Adultery and Murder

This is the story of Saint James the Faster.

St. James was so perfect in pleasing God that he cured the most gravely ill through his prayers, but the enemy of mankind lured him into great temptations. Once an immoral woman was sent to him by some mockers. She misrepresented herself to James, pretending to weep yet all the while luring him into sin. Seeing that he was going to yield to sin, James placed his left hand into the fire and held it there for some time until it was scorched. Seeing this, the woman was filled with fear and terror, repented, and amended her life. 

On another occasion, James did not flee from his temptation, but rather he fell with a maiden who had been brought by her parents to be cured of her insanity. He indeed healed her, but afterward sinned with her. Then in order to conceal his sin, he killed her and threw her into a river. As is common, the steps from fornication to murder are not very far. 

After this, James lived for ten years as a penitent in an open grave. At that time there was a great drought which caused both people and livestock to suffer. As a result of his prayers, rain fell, and James knew that God had forgiven him. Here is an example, similar to that of David, of how wicked the evil demon is; how by God's permission the greatest spiritual giants can be overthrown; and how, through sincere and contrite repentance, God, according to his mercy, forgives even the greatest sins and does not punish those who punish themselves.

(source)

Alternate versions of the story exist involving caves and wandering in the wilderness (link). But the heart of the story remains the same.

James the Faster is my patron saint. Those of you who will be at my wedding will hear the priest refer to me as James. This is not because Father Yuri has memory issues.

Ideally, a child will be assigned a saint from birth, usually carrying the saint’s name as their own in some form. For converts like me the process is a little trickier. A Saint isn’t chosen as much as discovered. The church teaches that we are all assigned a Saint by God at birth. They watch over us, and pray for us. They are personally invested in our lives and spiritual wellbeing, and, hopefully, we share something or other in common. They’re spiritual life coaches. They’re personal connection to the great cloud of witnesses. We ask for their prayers on our behalf and we study their lives and their words (if any were recorded) in order to learn to better follow Christ.

When I first set out looking for my saint, I originally set out looking for a Tikhon. It’s the closest thing to Tyson in the Orthodox Canon, and it sounds really really cool. When I spoke with Father Yuri about this idea, he suggested I look for a James. “James is a good name.” He said, “There are many Jameses.” So I looked.

Saints all have feast days. There are more Saints than days, so every day is a feast day for someone or other. James the Faster’s feast day is my birthday. It used to be that a child’s Saint was determined by whoever’s feast day matched up with a child’s birthday. That’s not always the case today, but I took it as a sign. I picked James the Faster, or as my friend Paul recently called him, James the Obscure. But, that’s another story.

You may have noticed this phrase from the above story, “As is common, the steps from fornication to murder are not very far.” If you’re anything like me, you scoffed at this, and chalked it up to a bit of editorializing on the part of the wiki-editor. Sleeping with someone usually doesn’t lead to murder. Thing is nearly everything I’ve found that mentions James the Faster makes this same connection. Even the hymn that’s meant to be sung on his feast day.

James the Faster, according to the height of his soul, a giant was he,
But, he, from the heights slipped, and the devil toppled him;
One sin, to the other hastens, adultery rushes to murder,
James the Faster, himself, punishes, and God comforted him.

I would like to ignore this. I would very much like to see the story of James the Faster as a simple story of the power of penance. I can’t do that though. There is a deeper truth here, and it won’t leave me alone.

School’s been hard recently. We’re being asked to see darkness and engage it. In our future clients and in our present selves. We are told that we can only take a client to places that we have gone ourselves. We can only help mend adulterous hearts if we have wrestled with our own adultery. We can only find comfort for murderous souls if we have studied our own murderousness.

James was a healer, a wonderworker. He healed a young woman of her insanity. I do not know the specifics of how things went down between James and the young woman. But, his is not the first story I’ve heard of a therapist sleeping with their client. James’ shame turned to contempt. He murdered the woman, further victimizing the very person he was meant to help. James, the faith healer, the counselor and man of God, was exposed. He succumbed to the evil that infects every heart. The evil that, when unengaged, spreads like a termite colony, slowly destabilizing the most solid structure. James’ house was large, and when it collapsed, it collapsed hard.

