A Layman Nurse-Observer's Notes

written with the blessing of my priest

Jerry's Journey to Joy Ranch

On silent stewardship, a smokehouse birth, and the poverty that becomes abundance

MAY 2026

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He was born in a log smokehouse in 1939, in the hills of Appalachia, in the kind of poverty that does not announce itself — it simply is, like the cold, like the dark, like the distance between a family and the nearest hospital or school or hot meal. There were no guarantees in that smokehouse. There were no connections, no inheritance, no runway. There was just a life beginning, and a world that would not be especially kind to it. And yet. From that smokehouse, my father grew — not into a man who spent his days trying to fill the hole that poverty had left in him, but into a man who saw that hole in every child's face he ever met, and loved them for it.

My father, Jerry, reposed yesterday. I was holding his hand. We prayed together as he crossed. And in the hours since, the thing that keeps returning to me is not the grief — though the grief is real and deep — but rather this: the shape of a life given away so quietly that almost no one noticed. That is the shape I want to try to trace here, as best I can, as his son, as a nurse who has watched many souls approach that threshold, and as a layman still learning what it means to be a Christian.

Among the many things my father did with the years that God gave him, the one that stands out most today is his volunteer work at Joy Ranch — a Christian home for children in crisis in Woodlawn, Virginia. He and my mother gave themselves to those children with considerable joy, and they involved my sisters and me as well. Jerry did not do this for recognition. There was no newspaper story, no plaque, no public acknowledgment of any kind, as far as I ever knew. He did it because he looked at those children and saw himself — the poor kid from Appalachia, the one who needed someone to show up, the one who needed a home that held. He simply loved them. And he showed up.

In one of his final conversations, my father spoke with Fr. Stephen. He said something I will carry with me for the rest of my life: "Maybe there are things in life I would've wanted to have done, but none of that matters. None of it really matters now." I did not need to ask him to explain. I knew him well enough to know that he was not a man haunted by unchecked ambitions or ungrasped things. He was telling the truth that only a humble man can tell — that what we accumulate cannot follow us, and that he had spent his energy on the only currency that does: love poured out for others.

✦   THE WORD   ✦

"He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much."

LUKE 16 : 10

My father never ran a great institution. He never commanded a large budget or a public ministry. He volunteered at a children's home in the Virginia hills, with my mother beside him, in the years when he had the energy to give. He was faithful in what seemed, from the outside, like a small thing. But the Lord does not grade on scale. He grades on fidelity. And the fidelity my father brought to those children — week after week, year after year, without fanfare, without expectation of return — was the same fidelity he brought to his family, to his faith, to his final hours. It did not waver. It simply was.

✦   FROM THE SAINTS   ✦

“

This is the rule of most perfect Christianity, its most exact definition, its highest point: to seek the common good and the advantage of all, and to prefer it to one's own profit. Not to look for one's own interests, but for those of others — this is the mark of the highest virtue.

— ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

Chrysostom's words could have been written as a portrait of my father. Jerry sought the common good. Not as a project, not as a strategy for his own sanctification, but as the natural expression of a man who knew what it was to have nothing, who received abundance he had not earned, and who understood — without having to be taught — that such abundance is never finally one's own. It is always, in the Christian imagination, held in trust for the neighbor. The poor kid from the smokehouse had never forgotten the smokehouse. That memory was not a wound he nursed. It was a compass he followed.

There is a kind of giving that seeks to be seen, that requires the newspaper story or the named bench or the grateful acknowledgment at the annual dinner. And there is another kind — the kind Chrysostom points toward, the kind the Lord describes in the Sermon on the Mount — where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. Jerry's giving was of this second kind. Silent. Steady. Hidden in plain sight, to everyone except the children who received it and the God who saw.

I am a nurse. I have sat with many people as they approached the end of their lives. I have watched what rises to the surface in those final hours, and it is never what I might have predicted in my younger years. It is not the acquisitions or the achievements or the places traveled. It is the love. The faces. The moments of genuine presence. My father had many such moments stored up. You could see it in the peace with which he left.

✦   DENOUEMENT   ✦

The smokehouse is long gone. The poor kid from Appalachia is reposed. But Joy Ranch is still there, on a road in Woodlawn, Virginia, full of children in crisis who need exactly what my father needed in 1939: a safe place, a loving face, a home that holds. Jerry's journey to Joy Ranch was not a single day's drive. It was the work of a lifetime — a life arranged, quietly and without fanfare, around the conviction that what we have received is not for our own keeping.

Today, I believe he has arrived at his Joy Ranch. The one that does not end. And I imagine he is at home there in a way that only a man who gave so much of himself away could ever truly be — because he arrives having spent himself, which is the only way to arrive full.

If you feel moved to honor a life of silent stewardship, I can think of no better way than to give to the place that shaped so much of how my family understood love. As always, I am a layman and a nurse, not a theologian or a spiritual director — please bring the questions this stirs in your heart to your priest, who can guide you with far more wisdom than I can offer here. But I can tell you what my father would have wanted. He would have pointed away from himself, toward the children.

Support Joy Ranch — In Memory of Jerry

Joy Ranch is a Christ-centered home for children in crisis in Woodlawn, Virginia. Since 1961, they have served over 5,000 children and their families. They receive no yearly-allocated state funding and depend entirely on the faithfulness of donors. Jerry believed in them. His family does too.

GIVE TO JOY RANCH

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Orthodox Healing and Wonder is written by a layman nurse-observer with the blessing of his priest. It is offered in a spirit of witness, not instruction. All things should be tested with your father confessor.

☩   ETERNAL MEMORY, JERRY   ☩

To Everything a Season

A short reflection on transition, the Holy Spirit, and thirty years

There is a particular stillness that comes with crossing a threshold. Not the stillness of emptiness, but the kind the body knows before it speaks — the held breath between one thing and the next.

Today I find myself in that place. A new role begins. A former one recedes to something smaller and dearer, PRN. And my father, too, is moving through his own passage. I notice the convergence and feel something I can only call the tenderness of time.

Thirty years sounds long until you realize it is not. Soon, God willing, I will be a grandfather. The thought does not frighten me so much as open me — like a window I did not know was there.

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

ECCLESIASTES 3:1

The Preacher does not call this cruel. He calls it true. And in the Orthodox understanding, truth is never merely information — it is a Person, and it is kind.

The Holy Spirit is love. He who has the Holy Spirit is moved to love even his enemies, and his soul is freed.

— SAINT SILOUAN THE ATHONITE

Saint Silouan did not say love is easy. He said the Spirit is love, and that the Spirit frees. Perhaps this is what transitions are for — not merely to move us from one place to another, but to loosen our grip, to remind us that we are held rather than holding.

To love our enemies. To pray for those ahead of us on the road and those behind. To humble ourselves before the One who numbers our days and calls each season good. This is not resignation. It is freedom.

I do not know what my father is feeling this week, or what he would say if I asked. But I can pray for him. And in that prayer, if Saint Silouan is right, the Holy Spirit arrives — not as doctrine but as warmth, as the thing that holds a father and a son in the same love across whatever distance lies between them.

The seasons will keep turning. So will we, God willing — turning not away, but toward.

