Just signed up for the big one...

The GRE, A.K.A. Graduate Record Examination. This will largely determine what grad schools I can get into. I'm also amongst the first to take the computer adaptive test, as opposed to the pen and paper test. This test is harder, because every time you get a question right, it gets harder, every time you get one wrong, it gets easier. Also, you cant go back and look at the instructions. You can't go back and change an answer, and you can't skip an answer to come back to it. Once a question is answered, it is locked in and cannot be changed.

Ohh what fun...

Honestly I fear it. The worst case senario is that I do another year in Tucson (ugh) and take the test again and get a better score. But I have resources at my disposal for practice. All the math and verbal lessons for the course I'm taking are available online, and are at my disposal for another two months. So I can practice like hell, to my hearts content.

On the spiritual front... Reconnected with a couple of good friends this week. Tim and Brian. Both are doing well. Tim is, as always, in communication with a Synod of Milan priest in Austin, TX by the name of Fr. Aiden. Both of them, more or less simultaneously, had the idea that it was high time to put a really traditional church in Tucson. Apparently Synod of Milan would only be able to send a priest through every couple of months, so it would be a priestless mission at first. However, the Synod of Milan, with the blessing of the Archbishop Hilarion (now of Australia, late of New Jersey) has already trained a number of ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) priests in the Orthodox Western Rite.

So here's the deal. If we can find a ROCOR priest who would be willing to move to Tucson, SoM will train him Western Rite. The problem is that ROCOR already has its own assessment of Tucson as not having enough people to justify a serious (and costly) effort. And I, to my regret, must agree at least at the moment. There are only around ten people in this town who would be interested. It is not a guarantee that all of them would join the church. Although at least half of them already trying to do so.

Alas... Nobody is sure what to do. Tucson needs an Orthodox church that hasn't got pews, an organ, or a patriarch who is in communion with heretics. That means either Jerusalem Patriarchate, Moscow Patriarchate, ROCOR, or Synod of Milan. The Greeks could do it, but they are not. Perhaps when a new Patriarch of Alexandria is chosen, he will re-impose the anathamata lifted by one of his predecessors, and not renewed under his immediate predecessor. If so then Alexandria will be back in the game for real.

Pray, wait, and see.

God the Merciful be with us always, now and forever. Amen.

It occurs to me...

I wish I had a church that wasn't 120 miles from where I live. There are both an Antiochian and a Greek church in Tucson, but having been to both of them I joined the Russian church in Phoenix. I remember well the day I walked into Holy Archangels church in phoenix. I had trouble meeting the eyes of the icon of Christ on the righthand side if the Iconostases.

I had trouble looking up from the floor. Here, in a small, obvioiusly poor church, was Gods house. It was more than a little unnerving to be standing in a place where the worship was carried out in a way dogmatically identical to that of the first Christians ever. Tradition unchanged for two thousand years.

The awe of the experience was matched by the warmth of the people. I regret that of the five of us that came up that day, I was the only one to become a cathecumen, and later be baptized. My brother is all on board with Orthodoxy, I just need to get him to Church. For that matter, I need to get myself to churh. But it is a large effort. The irony is that if I started going every week again (like when I was still taking the cathecumen classes), as easy as it would seem getting up at six thirty and making the drive, it would get all the more expensive, a tank of gas every week for the trip. I suppose I could go to the places here in town, but I don't feel totally at home there.

Both the Tucson churches have pews, for example. Doesn't make them non-Orthodox churches, it's just that there is no particular reason they need to have them, but they still use them. The Greek church also uses an organ, and the liturgy is done entirely in Greek.

But it's no excuse. Being at one of those churches and not communing is better than not going to any church at all. I've become lazy. I tell myself that the reality of my job is that my willingness to work untill midnight on Saturdays is a big part of what pays the rent (which is true). Ergo getting up Sunday morning is an aknowledged hardship (which is not true). Thus It is understandable that Church is a monthly thing for me (which is also not true). Still...my options are semi-limited.

