That, Sisters and Brothers, is The Mighty Clouds of Joy singing about “takin’ that Holy Ghost Step”, and there’s just not a better way to tackle the subject of missions, because starting missions all comes down to whether an established parish community is willing to “go ahead and take that step”.

And, over the past year, as we’ve been talking about our new temple, that’s one of the most common questions that folks have raised: In addition to raising money for a beautiful building that will last for centuries, are we also willing to help new communities get started?

The answer to that question is a resounding yes, but before I describe the projects that we’re currently sponsoring, it’s important to point out that we did not start these efforts out of a sense of obligation or because those were the next items on our ten-year master plan.

As The Mighty Clouds put it: What’s behind all this “ain’t nuthin but the Holy Ghost”.

So, here’s how it all unfolded.

About an hour and a half north of Cedar Park is Killeen, Texas. Killeen is home to Ft. Hood, one of our country’s largest military installations. There are also several other smaller municipalities in the area: Harker Heights, Copperas Cove, and Nolanville.

A lot of the folks who live in that area are active-duty military or retired military or military contractors. But a lot of the people who live in that part of Central Texas simply cannot afford to live anywhere else because the closer you get to Austin the more housing costs go up.

That’s a familiar situation in many parts of the country, but, in Texas, there’s an added complication for Orthodox Christians, because just about all of the established Orthodox parishes are in urban areas. So, folks often end up driving several hours each and every time they participate in the Divine Services.

However, over twenty years ago, a faithful Orthodox family, Jerry and Jennifer Juliano, moved to Killeen. They started attending St John’s. However, because the Julianos have been so welcoming and hospitable and generous to the folks in the Killeen area, an entire community of folks have gathered around them.

Jerry eventually pursued diaconal studies through the Antiochian Archdiocese. He now serves St John’s as Father Deacon Gerasimos; Jennifer is now Shamassy Irene. About five years ago, our bishop authorized them to offer a Typika with Holy Communion (that’s a very abbreviated Divine Liturgy) twice a month in Killeen, and they regularly have around a hundred people join them for worship in a rental space. But the community now also has a governance committee, as well as adult education and fellowship events, and it will soon have its own Catechesis of the Good Shepherd Program.

Now let’s look east of the Austin metro area.

Bastrop, Texas, used to be a small town on the highway to Houston.

However, Elon Musk put one of his Tesla factories nearby, and—well, you can imagine what happened next: a whole lot of growth and expansion.

While the Julianos have been the mainstay of the group in Killeen, there are two families who are doing that kind of good work in Bastrop: John and Lindsey Bell, and Michael and Clara Cotton.

John is a seminarian with the Antiochian Archdiocese; he and his wife, Lindsey, have been a part of St John’s for over twenty years. The Cottons own an historic home in Bastrop, one that is large enough to accommodate worship services.

The group in Bastrop is not yet as large as the group in Killeen, but they have an episcopal blessing to offer the same kind of Typika twice a month; they also offer a similar array of events, and we have every expectation that the group will grow, because they are displaying the same hospitality and generosity, and the same kind of welcoming outlook, that has been characteristic of the folks in Killeen.

So, when will these groups actually become ‘missions’?

Well, in a very informal sense, they already are. But, in the Antiochian Archdiocese, when a group is officially designated a mission that indicates the people in that group are prepared to take on all sorts of financial and liturgical and educational and administrative responsibilities that neither of these groups are quite ready to take on.

However, as St John’s continues to grow, and as these communities get even larger, they will be taking on more and more of those responsibilities, so we’re thinking that just about the time we are able to worship in our new temple, the folks in Killeen will be ready to be fully independent, and the group in Bastrop will not be too far behind.

Of course, when and how all that comes about will, finally, still be up to “nuthin’ but the Holy Ghost”. But we can afford to be patient and take one step at a time because we know where it is all going to wind up.

We’ve got the (much younger) Mighty Clouds of Joy singing about that glorious destination at the end of this post, but, in the meantime, won’t you take that “Holy Ghost Step” with us?

Join us in offering The Akathist for a New Temple (video) each and every week.

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Restack this post; upgrade your subscription to Paid.

Pick up a T-shirt from our Come See Something Beautiful clothing line.

Commission an image of a beloved pet for the Calming Room of our new temple.

Make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

And, hey: it may seem like all this is going to take a really long time, but, “just look”, and we’ll all be there.

Of course, even before these, you might want to take a look at Stuff You Need to Know, Plans for Our Temple, and About to get the gist of our project.

And if you already know you want to help us, here are some options:

• You can offer The Akathist for a New Temple (video) along with us each week.

• You can take out a Paid Subscription.

• You can pick up some CSSB merch; commission an image of a beloved pet for the Calming Room of our new temple; make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

Your First Ten

1. The best place to start is at the very beginning. Our inaugural article explains the name and sets the agenda.

2. If we aim for beauty, we need to be able to explain why beauty is not a luxury.

3. Fr. Aidan explains why focusing on concrete stuff like a new building is spiritual and shares his famous last words.

4. Greener than Oz is the first of a series of eight parts on the place of nature in our worship.

5. You can’t understand our plans without getting to know our patroness. This is the first of a series.

6. The Joyful Vision kicks off a series of posts about our iconography.

7. This post begins a series of answers to common questions, starting with a justification for a deliberately human-scale parish.

8. This is the first of what will be a series by John Bell introducing our iconographers, starting with our very own Baker Galloway.

9. At the start of our second year, our team is growing. Felicia talks about Texas, Thoreau, and learning stillness.

10. Hanna ventures into internet memes and takes on the internet’s Bear Question.

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If you’ve been reading Come See Something Beautiful for even a short amount of time, you know that we’re fans of the great Roman Catholic writer, G.K. Chesterton.

At the very end of one of his most popular books, Orthodoxy, he observes that “Joy…is the gigantic secret of the Christian”, and then he goes on to say

“…as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels…concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”

Now, as fan boys and girls of Mr. Chesterton, it’s really rare for us to take issue with our hero. But we think he took a swing and a miss in the final paragraph of that otherwise wonderful book.

To begin with, there’s nothing secret about the joy that is ours in the Most Holy Trinity.

At least, that’s the case here in Orthodox Land.

For example, each and every evening, during the Service of Vespers, the priest offers a prayer in which he says:

“Yea, O Master of all, Bestower of good things, may we, being moved to compunction upon our beds, call to remembrance Thy Name in the night, that, enlightened by meditation on Thy commandments, we rise up in joyfulness of soul…”

And, then, when we arrive in the morning for the Service of Orthros, the very first thing we do is reverence the icon of our Lord and Master as we offer this prayer:

“We reverence Thy immaculate icon, O Good One, and ask forgiveness for our transgressions, O Christ our God, for of Thine own good will Thou was pleased to ascend the cross in the flesh, that Thou might save those Whom Thou hast fashioned. Wherefore, we cry aloud unto Thee with thanksgiving: Thou hast filled all things with joy…”

So, liturgically, as Orthodox folks, our days begin and begin again with joy.

But then G.K. also “fancied”—he wondered—about whether joy was something that Christ Jesus “concealed” or “restrained” or “hid” or “covered” during His years on earth.

Which is strange, because in St John’s Gospel, when Christ Jesus is speaking to the apostles just before His death and Resurrection, our Lord and Master clearly states, “These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full” (15.11).

Not only that, but two chapters later, when Christ Jesus is praying to God the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit, He specifically says that He desires that His “joy be fulfilled in them” (17.13).

Now Let’s Talk about How You can Get Some Joy

So why are we bringing all this up?

Well, we’ve got no interest in starting one of those Orthodox/Roman Catholic Internet Shoot-outs.

And our admiration for Mr. Chesterton is undiminished—I mean, how many people do you know who can recite line after line of The Ballad of the White Horse from memory?

We just want to be sure that everyone knows—in the words of the prayer that we say every morning before we start Orthros—that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have “filled all things with joy”.

Which means that, no matter what happens to us on any given day—and, yeah, we fully realize the scope of that premise—we can, nevertheless, experience the Joy that is the Very Life of the Most Holy Trinity.

Of course, that, most definitely, takes practice, and the best way to get that kind of practice is through the Divine Services.

The problem is that most of us aren’t in the Divine Services that often, and, when we are, we’re distracted, stressed, bored (fill in the verb that applies to you).

But here’s the wisdom of Holy Orthodoxy: What the Church has discovered is that, if we hang in there, we are able to move beyond the distraction, stress, boredom (again, supply the noun that applies).

However, this isn’t about ‘trying harder’, because what happens is that we just stop trying at all: we just give ourselves over to the service…and our hearts open up…and we…actually…experience…joy.

Most of us need several hours of uninterrupted worship time to even get to that point, but that’s one of the reasons why, this weekend, we’re going to be offering An All-Night Vigil that will run from Sunday night, August 30, through Monday morning, August 31. That’s the Feast Day for St Eanswythe of Folkestone; she’s the Patroness of our Building Program. We offer this Vigil each year to ask for her intercessions, but we also use those six hours to soak up as much joy as we can.

And you’re welcome to join us.

If joining us on Sunday, August 30, and Monday, August 31 is a geographic impossibility, we’ve got some other ways to share that joy with you.

You can offer The Akathist for a New Temple (video) along with us each week.

Share

You can restack this post, send it around to everyone you know, and take out a Paid Subscription.

You can pick up some CSSB merch; commission an image of a beloved pet for the Calming Room of our new temple; make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

Speaking of sharing the joy, we can’t imagine closing out this Weekend Update without first turning it all over to “The Reverend”, Mr. Al Green.

But remember: We also hope to see you in the Vigil.

So I decided that videogames were a waste of time and not something I was interested in learning about.

Until one day I walked past my family’s game room and saw something on the TV. At first I thought I was watching an animated movie. It was beautiful. Not just the way it looked, but the way it sounded. There was music and landscapes and—was that a dragon? I lingered in the doorway, surprised when my brother told me that I was looking at the new Legend of Zelda game, Breath of the Wild.

I said “no” the first few times he offered to let me try it. It was a gut reaction.

I don’t like videogames, I reminded myself.

I can’t learn how to play a videogame.

Ultimately, I decided that it would be acceptable to sit and watch him play for a while instead.

About two years before this, I attended my first Orthodox service with my mom. I don’t remember what I was expecting going in, but I do remember what I was experiencing going out.

Incense.

Smokey, sweet, incense.

It felt like it had entered my nose and coated my entire brain. I didn’t know if I liked the smell or hated it. All I know is that it was stuck in there for what felt like a month, demanding to be noticed.

The service had been long and rather uncomfortable, accentuated by the fact that I didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t know the songs, though I did pick up a few Lord have mercy(s) by the end. There was crossing and bowing and moving around. Candles were being lit and placed in various locations. I wondered how people knew when to do all of the things they were supposed to do. It all looked and sounded and smelled so complicated.

