Hello all, it’s been a while. I’m sending this post out to the many subscribers who signed up for free. I keep forgetting to send out a regular digest of what’s been going twice weekly or so to paying subscribers. Sorry about that. As you can see above, I was in New Orleans this week, paying homage to my personal hero, Ignatius Reilly of “A Confederacy of Dunces” fame, at the statue of him on Canal Street, where the opening scene of the great comic novel takes place. After the last few weeks, I needed an infusion of Theology and Geometry (it didn’t hurt that I had dinner with an old friend the night before at Galatoire’s).
So, here is a sampling of what I’ve been writing about. (Paying subscribers can safely skip this; you’ve already read this.) You may not be aware that my wife filed for divorce in mid-April, while I was overseas. Some of my content here in the past six weeks has to do with that sad event.
From ‘The End Of The Sacrificial Journey”
T.S. Eliot said famously that April is the cruelest month. I will always remember April 2022 as the month that my wife announced that she has filed for divorce. Yet after the initial shock wore off, I realized that her decision was both correct and courageous. After nine long and grueling years of trying to save this marriage, I believe she made the right decision to end our mutual torment. As I’ve said, we agreed not to talk about the things that brought us to this point, but most of our closest friends, including at least one of the two priests who have counseled us over the years, believe that it is a sad necessity. I’m not kidding when I say that I have great respect for my wife for her decision, compassion for the suffering that led her to make it, and sorrow for the role I played in the breakdown of our marriage. I spent a good part of Holy Week in Jerusalem praying for her, that she — and I — can find peace and healing.
How tragic life is. When I lost my Catholic faith around 2005, the greatest shock for me was the realization that no matter how hard one tries to hold on to faith, it can be pulled out of one. I really did believe that one’s faith commitment was strictly a matter of willpower, but I learned that that isn’t true. In 2007, Bill Lobdell, the former religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times, wrote an essay about how covering church scandals cost him his faith. You should read it. Excerpts:
It took several years and numerous memos and e-mails, but editors finally agreed in 1998 to let me write “Getting Religion,” a weekly column about faith in Orange County.
I felt like all the tumblers of my life had clicked. I had a strong marriage, great kids and a new column. I attributed it all to God’s grace.
He began the process to convert to Catholicism, but broke it off:
At the time, I never imagined Catholic leaders would engage in a widespread practice that protected alleged child molesters and belittled the victims. I latched onto the explanation that was least damaging to my belief in the Catholic Church -- that this was an isolated case of a morally corrupt administration.
And I was comforted by the advice of a Catholic friend: “Keep your eyes on the person nailed to the cross, not the priests behind the altar.”
More:
I couldn’t get the victims’ stories or the bishops’ lies -- many of them right there on their own stationery -- out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different -- the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.
The lifeline Father Vincent had tried to give me began to slip from my hands.
I sought solace in another belief: that a church’s heart is in the pews, not the pulpits. Certainly the people who were reading my stories would recoil and, in the end, recapture God’s house. Instead, I saw parishioners reflexively support priests who had molested children by writing glowing letters to bishops and judges, offering them jobs or even raising their bail while cursing the victims, often to their faces.
All too familiar to me. Lobdell writes about covering a Protestant scandal, and about how seeing the human wreckage religious leaders and people caused, his faith finally simply left him. I was fortunate: I didn’t stop believing in God, only in the truth claims of the Catholic Church. When I became Orthodox, I resolved to become a very different kind of Christian. My intellectualism, and the intellectual certitude I brought to my relationship with God, had been not a source of strength, but of weakness. The utter humiliation of my losing my Catholic faith changed me. I hope it made me a better Christian. Only God knows, though.
Similarly with marriage. Honestly, I never imagined that I could lose my Catholicism. Nor did I imagine that I could lose my marriage. Yet here I am, after years of pain and disillusionment, among all the broken people — people who once thought that as long as they believed all the right things, and had the best of intentions, they could avoid the worst. Nope. I fought even harder for my marriage than I did for my Catholicism, and suffered excruciating pain for over twice as long in this failed marriage than in my failing commitment to Catholicism. It ended up in the same place.
And yet, this morning, back in Budapest, I ran into a Danube Institute friend and colleague on the street. She had not heard about the divorce. We talked for a while, and she noticed how calm, even happy, I was.
“How on earth are you doing this?” she said, referring to my demeanor.
“Entirely by the grace of God,” I said. “Christ healed my heart in Jerusalem. I’ll tell you the story when we have more time.”