As always, this reflection is offered by a layman nurse-observer, not a teacher. Please bring whatever stirs in you to your priest.

A layman nurse-observer, writing with the blessing of his priest

THE SEVENTH SUNDAY OF PASCHA  ·  THE HOLY FATHERS OF THE FIRST ECUMENICAL COUNCIL

Patrimony of Love

On a bent finger, a rocking chair in the Laurels, and the scarred men of Nicaea who handed us the Faith

SUNDAY, MAY 24, 2026

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THE HOOK

He read his Bible with a bent finger. I did not understand this as a child, not really, but I watched it the way children watch things that feel important before they have words for why. Papaw Dickenson would settle into his rocking chair in the evenings, open his illustrated Bible across his lap, and trace the lines of Scripture with the crooked index finger of his right hand, moving it slowly the way a scholar might draw a stick along an ancient scroll to keep his place. That finger had been broken in a loom when he was a boy in 1890s Virginia, caught in the machinery in an age when a child's hand was simply another moving part. It never grew back straight. And so for the rest of his long life, that bent finger pointed at the Word of God.

Before he was a preacher in the mountain community of the Laurels in Tennessee, Papaw Dickenson had driven donkeys hauling coal carts out of the mines in Virginia. He had worked the railroad as a young man. He carried the black lung all his life, the coal dust settling quietly in his chest like a slow creditor, and it claimed him finally in 1981. I was twelve years old. I never got to ask him the deeper questions. But I did not need to, not then. A child does not require theology to know that he is loved. What I knew was the patience in that bent finger when it rose to make a point, the gentleness of a man who had been broken by labor and had come through it somehow more tender rather than less.

Today the Orthodox Church remembers the 318 Holy Fathers who gathered at Nicaea in the year 325. I want to suggest that we think about them the way I think about Papaw Dickenson. Not as distant figures in golden robes. But as men who walked into that council chamber marked by what the world had done to their bodies, and who handed something precious down to us through those same bodies, across sixteen centuries of time.

Many of the Fathers at Nicaea were confessors, men who had survived the Diocletianic persecution not by recanting but by enduring. They came to that council bearing the marks of the empire's displeasure, missing eyes, branded flesh, limbs that had been twisted by the machinery of imperial power not unlike the loom that took the straightness from Papaw Dickenson's finger. And out of those scarred, marked, laboring hands, they gave us the Creed. They gave us the word homoousios, of one essence, the word that holds the door open on everything we mean when we say that God truly became flesh, that healing is real, that theosis is not a poet's dream.

Nicaea is a city in Bithynia, in what is now northwestern Turkey, unremarkable to the passing eye. The Laurels is a mountain community in Tennessee, unremarkable to anyone who has not loved someone who lived there. God seems to prefer these places. He seems to prefer the bent and the broken and the marked as his instruments of transmission. What came out of Nicaea was not an abstraction. It was a patrimony, handed down in bodies.

I do not pray for these alone, but also for those who will believe in Me through their word; that they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.

JOHN 17:20–21  ·  THE GOSPEL FOR THE FEAST

THE SAINTS SPEAK

Fathers and mothers: go and lead your child by the hand into the church.

ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

THE DENOUEMENT

Papaw Dickenson was a Church of God preacher, and he would not have known the word homoousios. But he confessed the same Trinity. He baptized in the same three Names. He fasted, he prayed, he washed feet in the ancient pattern of humble love. He did not know he was standing in a stream that ran back through Nicaea and beyond, but he was standing in it. The faith does not require that we know its full pedigree to receive it. It only requires that someone lead us to it by the hand.

That is what Papaw Dickenson did. He led me with a bent finger. He traced the Word for me in the evenings, in a rocking chair, in a mountain community in Tennessee, and when he raised that same broken finger to speak, I listened, not because I understood councils and creeds, but because I knew that he loved me. The Beatitudes were not a lesson he taught. They were a life he lived. And because of that, Orthodoxy has never felt alien to me. It has felt like coming home to something I already half-knew, something that was given to me before I had language for it, by a man whose body bore the marks of his labor and whose spirit bore the marks of grace.

The troparion for this Sunday says: You have established the Holy Fathers as lights on the earth; through them you have guided us to the true faith. I believe this. I also believe that the lights are not only the bishops of great councils. They are the preachers in the Laurels. They are the grandmothers who crossed themselves in the kitchen. They are every man and woman who led a child by the hand toward the living God, in whatever broken and beloved body they were given to inhabit.

This is the patrimony of love. It is not an argument. It is not an institution. It is a hand reaching for a smaller hand, across the years, across the mountains, across sixteen centuries, and saying: Come. This is where we belong.

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As always, these are the reflections of a layman nurse-observer, offered with wonder and not as instruction. Please bring any questions about the Faith to your priest, who carries the cure of souls. Memory eternal, Papaw Dickenson. Pray for me.

ORTHODOX HEALING & WONDER

ON DESPERATION & DIVINE WARMTH

The Fire on the Afterdeck

When the cry for warmth becomes the cry of the soul

Thirty-four years ago, on a night I cannot forget, our Coast Guard crew was searching the North Atlantic for fishermen who were overdue. Pancake ice. Sleet. Swells that rolled in with a cold indifference only the sea can manage. And then we saw it: fire. Not a flare. Not a signal mirror. A fire on the afterdeck, burning out of control, with the crew still aboard. They had not lit it to call us. They had lit it because they were cold. Beyond hope of rescue, beyond signaling, beyond strategy, they had simply done the most human thing imaginable: they reached for warmth.

The fire got away from them, of course. We had to fight both the flame and the rising water before we could bring those men home. But here is the thing that has never left me: we found them because of the fire. Their act of raw, shivering desperation, and not their competence or their seamanship or their distress flares, became the very thing that saved them. I have been a nurse for many years since that night, and I have watched people teeter at the edge of their endurance in many different ways. But I keep returning to those fishermen. Something in their story feels like a parable. Something in it feels Orthodox.

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"Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy."

PSALM 130:1–2  ·  DE PROFUNDIS

The Church has always known that de profundis, "out of the depths," is not a failure of faith. It is, in a way, the purest form of prayer. Psalm 130 has accompanied the Orthodox faithful at Vespers and at the burial of the dead for centuries precisely because the Church does not flinch from the depths. She has watched her saints go down into them. She has buried her martyrs from them. And she knows that the cry which rises from the very bottom, wordless and desperate and bodily, is not too small or too broken for God to hear.

Those fishermen could not send a proper distress call. Their radio may have failed; their hope certainly had. What they had left was only this: a body's refusal to be cold. And so they built their fire. I wonder sometimes whether our prayers, when they are most honest, look very much like that fire on the afterdeck: improvised, a little dangerous, out of control, and made of whatever was left at hand.

FROM THE DESERT

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"This is the great work of a man: always to take the blame for his own sins before God and to expect temptation to his last breath."

ABBA MACARIUS THE GREAT  ·  SAYINGS OF THE DESERT FATHERS

Abba Macarius does not describe the spiritual life as a staircase we ascend in orderly fashion. He describes it as a vigil, a waiting in acknowledged weakness, right up to the last breath. The Desert Fathers were not romantics about suffering. They knew exhaustion. They knew the cold of the Scetic desert at night, the heat of its day, the long watches in which nothing seemed to happen and God seemed very far away. And their counsel was not, "be stronger." It was something closer to: stay. Stay in your weakness. Expect the trial. Do not be surprised that the fire is getting away from you.

