Orthodox Writers, Readers, and Artists: Kh. Krista West, “The Community of Joy”

May 2011–A few weeks ago, I stood at my worktable and watched the rain deluging my backyard.  The light outside was that unique shade of Portland leaden gray, a tone that has an oppressive quality, flattening the sky and giving off a somber light.  Many people find it depressing, but it is after these storms that the grass glows with a sublime and intensified light, and it was that intoxicating light that I was hoping to see.  It was a solitary moment, just myself alone with my work, and I treasured the quietude and the beauty.

As I brought my eyes back to the work before me, I beheld an even greater beauty. The yards of beautiful burgundy and gold brocade spread across my table caused my heart to soar.  This glorious fabric was steeped in traditions that were centuries old, yet looked incredibly fresh and sparkling.  In my sixteen years as an ecclesiastical tailor, I’ve had thousands of yards of fabric pass over my worktable and yet their glory never seems to grow stale.  The familiar designs are like old friends well met, the new designs are awaiting their turn to be another link in the ancient chain of the beautification and adornment of Christ’s Church.

A few years after I began working as a church tailor, I met an old friend from high school.  He asked where I was working and I explained.  “You make the same thing over and over again?!” he asked incredulously, “Don’t you get bored?”   It hadn’t occurred to me to question this, but as I began to reflect upon it, I realized that my repertoire of garments is incredibly limited–only 12 basic designs—so I was making the same garments almost daily and yet I wasn’t bored.  Why was that?

I knew it had something to do with the feeling I got when I was working.  It didn’t happen all of the time, but every once in awhile I would experience the most delicious contentment, a deep sense of gratitude to be part of this line of craftsmen throughout the centuries who had worked at this labor.  It wasn’t particularly glamorous or thrilling work; in fact, any novelty it had had quickly wore off after slogging through tasks like cutting 45 feet of canvas interfacing into 4 inch strips or marking out row after row of bias binding.  But it seemed that the longer I labored, the more joy I had.

As time went on, I began to realize that the very thing that would cause boredom—the sheer repetition of my work—was in actuality, the very freedom that gave such joy.  By working at the same tasks, obtaining mastery bit by bit, year by year, I was going deeper and deeper into the work.   And, yet it wasn’t a self-serving mastery since it seemed that the more I delved into my work, the less I knew.  I had read an account years before of a famous artist who, decades into his career, was convinced that his work was worthless and he abandoned painting altogether; at the time, I thought he was foolish, but I began to understand his motivation—the better you get at something, the more aware you are of your own ineptitude.  In the case of working as an ecclesiastical tailor, familiarity bred humility.  Sure I could make a beautiful set of vestments, but in the back of my mind I knew that at some time and place in the Church’s history, someone else had done it better.

It is this very humility, this knowledge that I am laboring in a long, unbroken chain of tradition to which I am held accountable, and for which I will face judgment, that grounds my creativity.  I work within a limited, fixed tradition, acutely aware that I must not add or subtract anything from the essence of the garments which I have been handed down.  And the wonder is that, rather than make my work tedious and lifeless, it’s these very limitations that stimulate and feed my creativity.  As Photios Kontoglou, famous mid-20^th century iconographer states, “The artist of every period remains within the bounds of this form [the traditions of the Church].  And not only does this fact not trouble him, but by reason of it his work gains in intensity, for, unfettered by any necessity to invent a new type, he can devote himself completely to the task of execution.”  He speaks of the devout iconographers who “…transmitted their art, as a precious acquisition, to the subsequent artists, meekly and joyfully, not as an excellence of their own, but as a treasury of joy and a spiritual feast to which all are invited.”  Unlike many secular artists or craftsmen who find themselves enslaved to the modern, I found myself liberated by the ancient.

Every time I pick up my scissors and lay out another brocade, I am laboring within a great community.  Like the unknown artisans who laid the stones of Hagia Sophia or made the glorious mosaics at Ravenna, my faith guides my purpose, which is not a man-centered expression of myself, but rather a God-centered expression of the Kingdom of Heaven.   I am called to lay aside myself and approach the “spiritual feast” that is the adornment of the Church.

Because for the Orthodox Christian artisan, there are no solitary moments.  Each and every moment I spend by myself, working on an epitrachelion or cutting out altar cloths, is in actuality a moment spent in the company of all of the artisans who have gone before me in this long and glorious tradition.  We don’t stand alone, but together, and our joy is not taken from a single thing we might create out of our own limited and corrupt minds, but rather from the knowledge that we are laboring to make the material world give praise and glory to the Creator of All.