It really is true. I told my blog readers last week about the extraordinary thing that happened to me in a dark crypt chapel of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. If you missed that essay, here’s a link.
From “Graham Pardun’s The Sunlilies”
[Here is the opening of a post in which I told readers about an amazing little self-published book a friend tipped me off to, and which I’ve found to be a total delight:]
But first, let me tell you about an extraordinary little book of essays recommended to me by a Catholic friend: The Sunlilies, by Graham Pardun. The author is an Orthodox Christian living in Sandstone, Minnesota. He self-published the book, and sells it through Treedweller.net, his website (there’s something buggy about that site; if it won’t load the first time, reload it, and all will be well). I bought a hard copy yesterday, but persuaded Graham to send me an electronic copy so I could read it at once, and tell you all about it. I’m so glad he did! From the preface:
I'm nobody special, though—just a man of my times, like anybody else. Therefore, I wish to conclude this preface not with my own new words, but the new words of someone else, whose words express my heart completely—Paul Kingsnorth, from his essay, The Cross and the Machine, an account of his long conversion to Orthodoxy:
In the Kingdom of Man, the seas are ribboned with plastic, the forests are burning, the cities bulge with billionaires and tented camps, and still we kneel before the idol of the great god Economy as it grows and grows like a cancer cell. And what if this ancient faith is not an obstacle after all, but a way through? As we see the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit, of choosing power over humility, separation over communion, the stakes become clearer every day. Surrender or rebellion; sacrifice or conquest; death of the self or triumph of the will; the Cross or the machine. We have always been offered the same choice. The gate is strait and the way is narrow and maybe we will always fail to walk it. But is there any other road that leads home?
What is this book of essays about? Says Graham:
This is a book about Orthodoxy being a challenge to our culture's pervasive nihilism by being “radical,” in the sense of getting back to our roots. I mean this in two ways: A return to the ancient path of Yeshua Messiah, the root of all human flourishing, and, secondly, a return to the human body and its simple, but deep connections with the garden of Eden.
For me, the image of a lily fluttering in the sunshine encapsulates both: On the one hand, Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow is at the heart of Yeshua's teaching and way of life, as relayed above; on the other, the earthy, ephemeral beauty of the flower is a primary biblical image for the earthy, ephemeral beauty of the human person, rooted in Creation: “As for man, his days are like grass—he flourishes like a flower of the field” (Ps. 103:15)—and, also, when God comes to Earth as a healing dew, the Children of Israel will “blossom like a lily” (Hos. 14:6). In what follows, I would like to describe this flowering of Sabbath life under three aspects: wakefulness, surrender, and unity of breath. Taken as attitudes, these are three aspects of love, which is a form of attention and participation. Taken as practices, they're just a childlike form of “irreligion,” the Orthodoxy of the flowers and the birds.
There is not enough space in this newsletter to quote at length from the richness of this little book, and Graham Pardun’s religious imagination. If you like Paul Kingsnorth’s writing, you will love this book. You want to know how to experience the world as “re-enchanted,” that is to say, as hallowed? Graham Pardun tells you. The only writer who makes me feel this way about God and Creation is the great twentieth century rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and sometimes Wendell Berry. Here, in this rapturous passage filled with wonder, is Graham Pardun reflecting on the tension between the Mosaic prohibition on “graven images,” and the fact that God told the ancient Hebrews to make images of the cherubim (here, cheruvim) in the Temple:
And now, to the Inmost Sanctuary, in which the Ark resides—the “Holy of Holies”—which will carry us the rest of the way to the edge of the Hebraic universe: That there is an Inmost Sanctuary within the main Sanctuary, within the city-like Temple, within the Temple-like Earth, in which mountains, rivers, trees, and even stars sing songs of praise, according to the book of Psalms, shows that the usual dichotomy anthropologists and sociologists make between “sacred” and “profane” space doesn't quite fit here; for the Hebrews, there is only sacred space, and even more sacred space:
The heavens are yours —Also yours the Earth
The world and all its fullness... (Ps. 89:12)
— thus, for the Hebrews, the highest stars are holy, and, below them, the bright planets are holy, too (and, below them, the yellow sun and silver moon— all holy, all full of the beauty of ADONAI), and below the sun and moon and stars, the soaring white clouds are holy, and, below them, the soaring birds of the air are holy, and, below them, the butterflies and dragonflies—all flying insects that flutter in the sky, all of them are holy—and below them, the shining green trees of Earth, and then the lilies of the field beneath them—all holy, holy, holy—and the blue rim of the sky is holy as well, and the sparkling blue seas from horizon to horizon are holy as well, and the red clay and brown earth and yellow sands of Earth are holy as well, and the Holy Land of Israel at the center of Earth is holy, holy, holy as well, and the Holy City, Jerusalem, at the center of the Holy Land is holy as well, full to the brim with the beauty of ADONAI, and the holy Temple, a most holy city within the Holy City, is holy, and the sanctuary within the holiest city is holy, and the Holy of Holies within in the sanctuary is holy—and when the High Priest walks in and prostrates his precious human body to the ground on the most holy day of the year, this completes the whole holy cosmos, as the Hebrews saw it: concentric circles of holy images of God, like flower petals converging on the human heart.
