Orthodixie

Especially for the “Jesus-in-the-Tortilla” crowd comes news of …

“Mary-in-the-Grilled-Cheese.”

If you’ve not already gone to the above link, suffice it to say that 10 years ago a woman fixed a grilled cheese sandwich and, upon taking a bite, found what she determined to be the face of the Virgin Mary staring back at her from the toasted bread. She’s now selling it — the 1/2 sandwich with picture and missing bite — on eBay. I’m not sure if you heard me or not: She’s selling an old used grilled cheese sandwich on eBay !

She claims that over the years it has brought her good luck (e.g., winning $70,000 in a local casino). It’s no wonder that Christians are often so poorly portrayed in the Media.

Speaking of which … word has it that Orthodox Christian Tom Hanks has landed the lead role in the film adaptation of Dan Brown’s “DaVinci Code“.

Immediate commentary fails me.

1. Dear God, please put another holiday between Christmas and Easter. There is nothing good in there now. Amanda

2. Dear God, Thank you for the baby brother but what I asked for was a puppy. I never asked for anything before. You can look it up. Joyce

3. Dear Mr. God, I wish you would not make it so easy for people to come apart. I had to have 3 stitches and a shot. Janet

4. God, I read the bible. What does beget mean? Nobody will tell me. Love, Alison

5. Dear God, how did you know you were God? Who told you? Charlene

6. Dear God, is it true my father won’t get in Heaven if he uses his golf words in the house? Anita

7. Dear God, I bet it’s very hard for you to love all of everybody in the whole world. There are only 4 people in our family and I can never do it. Nancy

8. Dear God, I like the story about Noah the best of all of them. You really made up some good ones. I like walking on water, too. Glen

9. Dear God, my Grandpa says you were around when he was a little boy. How far back do you go? Love, Dennis

13. Dear God, how come you did all those miracles in the old days and don’t do any now? Billy

14. Dear God, please send Dennis Clark to a different summer camp this year. Peter

15. Dear God, maybe Cain and Abel would not kill each other so much if they each had their own rooms. It works out OK with me and my brother. Larry

16. Dear God, I keep waiting for spring, but it never did come yet. What’s up? Don’t forget. Mark

17. Dear God, my brother told me about how you are born but it just doesn’t sound right. What do you say? Marsha

18. Dear God, if you watch in Church on Sunday I will show you my new shoes. Barbara

19. Dear God, is Reverend Coe a friend of yours, or do you Just know him through the business? Donny

20. Dear God, I do not think anybody could be a better God than you. Well, I just want you to know that. I am not just saying that because you are already God. Charles

21. Dear God, it is great the way you always get the stars in the right place. Why can’t you do that with the moon? Jeff

22. Dear God, I am doing the best I can. Really. Frank

23. Dear God, I didn’t think orange went with purple until I saw the sunset you made on Tuesday night. That was really cool. Thomas

Stolen from an Orthodox e-list.

I have just finished reading Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. I commend it to all who, like me, are tardy in coming to this classic. Of the End Notes, 129 in my edition, the majority are Scriptural references. The dialogues between Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester are a treasure — almost as good as Scarlet & Rhett in that other classic. I’d been wanting to read Jane Eyre for some time when I found it for under $6, Barnes & Noble edition. This blog offering is definitely of the “Etc” category. But for those who appreciate such things, I’ve listed some stand-alone quotes below (B&N; edition pages in parenthesis; words in brackets are my own). Enjoy!

