Note: I haven't forgotten Fr. Stephen's request for an upcoming difficult essay, and it's coming. But the last two pieces have been hard sayings in their own right, so today we're taking a breather with something funny instead.

My dad was a tough man, but he knew how to lead by example, and he knew when it was necessary. One spring in the early eighties, not long after I'd crossed over out of Webelos into my troop, he came with me on a camporee near Devil's Looking Glass, an enormous cliff face on the shores of the Nolichucky near the Unicoi/Washington County line in Tennessee. I couldn't have been more than twelve.

I was always glad when my dad could come on these trips. He worked hard and wasn't always able to get away, so it meant something when he could. He had his own stories of high adventure from the days when he used to skydive on flights out of Decker Farm Airport, on the Nolichucky over in Washington County, not far from where we stood. In my mind, a man who'd been Airborne, who'd jumped out of airplanes for fun, could do anything.

We were rappelling that day, and when my turn came, I needed to borrow some of his courage. I'd recently seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Sallah's line came to mind: "Very dangerous. You go first." I'm sure my dad knew I was quoting the movie. I'm just as sure he could see the worry on my face, and that both things were true at once.

He laughed, put on his own belt, and went through the safety talk with the belay. "On belay," came the call, and over he went, cracking jokes the whole way, giving me a wink as he started down. "This is how you do it," he said. "You laugh in the face of danger."

Here's the trouble with borrowing courage from your father: once he's done the thing, you're obligated to do it too. There's no way to back out from a debt like that.

The strangest part of the descent wasn't the height. It was the position, leaning so far back that your feet are parallel to the wall and your back is parallel to the ground. It's an unnatural feeling, and I've never fully gotten over it in all the rappelling I've done since. I carried that weirdness the whole way down, maybe fifty feet in all, nowhere near the full face of the cliff. I don't want to make more of it than it was. But to a twelve-year-old, it was enough.

I don't remember what my dad said when I reached the bottom. I remember that he was smiling. I think now that he knew me well enough to know that once he'd gone first, I couldn't back down, and maybe that's part of why he smiled.

"Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross."

— Philippians 2:5-8 (KJV)

I didn't understand what I'd seen that day. I only knew I'd found courage I didn't have on my own. It was years later, as a grown man, that I recognized what my father had actually done. He hadn't just gone first to make me brave. He'd shown me servant leadership, the willingness to do himself whatever he was going to ask of me. He wouldn't send me anywhere he hadn't gone.

That's what Christ has done for us, and more. The hardest place He could ever call us to is a place He has already gone Himself, as part of our salvation. He did not remain in the form of God and call from a distance. He emptied Himself, took the form of a servant, and went first, all the way to death, so that wherever we're asked to go, we find He's already been there.

"Some old men came to see Abba Poemen and said to him, 'When we see brothers who are dozing at the synaxis, shall we rouse them so that they will be watchful?' He said to them, 'For my part, when I see a brother who is dozing, I put his head on my knees and let him rest.'"

— Abba Poemen, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection

My dad knew when to push me and when to carry the weight himself. That's a kind of discernment I didn't have words for at twelve, and I'm not sure I'd have named it as holiness if you'd asked me then. But I see it now, and I'm grateful for it, the same way I'm grateful for a Father who did not ask anything of me that He was not willing to do first.

If any of this stirs something in you, something about a father, a fear, a debt of courage you're still carrying, I'd urge you to take it to your own priest or father confessor. These things settle best in that place, not in the comment section of a Substack.

References

1. Scripture: Philippians 2:5-8, King James Version (public domain).

2. Saint quote: Abba Poemen, saying 15, in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward, foreword by Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984).

3. Film reference: Sallah's line, "Asps. Very dangerous. You go first," from Raiders of the Lost Ark, dir. Steven Spielberg (Paramount/Lucasfilm, 1981).

4. Devil's Looking Glass, a rock formation on the Nolichucky River near the Unicoi/Washington County line, Tennessee, rising approximately 800 feet above the river, alongside TN-81 South. Coordinates: 36.1414967°N, 82.4437511°W. Sourced in part to Charles Edwin Price, Haunted Tennessee (1995).

5. Decker Farm Airport, former skydiving airfield on the Nolichucky River, Washington County, Tennessee (now farmland). Coordinates: 36°12′00″N, 82°29′00″W.

Dolly Parton died today in Nashville. She was eighty years old.

I am not going to try to tell you who she was to the world. Other people will write that piece, and they will write it well. She sold more records than most of us can imagine, built a theme park that remade the economy of these hills, sang harmonies with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt that still stop me cold when I hear them. I have walked through the Gospel Music museum at Dollywood more times than I can count, and every time it has brought back some memory of a better, simpler evening.

But what I keep coming back to today is a coat.

She wrote a song once about a coat her mother made her out of scraps of rag, sewn together with a story about Joseph in the Bible to make a poor child feel like a rich one. It was not sentimental. It was true. My own parents and grandparents knew those kinds of hard times in these mountains, the kind where a mother has to turn nothing into something and call it love, and a family has to believe her. Dolly did not invent that. She just knew how to sing it back to us so we would remember it was sacred.

There is an old story behind that coat, older than the mountains, older than the song.

Now Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age. Also he made him a tunic of many colors.

Genesis 37:3, NKJV

That coat, in the old story, becomes the thing the brothers strip from Joseph and stain with blood and use to break their father’s heart. It is a mark of love turned into a weapon of envy. Dolly took that same image, a coat sewn from nothing, and turned it back the other direction. Not envy. Gratitude. Not something taken, but something given, and given again, for the rest of her life, to strangers’ children in strangers’ mailboxes.

Saint John Chrysostom, preaching on the paralytic let down through the roof, said this about the trials God permits us to pass through:

“For as a gold refiner having cast a piece of gold into the furnace suffers it to be proved by the fire until such time as he sees it has become purer: even so God permits the souls of men to be tested by troubles until they become pure and transparent and have reaped much profit from this process of sifting.”

St. John Chrysostom, Homily on the Paralytic Let Down Through the Roof

I do not know what Dolly Parton believed about the furnace, or whether she would have put it in those words. I am not in the business of speaking for anyone’s soul, least of all hers, and the Church does not hand out that kind of certainty to a layman with a pencil and a Substack. But I know a woman who came up out of real poverty in these mountains and did not come up bitter. I know she took whatever fire shaped her and turned around and spent the rest of her life handing books and scholarships and second chances to children she would never meet. Whatever furnace she passed through, something purer came out the other side, and it kept giving itself away for sixty years.

Maybe the Church will never call her a saint, and it is not my place to say she should be. But here in East Tennessee, in these hills she never really left even when the whole world knew her name, we will say it anyway, the way you say something true about a neighbor rather than something official about a stranger: she was more than an entertainer. She was us. She never forgot where she came from, and she never stopped giving back.

Let us lift up our eyes unto the hills, and remember her there.

If you find yourself sitting with grief today, for Dolly or for someone nearer to you that her passing brings back to mind, I’d ask you not to carry it alone. Take it to your priest or father confessor. That is where these things belong.

-----

References

Scripture: Genesis 37:3, New King James Version

Saint Quote: St. John Chrysostom, Homily on the Paralytic Let Down Through the Roof, trans. W.R.W. Stephens, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Vol. 9

She won’t remember the blanket. She won’t remember Pooh with his paw of blue honey, or the little card that said 1 Month in a wreath of green, or the light coming in soft through whatever window it was that day. She won’t remember any of it, not because it wasn’t real, but because for her it will simply be the water she swims in. The endless present. The only kind of time a one-month-old knows.

I don’t remember things going back that far. But I remember my grandfather’s hands. The country gravel of his voice reading something at the kitchen table. I didn’t know, while it was happening, that it was the kind of thing you’d someday have to live without the immediacy of. I only found that out the day it became a memory instead of a presence. One day he simply was not there, and I had to learn to carry him a different way.

This is not a sad essay, though it touches sad things. It’s an essay about a discovery I made only because I lived long enough to make it, and could not have made any other way.

A few years back, my three daughters and I went to the Knoxville Zoo and reenacted a photograph from their childhood. Same bronze tortoise. Same poses, more or less — Amelia with part of a sandwich in her hand, Erika serene as ever, Jessica reaching up toward something only she could see. We took the new picture and set it beside the old one, and I noticed something strange. Neither one felt like the past to me. Both felt like now. With my own children, even now, even at their weddings and graduations, I don’t experience time as something that has passed. I experience it as something happening.

Gwendolyn is different, and I knew it the moment I held her. Not because I love her more or less than I loved my own children when they were small. Because I am aware, in a way I’ve never quite been aware of before, that my presence in her story has an edge to it. Even if I were granted the wildest longevity, even if I became some impossible nonagenarian wonder of a great-grandfather, I would still see only the opening chapters of a book she’ll go on reading long after I’ve closed my part of it. With my daughters I have lived, and am living, inside the same continuous present as they are. With Gwendolyn, for the first time, I am standing just outside of it, watching it the way you watch a river from the bank instead of from inside the current.

And here is the strange gift in that. To her, right now, I am not a man with an edge to his presence. I am simply here, the way the blanket is here, the way the light through the window is here. She is living, this very month, inside the same endless present I once lived inside with my own grandfather, not knowing yet that presence and immediacy are not the same thing forever. She will learn that the way I did. Not through being told, but through the telling becoming true.

As arrows are in the hand of a warrior, so are children of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them (Psalm 127:4–5).

I always understood that verse as being about abundance. More arrows, more happiness. I’m not sure that’s what it’s saying, or not only that. A quiver isn’t a trophy case. It’s built for release. Every arrow in it is already, in some sense, on its way out, whether it’s loosed at twenty or at eighty, whether we’re there to see where it lands or not. The fullness of the quiver was never about how many arrows you could keep. It’s about the whole shape of the thing, arrows already flown and arrows still resting against the leather, together.

I don’t think I understood that shape until Gwendolyn arrived. I couldn’t have. It took living long enough to stand outside my own present, however briefly, to see that the fullness of the quiver is only known in the fullness of time; and even then, only a little of it, only what a man is permitted to see from wherever he happens to be standing.

Elder Porphyrios, writing to parents, said something that I think reaches further than parents alone:

“The joy that will come to them, the holiness that will visit them, will shower grace on their children” (Wounded by Love: The Life and Wisdom of Elder Porphyrios, trans. John Raffan, Denise Harvey, 2005, pp. 195–205).

He was speaking to mothers and fathers, but grandparents suffer losses too, and grandparents too are asked to make, as he says elsewhere, a new start each day. The grace he describes doesn’t stop at one generation. It showers forward, through whatever hands are open to receive it, onto children we will only know the beginning of.

I am only beginning to understand what my own arrival meant to my grandmother. People told me, over the years, how much it mattered to her, and I heard them the way you hear a fact you have no way to weigh. I have a little more weight to work with now. Not the fullness. Just a little.