It is within this context that we can say what Orthodox iconography is: It is the lyrical cheruvim of the ancient Temple, but one radical step further: A beautiful, childlike “idolatry” which reveals the true image of God not as emptiness as such, but as the precious human body. And it is in this sense primarily that we can become the “priesthood of all believers” in Messiah: Every deified saint we see on an Orthodox icon is standing, as it were, in the Holy of Holies, not just once a year, but eternally Now, offering praise to the Father of All out of the fountain of his or her own precious human heart.
From ‘Traveling And Tormented’
[Here is an excerpt from a deeply melancholy post here in which I reflected on the tragedy of my journey back to Louisiana with my wife and kids in the wake of my sister’s death — a sojourn that has now reached its end with the destruction of my marriage. If I had never brought my wife and children here, I am fairly confident that I would still be married today. But that is not what happened.]
I found this blog post of mine from December 18, 2011 — the first one after arriving back in Louisiana after leaving Philadelphia. The photos didn’t remain on the website, but this entry did:
A quick note to you all to let you know we made it to St. Francisville yesterday at noon — frazzled and backachey from the long drive, but … here, and happy to be so. Lucas made Julie stop the minivan shortly after we turned into my parents’ driveway so he could run the final yards and throw himself into his grandmother’s arms. It was a teary and joyful reunion. Above, a photo of Roscoe and me, and my very Southern breakfast — a Moon Pie — taken at a gas station south of Jackson, Miss. After gathering ourselves at my mom and dad’s house, we drove into town to show the kids their new house. It took about a minute and a half for Lucas to barrel through the thing, run out the front door, take a flying leap off the front porch, body-slam his mother and hoot, “I love it! It’s perfect!”
We unloaded the minivan and busied ourselves figuring out where the furniture would go when the unloading crew came over on Sunday morning. It really is a great old house — I’ll post photos later — and we’re lucky to have it. The camellias are in bloom in the yard. My cousin Melanie brought over a coffee maker and some Loisie cookies. Our great-great-great aunt Lois Simmons was known for making these fantastic pecan cookies, about the size of a quarter. I haven’t tasted them since my childhood (Loisie died when I was 10), but Melanie still makes them. I bit into one and it was a Proustian madeleine. I told Julie, “This is what my childhood tastes like.” The only thing missing was the aroma of a sweet olive tree, which Loisie had in her yard. (Here is a post about Loisie, including a photo of Loisie’s cabin, and of Loisie at her sink). I cannot imagine a better welcome-home gift than that jar of Loisie cookies.
Last night Hal, a neighbor in Starhill, the little community where my folks live, had a big jambalaya-cooking and bonfire at his camp by the pond. Julie was too worn out to go, but Lucas and I turned up to see folks and eat well. It was great — great to eat, great to see folks (“Are you thinking of moving this way? Wait, you moved here already? Today?!“), and great to be around a bonfire with Louisiana people drinking beer and eating jambalaya. Good times. Here’s Hal at work last night:
This morning I woke up and drove out to Starhill to meet the unloading crew, which is on its way as I type this (I’m having to update this blog at my mom and dad’s place; we won’t have Internet at the new house till sometime on Monday). Julie just texted from town to say that Lucas and Nora were bundled up and playing in the front yard, and came in to say, “We met this really nice man who told us to tell you that church starts at 10.” Love it. I walked Lucas and Nora around the block in our neighborhood near sundown yesterday. Nora held my hand and declared, in that policy-setting way of hers, “I’m going to say it for the third time: It’s BEAUTIFUL here!” Lucas sang, skynrdishly, “Sweet home, Loozyana… .” I think they’re going to be fine. Last night at the camp, it took five minutes for Lucas to make his first friend, an eight year old boy who’d just shot a coyote. Lucas thinks that’s the coolest thing he’s ever heard. Like I said, they’ll be fine.
