Goodness Without Beginning

All stories have an entry point; that moment serving as the initial contact between reader and subject matter. In many ways it's the most crucial aspect to any story, fictional or otherwise: knowing where to start says a lot about a writer's command of their subject matter; what they're ultimately hoping to express. Writing a book about WWII, for instance, one could start in many ways; maybe with the Armistice of 1918, or the signing of the Munich Pact in 1938; the invasion of Poland in 1939, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Perhaps our aspiring historian will opt to begin with a battle scene featuring their own grandfather, as an emotional entryway into his or her particular psyche, the reason for writing or even caring about the subject matter at hand. The entry point of a writer delineates a certain organization and prioritization of events, facts, feelings, and beliefs. Every writer has to determine that point, with each piece they write, or give up writing altogether.

Nine months ago, I made a conscious decision to stop attempting to find entry points: a decision to give up serious writing altogether for a time--no articles, no short stories, no poems, not even a diary or journal. I was in the midst of something absolutely massive and life altering. That sounds cliche, or too big a term, so maybe let's call it something else, something more specific: it was a change which permeated every aspect of me, physically, psychologically, emotionally, intellectually, artistically, and more. When it became clear, early last Fall, that I was indeed walking a path into the Orthodox Church--when  consciously entering the catechumenate--I found it simultaneously a type of homecoming and unlike anything I'd experienced (which is not unlike C.S. Lewis's speculation of what heaven would be like, come to think of it). And because of this, it seemed necessary to do something counter-intuitive: whereas in the past, my life had always been clarified by the act of writing, this time I needed to let a change occur more fully before trying to express it. I set the date of Bright Monday as the lifting of my fast as a writer, hoping that whatever transformation or reorientation of body, soul, and spirit which had begun last September, would at least be coherent enough by then to start expressing in words--or attempting to express. So now, the week after Pascha, two weeks after my Illumination (reception into the Orthodox Church), I began the difficult task of finding entry points once again.

Immediately I was hit by one salient fact: this story, unlike any of my other writing, published or otherwise, is different. To find a beginning to the story of my conversion to Orthodoxy, or at least a functional starting point, there seemed so many means of entry that it was impossible to choose simply one. All were dependent upon each other, and as a result, as I tried to organize these experiences into words, this life seemed in itself one massive, perpetual beginning. Should I start with the moment I set foot in St. Theodosius Orthodox Cathedral in Cleveland, sensing almost before arrival that this was the place I needed to be? Or would it be better to set the scene of how tired I was, how spiritually beaten down--just another desperate soul shot through with pain, in search of peace, disillusioned and abused, an angry, frustrated sinner in search of answers I didn't know how to ask, and had almost given up hope of finding? Neither was the real beginning. Looking back farther, I thought maybe it was the odd effect of a DNA test taken two years ago, revealing a Russian heritage I'd never known but always felt, and how that in turn inspired me, giving me a type of psychological permission to start seriously praying with icons. If I'm honest, that wasn't the beginning either, though: after all, an old friend who had become a Catholic priest and Benedictine monk had sent me an icon years before, encouraging me. My past seemed woven rather than linear, though there can be no doubt everything had followed gradually, even sequentially in a sense.

St. Theodosius Orthodox Cathedral
Cleveland, Ohio

While resisting the temptation to over simplify, or to engage in point/counterpoint contrasts between my past life and now, I found that the longer I looked, the more everything of my life was revealed to have been interrelated. I've mentioned icons a couple of times already, but to go back farther, there were the icons my parents had given me when my wife and I got married, and which I'd put away for years. Those might be the beginning of a narrative. I'd sensed a power about them, but also put them away for a decade or so, feeling that they were not the sort of thing to dabble in, but only to display if one intended to take an Orthodox path seriously and actively. Stretching back to my teenage years, I could talk about the impact Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had on my adolescent mind, or my fascination with the opening hymn of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, 'O Lord, Save Thy People.' Heck, that piece would bring it all the way back to infancy: the first piece of classical music my father ever played for me. Then there were the onion domes, and my seemingly bizarre life-long attraction to them. As a teen, listening to an old LP of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy, I would gaze at the sleeve, wondering where those beautiful domes were in Russia, fantasizing about walking down the corridor beneath them. Even just thinking of it brought me a certain type of peace that I couldn't explain. As an undergrad in Hartford Connecticut, I would go out of my way to drive past the old Colt Factory to see the dome. It wasn't even a religious building, but I was drawn to the shape--like the flame of a soul burning upward.

