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Ancient Faith Blogs is no more, but here is a guest post I wrote for Deacon Nicholas Kotar's blog, A Light So Lovely, during the Lenten Quarantine of 2020. What are you afraid of?
By Laura E. Wolfe. Let’s talk about fear. A few years ago, I wrote a fairytale about fear called Sasha and the Dragon. It was published as a children’s book, but I like to think that as with most fairytales, what it has to offer can be appreciated by all ages. In the story, a little boy named Sasha is afraid of many things: his Baba’s terminal illness, unkind neighbor kids, the loneliness of displacement and the threat of unfamiliar surroundings. His fear continues to grow until it colors all aspects of his life. Sound familiar? It should, because that’s what fear does. It spirals and feeds on itself, and left unchecked, becomes an organizing principle. There are biological reasons for this: When the limbic system is activated by a stress response, the prefrontal cortex doesn’t function at its normal capacity. Since that’s the part of the brain that’s responsible for executive functions like emotional control, memory, planning and prioritizing, it’s easy to see why fear is such a destabilizing experience. Fear reduces our ability to think clearly and live purposefully. In the story, Sasha’s fears permeate his life until they manifest as an actual dragon. The dragons that are threatening us today include not just pestilence, but also economic fears, political fears, fears of the unknown and uncontrollable, and fears about how the world around us is changing. It would be easy to behave like unbelievers and let the dragons wreak their havoc on our hearts. But that would be to forget that what Satan intends for us as evil, God wills for us as good. This is how Sasha finds his courage, because he turns to Christ in prayer even in the midst of his misery. Even though the dragon is too big for him to bear, he trusts that God already knows the way. After all, He is the Way. When we refuse to let fear be in control, when we humbly set aside our own desires for the world and the future, we can acknowledge the reality that was true all along: God is in control, and always has been. Sparrows don’t fall from the sky and hairs don’t fall from our heads without His knowledge. In my story, God is shown to be ultimately in charge when St. Michael intervenes and slays the dragon. But more importantly than the death of the dragon itself is that the way that Sasha sees and interacts with the world changes. Instead of being overcome, Sasha is able to rejoice in the beauty and light around him, to pay his spiritual gifts forward to his Baba, who receives with joy, and even to reach out to the neighbor kids, who don’t know what to do with his spirituality. The neighbor kids never will understand, you know. Even and especially when we act in faith, they will think we’re a little loopy at best, dangerously crazy at worst. The culture we create will be dismissed, misunderstood, and outright derided. This is especially evident in our attitude towards death. The world is absolutely terrified of it, to the point where it cannot tolerate acknowledgement of it or even discussion of it. And so our civil authorities often resort to hysteria or sentimentalism, unable to bear the burden of the inevitability of mortality. No one must die, no one must get sick, no one must suffer. But Christians? We’re different. We say our prayers, light our candles, burn some incense, chant the Psalms. In the nation of Georgia, they doused the streets with holy water. We tend the sick and the dying, even if it puts us at risk as it did for Fr. Nicola Yanney a hundred years ago. And then we do something even crazier: We accept that sickness and death happen and acknowledge in humility that God grants us the profound gift of giving meaning to our suffering. Like Righteous Job of old, or St. Nicephorus the Leper in recent history—like all of the martyrs, really—we release the power of sickness and death from their holds over us. We laugh at their impotence, because they are already defeated. Christ is risen and death is overthrown. Baba doesn’t speak any words in my story, but her actions speak loudly enough. When Sasha offers her a feather from St. Michael’s wing, she responds to Sasha with love, gladness and gratitude. Even though Sasha was afraid of his Baba’s illness, Baba never was. She suffers the end of her life with warmth and joy, and she sees with the eyes of faith. Baba understands what we all too easily forget—that remembrance of death is not a morbid neurosis, but a wonderful gift of maturity. The novel coronavirus has not changed that fact that you and I do not know the hour of our deaths, nor what sufferings still lie in store for us on the rest of our lives’ journeys. God willing, I pray for many years, but the truth is that today might be the last day of my life—whether due to illness, accident, or something unforeseeable—and I will do well to remember that and act accordingly. In a sense, nothing external changes for Sasha in the story. Baba is still dying, his neighbors are still mean, and the city is still loud. But something important has changed, and that is that Sasha has relinquished his desire to control and manage the world around him, leaving that formidable task to heaven, and he has directed