Writing During the Feast

I haven't felt like writing--it is as if the writing almost becomes unnecessary when I am finally at home. I don't have to write here to connect with the world around me; I am simply there, me, and all the pieces of color, wind, smells, tastes, deep loves all live with me. Writing, for me perhaps is an attempt to draw those pieces together in my nomadic life, when I am not at home--a home that paradoxically means that I am a foreigner. I am at home as an American in Greece. Not American, not Greek. Amereek. I am a Third Culture person, a person in the airport of culture.

Sounds depressing, I suppose. It is and it isn't. I am, in the deeper things, someone who has been able to choose, and yet someone who was formed deeply by Greece, in Greece, by Greeks. My life has been a glorious, mysterious conglomeration of small tragedies suspended like small creatures in the amber of deep comedy that is most purely expressed by Greece, what the ancient Greeks and the modern Greeks both are truly, underneath it, about. Also, I know that I don't really fit here--I know that the sum of my life is not a large failure to get back to Greece, though it has felt like that at times of immaturity. I want to, though. In Athens, on Sifnos, my sister and I look for a home, a place we can come back to.

But I know also that my real home is within God's will, and He has us each on a ship and asks us to learn the wind-road home, and continue to adjust our sails even past Ithaka. Ithaka is not enough, she only points to something greater by the very desire for her, perhaps the meaning behind Odysseus' second, and last odyssey to find a place that does not know what an oar is. Still, the questions remain--How do I, as an enfleshed soul, live on a ship, live 'turning my face on all I loved'  like the msytery of Sifnos' greatest poet, for all these years? Do the sounds, tastes, smells, colors, matter at all?

I do realize this time round, this nostos, that I was formed, I was brought up not only by my parents, friends, and teachers, but by the land and its people--I have a deep respect, always have, for older women, and always a slight awe, or even fear of them (I got my cheeks pinched hard a few times as a child); emotional signals are subtle for me, and the community should not be competitive. I dislike the spirit of rabid capitalism and ultra-efficiency (though at times I appreciate it). I'm totally on Captain Kirk's side. These are all things Greece instilled in me. I learned directly from the wind something of God's voice, and from the Greek sense of proportion--a small, white building with light green shutters providing a square background for a line of fig trees trained softly in human-tree organic symbiosis, into a kind of line in front of the building, the lines of the trees and building a kind of parallelism that produces a lively and ordered difference--a parallelism of polarity--and then one giant pot of red geranium providing the surprise, mirroring the unexpected we find so beautiful, so necessary, like the surprisingly particular love of God for each of us, a reminder that we are not part of a machine but part of a creation, a work of art, a home. Greece speaks truth in every line, even the fallen ones. The Greek miracle? It arises naturally--for me it seems almost inevitable because I love Greece like I love my own body.

The Greeks work hard, and they also work hard for the good of their communities and for beauty. This may surprise people who are watching the IMF issue, or who have seen the messiness, or imperfection rampant here--unfinished buildings, graffiti like a virus spreading in Athens. Yet Greeks get up extremely early and work hard as their ancestors have for millenia, hacking stumps out of the ground; the insides of homes and hotels and buildings are often spotless and extremely organized and clear of clutter. The outside, not so much. The landscaping of the National Archaeology Museum makes the place look slightly abandoned--but it isn't. They just let things grow, and people make paths through the grass or shrubs, paths that fit the pattern of communal life. And nobody yells at you for it. They live as a part of nature and don't seem to want to twist it into straight lines. It surprises the American-Germanic in me, but the part of me formed here relaxes and fits into my skin again. "Let the grass grow and the poppies will grow, too!!"

The thing I think I feel the most strongly about is the lack of competition. The Greeks aren't always focused  on vying for the highest place in a community; people are higher or lower, richer or poorer, and there is a certain appreciation, it seems, for everyone. They love to give little presents, especially to children, even strangers--chips and ice creams for TJ, who is quickly becoming a Greek. The hands of the Greeks I know are open for gifts both ways. I know nothing of Sinon, or the suspicion that made Virgil say, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." TJ senses the openness and talks to everyone he meets with his twenty words of Greek and there is appreciation, laughter, and joy in return. Walls are there to hand things over in Greece; they are there to create terraces on the mountainsides for subsistence farming, they are there to protect the path from the wind; they are there as hideouts for pigeons (little triangle-holes set in the stone); they are there for the bougainvillea to grow over; they are there for the weary traveler to sit upon. They are there to create a veranda away from the ever-present sunlight ricocheting off the blue water. Here, in an ancient culture, they are a heritage from one's ancestors; by them the mountains have been turned into farmland terraces over thousands of years, nameless gifts keeping the virgin contours of the mountains intact.