If this essay has stirred something for you, something about your own grandparents, or your own grandchildren, or the strange asymmetry of presence and memory, I’d ask you to bring it to your own priest or father confessor. These are not questions I can settle, only wonder at alongside you. He has made everything beautiful in its time; also He has put eternity in their hearts, so that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end (Ecclesiastes 3:11). We are given eternity in the heart, and only a little of the shape of it in the years we’re allotted. The rest we hold in trust, the way I now hold what my grandfather gave me, and the way Gwendolyn will one day, God willing, hold what I am only just now learning to give.

References

Scripture: Psalm 127:4–5, New King James Version

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:11, New King James Version

St. Porphyrios of Kavsokalyvia, Wounded by Love: The Life and Wisdom of Elder Porphyrios, trans. John Raffan (Limni, Evia, Greece: Denise Harvey, 2005), 195–205. https://www.orthodoxpath.org/saints-and-elders-counsels/34494/

Orthodoxy in many American parishes has become, over the last several years, a predominantly convert heavy community. The great migrations of foreign born families that defined the parishes of the twentieth century are still felt. They no longer define the parish experience in most places the way they did even ten years ago. Ten years ago, a convert like me, raised Protestant, baptized Catholic, chrismated Orthodox in mid-life, was the exception. Now it seems far more rare to find a Greek school in a parish than to find half a dozen families bringing whole milk, eggs, and other farm to table goodness to the parish functions, all of it defined by the raucous clamor of children. Our parish is overflowing with them. It is a joyful, noisy blessing.

When I was chrismated ten years ago, there was an otherness that called for explanation. Friends and relatives had questions. This is natural. But the biggest witness to my own family was not any words of comfort or reassurance I could have offered. It was what they saw about three and a half years ago, when the parish ladies threw a baby shower for my wife, who was expecting our youngest daughter. Nobody there was trying to convince my family of anything. They were simply gathered to support a woman getting ready to have a baby. My family had grown up with a certain idea of what a new, strange church looks like, an idea shaped by churches that seemed to be in the convincing business. What they saw instead was love with no agenda at all. That, I think, did more to settle my family’s concerns than any argument I could have made.

Fast forward several years. My wife and I were watching an interview on the television in the living room. A well-known convert priest was speaking. It does not matter which one, because today there are several. That was not the case when I was chrismated. Our son came bouncing through the living room on his way to the kitchen and paused at the screen.

“Oh, I know that priest,” he said.

“You do?” I asked. “How do you know him?”

He explained that this priest had come to his high school and spoken to the football players, varsity, JV, and junior high, who were part of the Christian athletes club. “He talked to us. It was cool.”

And just like that, I realized that what had been strange for me had become ordinary for my son. When I was in that same high school forty years ago, I had never heard of Orthodoxy. My own convert experience, like so many others I know, took place in a parish that counted its members in the dozens. Now we are hundreds, and the growth has not yet slowed. Nobody planned this. At least not on earth.

But stranger still, a well-known priest had come to town, spoken to a room full of teenage boys, and gone on his way. There was no fanfare. No announcement that Father So-and-So was coming, no special reception, no dinner with a love offering. Just a priest offering a blessing and a word to a football team. He came, and he went. There is a kind of peace in that.

Scripture

“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches.”

Matthew 13:31-32

He also told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened.”

Matthew 13:33

The kingdom does not announce itself with trumpets. It is buried in a field, folded into a lump of dough. It works unseen until, all at once, the birds are nesting in branches nobody remembers planting.

This is not a new thing that is happening to American Orthodoxy. It is a very old thing happening again.

Some fifteen hundred years ago, in a place called Paphlagonia, in what is now Turkey, there lived a hermit named Stylianos. He had given away his inheritance and gone to live alone in the desert. But word of his gentleness spread, and parents began entrusting their children to him, sometimes for a season, so that he might guide them and pray over their sicknesses. So many children were brought to him that Stylianos had to recruit fellow hermits just to help him tend to them all. The Church remembers him now as a protector of children, his icon showing him with an infant in his arms.

Nobody planned that either. A man went into the desert to be alone with God, and found himself running something very much like a nursery. The pattern is old: the Church fills up with children faster than anyone expects, and those entrusted with her care learn, sometimes with some scrambling, to make room.

I remember hearing once of monk-saints who, as children themselves, played ball with the other children of their villages, their cassocks flowing and tangling around their legs as they ran for the goal. I cannot yet find where I heard this, and I will not claim it as verified. But whether or not the detail is exact, the truth underneath it is not hard to believe. Sanctity has never required distance from ordinary childhood noise. It has often grown up right in the middle of it.

The Saints

A brother went to see Abba Macarius the Great and said to him, “Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.” So the old man said, “Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.” The brother went, threw stones at the graves and cursed them, then returned and told the old man what he had done. Macarius asked him, “Did they not answer you?” He said, “No.” The old man said, “Go back tomorrow and praise them.” So the brother went and called them apostles, saints, and righteous men, then returned and reported that he had complimented them. Macarius asked again, “Did they not answer you?” He said, “No.” Then the old man told him, “You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak. If you wish to be saved, you must do the same, and take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises.”

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward, p. 132

Macarius was not asking the brother to be indifferent to other people. He was asking him to be indifferent to their opinion of him. A priest who speaks to a football team and drives home is doing something a great deal simpler than it sounds. He is taking no account of praise. There is no love offering to receive, because he was never doing it to be noticed in the first place. The parish ladies who threw a shower for my wife were not trying to be seen doing a kind thing. They were doing a kind thing, and it happened to be seen.

Denouement

None of this means Orthodoxy has become unremarkable. It means the remarkable thing has stopped requiring an announcement. A field grows a mustard tree without a parade. A hermit fills up with children without meaning to start a school. A priest talks to a football team on a Tuesday and it is already old news by Wednesday. My son did not need me to explain any of it to him. He had already lived it.

There is a joke going around among Orthodox Christians now, the kind of joke that only makes sense once something has become common enough to laugh about. An inquirer asks, “Outside the Orthodox Church there is no…?” And the people answer, “Parking.”

It is a small joke, and I suspect it will not mean much to someone standing outside the Church looking in. But to those of us inside, packed shoulder to shoulder in an overflow lot on a Sunday morning, it means everything has changed, and also that nothing important has changed at all. The Kingdom of God is still within us, still hidden, still growing whether or not we can measure it. Christ still tells us not to look for it with careful observation, but to recognize that it is already among us.

If you find yourself wondering what this growth means, or unsettled by how ordinary the miraculous has started to feel, I would not trust my own reflections to settle it for you. Take it to your own priest, or to your father confessor. That conversation will do more for you than anything I can write here.

References

Scripture: Matthew 13:31-33, New King James Version

Saint quote: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, trans. Benedicta Ward (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975), p. 132

Stylianos of Paphlagonia: OrthodoxWiki, https://orthodoxwiki.org/Stylianos_of_Paphlagonia; Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylianos_of_Paphlagonia; Orthodox Church in America, https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/0577/11/26/103401-venerable-stylianus-of-paphlagonia

A fellow parishioner turned up in my hospital not long ago, and I found myself standing in the hallway outside the room working out what I was and was not free to do. I am not free to look at the chart. I am not free to ask the nurse on duty how the labs came back, or to offer my opinion on the plan of care. That restraint has a pledge behind it, Florence Nightingale's name is attached to it, and every nurse who has stood in a room of her classmates and spoken it aloud knows the weight of the sentence about confidence, that what passes between a nurse and her patient does not pass beyond that room.

But standing in that hallway, I noticed something else standing right alongside the canonical restraint, something nobody had ever written down for me or asked me to pledge to. I am also a parishioner. And a parishioner is not free to intrude either, chart or no chart, hospital or no hospital. I had been carrying two restraints all along without ever setting them side by side, one formal and one that I only recognized because I felt its shape in that hallway. For a long while I might have felt that narrowness as a kind of grief, one more place where love had to stand outside and wait. But standing there, I realized it was something else. It was freedom.

Because I am not free to intrude, I am free of the burden of intruding. I can visit on my lunch break, still in my scrubs, and hold a hand and share a joke and, more than either of those, I can pray. There is no medicine greater than that. And when my brother or sister returns to the parish, I am free to embrace them and be grateful, knowing that a medicine greater than my own did the greater part of the work.

That is the shape of it. The formal restraint I keep as a nurse is not really separate from the informal restraint I keep as a parishioner, a member of the family of Christ. It only wears a nurse's clothes on me because nursing is the vocation I happened to be given. Every one of us in the parish walks some version of this same path. We are not free to look into another man's plate during the fast and measure what he has allowed himself, any more than I am free to look into his chart. We are not free to trade in the particulars of what troubles our neighbor, dressed up as concern, which is only gossip wearing its Sunday clothes. Orthodoxy asks this of all of us, clinician or not: mind your own business, and do not let your eye grow dark with another man's affairs.

I have come to think this boundary protects three things at once, and I do not think that is an accident. It protects me from the particular pride of believing I am owed an explanation, that my concern entitles me to information, a stumbling block waiting to happen if I ever received it. It protects the dignity of my brother or sister, who is allowed to carry what they carry before God and their own father confessor without my eyes on it. And it protects the parish itself, the family we are, which cannot remain a family very long if it is also a courtroom.

Saint Paul says that if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it, and if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

I have felt the truth of that with no theology attached to it at all, only the plain feeling of a pew that is missing someone. I feel it during the liturgy. I feel it more at coffee hour, when the small talk moves around a gap the size of a particular person and no one quite says so. It is not necessary for me to know why they are gone for me to know that they are gone. The body feels its own member missing without needing the chart.

I have been meditating on this lately, on the brothers and sisters I have not seen in the parish for one reason or another, reasons that are none of my business and were never going to be. I am trying to discipline myself to do something small when I notice an absence, something that carries no accusation in it and asks for no explanation. An email. A line that says I have thought of them, that I remember the story they told me, that I hope to hear another one soon at coffee hour. Gratitude costs nothing and asks for nothing back.

Saint Anthony of Optina told his own flock that they should not be afraid of cholera, but of serious sin, for the scythe of death mows a man down like grass with or without cholera, and that they should place all their hope in the God without whose will not even the birds fall.

I think of that when I think of the ones I have not seen. None of us is owed the next liturgy. That is precisely why the not-knowing is a mercy and not a wound. I am not being kept from my brother's business. I am being kept for prayer, which is the one thing I am always free to offer him, sick or well, present or absent, whether I know his reasons or not.

And so when I do see that brother or sister again, when they come back through the doors and take up their place at coffee hour once more, I find that the parable of the prodigal is not the first thing that comes to my mind, though I understand why it might be another man's first thought. What comes to me instead is much smaller and much more my own. I cannot say that they have been restored. I do not know what they carried or how it was resolved, and it was never mine to know. But I can say that I have been restored, seeing them home again.

