What's Going On With Daily Dreher?
A digest of some of the most popular posts of late
This is a post to the entire Daily Dreher list, not just the paid subscribers. Paid subscribers, you will get a separate mailing for the day later.
I keep forgetting to send the entire list updates on what we’re talking about on the paid list. Here’s a sampling from recent issues:
Wednesday Night Table Talk (March 11)
Gang, I’m really wo’ out tonight — I got vaccinated for Covid today, perfectly legally and properly here in Alabama, but I’m a little tired from it — and have a very early morning meeting tomorrow. So I’m going to make this short. But what a difference this evening made in my outlook! I can’t tell you too many details, because though these are stories that I will ask the men to tell on the record if I get a contract to write the book about re-enchantment, they did not speak for the record tonight. I don’t want to violate their privacy.
I will tell you this below, though, because I think they would approve of it (they might approve of all of it, but both are Evangelicals with significant public profiles here in Alabama, so I’m not going to take that risk).
One of the men suffered the loss of his toddler, who drowned in their backyard pool. When he found her, she was limp and dark blue. His wife, a physician, started CPR when he went in to call 911. Suddenly water spewed out of the little girl’s mouth, and she breathed. In the ambulance to Children’s Hospital, the paramedics warned the parents that the child would probably suffer serious permanent brain damage.
In fact, she was perfectly fine. Doctors can’t explain it. Then their five-year-old son, who was poolside when it all happened, asked to be baptized. This seemed strange because he was so young, and usually it happens later in their tradition. The parents took him to their pastor, who said no, he’s too young. He kept asking, and finally gave up.
Then, when the boy turned 10, the pastor was willing to consider it again. He asked the boy when he knew that Jesus was his Savior. The boy said that when he saw his little sister drown, and he prayed for her, telling Jesus that if He saved his sister, that he, the boy, would dedicate his life to Him. In the next moment, water came spewing from her mouth, and she was safe. No damage at all to her brain or anything else.
As the dad told this story tonight, the hair stood up on his arm. We all saw it.
The other Evangelical at the table told a story about confronting evil in a church with which he was affiliated. There was theft, but also there was some witchcraft involved. He received a death threat. Driving his car over a bridge, he felt an “entity” (that’s the word he used) in the car with him, telling him that he needed to kill himself — and it took the wheel, trying to steer the car off the bridge. The man said nothing like that had ever happened to him. He screamed the name of Jesus, and made it safely to the other side of the bridge. The man had been a Christian for years, but said that was the first time he had an encounter like that, which taught him how real the spiritual struggle is.
He told another story about him and a prayer partner praying over a woman who had been paralyzed for years from a botched surgery. Not long after, she was at home alone, and fell out of her wheelchair. She prayed, and heard a voice say, “Stand up and walk.” So she did. The woman and her husband drove to the man’s house to surprise him — and boy, did they ever. She told the man that when he and his friend prayed over her that day, she regained her faith. She had been suicidal from her botched operation. But after that day, she once again believed in God. And soon, she was able to walk again.
(I asked this man out in the parking lot if he would be willing to let me interview him on the record about these stories if I write this re-enchantment book. He said yes, he would. The husband of the woman who walked again is involved in the man’s business, so he can put me in touch with him. Sadly, she died not long ago.)
As we stood in the parking lot after we finished at the restaurant, the third man at the table thanked us for telling those stories (I had several too), saying he had been low spiritually, and these really built him up. The Evangelical whose child was saved from drowning had told us back at the table that people in his Christian world have no idea what to do with stories like this — that is, stories of miracles and of manifestations of the demonic. He said it’s not like they believe they can’t happen; it’s more like they just don’t know how to talk about it, and they’re afraid of sounding Pentecostal. He said it’s a shame, because he believes so many Christians he knows are faithful in their belief, but flat and demoralized because they lack a strong sense of God’s presence, and the awe that comes with that.