his will towards changing what he has some power over: developing his connection with Christ. The only control we’re supposed to acquire is self-control, and God knows how impossible that task can seem at times. One last thought for you. Fairytales can be dark, and mine is no exception. There are some in our contemporary culture who think that such things are not for children, who believe that children’s imaginations must be sheltered from any image that could be interpreted as frightening or ugly. Yes, the dragon in my story is scary, and I certainly wouldn’t force an unwilling child to read a story that scandalizes him. More importantly, the evil is defeated—St. Michael shatters the dragon. That is the point. We would be wise to remember that more frightening to a child than a picture in a storybook is an adult that is panicking and afraid. An imagination fed on fairytales is able to stand up with Sasha, with the good miller’s daughter and the unlikely hero, even with Sarah in the Labyrinth and cry out to the dragons and David-Bowie-goblin-kings, “You have no power over me!” Despite the efforts of evil to make us think otherwise, the world around us is still beautiful no matter what happens, and a Paschal spring is blooming in America. Like Sasha after he sees the angel, all we need to do is open our spiritual eyes and everything around us changes. The kingdom of heaven is God’s freely given gift to us—appreciating it and giving thanks for it is not a mockery of suffering, it is an affirmation of meaning. Ancient Faith Blogs is no more, but here is a reprint of a post written for Behind the Scenes. Depicting Evil in Christian Art
March 28, 2019 · Laura E. Wolfe Hang around a coffee shop with a group of Christian subcreators, and eventually you’ll run into a conversation wrestling with this question: How can I depict good and evil in my work without actually making something evil? The converse of this question is, of course, how can I depict evil without minimizing its reality? If you err too far to one side, your work revolts by its ugliness; if you err too far to the other, your work disgusts with its saccharine sweetness. To make matters more complicated, tolerance for ugliness or sentimentality varies as widely as do the individually created souls who encounter the work. So what’s an artist or writer to do? I don’t claim to have the definitive answer to these questions, but I will offer a few thoughts on the subject. First of all, I’m a believer in radical honesty. Only by being honest with ourselves about ourselves can we begin the fight against the father of lies. What this means for art is that honest artists will have much difference experiences and familiarities with particular evils, and that will necessarily effect their portrayal in art. I think that because of this, some artists are called to create messier worlds than others. To illustrate this, let’s have a look at two Christian authors whose work I particularly enjoy: Dean Koontz and Elizabeth Goudge. Of the two, Goudge is the more explicitly Christian in her books, though if you know what you’re looking at, Koontz isn’t exactly hiding his light under a bushel. Goudge’s works consist largely of internal conflict against the sinful self, and whenever evil is necessary to the story line, it is more often than not insinuated. This is in stark contrast to Koontz’s work on Christian sainthood, the Odd Thomas series, where the ugliness and horror of evil and sin are depicted in oftentimes excruciating detail. It would be easy to dismiss the depiction of sin in Koontz’s work as gratuitous, except that it serves the very useful purpose of smacking us out of a sense of scrupulosity. If you only ever engaged with Goudge, you could be forgiven for developing a very optimistic view about the human soul, and you would probably be scandalized by the run-of-the-mill evil we see every day in the checkout line at the grocery store, let alone the truly terrible stuff that’s right in front of us but usually hidden by the veneer of public respectability. Despite its ugliness, it’s important not to get queasy about sin. How terrible, humiliating, and soul-destroying would it be to go to a medical doctor and have him or her recoil in disgust at our infection? When I worked in healthcare, one of the saddest things I ever heard was someone relating how they couldn’t deal with their mother’s end-of-life care because it was just “too gross”. When we react in the same way to the sins of those around us, or the evils that they suffer, especially if we have no personal experience to foster empathy, we’re really taking part in the same kind of humiliating dynamic. Think for a moment about the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man lying beaten and bloody at the side of the road is going to be difficult to deal with. The violence done to him would be horrifying and probably physically revolting. When I imagine that Samaritan, I see him struggling to carry that wounded man — the blood and filth from his wounds soiling the Samaritan’s clean robes; his shoulder wet with the man’s tears and mucus. There’s no flinching at the ugliness of sin there — just the Samaritan doing what needed to be done to drag the broken man to safety. The dangers inherent in enjoying work like Koontz’s are obvious. We don’t ever want to get to a point where we are