But just as I was beginning to understand the setting I was in, the priest started talking about the movie City Slickers in the homily which nearly sent me into orbit. It felt illegal. There we were in this ornate building, surrounded by strange looking images, candles blazing, incense searing into my brain, the clergy donning some of the most intricate looking outfits I had ever seen outside of the renaissance fair. And in the midst of all of this, the priest was talking about a comedy movie he loved.

What were the rules of this strange place?

We went home and watched the movie and really enjoyed it.

And roughly two years later, I tried playing Breath of the Wild for the first time.

I felt a little silly at first because I thought I wasn’t going to be any good. But just as I was starting to worry that I had made a mistake and was about to embarrass myself, the tutorial began. It wasn’t the tutorial I was expecting to see, the one that would feel like a chore to complete, with all the maps that didn’t mean anything to me yet and the settings I would forget how to access and other things I would click through before realizing that I missed some vital bit of information about how to jump.

This was a story.

Since I had never taken the time to learn how to play a videogame before, it was sort of lost on me how much freedom and subtle instruction the tutorial for Breath of the Wild actually gave me at the time. Now that I’ve gotten to the point where I can play other games, I realize how important this approach actually was.

If you’ve never played a videogame before or have been playing them your whole life, maybe this won’t make as much sense to you, but here’s my best attempt at explaining the common pitfalls brand new players are experiencing:

A lot of game developers design their games in a way that bank on the intuition of their players. Which is good, since you want to make your players feel like their intuition is leading them through the story and not like you’re giving up the secrets of the game at every turn. The problem is, brand new players (like me) don’t have that same kind of intuition on a very basic level. Things like knowing how to use a controller or how to look around to view your surroundings can prove to be a difficult task for someone who isn’t accustomed to using those tools. Most videogames don’t teach you how to do these things because it’s assumed that you will just know. This is why playing a game for the first time can feel like such a daunting task. It’s like learning to crawl and stand and walk and run all at once.

Despite these common pitfalls, Breath of the Wild immediately addressed all of them in a manner that was so subtle I barely even realized it was happening. The game utilized its narrative to compel me forward, uncharacteristically eager to learn. It was clear that the developers didn’t expect me to know everything about how to play, but weren’t going to use that as an excuse to overload me with information either. I was taught just enough to look around and take it in and given a few tools to help me explore. The rest was up to me. This motivated me greatly. As the music swelled I found myself running towards the crest of a hill gazing out over the horizon.

There was a castle looming in the distance. I headed straight for it and promptly fell off a cliff to my death. Apparently there was still more to learn. But instead of feeling discouraged and restricted, I felt determined and excited to find a way off The Great Plateau (the name of the tutorial space).

An hour or so later, I had earned a paraglider, listened to the stories of an ancient ghost king, and accepted my lifelong quest to rescue Princess Zelda from the Great Calamity Gannon. Throughout the game, the voice of Princess Zelda acts as your guide, much like our own princess St. Eanswythe is helping guide us to our new temple.

I don’t think I am the only person that Breath of the Wild helped teach how to appreciate and explore the world of videogames. I might be the only one who played it and thought the experience was somewhat comparable to what it feels like learning to be Orthodox though.

It turns out the smell of the incense never really left my brain. I found myself wondering about it, remembering it, asking questions about it, and eventually showing back up on the church’s doorstep for more.

Much to my surprise (and relief), the intimidated feeling I thought would always loom over every encounter I had with Orthodoxy began to melt away as I attended more services. The beats of the Divine Liturgy slowly became more familiar. There was a strange comfort in the knowledge that maybe I didn’t actually have to understand everything in order to be a part of it—that maybe the rules were less rule-ish than I had originally thought.

The blessed bread was available, and I took it gladly. I stared ahead at the icon of Christ as I placed my lit candle in the sand alongside a dozen others. I learned to cross myself from right to left with my index and middle finger pressed to my thumb. I fumbled through the service with the help of my little red prayer book, followed what I could, and savored the rest. It was enough.

Orthodoxy is particularly compelling in the way that it quietly invites you into the narrative and gives you space to approach it at your own pace.

It also gives you space to make mistakes.

Informational overload became one of mine (among many, many others).

There are so many books and podcasts (and Substack articles) about pretty much everything you could ever want to know about Orthodoxy. While it’s wonderful to live in a time where information is so readily available, converts like myself often throw themselves into the deep end of Orthodox doctrine before they are ready to tread water. Sometimes, Orthodox life can feel like a challenge to beat rather than a life to live and it seems more productive to treat it like a complicated videogame tutorial, cramming as much information into our skulls as possible before we have even learned to look around.

Perhaps we hope that gaining more knowledge will transform us into better Orthodox Christians. Maybe if we learn everything about the schisms surrounding the filioque, the creed we say every day will have more of an impact on us. If we win more debates in online forums or with our non Orthodox friends, maybe we will have more in common with the saints. If we read every ingredient label at the grocery store, maybe we can fast more perfectly and reap the spiritual rewards.

I can’t help but wonder if this drive to “win” at Orthodoxy by absorbing everything about it with our heads can sometimes distract from the transformation of our hearts—the part of us that is meant to sing and to smell the incense and go watch City Slickers. The part of us that wants to learn to play a videogame because exploring something so vast and unfamiliar is fun.

Now my daughter is learning to toddle through the nave and I am struck by the realization that she will grow up around all of this and see it as normal. She is exploring it with a confidence and a comfortability that I never knew. She points to the icons and waves at them. She watches the candles flicker and motions toward the basket of blessed bread expectantly as we approach the chalice because she knows it is her reward. She squirms throughout the service, giggles, and sometimes cries. She has even made a dash or two for the altar in her excitement. She will know these songs, and recognize the scent of incense. I’m grateful to be able to learn from her example.

I already look forward to the day when I can show her my favorite videogame.

Maybe this post hasn’t convinced you to play Breath of the Wild, but you can still help our princess and patroness of our building project, St. Eanswythe, by offering the Akathist for a New Temple, taking out a paid subscription to our Substack, liking and/or restacking this post, or donating to our building project!

Thanks for reading!

…aaand we’re thinking that we’re probably the very first Orthodox Substack to open a post with those Exarchs of Excess, Freddie Mercury and Queen.

But their anthem to Burning through All the Barriers is the perfect way to introduce today’s topic.

You see, we’ve been trying to catch up on all the questions that folks have asked during our first year on Substack. In our last post, we talked about the fact that, because of pastoral considerations and parking constraints, our community will only be able to serve about 500 people.

However, because most of our readers are Americans, and because Americans just naturally push back against any and all limits (which is why that video of Mr. M and Company has one billion views), a whole bunch of them have wondered why in the world we would ‘settle’ for a parish that ‘only’ has 500 members.

Of course, that’s not just an expression of our very American aversion to boundaries; it’s also a reflection of the fact that most of the Christians in this country belong to congregations that have more than a thousand members.

But in order to pack that many people into something that still feels like a single community, those congregations have had to come up with all sorts of…well, let’s just call them adjustments.

For example, it’s those large congregations that have promoted the idea of having multiple services at a single location. In Protestant and Roman Catholic parishes, that is now just an accepted way of doing things. However, as we’ve written previously, even though there are Orthodox communities that are experimenting with that approach, historically, in the Church, one of the most basic ways that the unity of a parish is expressed is when the people of that parish gather together before one altar for a single Divine Liturgy.

Another approach that is now commonplace in Protestant congregations—and, to some extent, in Roman Catholic parishes—is to divide everyone up into what are called ‘small groups’. Of course, in a normal, healthy community, most folks just naturally find their way into some sort of a group: it might be the choir, or the moms who get together on the playground, or a Bible Study, or several people who like to work outside and take care of the grounds.

But just as these larger congregations feel the need to leverage worship for maximum results, they also are compelled to organize everyone into interactive pods—and, no, they don’t refer to them that way, but that’s the basic concept. Rather than allow the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to direct people to the group that’s best for them, folks get assigned to an artificially-organized unit based on geographic or marital or age-based criteria.

At St John’s, we try to support folks in just about every way imaginable: we pray for them; we sustain them when they are ill or in crisis; we let them know about (and encourage them to participate in) all the opportunities for worship and education and service that are available in our community.

But what we don’t do is tell them who their friends should be or exactly what their involvement in the parish should look like.

The apex of this kind of ecclesiastical social engineering can be seen in the idea of a single large congregation having what are called multiple ‘campuses’ or ‘sites’. When most folks first hear about this approach, they just naturally assume that the congregation has started these satellite locations to make it easier for members to participate—and, sometimes, that is, in part, the motivation.

But more often than not, what is happening is that the large congregation simply acquires a number of other, smaller congregations in order to “grow their brand”. So, having more than one location is not about facilitating attendance or cutting down on the amount of time folks have to spend in the car. It’s about expansion; it’s about marketing; it’s about increasing the income base.

Very, very few Orthodox parishes have considered this sort of approach since it is so clearly a business model. But, from time to time, it gets floated as an outreach strategy, and folks have even asked us whether we have thought about starting a ‘second campus’.

And, actually, we have a couple of projects in the works that may very well become missions and, at some point, parishes. We’ll write about those efforts in our next post. However, if everything does work out, and if the Most Holy Trinity blesses those projects, these groups will not be the beginning of a multi-site network for The St John Label. They will all be independent communities.

But when it comes to this issue of numbers, there’s one last question that folks always ask: “Why don’t you just move?”

And what they’re suggesting is that we sell our current property and buy ten or fifteen acres out beyond the Austin Sprawl and just build a whole lot bigger.

Now, in some situations, relocation just makes sense. If a community is in a small facility on a tiny lot, then, yeah, sell all that and find a place where you can settle down and spread out.

But we already have that kind of place.

And we’re already settled down.

And we don’t need to keep expanding indefinitely.

And, besides, we have deep roots in these five acres. We live side by side with deer and a big old owl and skunks and geckos and rabbits and possums and mockingbirds and the occasional hawk. We have offered the Divine Services together on this lot for almost thirty years. We have hung lights in the trees and danced on the grass.

And I don’t know what you call that, but we call it home.

For a lot of folks, home is just the place they are staying until the next job opportunity or the next relationship. But we’ve all seen the damage that approach to life generates: loneliness, a paralyzing level of boredom combined with a tormenting degree of restlessness, and an inability to make deep connections with anyone or any one place.

So, as Felicia wrote about so eloquently in her last post, we’re not going to get caught in that trap; we’re not going to keep looking for a better piece of property. This is where we live; this is who we are.

And, by all means, you are welcome to join us here in Cedar Park, Texas.

If that’s not practical, but you’d still like to support our efforts, we’ve got all sorts of ways you can make that happen.

Share

Of course, the very best thing you can do is offer The Akathist for a New Temple (video) along with us each and every week. But you can also restack this post and upgrade your subscription to paid; order some of our CSSB merch; commission an image of a beloved animal for the Calming Room of our new temple, or make a donation to our Building Fund.

And since this is all, finally, about the place and the parish we call home, we’ll sign off with a beautiful song from Dave Grohl and The Foo Fighters about the need for limits and how we all want to find a place like St John’s.