He told a story about a few years ago when he and a group were in a service here where a replica of the Shroud of Turin was on display, and they heard a lecture about the Shroud. (Perhaps they were visiting the basilica Mother Angelica built in nearby Hanceville; it’s home to a replica.) The lecture offered evidence for the miraculous nature of the Shroud. My Evangelical interlocutor said it was totally convincing to him. Afterward, there was a crowd of people looking at the replica, and he noticed one older woman sobbing. She said, “All my life I have been a good Christian, but I have never known until tonight that my Lord is real.”
My new friend explained that this woman was saying that even though she believed that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person who walked the earth, it had never been palpable to her like it was when she heard the story of the Shroud, and was confronted with a replica of this sacred relic.
Now, the reason we started talking about any of this at all is because we were talking about how God became real to us, and I told the story about Monsignor Carlos Sanchez’s testimony of how miraculous interventions from God brought him back to the faith he had discarded, and later brought him to the priesthood . (I told the story in this edition of this Substack newsletter last year, and put it in a broader context.) This was in a conversation about how that old man’s testimony compelled me to become a serious Christian at a turning point in my life. Anything I accomplish for God in my life and work is in a real sense a testimony to his fidelity.
I really am more convinced than ever that I need to write this re-enchantment book. People have these stories of things that really happened to them, and they need to tell them to build up the body of Christ!
What If Christianity Makes Life Hard? (March 10)
One of my favorite Twitter follows, Esther O’Reilly, posted this from C.S. Lewis this morning:
That’s so true, and so well said. I can only imagine how much easier it would have been for me to write some of the things I’ve written in the past if I had read Lewis here, cutting right to the heart of the matter.
I have long been puzzled by people who think being a Christian somehow makes one’s life easier. It is certainly true that to be able to count on God’s providence, His abiding nature, and His love gives one the strength to endure hardship. But in the 21st century, in the United States, there are few advantages to being a committed small-o orthodox Christian.
In my case — given my profession, and my social milieu — holding to Christian orthodoxy on homosexuality has been a burden for me. At best, many of the people I am friends with, or at least colleagues with, cannot comprehend why I believe that homosexuality, or any sexual expression outside of a committed marriage (defined as one man + one woman), is immoral. More often, they think that I’m a bigot. I hate that, but there’s nothing I can do about it and still be true to what I believe is God’s clear teaching.
The weird thing — well, it’s not weird to me, but weird to them — is that I am perfectly happy being around gay people. I believe that they are no more sinners than am, and, to be precise, that they are in more or less the same boat as my straight friends who have sex without being married, as I did before I converted in my mid-twenties. But I cannot deny the clear teaching of Scripture, and of the Church. In my own case, it was my desire to be sexually “free” that kept me from being a Christian for several years. I was willing to believe it all, but I did not want to submit my sex life to Church discipline. I wanted to keep that little bit for myself, and to make a deal with God.
It doesn’t work. It’s dishonest. Either Jesus is the Lord of your life, or He is not. There is no middle ground. And, when God let me go as far as I was willing to go — there was a pregnancy scare after a drunken one night stand in 1991 — I surrendered to him. That was when Christianity became real for me: when I accepted it all, not just the parts I found easy to live by.
I accepted Christianity not because it makes life easier, but because I believed, and do believe, that it’s true. I became a Christian in Washington DC, in the early 1990s, as a single man. If you don’t think it’s hard to be chaste as a single man in your twenties, especially when you are the only one endeavoring to live that way, you are sorely mistaken. I had to do it to be faithful to reality. I suffered, but by God’s grace, I persisted. I was only able to see in retrospect that those hard times were times in which I matured, and my heart became ready for mature love, and marriage. But they really were hard times for me — lonely ones, and physically demanding. What I learned, though, was how with God’s help to master my passions, and not to be controlled by them. I did not realize until later how much that would help me later in life.
I thought that marriage would be like crossing a finish line, but it’s not. You exchange one burden for another, one with attendant blessings, of course. But it’s hard. I wish I had known as a young Christian convert, idolizing the married state, what it was really like. It’s not a field of clover; it’s two broken people trying to help each other carry their mutual brokenness on the pilgrimage to heaven. It’s like that for everybody. You could not have explained this to me as a young Christian, much less as a college-age unbeliever, but the binding of ourselves to others, and to God, through vows, provides ballast for the rough seas that every life must traverse.