We grieve for those who have gone to their reward, as we should. But let us not let the joy for those who simply return to us, even if only for a season, go unnoticed. That, too, is medicine. That, too, is the parish being a family in Christ.

If any of this touches on a wound of your own, on a person you are missing or a boundary you are unsure how to walk, take it to your own priest or father confessor. He knows you and your household in a way no essay can.

---

References

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:26, New King James Version.

Saint quote: St. Anthony of Optina, in Living Without Hypocrisy: Spiritual Counsels of the Holy Elders of Optina, trans. Archimandrite George (Schaefer) (Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Publications, 2009), Sickness section.

Historical note: Florence Nightingale and the pledge that bears her name, taken by nursing students at graduation, referencing the tradition of patient confidentiality in the nursing profession. https://nursing.vanderbilt.edu/news/2010/11/03/florence-nightingale-pledge/

The children went back to school this week. I heard them on my walk this morning before I saw them, that particular cadence of small voices reciting the pledge, drifting over the fence at the track where I have started going before my shifts. I have two jobs now, and nursing school behind me at last after ten years of working toward it, and I do not always have the time for a walk. But I had it this morning, and I am glad I did, because on the way home I stopped at the elevated beds my wife keeps and found two peppers hanging low under the leaves. Small ones. Easy to miss if you were not looking down at just the right angle.

It is not much of a harvest to carry to the blessing of the first fruits this year. But I mean to carry it anyway, and I have been turning over all morning why two small peppers should sit in my chest the way they have.

A few years back, Fr. Stephen Freeman came to speak at the 2023 Nativity Retreat at Christ the Savior Greek Orthodox Church in Bluff City, Tennessee, with Fr. Stephen Mathewes giving the introduction. During the question and answer session, I asked him something about the ground and my grandfather, and I do not remember now exactly how I phrased it. His answer was plain, almost too simple to have stayed with me the way it has: if a garden helps your spirit, then gardening is what you need to do. It was not a weighty piece of theology. I did not need it to be. I needed it to be true, and it was.

I did not know then how much I would need those words later. This has been a year of firsts, the first year with my new granddaughter and the first without my dad. I have felt both of those at once more mornings than I can count, and I felt them both this morning, standing over the pepper bed with the sound of children reciting the pledge still hanging in the air behind me.

For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel. (Zechariah 4:10)

I have read that verse before without much weight attached to it. It reads differently over two peppers.

It was said of Abba John the Dwarf that in his early days at Scetis, his elder gave him a piece of dry, dead wood and told him to plant it in the ground and water it daily until it bore fruit. The water was so far away that watering it cost him the better part of a day, out in the evening and back the following morning. He did this for three years before the wood came to life. When it finally bore fruit, the old man carried it to the brethren and said, “Take and eat the fruit of obedience.”

I think about that story differently now than I did the first time I heard it. Three years of walking for water and getting nothing back but the walking itself. I have not walked nearly that long, and what I am tending is smaller than a tree and further from certain. But the shape of it is the same. You water the thing you cannot see the use of yet, because someone wiser than you told you it was allowed, and you keep doing it through the years that give you nothing to hold, and then one morning there are two peppers under the leaves and you are not prepared for what that will do to you.

I do not know that two peppers mean anything beyond what they are. I am not sure I am the right one to say what they mean, even to myself. But I would rather bring them to the blessing than leave them on the vine, and I would rather sit with what my priest makes of it than decide on my own. If there is wonder here, and I believe there is, it belongs less to me than to the God who does not despise small things, and to a father confessor who can tell me what I am too close to see.

References

Scripture: Zechariah 4:10, King James Version. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Zechariah%204%3A10&version=KJV

Saint quote: Abba John the Dwarf, in Benedicta Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975), 85.

Fr. Stephen Freeman: remarks during Q&A, 2023 Nativity Retreat, Christ the Savior Greek Orthodox Church, Bluff City, TN, December 9, 2023 (retreat recorded; Q&A exchange from personal recollection). Video: https://youtu.be/pxfBtttrxWE​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There are many stories I would love to share about my maternal grandfather, my Papaw Dickenson, as we called him. He was born in 1892 near Russell, Virginia, in the country that would soon after become Dickenson County. His father, my great-great-grandfather, rode on horseback all the way to Richmond to record the birth. The certificate that came of that long ride gives the place of birth simply as Russell, a place name rather than a county, since the county itself did not yet carry that name in any official sense my Papaw could later point to on a map.

Family memory holds that we were kin, however distantly, to the man for whom Dickenson County was eventually named, and that he was a Union man in a part of the country where such loyalties were not simple things to hold. The documented history is more particular than the family memory, as documented history so often is. Dickenson is a name thick on the ground in that part of southwest Virginia, and my mother, who has looked into it more than I have, cannot say for certain whether the connection was an uncle, a great-uncle, or some further cousin twice removed. What the record does show is that Dickenson County was carved in 1880 from parts of Russell, Wise, and Buchanan counties, and named for a Russell County legislator who did not seek the honor. He is said to have declined it until a state senator proposed naming the new county Stonewall instead, after the Confederate general. Faced with that alternative, the legislature settled on Dickenson after all. Whatever the exact thread that ties my grandfather to that man, I find something fitting in a family holding fast to a memory of Union sympathy even while the documented history complicates the telling. Memory and record do not always agree, and I have come to think that both deserve to be honored, each in its own way.

In his youth my Papaw labored in the mines and later as a brakeman on the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway, the C.C.&O., which by the time it was finished was reckoned, in constant dollars, the most expensive railroad ever built in this country. It cut through the mountains of Appalachia by way of heavy trestles and fifty-five tunnels, carrying coal down out of Kentucky and citrus back up from the south into the hills. My Papaw loved his years on that railroad more than almost anything else he did in his working life, though the work itself was hard enough. Braking a train in those days meant walking the cars out in the open air, in every kind of weather, with nothing between a man and a bad step but his own sure-footedness.

He had more than one colleague given to music. The C.C.&O. itself was the subject of a song, “C.C.&O. Number 558,” recorded by Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters, though that is a story for another day. What I want to tell here is smaller. One of my grandfather’s fellow railroad men had a habit of meeting trouble with a rhyme. On one occasion the tender, the car that carried a locomotive’s coal and water, caught fire. When the bosses came around asking after the cause, this same colleague offered up a little verse on the spot:

The tender got hot, till the roof caved in,

And it plugged up the hole, where the coal went in.

By my Papaw’s telling, the rhyme tickled the bosses enough that no one connected with the accident was disciplined over it. A man in trouble, given the choice between excuse and honesty delivered with a wink, chose the wink, and it served him well.

That rhyme did not stay behind on the railroad. My grandfather carried it with him the rest of his days, and he brought it out whenever some ordinary difficulty crossed his path. I remember working alongside him when a rototiller balked and would not do what he expected of it. He would sit back with a sigh, and out would come the same old lines: the tender got hot, till the roof caved in, and it plugged up the hole, where the coal went in. It was not really about the rototiller, or the fire, or even the railroad anymore by then. It was a way of meeting the small, aggravating failures of an ordinary day without giving them more of himself than they deserved.

Scripture

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

Proverbs 17:22, King James Version

Saint Quote

Amma Syncletica, one of the Desert Mothers whose sayings were gathered into the Apophthegmata Patrum, taught that struggle and toil come first for those who draw near to God, and only afterward the joy that cannot quite be put into words. She likened it to a man trying to light a fire, choked and teary-eyed with smoke before he ever gets his flame.

I do not think my grandfather’s colleague was drawing near to God when he made up his little rhyme about a burning tender. But I have come to believe that the same instinct was somehow at work in him all the same, the instinct to pass through the smoke of a bad moment toward something lighter on the other side, rather than staying choked in it.

I still lose the television remote in the couch cushions more often than I would like to admit. And more often than not, when I finally give up hunting and just have to laugh, I hear my own voice reciting my Papaw’s line, which was never even his own to begin with. It came from a nameless railroad man on the C.C.&O., handed to my grandfather, and handed by him to me, without either of them ever meaning to teach me anything at all. I only received it. That is, I think, how the best of what we inherit usually comes to us.

If any of this stirs something in you, a family rhyme, a small inheritance of your own that has outlived the person who first gave it, I would encourage you to bring it before your priest or father confessor. There is more wisdom folded into these small things than we often credit, and a good confessor can help you see what is truly there.

References

Scripture: Proverbs 17:22, King James Version. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Proverbs-17-22/

Saint Quote: Amma Syncletica, Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers), Syncletica 1, as translated in Benedicta Ward’s Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Text available at https://publicorthodoxy.org/2020/12/04/encouragement-from-the-desert-mothers-in-troubling-times/

Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway (C.C.&O.), history and construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinchfield_Railroad

“C.C.&O. Number 558,” recorded by Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.models.railroad/c/JVod37Rb7aw

Dickenson County, Virginia, formation and naming for William J. Dickenson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickenson_County,_Virginia

William J. Dickenson, biography and the naming of Dickenson County: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Dickenson

My grandmother had a story she told more than once, and I never learned exactly how old it was by the time it reached me. An elder of her church had come to speak with my grandfather about a disagreement she’d had with somebody, some accusation laid at her feet, the particulars of which I never knew and never asked after. What I do know is that my grandfather, upon hearing the purpose of the visit, invited the elder to stay for supper. My grandmother protested. She should not, she said, have to feed a man who had come to accuse her. My grandfather answered, mild as he was, that maybe they were heaping coals on his head. And my grandmother, in the telling, always gave the same reply.

“No, Arthur. You’re heapin’ them on mine.”

I used to laugh at that story without much thought for what it cost her to tell it. It must have been thirty years old by the time I first heard it, and she told it more than once after that, which means she was still carrying it decades on. As a younger man I wondered how a person holds onto something that long. I don’t wonder that anymore.

Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before. (Philippians 3:13, KJV)

I will tell a story on myself. Years ago, when I worked in IT, I had a client, a small bank up in Rochester, New York, and I would fly up from time to time to talk with them about their database. I don’t recall the name of the bank now. What I remember is that it was winter, cold in the way only upstate New York can be cold, and that I stood in front of a room of bank employees with an early smartphone, something like a Droid, tucked in my pocket. I was certain I had turned it off. Partway through my talk it began to buzz, uncontrollably, again and again, interrupting me each time. In some desperation I finally pulled the battery out of it by hand, in front of everyone. The people gathered there had mercy on me. We all had a laugh, and I went on with the talk. But it was a mortifying few minutes, and I carried the mortification home with me on the flight back to Knoxville, the cold outside the window the whole way.

That was twenty years ago now. I still feel my cheeks go warm when I think of it.