There are doctornal issues as well. The Patriarch of Antioch is in communion with Coptic churches in north africa which (though they no longer employ it) have not officially renounced the monophosite herracy. Which means that by extention, the Antiochian patriarchate itself is in communion with the Coptics. If the priest disagreed with this stance, I might be more comfortable going there. But when we inquired with him, his response was that he didn't believe we should break communion with anyone ever, after all, we are called to love one another.

The response to that, in my mind, is that if you really love someone, and they refuse to stop engaging in a destructive behavior, you walk away to show that you will not tolerate it. Not doing so enables them to continue a bad way of life without loosing you as a penalty.

But I most certianly am not in the Patriarchs shoes. Nor do I have a bishops understanding of the holy mysteries. Which is not to say he cannot be in error, the stance of the Moscow Patriarchate, the Jerusalam Patriarchate, ROCOR and possibly even others is that he is, indeed, wrong.

I'm not sure what to do. Pray that I might recieve wisdom.

Alexey the Sinner.

Response to the first comment to one of my postings

Hello Fr. John

I was going to e-mail you directly, but I liked what I wrote as a posting so I'm doing that instead, where I know you'll see it.

For anyone else who may be viewing this Blog, this posting is in response to the Blog Entry entitled, "Why don't I like people?"

Here it goes:

Bless me Father.

not exactly what I wanted to hear no. Not considering that, having tried submitting to him in the past, I know full well that his response will be a gradual ramping up of the abuse untill he can publicly treat me like his (forgive my language) bitch. I'm serious. He walks up to you, says something condecending, as though you were a total newbee, and then unless you tell him to back off, it just gets worse, and worse, and worse, and worse...

I Know perfectly well that I ought to feel horrible FOR him, not toward him. I'm just as guilty as he is. It's my own hypocricy at work. I'm more accountable than he is after all, I'm the one baptized in the True Faith.

::long exausted sigh:: He's alread despised by most of the staff. In fact, nobody likes him. I suppose though, I ought to begin seeing this as a platinum opportunity for bettering myself. He's annoying in a 'little man with a little stick that he thinks is a big stick' kind of way. Which is, clearly, harder for me to deal with in a Christian way than a lot of other things. If I can just deal with David and not complain about it, I should be able to deal with other things as well.

It's like all great battles you wage against your sinful self. Once won, God increases your power over that aspect of yourself. Makes it easier to make the right choice, once you've made it in spite of difficulty. It's (in my experience) like gaining a new super power every time you knock off a boss on a particular level of a video game. Except that there are an endless succession of Bosses, all of which are constructs of your own sinful nature. You're battling yourself, not other things. You are your own worst enemy, you are your only enemy. Because of all the forces against you in the universe, the only one that has the power to damn you, is you. And we try like hell every day to do just exactly that. We fight against the (freequently obvious) right thing to do. We believe ourselves to be richeous when we are not, and we kill oursleves with pride. I wish I could see myself as uglier than David is. Because I am. There are higher expectations on me and I'm batting a lower comparative average.

So, what about talking to him about it? Should I not even bring it up directly to him? I wonder if it would even do anything anyway.

Argh. I'm a slug. I'm much worse than he is anyway, I've no right to complain. I beg God to forgive me for my acts of rebellion against my supervisor David and to teach me humility and give me the strength and grace to endure mistreatment with humbleness, and not complain about it.

Alexey the Sinner

Calm Waters

Had to think for a moment before I could conjure a good title for this entry. There isn't much going on just now to be honest. All is well, all is calm. I could be praying a lot more than I am, but my life is so smooth just now that honestly, motivation is less obvious than it should be.

