It’s Lent 2006, and I’m sitting in my bedroom, looking at a little paper sign. It says “The Old Cathedral would be a great place to get married, but it doesn’t #$*!ing matter.” The stars and symbols are really there because I didn’t want to put something that rude on the wall. Above that despairing phrase is the title, “Forbidden Thoughts 2006.”
I put that thought up there because I’d been having it entirely too much. The idea is that if I recognize that this kind of thinking will get me nowhere, I will stop hurting myself with it. (I think a shrink would call this “cognitive therapy.”) It’s like a gardener breaking up the soil with a pick. If he finds a rock that’s too big to be moved, he can keep whacking at it all day under the principle that he has the right to plant tomatoes wherever he wants, or he can leave a stake in the ground to mark the rock, and just go around it. My little paper sign is there to remind me to leave this rock in my head alone.
Why, you might ask, have I got a rock in my head? Well, I’m a bachelor, and I’m 26. I’m not too happy about it, and thinking about how you’d like to get married when you have no girlfriend is going to get you nowhere. The reason that the cathedral is in my head is that I just discovered this wonderful old church in San Francisco, the Old Cathedral of the Holy Virgin. This church was built in the 1880s by Anglicans. It’s a wooden church with Gothic architecture. The priest there tells me that it was built like a sailing ship, with no nails in it.
In the 1920s, large numbers of Russian refugees of the Bolshevik Revolution came across the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco. They bought this Anglican church and turned it into their own cathedral, filling it with beautiful icons. They named it after an icon of the Mother of God entitled “Joy Of All Who Sorrow.” (The short way of dealing with this is to call it “Holy Virgin Cathedral.”) In the 1960s, they built another cathedral in San Francisco, an even bigger one, with five gold onion domes that can be seen from the Golden Gate Bridge. That cathedral looks like it was brought by helicopter from Kiev. It’s also named after the “Joy of All Who Sorrow” icon, so there are two cathedrals with the same name in San Francisco (I don’t get this) but one is the Old Cathedral and the other is the New Cathedral.
The New Cathedral is famous enough to get into tourist guidebooks for San Francisco. Most people who walk into the place for the first time are a little overwhelmed by its towering ceilings, walls covered with frescoes, and not a word of English on any of the icons. There’s also the relics of St. John of San Francisco resting in a glass coffin in the cathedral. Yes, a dead person with his dark green hands and feet visible.
The New Cathedral is a popular place for Orthodox to get married, but if you’re going to invite a large number of friends who haven’t been to an Orthodox church, the grandiose, foreign design of the cathedral, and the dead body in the corner can kind of freak them out.
After having lived in San Francisco for a year, I’ve found the Old Cathedral. It’s a church with a few dozen members led by a priest, who, like me, did not grow up in the Orthodox Church. The services are half-and-half in English and Old Church Slavonic (a liturgical language which hasn’t been commonly spoken in 1,200 years). The cathedral looks more American and familiar, the services are long and contemplative, and the parishioners are a friendly multi-ethnic bunch of Russians, Ukrainians, Eritreans and converts. The cathedral is a large building that could hold 300-400 people easily, but we only get 40 or so people now (most of the founding families are going to the New Cathedral). The children of the cathedral take advantage of this fact because they can hide and play in the narthex of the church without disturbing the service going on up at the altar.
Up the street is Alamo Square Park, with its famous row of Victorian Houses, the second-most photographed structure in San Francisco after the Golden Gate Bridge.
So that’s the explanation for the little paper sign on my wall. The Old Cathedral would be a wonderful place to get married, but it doesn’t matter. Getting married is an abstract topic since I’m not seeing anyone, and it’s Lent. Yes, Lent.
Lent is a funny time for romance. Lent and romance are each appropriate in their own way, but together they’re like grapefruit and milk. You can have them together if you really want them, but it usually turns out weird.
Great Lent is the time in which the Church – meaning we humans – enter in to the spiritual condition of the Old Testament, in the words of theologian Alexander Schmemann. We are outside Paradise, outside of the gates of heaven, and no effort of our own will get us back in. But, the Old Testament tells of the coming of Christ, who
can transcend that barrier. Our worship in Lent is a re-enactment of the Old Testament – thank God it’s only six weeks long rather than centuries of preparation! The services of Holy Week, which follow, put us in the shoes of the Apostles, who are seeing the most amazing and frightening events of their lives, who are then delighted in the Resurrection of their Master and God.
Father Schmemann calls the mood of Great Lent “Bright Sadness.” We are sad because of our sins but we are happy because we know what’s coming.
Great Lent is a time of prayer and fasting, of giving up non-essential activities such as television and going to concerts or bars, not because these activities are bad (they can be very helpful) but because you’re focusing your soul on the crucified and risen Christ. It’s the spiritual equivalent of boot camp. It takes a lot of focus, and we don’t try a lot of new things. Having a new girlfriend or boyfriend during Lent is like a professional baseball player painting an oil mural during spring training. It can be done, but do you really want to?
