with
relatives, but Uncle was depressed and shot himself. He was carried away.
Auntie sent her niece upstairs with rags and a bucket, to clean up after
Uncle. Looking out her bedroom window at the shelter, the girl found great
comfort in the spiraled gold and ivory onion-domes gleaming in the sun
over a blue summer sea. "How beautiful," she thought, and gazed
for hours at the Trump Taj Mahal.
What earthly pleasure remains unmixed with grief? What glory
stands unshaken on the earth? All things are flimsier than shadows, all
things are flightier than dreams. One moment only and death shall supplant
them all. But in the light of Thy countenance and in the sweetness of
Thy beauty ... (Funeral Service)
Matushka lost her faith, a casualty of communion without community:
the lethal tension between the Gospel life in Christ and the priorities
of a parish. She witnessed her husband descend from joylessness to hypocrisy.
She endured his negligence of the family. She abandoned the field of her
own inner life. All were seeking solace elsewhere.
A strange case of spiritual malaria, she was left with reoccurring
episodes amid the overgrown opulence of a suburban church garden where
she searched for the man and
woman God had set there to serve and pray.
O Thou who of old didst call me into being out of nothingness
and honor me with Thy image Divine, restore me to that image, and to my
original beauty...
"Quit!" His wife urged. A church-warden was ravaged by
the legalistic fervor of a Priest who knew the Canons, but not their purpose.
He responded to his own fears made manifest in others with external formulas,
beautiful rituals, and ecclesial appearance.
Years later the Priest encountered love. Then he understood the
perseverance of the church-warden he had buried. Sometimes, late at night,
he sighed in his bed. "What's wrong?" Matushka would whisper.
"Just me." They'd reach for each other and hold hands in the
darkness.
The wife of the church-warden sighed and turned over in her lonely
bed.
People come to the Mission. They feel free to tell their troubles.
Pointing them to Jesus Christ is the mission of the Mission. Today, very
little in life is referred to Christ, be it beautiful or grotesque. People
have forgotten how to weave the thread of faith into the fabric of daily
life. Minute by minute, we are confronted with endless situations that
require us to make decisions of an ethical, moral, or spiritual nature.
Minute by minute, who we are becoming is being shaped by the choices we
make. Competition for our opinion as to what is beautiful and good is
very serious. Competition for our soul is deadly serious. The fruit of
the serpentine purveyors is more sophisticated than ever.
Transient images, smells, touches, tastes, sounds, and spiritual
intuitions permeate our existence. In and of themselves, they are ascetically
neutral. We experience them and either glorify God in an Orthodox manner,
fool ourselves with some religious rationale, or draw the veil of the
flesh and live as if God did not exist.
Ultimately, the vision of existence we embrace reveals the extent
of our willful continuing participation in the beguilement of Adam. We
are still free to obfuscate our God-given vision of love and the beauty
of His Garden with a veil of self-centeredness.
The vision of love is a gift of the Holy Spirit. It can glimpse
beauty even in what may be labeled ugliness, horror, futility, foolishness,
or failure. But there is little hope for our participation in the One
True Beauty when we decide as a matter of will to divert our desire for
True Beauty to whitewashing worldly tombs and saying they are beautiful.
Ontologically, there is only One True Beauty. All else is beautiful only
to the degree that it reflects the Hope and Truth offered to us by Jesus
Christ in His Mystical Body.
There is a deep beauty -- when Love glints through the diabolical
veil of human freedom gone awry -- when we respond to the horror, the
doubt, the loneliness, the fear, the pain, doing "what we can"
in offering some small act of Christ-like love:
To the young girl: The sanctuary of healing love in the shelter
of those who serve.
To the clergy-family: Senseless, ceaseless love in the face of
our common failure.
To the gardener and his widow: "Stand by your covenant and
grow old in your work... Loving one another. Even as I love you."
From Jacob's
Well
Newspaper of the Diocese of New York
and New Jersey
Orthodox Church in America
Fall/Winter 1997-1998
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