I heard an intelligent woman say once, that she knew she was doing what God wanted when her life was like a war. If things were too easy, it was likely because Satan had no objection to her current course of action. Then during a calm period of my life I asked her, what now? Am I doing wrong? Her reply to me was that no, I was not necessarily doing wrong just because my life was not chaotic and difficult, she described it as being a low burn. God tests us out of the fire as often as in it. A friend of mine has told me many times that Christianity flourishes under persecution, because it is much easier to choose the right path, when the wrong one is clearly defined by the evil men that walk it. When there is no obvious obstacle to the Christian life, we loose our way more easily. It is harder to be a Christian when nobody is pointing a gun at your head than when someone is. It is harder to walk the walk every day with nobody threatening your life, and everybody offering you easy, seductive, sinful ways to achieve pleasure.

I once asked Fr. John, what he thought the purpose of the suffering of the Christians at the end of time was. He said that he believed that it was the best way to help the true believers stay true when the Antichrist is at his most seductive. That makes sense to me. The more dire our circumstances, the more suffering God allows us to experience, forcing us to turn to him for comfort.

Our peril is never greater than when we are blind to it. Lord of Life and Light, Open our Eyes.


Alexey the Sinner.

Why don't I like people?

I'm referring to specific people here, not everyone in general. Is it wrong to dislike someone? I would tend to think yes, because our dislike of certain people stems from our disliking of some of their personality traits, which we ourselves do share in ways we are not aware of, or hypocritically ignore. So since we are just as wrong, or just as bad, we should feel bad for the people we don't like, and strive to like something about them, to assist us in genuinely loving them in spite, or perhaps even because of, their flaws.

Easy to say in practice. But some people do their level best to knock us down on any given opportunity. I recall the story of the Martyr Sebastian, who was a praetorian under one emperor, and executed under the next, whom did not tolerate Christianity. Sebastian was shot full of arrows, but, by the grace of God, survived the shooting. After he healed, he returned to the emperors court and admonished the emperor for what he had done, after which, of course, he was executed. I wonder if Sebastian liked the emperor who killed him, or only loved him. It is so much easier to love than to like. I don't understand either concept well enough to define them, but if asked about, for instance, my sister, I definitely love her, but I have never liked her.

There is only one person at work that I don't like. A supervisor named David. There are times I do enjoy talking with him, but during work he seems to do his level best to be a hypocrite. I was talking with my friend Elizabeth, whom I had not seen in months, at the cash registers, where I was assigned to work. Our conversing was not interrupting the flow of business, but David (all the same) first verbally told me to get back to work (we were talking in between customers), and then physically came over and told Elizabeth that "Webster needs to concentrate on work now." There are some people who would also have shut me down, and more others still who would not have cared, so long as business wasn't interrupted. The others I would have listened to, David (technically my superior) I openly told to back off.

My response to him was "I've seen you have conversations that lasted a half hour", to which he replied, "On my lunch break", and I fired back, "As long as the girl is pretty enough".

A little background: David is a wired guy. I know, I know, I'm the one labeling him but he is. He is thirty, lives in his parents basement, fancies himself a costume designer (he is purportedly quite good), is a big renaissance fair enthusiast...And at one point was soliciting female employees to come over to his house and dress in animal costumes, so he could put lingerie on the costumes and photograph them. Yeah. I'm not making that up.

Also, he (before becoming a supervisor) had a mildly amusing reputation. He would never be at the cashwrap area to help ringing up customers, unless there was a pretty girl in line. It was blatant, and obvious, and most of us just thought it was funny. He also hits up any attractive female he can talk with for a conversation.

At least one co-worker I talked to anticipated my reaction before I had a chance to relate it. David of all people had no right to call me on that. Anyone else, and I would have complied without complaining.

IN theory, we are supposed to submit ourselves to the authority that exists over us, because rebellion is wrong. God will protect us from the wrongdoings of our overlords, and reward us for our suffering when we submit as opposed to resisting.

