Everybody needs a little luck

Creche
Originally uploaded by []Aaroneous Monk[]

This is the second year in a row we've visited a Live Nativity at a church down the road from us. It is held in the evenings leading up to Christmas for a few nights and involves driving with your lights off around a very large loop lined by candles in plastic milk jugs. The camels (as advertised!) are a sure draw for Elias with the donkeys and sheep coming in a close second. We drove slowly from scene to scene explaining to Elias what was going on with the actors and admiring the real fires blazing outside prefabricated porticos, inns, and stables.

As we came upon the second scene along the road I saw a pregnant woman and her husband approach the innkeeper looking for a place to stay. I knew from the story that they had traveled far and long to get here and she was very near giving birth. I guess being a husband and father myself with the immediacy of the situation I was caught off guard. As the innkeeper shook his head "no" I began to cry. I must have been making some strange noises because Jennifer turned from the scene to give me a quizzical look. But for those few moments I couldn't help it. It was overwhelming.

Moving on, I got my hormones under control (men have them too ya know) and we rolled past the shepherds, singing angels, and then the manger scene with the three kings approaching one by one to bow and offer their gifts to the Christ-child. That was the last one and as we moved past it I said, "Goodbye baby Jesus, try to stay warm" in a sing-songy voice for Elias' benefit. He quickly added in a similar voice from the back seat, "and good luck!"

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

Recently Elias has become more and more involved with using our vacuum attachments as his “shooter” and wearing his hooded bath towel as a head covering with flowing cape (clothes optional). His grandma dubbed him “Darth Vader” this past weekend which he quickly adopted as “Dark Vader”, much like Max in his wolf costume in the children’s literary classic WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. We’ve been working on redirecting his desire to “kill bad people” into destroying “Robots & Monsters” (btw, I think we might just chuck our TV out the window).

While all of this has been transpiring the past several weeks I’ve been working my way through a collection of letters by St. Theophan the Recluse quaintly titled “The Spiritual Life and How to be Attuned to it.” As Elias and I were tearing through the house clearing it of Robots & Monsters room by room my mind made a strange connection. In St. Theophan’s letters, which are simply a modern application of the teachings of the Church and Desert Fathers, he makes clear the real battle we face. Not against “flesh and blood” (read: other people), but against our own evil inclinations and disorderd desires that swirl about inside of us and contribute to suffering in the world.

It seemed to me at that moment our efforts to transform Elias’ enemy from “bad people” to “Robots & Monsters” was just such a thing. “Robots” in his imagination are people-like, but devoid of warmth and love which can make them scary, spiritual imposters, much as the absence of these things in us can do the same thing, ie, dehumanize us. “Monsters” are those spiritually malevolent forces which assail us and which need be resisted. So, here is the lesson of St. Theophan, to direct our efforts at killing those things in us and not at “bad people” who are simply foils for our own inner frustrations and shortcomings which are outwardly expressed in violence and anger towards others.

OK, that was a little heavy, so now LET THE WILD RUMPUS START!

A day of numbers

A day of numbers
Originally uploaded by []Aaroneous Monk[]

nine and eleven equal twenty
which doubled is forty
the number of years the Children of Israel
spent wandering lost in the wilderness
the number of days Christ
spent there being tried and tested
the number of days in Lent
a time for introspection
for cleaning
and for healing

a third of nine is three
the number of persons
in the Holy Trinity
a triangle of love
that has communed
before time was time
time now for
introspection
cleaning
and healing

a number of things I wanted to say
a number of things I wanted to pray

St. Kevin Was Here

st. kevin was here
Originally uploaded by sesame ellis

Thinking about Kevin this morning hurts. A few weeks ago I found his name in my cell phone and tried to call the number wondering if someone might pick up, if I’d hear his voice one more time on the message, or a disinterested recording telling me the number was no longer in service. It was the last one, but I couldn’t bring myself to erase his name and number.

What set off thoughts of Kevin today was seeing a picture on flickr.com from one of my contacts that had been to Glendalough, Ireland a year or two ago and taken pictures of the lake and St. Kevin’s tower. That picture was buried deep in her photo stream, but someone had found it today and commented on it bringing it back to the surface. The title of the photo is “st. kevin was here” and shows her daughter playing on the shores of the lake.

Visiting Kevin was one of those rare treats in life. A time when you know you are about to embark on a journey of unfettered verbosity which can take you to the most far flung places. In those early years much of it was hot air full of strawmen we could easily set up and knock down, but the important thing was that two people were together, communing, and getting goofy if things got too earnest or we got too full of ourselves.

I still feel terrible when I remember the time I lost my cool with him and really cut him down. It was 1994 and we made a road trip to Cincinnati to stay with some artist friends of his on Mt. Adams for the weekend. Prior to leaving Cincinnati we took in a movie. I can’t remember the movie we agreed to see together, but when we got to the theater he discovered that Jodie Foster’s “Nell” was playing and he decided to do his own thing and see it.

Driving back to Marion after the movie Kevin was feeling particularly garrulous and went on at length about the movie, philosophizing and intellectualizing it to the Nth degree with no signs of letting up for the duration of the 4 hour trip. I finally became completely exasperated and asked him, “Kevin, has anyone ever told you you talk too much?” An awkward silence followed that lasted several minutes before he asked me with an irritated edge to his voice, “Has anyone ever told you that?” I so regretted letting that slip out and we spent the remainder of that trip in an agitated quietude.