It’s cold, crisp morning here. A gorgeous white blanket of frost covers the bottom below the cabin where my dad grew up, above Grant’s Bayou. I passed on by, turned off at my folks’ road, and stopped at the graveyard to say a word to my sister Ruthie, whose passing in September occasioned this homecoming. A vigil candle burned on her grave. I thanked God for her life and witness, and asked His help — and Ruthie’s prayers — that we may be good servants to Him and to her family. Our family.
Ours.
Today, just over a decade later, it all lies in ruins. There is nothing left, at least not from my perspective. I knew that things were irreparably shattered with my Louisiana family, but now, with this divorce, my own little family, the one I brought back to my home with so much hope and faith in the goodness of family, is shattered too. This came from somewhere. There are things I can’t say here, out of respect for the privacy of others, but I can tell you that this passage from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is relevant to the pain of today:
We paid our bill and stepped stiff-legged and nervous out into the cool night air. It began to rain softly. We walked back down the boulevard, towards the Rue du Bac, looking for a place to have dinner after our oyster appetizer.
“Uncle Rod, I need to tell you something,” Hannah said, her voice rising. “I really think you and Aunt Julie should stop trying so hard to get close to Claire and Rebekah [her younger sisters]. It’s not going to work.”
“Why not?”
“Because we were raised in a house where our Mama had a bad opinion of you,” she said. “She never talked bad about you to us, but we could tell that she didn’t think much about you and the way you lived. We could hear the things she said, and Paw too. I had a bad opinion of you myself, until I started coming to visit y’all, and I saw how wrong they were.”
“I was 15 the first time I did that,” she continued. “My sisters are still young. They don’t know any different. All they know is how we were raised. It makes me sad to see you and Aunt Julie trying so hard, me knowing you’re not going to get anywhere. I don’t want y’all to be hurt.”
I was hurt. And furious. My stomach knotted, and my throat tightened.
“Let me tell you something,” I growled. “Sometimes your mother and your grandfather could be ignorant and cruel. They had no idea what they were talking about. They just judged. Why do you think I had to get out of there? I couldn’t take it! Do you understand that Julie and I uprooted our family and moved to Louisiana, mostly for your sisters? And now you’re telling me that Ruthie poisoned the well with them.”
Hannah started to cry. “I wish I had never told you!”
“No,” I said. “No. I’m glad you told me. Didn’t I just tell you it’s always better to live in truth than to live a lie? You did the right thing. Honest, you did.”
“But now you’re mad.”
“Yeah, I am. I don’t want our family to be this way. You don’t know how many times I tried to explain things to Paw, and to Ruthie. But they didn’t listen. It was always their way or the highway. Dammit, she’s dead now, and it’s still that way in our family!”
We walked on. I felt like an angry teenager again.
“Can you give me an example of what was wrong with me in Paw’s eyes, and your mother’s eyes?” I asked.
“They thought you didn’t have to work hard for what you had, that everything came easy to you,” Hannah said.
I wanted to kick out a plate glass window. “Neither one of them could write five paragraphs that anybody would publish!” I fumed. “But they have the nerve to decide that my work doesn’t mean anything. That I’m cheating. I tell you Hannah, this is so wrong!”
We turned the corner and walked south down the Rue du Bac.
“It was such a waste,” I said, fighting back tears. “Ruthie and I could have had so many good years together. She wouldn’t let it happen. How did she justify this to herself? How come she was willing to forgive, and to understand everybody in the whole world but me? Why wouldn’t she even talk to me?”
“Mama wasn’t a bad person,” Hannah said, defensively.
“I know!” I shot back. “I think she was a damn saint. It makes no sense. That’s why this is driving me so crazy.”
“What are you going to do now?” Hannah asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We signed a two-year lease on the house. I’ll stay until that’s up, at least, and probably until Paw dies. Then we’ll see. What I’m not going to do is keep fighting this same stupid battle for another generation. I don’t have it in me.”
“Uncle Rod, you can’t leave!”
“Yes I can.”
“No! I need you! Please, don’t go.” She grabbed my arm.
That took the fight out of me. I don’t have any right to put all this on this kid, I thought. Her mother is dead. Just let it go.
“We’ll see, baby. It’s just hard, you know?”
Back home in the US, I confronted my father about this knowledge. He half-heartedly denied it, but it was clear that it was true. And later that spring, in an argument, he told me in anger that we didn’t deserve the affection of our nieces because “y’all are so damn weird.”