Krista West was born in Portland, Oregon and began sewing at the age of 4.  Her love of handcrafts as a child and her conversion to Orthodox Christianity in 1993 led into an interest in Orthodox ecclesiastical vesture.  She apprenticed with Leslie Schaill of Traditional Cassocks and Vestments from 1994 to 1997 and began Krista West Vestments in 1997.  Her focus quickly became on the Greek-style and while the majority of her work is in this arena, she also is interested in maintaining distinct styles of vesture within Orthodox Christianity.  To that end, she has sewn for the clergy of many jurisdictions.

In 2002, Krista began to research the origins of Orthodox Christian vestments.  In 2004, she travelled to Greece to participate in a museum conservation course hosted by the Greek Ministry of Culture which preventively conserved the ecclesiastical garments of the Gonia monastery in Kolimbari, Crete.  Her research and field work led to her podcast “The Opinionated Tailor” which began airing on Ancient Faith Radio in 2008.  She has written various articles on ecclesiastical garments and continues to research multiple aspects of this field, including natural dyestuffs and early Byzantine textile history.  She has lectured at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, St. Vladimir’s School of Theology and St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Seminary as well as at parish retreats.

Kh. Krista is married to Fr. Alban West, pastor of St. George Antiochian Orthodox Church in Portland, Oregon and is mother to three daughters.

Orthodox Writers, Readers, and Artists: Calee M. Lee

I always seem to forget to move the laptops when we’re expecting guests. Computers are as much a part of our home aesthetic as the Celtic souvenirs from our days living in Ireland or the Byzantine icons which dominate a corner of our living room.  I sent my first electronic message over 25 years ago so I suppose it is little wonder that I currently work in a field that relies on technology that barely existed several years ago.

My daughter is four and like so many of her generation, she cannot comprehend a world without computers.  One day, she was listing through household objects, trying to grasp the contents of my childhood. “Mommy, did you have a TV when you were a little girl?” “Yes, but it didn’t have a remote control.” “What about a Wii?” “No honey, they didn’t have video games that fit inside people’s houses.” “Well, Mommy. What about stairs? Did they have stairs when you were little?”

Yes. We had stairs.

My children live in a world that, at first appearance, has radically changed in the last 20, 50 or 100 years.  Information is constantly at their fingertips and children are now capable of tasks like audio recording and editing that still seem like magic to my grandparents. Yet, despite a different virtual landscape, their hopes, dreams and concerns are not fundamentally any different from those who have gone before.

Will anyone love me?

Can I do something important?

How do I navigate this world?

As an Orthodox Christian, I am supremely grateful for the examples set and recorded for us in the lives of the saints. As an Orthodox parent, I was initially unsure how to communicate these stories. Writers like Jenny Schroedel and Clare Brandenburg have shared several simple, yet beautiful, stories of our faith and their books are treasures in our home. Unfortunately, both the limited nature of the Orthodox publishing market and my personal pocketbook had left us with fewer children’s books that I would have hoped.

Enter Saint Helena.

Several years ago, our family had the opportunity to visit friends on the island of Cyprus for Holy Week. We logged mile after mile on our rented vehicle, visiting monasteries and reveling in the opportunity to immerse our very American selves in a culture defined by its faith and connectivity with the saints.  At many of the monasteries we visited, we noticed an abnormally large population of cats. Upon further inquiry, we discovered that these felines trace their genetic lineage to a shipload of cats sent by St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, after she visited Cyprus and found the island’s Churches to be infested with poisonous snakes.

This story rattled around in my head until one day, tired of princess paraphernalia proclaiming beauty without virtue, I sat down to write about one royal woman who not only embodied power and grace, she was adventurous and understood the value of a housecat to boot.  I wrote The Queen and the Cats: A Story of Saint Helena with the intention of providing our daughters with a royal role model who, instead of focusing on frippery, placed the Cross of Christ in the center of her gaze.

As I looked for a way to share this story and more like it, I realized that while there were few printed books for children about our faith, there were even fewer (there weren’t any) available in the format in which our family does most of its reading.  The Queen and the Cats was the first story about an Orthodox or Catholic saint to be offered for Amazon’s Kindle, and through this technology we are able to offer families an affordable way to share these stories (and their beautiful illustrations by Turbo Qualls) with children.  The Kindle book is available in six countries and can be read on any computer, smart phone or tablet with Amazon’s free app.

Paperback and ebook editions of The Queen and the Cats are available on Amazon and from several Orthodox booksellers. In 2012, we plan to release four more stories for children which draw from the rich treasury of the lives of the saints.