I'm no better than David, and in principal I have no beef with him when he is not interfering in my life. I tell myself that the only reason I ignore and or refute him is because if I gave into him he would get even worse (I seem to remember this happening before, though I cannot validate the memory, it is more of a feeling I suppose). SO what then? Do I continue to submit even if he gets worse and worse? Even he has superiors, but is it, assuming we are trying to live totally by Gods rules, to even report him to the big bosses? I don't know. Certainly a King exists to protect and defend his subjects, so does the power structure extend in principal to all organizations with centralized higher authority?

The answer I can think of at current is to submit in the intermit, and talk to the bosses afterwards.

I hope that is correct.

Alexey the Sinner.

Shutting an overdue door

God forgive me, for I have sinned. And I did it with a head full of annoyance as well, which makes it worse because it was pride run rampant. Still, what happend had, in a very real sense, already happened. A bit of storytelling is in order.

A long time ago, sixteen years ago to be spesific, I met a girl named Andrea. We were both seven at the time, and I was a very unpopular little boy, because, well, who knows, but I was. It had a lot to do with a big vocabulary and a big mouth and neither the wisdom nor the timing to wield either one effectively. I had some friends, but I did get picked on a lot verbally, though never physically.

There was one kid who was different. We got along, I thought, like a house on fire (where that expression came from I'll never know). We had similar interests in the wierd, scientific, sneaky and unusual. Protogeeks =) And all through the second grade year we were very tight. We weren't in class again untill fifth grade, and then after that we didn't see much of each other untill more than halfway through highschool. Still, it was a rare friendship I thought.

Our reuniting was very cool for me because even amongst my 'friends', I had few people who were genuinely nice to me. I still had not really learned how to be a social human being. Andrea introduced me to Tim, who is a good friend of mine to this day.

Somewhere along the line, and I never knew exactly when this happened, Andrea decided that my unsocial behavior was something she really, really did not like. Fair enough, though I was working on it. The only thing was that she never actually said anything. I know, I know, how do you say that to someone? Well, the problem was it took a long time for it to happen, and it wasn't all at once.

She would ignore me when we were out with the group, talk arround me, pretend I wasn't there, and basically not include me. These are, I realize, things that a lot of people do when they are arround people they don't want to be arround. But Andrea had lost interest in me in general, somewhere along the way, and was not greatly concerned. I was solidly ensconsed in friendships with almost all of her friends that she had introduced me to, and so I was a central member of "the group" that we had. This meant that I didn't get phased out and disapear. I was on the verge of simply doing so myself, because of how I was being treated by her, when Tim advised me not to. He said he didn't like the way she treated me, and that I shouldn't leave because of it. I told him that I thought I must deserve it, I knew I was no good socially and I didn't blame her for loosing patience with me. One can, after all, only take so much.

He agreed that I had a lot to work on, indeed we had been explicitly been working on turning me into a socially adept person with much success. He also said, however, that Andreas reaction to my personality flaws was up to Andrea, and not beyond her ability to control. Also, I had made much improovement, and her treatment of me had not improved along with it. Finally, the others in the group didn't have any issues with me, and mostly enjoyed having me arround.

After that, I became cognizent of the fact that Andrea was not my friend, and was actively against being arround me. I reacted accordingly, and became a lot less stressed out. When you think that a friend is ignoring you because your a social cripple and she can't take any more of you, that is quite draining. When you become aware that this friend has a responsability for her own feelings, and that she could be treating you nicely anyway, and that she has had continually less and less of a reason to ignore you, you stop taking offense at it, and start realizing that that is just the way she is, and it is no longer personal.

So began a period lasting probably two years, where we hung out with the same people, but there was no pretense that we were 'friends' as such. We had the same friends, but I no longer expected her to be nice to me or attempt to include me, so I was not hurt when these thigns never happened.

I did, however, begin to highly dislike her. She did things to the effect of taking emotionally vulnerable or dammaged people under her wing, and then dropping them when they came to depend on her. Weather it was because she got bored, or because they became clingy, or because they were getting better and no longer had enough problems to be fascinating to her (there was very definitly an element of this), they all suffered the same fate. She lost interest, and ignored them.