Neither socialism nor capitalism fit Greece, Maybe distributism. And Greece isn't perfect. I think one thing plaguing Greece really is  a soft mafia-ism. It fits their culture of strong family and community--it is not every man for himself, as in America, but it can be as serious a destroyer for an economy. In Athens, one can feel it...the pharmacies are the only place babyfood can be sold, for instance. This doesn't make any sense to the foreigner, until one understands that the pharmacy family and the babyfood family know the families who are in parliament, or something like that. It was a deal. Those are the gifts to beware, but these kinds aren't limited to Greece--we have our own form of mafia in America. It is just more packaged in fine terms. I don't know what regular Greeks feel about their own form, but it may seem kind of normal to them because, simply, it is built on the family connection and the head man. This is as ancient as Agamemnon, and probably just as self-absorbed as that sod was. However, the Greeks here I've spoken to seem to think that Greece is a small, easily bullied player in a banker's game. Having heard this about banks (think about the criminal bail-out in the US, look at the Occupy movements) for years now, I begin to wonder if they are right. For example, the Euro banks ("The National Bank of Greece is not Greek," one man informed us, "it is part of the Euro elite") take 3% of all credit card purchases in Greece. Why? And this is not mentioned in the media? How many people take this kind of thing into account when looking at the situation in Greece?

For me, when I was a foreign child, I was happily unaware of all this. I was aware of things, formed by things, under the radar: the smell of souvlaki wafting it's way across the beach and mixing delightfully with the smell of the sea, the particular smell of Greek bread and the taste of the water, the way the little red poppies peek out from the ever-brown grass-weeds, the wild and nutty smell of the huge beach reeds; the smile of the woman who ran the market, the wild, kind of rude kids at the bakery; the fact that vipers are small, shrunken things that move fast and strike without warning; the feeling that one was really meant to fly off with that particular wind, a Cupid wind for me as Psyche...we are indeed brought up by more than our parents, more than our churches, more than our friends. We are brought up by a million images, a million sensory and subtle interactions with the world we know as a child. Perhaps the person who loses, somehow, their forming culture, can see this more clearly--and can tell others how important everything is for a child, how dear it all is, no matter the failures within it. It makes me remember that I am part of the formation, however small, of the kids who come to play at our house; they will have some opinion of life, of women, by how I am with them.

I think of God asking us to be like children in this way--we need to take everything in of Him, just soak Him up, that we aren't primarily formed into Him by rational acuity but by small acts of openness and real experiences. It is, I think, harder if one is in an ugly culture (physically ugly, but also spiritually ugly--hypocrisy and arrogance in the 'religious' being perhaps the worst ugliness). If our culture values 'first' most highly, or 'smartest' or 'richest', we will become that as well. For me, these things have been violence in my life, like the violence of passivity has, too. Greece has a certain balance, a good balance here, and I was blessed to be formed in part by that.

God made us in our bodies and He speaks to us through the creation--some people are spoken to in the mountains, some on the back of a horse--most of us hear best, are able to be more real, at home, in the place where we were formed, where there was that first childlike love. Children who grow up with warping have the hardest time loving, and yet there are miracles here--but yes, Aquinas, God builds on nature, on us and our enfleshment. Yet, He can use even the warping or an exile to speak to us; He is everywhere and within us. I just think that there are places of beauty so profound it makes the soul sing: I was blessed enough to be formed in one of these places. Each place of beauty has a different song about the Creator to sing: I have heard a song from the pure white of the snow in Lander, and from the vastness of the Wyoming landscape, from the golden kelp in Santa Barbara; but here, in Greece, the song seems complete to me, like a dance with voices and instruments and hand-clapping. God knows this, and so I always ask, "Why the nomadic life?" I think now that God challenged me, and my sister, to dig deeply for God inside, to understand that even almost perfect beauty, in this world, is seriously flawed and can disappear like the haze over our beloved Middle Sea.

