If you're Oriental Orthodox in the Northeast....

MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO COME TO THE SCOOCH CONFERENCE ON SATURDAY AUGUST 16, 2014!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Register here: http://www.scooch.org/2014/05/3r-annual-scooch-youth-conference/

SCOOCH is a relatively new one day conference which I attended for the first time last year, and it is BY FAR my favorite conference ever!

Even though we can attend the church services, partake of every sacrament, marry with no problem, connect with godly friends of the same faith, and so much more from our six sister Oriental Orthodox churches, how many of us actually even know other Oriental Orthodox Christians?

Do you know whether a sister church could be near where you live?

Do you even know who their bishops are?

Do you have any idea what their languages even sound like?

Let alone in hymn?

Let alone in an entire service?

Do you know how their practices differ?

How their vestments differ?

Do you even know what other Oriental Orthodox Christians look like?

Let alone how deep and similar yet different their experience of Christ and Orthodoxy is?

Have you ever had a life-size chance to look outside your own Coptic bubble and realize that Orthodoxy is much greater and realer and fuller and widespread and lovable than you ever actually imagined?

Chances are, your answer to the majority of the above questions is a guilty no.  But it doesn't have to be that way.  It can be an easy ecstatic YES!  if you come to the SCOOCH conference.

SCOOCH stands for Standing Conference of Oriental Orthodox Churches.  You will get to see a bishop from each of our sister churches, as well as many many congregants.  For the first time, Coptic people won't drown out everyone else.  You'll be able to learn about each of the other churches, play Orthodox Jeopardy, and ask the bishops anything you would like.  Let's show them some Coptic lovin' and come out to meet them and see how awesome they are!

Last year we got into small groups and really got to have intimate conversation with each other, and my my, are Armenians, Ethiopians, Syrians, Indians and Eritreans awesome!!  It is so awesome that I decided it needed a blog post and not just a million google+ and twitter shares and texts that are all repeatedly ignored.

Yes, it unfortunately conflicts with the Spiritual Festivities competition in Philly, but if you're not serving there, come! (It was the only day we could get all seven bishops in one place at the same time, a rare event to witness in and of itself!)

You will see me there.  Register at: http://www.scooch.org/2014/05/3r-annual-scooch-youth-conference/

Who else is coming?

Society doesn't let women grow up.

Last year on The Roast, Jonah Hill made fun of Sarah Silverman's age, a successful female comedian in her 40's.  I watched interviews with her after the fact, and she took the joke lightly, but reflected on the deeper stereotypes about women this joke pointed toward.  "Basically, the joke is that I'm still alive," and speaking toward women, "Your obsession with being young is the reason why your daughters don't look forward to their future."  Her comment resonated with me deeply.

It is often spoken about the cultural setbacks placed on men, deterring them from growing up.  In a capitalist society where the end-all be-all is making money, the surest way to make money is to exploit people’s insecurities and desires.  Because men were the primary money makers in the past, we see the exploitation of their insecurities and desires thoroughly fleshed out before us.  The insecurity and desire to captivate a woman’s attention has led to porn addiction, strip clubs, and use of prostitution.  The insecurity and desire to excel in one’s vocation has led to video game addiction.  The insecurity and desire to be manly, the aggressive alpha-male, has led to steroid addiction and the muscle dysmorphia pretty much every college male has.

In these fantasy worlds, men stay boys, having everything handed to them without having to work towards their goals.  All of these desires should be a means to an end, namely becoming a father and a real man in Christ, but society deludes us into thinking that the means should be ends in and of themselves.  Since men with boy minds cannot handle being fathers, they have essentially metaphorically aborted their children.  The utter ruin caused by fatherlessness does not have to be explained.

The stunting of women's minds is on a strikingly similar trajectory.  Now that women are money makers, we see the exploitation of their insecurities and desires blooming before us, but we don’t talk about the cultural setbacks placed on women.  Sure we say oh it’s terrible women have body image issues leading to eating disorders and liposuction and breast augmentation and plastic surgery and botox, oh it’s terrible women think they have to be provocative and seductive to get the attention of a man leading to revealing one’s body and sexually acting out, oh it’s terrible that women identify their self-worth and happiness with materialistic things leading to spending addictions on makeup and nails and expensive clothes and jewelry.  But what are the practical ramifications of these setbacks on the future?