It’s Official.

We are the only site on the entire internet that has refrained from commenting, posting, reviewing, or discussing a certain contemporary movie that is based on a particular Bronze Age epic poem.

How did we do it?

Really, it wasn’t hard.

To begin with, we’ve got a temple to build. And, sure, when you hear that, you automatically think that we’re just busy, but there’s more to it than that.

Because, yeah, we’re busy, but we’re busy with Things That Last.

How do we know that our temple falls into the category of Things That Last?

Well, there’s a basic test you can perform.

The Wine of the Week Test

I spent my teenage years in a small town east of Dallas, Texas. There were only four television stations. This was also long before there was any such thing as twenty-four-hour programming, so, in order to fill the time, most of those four television stations would show a lot of movies.

Of course, a good many of those movies were films that hardly anyone remembers, but, in order to fill all the slots, day after day, week after week, the stations also showed a lot of classic films. So, it was during the long, barely air-conditioned summers of my youth, that I saw The African Queen, Casablanca, North by Northwest, and Anatomy of a Murder.

But here’s the thing: Whether the film was a revered classic or a forgettable B picture, all of them were constantly interrupted by commercials—and this was long before you could mute the sound or fast forward to the movie.

There was one station in particular whose afternoon movies were sponsored by a large Dallas liquor store called Siegel’s.

The spokesman for Siegel’s was this kinda creepy looking guy in a suit and a pencil thin mustache; he always stood in front of a trellis with a fake vine over it, and he would promote the Wine of the Week.

So that’s where all of the best efforts of all the best artists from the Golden Age of Hollywood ultimately ended up: as a platform for Mr. Kinda Creepy Looking Guy to pitch cut rate liquor.

And that’s where the movie that everyone is talking about this summer will also end up: Even though you set your alarm to get up in the middle of the night and score tickets for the IMAX premiere, in just a matter of months, that same film will be broadcast on a cable channel for which it has been “formatted to fit your screen”, and it will be constantly interrupted by commercials that are a way more annoying than that whole Wine of the Week schtick.

“Redeem the time”

That’s St Paul, from his Letter to the Ephesians (5.16). The apostle is talking about how we can offer our time to the Most Holy Trinity, because when we do that we are investing in eternity—we are working with Things That Last.

And that’s what our temple is: an investment in eternity. Not only is it going to be built in a way that will ensure that it is around for the next six centuries, but it is also going to connect our here and now with the timelessness of the Kingdom.

And you can help us get there by offering some of your time to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Because on August 30 and August 31, we’re going to have our fourth annual All Night Vigil for St Eanswythe of Folkestone. She’s the Patroness of our Building Program, so we’re going to stay up throughout the night and ask for her on-going intercessions on behalf of our temple project.

And that may seem like a long time to be in a worship service, but if you consider the 173 minutes you spent watching this summer’s most famous movie, and you add in all the time you’ve spent reading about it and writing comments and discussing it…well, you get the idea.

If joining us on Sunday, August 30, and Monday, August 31 is a geographic impossibility, there are other ways you can join us as we focus on Things That Last.

You can offer The Akathist for a New Temple (video) along with us each week.

You can restack this post, share it with everyone you know, and take out a Paid Subscription.

Share

You can pick up some CSSB merch; commission an image of a beloved pet for the Calming Room of our new temple; make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

And we’ll kick on outta here with a country take on Things That Last.

“As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful.” — Laura Ingalls Wilder

I have chosen the quote above from legendary author Laura Inglall Wilder because it expresses a sentiment that has been thrown into sharp relief over the last month as I move to a new city.

Moving is a universally annoying and challenging experience. You never quite realize how much stuff you have come to own until you must box it all up. There are so many things to consider and so many choices to make it feel like the constant stress will never end. I have moved from Killeen to Belton, Temple, Harker Heights, New Braunfels, and now to Austin with my husband. Each time I move, I worry that I will not have enough help lifting the heavy things, or that I will have no one to drive the Big Scary Truck for me, or that I will not have any help at all. Things of course always worked out, as they did this time, and I have yet to drive the Big Scary Truck (Thank you Dad and Michael).

As I write this, it has been a little over two weeks since we moved, and while the move itself went smoothly, I am still struggling to feel as if this new apartment is home (at the time of posting, it has been more than a month since the move). Although my husband and I are very excited to have moved since it allows us to be closer to family, friends, and church, the move does bring complications. My husband works the night shift over the weekends at his new job. This means that Friday through Monday from 5pm-4am he is at work and I am at home. It has been a difficult adjustment, and I have struggled to settle into this new routine. Lunchtime ends up being breakfast, and dinnertime ends up being lunch, mornings are afternoons, the middle of the week is the weekend, and it’s a whole upside-down topsy-turvy mess.

Home is so much more than a physical location, and as my life has changed over the years, so has my definition of home. When I was a child, home was where my family was. It was where I went to sleep, where I played, and where I grew up. When I moved away from home as a young adult, home became many different things. First, it was total independence in an apartment with only myself and my cat Chucky (no, he was not named after the doll). Next it was a shared apartment with roommates, followed by a rented bedroom in a house before it became the space I shared with my husband. And in each of these places, I learned something about myself, about who I was, and about what it means to build a home for yourself.

When I got married, I had an opportunity to redefine what home means to me, and I quickly realized that home was where Michael was. Together we built a new definition of home that was uniquely ours. We created new habits and routines that helped us grow together in ways we could not have grown on our own. Home is, indeed, “wherever I am with you”.

That’s why this disruption in our routine feels particularly hard to adapt to, because it feels like the home we built together has been uprooted. And while we have the opportunity to redefine what home means to us in this new space, neither of us are quite sure how to find an anchor amidst the chaos.

So, what do you do when your sense of home is so deeply rooted in routine?

You let God be your routine until you can build your own again.

The day that I unpacked my Icons and put them on the wall was the day that the new apartment didn’t feel quite so unfamiliar anymore. Lunch might be dinner, but the 9^th hour remains unchanged. Tuesday might be the new Saturday, but vespers is still at the same time and place every week. Sunday morning might be different for the foreseeable future, but the liturgy is still there at the same time every morning. Fellowship Hour might look different on my own, but it is still full of the same community of people that I have known all my life. In short, our ability to rely on the Church’s everyday routine has helped bring some stability back into our everyday routines and has slowly lent a feeling of home to this new apartment.

In a way, I think that is why I felt drawn to Laura Ingalls Wilder as a companion to this post. I always felt a sense of ease and contentment from reading about the Wilder family’s adventures. The wilder family moves many times to many different places throughout the book series, and yet, there is a rhythm and simplicity in which their dwelling place becomes a home. Life in the late 1800’s was routine out of necessity and there is almost a faithful way in which the Wilders lived, without complaint. It did not matter if they lived in a log cabin, or a dugout, or above a shop in town. They were home because they had each other. These books were a beautiful part of my childhood, and if you haven’t read them, I encourage you to do so.

I know that moving is (hopefully) an uncommon occurrence in our lives, but we can all learn how to let our spiritual home permeate our physical homes. We can all take a moment to reflect on what home means to us and how God fits into our understanding of home.

And, if you are interested in being more involved in the Church’s everyday routines, consider donating to our building campaign so that we, as a church community, can understand what it means to be home as we work towards building our new temple. Building Fund Donation.

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And maybe while you’re at it, take a moment to listen to one of my favorite songs by Simon and Garfunkle, “Homeward Bound”.

And, as you can easily see in the rendering above, while the new temple is going to be bigger than the structure in which we meet right now—and it’s certainly going to feel a lot more spacious—we’re not, finally, going to pick up that much more square footage.

In fact, when it’s all said and done, we’ll add about 60% more room in the nave.

So, the question then becomes, “Why bother?”

Why go to all the trouble and expense if all you get on the other side of the project is space for about one hundred and ninety more people?

As you can probably imagine, there are a number of (interlocking) answers to that question, so we’ll start with the most basic.

We’re currently worshipping in an all-purpose building that will later be converted into a Fellowship Hall. We want to worship in an actual temple.

And, yeah, that really should be obvious, but many Orthodox Christians have never actually participated in a Divine Service in a facility specifically built for that purpose, and so they don’t have any idea of just how different that experience is going to be.

A silly analogy: Let’s say that you live in Oatmeal, Texas (yes, it’s actually a place; look it up), but you work in Austin. The only way you have to get to work is to ride in the back of a pick-up truck with a bunch of other folks. So, every day, you show up at work wind-blown or sun-burnt or rain-wet, but you make do; you get used to it because that arrangement gets you where you want to go.

But then you meet someone who has an open spot in the back seat of a 1998 Taurus, and you start riding with them in that enclosed space, and you discover a whole new world: it’s got AC and a radio, and you can actually talk to other folks and hear what they say to you, and you realize that there are other ways of getting where you want to go.

Like I said, it’s a goofy comparison, but there are a whole lot of Orthodox Christians who have been riding in the back of that truck for so long, they’ve simply lost sight of the fact that there are better ways of getting to town.

So, sure, absolutely, you can connect with the Most Holy Trinity while you’re worshipping in a hotel ballroom or a strip mall or an all-purpose metal building, but that connection is going to look and feel and sound and (genuinely) be a whole lot more profound in a fully-adorned and carefully designed temple.

But that whole vehicle metaphor brings up another reason why we’re not building a bigger facility.

The number of folks who will be able to worship in our new temple will need to closely correspond to the number of parking spaces that are available.

We wrote a couple of posts about this not too long ago (Cars I and Cars II), but the basic industry standard is that you need one parking space for every two people.

Of course, there’s wiggle room in that formula: you can encourage folks to load up their vehicles; you can encourage people to move within walking or cycling distance of the parish.

But what you can’t do is just ignore the standard altogether, and far too many Orthodox communities try to get away with that.

These folks purchase plots of land that are far too small; they squeeze as much building as they can on to the property, and then they purposely underestimate their average attendance so the local municipality will only require them to install ten or fifteen parking spaces.

And that works throughout most of the year, but at Pascha and on the parish feast day and at weddings and fund-raisers, the neighbors get upset because folks are parking all up and down the street…

… and it’s just not a good look for a community whose Lord and Master teaches, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (St Matthew 7.12).

But at St John’s, we’re doing our best to respect our neighbors, and that means we’re going to respect the limitations that our parking will place on the size of our parish.

But there are other limitations a healthy community needs to respect, and that is a good transition to still another reason why our new temple is not going to be a whole lot larger.

The people who worship in our temple will need to be able to take care of one another.

A lot of times, that consideration is formulated in terms of a ratio between clergy and lay folks—y’know, as in one priest cannot effectively care for more than a certain number of people.

That’s not the formula we use at St John’s, because we don’t expect the priests to do all that work by themselves: our deacons also look after the folks in our parish, but, even more importantly, we also see that kind of service as the responsibility of everyone in the community.

