Light, Fire, and Focus

When I first started this blog, it was largely the result of the Strawmen releasing Saving Faded Dreams and putting together a website to promote the CD since we don't tour. I'm glad all that happened, but it is really a miniscule, and largely historical part of my life. I'm just not all that interested in that stuff anymore. What interests me most these days is the struggle my wife and I have in attempting to live an authentic Christian life in as traditional an Orthodox manner as is possible. That is, living in a community that pays more attention to the cycle of Church services, feast-days, fast-days, etc. than it does to our cultural holidays, paydays, and political cycles. More and more I've come to regard the gigantic teat of our culture (greed disguised as economics, lust masquerading as freedom, pride pretending to be self-esteem, etc.) as a fountain of misery. I find the traditional life of Orthodoxy that we attempt to live out on Overton St. in Portland refreshing and hopeful. . .but a helluva struggle because there is nothing in the wider culture that supports it. That's OK. It's a small sacrifice. I've always leaned toward counterculture activities anyway, and traditional Orthodoxy offers me all the counter-ness I can stand.

So, I'm going be focusing my blog more and more on these types of "scattered reflections", and have modified the subtitle of my blog to capture this. For any of you that have read some of my entries, you know that I've already been headed in this direction. I suppose this entry is more for myself, because I regularly get drawn to this and that and easily lose my focus. But again and again, I find myself being drawn to the light of Orthodoxy and its traditional way of life like a moth to the flame. I want to be burned up in that light.