Calee M. Lee lives and writes in Southern California. She is the founder of Xist Publishing, providing “books for the touchscreen generation” and attends St. Paul’s Greek Orthodox Church with her husband and two children.  She blogs sporadically at CaleeMLee.com.

Orthodox Writers, Readers, and Artists: R. Leo Olson

I know confessions in the Orthodox Church are private. I get uncomfortable whenever the topic comes up in a group for fear of someone spilling their guts and then expecting me to respond with some great spiritual insight. With that in mind, I would like to start this post off with a confession of mine.  Ready? I daydream during homilies. I know I should listen to the many well-crafted homilies I have heard. God bless the priests and their homilies. I grew up Baptist so I know all about paying attention to what a preacher preaches, but I still day dream.

Like Adam, I blame God for this. The cause of this day dreaming ‘sin’ is Bible reading. The Scriptures are full of the most fantastic stories and they capture me every time: The most perfect woman ever created is walking alone, naked in a garden and happens upon a fallen angel in the guise of a talking snake and changes humanity forever—now that’s a storyline, characters, inciting incident, and catastrophic plot points! There’s a reference to angels mating with women creating Nephilim. There’s a prophet that calls fire from heaven atop a mountain in a ‘throw-down’ of whose God is bigger and then taunts the priests of Baal that would shame a modern day professional wrestler’s smack talk. There is a story of a guy who is told to marry a prostitute and name their kids ‘no mercy’ and ‘not my people’—talk about being picked on in Hebrew school—now that’s interesting Young Adult fiction. But what really sends me dreaming is Jesus and His parables. When the Epistle or Gospel is being read, I don’t follow along in the bulletin but listen with my ears like the first believers would have heard it.

Life as an Orthodox writer for me is one of constant amazement, basking in the creation of the greatest story teller of all. He’s called the author and finisher of our faith. My creative life is interwoven with my life as an Orthodox Christian. One cannot exist without the other. Christ is in all and fills all things for me. I am compelled to write because the power of the Divine story captures me and communicates God’s love to me. He is called the Word after all.

Another confession: You may think, because of the last paragraph that I sit at my computer with incense burning, among a shrine of beeswax-candle-lit icons and chant music filling the air. That does sound cool, but my process for writing is very similar to other writers, such as Anne Rice, Stephen King or Steven Pressfield. It’s a grueling process both internally and outwardly. I fight the inner war of procrastination and the outer war of scheduling. Writing is hard and everyone has a comment or suggestion or ‘bone to pick with me’ or ‘their take’ and it gets in the way of my selfishness. It’s my story after all, right? (read sarcasm and deeper philosophical themes about living a life that edifies others into that last question.) But the process is also life for me. I must write. I must have a discipline of writing something every day. A lot of times what I write is weak, preachy, sometimes mean and ill-informed diatribes, but every now and then, there is magic. ‘There’s treasure in trash’ if you will allow the cliché. The process of my writing includes a large piece of paper with a mind map on it, trying to cipher a story arc. I usually start with a character or a phrase and then go from there. Once I have the kernel of an idea and have extrapolated possibilities I let it percolate and I start paying attention to what I see, hear, feel and think. I live, as best I can a liturgical, ascetic life. I read a wide spectrum of books and the lives of saints. This is where the magic starts.

In Sojourning with Angels I had the main character Milo in my mind for a long time. Then I ran across an akathist to a guardian angel and started to think about the role of guardian angels in our lives—so I have a guardian angel that can protect me in a car crash, good—yeah angels! The angel watches over me, and then it hit me and I was instantly unsettled —the angel is watching me right now. Right now as I sit at this computer, listening to Explosions in the Sky (post-rock band), snacking on ham and drinking coffee with cream on a Wednesday—Noooo—angels, look away!

I find many things that I believe as an Orthodox Christian unsettling when I really think about them: time dimensions that collapse during the liturgy and how I can’t stop yawning or being stern with my kids while in the Kingdom of God somehow. Or how my sinful mouth now consumes Christ—Whoa!—back to the post. So I usually obsess about these beliefs for a time, and with this book I obsessed about angels. I then read about the Toll Houses that guardian angels guide us through when we die and I knew then what to do with Milo and the story. Magic.

This seems to happen often in my stories. I reflect on the ramifications of some of these beliefs. I can’t possibly replicate this holiness because of my own flaws and sinfulness but I am wrapped up in all of this ‘stuff’, so I turn to my characters and the art of telling a story. Jesus did the same thing with the Good Samaritan. He told an amazing story then posed the question to the audience, “So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?” and sucked them into story forever.