Weird, for my dad, mom, sister, and her kids, meant anything that they couldn’t immediately understand.
Later, I confirmed with Claire, the second daughter of my sister, that all of this was true. And yet, though all of my family there professed to be Christian, they saw nothing wrong with despising their own family, because these family members were Bad City People.
The stress and anxiety from this new information — knowing that I had turned my back on my life and career on the East Coast, and taken my wife and kids to the country, all to be close to and serve my family — destroyed my health. I developed chronic mononucleosis. Doctors weren’t sure if I would ever recover. I did, but it took years. Not once did any of them in my family apologize or try to make amends. The suffering that my family — Julie, me, and the kids — were put through by them were what we deserved, for being unlike them. For being weird.
Re-discovering that blog entry last night, and reading it in light of the current catastrophe I’m living through, has really thrown me. I’m struggling to reconcile the fact that everything I wrote in Little Way — all the good things — was true … but it wasn’t the whole truth, as I discovered later. I only found out the family’s great secret at the very end, as I was finishing the manuscript. I wrote that night to a writer friend, and told him what I had just learned from Hannah. I told him my project was in ruins now, and that I would have to return the advance and cancel the book.
No, he said, this is not the destruction of your project. If you can learn to love your family in spite of this new revelation, that will be the making of your project.
So I went home and tried to live that out. It did not work. The unraveling of my family continued. I find it very, very difficult to resist bitterness, and even self-reproach. What if we had never come down here? What if I had not believed the myth that I had been raised on, of what Family means?
What does any of this mean now? I am a morally conservative, traditional Christian who hates divorce. Now I am getting a divorce — a fate I did not choose, but which I agree is the most sensible, merciful thing. I am a man who believes in Family, yet has lost his immediate family in part because of his family, who lived by a rigid ideology of Family that made no room for us.
None of this makes sense to me. Then again, perhaps it’s not irrational; perhaps it’s simply tragic. But there are no simple tragedies. I am thinking this morning of how much my poor wife, the one who is now divorcing me, suffered from their rejection, and its consequences for her husband’s health. May God love and heal her. I think of my poor children, who could not understand why things were the way they were with our Louisiana family, and whom I couldn’t explain the hateful truth. May God love and heal them too.
I should point out that my broader Louisiana family — my cousins — were just wonderful to us (and since the divorce news, have been compassionate). People in St. Francisville were too. I loved living there, and thought I would spend the rest of my life there. Now, I am a broken man who simply wants to settle his affairs and put all of this decade of loss behind me. I feel like such a fraud, and that I am in some sense responsible for victimizing my wife and children by bringing them into the bosom of my Starhill clan. Julie and I had prayed about whether to move to Louisiana, and we both thought it was the right thing to do. And now look.
I have no wisdom here, folks. Maybe you have something you can say that can help me think through this. I tell you, though, it was a great gift to spend the week after the divorce news there in Jerusalem, at Golgotha, where the lesson is that life is tragic and death-dealing … but that death and tragedy do not have the final word. If I did not have that sure confidence, through my Christian faith, I would be lying in the dark, unable to move.
Strange as it may seem, I have drawn on the wisdom of Dr. Silvester Krcmery, one of the anti-communist dissidents, to help me through this. I drew on him to help me through the final years of my painful marriage, too. Here is a passage from Live Not By Liesabout Dr. Krcmery:
Many of us find it difficult to be charitable to a sales clerk who is rude to us, or to someone who cuts us off in traffic. Few of us would be able to love someone responsible for us losing our job, or worse, being blacklisted in our profession. Rare is the man or woman who could find love in their hearts for their mugger or rapist.
But then, most of us aren’t Silvester Krčméry.
You will recall that Krčméry, who died in 2013, was one of the most important figures in the Slovak Catholic anti-communist resistance. In his eventual court trial, communist prosecutors called him a liar for saying that Czechoslovaks had no religious freedom. You are allowed to go to church to worship, aren’t you? they taunted—a barb that contemporary US progressives toss at conservatives who argue for religious liberty.
Krčméry threw the accusation back in their faces. He said Jesus is not satisfied with mere churchgoing, but wants believers to live for Christ in all times and places. This is what Krčméry had learned studying with Father Kolaković, and this is what first brought him to the attention of the secret police.
“Do not be afraid and always act as you think Christ would act in your place and in a particular situation,” Father Kolaković had taught his followers. When the secret police arrested Krčméry, he laughed, because he understood that he was being given the gift of suffering for Jesus.