This is the thing that has always quietly undone me about Orthodoxy: the Church does not ask us to pretend we are not cold. She does not offer us a spirituality of pure composure. She gives us the Psalter, all 150 of them, including the ones where the Psalmist accuses God of hiding His face. She gives us the prayer of Gethsemane. She gives us Holy Saturday. She knows that before the Resurrection there is the tomb, and before the tomb there is the cry, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me,which is perhaps the most desperate fire ever set on the afterdeck of human history. And yet. And yet that cry was not the end of the story.

THE DENOUEMENT

We brought the fishermen home. Towed what was left of their boat to the lift at the dock. They went to their families and their beds, and I went back to watch. That is what a search and rescue crew does. And that, I have come to believe, is something of what God does: not waiting for us to send the proper signal, not requiring that our prayer be formal or our faith be composed, but watching the darkness for any light at all, however desperate, however out of control.

If you find yourself in the kind of cold that has moved past strategy and into mere survival, if your prayer has become more of a fire on the afterdeck than a polished petition, I would gently suggest that you are not outside the reach of grace. You may, in fact, be exactly where the Psalms have always found the faithful: in the depths, crying out. The Church has prayers for that. She has saints who know that place. And she has, in the Holy Mysteries, a warmth that is not our own.

A word to the reader: I write as a layman and a nurse-observer, not as a theologian or a guide. If any of this stirs something in you, a memory of your own cold night or a question about desperation and prayer, I encourage you warmly to bring it to your priest. He has been given what I have not: the authority to accompany you into those depths, and the sacramental means to meet you there.

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ORTHODOX HEALING & WONDER  ·  WRITTEN WITH THE BLESSING OF MY PRIEST

Speak, Lord, for Your Servant Hears

On the first stirrings of God in a child, and how they come full circle

There is a parking lot in Elizabethton, Tennessee, that has no business being anyone's holy ground. It is cracked asphalt and utility lines, a defunct industrial building on one side, a road on the other. Forty years ago my uncle's lumber yard stood nearby. The rails that once ran through here have long since given way to a bicycle trail. Nothing about this corner of State Line Road and Doe Avenue invites the eyes to linger. It never did.

And yet. In 1976, a child in a yellow vinyl jacket sat in the backseat of his grandmother's Chevy Malibu in that parking lot and looked up past the power lines at the clouds. His grandmother was in the store. He had his book satchel. He was in first grade. He had time.

He looked at the clouds and thought something he had no words for. He noticed that the clouds were made of water and air, and that the water needed the air, and the air shaped the water, and neither of them could exist in that form without the other and without the sky holding them, and that the sky itself was held by something he could not see. He did not know the word contingency. He did not know the word God in any serious way yet, not the way the question was asking it. He had been raised faithfully in the Church of God, and he was grateful for that, and always would be. But what was happening in that backseat was prior to any vocabulary. It was wonder doing its ancient work before the words arrive.

I went back this morning, fifty years later. I took a photograph. I wanted you to see that it is real.

State Line Road and Doe Avenue, Elizabethton, Tennessee — May 2026

That child was me. I am now a grandfather-to-be. My eldest is expecting my first grandchild. And my father, at the other end of the arc, lies in hospice, and weeks ago Father Stephen laid his stole upon my father's head and said the prayers and blessings that accompany a man to the threshold. I have been thinking, in the strange suspended time that surrounds both birth and death, about what happens between the two. It seems to me it ought not be something radical or discontinuous. It ought to be a slow unfolding of love over time. A fire that begins smoky and uncertain, and if tended faithfully, becomes warmth.

Beginnings imply endings. And the spiritual life, if we are paying attention, turns out to be one long continuous act of learning to hear a Voice that was calling us long before we knew whose it was.

HOLY SCRIPTURE

Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, and the word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. And the Lord called Samuel again the third time. Then Eli perceived that the Lord was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, "Go, lie down, and if He calls you, you shall say, 'Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.'" So Samuel went and lay down in his place. And the Lord came and stood, calling as at other times, "Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for Your servant hears."

1 SAMUEL 3 : 7 – 10

Samuel was a child sleeping near the Ark, in a functional, unbeautiful tabernacle, in the middle of the night. The word of the Lord was rare in those days. The spiritual leaders were corrupt. The times were dark. None of that stopped God from coming to stand beside a sleeping boy and calling him by name. Three times He called, and three times the boy ran to the wrong person, because he did not yet have ears trained to recognize whose voice it was. It took an old man with failing eyes to say: go back, lie down, and when you hear it again, say only this. Say: I am listening.

There is no shame in the child not recognizing the voice. That is not a failure of the child. It is simply the nature of the beginning. What matters is the posture. The openness. The willingness, once instructed, to say: speak. I am here. I am listening.

A child in a yellow jacket looking up at clouds is already saying this, even without the words. The wonder itself is the posture. The question the clouds are raising in the child's heart is already a form of prayer, addressed to Someone, even if the child cannot yet name Him.

FROM THE DESERT MOTHERS

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"In the beginning, there is much struggle for those who come near to God. But after that, there is indescribable joy. It is just like building a fire: at first it is smoky and your eyes water, but later you get warmth."

AMMA SYNCLETICA  |  DESERT MOTHER, 4TH CENTURY

Amma Syncletica was not writing about children. She was writing about beginners. About every soul that first turns toward God and finds the turning harder and more disorienting than expected. But I cannot read her words without thinking that every child is, before God, the most luminous kind of beginner there is. The soul has not yet learned to look away. The eyes still water. The fire is still smoky. And that is not a deficiency. That is the beginning of warmth.

What strikes me, as a nurse and as a layman who came to Orthodoxy late and gratefully, is that Syncletica's image has no terminus. She does not say the fire eventually goes out. She says it becomes warmth. The smoke of early wonder, the fumbling questions of a child in a parking lot, the tentative prayers of a young person who does not yet have the full vocabulary of faith, these do not disappear when we grow older. They deepen. They clarify. The smoke becomes something you can sit beside. And it rises like prayers with the incense.

GATHERING THE THREADS

My father has Father Stephen's prayers over him now. My grandchild is not yet born. Somewhere in between those two realities I am standing, a nurse who has seen enough of both ends of life to know that the body is always telling us something the spirit already knows. And what I keep returning to is the image of that parking lot. Not because it is beautiful. Because it is true.

God called Samuel in an unremarkable place, in the dark, before the boy had a single category for what was happening to him. He calls our children the same way. In backseats and backyards, in the middle of ordinary afternoons, through the cracks in the asphalt of the world, He comes and stands and says their name. They may not know whose voice it is for years. Perhaps decades. Perhaps the smoke lasts a long time. But the fire, once lit, does not require that we understand it to be real. It only requires that we do not smother it.