Confession three: One day I was walking down the Christian fiction aisle of a bookstore and saw Amish prairie romance novels, an end of the world series, a couple books about Christian assassins, vampires and zombies. I confess I write Orthodox fiction because I am not satisfied with the stories that populate the Christian fiction aisles. I write the stories I would want to read—stories that wrestle with the sinful condition of mankind, stories where God is thought to be silent, stories where characters really struggle and run from God, stories where the love for God must fight if it’s going to win, stories of faith, adventure and definitely more about angels than vampires. The world needs great fiction, even fair to good fiction, from an Orthodox perspective because, well, if we don’t write it then we will have missed the mark as artists, writers and Orthodox Christians in America and that is something to go to confession about.

R. Leo Olson lives in West Michigan with his wife and three children. He has degrees in Comparative World Religions, Biblical Studies and Ancient Greek. He attends St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids MI. He has recently published his first adult fiction novel: Sojourning With Angels: The Rise of Zazriel. More information than you probably want can be found at  http://rleoolson.com/wordpress/

Orthodox Writers, Readers, and Artists: Thomas Eric Ruthford

I got my start as a writer with a game called “Ghosts in the Graveyard.” It is a variant on hide-and-seek that my sister and I played with the neighborhood kids when I was 8. The game had involved one child being a tour guide, walking the others around the “graveyard” and telling spooky stories at different locations until the ghost jumped out, shouted “Ghosts in the Graveyard!” and started chasing everyone.

When I was the tour guide, I told stories about how the trees in a certain area had, over time, grown in such a way that their tops were very sharp so that they could impale parachuting skydivers in revenge for centuries of logging of their kind by humans. I was often asked to be the tour guide, and the encouragement made me want to be a writer.

Making a connection with the audience is both rewarding and challenging, especially with humor. All at once, you have to come up with something that’s relevant to your audience, it needs to have unexpected combinations that will cause mental fire drills in the heads of the reader (laughter) and you need to make sure you don’t go too far and offend people.

I got inspired to write Orthodox humor by The Onion Dome, which during its heyday was the Saturday Night Live of Orthodox humor. It had a lot of fake news and fake pastoral advice (hold your nose while walking in front of restaurants during Lent) and was a hoot. The creator of the site, Alex Riggle, brought together an assortment of writers to create a new genre that was both obscure and hysterically funny to the Orthodox people who followed it.

My humor book, “Heaven Help the Single Christian” got started as an Onion Dome article. I was inspired by a young man who had met a girl on one side of the country at a church conference. They got along well. A few weeks later, he flew to the other side of the country to show up unannounced on her doorstep with a bouquet of flowers. This delightful story spread around the girl’s group of friends – my fiancé (now wife) being one of them – and the extreme measures that he was willing to take to find a girl who believes in God really resonated with me. My first thought was to laugh at him mercilessly for his romantic pilgrimage, but then it occurred to me that I’d done the same thing, twice, before I met my perfect girl, only my pilgrimages involved buses, not airplanes.

When I was in the midst of the struggle to find someone to marry, I thought that someone needed to write a good book on the topic, but I was far too angry to do it. After getting engaged, I had a new joy in my life, but the memories of being single were still strong enough for me to write something lighthearted but engaged in the reality of the topic, and the book came together quickly.

Promoting your first book is a challenge. The recommended way of starting is to get invited to conferences, give talks, sign your books, and sell them out of a box that you bring. I’m still trying to figure out how to do that. I’ve also made some zero-budget advertising videos and put them on the Internet in hopes that they’d go sort of viral, and I’m writing essays based on parts of the book for magazines.

I’m trying to break out of obscurity, but it’s also important to try remaining humble at the same time, making being a writer a unique spiritual task for a Christian. I want to provide material that speaks to the reality that Christians face in their daily lives while also providing appropriate advice. The writer’s task is a lonely one, but the help of other Christian writers is necessary, both to help improve your work, and to make sure that what you write helps people with their salvation.

Thomas Eric Ruthford is a writer living near Seattle, Wash. He and his wife, Miri, met at the Old Cathedral of the Holy Virgin in San Francisco in 2006 and got married in the same church a year later. Thomas was baptized in a creek in Wilkeson, Wash., in 2001, having never been a member of a church before. In his career, he’s been a newspaper reporter, a Peace Corps volunteer, and a financial officer at the Raphael House homeless shelter in San Francisco, an Orthodox charity. He’s an avid bicyclist, this year riding 204 miles in one day, a new personal record.