Nobody wronged me in that room. There was no elder, no accusation, nothing to forgive. Just a phone I couldn’t silence and a room full of strangers who were kind enough to laugh with me rather than at me. And yet here I am, two decades later, still stacking coals on my own back for an offense that was never anyone’s to hold against me in the first place. My grandmother at least had cause. She was answering a real accusation with real coals, misdirected onto herself out of love for my grandfather. I have no such excuse. I have only the habit of it.

Amma Syncletica, one of the Desert Mothers, drew a distinction that has stayed with me since I first read it.

“There is grief that is useful, and there is grief that is destructive. The first sort consists of weeping over one’s own faults and weeping over the weakness of one’s neighbors, in order not to destroy one’s purpose, and attach oneself to the perfect good. But there is also grief that comes from the enemy, full of mockery, which some call accidie. This spirit must be cast out, mainly by prayer and psalmody.”

I think what I feel on that flight home, and what I still feel now when the memory surfaces, is the second kind. It wears the clothes of humility. It even feels, in the moment, like a kind of honesty, as though refusing to let myself off the hook proves I take my failures seriously. But it moves nowhere. It doesn’t turn me toward repentance or toward the perfect good Syncletica speaks of. It only circles the same embarrassment again, mocking, the way old coals get stirred up and made to glow red once more though the wood underneath them was spent long ago.

There must be a point, I think, past which we are meant to let the fire go out. My grandmother heaped hers in a moment of real love, misdirected but at least aimed at something. Mine has no such aim. It is only a habit of self-accusation for a debt that was settled in that room in Rochester twenty years ago, forgiven before I ever left it.

I want to be honest about something here, because I think it matters more than any insight this essay might offer. Naming this pattern in myself, writing it down, even recognizing Amma Syncletica’s grief that comes from the enemy at work in my own chest, has not once made the coals stop burning. I knew, rationally, on that flight home, that I was carrying something far heavier than the moment deserved. Knowing that did not lighten it. If reasoning my way out of it were possible, I would have done so decades ago. Whatever actually melts this kind of thing is not a realization. It is something that happens to a person, in the sacraments, in the quiet and specific counsel of a father confessor who knows you by name and knows what you are actually carrying, not in an essay written for strangers.

So I offer you my own coals, still warm after twenty years, not as a lesson but as a confession of my own. If you find you are heaping them on your own back for something long since forgiven, something no one but you is still holding against you, I cannot lift that from you here. That is not what this was for. Take it instead to your own priest, your own father confessor, and let him help you find where the fire is meant to go out.

REFERENCES

Scripture: Philippians 3:13, King James Version. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Philippians-3-13/

Saint Quote: Amma Syncletica, Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedicta Ward. https://www.saintjameslancaster.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Forum-23-Desert-Mothers-and-Fathers.pdf

Scripture (referenced): Romans 12:20, King James Version. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Romans-12-20/

Many years ago in 1993, I was blessed to have an extended tour of duty at the Coast Guard training facility in Yorktown, Virginia. It was my favorite duty station and the source of many wonderful memories. My school was delayed when I first reported, so I wound up spending several months working as an office aide in the National Search and Rescue School while awaiting my class to form up. We were not allowed to have vehicles on base at that time so I rode a bicycle everywhere. I routinely rode my bike down the Colonial Parkway from Yorktown to Williamsburg and back. It was a long but rewarding ride. I was in my twenties so I could handle things like that.

On one of these occasions, I happened on one of the many historical markers for sites along the Colonial Parkway. It was for an abandoned plantation, and there was a trail leading to the former homestead. The excursion I undertook that day became a core memory and has shaped my understanding of history, provenance, and what we can access about the truth of the past. You see, in Yorktown you are surrounded by history. One can casually walk around the grounds, see the cannons left behind, stand atop Redoubt Number Nine, and see the flag of surrender under glass in a museum. It is a curated past, accessible by an unaccompanied walk.

On the Coast Guard base itself there are trenches, which I was told were not from the Revolution but from the later Civil War, as well as a grave with glass over it and a sign proclaiming it one of the earliest European graves in America. One is surrounded there by history. But a question lingered in my young mind. How do I know that any of this stuff was real? Were the people who fought, lived, loved, and died here as real as me and my petty cares?

What was different about my experience at the old abandoned plantation was my awareness that life there was possibly not pleasant, and I had time to dwell on it. It was a lazy day of liberty, and I had nowhere else to be. So I walked the grounds of the old place and held up a red brick. I knew from my own heritage and schooling that bricks like this, if they followed the pattern of so many historical ones in Tennessee, were probably the result of the labor of enslaved people. I could see the outline of the brick footers of the big house there near the Parkway. I tried to imagine what life was like there two hundred years ago. For a moment my imagination got the better of me. Somehow I was able to imagine conversations, passing people, the work of two centuries past, and it was frankly more unsettling than it was whimsical. I felt moved by the reality of the history of this place in a way I never had been anywhere else before or since. I am at pains to describe it even now.

And afterward, I had a realization. Long before I became Orthodox, long before my journey to the Ancient Faith, I understood there were at least three different narratives alive at that old home site. One was my own imagination. The other was what the history books say. And the last is what God knows about life there. The first, my imagination, is the most fallible and the most perishable. The feeling I had there will likely die with me, since I lack the ability to translate it to you with absolute fidelity in words. What the history says happened there has better attestation than my feelings, but it too is subject to the fate of the Library of Alexandria and remorseless time. Only what God knows of that place will remain forever.

I believe this is what we mean when we say Memory Eternal. It is not our memory. It is God's. That is a humbling thought, and the only way I have come to know it is through wisdom that has been suffered more than sought. It is not something I could have read in a book. I will have to research and see if I can pin down which of the many sites along that parkway it actually was. No indeed, the knowledge I carry from that moment has come to me only through repetitive contemplation of the Jesus Prayer, and through knowing how much I do not know.

I believe now, as best as memory across three decades allows, that the place was Green Spring, just off the Colonial Parkway between Williamsburg and Jamestown. In the early nineties there was a small parking area and a short trail leading through the woods to the brick foundations of a seventeenth century manor house built by Sir William Berkeley, Virginia's colonial governor. Nothing stood above ground. An archaeological excavation had uncovered the site decades earlier, in 1954, but when the work was finished, the foundations were reburied to protect them. So the quiet, abandoned feeling I had that day was not simply the absence of a visitor center. The place actually had been opened and studied and then hidden again, waiting.

I also learned something in researching this very essay that I did not know, and could not have known, on the day I stood there. Green Spring passed from Governor Berkeley's family to the Ludwell family, and in that family was born a man named Philip Ludwell the Third. He was raised on that ground. And Philip Ludwell the Third is remembered as the first known convert to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in the Americas. He was received into the Church in London in 1738, translated Orthodox texts into English, and some who study the site believe he may have built a small chapel there on the plantation grounds, facing east in the old manner, since ordained clergy were scarce and plantation owners often kept worship close to home. He reposed an Orthodox Christian, with the full rites of the Church.

I want to be honest with you about this, because honesty is the whole point of the essay. I had no idea, none whatsoever, that the ground I stood on that day had any connection to Orthodox Christianity. I did not become Orthodox myself until many years later. I only discovered the connection while doing the research for this very piece.

When I told my wife the story, she did not grasp the weight of it at first. I gave her the background. A few minutes later she came back into the office and said, wait a minute, you were not Orthodox then, how did you know? So I told her again, plainly. I did not know. I did not know until I sat down to write this and went looking for the history. She thought about that for a moment and said, that is more than coincidence. I said, precisely.

Scripture

For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Corinthians 13:12

The Holy Tradition

Some old men once came to test Abba Anthony in the desert, bringing him a difficult verse of Scripture to interpret. He asked each of them in turn what it meant, from the youngest to the oldest, and to every answer he replied, you have not understood it. Last of all he turned to Abba Joseph and asked him the same. Abba Joseph said only, I do not know. And Abba Anthony said, indeed, Abba Joseph has found the way, for he has said, I do not know.

I do not know why I felt what I felt on that ground thirty years ago. I do not know if the man whose chapel may have stood near that spot had anything to do with the strange weight I carried away from it. I am not sure it is given to me to know such things this side of the glass, darkly. What I do know is that a plantation I visited as a young man not yet come to the Faith turns out, decades later and entirely without my seeking it, to be tied to the first Orthodox Christian in this land. I do not think that is coincidence. I think it is closer to what the Fathers would call providence, the kind that does not announce itself, that works quietly underneath our knowing and our not knowing alike, and waits patiently, the way that brick waited, the way that buried foundation waited, for us to notice.

If any of this stirs something in you, some ache to understand how memory and providence and history hang together in the mind of God, I would ask you not to take my word as the last one on it. Bring it to your own priest or father confessor. He will know better than I do how to help you carry it.

References

Scripture quoted from the King James Version, 1 Corinthians 13:12: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13%3A12&version=KJV

Saint quote from The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, translated by Benedicta Ward, SLG, under Abba Anthony: https://www.st-sergius.org/News/DF.pdf

Sir William Berkeley and the early history of Green Spring Plantation, James City County, Virginia: https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/047-0006/

Philip Ludwell III, first known Orthodox Christian convert in the Americas, born at Green Spring in 1716: https://www.ludwell.org/philip-ludwell-iii/

My oldest daughter was born thirty-five years ago. The time has slipped by so quickly I can scarcely believe it, but here we are, and recently I met her daughter, my first grandchild, for the first time. Mom and I drove down to Knoxville, as we had so many times before. I found myself narrating the trip the way I always do on that stretch of I-40, pointing out the building where I enlisted in the Coast Guard, the hotel where I spent my last night before shipping out to boot camp.

My daughter Jessica and my son-in-law Dietrich live in a split foyer colonial, not so different from the one I raised her in. A lovely little home with a closed-in veranda. When I held my granddaughter for the first time, there was a kind of magic in seeing that little face. You recognize it, but you also recognize your son-in-law in it, so it is different from seeing your own daughter’s face for the first time. As I held her, my mind went back to the flight home when Jessica herself was that size, and I knew, the way you know these things without wanting to, that I likely have fewer days ahead of me now than behind. And still, I am so blessed to be holding this little life.

Looking around my daughter’s home, the old adage about apples not falling far from the tree seemed to apply everywhere I looked. Woodburning projects I made as a boy now adorn her mantle. Books I read as a boy now sit on her bookshelf. The Irish tin whistle in B-flat that I played for years now rests as an ornament on her mantle too. The life of my youth shaped her youth, and now it is shaping the youth of this next generation.

For whatever reason, this is not a blessing granted to everyone, and I do not think pride is the proper stance toward it. I get a little nervous whenever people say, “Oh, you must be so proud.” I am Orthodox. Pride is not something we hold up as a virtue. I think a better word is gratitude, especially because I do not feel like it was earned. It was a grace given to me. My best friend passed away at thirty-six and never had the chance to have a family of his own. I have another close friend who never married, a confirmed bachelor his whole life, and he does not consider his life the poorer for it. This is not granted to everyone, and so I feel deeply blessed that it is part of my life. But the biggest thing I have experienced through it is not pride at all. It is mystery.