It happened to friends, it happened to boyfriends, it happened to people who depended on her. I am guilty of as much of it as she is certianly, but I do believe that I at least felt remorse for my mistakes and tried to make amends for them. Andrea just sailed on, oblivioius to the pain she was inflicting on people emotionally. When asked about it, she would have an elaborate story, full of tragic drama and reasons why she, certianly, was not at fault for any pain anyone else was experiencing. Not once, in all of her relationships that went sour, was anything of her own doing, according to her.

She had other habbits as well. She liked to sleep in, a lot, and as often as she could. It was not at all uncommon for an event to be postponed or cancled because she was only just waking up when we called her to find out why she was already twenty minutes late. Tim wouldn't go without her, because they were best friends, and, it was very much against his general principal to leave anyone out just for being late. I, personally, really didn't like her at this point, so I found all the waiting arround for her to be very exasperating. What usually wound up happening was that we would wait, and wait, call, get no answer, drive to her apartment, wake her up, and be way too late do do whatever it was we'd planned on doing.

After a while even Tim decided that she simply wasn't interested in being anyones serious friend. When things were finally building to a head, that was when she moved to Olympia, Washington. She said she liked the pacific northwest, and it is easy to believe, the ares is stunning. Ostensably she was going for the purpose of putting physical distance between her and her ex-boyfriend Ryan.

Ryan was (and, unfortunately, is) a very dark and somewhat introverted guy. Andrea found him fascinating. Long story short, she dumped him when they were both very much in love with each other. We all found the match up to be kind of scary and unwholsome anyway, but the end of it was awful to see. Ryan totally self destructed and started using booz and soft core drugs. Andrea wallwed in melodrama. She broke up with him "because I knew I couldn't keep him forever" whatever that meant.

Not long after the initial aftershocks subsided Andrea started dating Ryans best friend Bryan. This really twisted the knife in Ryans back. Worst of all was the fact that (I learned this later on) at the outset Andrea had told Bryan that she was still, and always would be, in love with Ryan, and would never feel that way about him. Sadly, Bryan had no problem with that.

That relationship only lasted a couple of months before they 'broke up'. Bryan hung all over Andrea in public all the time, and Andrea did very little to stop him. She confided in Tim that she really, really didn't want him to keep doing that, but that she didn't have the heart to stop him. It got very uncomfortable for us to be arround the two of them in, in public or private.

On one occasion she blew us off to masquerade as a lesbian to go out with her gay friend so he wouldn't look pathetic going into the gay bar all by himself to pick up a gay one night stand.

These were the things that I didn't like. So when she came back from Washington recently, I didn't hear about it untill I found out secondhand from my mom that she had invited my younger brother to a housewarming party of hers. Mom was upset that she had invited only my brother.

It all finally came to an end yesterday night when I was on my lunch break at Barnes and Noble. She came into the store and decided to come over to my table and talk to me. I really didn't want to be arround her and wasn't making an effort to conceal this. I fessed up about that and said, simply, that I didn't like her. She asked why (sounding quite astonished), I was in the middle of explaining this when she answered a cell phone call without warning and tuned me out.

So she called to find out what she was too buisy listning to her phone to hear me explain. I explained it, she refuted everything, and when I brought up the 'ditch us to hook a guy up with a gay one night stand' story, her initial defense was "I don't think I promissed I was going to hang out with you guys".

I aknowledge that as a younger guy, I had no social skills, there was no matching concession from her regarding...anything. The call got somewhat heated and she said, "OK, Fine, this phone call is over..." I cut her off, my response was, "Fine! I didn't want it to happen in the first place!" and I hung up.

Not attractive behavior, not smart, not Christian. But nothing I could have said would have gotten anything out of her. She's the kind of person who, when you admit something, takes it and runs with it as further proof of her own infalability. I lost my cool, and, that may be the end of our association. Not that the association had much to it, she never called, or communicated in anyway, and made no effort to hang out with me. This was just a formalization of reality.