… he was not quick either of vision or conception … (3)

While I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head. I can now conjecture readily that this streak of light was, in all likelihood, a gleam from a lantern, carried by some one across the lawn; but then, prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were for agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. (13)

At last both slept; the fire and the candle went out. For me, the watches of that long night passed in ghastly wakefulness; ear, eye, and mind were alike strained by dread; such dread as only children can feel. (16)

Still I felt that Helen Burns considered things by a light invisible to my eyes. (59)

Sometimes, on a sunny day, it began even to be pleasant and genial; and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps. (82)

It seemed as if, could I but go back to the idea which had last entered my mind as I stood at the window, some inventive suggestion would rise for relief … (94) … A kind fairy, in my absence, had surely dropped the required suggestion on my pillow; for as I lay down it came quietly and naturally to my mind … (95)

It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world; cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted. The charm of adventure sweetens the sensation, the glow of pride warms it; but then the throb of fear disturbs it; and fear with me became predominant when half an hour elapsed, and still I was alone. I besought myself to ring the bell. (104)

Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. (123)

[In speaking about her pictures, which Eyre had painted on holiday:] “I had nothing else to do, because it was vacation, and I sat at them from morning till noon, and from noon till night; the length of the midsummer days favored my inclination to apply.” (143)

[In answering whether she was satisfied with them:] “Far from it. I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realize.” (143)

“Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.”

— “Repentance is said to be its cure, sir.” (155)

When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavored to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination’s boundless and trackless waste into the safe fold of common sense. (183)

[On “trailing”:] Genius is said to be self-conscious; I cannot tell whether Miss Ingram was a genius, but she was self-conscious — remarkably self-conscious, indeed. She entered into a discourse on botany with the gentle Mrs Dent. It seems Mrs Dent had not studied that science, though as she said, she liked flowers, “especially wild ones”; Miss Ingram had, and she ran over its vocabulary with an air. I presently perceived she was (what is vernacularly termed) trailing Mrs Dent; that is, playing on her ignorance. Her trail might be clever, but it was decidedly not good-natured. (198)

[With jealous eye bent toward observing her love and other ladies:] I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking — a precious, yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony; a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless. (200)

[On looking upon her cruel, dying Aunt:] The rain beat strongly against the panes, the wind blew tempestuously. “One lies here,” I thought, “who will soon be beyond the war of earthly elements. Whither will that spirit — now struggling to quit its material tenement — flit when at length released?” (275)

And then I strangled a new-born agony — a deformed thing which I could not persuade myself to own and rear — and ran on. (283)

While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain; there was hope in its aspect and life in its color; and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple. (298)

[Upon resisting her master’s advances:] “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsubstantiated, I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God, sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad — as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation; they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth, so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane, quite insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by; there I plant my foot.” (369)

[Upon setting out for an uncertain destination:] As yet I had not thought; I had only listened, watched, dreaded; now I regained the faculty of reflection. (375)

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones. (395)

I know no medium; I never in my life have known any medium in my dealings with positive hard characters, antagonistic to my own, between absolute submission and determined revolt. I have always faithfully observed the one, up the very moment of bursting, sometimes with volcanic vehemence, into the other … (465)

How’s that for understatement of the day?

Father of Parma priest to be canonized; Communists killed Serbian pastor

It had all the makings of a classic Balkans tragedy. A father survives the Nazis, but is executed for his faith by the Communists. The son, surviving on a young boy’s memories of a loving parent, must deny the father publicly lest the same authorities put him to death.

After immigrating to America, the Rev. Vasilije Sokolovic continued to be haunted by all that he did not know of the fate of his father, who was dumped in a shallow grave in an unmarked field in Serbia in 1945. But the longtime pastor of St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Cathedral in Parma never lost faith. And now the remarkable fidelity of a father and son bonded in life and death across six decades is being rewarded.

The Serbian Orthodox Church next May will canonize Sokolovic’s father, the Rev. Budimir Sokolovic, as a priest-martyr, entering him into a select pantheon of saints that the church declares led lives so holy that the faithful may pray to them for inspiration and divine protection.

An icon is being made of Sokolovic’s father, and Eastern Orthodox Christians around the world will be able to celebrate July 11 as a feast day honoring St. Budimir of Dobrun and 29 other priest-martyrs of World War II.