Tchaikovsky 6/Ormandy: The LP sleeve from the youth, now framed on my studio wall

Colt Factory Dome, Hartford CT
Library of Congress, Public Domain photo

But why limit my personal history of these sensations to specifically Orthodox or Russian cultural symbols? My journey as a jazz musician played a sizable part too: there was something so perfectly compatible about the way a jazz musician must practice and the Orthodox spiritual life--both working on their interior constantly. Then there was nature: the breath, like incense of the Hudson River of my childhood that spoke to me in the early mornings and seemed to be an expression of praise inherent in creation, and which I needed to find somewhere explicitly done by people for God.
 
But I couldn't find one good entry way, and it got me to thinking. I'm convinced we Americans are inordinately conditioned by our education and society to look for simplistic, rational causes. Political narratives corral voters into simplistic dichotomies, whether those concern the environment, foreign policy, or economics. Religiously speaking (and to over-narrow it for the sake of brevity to arguments within Christianity for the moment) we're too often corralled into a notion that either Protestantism or Catholicism is correct. Perhaps because of our fundamental two party system we tend to create false dichotomies at an alarming rate, but I think it goes deeper. Because of our relatively lightening-quick political cycle of four years, and our openness of franchise in voting, the messages get distilled to the point of reductive, rational simplicity all too often. There are many problems with this, and I'm not going to attempt to innumerate them all, or discuss them--I'm not even going to say that our political culture is the problem. It might just be a symptom. But I think all of this has a profound effect on the individual soul, and ought to be understood a little better. We are all conditioned by our surroundings, and those include socio-political assumptions. How we live in society fundamentally shapes how we view ourselves on many levels. And just as we might be conditioned to see clear, rationalistic dichotomies on every issue politically, we can be tempted to see such things within ourselves, or simple single cause starting points to important moments in our lives. To encounter something like Orthodoxy, which can't be categorized in these ways, is something which might be facilely called counter-cultural (paradoxically a term which would only encourage a similar dichotomy), but the whole experience is perhaps better described as super-cultural, or potentially culture-altering. What I'm scratching at with these words, perhaps incoherently, is that I was a man conditioned and used to finding answers to relatively clear problems. I wasn't prepared for the all encompassing, permeating experience of Orthodoxy, which made so many false dichotomies almost immediately irrelevant, or expanded my field of thought so quickly as to see the inadequacy of how I'd habitually framed many questions. 

A quick review of all these potential beginnings--endless moments one might choose to start a narrative--reveal so many aspects of what it is to be a human being: childhood, parents, music, beauty, vision, friendship, literature, nature. There are many more that could be added, so many that my life seems to have been saturated with signs, guideposts, and avenues that lead to my stepping into St Theodosius and the Divine Liturgy I first encountered there. My goal is to begin the task of writing these things, sharing them with others, and this blog, which has been searching for an identity for so long, seems perhaps an appropriate starting place.

I'm the author of two blogs: The Jazz Clarinet, which has a clear focus, has won awards, been reviewed by the Journal of the International Clarinet Society, and hopefully, in it's own little way helped re-frame and promote the history of the clarinet in jazz. Then there is this one: barely read, originally entitled American Poetics, but soon renamed the more generic Seddon Done as a place to post random thoughts and academic articles I'd published elsewhere. The name was a play on "said and done" of course, but last Fall seemed to take on a new meaning as well--that I was done with something. And perhaps that's true. When walking in a new door, we're also walking out of someplace else. We're done with something. When I walked into Orthodoxy I was embracing something all encompassing, and in a real sense finished with some other things. The more I experienced, the more needed to be given up or let go of, simply to make room inside. One cannot be filled with love if one is holding onto malice. There simply isn't room in the soul for both. So there was another appropriate meaning for the blog's name.

Perhaps this blog will find better focus and a clearer purpose as I write of my experiences becoming an Orthodox Christian. That's my hope, at least: to share what I've found in Orthodoxy: its transformative, healing, and peace-giving reality. As for a coherent entry point into my narrative, I stumbled across something appropriate while reading the Philokalia the other day, in an observation of St. Maximos the Confessor:

All goodness is without beginning because there is no time prior to it: God is eternally the unique author of its being. (Philokalia, Vol 2 pg 124)

So there's the answer: I was trying to find an entry point to discuss this vast goodness that has permeated my life. But it didn't start with me. It has no beginning.