What does this mean in practice? That is a question for your priest, not for a layman-observer writing from his own particular corner of wonder. But I will say this much: the child who asked questions about the clouds in 1976 and the man who stood in an Orthodox nave for the first time decades later, they are the same person. The unfolding was slow. It was not radical. It was, looking back, continuous. And if there is something to pass on to the grandchild coming, and to tend in the father departing, it is simply this: the Voice does not stop calling. Our whole life is learning to say, with Samuel, with more and more of ourselves: speak. I am here. I am listening.

As always, this reflection is offered by a layman, written with the blessing of my priest. Please bring any questions it raises to your own father confessor.

There is a kind of reckoning that does not come immediately. Sometimes it waits, patient and unhurried, the way a seed waits underground, until the evidence of what we have done breaks the surface of the earth and stands in the morning light for all to see

My cousin Glenda was helping our Uncle George plant beans one spring afternoon on Roan Mountain in the hills of East Tennessee. Uncle George was not a man who invited shortcuts. He had been born in 1893, had fought in the muddy trenches of France in the Great War, had come home and lived out his days in a small cabin on Shell Creek with a severity that today would strike most people as almost monastic. He wound his clock before dark, rose before light, and poured himself into the land and into the care of his disabled sister with a devotion that asked nothing in return.

The beans were being planted one by one: a hole jabbed with a stick, a bean dropped in, the stick moved along the row. For a little girl, it was the longest afternoon in human history. So when George excused himself to the outhouse, Glenda made a calculation. She carried the bag to the end of the row and dumped out a good half of the remaining beans. Enough to finish quickly. Not so many missing that he would notice.

He noticed.

Not that day. Weeks later, when a great mound of bean vines came surging up at the end of the row, lush and abundant and impossible to explain, Uncle George saw it and understood at once what had happened. And Glenda, who had perhaps hoped the matter was safely buried in the past, found herself called to account before the evidence of the earth itself.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. — Galatians 6:7, King James Version

Saint Paul wrote those words to a church that had grown a little too comfortable with the idea that the outward life and the inward life could be kept neatly separate. He was not merely speaking of punishment. He was speaking of a law woven into the fabric of creation itself, the same law that governs every garden, every field, every row of runner beans on a mountain in Appalachia. What is sown will come up. The earth keeps honest accounts.

And yet here is where the wonder enters: the law of sowing and reaping, taken alone, would leave us in despair. Because we have all, in one way or another, dumped the bag at the end of the row. We have all cut corners in places we hoped no one would notice. We have all stood, sooner or later, before the mound of vines and had to admit what we did.

A brother came to Abba Moses and asked for a word. The old man said: Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. — Abba Moses, Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Uncle George was not a theologian. He was not, as far as I know, a churched man in any formal sense. But there was something in the way he lived, in the smallness of the cabin, the strictness of the hours, the utter absence of any striving for comfort, that the Desert Fathers would have recognized immediately. He was a man who had sat in his cell and let it teach him. The mountain taught him. The beans taught him. Time taught him.

What it taught him, I think, was this: that the truth will out. Not to torment us, but to free us. The mound of beans was not a trap; it was an invitation. It gave Glenda a specific, undeniable moment to say: I did this. I am sorry.

What strikes me most, turning this story over and over as I have for many years, is not the transgression and not even the discovery. It is what happened after. Glenda sought forgiveness. Not because she had to. Not because George demanded it. But because she esteemed his love enough to want to be right with him. And George, stern and mahogany-skinned and clock-winding Uncle George, who had stood in the mud of France and watched things no man should see, gave it. After the lecture, of course. But he gave it.

That is the whole movement of the spiritual life, is it not? A sowing. A reckoning. A seeking. And then mercy, offered by the one whose garden we have wronged.

I am a nurse by training, and I have sat beside people in their last hours who were still carrying bags full of dumped beans, things done decades ago that were never confessed, never laid down. The mound had grown tall. And I have seen the relief, the physical and bodily relief, when a priest came, and those things were finally spoken and absolved. The body knows when a weight is lifted. The garden knows when it has been tended honestly.

The law of sowing and reaping is not our enemy. It is the mercy of a God who does not let us get away with unreality. He loves us too much to let the mound stay buried. He surfaces it, gently, often comically, sometimes through beans, because He wants us to be free.

As always, I write here as a layman and a nurse-observer, not as a teacher. If something in these words stirs something in you, some old mound you have not yet addressed, I would encourage you, gently and warmly, to speak with your priest. That is what he is there for. That is precisely what he is there for.

A crossroads in the mountains, and the grace of letting go

In the late 1960s my dad was an I&R man doing install and repair for United Intermountain Telephone in the mountains of East Tennessee. Driving his repair van up and down the narrow mountain paths, he was often installing the very first phones that some mountain families had ever owned. These were nearly always party lines, shared by neighbors, and many of those neighbors were people who knew my dad from when he grew up in the high-country community there. This time in his life has been a rich trove of stories he has shared with me over the years.

About five years ago, my dad and I took an all-day excursion in his big truck all over the county. We went to the house near where he was born in a log smokehouse. We saw cemeteries and shared stories. Unexpectedly, on this day he shared with me a story about forgiveness and acceptance. It was one of the most beautiful days he and I ever spent together. The story came to its turning point at a crossroads by a farmer’s field, back in the sixties. But first, let us go back a little further, to his childhood.

“Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”

— Ephesians 4:32

My dad grew up poor in Appalachia. His father had tuberculosis and spent decades in a sanatorium in Ohio. Dad saw his father only twice in his life, once with me as a three-year-old. In one of his high school photographs, his shirt is held closed with safety pins. He had only two sets of clothes. His mother, my Granny Josephine, would wash one set while he wore the other to school. As an adult my dad had hammered toes. I learned this was the result of shoes too small for his feet and a terrible accident on a tobacco farm, where a horse-drawn tobacco sled ran over his feet and severed the tendons connecting to the toes. They drew up and were never repaired.

Such stories of struggle typified his childhood. But one was worse than them all. In the early 1950s, when dad was a young boy, his brothers and sister had been given nice Christmas clothes. Their mother took them to town, and when she returned, the house had burned to the ground with all the new Christmas things inside. My great-grandfather, US Grant Range, arranged for a house to be built for his daughter-in-law in the Black Bottom community near River Race. Black Bottom got its name from the dark river soil and the fact that the roads were graveled with coal cinders. I have fond memories of that house, but while it was being built, my dad and his siblings were sent up into the mountains to live on a large farm owned by a local man. The man turned out to be cruel. He would drink, and he would whip and beat the boys. My dad and his brothers could not wait to leave, which they gladly did once the house in Black Bottom was finished.

Years later, after graduation and a stint in the army, my dad was doing install and repair work up in the mountains. He came to a crossroads in his telephone truck. And there, sitting atop an old Massey Ferguson tractor, was the cruel farmer who had tortured him and his brothers a decade before.

“Do not hate the sinner, for we are all responsible for all. If you hate him, you have already condemned yourself.”

— St. John of Kronstadt

My dad became very still and quiet as he recounted this episode to me, just a few years ago, on our good day in his truck.

He looked across at the man, who was wearing bibs with no shirt and a straw hat that had seen its days. The man had taken a break from mowing with a tow-behind rig on the tractor. Corpulent, sweating, cotton-eyed, and drunk, he was drinking even in the midst of his work. At first, dad said he worried the man might recognize him. Then the anxiety passed, when he realized the old sot was too deep in the bottle to recognize anybody. And then anxiety turned to anger as dad recalled the cruel treatment, the beatings and whippings this man had dealt to him and his brothers.