My mother asked me in the car on the way home whether you can ever know what kind of life you are going to have. I am not sure that you can. But I told her that I never really questioned whether I would have a big family. I knew from childhood, at least by the sixth or seventh grade, that I wanted a family and wanted to be surrounded by grandchildren someday. Other paths simply were not entertained. I could not tell you why. I imagined it, daydreamed about it, worked toward it. But wanting something and working toward it is not the same as earning it. I think the gratitude has to be rooted in the recognition that we are not the ground of our own existence.

“Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.”

— Psalm 127:3-5

Everything that exists, exists because of the ongoing will of God, as the Church has long understood it, though I could not have told you the philosophy of it standing in that room. The Logos, the Word that stood at the beginning of creation, is still being spoken. God is still willing creation to be. This, I think, is at the heart of the mystery of meeting your own grandchild for the first time. You did not will yourself into existence, and neither did you will this grandchild into existence. I may have been given the grace to imagine it and to long for it, but the greater grace, the grace of living it, did not come from me.

“Let everything take second place to our care of our children, our bringing them up to the discipline and instruction of the Lord… Form the soul of thy son aright, and all the rest will be added hereafter.”

— St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on 1 Timothy, Homily 9

I think of that instruction now, standing on the other side of it. I raised my daughter and tried, however imperfectly, to form her soul rightly. And now I watch her doing the same for her own daughter, using the same materials, quite literally, that shaped me. If there is any wisdom in what Chrysostom says, it is that the forming does not stop with us. It passes on. It becomes the inheritance itself.

I do not know how to resolve the mystery of grace and gift, of why some are given this and others are not, of what it means that I did not earn the very thing I most wanted. I am not sure it is mine to resolve. I only know that I stood in my daughter’s living room, surrounded by the artifacts of my own boyhood, holding a child who did not exist a year ago and now fills the room with her presence, and I understood that I was standing inside something much larger than myself.

If you are wrestling with your own questions of grace, inheritance, or providence, I would urge you, as I try to urge myself, to bring them to your own priest or father confessor. These are not questions for a nurse or a grandfather to answer alone.

References

• Scripture: Psalm 127:3-5, KJV. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%20127%3A3-5&version=KJV

• Saint quote: St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on First Timothy, Homily 9. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/230609.htm

This page exists because a reader deserves to know how the words in front of them came to be.

Orthodox Healing and Wonder is written by a layman, not a theologian, not a cleric. I am a nurse, a husband, a father, a convert to the Orthodox faith, and I write these essays under the blessing and oversight of my parish priest. What follows here are the principles by which this publication is made.

On permission. Every article on this Substack is written with the canonical permission of my parish priest. This is not a formality. It is the reason I am permitted to write at all.

On what these essays are. These essays are the reflections of a layman, not spiritual instruction. I do not teach. I witness. Where a piece touches on disputed theological questions, I do not resolve them. I point toward them and toward the tradition’s resources, and I ask the reader to bring the deeper questions to their own priest or father confessor.

On oversight. Every essay is subject to human editorial review, including fellow parishioners, priests and minor clergy of my acquaintance, and the affiliated publishing personnel of Runebooks.com. Nothing here reaches a reader unread by someone other than me.

On how these essays are made. Every essay begins in my own mouth. I am a working nurse with a family, and dictation, followed by my own further refinement, is the way Father Stephen has permitted me to keep this discipline of writing alongside the rest of my calling. What you read began as my voice, speaking honestly about something I saw, remembered, or knelt beside.

On sourcing. Facts are researched, and references are included at the end of every article. Where a source is uncertain, that uncertainty is disclosed rather than smoothed over.

On quotes from the saints. It is a principle of this publication that all quotes attributed to saints, Desert Fathers or Mothers, or other Orthodox figures come from a verified published source, such as a recognized academic translation. Where a quote’s precise sourcing cannot be confirmed, that is stated plainly in the piece itself.

On what this publication owes no one. This publication does not submit its work for adjudication by AI-detection tools, and does not treat their verdicts as truth. Such tools have no access to a person’s dictation, their prayer, their conversation with their priest, or the ground they knelt on to write what they wrote. What stands behind an essay here is the process described on this page, and the people named in it, not a percentage generated by software with no appeal and no accountability.

If you have questions about how a particular essay was written, or about the tradition it draws from, I welcome them. And as always: for anything beyond what these essays can rightly hold, please bring it to your own priest.

Oliver Collins was a hunted man before he was ever a soldier. In November of 1861, he fell into line with a company of Carter County men under Dan Stover and helped burn the railroad bridge at Zollicoffer, where the tracks crossed the Holston River. The stone abutments stand there yet, though the bridge itself is long gone. The Confederate authorities wanted the bridge burners found and hanged, and Oliver Collins went into hiding, and then into the Union army, not entirely by choice. He became a captain in the 13th Tennessee Cavalry, U.S.A., and rode under Gen. Samuel P. Carter. When Carter’s raid came back through in December of 1862 and the bridge at Carter’s Depot needed burning again, Oliver Collins was there for that one too, and family telling has it that he said something like, you have accused me of burning this bridge before; today you will see that I am truly guilty. I cannot verify those exact words, but I believe the spirit of them. A man who spent a year hiding from a rope does not sneak up on his own guilt a second time. He rides in and puts his name to it.

He survived the war. He lived to see my great-grandmother married in 1903. And now he lies in Williams Cemetery, where Union men and Confederate men rest in the same red clay, without regard to which side of the argument they took in 1861. Whatever quarrel put them at odds with one another, the ground has settled it in the only way the ground knows how.

I think about this because it is tempting, in every age, to believe that our troubles are new. That the speed of change, the fracturing of old certainties, the sense that the ground itself is shifting beneath us, is somehow unique to now. I do not believe that. My great-great-great-grandfather rode with a price on his head through mountains held by an army that wanted him dead, and he did it on a horse he was never paid for, and he came home and got married and buried children and grew old. Whatever presses on us today, it is not heavier than that.

All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. (Ecclesiastes 3:20)

There is a saying from the desert.

A brother came to Abba Macarius the Great and said, “Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.” The old man told him, “Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.” The brother went and hurled insults at the graves, then came back and reported what he had done. “Did they answer you?” Macarius asked. “No,” the brother said. “Then go back tomorrow,” said the old man, “and praise them.” So the brother returned and called the dead apostles and saints and righteous men, and came back once more to tell Macarius. “Did they answer you this time?” the old man asked. Again, no. And Macarius said to him: you insulted them, and they were silent. You praised them, and they were silent. If you wish to be saved, you must become dead to both blame and praise, just as they are.

I did not go to Williams Cemetery to curse or to praise. I went to clean a stone. But I understood something of what Macarius was pointing toward while I knelt there. The dead do not answer us, whichever way we speak to them. They have already given their testimony, and it is written in nothing louder than the ground itself. Union and Confederate alike, hunted men and men who did the hunting, they have all gone unto one place, and the dust does not sort itself by the causes we thought so urgent while we were breathing.

It has been a month now since my father’s passing, and I find I return to this thought more than any other. Whatever a man builds, whatever cause he serves, whatever he is right or wrong about in his own time, none of it is the inheritance that lasts. Oliver Collins left me a good story and a name in a regimental history, and a headstone I had to clean the moss from just to read it. What my father left me is not a story at all, but a faith and a love that do not turn to dust, because they were never made of it to begin with. That is the only heritage that does not need a headstone cleaned to be remembered.

If you find yourself standing over old graves, or new ones, and wondering what any of it means, I would not presume to have a final word for you. That belongs to your own priest or father confessor, who knows your grief in particulars I cannot. But I will say this much: go and stand there awhile. Let the ground preach to you in its silence. It has buried more quarrels than ours, and it is not finished teaching humility to those of us who still walk above it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Thank you.

References

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 3:20, King James Version.

Saint quote: Abba Macarius the Great, Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers), trans. Benedicta Ward. [Note for Father Stephen: minor textual variants exist across translations of this saying, e.g. whether the brother throws stones or only speaks; core structure and attribution are stable across sources.]

Capt. Gilson Oliver Collins, headstone and burial record, Williams Cemetery, Valley Forge, Carter County, Tennessee (Find a Grave memorial #99929545).

Zollicoffer Bridge burning, November 8, 1861, and Carter’s Depot raid, December 1862: R.M. Scott and W.J. Angel, History of the Thirteenth Regiment Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, U.S.A., Including a Narrative of the Bridge Burning (1903), Chapter XI.

A reflection on AI, Epistemology, and Wisdom according to the Orthodox Christian Tradition and Scripture

I picked my daughter Amelia up from school one afternoon when she was in high school, and I asked her, the way you do, how her classes had gone. She had a quick wit even then, and she gave me a small, sideways grin and said, “We studied history today. Or as they called it when you were younger, the news.”

I laughed. I have thought about that line for years since.

There is something true buried in a teenager’s joke, something about how quickly the immediate becomes the archived, how the news of a morning is the history of an afternoon. We live now inside that collapse more than ever. What is current becomes past almost before we have finished reacting to it. But underneath that small observation about time sits a much older and much larger claim, one that has nothing to do with how fast our news cycles turn.

At the very end of John’s Gospel, after the resurrection appearances, after the miraculous catch of fish, after Peter is asked three times whether he loves his Lord, the Gospel closes with a strange and startling sentence. John writes that Jesus did many other things besides, and that if every one of them were written down, he supposed the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

"And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. Amen."

— John 21:25 (NKJV)

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I do not think it is merely admiring language. I do not think John is simply telling us that Jesus was remarkable, that his life was full, that there was more material than one Gospel could hold. I think John is telling us something about the nature of reality itself. He is telling us that Christ is the Logos, the Word through whom all things were made, and that the Logos cannot be exhausted by his own creation. Not because the world’s libraries are too small, though they are, but because the thing being described was never a finite subject with a finite number of facts attached to it. It is not that there was too much to write down. It is that what Christ is exceeds, by nature, anything creation could hold. The overflow is not incidental. It is a signature of what kind of being we are dealing with.

There is a sidebar here I want to walk through carefully, because I am a layman, not a theologian, and I do not want to get above my raising.

Scripture tells us in Romans that the invisible things of God are understood by the things that are made, that creation itself testifies to its Maker. This is a foundation of Orthodox wonder, this seeing of God through the world he made. And it seems to me, as one who only notices, that this same pattern John describes, this uncontainability, this exceeding of any system meant to hold it, shows up elsewhere in creation too. Mathematics, of all places, seems to whisper something similar. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems tell us that any sufficiently powerful formal system will contain true statements it cannot prove from within itself. Russell’s paradox tells us that a set which tries fully to account for itself collapses into contradiction. I want to be careful here, because Father Stephen and Father Gregory have both counseled me on this very territory, and their counsel was wise: this is applicability, in Tolkien’s sense of that word, not allegory. I am not saying mathematics proves theology. I am saying that a man who already stands within the claim of John 21:25 might notice an echo of it in the strange places where formal systems reach for total self-containment and find they cannot get there. It is hard not to wonder at that. But it is only wonder. I will leave the proving to better minds than mine.