What kind of body and face do we glorify?  Essentially, the body and face of a prepubescent girl.  (Designers deliberately chose 15 year old girls to model their clothing because they were at a specific point in puberty when their limbs start growing before everything else, and therefore are disproportionately long, and before their body fat to muscle ratio shifts in the direction of more fat.  Designers now are finally choosing women a bit older after their practices were exposed.)  Completely hairless, not a centimeter of fat anywhere on her body, not a trace of a wrinkle.  Is this unrelated to our abortion epidemic?  I think not.  Because that is not the body of a woman who has been pregnant and given birth to a child.  Because the mind of a woman preoccupied with staying young and sexually attractive is not the mind of a woman toiling to raise godly children, growing in wisdom and humility (or forming any worthy opinion for that matter).

 Isn’t the next predictable step a lack of motherhood?  Society is again turning all of these means into ends, now destroying the end which is motherhood and becoming a real woman in Christ.  Women with girl minds cannot be mothers.  Abortion is killing one's offspring, and because boys and girls cannot have children, it is no large step to go from aborting one's offspring metaphorically to aborting them literally.

The ramifications of these stereotypes, which are put in place to exploit our insecurities, is real.  Silverman hit it right on the head.  Women are not allowed to grow up and age, and so their (unborn) daughters never will either, if we continue to let our carnal desires guide us rather than our Eternal Desire.

What are your thoughts?

Words that have changed me: Words for the hurt.

Those whom one loves the most, family and close friends, are the hardest to forgive.  One feels entitled to their love and can be immensely hurt when she does not receive it.  But it is a hurt that one must learn to remedy or else it will last one's entire lifetime, as we will always be surrounded by people we must care for.

I like trigger phrases, phrases that can quickly come to mind and penetrate straight through my thoughts to snap me back to reality.  In two previous posts I shared some trigger phrases I use, one for anxiousness and one for growing closer to God.

When I feel hurt after someone says or does something rude, and start down into the tunnel of self pity thinking no one understands me or truly cares about me, the phrase that snaps me back to reality is, "You can't expect the love of God from a created being."  Because that is really what it comes down to--being hurt is just a result of my pride, when I expect I should be treated a certain way and am startled when I'm not.  It right away points out how ridiculous my pride really is.  "You can't expect the love of God from a created being," is quite an obvious fact, but in my pride it is really the false expectation I have.

One of my life long struggles is cultivating a positive relationship with my father.  I have always criticized him for being a hypocrite and having an unloving way in instructing me.  He would always be right when pointing out my flaws, but I always resented him for being harsh in his delivery, or not following the very advice he is giving me.  Even if I had already intended to do something, once he started barking orders at me to do that very thing, out of sheer resentment I would no longer do it.  But I knew I couldn't live like this forever, I knew I couldn't let my hurt (and ultimately my pride) hold me back in life, and I had to find a constructive way to deal with such situations.  Repeating to myself, "You can't expect the love of God from a created being," every time I have an occasion to feel hurt, has been a truly freeing experience for several reasons.

First of all, the phrase automatically brings my mind to the love of God.  Feeling hurt is an isolating feeling, but when I remember "You can't expect the love of God from a created being," I don't have a chance to start feeling alone because it reminds me that I am not alone, that I have the love of God.  It gives me the reassurance that I am already receiving perfect love from Someone--and that that Someone also loves the person I am raging against in my mind.

It then moves me to compassion, looking at my father or my friend or whomever as my peer, my equal, in this spiritual journey.  I no longer have the choice to criticize my father as being a hypocrite, claiming that he should be a better example for me because he is my elder, because he is more fundamentally my peer.  We are all equally responsible for our actions before God, and instead of criticizing him, I should pray for him.  In my self-centeredness, I remember this phrase, and it opens me up to "allow" others to have flaws.