I became Orthodox in 2001, and my first Lent was in 2002. It was also my first year of serving in the Peace Corps in Ukraine. It was a wonderful time of spiritual discovery, with each service bringing me a little closer to the Resurrection. Also, I had discovered how Ukrainian dark bread is really good even without margarine. I ate it all through Lent and lost 40 pounds. It was great. When Pascha came around, it was like graduating from high school again or something – we made it!
Lent 2003 was a little harder to take because the Iraq War started in the second week of Lent, and it seemed like every Ukrainian I knew wanted to tell me what an idiot president that we had.
Lent 2004 is when things started getting complicated. I had just gotten back to the United States, and I was suffering badly from culture shock. (The culture shock of coming home is worse than going there.) And, there was this American Orthodox girl who wanted to spend time with me. She’d studied Slavonic language in university. She was beautiful, brilliant and tall, but she’d been a pretty shy person through high school and college and as a result had learned about men through reading Jane Austen novels.
We started seeing each other a couple of weeks before Lent. I enjoyed talking to her, but I wasn’t too sure about it becoming “a thing” with her. And, I wasn’t too sure about starting a new relationship during Lent in principle. She, on the other hand, was very enthusiastic. Sitting next to her, I thought I could hear the violins playing in her head, a crescendo moving to a climax of energy that could be let loose if we had our first kiss.
I thought we could just talk during Lent and maybe get romantic after Pascha. (And, stupidly, I thought that if I didn’t kiss her, we’d stay friends.) Anyway, it all fell apart a few weeks into Lent and I rarely hear from her now.
During Lent 2005, I met a tall girl at a church conference, and we got to talking about favorite books. She said she was reading
Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen. After the conference, we kept writing each other, and she invited me to travel to her town 200 miles away to meet her parents. I was really excited, and I went to the library and checked out
Sense and Sensibility to read on the bus. I got through half of this piece of chick lit (the main character was wondering why her suitor had left unexpectedly and was mad that he hadn’t written or called). I met the parents, who really seemed to like me, and then the girl told me her true ambition was to be a nun.
When I got back home, I walked directly from the Greyhound bus station to the library and hurled
Sense and Sensibility through the return slot with finality.
Now we come to 2006. It’s Lent again, and, smarting from the embarrassments of the past two years, I swore off talking to eligible women. And, I started attending Old Cathedral, a beautiful place to get married, which brings me back to my original scene of this essay – sitting in my bedroom, I’m looking at that paper sign which bans the use of that dreadfully negative thought.
Let me let the clock run forward some from Lent 2006 now, and I’m going to tell you how my resolutions turn out.
I almost succeed in my efforts not to talk to women during Lent, until I’m at another San Francisco Orthodox church. It’s the evening of Holy Thursday, and I’m in line to go up and kiss the large crucifix that we put in the middle of the church in remembrance of the death of Christ. There, I meet a tall, beautiful young woman with long brown hair who has just moved to San Francisco. We become friends, and I spend most of the next several days with her. She’s very stylish. She says that she likes San Francisco because you can find more unique cocktail dresses in the boutiques and you rarely have to endure the frustration of finding another girl at a party who is wearing the same dress as you.
We go to the Paschal night service together, and then at the feast afterwards, I’m so entranced with the girl that I forget to eat.
That story doesn’t get much further than that, though. Pretty soon, I discover why. I met her on Holy Thursday, but on Holy Wednesday, she went to a dance club called Ruby Skye and met a young man passing through San Francisco. A few months later, she moves to Canada to be with him.
I keep going to church at the Old Cathedral, which, unlike the other church I attend sometimes in San Francisco, has no girls. (I wouldn’t have any problem identifying the other church if it didn’t lead to the identity of the girl I’m talking about.) This is at once a relief and a frustration. It’s a relief not to have to think of the right thing to say.
I go to an Orthodox conference for young adults. There I meet a tall, beautiful young woman from Canada. I tell her a little about my Peace Corps service, and about how I lost weight in Ukraine because the diet is better.
“Now you’re slim,” she said.
“Not quite,” I said. “My ideal weight would be 230.” (I’m six feet nine inches tall.)
“What?” she said incredulously. “That’s how much I weigh. Are you calling me fat?”
That didn’t get any further.
I keep going to the Old Cathedral. One Saturday in July, I’m attending a vigil service, which is an evening preparation service before the next day’s liturgy. During vigil, we have two services combined into one. There’s Vespers, which contains an assortment of readings, mostly from the Old Testament. Then, we move into Matins, which contains the Canon, an assortment of readings about the New Testaments saints that are commemorated that day. It also contains a Gospel reading about the Resurrection. Like Lent, it’s a movement from the Old to the New, from darkness to light.
This particular Saturday, we have some visitors helping out with the service. Rather than the usual one reader to do the responses to the priest’s prayers, we’ve got a real choir director visiting from Boise with her daughter. And, the choir director’s husband is a priest, serving, so we’ve got two priests working together at the service. I hear the lovely singing and reading emanating from the choir’s corner at the front of the church.
The vigil service takes about two and a half hours. At the end, I walk over to the choir’s corner to say hi to the visiting choir director and her daughter. They’re both quite happy to see me. Later on, I ask the daughter out on a date, and rather than the usual “prove you’re worth it” routine that a girl will give you, she says yes.
And, the Old Cathedral turns out to be a great place to get married, and it
does matter.