It is extraordinarily rare for a saint to be a part of the living memory of the church. For a new saint to be the father of a beloved priest in your community is an extraordinary event in the religious life of Northeast Ohio. For one man, it is nothing short of a miracle.

The 66-year-old priest makes the sign of the cross and lets the tears flow as he speaks of the wonder of moving from a lifetime of praying for eternal peace for his father to being able to pray to him in heaven. “He is closer to God,” Sokolovic said in an interview at St. Sava. “I’m not anymore sorry for what I suffered all my life. Thank God.”

‘You are my life’

In 1944, the Rev. Budimir Sokolovic rode into the Serbian village of Milanovac on horseback, scooped up 6-year-old Vasilije and his brother and told them, “You are my life.” It is the last memory Vasilije Sokolovic has of his father, who returned to the battlefield during World War II as a spiritual counselor to a Serbian group that fought against the German occupation of Yugoslavia.

The elder Sokolovic lived to see the expulsion of the Nazis, but did not survive the ensuing anti- Communist struggle. He was jailed and later executed sometime in May 1945, his body buried in a field where no one could find it. The sons he left behind were taught by their mother to deny any relation to the priest for fear that they, too, would be killed.

In the Gospel accounts, fear of retribution causes the apostle Peter to deny Jesus three times. Sokolovic understands the pain of the early church leader forced to deny a loved one. As a young conscript, he was asked by an Army sergeant if he knew of a priest named Sokolovic from Bosnia. “I don’t know him,” Vasilije replied. “I’m from Zagreb.” But he followed his father into the seminary, becoming the 42nd generation of Sokolovics to enter the priesthood.

Sokolovic feared revealing his heritage even in the seminary, telling his story only to trusted older priests. He still is overcome with emotion at the memory of priests who knew his father hugging him and giving thanks that he and other members of his family were alive.

A tale of two countries

In 1966, Sokolovic left Yugoslavia under a false name and immigrated to America. He worked in steel mills and construction in Gary, Ind., before he got his first parish in Masontown, Pa., in 1970. He served there for five years and was a pastor in Steubenville for a decade before coming to St. Sava in 1985. He served as pastor of the Parma church until 1999, when he became pastor emeritus.

He never forgot his father

The pain of a boy without a dad became the suffering of a man haunted by not even knowing where his father’s body lay. It “was thrown into the ground like a dog, never any prayers.” Sokolovic’s daughter, Mirjana Damljanovic, remembers that on family trips back to Yugoslavia, her father would put on his liturgical robes and say a memorial service over a patch of ground near where his father was killed. He told his children that his father was a good man, “and a great priest.” But Sokolovic struggled to achieve closure, family members said.

It was only after the fall of communism that an open Serbian Orthodox Church could raise up the lives of those who died for their faith during World War II. When a Serbian Church official told him that the Holy Assembly of Bishops approved his father’s cause for sainthood, Sokolovic “just burst into tears he was so overcome with joy,” his daughter said. In October, he received word that a priest investigator found part of a skull, a wooden cross, myrrh and a prayer book in a field where Budimir Sokolovic was believed to have been murdered. The remains need DNA testing.

The series of events this year seem almost “surreal,” said the Parma priest’s daughter. Only two years ago, Sokolovic suffered a stroke and at one point slipped into a coma. Today, he is writing the hymns to be sung on his father’s feast day, and “he lives now with a real mission,” said his wife, Zorine. Added his daughter: “It’s kind of a closure that he never had.”

Saying goodbye

Catholic and Orthodox faithful pray that departed loved ones go to heaven, but it is only in the cases of saints that the church speaks definitively of an individual’s place in the afterlife. Before the canonization ceremony in May, Sokolovic will say one last memorial service for his father in the area where his father was believed to have been buried. The boy who grew up afraid to tell anyone “who I am, who my father was” has lived to see his father achieve sainthood. “The great suffering,” Zorine Sokolovic said, “led to great glory in the end.”

Sunday, November 14, 2004; David Briggs, Plain Dealer Religion Reporter

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