Becoming a Good Woman

Donning the Veil, Pascha, Bright Week, and Beyond

God Bless America

*

Oh, America.

*

This morning, facebook marketplace sent me to the dilapidated home of a model-car collector, wearing a God, Guns, & Trump t-shirt. His living room smelled overpoweringly of weed, and he was a real sweetheart. We negotiated $60 for the glossy black antique cabinet, and I expressed my condolences that his adult kids didn’t want the record collection that had occupied said cabinet over the course of the previous 30 years. I asked him if anyone ever gave him a hard time about the t-shirt, especially here in the city, and he said “You know honey, not so much anymore! Heck yeah during his first term, but now I just get hard looks from the liberal holdouts. Even they know what’s good for us.”

*

Later, I got my hair cut (finally) by a lovely, heavily tattooed man who told me all about meeting his husband on grindr, his terrible evangelical family, and the rainbow tulle skirt he’s planning to wear on his rural holiday for the purpose of intimidating conservatives. Everything was going so well, until (blessedly near the end of the haircut), he asked me how many kids I have, and I told him the truth. The tone shifted palpably, and chop chop chop we were all done then and there. “You don’t seem like a round brush girl, so I’ll leave it at that,” he said curtly. I suppose I ended up intimidating him with the mere knowledge of my prolific breeding. Such power. I feel naked without my hair, and I rather regret the whole ordeal, but at least it will grow out, eventually. I tipped him generously, but I probably won’t be back.

*
America is phenomenal—my favourite country, among all the places I’ve ever visited in the world (Morocco! The South of France! A month touring Spain! Five years in Central America which was four-and-three-quarters-years too many years for me). Sure, every nation has its problems, but there is no society other than the US more spirited, or more earnest, at least in its striving for self-ownership as a cultural principle. Is such a thing oxymoronic, hubristic, and impossible? Yes. But who cares. Like its hilarious leader, America bullishly forges ahead. And despite all the histrionics, everyone, in large part, more or less, gets along. This is remarkable and commendable and charming, and I love it.

*

Our visit to the US is drawing to a close this time around, and overall I feel a bit devastated. I have felt more contented here than I have anywhere else in the past…thirty-five years? Forty? Mostly this is thanks to our spiritual community, and the sense of cohesion Lee and I have finally found in Orthodoxy—as a family, in our marriage, in regards to our children’s education, our overall world-view, and the sense-making that I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve been yearning for throughout my life; a spiritual centre. And of course, true community is all of these things in relative balance and orchestration.

*

We will, of course, be doing everything in our power over the long-term to extend our time in this country in the future, if possible (legally, of course), but for now, we’ll be departing in a couple of weeks—back to Central America. I am also quite wistful about leaving this beautiful house that we so readily made into a home, and which, for the first time, represented my conscious effort to make our home a little church. But everything unfolds according to God’s will and ours, and, thanks be to God, we have found a new house through a friend at the parish that we’ll return to next year, which also means we have a place to store our things in the interim, and a sense of continuity for our kids who have, despite the short time here, formed deep connections with their friends and the cadence of life lived according to the liturgical unfolding of things.

*

We’re looking on the bright side. The newfound sense of integration, ritual, ceremony, and connection with God we have absorbed here can’t ever be severed. It will be both a challenge and a gift to maintain our prayer rule, and the practices and perspectives that we’ve come to embrace.

Feminist Flailings

*

Woven through the story of our family’s conversion—and profoundly interconnected with my husband Lee’s miraculous willingness and discipleship after a lifetime of animosity towards the church (and towards Christianity in general)— is my own gradual, yet radical shift away from the misogynies of feminism, and towards the rightful order of the Patriarchy. The realization of my deep desire to trust, surrender, allow, and submit to the leadership and provision not just of my husband, but of a larger patriarchal structure began to dawn a few years ago (largely thanks to the wider revelations of Rona), but since joining the Orthodox church, and our parish in particular, I can now say that I have experienced, for the first time in my life, a functional community—certainly the most functional community I have ever seen or been part of before—and it’s no coincidence that the church also happens to be a correctly ordered patriarchy.

*

This is remarkable for a number of reasons, not least of which is its rarity in this world, by design. My family of origin was completely dysfunctional, largely on account of the fact that both of my parents had been utterly brainwashed by feminism and the counterculture movement of the 60s, and as a result, our family was fractured in exactly the ways that particular agenda was contrived to bring about. My mother attempted to compensate for the dysfunction of our homelife by taking us to church, but the Anglican church was in no way a functional community either—it mimicked one, or attempted to, but it had no armature in doctrine or scripture, and no anchor in any real principles to speak of.