But that was one of those things about hanging out with Kevin. He could be so exasperating at times. Over the years that I knew him (especially the early years, before the first signs of cancer and before he came into the Orthodox Faith) there were more than a few people rebuffed by his words and behaviors, but the pros far outweighed the cons for me in nurturing our friendship. If one could just bear up a bit under his eccentricities and lack of social graces there was a huge pay off in getting close to him. The transformation that he underwent in his later years with the progression of cancer and spiritual deepening was truly remarkable. Where before there was arrogance and frequent irritation in intellectual wranglings it was more and more replaced by humility, patience, and love. I wish I could hear his voice again.

Kevin as a painting outline

Kevin used to start paintings and then not be able to finish them because it was such a tedious process with his poor eye sight. The "model" (usually one of his friends) oftentimes could not sit long enough or often enough to complete the process. As a result he had many incomplete paintings at various stages of development sitting around his apartment. My favorite was of a faceless young man in a green sweater with the body of an acoustic guitar in his lap and his arm outstretched with unformed fingers wrapping around a nonexistent neck. This Photoshop effect I did on a recent photo of him reminds me of some of those unfinished paintings.

I sat for him twice in our long friendship. The first time was before I left for Europe in 1994. We stayed up all night, me sitting on a barstool and Kevin painting, and we talked and talked and talked...and then we talked some more. He was unable to start on my face before I had to leave for the airport the next morning. It was a painting of a 20-something male with long wavey hair, t-shirt, shorts, sandles, and a backpack with absolutely no nose, eyes, or mouth. He ended up reclaiming that canvas later on for a different painting.

The second and last time I sat for him was just prior to my leaving for Russia in 1998. I sat in a chair with my backpack beside me, hunched over with an open book in my hands and a black prayer rope hanging from my right wrist. The book was that spiritual classic of Russian literature The Way of a Pilgrim. I read it to him out loud as he painted and we made it through the book at least twice in the 14 hours it took to finish the painting (though, in fact, the border where my right arm touches the draped mattress I was leaning against was not finished *in true Kevin fashion*).

I’d like to think , like those paintings, our friendship will continue to develop in some inexplicable way, always growing and never “finished.”

Kevin, the beginning

My first memory of Kevin takes me back to the Spring of 1989 at Indiana Wesleyan University (IWU). I had just turned twenty and was a recent transfer from DePauw University. It was such an odd time for me, having spent almost an entire semester at home after a false start to my sophomore year at DePauw and now at a school affiliated with the church of my upbringing. It was a school that I’d visited on a few occasions in High School for special recruiting weekends with my church Youth Group but had never seriously considered as a college choice in my search for greater independence. My initial enthusiasm for pursuing a career in medicine was beginning to wane with nothing definite to replace it and I felt not a little lost and adrift. It was during this melancholy time that I first encountered Kevin McCarty.

“Encounter” might not be quite the right word, maybe “glimpsed” is more accurate. It was evening time and I was walking along a sidewalk on my way to the library to do a little studying (or was it a night class?). As I passed under the branches of a tree I heard a peculiar whizzing-whirring noise coming from up ahead near the library. I looked up and saw by the light of a street lamp someone approaching on a bike, but not just any bike. It was an adult tricycle, like the ones I’d seen as a kid ridden by old people with the basket on back. I quickly stepped off the sidewalk and deeper into the shadows of the tree. He was coming at quite a clip and did not see me, but what a magnificently weird wonder to behold! He had on a long trench coat whose tales were flapping wildly behind him as he whizzed by oblivious of my presence, like a phantom flitting through the night going who knows where.

I did not see much of Kevin the rest of that year and he remained in my mind just a tall oddly shaped man with very thick glasses that would occasionally materialize somewhere on campus. It was not until the Spring of 1990 when I’d changed my major to History/Political Science that I began to see him more often due to his attending Dr. Martin’s classes. Dr. Glenn Martin was a professor who I had become more and more captivated with over the Fall of 1989 mainly due to the fact I’d begun making friends with people who had come to IWU specifically to study with him. I began attending his Sunday morning class at College Church and was hooked. This was my “intellectual awakening”, an opening of my mind to new ways of thinking and a seminal college experience. It is also what initially bound Kevin and me together and provided a kind of context for the development of our friendship.

8 Point Cross

Almost 10 years ago now I made this cross out of palm fronds in the basement of Ss. Constantine & Elena Orthodox Church with my wife (then fiancé) and our friend Karin. It was Palm Sunday and it is traditional to use the fronds that you are given at the end of the Liturgy to weave into a cross.

As we sat there together, Karin and I entered into a friendly competition to make an "8 Point Cross" in the Slavic tradition (short bar at the top representing the sign placed over Jesus' head and the bottom slanted bar representing the foot board pointing up to the "Good Thief" on Jesus' right). The pussy willow branch is what the Russian's use on Palm Sunday because of the lack of palm trees there.

Karin passed away a few years after that from breast cancer. She was a big woman with a larger-than-life personality, some might say ostentatious, but we loved her very much. I took this photo today because I realized this frail cross will likely fall apart over time and I wanted to capture it in memory of Karin. May her memory be eternal as the Orthodox say.