When you, as a Christian, are put to the test — as a married person, or in any other aspect of your life — that is when you face whether or not you are a believer because it makes your life happy, or whether you are a believer because to be united to God, and obedient, is to live in binding relationship to reality. I travel for my work a lot, and though I have never been tempted to cheat on my wife, I know that the day might come when some woman makes an offer. Nobody would know if we did it. But God would. Besides which, to sin against God and my wife in that way would be to live in untruth. It would mean contradicting what’s real. This is why I am confident — and my wife can be confident — that I will be faithful, no matter how happy I might think cheating would make me in the moment: because I know that not only is it wrong, but it is also unreal. The universe is not like that. Yes, people are unfaithful to their spouses all the time, but they are violating the Tao, and there will be consequences for that.
I have gay friends who mean a lot to me. I don’t wish to hurt them, nor do I wish to hurt my straight friends who are living together, but not in marriage. But as I said, God does not give me the choice to pick and choose which of His truths I want to believe. My conscience is troubled when I think about my own gluttony, and when I realize how little I care, really care, about the poor. I am a sinner under judgment. Every day there is the opportunity to repent. It may be that when we are judged, I will stand accused of having been hard-hearted toward the poor, while my gay neighbor will stand accused of sodomy. Both of us will have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Only by uniting ourself to Christ’s perfect sacrifice do either of us have a chance of heaven.
Christianity is supposed to be hard, because dying to oneself is not supposed to be easy! Each age has its own trials for believers. Besides, as Lewis (I think) put it, you may observe perfect chastity, but go to hell for having a cold and unloving heart. Nevertheless, we can’t escape the command to be chaste. Lewis wrote, in Mere Christianity:
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’ Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong. One or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong ... God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them. Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it ; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult ... We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity—like perfect charity—will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God’s help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up and try again.
Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.
Nobody loses their job, or friends, or standing, for condemning gluttony, avarice, or other serious sins in the Christian tradition. You do if you denounce sexual sin, especially homosexual sin. If you want to have a good career, and live life untroubled in middle-class and upper-class society, you would do well to abandon Christian teaching on sexual morality. (I see today that a prominent Christian theologian admired by many conservatives has officially done just that; his career will really prosper now.) If you are a Christian because it’s good for you and good for society, now is the time to find something else to be, because fidelity from here on out is going to bring you a lot of grief.
But if Christianity offers a true account of the universe, and you are honest, then you will want to believe it, even if it brings you martyrdom. In fact, the only way you can be faithful under duress, even unto martyrdom, is if you are sure that it is true. Christ said (Luke 9:26): “For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, of him the Son of Man will be ashamed when He comes in His own glory, and in His Father’s, and of the holy angels.”
That’s the way the universe really is. Driving to the camp yesterday through rural Alabama, I saw lots of signs outside of Baptist churches. One stuck with me: “Be the reason people know God is good.” Great advice. We prove that by our charity. To that I would add: “Be the reason people know God is real.” We prove that by our willingness to suffer.
The Sacred Cosmos In A Hazelnut (March 7)
Here is Malcolm Guite’s sonnet to the 14th century English anchoress Julian of Norwich. An anchoress is a woman (men are “anchorites”) who formally withdraws from the world to live a life of prayer and fasting. The were usually walled up inside a church, as if dead to the world, but were loved and supported by the people of the parish, who craved their prayers and counsel. Julian was a great English mystic whose book “Revelations Of Divine Love” was the first book written in English by a woman. It is about fifteen visions of Christ that appeared to her on May 8, 1373, as she lay dying. She had already received the last rites of the church when she began to have her visions. The next night, she had one more. Julian fully recovered, and wrote about what she had seen. Fifteen years later, she wrote a longer version, which included all the reflection she had done on their meaning.
This poem can be found in Guite’s collection The Singing Bowl:
Mother Julian
Show me O anchoress, your anchor-hold
Deep in the love of God, and hold me fast.