In some stories, James wanders in the wilderness for a while, nearly abandoning the life of a monk. The stories mention no investigation that uncovers the murder. James is not discovered by anyone but himself. The darkness of adultery and murder was his own, and he is unable to ignore it. James the Wonderworker, man of God. James the Adulterer. James the Murderer. James the Hypocrite.

In the stories of wandering, James comes upon a monastery. He confesses his sin to the monks there, and they encourage him to stay with them, be penitent, be forgiven.  He chooses a cave, or, as in the above story, an open grave. James has chosen to live in his own death. Confronted by his own darkness and sin, he inhabits the grave where his poor victim was not granted rest.

James’ ten years of penitence do not “undo” his sins. They do not bring the girl back to life. Other saints raise the murdered from the dead, but James story is not one of undoing, it is one of repentance. James the Wonderworker became James the Murderer, but he didn’t remain there. Human darkness is not permanent. Sin feels like gravity, always scheming for the fall from Grace. James chose to live in the darkness of his sin without succumbing to it. He lived at the bottom of an open grave when the bottom of a bottle would have been easier. He fasted and prayed. He knew his own sin intimately, and he did not try to hide it again.

This is a man that the Church recognizes as Saint. An adulterer, a murderer, one who took advantage of those who trusted him to heal them. He fell hard, but yet his icon hangs in my bedroom. What is this? How can it be that a man so filled with violence, contempt, sadism and masochism is held up as an example for the faithful? Is redemption really that powerful? Or is this just another patriarchal story where a man literally gets away with murder? I want to believe the former.

In my coming work I will see people who have seen such darkness. I will sit across from the abused and the abusers. I will see so much harm, so much hate, contempt, violence, shame. I must believe in redemption if I am to keep my head. I must believe that James the Murderer, once James the Wonderworker, can become James the Faster, Saint and intercessor for my soul.

Most importantly (right now) I need to see myself in every aspect of James’ story. I must see my own hubris that leads me to open the door to my own adultery. I must see my shame, which becomes contempt, which becomes violence that will drive me to victimize the powerless. I must see my own grave, and live in it in prayer and fasting. I must see my own redemption if I am ever to hope to see someone else’s.

SAINT JAMES THE FASTER
Who from the greater height falls, is injured more,
To the heights whoever is lifted, let him cautiously shield himself.
The holy apostle writes: "Whoever thinks that he is standing secure
should take care not to fall," let him fear God.
James the Faster, according to the height of his soul, a giant was he,
But, he, from the heights slipped, and the devil toppled him;
One sin, to the other hastens, adultery rushes to murder,
James the Faster, himself, punishes, and God comforted him.
All virtues, one sin, is able to erode;
One hole in the granary, all the wheat pours out.
A house filled with fragrances, one handful of filth
Empties it of redolence and fills it with stench.
One-hundred victories nor one-hundred celebrations do not help
When in the final battle, the head is lost.
The spiritual life is a struggle against the hordes of the devil,
In this battle, from the beginning the proud are defeated.
Whoever invokes the Name of God with profound humility
That one, in battle, will be protected by God's mercy.

The Beautiful Misfits Brigade

We come without capital. We come without cool. We come without cleanly defined parameters of where the one thing becomes another but we know that we are here, or are we? Sometimes we get confused. We come with rhetoric and shout, but with whispered poetry, sometimes. We come all of us, and by all rights we should not get along.

This is why we are beautiful. This is why we are misfits. Our fit, it has, it missed, it has. Our fit is missed and we miss having a fit. Some of us never really did, have a fit that is. Some of us have had far too many, and the miss is more or less intentional now, missing the fit that is. In any case, we are miss matched, patchwork people, straw and bubblegum, duct-tape people. Different people with the same haircut, and different haircuts on the same people, and some of us haven't got much hair at all. And still, we come.

We come bringing only what will fit in our prosthetic-robotic-post-hydroponic lunch-pales that we got in grade 3. We come with our tales, long and fluffy, short and sleek, they are our tails, tales, trails. Oh, we do get confused. We are a thrift store tie-rack. We are here because we don't have anywhere else, and it is in our nature to find the place where everybody don't belong.

We come with ourselves and one at a time (or sometimes all at once) we explain what that means. We stand (or we sit on the floor [or a chair]) and we tell ourselves who we are. Or rather, we tell one another who we are. Or rather, one of us tells the rest of us who one of us is. But then, I just said the same thing thrice, didn't I?