My dad grew serious as he recounted what happened next. “I made up my mind that I was going to tell him how he had done us,” he said. But then another thought entered his mind. “I looked at him sitting there, sweating and drunk on that tractor, and I realized how pitiful he was. I could not hate him. I could not say anything. Because I realized that what he had done to himself was far worse than anything I could ever say to him.” He paused. “Then I really did feel sorry for him. I do know that somebody watches us. So I had to forgive him and let it go. Sometimes, son, you just have to let these things go and let the Lord sort them out.”

My dad was not one to hand out such serious stories freely, and this one has stayed with me in the years since we spent that wonderful day together in his truck. It is not a sad story, in some ways, because I could see the relief on his face as he recounted how he came to forgive this man. My father was, as we say in the mountains, very particular in his youth. He was serious much of the time and wanted things a certain way. But I could see the lightness that came to his face when he told me of letting go of resentment and holding on to forgiveness.

There at a mountain crossroads, without a church nearby, without a priest, without an icon, my father received a grace. He saw through bitterness to pity, and through pity to release. The Fathers would recognize this movement. It is not weakness. It is the beginning of true sight.

I am only a layman and a nurse, and I share these things as one who is still learning. If something here stirs you toward examining the heavy things you carry, I would encourage you to bring them to your own spiritual father. That is where the real work of forgiveness finds its footing.

As always, these reflections are offered humbly, with the blessing of my priest. Whatever moves you here, bring it to your own confessor and father in Christ.

Health · Wonder · Orthodox Life

Remembering Eden.

On a Prince Albert can, a cold mountain morning, and the country we cannot stop longing for

May 19, 2026

I · The Remembrance

There was a farm in the mountains of Appalachia where my grandparents lived, and to reach it you climbed nearly a mile in elevation over roads that civilization had not particularly bothered to finish. Even in the middle of July the mornings were cold enough to make your breath visible, and the winters were something the lowlands have no word for. There was no electricity to speak of. In the evenings the house glowed with oil lamps. A battery-powered radio brought voices from another world that felt very far away and not especially important. Water came from a cistern and a hand pump in the kitchen. The outhouse stood at the edge of the yard where the animals began. It was, by any modern measure, a hard way to live.

I was a small boy in the early 1970s when I first remember it clearly, and what I remember most is the creek. I would spend whole mornings catching crawdads from the cold water, lifting stones to find them, and saving the best ones in a Prince Albert tobacco can to carry back and show my sisters. The crawdads never seemed to mind very much, and neither did I.

That memory has returned to me across five decades now, unbidden and unchanged. It surfaces in hospital corridors at three in the morning. It comes back in the middle of prayer. It arrives sometimes for no reason at all, carrying with it the smell of woodsmoke and cold creek water and something else I have never been able to name precisely. I used to call it nostalgia. I have come to think that was too small a word. It is not the past I am longing for. It is something the past was pointing toward.

We are, it turns out, not strangers to wonder. We are exiles who cannot quite forget the country we came from. Every human life is haunted by a landscape we have never visited in this body, by the fragrance of something we have never, in this life, smelled. The theologians call this the vestigial image, the imago Dei bruised but not erased. I call it the ache. You probably know exactly what I mean.

A garden glimpsed at dusk. The first cold breath of October. The moment a piece of music resolves and for just a second something in your chest lifts toward it, not with pleasure exactly but with longing, as though the beautiful thing is not the thing itself but a door, and you half-remember what is on the other side.

II · Scripture

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

— Ecclesiastes 3:11

The Preacher does not say God has placed knowledge of eternity in the heart, but eternity itself, as one plants something living that will press against its container from the inside and refuse to be comfortable. This is not a metaphor for vague spiritual longing. It is an ontological statement: we are made from above, shaped around an absence the shape of God, and no earthly beauty, however staggering, will fill it completely. It will only, at its best, remind us.

The old mountain farm reminded me. Not because poverty is holy, or because simplicity is a virtue in itself, though the Fathers have a good deal to say about both. It reminded me because it was legible. Water came from where water comes from. Light came from fire. Animals were animals and you knew their names and they knew yours. The world had not yet been translated into abstraction. And in that legibility, something ancient in me relaxed and said: yes, this is closer to what things actually are.

This is why the beautiful is never simply pleasant. It wounds. It convicts. The Orthodox Tradition understands this entirely: beauty is not decoration. Beauty is theology. The icon does not depict heaven the way a postcard depicts a resort. The icon is a window, and the light comes from the other side. So too, I would venture gently, did that oil-lit kitchen in the mountains.

III · From the Saints

“The soul, having tasted the things of the Spirit even a little, is seized with a longing and love for God. It cannot bear to be separated from that sweetness, but runs always toward it, as though it were being drawn by the fragrance of costly ointment.”

— St. Macarius the Great, Homily 15

Abba Macarius knew the desert: cracked earth, scorching days, the silence that presses on the ears like a hand. He was not speaking from a comfortable chair about pleasant feelings. He was speaking from a place scraped clean enough to notice the fragrance. The word he reaches for, ointment, is deliberate. It is the same image as the Bride in the Song of Songs: Draw me after you, let us run. The King has brought me into his chambers. The longing and the running are the same motion.

There is a kind of simplicity, whether the desert or the Appalachian ridge, that accomplishes what Abba Macarius describes by subtraction. Remove enough noise and what remains is not emptiness but presence. The Desert Fathers sought that by going into the wilderness. My grandparents lived it, I think, without particular theology behind it, simply because that is how their people had always lived. And a small boy with a Prince Albert can full of crawdads stumbled into the edge of it without knowing what it was.

He has been trying to find his way back ever since.

IV · Denouement

The memory of that farm is not, I have finally come to understand, a memory of the past. It is a memory of the future. Or more precisely: it is a memory of what is, seen briefly and clearly through the thin place that childhood sometimes provides before the world’s noise thickens around us.

The Orthodox understanding of the Kingdom of God is not that it lies ahead of us as something yet to be constructed. Our Lord Himself was precise about this: the Kingdom does not come by observation, not lo here, not lo there. It is found, He said, within you. The Fathers understood this to mean that the Kingdom is discovered through the noetic faculty, the eye of the heart, when that eye has not been darkened by passion and distraction and the noise we voluntarily pour into ourselves. The Liturgy does not rehearse a future hope. It enters a present reality from the inside. And the ache, the longing that rises in the chest at the smell of woodsmoke or cold water or the first cold morning of September, is not mere sentiment. It is anamnesis, the sacred remembering that the Church herself performs at every Eucharist, and it rises from that same interior country. We are creatures who carry the Kingdom as a seed, and we carry its grammar in our bones.

I think of my grandmother moving through that kitchen in lamplight, filling a kettle from the hand pump, unhurried in a way that had nothing to do with having nowhere to go and everything to do with knowing where she was. I think of the animals audible through the walls in the morning, the particular cold of those summer dawns, the spring thaw that turned the creek loose and fast and cold enough to ache in your hands when you lifted the stones. I think of the crawdads in the Prince Albert can, regarding me with what I now recognize as considerable patience.