Show me again in whose hands we are held,
Speak to me from your window in the past,
Tell me again the tale of Love’s compassion
For all of us who fall onto the mire,
How he is wounded with us, how his passion
Quickens the love that haunted our desire.
Show me again the wonder of at-one-ment
Of Christ-in-us distinct and yet the same,
Who makes, and loves, and keeps us in each moment,
And looks on us with pity not with blame.
Keep telling me, for all my faith may waver,
Love is his meaning, only love, forever.
—
Did you know that Julian’s famous line — “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” — is actually from the lips of Christ, in his vision to her? Fifteen years after the night of visions, Julian wrote about the meaning of her revelations. She said, in part:
And from the time that this was revealed, I often yearned to know what our Lord’s meaning was. And fifteen years and more later, I was answered in my spiritual understanding, and it was said: “Do you want to know your Lord’s meaning in this? Be well aware: love was his meaning. Who showed you this? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold fast to this, and you will know and understand more of the same; but you will never understand nor know anything else from this for all eternity.”
So I was taught that love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw most certainly in this and in everything, that before God made us he loved us, and this love has never abated nor ever shall. And in this love he has done all his works; and in this love he has made everything for our benefit; and in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had our beginning, but the love in which he made us was in him from without beginning, and in this love we have our beginning. And all this shall be seen in God without end, which may Jesus grant us. Amen.
This was one of her visions:
And in this vision [Jesus] also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball, as it seemed to me. I looked at it and thought, “What can this be?” And the answer came to me in a general way, like this, “It is all that is made.” I wondered how it could last, for it seemed to me so small that it might have disintegrated suddenly into nothingness. And I was answered in my understanding, “It lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the same way everything has its being through the love of God.”
In this little thing I saw three properties: the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; the third is that God cares for it. But what is that to me? Truly, the maker, the love, and the guardian. For until I am of one substance with him I can never have love, rest, nor true happiness; that is to say, until I am so joined to him that there is no created thing between my God and me. And who shall do this deed? Truly, himself, through his mercy and grace, for he has made me for this and blessedly restored me.
St. Paraskevi & The Little Blind Boy (March 1)
A friend and reader of this blog, a fellow Orthodox Christian, sent this e-mail out several days ago to his list. I have his permission to publish it as long as I take names out. I know the identity of all in this family, and know from following the dad’s writing how very sick his adopted son has been. I have given the child a fake name, to honor the father’s request and to make for ease of reading:
As many of you know, my six-year old son Elijah was born mostly blind, afflicted with microphthalmia and congenital cataracts which in turn led to other issues, among them amblyopia and nystagmus. The conditions would have been treated almost immediately after birth here in the United States: in China, for a mother in desperate circumstances — which she must have been, to break her own heart — there were no such options. My son was abandoned in a public place as an infant, and eventually found his way to his orphanage, and received no treatment whatsoever for his vision during the most critical early months of his life.
Several weeks before I met him for the first time, while on business in Houston, I received a courtesy call from China: as the prospective adoptive father for [Chinese name], age 21 months, would I object to a local Ningbo medical clinic performing cataract-removal surgery tomorrow? Of course not, I replied. Please proceed. I felt confident in the decision. I have some familiarity with international health and medicine, and I knew that cataract-removal surgery is one of the most common surgical procedures in the world. It’s the sort of thing you can trust a small Zhejiang clinic to do right, even in a child.
I informed my wife, almost as an aside — it was late evening in Houston, early morning in Ningbo — and she said okay. Then she called me back. She was filled with a sense of dread. She was possessed with a conviction that this surgery must not happen. I had to call China back immediately. I had to stop them.
Responding with the gentle understanding that makes marital life with men from my family an exercise in premature aging, I ticked through all the reasons she was being preposterous. The surgery made sense. It is exceptionally common. Zhejiang is a cut above most of China in medical care. The chances for harm are small anyway: the boy is probably almost totally blind no matter what. Reason says do it. Plus, I have no idea how to track down these people in China now.
She listened, and then said: stop it. Stop it now.