When I remember that everyone is my peer, it then reminds me of my own inability to give the love of God.  I should not just pray for the person who has hurt me, but I should pray for myself, and realize the ways I hurt others without even taking heed to what I do.   Thinking that I give perfect love is a related illusion pride might give, but with this phrase, I am reminded that I too am a created being, and I fail miserably in being loving.  If I am allowed to be flawed, so are they.

Moreover, when I remember the love of God and remember that we are all sufferers of the sickness of sin, it actually makes me more perceptive and sensitive towards instances of love.  I no longer look at my fathers instruction as harsh judgment, but as his struggle in trying to improve me and raise me right.  It takes away my narrow view of what love should be and how it should be delivered.  Because I no longer have this insurmountable expectation, it opens me up to see all the ways I've been ignoring the love of others, however imperfectly it is being delivered.

Perhaps most importantly, it opens the door for reconciliation.  When I am no longer condemning the person in my mind for having flaws, and when I am now open to the ways they have shown me love, my heart is open to forgive, reconcile, and focus on improving the relationship.

You can't expect the love of God from a created being, and that is a good thing.

Allergic Reactions and the Spiritual Life

I went to a wedding last weekend,* and they gave out chocolates with nuts in them.  I love chocolate, and apparently nuts are pretty good too.  But I'm allergic to nuts, and so I must forego the apparently heavenly combination.  No matter how exquisite and delicious the chocolate might be, I can't have them, and I certainly don't want to have them, because the pleasure will only last a few seconds, and then I will start getting a reaction and potentially die.

Watching everyone around me eat the chocolates made me reflect on the spiritual life.  I should look at an opportunity for sin in the same way I look at chocolate with nuts.  No matter how pleasurable the experience might be, it is fleeting, and is certainly not worth engaging in when it will only bring death to my soul.  I am not tempted by chocolates with nuts because the reality of death is always before me.  I wish I were just as realistic when I am tempted to sin.

*I didn't actually go to a wedding last weekend, but I did when I was writing this post, which has been a draft since October.

Reflections on being Woman of Steel

Hello my beloved blog readers!  Here is a blogpost that I've had saved as a draft for quite a while, and I owe you something don't I?  Better late than never!

Back in November I broke my right hip in a freak accident at the gym.  And now I am part steel.  When I was at the hospital, I was happy to be hurt.  Now I understand why Christ urges people to visit the sick.  Seeing people, getting calls and texts, was so uplifting.  I also learned many lessons in how to best interact with a sick person, which I share below.

There were certainly some negatives to the experience, which included people needing to understand exactly how it happened.  I didn't mind saying oh it was an accident at the gym while using the leg press, but when people wanted to know exactly how it happened, I had to reenact the whole thing in my head again and again which was just a stressful memory.  Throw in the fact that most people didn't even know what a leg press was yet still insisted on understanding the exact nature of the fracture, it was super annoying.  So I think I'll use this rule of thumb the next time I visit a sick person: find out from someone else what happened if I'm curious, or just ask very general questions.

What pissed me off the most, though, was people trying to give me advice, and it usually came from people 1,000 times less fit than me.  "Be careful next time!" "Don't push yourself so hard!" "Obviously you have no idea what you're doing at the gym."  Did they really think that they felt worse about it than I did?  So another thing I learned is: don't try to give advice to a sick person, especially if you have no idea what they are experiencing.  Give comfort, not advice.  A better explanation of this idea can be found here: http://articles.latimes.com/print/2013/apr/07/opinion/la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407, an article on how not to say the wrong thing to a sick person.

Lastly, I thought it was pretty morbid when people would compliment me on my figure and tell me I lost weight.  "Wow, being hospitalized for a week and getting surgery and constantly throwing up and having no appetite and having extreme muscle atrophy in your leg really did you good!"  Um, thanks?  O2belkom?  Especially considering I wasn't fat and didn't need to lose weight.  Maybe people just forgot how I looked before.  Regardless, they were morbid comments that probably reflected our society's obsession with being skinny--the mentality that being skinny is a positive end in and of itself, regardless of whether the person used a healthy means to attain it.   Even if I were obese, even if losing weight from a hip fracture brought me down to a normal weight, I do not think telling someone they look great is an appropriate comment to make under such circumstances.