And, actually, so does St Paul: “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the Law of Christ” (Galatians 6.2).

And St John: “let us not love in word and in tongue, but in deed and truth” (1 John 3.18).

Notice: Neither of those verses are preceded by the words, “Hey, all you priests and deacons…”

Because caring for one another is the work of the entire parish.

But it’s hard to do that work well in a community that has more than 500 people in it.

And, here in Cedar Park, we’ve been bumping up against that number for quite a while.

Of course, all you problem solvers out there are already thinking about solutions to that issue—small groups, relocating, multiple campuses—and we’ll address all that in the next post.

But, of course, when you get right down to it, all of the issues confronting our parish (and yours) are not going to be solved because of our planning skills. Our Lord and Master is going to provide us with the guidance and the resources that we need, and, when it’s all done, and our new temple is complete, we will look back and wonder how we “got over”.

And if you recognized that line from one of Aretha Franklin’s great gospel songs, good on you. If not, you have a treat awaiting you at the end of this post.

But if you want to join us in that beautiful new temple when we “look back and wonder”, why not just go ahead and take that step and actually join us here in Texas?

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If that’s not feasible, then we sure would appreciate your support: you can offer The Akathist for a New Temple (video) along with us; you can bump that subscription up to Paid; you can purchase a Come See Something Beautiful sweatshirt; you can commission an image of a beloved pet for our Calming Room in that new temple, and, as always, you can make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

Here’s Aretha.

We’re starting with some 1970’s gospel because, this weekend, we’re celebrating the greatest feast of the Mother of God: The Feast of Her Dormition.

What we commemorate with that celebration is the death and resurrection of the Most Holy Theotokos. And the reason we’re listening to songs about clouds is because all the apostles were brought to the funeral of the Mother of God on the clouds of the air. They were scattered across the world, doing the work of the kingdom, but they were transported back to Jerusalem to say goodbye to the Most Holy Theotokos.

And this is not a small detail in the story of the Dormition.

Here’s a hymn from the Canon of the Feast:

“Carried to Zion as it were upon a cloud, the company of the apostles assembled from the ends of the earth to minister to thee, O Virgin. Thou art a swift cloud, from whom the Most High God, the Sun of righteousness, shone forth upon those that were in darkness and shadow.”

Here’s the final hymn from the Praises for the Feast:

“At thy deathless Dormition, O Theotokos, Mother of Life, clouds caught the apostles up into the air: though they were dispersed throughout the world, they were brought together to form a single choir before thy most pure body. And, burying thee with reverence, they sang aloud the words of Gabriel: Hail, thou who art full of grace, O Virgin Mother who knew not wedlock, the Lord is with thee. Entreat Him Who is thy Son and our God to save our souls.”

And this is from the Akathist for the Dormition:

“The divinely-moving stars, the holy apostles, scattered across the earth for the sake of the Gospel, were translated upon clouds across the breadth of the air to the burial of the Mother of God, whom they escorted with chants and hymns, crying out together with the immaterial beings: Alleluia!”

Now, to be sure, all of you Protestant folks are wondering where any this stuff shows up in Holy Scripture. But even though the Dormition is part of Holy Tradition, there is nothing in the story that is biblically implausible—shoot, if Philip the Deacon can fly from Gaza to Azotus (Acts 8.39-40), why can’t all the apostles do a little air travel?

Riding the Waves

Really, the bigger question is how did the apostles actually do it?

St John of Damascus has a lovely homily for the Dormition in which he describes the apostles as rain drops blown on the wind, but, I mean, if you’ve never actually been a rain drop before, how do you pull that off?

I imagine some of the more confident apostles just embraced the whole super hero vibe

On the other hand, there were probably at least a few of them that looked more like this

And, actually, we can identify with that whole dynamic, because just as the apostles were doing something they had never, ever done before, that’s pretty much what’s been going on with this Substack for the past twelve months.

It’s not like it hasn’t been exhilarating—it’s been exciting in the same way that flying through the air for the first time must be exciting.

But it’s also been just as nerve-wracking as being unexpectedly transported across the sky: new tech, new responsibilities (I’m selling T-shirts, for cryin’ out loud, lots of posts, lots of deadlines.

But It’s All Worth It

And I’m sure that’s how the apostles felt when they finally touched down in Jerusalem.

Though, again, you gotta wonder: While I’m sure some of them just absolutely nailed the landing, others probably just ended up skidding to a sudden stop or rolling into the city.

But whatever they looked like on re-entry, they were all there for the Most Holy Theotokos.

And, since She is the Very Icon of the Church, the Living Temple of the Most Holy Trinity, She is also offering to Her Son all our efforts to build a temple here in Cedar Park, a temple that will, for centuries, draw people into His Church.

So, if like some of the apostles, our lack of aerodynamic technique is showing, if our hair is all blown back, if we miss a spelling error or forget to fire up a link, please know that it’s for the best of causes and that we are grateful for your forbearance and for your generous support.

Happy Feast!

You are all welcome to join us this weekend as we celebrate The Dormition. We will offer Great Vespers with the Lamentations for the Mother of God this evening, Friday, August 14, at 7pm. Tomorrow morning, Saturday, August 15, we will serve Orthros at 6am and Divine Liturgy at 8am.

If you are unable to come pray with us—or if you aren’t caught up in the clouds and transported to Cedar Park, Texas (hey, it happened to Philip the Deacon, so it can happen to you)—there are any number of other ways you can help us out.

Offer The Akathist for a New Temple (video) with us. Restack this post; send it out to everyone you know.

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You can take out a Paid Subscription to this Substack. You can commission an image of a departed pet for the Calming Room of our new temple. You can make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

And don’t forget those T-shirts.

We wish each and every one of you a Blessed Dormition, and we’ll leave you with this nice recording of the main hymn for the feast.

And don’t even get me started on the music.

On a rewatch a few years ago, I caught a new moment to add to my collection of favorites, and I wanted to share it with you all today because it reminded me of The Bear Question.

Let me explain for those that don’t know.

Around the same time as my rewatch, a viral question was sweeping the internet (or at least the dusty corners of the internet where I hang out). The question was posed to women: if you were alone in the woods and heard a noise behind you, would you rather turn around and see a bear or a random man?

Women almost unanimously chose the bear.

It wasn’t that women thought they could tame or outrun the bear.

“A bear might run away if I scream loud enough,” One commenter suggested.

“The worst thing a bear will do is kill me,” Another said.

Yikes.

It seemed that women were choosing the bear with some level of awareness that the outcome was not very favorable.

Of course, a whole lot of men thought this question was absolutely ridiculous, intentionally posed to prop them up to be seen as violent and unpredictable villains. They felt that this was unfair. As a result, some of them took to their own social media pages and told the women who chose the bear how wrong they were, explaining all the reasons why bears are dangerous and how men are actually women’s greatest allies and protectors.

I am not here to talk about the likelihood of this scenario or whether I think women should choose the bear or the man.

I am here to talk about the Lord of the Rings.

The scene I want to take a closer look at to help get to the root of my thoughts on The Bear Question takes place at the end of the first movie. The fellowship is traveling by river, the Uruk-hai hot upon their heels. Frodo has begun to look at the other members of the fellowship with some level of suspicion after Lady Galadriel’s warning to him that someone would try to betray him.

After setting up camp for the night on a riverbank, Frodo wanders deeper into the woods to be alone and to think through his options. Should he stay with his friends and risk being betrayed? Or should he disappear and carry out his quest by himself?

As Frodo wrestles with these thoughts, he suddenly discovers that he is not alone. One of his companions, Boromir, has followed him. Boromir is a man from Gondor with his own opinions about what they ought to do with the ring. At first, Boromir’s presence feels rather unassuming. He is gathering firewood. It almost feels like it is sheer coincidence that has brought him here at the same time.

But when he begins to speak, it becomes obvious that Boromir’s motives are to persuade Frodo to give the ring over to Gondor. Boromir is convinced that his city can withstand the evil of the ring and use it against Sauron. Frodo knows in his heart that Boromir is drastically overestimating himself and tells him as much. As the conversation continues, Boromir grows more and more impatient, pleading with Frodo to see reason as he does. But Frodo insists that there is no other way. Finally, in plain terms, with more fervent desperation in his voice, Boromir asks Frodo to lend him the ring, to which Frodo quickly refuses and backs away.

“Why do you recoil? I am no thief!” The tension builds.

“You are not yourself.” Frodo insists.

“What chance do you think you have?” Boromir growls, the mask slipping, “They will find you, and will take the ring. And you will beg for death before the end!”

Frodo turns his back to Boromir and tries to run away, but Boromir follows, clawing for the ends of his cloak in an effort to take the ring by force. Frodo slips the ring on, turning invisible. He manages to squirm out of Boromir’s grasp, kicking him to the ground as he runs away into the woods.

“I see your mind! You will take the ring to Sauron! You will betray us! You go to your death, and the death of us all! Curse you! Curse you!”

Boromir shouts but the woods have gone silent.

…

“Frodo?” He whimpers at last, the regret audible in his voice as the reality of what he has just done begins to set in.

I think it’s pretty important that we are all able to identify with Boromir in this scene. It represents all of us when we fail to withstand the temptations of power and control when it truly matters—especially when the consequences land on someone else. It’s also important that we understand that Boromir is not the villain of this story by any stretch. He is a good man, a valiant warrior, one of the few entrusted with this nearly impossible quest to save Middle Earth (if you haven’t seen Boromir’s extended edition scenes, you’re missing out). He is Frodo’s protector. But when he is faced with the reality of the ring’s power, his own shortcomings and weakness outweighs all of this, making him into an active threat to Frodo instead.

A few seconds later we rejoin Frodo sprinting through the trees, invisible. The voice of Sauron sounding from everywhere at once, drowning out Boromir’s shouts somewhere in the distance, “Frodo, I’m sorry!!”

Frodo removes the ring.

Soon he is joined by another member of the fellowship, Aragorn.

“Where is the ring?” He asks.

“Stay away!” Frodo cries out, backing away from him.

Aragorn looks at him, confused, and reminds him that he has sworn an oath to protect him.

“Can you protect me from yourself?” Frodo asks.

Frodo opens his palm to reveal the ring. Aragorn freezes. For a moment, we hear the haunting whispers of Sauron in Aragorn’s ears as he hovers a hand over the same temptation that Boromir succumbed to only moments ago.

I want to remind everyone that Aragorn has every right to want to take the ring from Frodo, even if his reason is to destroy it himself. He is the heir of Isildur, the very person whose failure to destroy the ring centuries ago has allowed for Sauron’s evil to endure and the line of kings to be broken. Taking the ring and destroying it could grant him the opportunity to prove himself not just as a worthy king but as a worthy man. All that stands in the way of him seizing that opportunity is this hobbit.

It would be so easy to reach out and take it.

But instead, Aragorn drops to his knees and gently closes Frodo’s hand, hiding the ring from view and quieting the voice of Sauron.

“I would have gone with you to the end. Into the very fires of Mordor.” He says softly. And then he lets Frodo go.