I raise all of this now because yesterday, Substack, the platform that carries this very newsletter, announced a new tool built with a company called Pangram that lets readers scan a piece of writing and receive an assessment of how much of it, if any, was written by artificial intelligence. They have also opened a space for writers like me to say plainly how we used AI, if we used it at all, in the making of a piece.

I want to say clearly that I approve of this. Not because I think artificial intelligence is a neutral curiosity we can take or leave, but because Substack has not done the unrealistic thing of pretending a line can be drawn where none exists. AI is embedded now in search, in the orchestration layers behind half the tools we touch every day, in ways most of us never see and could not opt out of if we tried. What Substack is asking is not “did you use it,” which is a question with no honest binary answer left in it, but “how did you use it, and will you tell your reader plainly.” That is not a prohibition. That is an invitation to transparency. And transparency, unlike prohibition, can actually be practiced with integrity.

So let me practice it. This piece itself was made this way. I speak, most often extemporaneously, the way I am speaking now, thinking out loud the way we do here in East Tennessee, circling a thought until it finds its shape. What comes back to me afterward is research brought in, quotations checked against their sources, structure suggested and revised, my own words gathered and returned to me in a form I can then take up, correct, and make my own again. It is closer to working with a scribe, or an orchestra, than to working with a second author. An orchestra does not write the symphony. It renders what the composer already heard.

I know this is true because of Glenda. I wrote once about my great uncle George, about a memory involving beans and my father and a summer long past, told the way I remembered it, spoken before it was ever typed. At my father’s wake, my cousin Glenda came to me with real feeling in her voice and told me how grateful she was to have read that piece, how it carried her straight back to her own childhood, back to the two of them, back to a farm that no longer exists except in memory. No tool gave me that memory. No tool gave Glenda her tears. What moved her was truth, remembered and witnessed, and only afterward arranged. The arranging can be shared work. The remembering and the witnessing cannot.

All of this bears on how we ought to think about artificial intelligence generally, and I do not want to rely on my own understanding here, because I do not trust it enough for that, and neither should you trust mine on this alone. I want instead to speak the way an observer of life speaks, the way I have learned to speak after years of watching people and their limitations.

I have come to think of two kinds of fish. There is a bold fish, who believes he can escape the bowl, or who may not even believe there is such a thing as a bowl at all. And there is a shy fish, who by contrast is not simply content to stay within the bowl, but believes wrongly that there is nothing at all beyond it.

Forgive me, but I do not think either of these fish has hold of reality. The bowl exists. Human beings have real epistemological limits, and this is not a hard saying from Chris Range, it is simply the plain fact of being a creature and not the Creator. But likewise, we ought not believe there is nothing beyond us. There is a beyond. We can contemplate it, gesture toward it, wonder at it, even if we can never grasp it or climb out into it by our own cleverness. As long as we remain creatures and not the Creator, there will always be a bowl. The question was never whether the bowl is there. The question is what we do once we know it is.

This, I think, is where artificial intelligence actually sits in the order of creation, neither the messiah the bold fish imagines nor the mere slop the shy fish fears, but a tool, made by creatures who are themselves bound by the bowl, incapable by its nature of the uncontainable thing John describes in his Gospel, because it has no eye of the heart, no noetic faculty, nothing that could ever exceed the sum of what was fed into it. It can orchestrate. It cannot witness. It cannot remember a summer of planting beans with Uncle George. Only a creature made in the image of God, however limited, can do that.

Abba Anthony said, “I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, ‘What can get through from such snares?’ Then I heard a voice saying to me, ‘Humility.’”

I love that saying because it does not deny the snares. Anthony does not pretend the danger is smaller than it is. He groans. He sees the whole net spread out over the whole world, and the sight of it is enough to make an old and holy man despair for a moment. And the answer he receives is not a strategy for outwitting each snare one at a time. It is a single word. Humility does not make the bowl disappear. It does not promise escape. It simply passes underneath the snares without needing to have conquered them, without needing to deny they were ever there.

That, I think, is the posture we are asked to carry as we take up these new tools and wonder what to do with them. Not the bold fish’s denial that any bowl exists, and not the shy fish’s despair that nothing lies beyond it. Just humility, which knows the limits are real, and hope, which knows the limits are not the last word.

Whatever thoughts these words have stirred in you, I would ask you to carry them further than I can take you here. Bring your questions, especially the hard ones, to your own priest or father confessor. That is where this always belongs, and that is where I will leave it.

On parables, Uncle Lew, and telling the truth sideways

My neighbor Rusty and I have a lot in common. We are both former military men with foreign brides. That is a trend you can observe if you notice the number of sweet Asian ladies accompanying their husbands to the local VA, but perhaps that is a story for another time. Our wives are best friends, and our children play together. They are the best neighbors anyone could ask for, and I am grateful for Rusty because he is a wonderful storyteller in addition to a true neighbor in the Biblical sense. Many times, recounting one of his tales, Rusty’s wife Mel will inquire, “Now, Rusty, is that true?” to which he will reply dryly, “Well, if it ain’t, it ought to be.” This always gets a laugh, and it reminds me of a film I am fond of, in which an old man tells a boy that there are some things a man believes in because he must.

Episode six focuses on a fictional guitar man from South Carolina I call Lewis Yancey. His personal history and outlook are closely modeled on my memories of my dad’s older brother, Uncle Lewis Younce. Uncle Lew led a colorful life, and his real history runs close to my fictional character’s backstory: born in the South, raised on music, gone abroad in the military, a romance with a lady from another country, a heartbreak, and that heartbreak played out afterward in his music. Uncle Lew’s music took him to Nashville, where, like my fictional character, he sat in as a session player with the famous Boudleaux Bryant.

To those few readers who actually knew my Uncle Lew, they might read Episode 6 and think, “Wait, that isn’t how it happened. Gabrielle didn’t come to the U.S.” And of course that is not how it happened. Lewis Yancey is a fictional character. Lewis Younce was a real human being. The story I am writing is a story about love, and loss, and sacrifice, and repentance. But I have to tell it the way the story requires, not as a biography. Not that my uncle’s life would not make an interesting biography. It would. But this is a story, with a message that transcends a single character.

Part of why I make this point is to distinguish between the essays I write here on Orthodox Wonder, which are grounded in real experiences of life as a nurse here in Appalachia, and the fanciful tales I weave in the fictional world of the Elderverse. You probably know that already. Yet as people see themselves in these stories, it is very easy to ask, “Is that how it happened?” Not necessarily. The fictional story is pointing to a larger Truth that I cannot always access concisely in a factual essay.

We know there is no such thing as a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins. And yet we are grateful for the truth of his adventure in Middle Earth. What is a parable, except a story that is general, not about a particular person, pointing toward a specific truth?

“All these things spake Jesus unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto them: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying, I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world.”

— Matthew 13:34–35, King James Version

Christ Himself, who is Truth, chose the parable as His ordinary way of teaching the multitude. Not because plain speech was beneath Him, but because some truths will not survive being handled directly. They have to be carried in a story, set down gently in the hearer’s own house, before he recognizes that the story was about him all along. The prophet is fulfilled not in spite of the parable’s indirection, but because of it. Things kept secret from the foundation of the world are opened, not narrowed, by being told sideways.

Do the saints always tell us the names of their instructive tales? No. They tend to keep those details private, and yet the moral of the story holds true. The desert elders understood something about this too, that the same true thing said plainly to one soul can wound where it should heal, while the same truth carried gently can raise a man up.

It is remembered of Abba Poemen that when a brother came to him and openly confessed a fault, the old man would not simply confirm the accusation, for a soul told bluntly that it has sinned may lose all resolve and fall further into despair. Instead he would answer gently, bidding the brother take heart and watch himself now, so that the very words meant to name the fault became the words that stirred the man toward repentance rather than ruin.

— Abba Poemen, the Desert Fathers, from the Apophthegmata Patrum

That is the whole of it, I think. Rusty telling a tale that gets a little taller in the telling is not lying to Mel. He is reaching for something a plain account of the evening could not carry, and he knows it, which is why he grins when he says it ought to be true even if it isn’t exactly. Uncle Lew’s real life would make a fine biography, but it would not, on its own, carry the weight of love and loss and repentance the way Lewis Yancey’s story can, because a biography is bound to what happened, and a parable is free to go after what is always happening. Christ taught this way on purpose. Abba Poemen answered this way on purpose. And I am trying, in my own small and imperfect way, to write both kinds of truth on purpose too: the fact-bound essays that come from a nurse’s real days in Appalachia, and the fiction that goes looking for what the facts alone cannot say.

I hope that if you are a reader of both my fact-based essays and my fanciful Christian fiction, you will, with grace, keep the distinction in mind. As Rusty would say, if that ain’t true, it ought to be. And whenever a story, mine or anyone else’s, stirs up a question in you that runs deeper than these pages can settle, I hope you will take it, as I try to, to your own priest or father confessor.

There is a photograph my mother keeps, taken in the summer of 1957 or ’58 in the rhododendron gardens atop Roan Mountain, on the line where Tennessee gives way to North Carolina. Four girls stand together under the trees. My mother is the tallest of them, her hair pulled back, standing a little apart from her cousins the way tall children do in old photographs, half in the group and half already grown out of it.

I framed a copy of that photograph years ago because when I look at it, I do not entirely see my mother. I see my oldest daughter, Jessica. The dress is wrong for the decade and the light is wrong for a phone camera, but the face underneath is the same face, tilted the same way, patient in the same way, waiting for whoever was hidden behind the camera to finish and let her go back to playing.

I have noticed this before. In a photograph of my great-grandmother, stern in the manner required of women photographed a hundred years ago. In a photograph of my grandmother in her nursing uniform, starched and certain, looking back across the decades at a grandson who would grow up to wear a uniform of his own. And now, only weeks after burying my father, I am holding my brand new granddaughter, Gwendolyn, and finding the same face again. Dark-haired, fists closed, asleep against a quilt, wearing a onesie that jokes about the sleepless nights ahead of her parents. She does not know yet what she is joking about. She only knows how to sleep and how to reach.

Four faces. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother, my daughter, and now this fifth face barely a few weeks old. I did not plan to notice the resemblance. It simply kept presenting itself, the way certain truths do when we are paying attention to something else.

We receive our lives through generations of mothers. Not only love, though there is love in abundance, but something harder to name. Counsel. Instinct. A way of standing in a room. The Church has a word for that kind of hidden thing that carries more than it appears to carry: *mysterion*. Not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be entered, a thing hidden that reveals meaning precisely because it stays partly hidden.