None of it was Eden. But I now believe it was a Remembrance of Eden.

The body that cannot feel wonder is already ill, even if the labs come back perfect. And the soul that has stopped noticing beauty, that has armored itself against astonishment, has done something the Fathers would recognize as a spiritual pathology: acedia, the noonday demon, the grey sameness that makes even the Eucharist feel routine and the first cold morning of spring feel unremarkable.

Pay attention to what makes you ache. The crawdads in the creek. The lamp on the table. The particular sound of a mountain morning before anyone else is awake. Write it down. Bring it to the Divine Liturgy, which is itself an act of holy remembering. And then, with more urgency than I am competent to convey, bring it to your priest. These are not small private sentimental experiences. They are evidence that the imago Dei in you is still turned, however crookedly, toward its source, and toward an Eden that is not only behind us but, by the mercy of God, still ahead.

Nothing here is instruction or spiritual direction, only the observations of a nurse and a layman writing with the blessing of his priest. Please bring what stirs in you to your father confessor, who can guide you far better than these pages ever could.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

I have been turning this over lately, trying to understand repentance. We sometimes imagine it as a kind of permanent brokenness — a dwelling in the grief of what we have done wrong. But the Fathers suggest something different. Repentance is a turning, not a paralysis. It is the wings folding and then opening again. The grief is real, and it matters, but it is meant to launch us — back toward God, back toward the work, back toward the hive.

For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.

— 2 Corinthians 7:10

There it is in a single verse: two kinds of sorrow. One opens a door; the other closes one. Godly grief turns us around and sets our feet moving. Worldly grief folds in on itself, heavy and airless, until it cannot move at all. Repentance as the Fathers understood it is active — a metanoia, a change of nous, a re-orientation of the whole inner person toward light.

And then? Then comes the resilience of simply continuing. Not straining after spiritual heroics. Not performing contrition for an audience. Just the quiet recommitment, again and again, to be what we were made to be — to rise, to fly, to bring something home to the hive.

“Do not be troubled by the falls, but rise up immediately and go to God again. The more swiftly a man rises after his fall, the more he shows his love for God.”

— St. John of Kronstadt

Here is where rest enters. The bee naps in a flower. It does not nap in the hive’s anxious center, surrounded by the work it has not finished. It rests inside the very thing that is the purpose of its laboring — inside beauty, inside sweetness, inside the gift the creation has extended to it. A flower is a hammock for a bee.

We too are invited to rest inside the thing itself. To pause before a flower — not to analyze it, not to photograph it, not to name it in Latin — but to let its existence settle upon us the way light settles on water. This is the foretaste our Lord extends. The peace that passes understanding does not wait for us at the end of our labors. It waits in the flower we walked past this morning. It waits in the small stillness of interior prayer. It waits whenever we allow the world to be beautiful at us without demanding that we do anything with it.

Repentance. Resilience. Rest. They are not three separate disciplines to master in sequence. They are one motion, like a wing: the turn toward God, the flight of simply continuing, the alighting in wonder. And then again. And then again. Until we are no longer able — and find ourselves in the rest that has no end.

These reflections are written with the blessing of my priest and offered in humility, not instruction. Whatever in them is true belongs to the Tradition; whatever is wanting is mine alone. Bring any of it to your own father confessor — he knows you, and I do not.

The Guarded Heart

Where Epictetus and the Desert Fathers Meet

A LAY REFLECTION  ·  WRITTEN WITH THE BLESSING OF MY PRIEST

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There is a moment in the Enchiridion, that slim, battered handbook of a freed Roman slave, where Epictetus gives his readers what might be the strangest piece of advice in all of ancient philosophy. When something disturbs you, he says, you should turn to it and announce aloud: "You are just an impression, and not at all the thing you appear to be."

To a modern reader, this sounds uncannily like cognitive behavioral therapy. But to anyone who has spent time in the Philokalia, or sat with the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, it sounds like something else entirely: the echo of a voice already heard in a more ancient and more fragrant room.

The resemblance is not a coincidence. It is an invitation.

"Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life."

PROVERBS 4:23 · ESV

THE STOIC SOUL

Epictetus was a slave. His master, a notoriously cruel man, once twisted his leg simply to demonstrate that it could be done. Epictetus looked up, calm as a stone in still water, and said: "You are going to break it." And when the bone snapped, he added only: "Did I not tell you so?" His body was owned. His prohairesis, his moral will, his capacity to choose, was not. That, he taught, was the one truly inviolable human property.

Centuries later, in the blazing silence of the Egyptian desert, St. Anthony the Great and his brothers were learning the same sovereign freedom by a different road. They discovered that while they could not prevent the logismoi(the provocations, the uninvited thoughts that batter the mind like moths against a lamp), they were entirely and solemnly responsible for whether they assented to them. The thought arrives on its own. The welcome is ours to give or withhold.

Two men, separated by centuries and by the whole abyss between paganism and the Gospel, found themselves standing at the same gate.

“The truly intelligent man has only one care: to obey and please the God of all. He trains his soul… to be grateful to God for His high providence in whatever happens in life.”

ST. ANTHONY THE GREAT

TWO WAYS OF SEEING

The convergence is striking enough to lay out plainly. On three great practical questions, the Stoic philosopher and the Orthodox saint arrive at answers so close that one almost wonders whether the Fathers had been reading Epictetus, and some of them almost certainly had.

The Practice | Epictetus | The Desert Tradition

The Filter of Control | “Is this up to me?” If not, it is nothing to us. | “Is this from God?” Trials are accepted with gratitude; temptations are refused.

The Watchman at the Gate | Examine every impression before granting it power over you. | Nepsis, watchfulness. St. Hesychios pictures the mind as a sentry refusing entry to any disturbing thought.

Acceptance of What Is | “Wish for things to happen as they do.” | Holy Abandonment to the Will of God: nothing reaches us without His permission. Our answer is, Thy will be done.

St. Hesychios the Priest, writing in the Philokalia, describes this watchfulness with surgical precision: the guarded mind stands at the threshold and interrogates every thought that approaches, the way a city guard questions a stranger at the gate. Who sent you? What do you want? Are you from the Lord? It is, in every practical detail, what Epictetus describes; and yet it is something more, because the guard is not alone at his post.

THE CRUCIAL DEPARTURE

Here is where the roads, so companionably parallel, diverge; and the divergence is everything.

For Epictetus, the why of inner discipline is the pride of an unbreakable self. The Stoic clears the mind to become master of himself. His is the dignity of the fortress that will not fall. There is something genuinely noble in it. But it is a nobility that looks inward and, finding sufficient resources there, requires nothing further.

For the Desert Father, the why is something almost opposite: self-emptying. The Christian clears the mind not to occupy it himself but to make room for Another. One tradition seeks the silence of an empty room. The other seeks the silence of a great cathedral, not empty at all, but hushed and waiting, every lamp trimmed, every breath held, listening for the Voice of the Lord.

The Stoic learns to endure. The saint learns to receive. Both practices begin in the same watchful stillness; one ends in self-possession, the other in the surrender of self to the One who is more truly ourselves than we are.