I don't know what to do, or what to say, it was over a long time ago, but I still blew it in the end. But I couldn't think of any other way to finally end it.

::shrug::

I did wrong, but I can't tell how much, and I couldn't see any other way.

Alexey the Sinner

Is this Blog functional?

Just a test to see if Blogger, indeed, works.

It's all politics

"The politics of the Earth are fire and ice, which suffer no rivals unanswered. The politics of heaven are those of fire alone, which suffers no rivals at all"

Fictional quote, I just made it up. But it seemed highly appropriate. I admit I am unable to understand how anyone could choose Bush over Kerry. Certainly Kerry is corrupt, but so is Bush, and to me it seems patently obvious that of the two, Kerry has fewer friends in the energy industry, and it is at least possible that he will not try to expand the unholy powers of The USAPATRIOT act, and perhaps even allow the existing powers to expire as they were originally written to do.

Our freedoms chiseled away. Oh well, they would be whomever gets elected. No president of this "nation" will ever be a Christian King, the form of rulership ordained by God. Which means that though there is a sincere majority that believes itself to be Christian, it will not be an emulation of Gods kingdom.

I feel such a fool. I feel a fool for caring. For getting wrapped up in the struggle, because it's all a show. Republican and or Democrat, the differences do exist, but they change precious little for all too many.

Children starve, and I make jokes about Bush.

We have a privatized health care system unlike every other first world nation, and I crack wise about what a Nazi John Ashcroft is.

The full magnitude of the problems that I ought to be doing something about, and don't, are staggering enough. Why do I look for other people to hold up as bad guys? Pride I imagine. I like to think that I'm smart enough to spot things that other people don't see, or if they see them, I feel particularly clever if I articulate it in a novel way that draws a laugh. Oh well...

If someone asked me why I even give a damn about politics it would be a good question. But my response wouldn't be so good. "Because I give a damn about the things that are going to happen to me" I spit back, and feel justified saying it. But who is on my prayer list? How active is my prayer life even for myself? True, I did just move apartments not long ago, and there is some allowance of time for setting my living quarters back up, but how lazy must I be not to prioritize the spiritual wellbeing of others above getting my cable modem hooked up?

Well, the simple answer is that the cable modem is a hassle to live without. The prayer list I could type up and print off any old time, so naturally there's no particular reason it has to be done right this second. I've been going to bed so late of late that I'm too tired to do the full blown prayers.

So what do I do to be doing the right thing? How now shall I live?

-Look out for others as best I can, and never forget their needs.
-Give ear and concern to events of the world, but recognize that they are outside my control and that as a Christian I am watched over and protected.
-Wage furious defense of the Orthodox doctrines, but give no more than your solicited opinion about matters of lesser importance. To do more is, perhaps, to gossip.
-Set yourself about the Earthly tasks your Heavenly Father has given you, and forsake them not, for they are Holy in that they are given you from Above.
-Get thee to bed now, it is nearly 3:30AM.

Alexey the Sinner

A blissfully normal day

Nothing weird happened today. It was nice and predictable, which is a step up from my earlier problems of recent days. My ex-girlfriend and my best friend in the world, Megan, is sleeping over tonight. She in the bedroom, I in the floor in the other room in front of the TV. We are hanging out early tomorrow so it made no sense for her to make the half hour plus drive back home. I worry about her sometimes. Her affection for me seems to have decreased not at all since we were "a couple". In fact the only thing that doesn't happen now is physical intimacy, and even then were addicted to snuggling/cuddling. Can't help it, she's incredibly dear to me, and I love her deeply. It's not romantic, not at the moment, but it could be again, and it used to be.

She's a strange bird. No feelings about religion and faith whatsoever. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't dig any up in her. Not even negative ones. It was like sticking a pole into a deep lake, it's totally unmoved by your actions. Neither hot, nor cold... And we know what that leads to.