But other than the less-than-wise words of a few people, this has been a beautiful experience.  I've always been healthy and have never been hurt, so I've never been hospitalized for extended periods of time.  I always thought if someone is sick, they must want to rest and have peace and quiet.  I thought visitors must be annoying, and constant calls and texts tiring.  But I found, for me, nothing could be farther from the truth.

The care of everyone, from relatives to a distant acquaintance, is a beautiful memory that I will always carry with me, even now that I am healed.  The love I was given made despair seem like a silly thought.  It would have been easy to get frustrated and feel like a burden, not being able to do the most simple things on my own and needing to constantly ask for help, and not being able to go back to the gym for months on end (which was my sanctuary), but when everyone around me was just happy that I was alive and healing, it brought me back to reality and what really matters. It felt like the words of Christ, "there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine just persons who need no repentance." (Luke 15:7) My whole family and my whole church were rejoicing over one person getting better and walking again.

What probably made it even more sweet was that the reach out was always personal.  I permanently deleted my facebook a few months before I got hurt, and I think if I had facebook I might have gotten many facebook messages or wall posts, but wouldn't have appreciated it as much as the visits, the phone calls, the texts, the emails.

This experience has truly deepened and matured me, and I think God used this accident as an opportunity to teach me many lessons I was overlooking.

I used to be super fitness girl, my motto was "your body is the only place you have to live."  Which is true, we are human beings, not incorporeal angels or ghosts in machines, and our bodies aren't just transport systems for our brains, they are part of our very being and affect our wellness in so many ways.  We have to take care of this temple God has given us to live in.  But everything needs balance, and I was starting to get out of balance.  I used the gym as an escape from life, where I could just leave all my problems at the door and just focus on me against the iron, which was very fulfilling, but it was really an illusion of fulfillment, and I was neglecting my other, more important talents.

With this injury, my movement was so limited because of the injury itself and because of precautions post-surgery, that I might as well have been paralyzed.  The old Martha was so used to moving around and being capable of anything, so being bedridden for the first couple of weeks was torture, but eventually I came to terms with it, and I read so many books.  This experience has solidified the reality that the body is temporal no matter what you do and that I must focus on developing my mind, and my main talent, critical thinking.  It has strengthened my desire to be a teacher because my mind will be the only thing I have to give to my children and students, and will be the most important way I can influence them.

Soon enough I will be back to my iron pounding ways, but now it will be a much more solemn experience. A healthy body functions best when it is subject to a healthy spirit.

What I Am Thankful For

What I am most thankful for today are my problems.  I guess today I realized that if it weren't for my problems, I wouldn't be so close to God.  I mean the sins and wrong ways of thinking and acting that I've dealt with my whole life.  The things about me that make me feel like shit when I reflect on myself, are the very things that have forced me to cling to God, to my only aid; the things that make my emptiness and nothingness so apparent to me that I can't do anything but run to fill myself with Him.

I think about what my life would be like if I didn't have the struggles that I do.  I used to always think, wow, life would be so much better, I would be such a better person.  But I don't know if I would have the relationship with God that I have now, and it is only that that makes me who I am.

Today, I thank God for my crappiness, and for Him bringing me closer to Him by means of them.

A Timeless Tale

I'm someone who is really prone to despair and depression, which is to say that I very easily lose sight of God and prefer to look inward at my weakness rather than upward at His strength. When I'm at my worst, I pick up The Life of St. Antony by St. Athanasius. Needless to say, this is one of the few books that has drastically changed my life and the way I understand things, and it cannot be re-read enough times. I honestly have no idea why, but reading the life of such a saintly being just brings my spirits up to heaven like no other. I read it for the first time six years ago. I have found no other remedy for my depressive tendencies.

There is one account in particular that always has the same effect on me every time I read it. It is a story of one of his many encounters with the devil, and when I read it, no matter what state of despair I am in, it all fades away. It is as if his love and faith in God are so unshakable that in a moment, he can carry ten thousand weak spirits like my own on his shoulders and bring all of us up toward the love of Christ.