In our telling of our being we become a bit more. In our listening to our being we connect, if only for a moment to the fit that was (ostensibly) missed. We find our fit and we fit with the other unfitted folk. And, this is why we are beautiful. It is the beauty of a kaleidoscope, of a leaf pile, of a lost-and-found bin.

We shouldn't fit. And we don't. We all don't. That's why we came. That's why we're beautiful.

I Wonder

I wonder what will happen to the Shaman in my head, the little boy who still hasn't figured out who his people are, the one who returned the shadows to their bodies, the one who scared away the tommyknocker with the help of his brother bear.

I wonder what will happen to the wizard in my head, the vagrant who whistled cider into existence, who turns his lovers into nymphs and ice eagles, who plays music that tells the story of the beginning of humans and the death of magic, who travels with the silver dog whose eyes burn blue.

I wonder what will happen to the bridge in my head, the girl who unlocked the fremont troll, who outsmarted puck and saved her boggart, who marked her own forehead with the unbreakable seal.

I wonder what will happen to the poet in my head, the hopeless romantic who joined forces with the cowboy and the scientists, the one with the flying monkey, who saved the princess and defeated the lich, but lost his leg in the process.

I wonder what will happen to the strong one in my head, the woman who opened the forbidden door, who unlocked a lifetime of pain, who saw things she never asked to know, who was erased, but refused to be forgotten, who may be the salvation of her eraser.

I wonder what will happen to the werewolf in my head, the fiction who scares my friends every Halloween, who gibbers and creeps, who leaves just enough up to the imagination.

As I get older, and as I learn to live in the world outside my head a little bit more than the world inside it, as I learn about attachment and z-scores, missiology and marriage, as I spend less and less time with my old buddy Neil, as I fall farther and farther behind on the adventures of my beloved Constantine, as I begin to dream more and more of schedules and schoolwork, and less and less about faeries and fireflies, I wonder what will happen to the stories that only live in my own head.

I guess I’ll throw them out into the world and hope that they take seed in someone else’s mind, or at the very least, take them somewhere else, somewhere closer to the truth but father from reality. I wonder if they’ll find anything worth keeping.

Why, How, -Well-

Why
Why do people change? People change because we are plastic. We are born to change. Human beings change our environments, both external and internal, to better meet our needs. We change because we are designed to change. It is how we survive. The very nature of life is motion, movement, growth, death, rebirth, and eternal change. In other words, we change because we change. The particulars of why an individual changes are particular to that individual’s story, but the general rule boils down to adaptation to a changing environment.

Why do people stay the same? People stay the same because it works. The systems of thought and action that fed us last week will most likely feed us this week. We find a tactic that minimizes our pain, and we stick to it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Why do people want to change? People want to change either because they must develop new systems to survive, or because their old systems have become maladaptive.

-Well-
That’s one way to look at it. And that perspective definitely exists within me. But, there is another. I believe in the imago dei. I believe that the Image of God in each one of us is an Icon of God. An Icon is a window on, reflection of, eternity, the place outside of time and space where God and the Saints who have gone to rest before us are. I believe that we have a window to that place inside of each of us. Saint Issac the Syrian said, “The ladder that leads to the Kingdom is hidden within you.”

I believe that people want to change because we want to be constantly becoming what we are, Icons of the divine.

How
The manners through which people change are as myriad as their reasons for changing. How many ways are there to move? Sometimes change happens entirely without intention or notice. Perhaps one day we may take note that we are much different than we were earlier in our lives, but without careful introspection there is no clear sense of how this came about.  Sometimes, change comes after a long process of concerted effort or a sudden, clear decision to be different. Change can come through interpersonal relationships, or individual determination. Change, both positive and negative, happens by living.

-Well-
That’s all well and good for an answer, but what we’re really interested in is positive change, isn’t it? How people change for the better. My answer to that is theosis. The Icon of God is like a flame, lit before time, the very energy of God. Theosis is kindling that flame within us until it burns away all corruption and disease, spiritual and physical, and we are left as the bush on Horeb, burning but not consumed. We help one another in theosis the way that one candle can light another. The way that two torches can be held together to produce a single flame.

Shotguns

Note: I almost submitted this as a prayer request on his website. I'm glad I didn't.