*

Even as a child I felt its instability, represented and enacted in the constantly fluctuating, evidently meaningly prescripts, based on nothing more than fashion and political correctness. More glaring was the supposed “leadership” of the female priests, who flooded into the church in the late 80s with their butch hair-cuts and androgynous auras and who, I recognize now, were used by the church for political expediency, while they themselves used the church to express contempt for their own sex, and to distinguish themselves as above mere mothers (and men), though what they were really doing was engaging in feeble attempt to assuage their own self-loathing on a multitude of levels. Yes, I’m generalizing, and this is also, by definition, true. Not just biblically (though that too), but because I did my own version of the same thing, for years, not knowing that obedience—to what’s true—is true liberation.

*

True Liberation

*

I dreaded church, as a kid—not because I didn’t want to go…I did. But because when I did go (every Sunday) I knew that it was incoherent and I wanted it to be different than it was. I loved singing in the choir, I loved the potential of it all….but in the end, I was left out in the cold.

*

When I observe, now, our children’s enthusiasm for attending liturgy (especially our teenagers), this isn’t actually even remotely surprising to me. Lee and I have found for our kids and our entire family, precisely what we were both craving when we were young—something profound and beautiful and ancient and entirely alive. When Lee and our older kids attend catechism, they are welcomed by a spiritual father who encourages questions, and who shares the rigour. The gratitude I feel, towards this community for being what it is, to God for being all-forgiving and steadfast in drawing me along as I persisted in the seeking—is indescribable.

*

It’s maybe Anglicanims’s proximity to what I know how to be The Truth that made it so remote; that created such a chasm of desire and recognition. I spent so many years attending church, seeking, yearning, and yet ultimately feeling a void. It’s not just a void though, as I understand it now; it’s a direct inversion. The ways that Anglicanism is rigid, are the ways that Orthodoxy is yielding. The ways that Orthodoxy is dignified and structured, is in direct contrast to the ways that Anglicanism (and Catholicism in many ways) is amorphous and disordered.

*

I am well aware that all this might sound disdainful towards Anglicanism, if not positively hateful… but that’s really not it. I actually feel significant gratitude for my upbringing—including all the broken parts. I’ll always adore Anglican hymns, and more broadly, the way my heritage has brought me here. There is also a kind of delight in finally understanding what the deficiencies were that I sensed for so long but could never articulate as a child and a young person— then an increasingly cynical and wearied adult, until now. Now I know what was missing: Truth itself—the truth of the body, of the Saints, of beauty, the lineage of baptism, and the expression of Fatherhood (yes, it does all come down to daddy issues—for all of us).

*

Pascha Festivities

*

On the Saturday morning prior to the aptheosis of our overnight Pascha service and celebration, the kids begged to go to church for morning prayer and liturgy, but given that we had been attending church at least daily during the preceding Holy Week, we opted instead to spend the day preparing for the evening’s festivities, including gathering up blankets and pillows for the “sleepover” as the kids delightedly referred to it. When I was first informed that the service would be all night long and that we shouldn’t expect to leave for home until four or five in the morning—which would include five or six hours of worship, then feasting to follow—I was shocked. But I was even more shocked to learn that it’s acceptable for children to sleep on the beautiful wool rugs in the church itself…As a former Anglican, such a thing would have been anathema…even as the Anglican liturgy has devolved into puppet shows and pet blessings…it’s all cognitive dissonance and (satanic) reversal.

*
I had ambitiously set out to bake an enormous batch of hot-cross buns (with sourdough starter, no less) but (perhaps unsurprisingly) they ended up being an abject failure from the start. I forged ahead, despite seeing immediately that my dough wasn’t rising… and sure enough, they emerged from the oven already almost hard as rocks. By the time they cooled, they were virtually inedible—suitable really only as small hand-held weapons, I’m afraid. I put a few in the Pascha basket nonetheless…along with the smoked salmon, various forms of saucisson, Lee’s favourite chorizo, an assortment of cheeses, and a smoked octopus that Horus eyed at the deli and politely requested.

*
I also made a roast beef. I love roast beef, when it’s cooked properly, which, in my view, means bloody and tender. I have deeply traumatizing memories of my dear grandmother’s cooked-to-shoe-leather-gray sunday roasts (though it feels like a real betrayal of her memory to confess such a thing, especially since the doneness of beef was such a point of contention between my parents, and only one topic among many that was brought up to highlight the class disparities between the two factions—in equally derogatory terms—pomposity vs. vulgarity). In any case, rare beef is objectively better…so pretension and upward mobility for the win [so she tells herself].

*

Anyway. Nevermind all that. In the past, I have often either drastically overcooked or undercooked my roasts using what I had always assumed was the only reasonable technique in existence: placing the meat in a super-hot oven and then reducing the heat and hoping for the best. But I recently came across the mind-blowing concept of reverse-searing a roast, and I took the leap of faith, cooking this hunk of dead cow at 230 for hours and hours and….and it worked brilliantly. Life has been altered irrevocably.

*

Donning the Veil

*