I have an appointment tomorrow and so I must get to bed. Today was not active enough really for me to do an incredible amount of obvious sinning. Well, probably if I'd been paying attention it would have been obvious. Lets see, I spent most of work (though I did get my work done pretty well) lost in a fantasy about being a starfighter pilot on the edge of the solar system. Because it was entertaining, and it kept my mind busy while I performed the not unpleasant, but not highly stimulating task of straightening shelves and putting away books.

Also, I've noticed that I have a tendency to poke my nose into things I ought not be poking my nose into because I have a puckish interest in seeing what it is. Kind of a juvenile, "Ohh ohh, I bet I know what's in there. And I want to see it!" kind of thing. And it's amazingly stupid crap to boot. Like badly written books in the "Teen fiction" section on the outer wall of the children's section when I'm upstairs reading it. Ugh, one of the books was...How to describe it. It was one of those books predicated on people being fascinated by teenage angst. Except the book was about the 'angst' surrounding a highschool girl coming out as a lesbian. Didn't contain anything juicy, not that I found anyway. And honestly, I wasn't looking for that. I just...Heck I don't know, I just wanted to see it. I knew it was in there, so I had to have a look. Stupid eh? Curiosity killed the cat, it also screwed up the Christians spiritual life when he couldn't bottle it up long enough to get himself out of danger.

Oye, listen to me. I almost went off on a rant about how inane and boring teenage angst books are. UGHHHH!!!! USELESS!!! WASTE!!!! OF!!! EFFORT!!!! Sheesh, it's even a waste of text. It's a waste of the energy output of my finger muscles required to do the typing. There are so many sinful, wrong things about me, UGH! Fr. John (my priest, although, at current, he's the only one with the URL for this Blog I believe) once told me that were we aware of all our sinning, it would kill us. Our ignorance of the full weight of our wrongs is insulation against insanity, and the Holy Spirit reveals as much of our guilt to us as we are capable of handling to or willing to allow ourselves to accept responsibility for. He lets out a little more whenever He is looking to expand our ability to accept our own guilt. God never gives us more than we can cope with, including knowledge of our own evil.

We wouldn't be able to walk, let alone function, if we knew the full extent of our inner darkness. Aside from illuminating our souls, the light of the fire of God within us casts sharply defined shadows where we throw up blockades to keep the light out because we prefer the darkness.

I recall the words of a piece of junk protestant "feel good, Jesus is my buddy" type song, "Light a fire in me,
Let the flames run free,
Burn away the dross,
Holy fire of God"
It may be badly written music (I'm not trashing them, it really is cheesy, which is bad to do when worshiping God) but the sentiment is at least focally accurate. The fire will hurt at first, because so much of you is so corrupt. But let it burn your flesh away now, rather than scorch your spirit endlessly in the hereafter.


Unworthily Yours, Alexey

Idle hands, minds, and bodies

There is, perhaps, no easier path to sin than boredom. Some paths are more direct, and some far shorter, but none as easy, or as seductive. I submit myself as an example. What feels like a long time ago now, which was in reality a week before the end of June of this year (2004 A.D.) I took an oath, or a vow I suppose. Standing in the shower in my grandparents eighteenth century house in upstate Cooperstown, New York I vowed, after having confessed to a priest of the Orthodox church, (of which I am a member), that I had, in the past (long ago now), looked at illegal pornography. This weighed particularly heavily on my soul, because one can imagine what it must take for pornography to actually be illegal in this, most egalitarian of countries.

I vowed that never again would I knowingly look at pornography (I assumed that now and again, being a web lurker, I would get ambushed), nor masturbate, nor receive any sexual pleasure outside holy wedlock. The action of making a vow has, in and of itself, a great deal of power. I'd never done it before, but I did it then with all sincerity and resolve. Did I expect myself to be able to hold to it perfectly? Or at all? No, I did not. But I did it anyway, knowing that only by making such a vow could I hope to actually end my liking for pornography (I looked at all sorts) once and for all. And it worked, until yesterday.

