Private Lives

"I don’t know how the rest of my story will go. 

I don’t know who I’ll be in it. 

All I know is I feel like this is just the beginning."

from "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee" 

The last few weekends have been a combination of movies, reading and, well, church. My heart feels good about being open about my faith but in my worldly mind I know it sounds a bit uncool too. As the character Mitchell thought to himself in Jeffrey Eugenides "The Marriage Plot":  "The worst thing about religion was religious people". 
But I'd rather not tie back my faith to religion so much as viewing it as a living breathing church that heals and houses me and keeps me on the right road. 


So, getting back to my other loves... movies and books... I've swayed from The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (the movie version of the novel by Rebecca Miller) to "Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village" (...I know, what a title!). 

There is something about the word "cosmos" that completely drags me in. It's a word of the world but it's also an internal word.  It's a reminder of nature and spirit - that there is time ticking in the background and that I must remember to look up and out. It's that little whisper in the trees and the "dock dock" of the tennis ball I used to whack repeatedly against the garage wall when I was young and present - a sound like the tick tock of the clock. 



So reader, how does "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee" tie back to Eastern Orthodoxy and my life... Pippa is constantly evolving - the angelic child, the confused teen, the lost twenty-something, the graceful matriarch. My faith and yearning is also organic - a result of God's grace being shown to me in some pretty mean hours (there goes that clock analogy again!) and the cycle of daily life. Of course I wish my life could be one long Ivy League/Wes Anderson/Paris Vogue moving feast - but it isn't. 


It's waking up, instant coffee, burnt toast, soggy Nutrigrain, working hard, glass of wine, The Only Way is Essex, The Voice, Pokemon and a bunch of plant watering! But, there's so many little diamond splinters of goodness... lots of poetry in the banal.

In a previous post I talked about life dividing into two roads. I'd like to close in sharing some text I read soon after that mini revelation of mine: 

"There are two roads that lead towards God. One is the harsh and tiring way with the savage struggles and assaults of evil. The other is the smoother way, the one through the power of love. There are many who chose the tortuous, difficult road and, as the saying goes, they "shed blood in order to get spirit." Through that method they reached great heights of virtue and spiritual attainment. I personally prefer the second and easier method for I consider it the shortest and more direct way to God. That is the way I urge ordinary people to follow.... Struggle for the spiritual life with simplicity and without haste or force."

Elder Porphyrios

From "Gifts of the Desert: The Forgotten Path of Christian Spirituality" Kyriacos C. Markides.

page 296