Frustrated and tired at this stage in the evening, I told her I’d think about it. I indulged my frustration for a little while, and then decided that it wasn’t worth the domestic squabble. The child would be blind anyway. The surgery can wait. I’ll make the effort, which won’t work, and then I can say I tried.
Mostly my ego was bruised at the emphatic rejection of what I thought was my knowledge and insight.
I called the adoption agency’s man in China. He picked up the phone and, across a bad connection, I explained to him that he had to track down this orphanage and stop this surgery that was happening in — oh, maybe thirty minutes? I will try, he said, but I don’t think I can. I hung up.
About an hour later he called back. They were bundling the child up to go to the clinic when he reached them, he said. They were annoyed, but they complied. There was no surgery.
Thanks, I said, and I thought that was the end of it.
A couple months later, I met him at the orphanage in Ningbo — May 12th, 2016, possibly the most wonderful day of my life — and watched him feel his way along the floor, and thought I was right about that surgery.
Six months after that, I saw him again, on the date of formal adoption, and I thought again that we still should have done that surgery. But in a truly heroic act, I kept it to myself.
Three months after that, after a series of exams and scans of his afflicted eyes — now in the United States — we learned that the peculiarity of his cataracts and the scarring within his eyes meant that had that surgery gone forward, his retinas would probably have been pulled off and he would have been plunged into darkness forever.
It stopped me short. My complacent assurance would have doomed him for his entire life. My wife’s passionate conviction, so unusual in its context, arising ex nihilo as it were, was the antidote — as was my (candidly) very uncharacteristic decision to acquiesce to it. My little boy was saved from a maiming and blinding by mere minutes.
I still think it was Divine intervention, and I thank God my wife had the sense to listen to the abrupt conviction that seized her then.
This morning Elijah went to the eye surgeon for a periodic check-in. He’ll have surgery for the amblyopia this summer. The first time this surgeon saw him, four years ago, she estimated his vision at perhaps in the 20/600 to 20/800 range: shapes and colors and shadows and nothing more for him.
This morning his distance vision tests out at 20/100 to 20/150.
His near vision is 20/30.
Someone watches out for this little boy, and we are just the instruments. My son, my miracle, my Elijah.
Elijah’s dad added in comments for me at the top of this forward, that I should ask him how God sent healing through the relics of St. Paraskevi.
I don’t know when I’ll be traveling out where Elijah’s dad lives, so I asked him to tell me the story. Before you read what Elijah’s dad said, here’s the life of St. Paraskevi, of whom I had not heard until this morning. Turns out she was a second-century Christian born in Rome of Greek Christian parents. The biography below comes from this site. It reads:
St Paraskevi was born in Rome about 140 AD of Greek Christian parents. Her father, Agathon was rich and her mother, Politia, had many attributes, the greatest of which was her charitability. Agathon and Politia had been married for many years but they were childless. They prayed to God to bless them with a child which they would raise in a true Christian atmosphere. Their prayers were answered with the birth of a girl and because she was born on the sixth day of the week, they named her Paraskevi, the Greek word for Friday.
What impressed Paraskevi the most was not her parents' guidance, but the Christian life which they led. Thus, she knew from a young age, the way of life she would one day lead. She obtained her education from secular books and from the Scriptures. She was also very knowledgeable in the field of philosophy. Bolstered by her Christian upbringing and philosophy, she often conversed with other women about Christianity, trying to strengthen their faith in this new religion.
Many noblemen wanted to marry this beautiful, educated and rich woman. Her understanding and kindness made her even more desirable, but having a higher goal in life, Paraskevi rejected any marriage proposals.
When she was 20 years old, both her parents died. Filled with the spirit of Christ and Christian ideals, she sold all her worldly goods and dispersed most of her money among the poor. The remainder was contributed to a community treasury which supported a home for young virgins and widows who had dedicated their lives to the teachings of Christianity. These women had, however, strayed far from the word of the Gospel and, therefore, Paraskevi remained in this home for many years and taught them the true meaning of Christianity.