And thus, Aragorn, son of Arathorn, sets the perfect example of what it really looks like to be a protector.

He doesn’t tell Frodo that he is wrong to be afraid or that he should give him more credit considering he has given Frodo no reason not to trust him. He doesn’t try to take the ring or convince Frodo to stay with the fellowship. Aragorn displays incredible restraint, honesty, and humility. He listens to Frodo, takes his concerns seriously, and allows those concerns to change his own mind. This is the kind of protection that I would argue a lot of us often find ourselves truly in need of even if we struggle to ask for it.

It is absolutely worth noting that Aragorn goes on to fight roughly 20 Uruk-hai right after this scene. So does Boromir in a remarkable display of courage and self sacrifice (I love a redemption arc!). But Aragorn’s commitment to protecting Frodo goes so far beyond fighting the external threats to his physical safety, which is why I think we can all learn something very practical from his example.

Can you protect me from yourself?

To me, this is what The Bear Question actually boils down to (though there are many other ways to interpret it):

Will you face your own shortcomings for my sake AS WELL AS protect me from danger?

This is a legitimate question, one we should all be able to ask of the people closest to us, especially the ones that are supposed to protect us from harm. The Bear Question doesn’t really cost any of us anything to answer. But neither do the countless other hypotheticals designed to tease out the extreme lengths someone would go to protect us from danger. I’ve witnessed a lot of those before and even found myself in a conversation or two about how someone would protect me from a bear (why are there so many bears?).

But what if none of us are actually asking for any of that? What if the bear (or the orc) is less of a threat than we can be to each other?

Here’s the good news: Someone who is actually willing to fight a bear to protect their loved ones is (hopefully) someone who will have the humility to serve and listen to them too. And thankfully, most of us have plenty of chances to get really good at that. We probably won’t have to fight off 20 Uruk-hai, but we may have to look out for other less obvious threats to the people we are charged to protect.

These more covert threats may show up as our pride, our selfishness, and our desire for control. Protecting others from ourselves in these ways tends to manifest as small but significant sacrifices we can choose to make or ignore on a daily basis. Doing the dishes, folding the laundry, assuming the best of the person in front of us even when they are telling us something we find difficult to hear. These are the things that remind us that we are here to serve the ones we love as well as die for them. These are the things that, as Fr. Aidan—I mean—Gandalf puts it in this lovely monologue from The Hobbit, “keeps the darkness at bay.”

It’s easy to say we would die for someone since a lot of us know it probably won’t ever come to that. And sometimes, that can make it difficult for people to approach us and ask for our help in this way without getting shut down. My hope is that this little thought experiment might help us adjust our idea about what it looks like to be a protector in a more practical sense, not to exclude the part where we are willing to die for others, but rather to include the “everyday deeds” that support the life of our community.

And hey, if we do find ourselves faced with the opportunity of making the ultimate sacrifice for someone else, hopefully we are ready to jump into action since we’ve spent all that time practicing by mowing the lawn, planning all those weekly meals, and going to confession. And who knows? Maybe there is a number of dishes we can wash or a number of times we can humbly listen to someone without judgement that equates to fighting 1 bear!

Some other ways you might consider practicing self sacrifice and participate in protecting others include but are not limited to:

• Offering the Akathist for a New Temple

• Subscribing to our Substack

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• Liking or restacking this post if you found something of interest

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• Donating to our new building fund

Thanks for reading!

Because there are now Orthodox parishes that actually do serve at least two Liturgies each Sunday morning. These folks have received permission from their bishops to use that approach, at least on a temporary basis, but, again, as we explained last time, that doesn’t mean it’s at all a good idea.

But what if a parish genuinely doesn’t have enough space in their current facility to accommodate everyone who wants to attend? What are those folks supposed to do?

Well, we are all out of space, and we’ve found ways to move forward.

That doesn’t mean that what works in our setting will work in every community, but the point is that there are lots of options to consider before we start cloning the Liturgy.

For example.

Lose the Pews.

We’ve written about this before, and, while some folks would never forego fixed seating because of historical or theological or spiritual considerations, they might be willing to do without those chairs or pews if they understood how much more space they might gain.

Because as any architect or event planner will tell you, a seated person is going to take up 7-10 feet of space; a person who is standing is only going to need 5-6 feet of space.

So, the next time you’re in that temple that is just full-to-the-brim, quietly calculate how much more space you would gain—and how many more people you would be able to accommodate—if you simply put the chairs or pews along the walls.

Another example.

Clear the Clutter.

When you’re calculating how much space you could save by doing away with the fixed seating, you should also ask yourself a few other questions.

• Do the icon stands have to be right in the middle of the nave?

• Can we move the candle trays closer to the door—or put them in the narthex?

• Does that shrine have to be in that particular spot?

• Would it be possible to relocate the banners or the chanter’s stand to free up some space along the wall?

Making changes—or even shifting things around a bit—in sacred space is a delicate undertaking. However, if priests and parish councils and parishioners would only take a good, long look at how things are arranged in their temples, they would be amazed how much room they would be able to free up.

And, last, but, certainly, not least.

Space it Out.

Most of the ‘overcrowding’ that Orthodox parishes experience arises from the fact that everyone in the community wants to be present during a particular time slot on Sunday morning.

And that’s important because, as we stressed in our last post, one of the basic ways we proclaim our unity is by standing with our brothers and sisters before the same altar each and every week. The problem is that, in most parishes, on an average Sunday, the time slot for doing that is about three hours—and, often, it’s a whole lot less.

That’s because most communities only do an abbreviated version of the service that comes before the Divine Liturgy—The Service of Orthros. But here at St John’s, we allow two hours for Orthros. That means, on a typical Sunday morning, we’re in the Divine Services for close to five hours.

And the attendance during those five hours varies a great deal. During the Divine Liturgy itself, folks are often packed right up against the iconostasis. But, during Orthros, a lot of times, it’s just the clergy and the chanters and four or five other folks.

But what that means is that everyone has a setting that works for them: if people enjoy being part of a crowd, then, boy howdy, we’ve got that covered.

However, if folks prefer a quieter, more spacious setting, we can provide that, as well.

The fact that we also offer Daily Services and Divine Liturgies when a feast falls during the week provides even more options, but here’s the point to remember: those options occur naturally because we have a full liturgical calendar, not because we are trying to appeal to different target populations or interest groups.

In fact, when it comes to overcrowding (and most other problems) if we’ll just be the Church, everything will take care of itself.

Or, to put it another way, our Mom will make sure we have everything we need.

Or, to put it still another way, Mother Mary, the Very Icon of the Church, will always show us the way forward.

Yes, that lovely image is by our own Baker Galloway. And, of course, we’re also right in the middle of The Dormition Fast, when we dedicate the first fifteen days of August to the Most Holy Theotokos.

Which is why we are going to, still once again, go Back to The Beatles at the end of this post.

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Before we get there, though, please know that you’re welcome to join us at the Divine Services. If that’s not geographically possible, join us in prayer for our new temple.

In addition to your prayers, you can support us by taking out a paid subscription or picking up some Come See Something Beautiful clothing or commissioning an image of a beloved pet for the Calming Room of our new temple or making a direct donation to our Building Fund.

And, sure, Sir Paul has always insisted that he’s singing about his mum, but that just means we can sing about our Mum, too...

“It’s great to stay up late!”

That’s what we’re going to be doing a month from now: in fact, we’re going to be staying up all night long when we offer our Annual Vigil for St Eanswythe of Folkestone.

If you’ve been reading Come See Something Beautiful for a while, you know that this Anglo-Saxon Abbess is the Patroness of our Building Program. If you’re new to our Substack, you can read all about our relationship with St E here: St. E. and Me.

But you might also be wondering about how a Vigil works. Granted, you don’t hear about vigils much nowadays, but it’s an ancient form of Christian worship, and it’s something we still do here in Orthodox Land. Basically, it’s a series of back-to-back services, that are offered over-night. Monastic communities serve vigils on a pretty regular basis; in parishes, vigils are generally only offered on really special occasions.

But, for all of us here in the Parish of St John the Forerunner, August 31 is about as special as it gets, because we will be honoring the Kentish Princess who intercedes for us and for our new temple.

“Wait a second…why don’t you…?”

Now, as you know if you’ve seen “Singin’ in the Rain” (and, if you haven’t please log off and go watch that musical right now), what prompts Debbie and Donald and Gene to launch into that great number is the fact that they’ve come up with a great idea—an idea that changes the course of the whole movie.

And we’ve got our own great idea—an idea that we think we’ll change the course of our whole temple project. And we’re going to unveil that great idea right before we begin the Vigil for St Eanswythe on Sunday evening, August 31.

“Hot Dog! Hallelujah!”

That’s how Donald responds to the great idea in the movie, and we’re really hoping you’ll feel the same way.

(But will there be dancing?)

We knew you wanted to ask.

And, of course, the answer is yes: We will, most definitely, be getting down with our fine selves during the All Night Vigil.

We’ve written about this before, but, really, how could we not throw some shapes when that’s what all the saints are doing, right now, in the Kingdom of Heaven?

Let’s just take some recent examples from our hymnography. Here’s a portion of the canon for St Marina on July 17

“Manifestly flashing lightning-like with the martyrs’ splendor, thou dost dance around about God, sacredly deified, O all-famed Marina, and granting enlightenment, by thine intercessions, unto them that sing thy praise.”

And here is a selection from the Intercessions for St Elias the Prophet from July 20

“Two brightly shining luminaries are risen upon the world, even Elias and Elisha. The first, with a divine word, shut up the rain-drops of the heavens, rebuked kings, and upon a fiery chariot ascended into the heavens. The second healed the noxious waters, and when he had received a double portion of grace, he crossed the streams of Jordan on foot. And now, as they dance for joy with the Angels, they intercede on our behalf, that our souls be saved.”

At the vigil, we won’t be hoofing around the nave like Gene and Donald and Debbie—though, we gotta say: Father Andrew Wilson does a mean Maxi Ford—and that’s not easy to pull off in a cassock.

No, we will be a lot more subdued…but, we’re convinced that if they have any tables or staircases or couches in the Kingdom, it’s so saints like Marina and Elias and Elisha can slide under them or dash up and down them or somersault over them.

And we’re looking forward to joining them in that joy.

But even though there won’t be any physical acrobatics during the overnight hours of August 30 and August 31, at the end of this post, we’ve got a pretty accurate musical description of what will be happening in our hearts after the service is done, and the sun’s coming up, and we’re walking out to the parking lot.

We’ll play that for you in just a moment, and, if you’d like to get in on that joy, all you have to do is show up and stay up with us on August 30 and August 31.

If you can’t fit an all-nighter into your plans, we’ve got other ways you can support us and connect with that joy.

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And while Katrina and the guys don’t have half the energy of Debbie and Donald and Gene—well, you get the idea…

I love snow.