Yesterday I received a rather astonishing spam. It advertised child pornography. I assumed it could not be for real. "They wouldn't send it out to people who could just report them to the FBI" I thought, "It is most likely porn, but it cannot really be what it says it is." Well...it was. I was shocked, and scared. Not shocked to discover child porn on the internet, I'd known full well you could find that. I was shocked to discover that someone had send out a spam about it. Wouldn't they just get shut down? After the shockwave cleared my central brain I clicked closed the web browser window with the offending site on it.

Scared that I might be tempted to look at it, I compulsively deleted the e-mail, feeling terrible that I had ever actually clicked the link to see what it really was. I'd had no business doing it to begin with, but it was stupid curiosity, not lust, that drove the decision to click that link the first time.

Yes, the first time. I clicked it again once to make sure I hadn't imagined it, and I got an eyeful. It was as ugly as I'd thought it was, and just as bad as you can think. That was the only other time I actually looked at the webpage. After making sure it really was what I thought it was, I forwarded the IP address (it had no URL as such) to the FBI, via their website. I gave the FBI my name, phone number, physical address, e-mail address, and told them I would keep the e-mail to forward it to them in case they wanted it for some reason.

After waiting about twenty-four hours, I deleted the e-mail anyway. My apologies to the federal authorities, but I couldn't take having the link in my possession anymore, and I felt better after having disposed of it. But this incident kicked open a door. I suddenly got curious about weather or not there were any new and interesting stories....On the erotic stories website I used to frequent. Some of them had actual storylines I told myself, I wanted to check up on them. Yes, certainly, and the current administration was totally ignorant as to the fact that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. I don't' know what it was that I was feeling. Browsing the stories again gave me a sexual thrill, that much is certain, but I wasn't feeling, for lack of a better word, horny, before I got to the website. And even while I was there I didn't feel incredibly sexually aroused, just somewhat aroused.

::EDIT:: What occured to me, therfore, was that I had gained (by taking the vow) a strong ability to walk away from it and resist the temptation of it, but had not managed to kill my liking for it in general. ::::

Starve something long enough and the hunger itself will make a lunge at the first drop of blood. I made the decision both to click that link, and to look at that second website. Afterwards I felt awful. The dark, ugly feeling of having broken part of my vow did not go away without serious praying.

All this was set in motion by free will decisions, no argument. But it ought also be noted that these free will decisions were made, when there were very few if any other decisions that needed making. I was quite bored at the time. Indeed, even back before taking that vow, porn typically took a second seat to basically anything else that was interesting. I might spend a good deal of time with the porn, but I didn't go seeking out an opportunity to look at it. The opportunities came because I didn't bother doing very much at all with my free time. I didn't practice violin, I didn't do homework, I didn't do athletics, though I did read a whole lot of books.

And now, I sit with guilt on my hands, even if my soul does feel better for having confessed these things in prayer. I gave in to temptation, yes, but worse, I did it because I wanted to. Every time I make a major sin I become painfully more aware of one thing: temptation is not what makes you do anything. You make yourself do everything that you do. All the temptation in the world is only a smokescreen, telling you that the choice is not yours, but it is. When you break that rule, when you break that promise, all the tempting in the entire universe is only noise. The decision to actually move forward and sin, is always yours, and always deliberate. Sometimes we don't realize we are sinning, and that is more difficult to prevent, and easier to eliminate at the same time. We can simply learn less sinful habits. But processesed, cognizant actions are always a choice. You have to actually do something, and that choice is only ever yours to make.

That being said...Human beings are incredibly weak. And if they're staring down the barrel of temptation too long, eventually they will flinch. Give me enough time sitting in front of my computer with nothing to do, and eventually, I will find something sinful to do with it.


This is the beginning of a new Blog for me. The last one was the work of me, when I wanted to dump my brains most toxic runoff in a public place and dare people to look at it. This one will be different. It may, occasionally, be worth reading.

Unworthily yours, Alexey the Sinner.