LIVING THE WISDOM

Perhaps you are sitting with a frightening test result, or a letter that unmade a plan you had trusted. Perhaps it is simply the low-grade chaos of an ordinary Tuesday: the traffic, the inbox, the child who will not sleep, the colleague who managed to be both wrong and loud about it. The circumstances differ. The invitation is the same.

Your peace does not live in your circumstances. It never has. The Stoic knew this. The saints knew it with a joy the Stoic could not quite imagine.

By practicing the inner guard, by meeting each troubling impression at the gate and asking, quietly, is this mine to carry? we stop being carried away by the world's weather. We learn, as a nurse at a bedside learns, that while the storm may rage around the vessel, it only sinks the ship if we open the hatches and invite the water in.

And then, when the mind is stilled, something the Stoic could not philosophize his way to becomes possible: we may find, in the cleared and guarded room of the heart, that we are not alone there at all. The One we have been making room for was already present, waiting with the patience of someone who has always known we would eventually grow quiet enough to notice.

A WORD BEFORE YOU GO

I write as a layman and a nurse — someone who has watched people guard or surrender their peace at the bedsides of the suffering, and who finds in both Epictetus and the Fathers a wisdom worth living. But wisdom this rich is not safely navigated alone. If these ideas stir something in you — a desire to take up the practice of nepsis, to learn what Holy Abandonment might look like in your own particular life — please bring these questions to your priest. He can guide you in a way no philosopher's handbook ever could.

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ORTHODOX WONDER  ·  SUB SPECIE AETERNITATIS  ·  GLORY TO GOD FOR ALL THINGS

A Reflection for Mother’s Day

I. A Realization

There is something that stops me every time I work a long shift. It’s the moment a family member, exhausted and frightened, simply stays. They don’t have to. Visiting hours are long past. But they pull a chair close to the bed and they remain, as though their presence itself were medicine. I have watched this many times and it never stops being astonishing to me. Love, it turns out, has a very specific posture: it leans in.

I know this now not only as a nurse, but as a child. My father is ill. And I have watched my mother do what I have seen so many do on my unit. Mom pulls her chair close, and she stays. There is no speech in it, no grand gesture. Just her, beside him. And somewhere in the watching, I began to understand something I could not have learned from a textbook: that love does not always do something. Sometimes love simply becomes a presence. A warmth in the room. A hand that doesn’t let go.

It was in one of those quiet hospital hours that a name came to me, tucked behind two of the most beloved saints in all of Christendom. The Holy Unmercenary Healers Cosmas and Damian had a mother. Her name is Theodoti. The Church remembers her. She is a saint. And on this Mother’s Day, I want to sit with her a moment. I want to be present with Saint Theodoti the way my mother sits with my father. just to be near.

II. The Scripture

“Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her: ‘Many women have done excellently, but you surpass them all.’”

— Proverbs 31:28-29

III. The Voice of the Fathers

Abba Poemen said: “Teach your mouth to say that which you have in your heart.”

Saint Theodoti did not leave us writings or sermons. What she left was two sons who gave their lives, and their gifts, entirely away, without payment, without glory-seeking, in pure love for the suffering. Somewhere, in the home where they were raised, they learned that healing is not a transaction. They learned it from watching someone.

Her mouth was her life. Her teaching was her presence.

IV. The Denouement

I am a nurse, not a theologian. I hold needles, not censers. But I have learned at the bedside what I suspect Saint Theodoti knew in her bones: that healing flows from love, and love longs to be present.

Cosmas and Damian did not emerge fully formed as unmercenary healers from nowhere. They had a mother who raised them in the Faith. Saint Theodoti was a devout widow who, tradition tells us, gave herself wholly to God after the death of her husband. She did not clutch her sons. She gave them, with open hands, to Christ. And Christ gave them to the world.

My mother does not know she is teaching me anything right now. She is just sitting with my father. But I am watching. And I am learning, again, what love looks like when it stops performing and simply remains.

This Mother’s Day, perhaps we might light a candle for the mothers we know, and for the ones the Church quietly remembers. Our mothers show us, by staying, what presence really means.

As always, if any of this stirs questions about the saints or the tradition, please bring them to your priest. He will know far better than I do, and that conversation is itself a gift.

Holy Theodoti, pray for us. And pray for all the mothers who stay.

"Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." — Matthew 18:3

There is a profound biological paradox hidden in the rugged expanses of the Swara Acacia plains in East Africa. It is a land governed by the unyielding laws of the bushveld, where survival is usually bought with muscle, speed, or venom. Yet, amidst the thorns of the acacia trees, lives the hyrax—a creature that defies the "red in tooth and claw" reputation of the African wild with nothing more than a soft coat and a pair of wide, trusting eyes.

Years ago, while on vacation, my son found a baby hyrax that had tumbled from its nest onto our porch. Looking at that tiny, defenseless ball of fur, one couldn't help but wonder: how does something so seemingly vulnerable persist in a world of predators?

The Science of the "Cute"

In biology, this "cuteness" is often linked to neoteny—the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. It is characterized by large eyes, rounded faces, and small statures. While we often view these traits as mere aesthetic charms, neoteny serves a vital evolutionary purpose. It triggers an instinctive caregiving response in others; it is a signal of need that demands a protector.

Of course, nature balances this vulnerability with a surprising hidden strength. As anyone who has spent a night in the bushveld can attest, the hyrax possesses a vocal range that is nothing short of terrifying. At night, these "cute" creatures emit blood-curdling screams and haunting cries that echo through the trees, a startling reminder that there is a fierce spirit housed within that small frame.

Becoming Like a Little Child

There is a spiritual parallel here that mirrors the biblical exhortation to "become like little children." We often mistake this instruction for a call to be childish or naive. However, looking at the hyrax, we see a different kind of "childlikeness."

To become like a child is to acknowledge a fundamental state of dependence. The baby hyrax on the porch didn't survive through its own prowess; it survived because its "cuteness"—its very vulnerability—called out for help, eventually leading a Ranger to lift it back to the safety of the heights.

In our journey of faith, we often exhaust ourselves trying to grow "armor"—becoming hardened, self-sufficient, and cynical to survive a dangerous world. We forget that our greatest strength lies in our proximity to the Maker.

"But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'" — 2 Corinthians 12:9

The Wisdom of the Desert

This paradox was not lost on the early monastics. Abba Pastor, one of the Desert Fathers, was once asked how a person should live. He replied that we should be like a little child who, when struck, weeps, and when played with, laughs, yet harbors no malice and seeks no status.

For the Desert Fathers, being childlike meant "holy simplicity." It was the stripping away of the ego’s need to defend itself or prove its worth. They understood that the more complex we become in our self-reliance, the further we drift from the simple, radical trust required to survive the spiritual wilderness. Like the hyrax, they knew that their safety wasn't found in their own power, but in being small enough to be looked after by the Father.

The Trust of the Dependent

If a creature as small as a hyrax can endure the wilds of Kenya—protected by its design and gifted with a voice that punches far above its weight—how much more can we trust the One who knit us together?

Becoming like a child means:

• Embracing Vulnerability: Admitting that we cannot navigate the "bushveld" of life alone.

• Finding Our Voice: Understanding that, like the hyrax’s midnight cry, our prayers and our witness don't need to be polished; they just need to be honest.