I love the magical feeling of standing outside and looking up and seeing a whirlwind of white flakes spiraling towards your face. I love the way that snow blankets trees and gives them an almost ethereal look, and I love how clean and crisp a winter landscape looks covered in unbroken snow. It’s like endless possibilities stretched in front of me, just waiting for footprints to tell a story.

There is something fierce and wild about it too, and I can recall once standing upon a particularly large mound of snow, feeling almost as if I could be a character in a Jack London story.

Perhaps my love of snow comes from living in a region where it is scarce—Texas certainly affords little opportunity to experience snowfall—but I think that my love of wintertime runs a little deeper than scarcity. Wintertime engages all of my senses and when I’m outside in the cold, I feel awake. I can feel the bite of the cold on my skin, I can taste the snow as it catches on my tongue, or see my breath rise in front of my face. I can hear the wind howling and the crunch of dead leaves beneath my feet. This is one of the most beautiful things to experience as a human. To discover yourself so alive in a landscape so still is exhilarating.

And in a way, that’s what Orthodoxy feels like to me.

One of the most beautiful parts of Orthodoxy, to me, is the way that the services invite you to experience Orthodoxy with your whole body, with all five senses. You can smell the incense, you can touch the icons, you can see what’s happing in the liturgy through the Iconostasis, you can hear the choir and chanters, and you can taste the Eucharist and blessed bread. These things have always helped make Liturgy feel tangible.

However, sometimes it is the very tangible nature of the service that leads to a loss of focus.

On any given Sunday, there is a constant flow of people coming in and out of the nave, children are making noise, and there are often so many people that standing in the nave can feel a bit cramped. And while having a crowded and noisy nave is a good problem to have, it can make it hard for all of your senses to be focused on what is happening in the liturgy.

And sometimes, you just need a quiet moment to pray.

That is why I find vespers to be such an important and much needed part of being Orthodox.

Vespers is a beautiful service and a great opportunity for quiet prayer and focus. It is often much less crowded than a Sunday morning Liturgy, and the nave is darkened. Because of the darkness, and the relative quiet that a less crowded service brings, I find that I can focus much more easily on the service and on my presence in the church. I can focus on the icons, I can listen to the chanters, and I can devote most of my attention to the prayer bracelet in my hands.

The quietness of a vespers service is what feels the most important to me. In a way, it reminds me of snow.

In fact, when I think about vespers, I think about Alaska.

Allow me to elaborate.

When I pause to think about the stillness that I associate with vespers, I am immediately reminded of the trip I took to Alaska in college as part of a Real Break ministry. I think about the small wooden chapel situated at the end of a long hike through the woods and cold. I think about the quiet, broken only by the crunch of our boots breaking through the fresh snow and the sharpness of our breath as it rose in clouds over our faces. I think about the peace and quiet that settled into my heart when I stepped into the chapel and how our voices sounded magnified to the rafters as we sang “O Gladsome Light”.

And I think about how God was there.

Among the trees, in the cold, and in the quiet over the snow.

God was there.

In our voices, in the chapel, and in the solitude of our prayer.

God was there.

That is what vespers feels like to me when I stand in the quiet of the darkened nave. I feel like I have stepped back into that Alaskan chapel, back to the quiet of the woods, and the crunching of snow beneath my boots. And I know the quiet I feel in service is the same quiet I felt in the snow.

Being able to connect vespers and snow the way I have in this post makes me think that maybe someone like Henry David Thoreau (who I quoted in the beginning of this post) could have felt a similar way if he had known about Orthodoxy and vespers.

And who’s to say he didn’t? If Henry David Thoreau could find quiet in the snow, what’s stopping us from doing the exact same thing?

So. If you want to experience this quiet for yourself, attend vespers this coming Saturday. And while you’re there, listen to the quiet and let it settle into your heart the way snowflakes settle on your eyelashes.

And while you’re thinking about vespers and snow, consider donating to our building fund so that we can carry this quiet sanctuary over to our new temple with each and every vesper service offered. Building Fund Donation

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P.S. I’d like to leave you with one of my favorite songs related to winter.

And that’s probably the question that we’ve heard the most: If you’re out of room, why not just add additional services?

Of course, in American Christianity, additional services are a sign of success: it means you’ve outgrown your current space; it means you’re attracting more people. In fact, a congregation that does not have multiple services is regarded as static and stuck.

But there’s also a flip side to that dynamic: offering additional services means that each service can be designed with a specific target audience in mind. So, the early service is for folks who prefer a more traditional order of worship; the main service is for people who like contemporary music and who are comfortable with lots of tech; many congregations now also offer a more subdued, contemplative service—and then there are services for youth and children, as well.

The whole idea is that lots of choices in terms of style and lots of options when it comes to scheduling are going to make it possible to appeal to lots of different people.

But that’s not how things work in Orthodox Land.

We just have one main service: The Divine Liturgy. Historically, our tradition has been that everyone attends that service together—and to support that tradition, the canons of the Church forbid a priest from serving more than one Divine Liturgy per day.

Which sounds odd until you realize the value we Orthodox place on unity.

Because, for us, unity starts with the fact that we all gather together in one place at one time and offer the same service before the same altar. There are a lot of other dimensions to our unity—the beliefs we proclaim, the calendar we keep, the teachings by which we abide, the structures by which we are organized—but it all starts with showing up alongside our sisters and our brothers for The Divine Liturgy.

So, in Holy Orthodoxy, unity is not an abstraction; at its most basic level, it’s about the person standing next to us in the services.

Nevertheless, human nature being what it is, you really shouldn’t be surprised to learn that a good many Orthodox communities have found a way to—well, let’s just say they are massaging that concrete take on unity into something that’s a lot more…theoretical.

That’s because there are a number of Orthodox parishes which now have two liturgies on a Sunday morning. And, strictly speaking, they’re not doing anything uncanonical: they have multiple priests on staff, so each priest still offers just one liturgy, and all of these communities have obtained episcopal permission to do what they are doing. In other words, their bishops have blessed the arrangement because the folks in these particular parishes believe that they just can’t fit everyone into their current facilities.

But just because a bad idea appears to be a common-sense solution doesn’t mean it’s not also a bad idea.

And more than one Divine Liturgy on a Sunday morning is a bad idea.

Now, to the credit of our hierarchs, none of them have blessed this sort of arrangement as a permanent solution. It’s supposed to be a temporary measure. However, as anyone in American Christianity will tell you, once you have started a new service, it’s very, very difficult to later shut it down.

That’s because—surprise!—the folks who attend that new service begin to regard themselves as a congregation within the congregation, as a community within the community. They will start to form a separate identity from the larger group; they will see themselves as “the folks who attend the Early Morning Liturgy” or “the people who get to go to brunch early”. And even if they were told ahead of time that the entire set-up is only going to last until the new building is complete, once it’s time to discontinue that additional service, there will be resistance, if not outright opposition.

But there’s more to this than just challenging social dynamics. Because adding an additional Divine Liturgy also disrupts the Typicon of the Church.

The Typicon is the schedule of the Divine Services.

That schedule has basically been the same since the tenth century. The schedule is handled differently in Byzantine and Slavic Orthodoxy, but, in Byzantine communities, the Divine Liturgy is always preceded by the Service of Orthros.

In the West, Orthros is known as Matins; it’s the daily morning service. It’s also the service in which the bulk of the Psalter is read and most of the hymnography is sung. That means Orthros is where we are trained in the Holy Scriptures (through the Psalter) and where we are trained in the interpretation of the Holy Scriptures (through the hymnography).

Unfortunately, as we’ve pointed out before, most Orthodox communities only offer about fifty minutes of what should be a two-hour service. So, in a great many parishes, Orthros is now more of an opening act for the Divine Liturgy than a service that has an identity of its own.

But when folks decide to offer two Divine Liturgies each Sunday morning, Orthros disappears completely. There is simply not time to serve Orthros along with an additional Liturgy, so communities simply stop offering Orthros altogether—and, again, it’s always ‘temporary’; people always insist that, at some point, everything is going to go back to ‘way it should be’, but that hasn’t yet happened in any of the parishes that offer two Divine Liturgies on Sunday morning.

Of course, I could be mistaken about that.

I mean, if you know of an Orthodox community that has successfully offered an additional Divine Liturgy on Sunday morning for a limited period of time, and then returned to the traditional schedule of Orthros and Liturgy, please let us know.

While we’re waiting on that update, why not join us in offering The Akathist for a New Temple (video)? You can also swap out your regular subscription for one that is Paid, pick up a Come See Something Beautiful T shirt, commission an image of a departed pet for the Calming Room of our new temple, or make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

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And, not surprisingly, we’re still waiting…

But we do have a solution to all this, and we’ll share it with you in an upcoming post. In anticipation of that, we’ll leave you with an appropriate tune (once, again) from The Fab Four.

That’s the final scene from the lovely old Brazilian movie, Black Orpheus.

Orpheus has died, and his two young friends, Benedito and Zeca, use the musician’s guitar to play the sun up.

I’ve thought about that cinematic moment a lot this month because we’ve been serving the Divine Liturgy at 6am on Wednesday mornings. We do that when there’s not a fasting season because it provides folks with a quiet option to the over-crowding we experience on Sunday mornings.

It’s also a good time to pray for our new temple, and so we always make the reliquary of St Eanswythe of Folkestone available for folks to reverence.

Of course, we serve Orthros just about every weekday morning at 4am, so we’re used to getting up early. But Orthros is generally over before the sun comes up; however, with the 6am Divine Liturgy, we get to also watch the morning light slowly move through the Holy Place and the Nave.

And, sure, we don’t make that happen any more than Orpheus caused the sun to rise over Rio. After all, as G.K. Chesterton famously pointed out:

“…God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun”.

But, boy howdy, we get to help.

In fact, we join with Orthodox Christians all around the globe, and, just like Benedito and Zeca, we assist with the sun rise.

Just pick a point on the planet.

Let’s start, say, with St Michael’s Skete in Alaska

The monks there greet the morning with Orthros and then the light rushes on across the Pacific Rim, and it lights up St Seraphim Monastery in Vladivostok, Russia

The light then spreads out across the steppes, and it flows over the Holy Trinity/St Sergius Lavra outside of Moscow

The dawn then leaps over the Balamand Monastery in Lebanon

and St Saba’s outside Jerusalem;

it explodes over the monasteries on Mt Athos

And flows through the Voronet Monastery in Romania

The light then races to the Monastery of the Protection of the Mother of God in Bussy-en-Othe, France

and on to the Monastery of St John the Baptist in Essex, UK.

The morning then shines out across the Atlantic, and it illumines the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York

and Holy Cross Monastery in West Virginia,

…and…then…it’s our turn

That’s right, here in good old Cedar Park, Texas, we get to play our part in fulfilling that Psalmic prophecy: “From the rising of the sun, until the going down of the same, the Name of the Lord is to be praised” (112.3).