Silvester Krcmery, MD, a servant of Christ tortured for his faith
In prison, Krčméry was denied a Bible and found himself grateful that he had spent the past few years of freedom memorizing Scripture. Like other political prisoners, Krčméry endured repeated tortures. He had been trained to resist brainwashing. In the end, he relied on faith alone to guide his path. The more he surrendered in his weakness, the greater his spiritual strength.
The young doctor decided to be united in his suffering with Christ’s, and to offer his pain as a gift to God for the sake of other persecuted people. He believed that the Lord was allowing him to endure this trial for a reason—but he had to convince himself in the face of his agonies.
“Therefore I repeated again and again: ‘I am really God’s probe, God’s laboratory. I’m going through all this so I can help others, and the Church.”
Krčméry decided that he had to be useful. He discovered that simple acts of solidarity with fellow sufferers, both given and received, mattered more than he could have imagined. In that communist prison, the biblical command to bear one another’s burdens became intensely real. “A brother who helped in hard times was closer in suffering than the closest relatives and friends, outside, often on a permanent basis,” he writes. This Catholic layman lived out the truth of the Orthodox priest John of Kronstadt’s advice to the widowed priest Alexei Mechev: to join his grief with the griefs of others, and he would find them easier to bear.
Torture, deprivation, isolation—all of those things could have destroyed Silvo Krčméry, and made him a hateful man, or at least a defeated one. But the transcript of his 1954 trial shows that it refined him, purified him, made him strong in the Lord. In his final defense statement, Krčméry defiantly proclaimed to the court:
God gave me everything I have and now that I face persecution because of Him, and am called on to profess my faith in Him, should I now pretend I don’t believe? Should I hide my faith? Should I deny Him?[ii]
He taunted his communist persecutors, declaring, “We will not allow ourselves to be led to hate, to rebel, or even to complain. . . . That is where our strength and superiority lie.”
It would be ten years before Silvester Krčméry saw the outside of a prison. He spent the rest of his life evangelizing from his home in Bratislava and working with the sick, especially addicts. The man who said that refusing hatred was the strength of persecuted Christians did not seek vengeance, even after communism’s fall.
What would Dr. Krcmery say to me today, as I sift through the ashes of my life? I am asking him in prayer. Thank God for the communion of saints. I trust that that good and holy man can hear me on the other side, and will somehow answer me. I need to learn how to refuse bitterness. I need to see myself as God’s probe. I tried to do that, following his example, in the final years of my marriage, after I had learned about him, and now I need to do it more than ever.
I think back to me at 26, a new convert to Christianity, in the Catholic tradition. How certain I was of how the world was ordered, of what were the right things to believe, and the right things to do. How confident I was, even to the point of arrogance. Life since then has held one humiliation after another for me, even amid the professional triumphs. And yet, a strange thing: each one of these humiliations, as excruciating as they have been, have brought me closer to Christ. I can tell you after Holy Week in Jerusalem, in the wake of the divorce announcement, that I have never in my life felt closer to the Lord. I have tears in my eyes as I write this, but they are tears of gratitude for his presence. He didn’t fix the problem. He shared my suffering, and gave me a share of his. That is enough.
Coda
Today, my non-subscribing readers, I go for the first mediation session of the divorce process. That’s when my wife and I get together with our lawyers and a mediator and try to come to a settlement instead of going to trial. I’m hopeful we can work things out, given that we are both coming into it wanting to settle our affairs peacefully. Still, it’s going to be a hard day. We were married in New Orleans, on December 30, 1997. On Sunday, when I arrived in the city for my short visit, I reflected on how it felt to walk through the streets of the French Quarter on that day, with my new bride on my arm. Life, my dears, is tragedy.
But I believe — I really and truly believe — in redemption. I no longer have a church home; I resigned from my local Orthodox parish because I can’t imagine going to Sunday worship in the same little church where my divorcing wife is at prayer. I am leaving with my older son Matt, 22, next week for Vienna, where we will spend the summer in a long-planned trip, in which I will research my next book, and he will rebuild his cycling skills after a long recovery from an injury, and also look for grad school programs. We will find an Orthodox parish there, and carry on. I’m sad, of course, but not unhappy, really — which sounds like a paradox, but that just shows you how much work the Holy Spirit has done in me, and how profoundly the example of Dr. Silvester Krcmery changed my life.
I’m going to try to be more faithful about sending out these digests. However, if you would like to move to a paying subscription, you won’t miss a thing. I have added a comments feature for paying customers. The discussion is pretty rich most of the time.