This was not enough for her, however, and unprotected she went out to teach the way of Christ, knowing that death was waiting for her at the end of her journey. It was during this period that the Jews and Romans persecuted the new religion with the greatest intensity.
She left Rome at the age of 30 and began her holy mission, passing through many cities and villages. She was not caught immediately and put to death because Antonius Pius ruled Rome at this time, and he did not execute Christians without a trial. Instead, he protected them against the blind mania of the Jewish and Roman inhabitants. A Christian could only be brought to trial if a formal complaint were lodged against him by another citizen. However, at one time Antonius had to repeal this law because of the many disasters which had befallen Rome, and which were blamed on the Christians.
Eventually, Antonius heard of St. Paraskevi's holy mission. Upon her return to Rome, several Jews filed complaints about her and Antonius summoned her to his palace to question her. Attracted by her beauty and humility he tried with kind words to make her denounce her faith, even promising to marry her and make her an empress. Angered by her refusal he had a steel helmet, which fitted tightly around her head, lined with nails and placed on her head. It had no effect on the Saint and many who witnessed this miracle converted to Christianity. Hearing of this, Antonius had them put to death.
Thrown into prison, Paraskevi asked God to give her the strength to face the terror which awaited her. Antonius again continued the torture by having her hung by her hair and her hands and arms burned with torches. The Saint suffered greatly, but had the will not to submit to the pain. Antonius then prepared a large kettle of oil and tar, boiled the mixture and then had Paraskevi immersed in it. Miraculously she stood as if she were being cooled rather than burned. Angered, Antonius thought that she was using magic to keep the contents cool, but the Saint told him that he could test it. She took some of the boiling liquid and threw it in the Emperor's face. It burned his eyes and blinded him. She stepped out of the kettle and went to Antonius, telling him that only the Christian God could cure him. Immediately, he regained his sight and humbled by the miracle he freed the Saint and ended all persecutions against the Christians throughout the Roman Empire.
Free now, Paraskevi went forth with greater zeal to accomplish her apostolic mission. As long as Antonius was alive she taught without fear, however the Emperor died at which time Marcus Aurelius came to power. During his reign a pestilence befell Rome and many people died. Once again the Christians were blamed. The Emperor was forced to change the laws dealing with "non-believers".
Paraskevi was captured in a city which was ruled by a man called Asclipius. Refusing to sacrifice to the pagan gods, she was thrown into a pit with a large snake. The Saint made the sign of the cross and the snake did not harm her. Asclipius, realising that a great and mighty power guarded Paraskevi, she was again set free to teach others about Christianity.
She soon arrived at the city in which she would meet her death. Taracius was the ruler here, and he summoned her to the palace for trial. As Antonius, he also ordered his soldiers to prepare a kettle filled with boiling oil and melted tar and the Saint was placed in it. Once again, nothing happened, and many of the onlookers converted to Christianity. Paraskevi was then tied and beaten and afterwards imprisoned and a huge rock placed on her chest. She prayed to Christ to help her be strong.
The next morning Paraskevi was taken willingly to the Temple of Apollo. Everyone praised Taracius, thinking that he had succeeded in breaking Paraskevi's faith. However, upon entering the temple, the Saint raised her hand and made the sign of the cross. Suddenly, a loud noise was heard and all the idols in the temple were destroyed. The priests and idolaters dragged her from the altar, beat her, and pushed her out of the temple. The priests demanded that Taracius kill Paraskevi. She was convicted and condemned to death.
When the Saint was taken out of the city to be beheaded, she asked to be left alone for a few moments so that she might pray for the last time. Afterwards, the soldiers returned and executed the Saint.
St. Paraskevi is considered to be a healer of the blind, because of the miracle she performed in restoring the sight of Antonius Pius.
Now, with that, here is what happened with Elijah. The voice belongs to Elijah’s dad:
The St Paraskevi story is pretty interesting. I’d never heard of her before we adopted Elijah, and a friend of ours, knowing we’d have a visually impaired son, sent us an icon of her.