When I was young, I had a dream that I was standing in the foyer of the church. My parents were in the building, but I didn't know where. I wasn't afraid, I was just wandering around.

I remember a man burst through the front door holding a double-barreled shotgun. I was afraid. He was so angry. He turned to me and started yelling. "Where's Bily? Where's Bily!?" I remember being confused, because in my head you were Pastor Robert, and it took me a second to figure out what the angry man was talking about.

"I don't know! I don't know." I said.

He asked where my parents were. I said downstairs. He left, and I was very confused.

For years I wondered what that dream was about. I remembered it, and I still remember it. When the news of your gross abuses of power began to surface in my life, I was reminded of my dream and I began to wonder again about what it could mean. I think I've figured it out.

The man in my dream is me The dream was a warning of what I could be, of what my rage could become. I am no longer a child, and today I am angry.

You have nothing to fear from me today. God willing, I will never have to see again. I will not come after you with a shotgun, but I thought you should know. If it weren't for God's intervention when I was very young, if the seed of this dream had not been there to warn me of the dangers of being consumed by anger, you would be in danger.

You've lived long enough for a generation of angry young men to grow up with your domineering, vicious shadow in their memory. You are growing old and weak, and many angry young men would be glad to watch you burn. Be careful. Be aware. I'm sure I'm not the only one with a shotgun in his soul.

My Father Had Ulcers in Highschool

Literally the worst timing. Literally the worst. I can't back out now though. I can't. I have to be strong. I can do it. I am strong. I am fine. We can do this. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I'm not ready. In the state I'm in. Fuck. I have to man up, I can't run away, I'm not like them. I need to push through. For her. What if I break down in the car? What if I turn into a pumpkin? What if the sky turns green and drops acid rain?

If only there were some way out. Some kind of pause button. Sleep doesn't help, it just brings tomorrow faster and the difference between 5 and 9 hours of sleep gets less and less meaningful as grades pass. I only signed up for one credit beyond what was recommended. Why is it so hard?

Why can't I sleep? Why can't I stay awake? Seriously, what the hell is wrong with me?

Seriously though

Who has been accessing this blog from Russia? 25 times in the past week?
25 times‽ <-- It's an interrobang!
What is going on?

Composure

When I was little, I cried a lot. My mom said I was sensitive. I remember the first time I realized that my parents would die one day. I cried. I knew that it was okay and that they weren't going to die any time soon, but I was suddenly aware that they would, in fact, die, most likely before I did. I don't remember how old I was.

When I got older, I learned to hide my tears. I had a very good friend who followed the John Wayne school of manliness. Men wore boots, got in fights, remained stoic, played football, felt nothing, did what was right in the most bastardly way possible. Passion was out of the question. This is probably the reason I am to this day resistant to sports and classic westerns.

In my house, composure was a sign of legitimacy. In any argument, the winner was the one who didn't lose control of their emotions. People who lost their cool were allowing their emotions to overcome their rationality, and the most rational person was the one who was in the right. Makes sense, doesn't it?

I'm sure there are many other factors that lead to my current state of being, but I've only just started therapy and revelations like this take time.

In any case, the result of all this is that I have a hard time allowing myself to express my emotions in their raw, simple forms. I have very carefully constructed a persona of a master translator. I tell stories. I use analogy. I like pretty words. I work hard to turn these overwhelming, illegitimate emotions into clear, acceptable forms of communication.

A little over a year ago, I wrote this blog post about Europa. I knew, even then, that my "composure" was a shell, and that my emotions underneath were raging, looking for some release. Here's the funny thing though, I am not the most composed person in the world. I don't stuff my emotions all the time. It's usually not that difficult to figure out how I'm feeling. If this is composed, then what does it look like raw?

When I was home, over Christmas, my father told me that he was happy that I was going through the program I was going through at school. He said he hoped I would figure out some of my mess. "You've always been good at talking about abstract things. But, you've also always been very difficult to talk to about practical things." I knew what he meant. I lose my composure sometimes.

I don't know where all this is heading. I don't really know what I'm trying to get across here. I don't know if any of this even makes sense. I want to be useful. I want to be helpful. I want to be healthy? I want to be able to experience emotions without compromising my ability to convey my thoughts. I want, more than anything, to be understood, but it's so hard. It's so very hard.