And, for sure, there are lots of other Beneditos and there are lots of other Zecas all around the world who take part in this daily Cycle of Praise: nursing moms who turn to their icon corner as the sun comes up, elderly folks in nursing facilities who make the sign of the cross as the new light comes through the windows of their room, working men who get in their trucks at dawn after a long night shift and take a moment to touch their fingers to their lips and then touch the image of the Mother of God that’s taped to the sun visor.

We all make it happen together, but, a month from now, on The Feast of St Eanswythe, here at St John’s we’re going to stay up for the whole sequence. We’re going to offer an All Night Vigil in honor of the Patroness of our Building Program, and we’d love to have you keep vigil with us.

If you can’t make it to Cedar Park on Sunday, August 30, and Monday, August 31 (or if you’re just not able to pull an all-nighter at the beginning of the week), we understand. But there are a whole lot of other ways you can get in on the action.

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We’re looking forward to the day when we will be able to see the morning sun light up our new temple. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with this bit of musical anticipation from The Beatles.

This quote is one of my favorite quotes from Tolkien’s LoTR trilogy because it is a reminder that true transformation happens through faith and trust. Frodo and Sam are in the middle of a story that seems unlikely to end positively in their favor, and the only thing they decide they can do is to keep going. Of course, we all know how the trilogy ends (if you don’t, it’s 2026 and the movies are on Amazon prime—you can even get the books on Amazon kindle. Seriously, it’s super easy) but what made it meaningful and what makes the characters’ choices heroic is that they made them in the face of uncertainty.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably expressed this exact sentiment many times: “When are we going to /actually/ start building this new Temple? It’s been years and it seems like all we do is talk about money.” Waiting is something that is not easy for me and is something I’ve always struggled with, ever since I was old enough to repeatedly ask “Are we there yet?” on a car trip (sorry mom and dad). I have recently been diagnosed with ADHD and while the difficulty with waiting makes a lot more sense to me, I have also realized that my life has had a lot of waiting in it. I waited 27 years to meet the man I married, and let me tell you, Michael was (and is) well worth the wait. I waited 15 years for the little sister that I had been begging for since I could talk, and she was absolutely worth the wait. I waited a total of 8 years to finish college and graduate with a masters in English. That’s a lot of waiting. All of that waiting led to wonderful blessings, but it was hard for me to recognize the transformations that were happening in my life because I was focused on the uncertainty that comes with waiting.

Similarly, I think we are experiencing a period of transformation as we work towards our goal of building a new Temple, We can’t know when this journey toward our new Temple will end, but the faith and trust that is at the root of this project has already shown us small pieces of that transformation taking place: our parking lot was recently extended, we have a new exit door in the nave, there are railings on our sidewalk, our Discord page allows us to connect as a community in ways we weren’t able to before, and we are blessed to continue to catechize and baptize new members of our parish on reception Sundays. These are just some of the things that I have noticed in the past several months, but I am sure that there are many more things that could be added to this list.

The building project has been an ongoing conversation within the community over the past several years. Currently, the focus is on the new Temple, but I can recall when the conversation was about building the building we are currently in. Back then, we were holding services in the Parish Hall (the building that we now use for Sunday School) and the foosball table (yeah, we had a foosball table) had a waitlist. I was a teen at that time, so a lot of the logistics that went into building the Long Hall were lost on me. I didn’t understand the effort it took to raise the money needed to start construction, or the numerous meetings, discussions, and sacrifices that occurred during the entire process. The biggest thing that I was concerned about was the unfortunate fact that the building that we are currently in was going to sit right on top of a wild blackberry patch that had been growing on the property for years and which I would miss when it was gone (I do still think about that blackberry patch).

However, just because I was a kid at the time, doesn’t mean that I couldn’t contribute or participate in meaningful ways. I was old enough to put my tithing money in the building fund bowl, and to attend liturgy and participate in the life of the parish. I also recall that there was one Sunday we all wrote our names on individual pieces of wood and placed them in the ground where the building that we are currently in would eventually go to mark the place where we usually stand during liturgy. I remember looking at all of those sticks in the ground and feeling this intense sense of belonging unlike anything I had experienced before.

Looking back, I realize that even when the building that we are currently in was the focus, the building project included plans for the temple we’re fundraising to build right now, which means we’ve been praying about it for a lot longer than we’ve been raising money for it. Not only that, but Fr. Aidan (and others) have been talking about this building project for years. One of the Fall/Spring theological seminars was dedicated to the physical aspects of the building, and we learned a lot about the style of building, the importance of squinches, the history of basilicas (although it seems really unfortunate to me that Orthodox churches are never bult in the gothic cathedral style. I think Orthodox gargoyles would be SO cool) and the pros and cons of a dome. We’ve also had several presentations from our very talented team of iconographers regarding the plans to adorn the inside of the new temple. In short, this is a process that has been ongoing for a long time and that will continue for the foreseeable future. This period of waiting that we are in right now is a chance for all of us (especially me) to practice patience, trust, and faith that God knows what we need.

So, I invite all of you to wait with me on this long-expected journey towards our new Temple. And while you’re waiting, consider donating to help us build our new temple: Building Fund Donation or sharing this post to help raise awareness!

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There may not be dwarves knocking at the Narthex doors, or a wizard who shows up to blow smoke rings during coffee hour (unfortunately), but we have already gone there and back again. This is St. John’s story and we are the people in it—if we take one more step it will be the furthest away from home we have ever been.

And just because I think we could all use a little dose of nostalgia (it helps with waiting), check out this classic LoTR music video:

And lastly, I want to share a video from a channel that I listen to frequently whenever I need peaceful background music:

That’s The Bad Boys of Rock and Roll doing their best to sound like a country western band. It was during a set they performed in our hometown back in 2005.

And it’s a nice try: Mick is working hard trying to sing with a twang; Ron even got out a slide guitar, but, y’know, when you get right down to it, you just really shouldn’t try to be someone other than who you actually are.

And when it comes to Orthodox architecture, that’s a dynamic we American converts struggle with.

A lot.

Stick with me here, for a minute.

In our most recent posting, we’ve been talking about what it is, exactly, that makes a building Orthodox. Folks will focus on different features—the narthex/nave/Holy Place layout, the color of the ceiling and the carpet, the particular kinds of crosses that are on display. But, for most American converts to the Faith, the Dome is the #1 Thing that makes a structure authentically Orthodox.

And while we’ve spent the last two weeks talking about the fact that Orthodox temples did not start out with domes and how there is a long tradition of temples without domes, we know that most of our fellow converts are probably not going to change their minds: they’re still going to want to see some kind of dome, even if they have to do a lot of architectural fudging in order to pull it off.

The reason our convert sisters and brothers are so insistent on this feature is because, by being received into the Church, they believe that they have become different. They believe that they are no longer the people they were before, and, since domes are not something that you see very much anymore in American ecclesiastical architecture, that distinct feature goes a long way towards supporting their new self-understanding.

Of course, there are lots of other ways we converts communicate the fact that we are now different.

• A man from South Carolina who is a buttoned-down financial planner grows a beard that spreads across his chest and down to his waist.

• A woman from a parish in Missouri who is learning to chant starts singing with hypernasality because she says it sounds more authentically ‘Middle-Eastern’.

• A young man from Wisconsin goes off to seminary. By the time he graduates, he’s speaking with an accent that is vaguely Central European.

• A woman named Alice from Sacramento announces on social media that her new name is Thekla.

Anyone who has spent any time at all in Orthodox Land knows that those examples are, actually, pretty tame.

And, of course, the irony is that, when we are received into the Church, we do become new people. Through the mercy of God the Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are united to Christ Jesus, and we are transformed as we grow in our relationship with The Most Holy Trinity.

But that is a very long process, and we don’t measure our progress with external markers.

If we want to know if we are drawing closer to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we ask ourselves two questions.

Are we sinning less? That means less anger, fewer lies, not as much overeating or over-drinking, along with reductions in envy, gossip, and porn usage.

And are we acquiring the virtues—are we becoming righteous? That’s going to look like increased patience and the ability to admit mistakes and the humility to listen to what other people are actually saying.

Of course, that’s hard work, and it’s a whole lot easier to just grow a beard and announce that you’ve changed your name.

Domes feed into that dynamic. Even if these features are done badly—and they often are—they still allow converts to think to themselves, “I must be different. I’m worshipping in a building that’s unlike anything else in American Christianity.”

Now, sure, I don’t know if there are any folks who actually formulate their thoughts in that fashion, but I do know that a lot of our convert sisters and brothers who are only able to define their new identity over and against what they have left behind.

Which is why former Pentecostals often get agitated if anyone says anything positive about charismatic worship. It’s why folks who were previously Episcopalian get nervous when the choir gets a little too polyphonic. It’s the reason people who used to be Baptists get anxious when someone suggests the parish might offer a vacation church school next summer.

Folks just feel the need to distinguish themselves from their previous communions. And that carries over into architecture. So, when folks are less than enthusiastic about the cruciform basilica design of our new temple, most of the time, what’s really behind that is the concern that the building isn’t going to be distinctive enough…

as in, it’s just too Western…

which, ultimately, is just code for—“It reminds me of what I’ve left behind.”

But at St John’s, we spend a good deal of time helping converts appreciate what those other communions gave us. After all, it’s where most of us learned the Name of Jesus. It’s where we heard our Bible stories. It’s where we were taught what the Christian life looks like.

So, there is no reason not to be thankful for the Sunday School teachers who instructed us and the youth pastors who supported us and the choir directors who taught us to sing and the pastors who proclaimed to us the Holy Scriptures.

In the very same way, there is no reason—none at all—why we cannot gratefully use the architecture of the early Christian West. Sure, things went off the rails in the late Middle Ages, but the cruciform basilica design is firmly within the tradition of the pre-Schism Faith, so it’s part of the holy inheritance that has been passed down to us.

And, for cryin’ out loud, people: This is Texas.

So, there’s just not going to be a better place for a temple that makes use of the Best of the Christian West.

But there are even bigger issues at stake here.

Because we live in a culture where all kinds of people want to be Someone Else—to the point that they are willing to undergo incredibly complex and painful surgical procedures. So, just a glance at that horizon lets you know how important it is that we stay true to Who We Really Are in the Faith and in our relationship with the Most Holy Trinity.

The Staple Singers had it right back in 1972.

We’ll get our funk on in just a moment, but, first, help us stay true and build that new temple by offering the Akathist for a New Temple (PDF/video). Upgrade your subscription to Paid. Pick up some CSSB merchandise. Commission an image in the Calming Room of our new temple. Make a direct donation to our building fund.

And we’ll hand it over to Sister Mavis and Papa Roebuck.

That’s us blessing the fine group of young people (and parents) that our community sent off to Camp St Raphael a few weeks ago.

Camp St Raphael is located in the wilds of Oklahoma, so, when we blessed the campers, we included some prayers for protection against your basic Okie varmints—chiggers, ants, mosquitoes, scorpions, Sooner fans—and it reminded us of that tune Jerry and Dawg covered all those years ago.

Blessing the Vehicles

And that’s us Blessing all the Vehicles in the parish this past Sunday.