Elijah came home with us in early December 2016, and we got him examined, with the surgeon and an MRI, in January. The examination results were grim: lots of scarring (likely from in-utero infection), and what’s known as persistent fetal vasculature (PFV) in both eyes. (This is where we learned that the China-side cataract removals would have likely pulled off the retinas.) The PFV is usually a consequence of the eyes’ failure to develop in the womb: they start to form, and then basically stop, meaning the network of blood vessels that normally dissolve into the vitreous fluid within the eyes, don’t. We got those results back, and it basically meant that any future intervention would be marginal at best: even with cataract removal, the PFV inside the eyes would permanently block vision. You can’t go in and clean those out.
A week or so after this happened, a good friend of ours — [a priest] — called to let us know he was in [our city]. That was a nice surprise. Even more surprising was that he had relics of St Paraskevi with him. I forget why he had them, and I need to ask him again, but he offered to come over and bless Elijah with the relics. So I said of course, and he came over and did just that. Elijah was only two years old then, so he squirmed about a bit while it happened, and that was it. Then we had a nice chat, and caught up, and I thought no more of it.
Maybe a month or so after that, we had to go get another MRI — or maybe it was an exam under sedation, I’ll have to ask my wife — because the retinal surgeon wanted it. So we did. And guess what: the PFV was gone.
Gone, gone, gone.
This changed everything for Elijah. Now we could start planning for what we actually ended up doing later in the autumn: have surgery to remove his cataracts and give him artificial lenses, which is what he sees with today. About a month later, I took Elijah to the monastery of St Paraskevi [in] central Texas to give thanks. (You should visit, by the way: the feast day is July 26th.)
So that was the big miracle as far as I’m concerned. What’s really interesting, by the bye, is how utterly unfazed the physicians were by the change. I was totally astonished and amazed, and they weren’t. (I didn’t tell them about the holy relics.) To them, it was simply a matter of conflicting inputs, with the latest one invalidating the earlier one. I suppose I should allow that possibility: that the PFV was never there, and that it was a bad scan at the outset, and that I am imputing a miracle where there is only ordinary processes. But I don’t think I am: PFV is, well, not subtle.
And there’s one more thing.
A few months after all this, in May 2017, we moved the family to the [city] area. We ended up attending [a Greek Orthodox church in the suburbs] for about a year. On one of our first weekends at Liturgy there, the pastor, [name], announced that a surprise benefactor had contacted him from Greece, and wanted to send relics to the parish. Among them: relics of St Paraskevi.
Talking with [the priest] afterwards, I told him this whole story, and I said, “It’s almost like she [the Saint] is chasing him [my son] down, following him wherever he goes.” Fr [name] — who is a great priest, by the way, the kind of man who is a police chaplain during the week because that’s his natural milieu — replied, as if it were totally obvious, “Well, yes.”
We’re back in [home state] now, but our son has a St Paraskevi icon by his bedside now, and always will as far as I’m concerned.
Two thoughts on this that have occurred to me as we’ve watched this happen:
First, there is nothing — nothing — about me or my wife that suggests a holiness in family life or personal devotion that would suggest the sort of people who may simply expect saintly intercession. We are Orthodox, but we are not particularly good or exemplary Orthodox. I’ve never successfully kept a fast, and my confessions are … well I have more than an ordinary burden of sin, I think. We arrive late at Liturgy. Sometimes we don’t even go. We just are not the sort of people who live the lives in faith that we ought to live. I’m not sharing that to be self-flagellating or falsely humble, it’s just the reality. We are really ordinary and somewhat lackluster American Christians. Which means that this all happened because God, and the Saint, really love our little boy, for his own sake.
Second, I have to admit that I never quite believed saints like St Paraskevi really existed. She lived very early in the Church’s history, second century AD. If you’d asked me five years ago, I would have said something to the effect that she and all the other saints of that era, or even prior to modernity, were plausibly legends. Salutary legends to be sure! But legends nevertheless. Surely we can’t be expected to believe that a young Roman woman of no social standing once proclaimed her faith, and performed miracles, before the Emperor Antoninus Pius? I was very much taken with modernist standards of proof. Then I was given an entirely different standard of proof: that once-young Roman woman interceded before God for my little boy.
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