Deck the Halls

20 November 2011 at 9:42 pm (Entertainment, Family, Food, Greece, Plinky Prompts, Relationships, Religion, Seasons, Special Days, Travel)
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Not our own hall, though. Not if I can avoid it. Not this time.

You see, I plan to be in Athens for the holidays this year. Last time was in 2009, and I've missed the atmosphere so much.

We haven't booked tickets yet, so I don't know exactly when we will be away – any time between 17 December and 2 January. I want to be there as long as possible, and not only because I desperately need seven workdays to bring my paperwork up to date, failing which would create no end of trouble.

You see, we say 'holidays' there, instead of just 'Christmas', because Christmas is only the beginning of the festive season. During most of the 12 days, the party goes on non-stop. There are so many name days to be celebrated, and a good few of them involve such popular names, that an overdose of treats is very likely, if one really keeps in touch.

The week between Christmas and the New Year also hosts more parties than any other time in the year: one long revel to celebrate the birth of the Son and chase the old year away. Add to it the fact that presents are exchanged on New Year's Day, rather than Christmas, and you can understand we could never be satisfied with a day or two of celebrating. Oh no. That's just a warm-up.

So I'm going to do everything in my power to be down early, to enjoy the build-up of activity. To decorate the tree in my mother's living room, which I haven't done since 2006, together with my little one. To welcome carol singers on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve. To go to church at dawn and hear liturgy in Greek again. To have the pork and leek casserole that is traditional Christmas Day fare in my part of the country, and my mother's incomparable melomakarona. To visit with uncles and aunts and cousins and old friends, who haven't seen my son since he was just crawling. To see old friends, walk along crowded decorated streets, and welcome the New Year with fireworks at midnight and clinking glasses of bubbly with the family that made me and the one that I made, all together.

Despite the bleak economic climate in Greece right now, all I can think of is spending time with the people I care for. Nothing else matters. We've faced the spectre of poverty here as well, and we're just beginning to raise our heads above water, but I'd do anything to never have to spend another holiday season separated again.

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A Little Deep Reading

6 November 2011 at 4:30 pm (Britain, Insight, Internet, Plinky Prompts, Reading, Religion)
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I love finding books to recommend, and that doesn’t happen half as often as I’d like.

I should have written this five years ago. That’s when I bought 366 Celt by Carl McColman. It was at the Past Times outlet store in Freeport; the promise of insight into Celtic culture and lore, combined with the art deco-style cover, convinced me easily to fork out a fiver for it. I leafed through it and blogged about my acquisition on my very first blog, on the now-defunct Yahoo360, and the following day I woke up to a comment from the author himself! I think that was when it started dawning on me that online networking had power.

The book came with me when I moved to the UK for good, but first one reason and then another kept me from actually reading it. I kept following the author, though, first on his Y360 blog and then on his site (anamchara.com), especially after I settled here on WordPress myself.

The time to actually sit down (actually, lie down, in my personal reading habits) and digest the book itself came this past September. Its 366 pages went very fast, probably because each unit – I wouldn’t call them meditations, as they’re between reflection prompts and encyclopedia entries – fits on one page and can be absorbed swiftly, allowing the reader to move to the next without gaps, as well as to read up to the last available moment, without risking having to stop mid-section.

The 366 entries are organised into 40 ‘paths’ of uneven length; most have 9 entries each, some have fewer, and then there’s the Path of the Ogham, with a whopping 21 entries. I found myself reading four to six paths a day, and was done with the entire book within a week.

The paths deal with aspects of the Celtic microcosm as well as macrocosm. They cover peculiarities of the Celtic character and understanding of the world, keeping to more general, ‘umbrella’ points rather than delving too far into particular Celtic branches (although, in practice, most of the lore collected comes from Ireland, with the Welsh element a distant second), as well as history, mythology and spirituality, both of the Pagan and Christian flavours.