I think of this in the plainest terms. When I hear the sayings of the Desert Mothers, I hear my grandmother’s voice, and my mother’s, layered underneath the older words like a second speaker in the same room. If that is true for me, a man twenty centuries removed from Nazareth, how much more must it have been true for Christ, who kept his mother’s voice not as memory but as the first voice he ever knew.

Scripture places the mother at the very threshold of our exile, and at the very moment exile begins, gives her a name that points toward what will outlast it.

*And Adam called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.*

— Genesis 3:20

It is worth sitting with the timing of that verse. Adam and Eve have just been told what the ground will cost them, what the years will cost them, that they will return to the dust they were taken from. And in the middle of that sentence of exile, Adam names his wife for life, not for death. Eve, the mother of all the living. The line of mothers does not begin after the Fall. It begins inside it, as a kind of answer to it, motherhood set into the world as the thread that keeps carrying life forward even through a history that will be marked by loss.

Every mother since has carried a little of that thread. My great-grandmother carried it through hardship I only know secondhand. My grandmother carried it into a nursing career that I would, without entirely planning to, follow her into. My mother carried it into me, and my wife and I have tried, imperfectly, to carry it into Jessica. Gwendolyn will carry it further than any of us will live to see.

The Desert Mothers understood something about this kind of quiet, unglamorous carrying, and Amma Theodora left behind a story about it that has stayed with me since I first read it. A hermit who had the power to cast out demons once asked them plainly what it was that defeated them. Was it his fasting? No, they said, we neither eat nor drink. Was it his vigils, his nights spent awake in prayer? No, they said, we never sleep either. Then what power sends you away? And the demons answered him: nothing overcomes us except humility.

This wisdom comes to us as a short narrative rather than a single quote from one of the seven sayings attributed to Theodora in the Apophthegmata Patrum.

Amma Theodora is said to have told this story to make a simple point. Neither asceticism nor vigil nor any kind of visible suffering saves a soul on its own. Only humility does that work. I did not grow up hearing that story, but I grew up watching my mother live it. She did not teach by argument. She taught, and still teaches, by a kind of steady lowering of herself that I only came to recognize as strength once I was old enough to have tried and failed at other kinds of strength myself. She was never trying to win the room. She was trying to feed the people in it, one way or another, and let the winning take care of itself or not happen at all.

I started writing this reflection and caught myself asking why it had come to me now, in the middle of an ordinary week, and not in May, closer to Mother’s Day, where it would have fit the calendar more neatly. But I think I know the answer. It has come now because I am, for the first time, a grandfather. Because I am holding a granddaughter who will, I hope, one day be a mother herself, in body or in spirit, and take her place in a line that did not begin with her and will not end with her either.

I used to think, without quite admitting it to myself, that I stood somewhere near the center of my own story. Burying my father this year and holding Gwendolyn within the same season has cured me of that. I am not the center of anything. I am one chapter, and a short one, in a much longer book: the book of mothers, written and rewritten across every generation of women who taught the rest of us, mostly without words, what it looks like to carry life forward through a world that has not stopped costing us anything since Eden.

I am grateful this morning for my mother, for my grandmother who set me toward nursing before I knew that was where I was headed, for my daughter, and for this new granddaughter who has, without doing anything at all yet, reminded an old grandfather where he actually stands. If any of this stirs something in you beyond what I’ve managed to say here, I’d ask you to bring it to your own priest or father confessor, who will see further into it than I can.

There is a strip of ground between my neighbor’s house and mine that neither of us has ever quite gotten around to taming. Every summer it grows up thick with briars, and every summer I go out with a machete and cut it back down, promising myself that this is the year we finally landscape it properly. It never is. Yesterday was such a day. I was down in the brush, sweating, watching for poison ivy, when I noticed something I have somehow never stopped to notice before: I was not alone out there.

The briars were full of bees and flies, both of them, working the same tangled strip of ground for reasons that had nothing to do with each other. The bees had come for the blackberry blossoms crowning the tops of the canes, small white flowers I would have walked past a hundred times without seeing. The flies had come for something less lovely. Deer, or some other creature of the woods, had taken to using that same overgrown corner as their latrine, and the flies had found it before I ever did. Same ground. Same tangle of green and thorn. Two different reasons for being there.

Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. - Philippians 4:8, KJV

REMEMBERING THE SAINT

Saint Paisios of Mount Athos told a version of this parable more than once in his life, and the tellings differ a little in their particulars. But the sentiment holds steady across all of them:

Put a bee in a room full of filth with one small spot of sweetness, and it will find the sweetness and never trouble itself over the rest. Put a fly in a garden thick with blossoms, and it will pass over every flower to find the one patch of dirt.

The bee and the fly are not different because of where they are placed. They are different because of what they are looking for.

I have thought since yesterday about how easy it is to become a connoisseur of what is wrong. Not because I mean to. I do not go looking for the filth in a room any more than the fly means to insult the flowers by ignoring them. It is simply where attention has learned to land, and attention, like a fly or a bee, tends to keep landing where it has landed before.

Saint Paisios was canonized only within many of our lifetimes, which means an entire generation of converts and cradle Orthodox alike have had the strange grace of watching a modern man become a modern saint. I did not know him. I have only his words, carried to me secondhand through books and podcasts and now, apparently, through my own overgrown yard on the eve of his feast day. That a saint’s teaching should arrive by way of blackberry brambles and a deer’s latrine strikes me as exactly the kind of joke Paisios himself would have appreciated. He was not a man who needed his holy things kept clean of manure.

I got the whole strip cut back yesterday without a single welt of poison ivy to show for it, which either means I was careful or I was lucky or, more likely, that grace does not always announce itself as vision or ecstasy. Sometimes it is only this: a man in the briars, sweating, spared a small and ordinary harm, and given, almost as an afterthought, something to notice.

Whatever this noticing was worth, it belongs to the tradition and not to me to interpret fully. If any of this stirs a question in you about discernment, about where your own attention has learned to land, or about the life and teaching of Saint Paisios himself, I would only point you where I always try to point: to your own priest or father confessor, who knows you and can walk with you through it far better than a stranger’s yard ever could.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I don’t mean old the way people mean it in the Midwest, a hundred years and a little sag in the roofline. I mean old by frontier standards. The barn was raised in the late 1830s or early 1840s, built in the old mountain cantilever style, out of yellow poplar, hewn square with a broad ax. Yellow poplar was the wood you wanted if you could get it: straight-grained, easy to work green, and resistant to the insects that would hollow out a lesser barn in a generation. You could still find a few small wormholes in it anyway, faint reminders that nothing wood, however good, is entirely beyond time’s reach. The joints were dovetailed. The frame was pinned with mortise and tenon. My cousins played in that barn when they were small children, and it was already a hundred and fifty years old by then, still standing on legs cut by men who had never seen a nail gun or a chainsaw.

My fifth great-grandfather, Jonathan Range, built that barn with his brothers. It wasn’t the only thing his hands left behind. I have a decorative mantle he carved, and nails he forged himself, iron drawn out and shaped at his own fire. When the barn finally came down, a developer in North Carolina bought the old logs and hauled them off to be worked into a modern building as ornament, a decorative flourish for someone else’s walls. But one piece never left the family. My father and my great-uncle cut it down to size themselves, and it became the mantle over the fireplace in my parents’ home. I remember standing there the day they did it, watching two men my whole life had taught me to trust, sizing a piece of wood that had outlived five generations to fit a hearth it had never been built for.

It is, on the one hand, just a piece of wood. On the other hand, it is a piece of wood that a man cut with his own hands almost two hundred years ago, a man whose blood is my blood, whose name I carry down through six generations to my own. I can touch what he touched. That much is not in question. What I have wondered, standing at that mantle more than once since my father died, is whether touching the wood means I can touch the man. Whether I can reach, through pine and grain and the shape of a dovetail joint, something of the faith he carried in him while he swung that ax.

I do not know a great deal about what Jonathan believed. I know his labor. I know the mantle, the nails, the barn that stood for a century and a half before it fell into someone else’s decoration. But I have one more thing, and it may be the most telling thing I own of him: his last will and testament. It does not open with a list of livestock or an account of debts owed. It opens like this:

“Knowing it is appointed unto man once to die, I hereby declare…”

He did not have to begin that way. Men of his era wrote wills full of practical accounting, and plenty began plainly enough, with names and dates and nothing more. Jonathan reached for Scripture instead, and reached for it correctly, nearly word for word:

“And as it is appointed unto man once to die, but after this the judgment.” - Hebrews 9:27

That is the only sentence of his interior life that has come down to me in his own hand. Not a creed. Not a confession of church membership. One verse, chosen deliberately, standing at the threshold of the last document he would ever sign, the place where a man’s truest convictions tend to show themselves whether he means them to or not.

I have spent my working life in something Jonathan Range would not recognize at all. I am a nurse, but even nursing now runs half on paper charts remembered only as old habit and half on screens, on documentation typed into a database that will be migrated, reformatted, and eventually deleted when the software changes hands again, as it always does. I have written things, too, essays and reflections, words assembled out of pixels that exist nowhere but as patterns of light, that could vanish with a server failure or the quiet sunsetting of a platform nobody bothers to announce. Jonathan left wood a man can still run his hand across two centuries later. He left iron nails forged strong enough to still hold. What have I left that will still be there for someone else’s hand to touch in a hundred and forty-five years?

I do not think I have an answer to that. I am fifty-seven now, old enough that the question has stopped being rhetorical and started being personal, the kind of thing I turn over at night rather than in an essay meant to resolve neatly. The Church offers me a consolation here, and I believe it is a true one: that the cup of water I hand a frightened patient at three in the morning matters to God in the same economy that remembers a widow’s two mites, that nothing done in love is wasted, whether or not it survives in any form a person could touch. I believe that. It is not always easy to feel it, especially now, with my father gone and so much of what he built and taught still settling into a shape I am only beginning to understand.

What I can tell you is what I do when the question gets too heavy to carry standing up. I go to the mantle. I put my hand flat against that old poplar, worn smooth now by five generations of other hands doing the same thing before mine, and I pray without words. It is the only kind of prayer that seems to fit the moment, the noetic prayer the Church has always pointed me toward, the prayer of the heart rather than the tongue, and I ask for guidance for whatever time I have left to build something, anything, that might last.

Saint Isaac the Syrian, who understood the limits of speech better than most men who ever lived, wrote that words are instruments of this present world, but silence is a mystery of the age to come.

“Words are instruments of this present world; silence is a mystery of the age to come”

Jonathan Range gave me one sentence of speech, borrowed from Hebrews, spoken at the edge of his own death. I do not know what silence he kept in the fifty-some years before that, what prayers he prayed at his own hearth, what wordless things passed through him while his hands were busy with an ax. But I know that when I stand at his mantle now, the wood does not speak. It simply holds still, the way it has held still since before my grandfather’s grandfather was born, and something in that stillness draws me toward whatever it was Jonathan Range knew and never wrote down.