My sister and I have similar feelings, similar desires, but we have dug inside for God and suffered in different ways--looking at each of us is kind of like looking at two versions of a similar being; the small differences become the rudder movements that takes each one through different waters. She is next to my heart, one who also knows the joy and pain of seeing small remembrances, things resurrected from a childlike world lost. That is something huge, as many siblings can attest. And God uses everything, everything in our life, to speak to us, even the little biscuit packages we remember and the particular way the taverna tables slant on the gravel along the beach. We remember eating the biscuits together with a kind of pure unconcerned-ness, like the lilies of the field; we remember scrambling under the tables for bottle caps, like the merchant who found the pearls--a kind of pure concentration. No one yelled at us, either. We knew an unburdened spirit, but we didn't know courage--and perseverance through the pain in the world, in ourselves, and the most deep, the pain between ourselves and how love does indeed conquer all. We can though this give back to God, as He gives of Himself to Himself in the Trinity: through the exercise of virtue, through hard things (the hardest in ourselves) we can give something of ourselves to God. In fact, we can lay down everything in the face of those who hurt us, of those losses in our lives that demand faith. The nomadic life and a kind of permanent exile is one way, in a sense, a very gentle way.

Here, on Sifnos, it is the first time in almost forty years that I've been back in a more simple Greece, almost back in 1970's Greece, and I could now realize that all the small things I've held onto (bouganveillia in Santa Barbara, the taste of salt water, golden light, colors, certain friendships which have that openness and lack of competition or Americanesque hard edge) have been puzzle pieces that are all together here--I realized this when I could not write about it. There was too much--normally I have only small pieces to write about, and I write about them as jewels I've found. Here, I am covered with them, and I don't want to write, but to dance and sing and to just be.

And, I wonder if we are like the silver sea of olive trees here, stretching out across the hillside. The same growth process that expands and heightens the tree also serves to heal wounds; I know, for instance, that the sensitivity to beauty that was instilled in me by Greek land, sea, and people, helped my spirit expand; it also, now, helps me heal not only myself, but others, because beauty is also truth.

It is, truly, a foretaste of heaven--it is itself a piece of heaven--a large piece. I know now what I didn't know all those years ago, that this is pointing to a renewed earth.

A renewed earth--that brought about by the fire of the Holy Spirit. In Lander, the Sunday before we left, it was Pentecost Sunday and I remembered again the Holy Spirit in that particular way. As a child in Greece, I had a special devotion to the Holy Spirit; I would go out into the forests of Anatolia College and sit in the sun on a particular rock in the sun amongst the pines, and listen for Him. I heard Him in the wind, with that soft whistling, brush-like sound that the pine needles make. I would be there for hours at a time. It was my touchstone, the center meaning of me, and I loved Him and He loved me.

When we left, I couldn't figure out how to find Him again without that place. Nothing in the place we came to seemed to speak that way, so I despaired and the road back was harder on Him than on me. Many years later, I was sitting there in Lander at the Pentecost service and thinking of Him again, but rather abstractly--red for the Holy Spirit, okay.

The next Sunday was Mass in Athens at the Catholic cathedral. For some reason, it was Pentecost Sunday again. The red vestments were lost in the beauty of that place, the loftiness of it, the old stones and the home-smell of Greece--spots of red, though, like the wild poppies, the pot of geraniums peeking out. The choir sang and it was the best I've heard in many years, and it suddenly hit me quite forcefully, perhaps through the mixture of East and Western tones, the softness and power of the sounds, like wind, that the Holy Spirit was speaking again to me as He did once--here I was in Greece again, but I was not out in a forest but in the house of God--but He knew I would better hear Him again, that my heart was more open somehow, because I was happy--all the pieces were together--family here, my beloved land of formation, my parents, my children, my sister, my husband, the love of friends, old and new, that are part of me now.

The words, like boulders, will not fit what is water and wind--but let me try. Childlike-ness is that particular openness of our whole selves to God speaking, and we hear Him, know him like we are formed as children--through the senses, through a developing, open-to-truth mind, through the emotions so directly attached to the senses for us, through the imagination, through the memory. Therefore, the place we have loved as a child can, once again, open those closed doors that are defenses against what is foreign, what is hard to understand for us, what does not use the same tonal sounds, colors, smells, as that forming place. For me, this land and its people throw open my doors, like the heavy shutters on Greek island doors and windows--that golden light streams in, carrying the brown, grey, blue, white, and dots of red. All of it wakes up my spirit, like profound music in the liturgy--it is a prayer, a conversation that I can't have in the same way, really, anywhere else.

Yet I know God also asks us to be in the dark, to not completely depend on that alma mater or on sensory needs; we have to balance ourselves between detachment and attachment. This is the message of Babette's Feast, in part. Greece is my Feast, to remind me of joy and satiation in landscapes that are foreign to me. Yet I must also practice the asceticism of the North and the winter and the desert. God, knowing my sensual sensitivity, gave me an obvious, forming lesson in Wyoming and I love it for that, too. It reminds me to search always for a renewed heaven and earth, whilst Greece reminds me to dance, to take the joy in, to remember heaven.

Deo Gratias...Δόξα τω Θεώ.