I don’t have any Celtic ties myself, whether by blood, family or location, but the view presented in that book fascinated me – even made me a bit jealous of the community spirit that Celtic ancestry generates in modern people with nothing else in common. It was written before McColman reverted from Paganism back to Roman Catholicism, but there are no attempts at reconstructionism. It’s a balanced account that will hold plenty of interest for the Celtic enthusiast, whichever side of the hill they’re climbing. I can’t recommend it enthusiastically enough.

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No More Heroes?

19 January 2011 at 9:18 pm (Music, People, Rants, Reading, Religion, YouTube)
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Hugely, obscenely misunderstood song. It’s not about nihilism and ‘the age of heroes is past’. It is about calling for more heroes, for a way out of mediocrity. ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ If your English is not good enough to understand the words, don’t critique.

Excuse the fit of pique; I recently came across a series of articles on rock music collected from a Christian youth magazine I used to read. I hadn’t seen them in a few years, and only came across them on my last visit home, while sorting out books to take back with me. I remember reading them when I was a teenager and being rather unconvinced. As an adult, I can fully grasp the extent of their bias and ignorance, and both are monumental. Really, proof that one should leave well alone if they don’t know their subject well enough. Ignorance is no excuse for misinformation. (Yes, I know it happens all the time, but don’t get me started along that track.)

The heart of the matter, however, is that people need heroes. Rather, they need role models, and in the absence of heroes, they’ll opt for antiheroes or villains. So, whatever happened to the heroes in the 21st century?

The short answer is: we’ve grown closer to them, and they no longer seem larger than life, like they used to. With the media covering every corner of the planet, it is easy to find out nearly everything about those who are everything one wants to be, and that makes them appear just human, regardless of their glamour levels. It’s hard to imagine legends of divinity about someone that you know even where they stop for coffee.

It’s not the heroes’ fault if they fail to fill the boots we prefabricate for them. It’s up to us and what we want from our lives. If you want 15 minutes of fame and aim to go on Big Brother to get it, you should be prepared to bitch and whore for attention, and eventually to be shoved aside when the next crop comes up. If you want to be Sir Alan Sugar when you grow up, be prepared to be treated the way he treats his apprentices on the way. We all have a big goal, but it doesn’t matter when we reach it, or even if we reach it at all. What does matters is the how; the journey there and the choices we make along the way. Because the goal is one moment and the journey is, you know, one’s life.

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The Spectre Without

25 November 2010 at 3:46 pm (Entertainment, Insight, Movies, Plinky Prompts, Psychology, Reading, Religion)
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Belief in ghosts seems to be for some a substitute for more organised spiritual systems, and for others, a throwback to the Dark Ages and proof that we’re still primitives at heart. As usual, I can agree with neither. On the fence, moi?
Marley’s Ghost

I’m going to be upfront: I’ve never seen a ghost. I’ve never thought I saw a ghost. I’ve never witnessed a haunting of any kind, be it spectral figures, slamming doors, eerie lights, or what have you. I have been spooked in certain places, but it has always been a case of ‘this is giving me the creeps’ rather than ‘what was that?’, if you know what I mean.

I still don’t know how I feel about the existence of ghosts as a theory. My personal religious and spiritual path has led me to believe that the dead are removed from the world of the living. They can’t come back, contact the living (seances are either frauds or extremely dangerous), or, more importantly, lose their way to the afterlife and linger in some sort of in-between state, because it is not up to them to move on or not.

On the other hand, I do believe that great spiritual or, especially, emotional activity can leave a residue when the person that was the focus of such activity is gone. Random apparitions can very well be residual presence of the departed, not themselves. Or, in the worst of cases, especially in cases of great negativity, there can be gateways into the spirit world that allow other kinds of spirits to come through. Those can impersonate the dead, but are other things altogether. Such can happen spontaneously in locations loaded with emotion, especially if it keeps being fed by the emotions of others (I wouldn’t be surprised at all if cathedrals had all their resident ‘ghosts’, just as many people claim that concentration camps do), or they can be created through ritual. Spiritualist seances open the gates wide for such intrusion, and I believe there’s more there than horror movie fodder.