This account is the exact antithesis of self-obsession and despair:

Girding himself in this way, Antony went out to the tombs that were situated some distance from the village. He charged one of his friends to supply him periodically with bread, and he entered one of the tombs and remained alone within, his friend having closed the door on him. When the enemy could stand it no longer--for he was apprehensive that Antony might before long fill the desert with the discipline--approaching one night with a multitude of demons he whipped him with such force that he lay on the earth, speechless from the tortures. He contended that the pains were so severe as to lead one to say that the blows could not have been delivered by humans, since they caused such agony. But by God's providence (for the Lord does not overlook those who place their hope in him), the friend came the next day bringing him the loaves. Opening the door and seeing him lying, as if dead, on the ground, he picked him up and carried him to the Lord's house in the village, and laid him on earth. And many of his relatives and the people of the village stationed themselves by Antony as beside a corpse. But around midnight, coming to his senses and wakening, Antony, as he saw everyone sleeping, and only his friend keeping the watch, beckoned to him and asked him to lift him again and carry him to the tombs, waking no one. 

So he was taken back there by the man and, as before, the door was closed. Again he was alone inside. Because of the blows he was not strong enough to stand, but he prayed while lying down. And after the prayer he yelled out: "Here I am--Antony! I do not run from your blows, for even if you give me more, nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ." Then he also sang, "Though an army should set itself in array against me, my heart shall not be afraid." These things, then, the ascetic thought and spoke, but the enemy who despises good, astonished that even after the blows he had received he dared to return, summoned his dogs and said, exploding with rage, "You see that we failed to stop this man with a spirit of fornication or with lashes. Far from it--he is even insolent to us. Let us approach him in another way." Now schemes for working evil come easily to the devil, so when it was nighttime, they made such a crashing noise that that whole place seemed to be shaken by a quake. The demons, as if breaking through the building's four walls, and seeming to enter through them, were changed into the forms of beasts and reptiles. The place immediately was filled with appearances of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions, wolves, and each of these moved in accordance with its form. The lion roared, wanting to spring at him; the bull seemed intent on goring; the creeping snake did not quite reach him; the onrushing wolf made straight for him--and altogether the sounds of all the creatures that appeared were terrible, and their ragings were fierce. Struck and wounded by them, Antony's body was subject to yet more pain. But unmoved and even more watchful in his soul he lay there, and he groaned because of the pain felt in his body, but being in control of his thoughts and as if mocking them, he said: "If there were some power among you, it would have been enough for only one of you to come. But since the Lord has broken your strength, you attempt to terrify me by any means with the mob; it is a mark of your weakness that you mimic the shapes of irrational beasts." And again with boldness he said, "If you are able, and you did receive authority over me, don't hold back, but attack. But if you are unable, why, when it is vain, do you disturb me? For faith in our Lord is for us a seal and a wall of protection." So after trying many strategies, they gnashed their teeth because of him, for they made fools not of him, but of themselves. 

In this circumstance also the Lord did not forget the wrestling of Antony, but came to his aid. For when he looked up he saw the roof being opened, as it seemed, and a certain beam of light descending toward him. Suddenly the demons vanished from view, the pain of his body ceased instantly, and the building was once more intact. Aware of the assistance and both breathing more easily and relieved from the sufferings, Antony entreated the vision that appeared, saying, "Where were you? Why didn't you appear in the beginning, so that you could stop my distresses?" And a voice came to him: "I was here, Antony, but I waited to watch your struggle. And now, since you persevered and were not defeated, I will be your helper forever, and I will make you famous everywhere." On hearing this, he stood up and prayed, and he was so strengthened that he felt that his body contained more might than before. And he was about thirty-five years old at that time.

The entire book is extremely short, 94 paragraphs in all, and extremely readable. St. Athanasius was a brilliant writer and biographer.

The Life of St. Antony by St. Athanasius can be read online or downloaded as a pdf from here:
 - http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204.xvi.ii.i.html