• Resting in Placement: Trusting that when we fall "out of the nest," there is a Hand capable of reaching down and restoring us to the branches where we belong.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve noticed in the emergency department that the patient who comes in who is truly patient and childlike and accepting of the medicine that is being dispensed for them is often the patient who has the best outcome.

In the quiet corners of our lives, perhaps we can learn to shed the heavy scales of adulthood. In the eyes of the Creator, our value isn't found in our strength, but in our willingness to be held. If the small things of the earth are watched over so intently, if every sparrow is known and every hair is counted, we can rest easy knowing God sees us in our weakness and He loves us.

I hope you enjoy these reflections drawn from the observations of nature and prayer. As always if you have important questions about spiritual matters I encourage you to reach out to your priest. Thanks for reading.

"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made... For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened." — Romans 1:20–21

There is a specific kind of blindness that comes from modern life. It isn't a lack of sight, but a darkening of the heart—a layer of soot that settles over our vision until we no longer see the world as a miracle, but as a series of resources. We see "timber" instead of a tree; we see "real estate" instead of a meadow; we see "utility" instead of "glory."

J.R.R. Tolkien understood this "darkening" perhaps better than any writer of the 20th century. He saw that our hearts become heavy when we try to own the world rather than inhabit it. To Tolkien, the antidote was a process he called Recovery: the regaining of a clear view. It is the act of cleaning the windows of our souls so that the things we have "appropriated" can once again be seen as they are in themselves—mysterious, beautiful, and utterly independent of us.

The Sin of Possession

In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, evil almost always begins with a closed fist. The tragedy of Fëanor and his Silmarils, or the long, wasting shadow of Gollum and his "Precious," is rooted in the same spiritual rot: possessive love. This is a love that has curdled into a desire for total ownership.

When we seek to possess a thing, we stop seeing its "invisible qualities." We stop giving thanks for it because we believe we are the masters of it. Tolkien contrasted this with Enchantment, which he viewed as a sub-creative act of participation. Enchantment allows us to enter into a secondary world of wonder where we are guests, not owners. It requires an unpossessive heart—a heart that is willing to let beauty exist without needing to claim it, label it, or lock it in a vault.

The Machine vs. The Tree

Tolkien often equated the "darkening" of the world with "The Machine"—the human urge to use "Magic" to dominate wills and manipulate nature for power. This is the ultimate expression of the darkened heart described in Romans. It is the exchange of the Creator’s glory for a version of the world that we can control.

But there is a resistance to the Machine, and it is found in the things that refuse to be small enough for our pockets.

Conclusion: Finding the Unpossessive Heart

I have found, as Tolkien did, that the most immediate way to experience this unpossessive love is to step into the presence of great trees.

If you walk into a deep, old forest—the kind of place where the light filters through a canopy that was rising long before you were born—you are forced to confront a reality that is bigger and deeper than your own ego. You cannot truly "own" a great oak or a towering hemlock. You can stand in its shadow, you can admire the geometry of its bark, and you can offer a prayer of thanks for its existence, but it remains stubbornly itself. It does not belong to you; if anything, you belong to the moment it has granted you.

In the presence of these "silent shepherds," the possessive grip we keep on our lives begins to loosen. We stop trying to bend the world to our will and instead allow our "futile thinking" to quiet down. In that prayerful unwinding, the soot is wiped away from the window. We see the world once again as it was created: not as a collection of things to be possessed, but as a vast, enchanted cathedral where the "eternal power and divine nature" are, quite simply, clearly seen.

Go outside today. Say the Jesus prayer and hug a tree.

In 2018, when I was still quite new to Orthodoxy, I had the privilege of attending an Ancient African Christianity conference sponsored by the Fellowship of Saint Moses the Black. It was held in Columbia, South Carolina, at a parish with wonderful facilities and an even more wonderful spirit. I expect that in the time to come, if the Lord sees fit for me to write more, I will have many reminiscences to share from that weekend.

However, I want to start my missives here on Substack with a particular anecdote from those days—a moment that taught me something vital about people, and the varied ways we inhabit our senses of wonder.

The Beetle on the Leaf

It happened on the last day. Several of us were standing outside for a group photo when I noticed a beetle resting on a leaf. Since I was a child, I have always loved what I call "Little Things." This creature was a darkling beetle, or perhaps a similar species from the family Tenebrionidae. I gently picked it up and marveled at the iridescence of the sun reflecting off its carapace—a tiny, living jewel.

I held it up on my finger to show a lady standing near me. "Look," I said, unable to hide my delight, "it’s a little darkling beetle. Look at how shiny it is!"

Well, the lady shrieked as if she had been startled by a serpent.

I felt immediately downcast; it must have shown on my face. Mother Katherine Weston was standing nearby, observing the exchange. I wasn’t sure if the expression on her face was a smile or a gentle, monastic grimace of disapproval. She leaned in my direction and said, with profound kindness, "I think her sense of wonder is different than yours."

The Discipline of Attention

I do not believe the case is that I possess a particularly unique sense of wonder. The old nursery rhyme tells us what little boys are made of—snips, snails, and puppy dog tails.Rather, I think it is that each of us is gifted with a specific capacity for wonder, which can either be cultivated or allowed to wither.

We live in an age where social media is thick with portents of doom and gloom. It is so easy to let our senses be dulled by the world's noise, to miss the glory that permeates the mundane. We need, perhaps now more than ever, to train our eyes to see the "Little Things" as windows into the Creator's heart.

As the Psalmist reminds us:

"O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches." (Psalm 104:24)

If we are to navigate this life with joy, we must practice seeing that "fullness" of riches, even in the shell of a beetle or the pattern of a leaf. As St. Basil the Great wrote in his Hexaemeron:

"He who has learned to see the glory of God in the smallest of creatures has reached a high state of contemplation. For the wisdom of the Creator is not only in the stars and the heavens, but in the intricate workings of the blade of grass and the tiny insect."

I still carry the memory of a humid South Carolina night in 2012—the air heavy with the scent of woodsmoke and the anticipation of the vigil. Standing outdoors in the dark, I watched as the deacon began the Exsultet. I remember the flicking shadows on the parchment of the rolls, a tradition I didn’t fully grasp then, but one that felt ancient and vital.

The chant rose into the night air, specifically pausing to offer thanks for the bees: “the work of bees and of your servants’ hands.” It felt like a strange, lovely detour in the middle of such a grand liturgy—to stop and acknowledge a tiny insect.

Now, years later, that "work of bees" has a different weight for me. Every spring, as the grass begins to surge and the yellow heads of dandelions pop up across the yard, I find myself checking the mower. I wait. I give them their turn first.

There is a quiet liturgy in a messy April lawn. By leaving the nectar for them, I feel like a silent participant in that ancient chant. The wax for the candles doesn't just appear; it is built, cell by cell, from the nectar of the very weeds I’m tempted to cut down. To care for the bee is to care for the light that eventually burns on the altar.

In the silence of a Saturday morning, watching the workers hover over the clover, I realize that my patience with the mower is its own kind of "Easter Proclamation." It is a way of saying that the smallest lives matter, and that we are all, in some way, sustained by the humble, golden labor of the hive.