Maybe that is the whole of what gets transmitted, in the end. Not the creed, which fades. Not even the wood, which will eventually go to fire or rot no matter how good the poplar. But the posture: a hand laid flat on something old, a heart made quiet enough to listen, a man willing to ask, at the threshold of whatever comes next, for the grace to meet it well. If that is what I have from Jonathan Range, it may be enough. It may even be the only inheritance that was ever really his to give.

The timbers that formed the cross stretched vertically between heaven and earth, but also horizontally connecting us across time.

If you find yourself asking the same question I am, whether anything you have built will outlast you in any form worth calling faith, I would not trust my own wondering to settle it for you. Bring it to your priest or father confessor. That is where questions like this one are meant to go, and where, I have found, they are always received with more patience than I bring to them myself.

Chloe is three. She had been to the beach once before, at two, but she carries no memory of it, so yesterday, as she zipped into her life jacket and inched toward the crashing surf of Pawleys Island, her whole small body told the truth of the moment. Wonder and apprehension arrived together, the way they nearly always do when something large and unfamiliar makes itself known. It took several minutes of playing in the sand, of letting the water lap at her toes and retreat, before her shoulders came down and her face opened into something like trust.

She did the same thing again that afternoon at Ripley’s Aquarium. We stepped into the tunnel for Danger Reef and she looked up and muttered, “scay wud.” Scared. But then the lights began to dapple through the water overhead, and the sharks and the parrotfish and the great slow shapes of things she had no name for began to glide past on every side, and she found her joy. She found it completely. I suspect the fish in that tank have Baby Shark memorized by now, hummed and shouted at them daily by toddlers from every corner of the country who arrived, like Chloe, a little afraid and left singing.

My friend Terry Mattingly wrote recently on his Substack @rational sheep in remembrance of The Princess Bride, and in it he named something true and hard: life is pain. My friend Jocelyn Mathewes makes art at @tiny high five that does not look away from difficult things, that sits with grief and fracture and asks us to sit there too. I do not want to take an ounce away from either observation. Both are honest. Both are earned. I want instead to place my arm around them, because I think what they are describing is Chloe’s apprehension wearing a grown man’s face, a grown woman’s brush.

We are awed, and rightly so, by the sheer might of creation, and by the theodicy that creation forces on us, the plain fact that a world this beautiful is also a world that crashes and bites and grieves. Job never got an answer to his question. He got a whirlwind, and inside the whirlwind he got Leviathan and Behemoth and the storehouses of the snow, and he was struck dumb by the sight of them, and that dumbstruck wonder was, apparently, enough. Chloe cannot articulate what she feels at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean or the edge of a tank full of sharks. Neither, in the end, could Job. Neither, most days, can I.

But hesitation is not the end of the story. It is the doorway. The waves that frightened Chloe are the same waves she was laughing in by the time we called her in for supper. The tunnel that scared her became the place she pointed and grinned from, again and again, all afternoon.

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

— Psalm 30:5

There is a saying passed down from Elder Sophrony of Essex, preserved in the accounts of those who sat with him, that he once told a young priest who asked him how anyone could possibly be saved:

“Stand on the edge of the abyss, and when you feel that it is beyond your strength, break off and have a cup of tea.”

(A note on this quote: it survives in firsthand testimony, most notably in Archimandrite Ephraim of Vatopedi’s recollection of a conversation with the Elder, rather than in Sophrony’s own written works. I offer it here in that spirit, as oral witness rather than published text.)

I love this saying because it does not deny the abyss. Sophrony does not tell the young priest to stay home, to avoid the edge, to pretend the drop is not real. He tells him to stand there. And then, when it becomes more than flesh can bear, to step back. To have tea. To return to the ordinary and the warm and the small, not as defeat, but as the necessary rhythm of a creature who was never meant to stare into the infinite without rest.

This, I think, is the whole of it. Chloe’s apprehension at the water’s edge, Terry’s grief dressed as film criticism, Jocelyn’s canvases that refuse easy comfort, my own hesitation before the parts of this life that do not resolve: all of it is the same creature, standing at the same abyss, awed by a Majesty too large to take in all at once. And all of it is met, eventually, by the same promise. Joy comes in the morning. Sometimes the morning is a long night away. But sometimes, if you are three years old and someone you trust is holding your hand, it is as near as the moment you step into the surf.

If any of this stirs something in you, something larger than a stray feeling about a toddler at the beach, I’d ask you to bring it to your own priest or father confessor. They will know what to do with an abyss far better than I do.

When my sister Jennifer was small, the word I would have chosen to describe her was not resilient. She was born helpless, unable to fend for herself in any of the ways a six-year-old brother finds impressive, and I confess I did not see what all the fuss was about. Did she fuss. I remember once she was crying about who knows what, and my father asked her what was the matter. She told him, plainly and completely, that she was upset, her feelings were hurt, and her socks were falling down. This tripartite complaint has been a catchphrase in our family ever since, the shorthand we reach for whenever life piles up its small indignities all at once.

Her favorite comic character was Wonder Woman, and I have come to think the choice suited her better than either of us knew at the time. She had a good deal in common with the princess of Themyscira, beyond the shared Underoos. She was the one among us who threw herself into imaginative play with total conviction, who could turn a backyard into an island and a broom handle into a lasso of truth. That is, when she and our sister Cheryl were not competing for my obviously desirable approval, a contest I did nothing to discourage.

She has raised two remarkable children, my nephew Tyler and my niece Megan, both of whom inherited her family’s quiet penchant for service. She loves veterans, and she has earned the right to that love the hard way, having endured the loss of her husband, Stephen Maddies, in combat abroad. What would have dimmed a lesser light did not dim hers. In time she married my brother-in-law Brent, who is, in two words, a good man.

She still attends the church our grandfather helped found in the 1940s, the Church of God on Roan Street in Elizabethton. I bring this up not as a footnote but as the point. I am a convert to Orthodoxy, and converts carry a particular temptation toward pride, the quiet and respectable kind that mistakes having found the fullness of the faith for having cornered the market on grace. Jennifer may not have steeped herself in the recondite language of the ancient church, but she is a willing worker in faith writ large. And she is one of the most enduring, quietly loving people I know, shaped by decades in a small congregation on a street I could walk with my eyes closed. The grace of God was never waiting on my awareness of it to go to work in her.

Scripture has a name for what I am describing in her, and it is patient about naming it. Saint Paul writes:

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up… Love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13:4-5, 8, NKJV)

Endurance is the word that keeps surfacing when I try to describe my sister, and the desert mothers knew something about it long before either of us did.

Amma Syncletica is remembered for comparing the soul to a ship at sea: how it sails out at first on a favorable wind, how the sails fill, and how later the wind turns against it and the waves toss it until the rudder seems to answer to nothing. And then, she says, the calm comes, and the tempest dies down, and the ship sails on again.

Jennifer’s ship has been tossed by real weather. A husband lost to war is not a metaphor. But the tempest died down, and she sailed on, and she raised two children who service seems to run in like a family trait, and she found Brent, and today, on her birthday, which happens this year to fall on the two hundred and fiftieth birthday of the country whose defenders she has always loved, I find myself thinking that she did turn out to be resilient after all. Wonder Woman, it turns out, was never really about the lasso or the bracelets. It was about a woman who endures what she is given and keeps her love intact on the other side of it.

I complain about my sister a good deal less than I used to. I have watched her too closely for too long to keep it up with any conviction. She is amazing, and she is resilient, and I am grateful for her, in the way you are grateful for people who show you what love looks like when it has been asked to hold something heavy for a very long time.

Happy birthday, Jennifer. If any of this stirs something in you toward the deeper questions of grace, suffering, or the life of faith, I’d only ever point you back to your own priest or father confessor. That is where the real answers live, not in an older brother’s birthday letter.

I have always joked that Cheryl is my older sister, or at least my big sister, which is funny considering I am four years older than her. That is simply the way her personality runs. When we were little, we were both adventurous. I liked to take her for rides on my motorcycle, and she never once told me no.

There was a funny thing about Cheryl. She was fiercely protective of me, which is funny considering she was smaller. I played baseball for a team called the Taylor Mixers, and my friend Ron Crowe and I were probably the two best bench warmers the team ever had. One day Ron and I were teasing each other the way boys do, and he was flipping at my hat. Before I knew it, he found himself pinned against the chain-link fence separating the dugout from the field. My little sister Cheryl had put her arms through the links and was choking him, saying, “Don’t bother my little brother.” That is how she has always been.

She is the most like our father, and most people would say we are opposites, but there are more similarities than folks tend to notice. Both of us have an entrepreneurial streak, though hers runs stronger than mine. Both of us are drawn to theater. She and her husband John own the State Line Theater, a drive-in movie house built in 1947 and one of the very few drive-ins left in the country with a digital projector able to show first-run films. I serve on the board of the Bonnie Kate Theater, our local community theater here in Elizabethton. That does not make us competitors. It only proves that two kids most people would call opposites turned out, in the ways that matter, to be quite a lot alike.

There is much to admire about my sister. She is quick to tell you her opinion, and she is one of those wonderfully unfiltered, humorous people who will have you laughing before you know what hit you. But underneath that is a very loving soul. And I think the losses our family has carried in recent years have only sharpened that love, not dulled it.

Scripture tells us that man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. Samuel learned this standing in Jesse’s house, passing over the tall and the strong, waiting for the boy still out in the fields with the sheep. The world measures by height and by size and by the shape a person cuts standing in a doorway. The Lord was never measuring that way at all.

1 Samuel 16:7, “man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart”

Cheryl was the smallest one in that dugout. She still put her arms through a chain-link fence and pinned a boy twice her size, because she believed her brother needed defending and she did not stop to consider whether she was big enough for the job. She has been doing some version of that her whole life. As I have said about her before: dynamite comes in small packages.

Amma Syncletica, one of the Desert Mothers, taught that a virtue known and praised begins to lose its power, the way an exposed treasure loses its value, or wax melts when brought too near a fire. I think there is something of that in Cheryl. She has never made a show of her protectiveness or her love. It simply moves in her, quietly, until the moment it is needed, and then it moves like fire. I will confess this is my own reading laid alongside her saying, since Amma Syncletica spoke of hidden virtue rather than smallness of stature outright, and I offer the pairing humbly rather than as settled teaching.

Happy birthday, Cheryl. Thank you for every ride on the back of that motorcycle, for every time you told the world not to bother your little brother, and for being, in all the ways that count, so much like Dad. For those of you reading who want to go deeper into what Scripture or the saints have to teach about hidden virtue, humility, or the love that binds a family through loss, I would urge you, as always, to bring those questions to your own priest or father confessor.