unaffected, or God forbid, entertained by sin and evil. But it’s easy to ignore that works like Goudge’s have their own spiritual dangers. We must beware of letting sentimentality offer us a false sense of safety. In a sense, even the most well-intentioned work can be a source for sin. Giving artists the freedom to create works that might be outside of someone’s comfort range can be for us an act of trust in God’s providence. God’s hidden hand is working salvation everywhere — and it is His prerogative to connect the souls of whomever He chooses. For that reason, I think it’s important to keep an open mind about the wide variety of depictions of good and evil in Christian art. Different works will resonate with different people at different points in their lives, for many different reasons. It is the spirit of discernment that allows us to look at a work and acknowledge that although it may not be for us at a particular moment, that doesn’t preclude the work from being immensely meaningful for someone else. I suppose it comes down to prayer and watchfulness, doesn’t it? Whenever I encounter a work of art or literature, I have to be mindful of my own interior responses to that work, and turn away if it causes me to sin, locating the evil in my own heart rather than in the work of art itself. The same is true for being a writer, and artist — a subcreator of Christian art. If in the course of writing, my work takes me to a dark place, it does not preclude the Holy Spirit from using that work in ways I will never be able to anticipate. Locating my own creative activity firmly in the framework of prayer makes it an exercise of faith in God’s ability to use even broken vessels for His glory. I suppose then, that my answer to the question is simply to pray, and let God handle the rest. Ancient Faith Blogs is no more, but here is an old interview from Behind the Scenes. Humans of Ancient Faith: Laura E. Wolfe
July 7, 2021 · Melinda Johnson Humans of Ancient Faith is a series of mini-interviews designed to introduce you to the many wonderful human beings who make this ministry possible. We asked the same 5 questions in each interview, and let the interviewee choose a sixth question. Today’s guest is author Laura E. Wolfe. ++++++++++++++ If you were named for your defining characteristic, what word or phrase would be your name? The Outlier. Or as Moana’s Gramma put it, “I’m the village crazy lady. That’s my job.” What is your earliest specifically Orthodox memory? After I read Russka by Edward Rutherford, my newly-chrismated cousin took me to the early morning English liturgy at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Bethlehem, PA. My whole body remembers that experience— and I knew right away that the Lord was in that place. What’s your favorite story about your patron saint? We don’t know much about St. Laura of Cordoba, who is a pre-schism saint from Spain, except that she was boiled in oil. I can’t even say that without shuddering. My experience of praying with her is that she is both quiet and courageous, and she radiates a sense of spiritual stamina. What’s the title of a conference Ancient Faith has not yet hosted that you would absolutely attend? “Spiritual Warfare for an Enchanted World”— Suppose it doesn’t need to be re-enchanted, because it was never disenchanted. Now suppose that I mean that statement literally and not metaphorically. Sounds like an exciting conference, no? What’s a book or movie that you’d highly recommend? What did you like about it? I love to recommend books to people! But I think you need to know someone first, in order to make a good connection. There’s a picture book called Larky Mavis, by Brock Cole, that I think does a good job of capturing what being around a holy fool might feel like — uncomfortable and exciting. I’m also lately a big fan of The Ethics of Beauty, by Dr. Timothy Patitsas, because it’s both very deep and very accessible. What are you working on? Writing-wise, I have several irons in the fire. I’m in the middle of writing a book with a friend about being an Orthodox homeschooling family that uses the Charlotte Mason philosophy, and I’m also putting the finishing touches on a couple of different fiction manuscripts. But it’s also summer, so that means I’m pulling a lot of weeds out of my garden and observing my mer-children in their native habitat. About Laura E. Wolfe Laura E. Wolfe is the author of the beloved picture book Sasha and the Dragon (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2017) and the novella The Lion and the Saint. A wide-eyed nature lover her entire life, Laura has a Bachelor of Science degree in biology with a minor in philosophy, and she still thinks the best place to read a good novel is halfway up a tree. She and her family are members of St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church in Emmaus, Pennsylvania. About Melinda Johnson Melinda Johnson is an Orthodox Christian, wife, mama, writer, and the author of Letters to Saint Lydia (AFP 2010) and the Sam and Saucer books (AFP), among others. Melinda has a Master’s in English Literature because she loved taking literature classes so much she couldn’t stop doing it. When she is not seeing “heaven in a wildflower,” Melinda enjoys writing for children, walking and talking, and baking bread. |
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