We already talked about the reasoning behind this in detail, but, basically, it has to do with the fact that this past Monday, July 20, was the Feast of the Holy Prophet Elias.

That’s the Man of God riding up to heaven in a “chariot of fire” drawn by “horses of fire” (II Kings 2.11), and, while none of the cars and trucks and motorcycles that we blessed emitted flames, with the temperature topping 100, our procession, for sure, had some sizzle.

In fact, between the full vestments (including those funny Orthodox hats) and all the walking and the repetitive motion involved in making sure over 200 vehicles were sufficiently doused with Holy Water, at the end of our Parking Lot Parade, we looked like old Wilson Pickett used to look at the end of his set.

And out of all the perspiratory people in the world, why would we be thinking right now about Wicked Wilson Pickett?

Well, other than the fact that it demonstrates how we are, deep down, absolutely and genuinely funky (I mean, c’mon: just look at those hats!) it’s because when it comes to singing about having just the right kind of ride, nothing beats his R&B classic—and we’ve got it queued up at the end of this post.

Blessing the World

But, to paraphrase another great blues artist, we’ve still got some more blessin’ to do.

Which is why we want to remind you about the Vigil for St Eanswythe that we are going to be serving in the overnight hours of Sunday, August 30, and Monday, August 31. As we hope you know, St Eanswythe is the Patroness of our Building Program; August 31 is her feast day. So, for the past four years, we’ve offered a vigil on that day.

And, yes, staying up all night produces what we call, in Orthodox Land, ‘Liturgy Lag’—pretty much the exact same feeling that you get after an international flight across numerous time zones. But it’s worth it because the whole world is blessed during that long series of services.

But this year’s vigil is going to be even more exciting, because, before we kick off that six-hour series of services, we’re going to unveil a surprise.

And, no, we’re not going to provide you with clues or hints, because, well, then it wouldn’t be a surprise.

So just plan on joining us for the Big Reveal on August 30, and then hang around through the hours of the night as we pray for our new temple and ask the Most Holy Trinity to bless the entire planet.

But even if you’re not able to be there to watch the sun rise with us on August 31, there are still all sorts of ways you can help us out.

You can offer the Akathist for a New Temple with us each week (PDF/video).
You can restack this post, share it with everyone, or take out a Paid subscription.

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You can pick up some Come See Something Beautiful clothing.

You can commission an image of a beloved pet for the Calming Room of our new temple.

You can make a direct donation to our Building Fund.

And, as promised, we’ll wrap all this up the soulful (and, yes, slightly soggy) Mr. Pickett.

We’ve made the point that doing a dome right is an expensive undertaking—in fact, that’s one of the main reasons why, at St John’s, the temple we’re planning to build is going to use the Basilica Design, a model that does not require a dome.

But, then, lots of folks want to know: If domes are so darn dear (yeah, we went for the alliteration on that one), then why do you see them on so many Orthodox buildings?

Well, that’s because most of those features are not Structural Domes; they’re Ornamental Domes.

Here’s the difference:

Structural Domes are constructed using brick, stone, reinforced concrete, or whatever structural system is being used in the walls of the building. Those structural materials are used to create an open half-sphere dome on top of a cylindrical drum-shaped opening. To connect the dome to the rest of the building, a variety of techniques are used.

With a four-pillar base, triangular pendentives transition the bottom opening of the dome down to the four main columns.

With a square or octagonal base, semicircular squinches (which is just the coolest word ever) transition the bottom opening of the dome down to eight points, which can then be supported either by columns or the walls.

But these techniques also allow the massive weight of the brick and concrete vault to be distributed throughout the building.

On the other hand, Ornamental Domes are manufactured using metal, fiberglass, PVC, or wood. These vaults are then positioned with a crane and attached to the building in a variety of ways:

• sometimes they are mounted on the building’s structural frame;

• sometimes they are simply fixed to the top of the structure.

This approach does not require pendentives or squinches because an Ornamental Dome doesn’t weigh anywhere near as much as an Actual Dome. However, you will still often see faux (that’s French for fake) pendentives and squinches made of sheetrock in buildings that feature an Ornamental Dome because that’s what folks expect an Orthodox temple to look like, and so they are added as decorations.

So, what’s the Take Away on all this?

The main thing to notice is that Structural Domes are more expensive because including that feature in a building has a dramatic impact on the entire structure: the temple must be able to support the pressure that is going to be generated by that kind of vault.

But the question then becomes: why in the world should we go to all that trouble? If more modern, less expensive techniques are available—and the end result looks pretty much the same—why choose a Structural Dome over an Ornamental Dome?

We’ve actually written about this dynamic before, but, this time around, let’s think about it like this:

• Somewhere, right now, there’s a chanter who’s experimenting with an app that will provide the ison, or drone note, to accompany him when he’s singing. He doesn’t have anyone in his community who really knows how to do that, but the app is free, and the more he tries it out, the better it sounds.

• Somewhere, even as you are reading this post, there’s a priest who has just printed off his first AI homily. It’s been a busy week with lots of meetings and hospital visits and extra time spent helping a family in crisis, and he tells himself that he will only go to the Large Language Models when there’s another week like this one, but, as he reads the sermon, he’s amazed at how good it is.

• Somewhere, down the road, you’re at a Pan-Orthodox Conference, and you’re in the vendor area, and you see a sign for an Iconographic Artist. When you get to the booth, what you find is a really friendly couple who specializes in customized, computer-generated Iconic Images: they never use the words icon or iconographer, but they produce some really amazing items on their 3D printer, and you end up buying one of their Real Reproductions for your prayer corner at home.

That’s the world in which we live, a world where people are no longer entirely sure what is and is not real. So, what we do in the Church has to be rock-solid reliable, from the music that we sing, to the words that we speak, to the images that we venerate.

And, of course, that includes the temples that we build.

But there’s still one other way that folks push back on all this: They point out that it’s 2026. They point out that no one does that kind of monumental architecture anymore. They point out that if we’re so concerned about what is real, then we need to get real about the real limitations of the real world in which we live.

But here’s what we say to that: Check out this beautiful slice of reality

This temple was completed in Romania just last year, and it features a Structural Load-Bearing Masonry Dome

And, hey, if they can do it in Romania, we can do it in Texas.

Now we’ve already made it clear that our temple is going to be constructed using the Basilica Design. But the much smaller chapel we’re planning will have a dome, and you’d better believe it’s going to be a Structural Dome.

Of course, one advantage that the folks in Romania have on us is that they got some of their funding from state sources. Texas is still a fairly religious place, but our State Legislature isn’t likely to put together a bill to help us build everything we’d like to build (though, for sure, if anyone connected with the governor’s office would like to give us a call, we would be happy to talk with you!).

That’s why we’re out here on these internet intersections raising money, so please share this post with everyone you know, and think seriously about taking out a Paid Subscription, purchasing a Come See Something Beautiful hoodie, commissioning an image of a departed pet for the Calming Room of our new temple, or making a direct donation to our Building Fund.

And, by all means, offer the Akathist for a New Temple (PDF/video) with us every single week.

We’ll sign off with a little construction music by The Jordanaires, and we’ll look forward to that day when we will get to pray with all of you in our new, domed chapel.

And, during our recent postings about the history of the Basilica Design, and how we are using that design in our new temple, one of those alert readers asked a question:

“Aren’t you actually going to be building a Cruciform Basilica? That’s what it says on the Plans for Our Temple section of the Substack.”

And, of course, that’s exactly what it says:

So, now, you’re probably wondering about the difference between a cruciform basilica and a regular basilica.

Well, it all boils down to a feature called a transept.

A transept is a bay on either side of the nave; these bays are oriented transversely to the nave, giving the entire area a cruciform—or cross-like—shape.

And, actually, it is this addition to the Basilica Design which made the model distinctly Christian.

If you’ll remember, the basilica was originally just a generic Roman administrative complex, but adding the transepts signed the model with the same symbol that we Orthodox Christians use numerous times a day—the same symbol that we wear around our necks, the same symbol that was made on our bodies when we were received into the Church.

Historically, transepts have been used for all sorts of things: depending on the size of the building, those bays can function as side chapels or as reserved seating for dignitaries of various kinds. Nowadays, transepts are often occupied by a communities’ musicians: the choir is set up on one side of the nave; the chanters do their work on the other side of the nave.

But transepts also have an important iconographic function. These bays make it possible to gather together and develop particular iconographic themes. For example, we’ve shared this particular graphic before, but it shows the images that will be used in the transepts in our new temple:

On the south—or right—side of the nave, the transept will feature murals that focus on the Birth of our Lord and Master: The Annunciation, The Nativity, The Adoration of the Magi:

On the north—or left—side of the nave, the transept will feature murals that focus on the Passion of our Lord and Master: The Burial, The Descent into Hell, The Adoration of the Myrrh-Bearing Women:

So, these bays will highlight some of the most decisive and the most dramatic episodes of The Incarnation: The Birth and The Passion of Christ Jesus.

But the folks who read this Substack aren’t just observant; they’re also very, very practical, so, right now, a lot of you are thinking something along these lines:

“OK. Transepts. Check. Long history with this sort of design. Got it. But really: Who’s going to stand in the middle of that building and look back and forth at the images on both sides of that long structure? You would just end up feeling silly, and your neck will give out. If anything, everyone’s going to be focused up front—that’s where the action is, after all—so why not concentrate the iconography in that part of the complex?”

Those are good points. We’ll begin our response by pointing out that we actually do have a whole lot of iconography up in the front of the temple.

And then we’ll point out that, sure, folks will feel silly, and their necks will get tired looking back and forth at the images in the two different transepts, but you know what? They’ll do it anyway. In fact, a lot of people will actually come by the temple during the week so that they can just light a candle and say their prayers and then do that silly, neck-swivel thing when no one else is around.

Beauty just has that kind of impact on people.

And here’s another way those bays will impact folks: Once people realize that they spend most of their time in the Divine Services in a space that is defined by images of the Birth and The Passion of our Lord and Master, then they will realize that their own personal stories are part of a much bigger Story.

A Story that is transforming and hopeful.

A Story that is healing and redemptive.

And even though they will probably never, ever be able to put it into words, they will also come to realize that their personal stories are not, finally, defined by

• the pay day cycle

• the results of their most recent medical exam

• their supervisor’s moods

• the latest political polls

• the stock market’s performance

• their grade point average

• their porn addiction

• their grandchild’s disability

That’s why we want to build a basilica with transepts that are adorned with beautiful iconography. Because all of us are part of a bigger Story.

A Story that is transforming and hopeful.

A Story that is healing and redemptive.

A Cruciform Story.

Please help us with this effort. Offer the Akathist for a New Temple (PDF/video) along with us. Purchase some of our CSSB clothing, commission an image of a beloved pet for the Calming Room of our new temple, or become a Paid Subscriber.

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Donate to our Building Fund.

Because, as Bill Monroe reminds us, we can all be part of that bigger Story.