Speaking of which, I want it on record that I can enjoy a good ghost story as much as the greatest believer in the real thing. A Christmas Carol is a perennial favourite and it’s not a proper holiday season without re-reading it, and preferably watching it as well (Sir Alec Guinness, in the 1970 musical version, is easily the best Jacob Marley out there). The Victorians generally created great ghost stories, from Joseph Sheridan LeFanu to Oscar Wilde through Algernon Blackwood. (And Patrick Stewart as the Canterville Ghost? Win!) The Sixth Sense is high on my list of memorable movies, and I’m looking forward to the new season of Being Human, to see what became of Annie – and I’ll be quite miffed if she’s written clean out.

To conclude the ramble, the jury’s out on the issue, and I may be swayed towards either extreme still. I do know, though, that such is not going to happen through New Age wishiwashiness, nor through militant materialism.

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Faith

8 November 2010 at 11:02 pm (Britain, Family, Greece, Insight, Plinky Prompts, Religion, Self)
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‘Coz ya gotta have it.
Greekness

Religion. A subject that never fails to raise controversy. After a time of being deeply unfashionable, it’s back with a vengeance, and the haves and have-nots are battling it out like there’s no tomorrow. Which they both very probably believe, as well. Welcome to the New Dark Ages.

Now let’s take a step back and a deep breath, so I can tell you about my personal take on the subject.

So, have or have-not? The short answer: have.

I grew up Christian, Greek Orthodox, in a community immersed in the particular flavour of faith. The country still has a good handful of religious feasts as official holidays, including my name day – which has always been a good thing.

They say you can’t be born into a faith. I believe you can, the same way you can be born into a culture or language. Personal acceptance is more important on the subject of religion, but I don’t believe that even children who follow the faith of their community are brainwashed simpletons, no more than the community’s customs, mores, even culinary habits, make them so.

My family were not fanatics, but not indifferent either. We didn’t go to church every Sunday, but we did attend on feast days, and school took us to liturgy about once a month as well. Some of my happiest memories had to do with the long hours of Holy Week services, watching the Divine Passion unfold to its glorious conclusion. I took communion usually three times a year (Christmas, Easter, and on my name day). My mother’s elder brother was an amateur cantor, and he gave me my first New Testament when I was eight or thereabouts. By the time religious education (always compulsory) had reached dealing with scripture, in Year 6, I had read my Testament cover to cover, understanding its archaic language enough to translate for the rest of the class.

In my teens, I deepened my practice. I started reading an Orthodox youth magazine (I still have a few bound volumes at home), going to confession and Sunday school, ritualising prayer. At a time when most kids turned away from religion as a reaction against their parents, seeing it as another control mechanism, I codified mine more. I never lost my religion. Faith and practice have been going hand in hand ever since I gained complete awareness. I flirted with neopaganism for a while, but I finally decided that a feminist philosophy was not what I needed.

This doesn’t mean I’m always at ease with the Orthodox community. A great part (including the supporters of that youth magazine) are very reactionary. I don’t believe that faith should adapt to the world; after all, faith has to do with eternal values. But it must definitely be constantly reinterpreted, so that it doesn’t become dead letter, leaving the faithful floundering.

Today I have joined the Orthodox diaspora in the UK. I’m lucky to have a small but solid Orthodox community where I live, and an inspiring ancient little chapel to worship in. My husband intends to convert from Protestantism; I’m going to have my son baptised and my marriage sanctified, as the sacraments they both are. I have developed a fascination with rosaries and acquired a small collection, which are both objects of beauty and devotional items, though few Roman Catholics would recognise the prayers I say over them. My home shrine holds two hand-painted icons from Mount Athos (the True Vine and the Holy Family) that warm my heart. I am perhaps more aware than ever of what I am, and find comfort in that. The Boss and I don’t always see eye to eye (much to my chagrin), but we have definitely reached an understanding.

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