The MONSTER

For far too long, bitterness, self-loathing, isolation and despair have defined my mentality, my relationships, my very life. Those that have been hurt the most by my insular, self-destructive, and depressed mentality and actions have been those most close to me; more specifically, my mom, siblings, family, fiance, and what very few friends that I have left in this life. Silent, introverted, CRUSHING depression has deprived me of much the joy I enjoyed in this world.

I have very recently admitted to and been attempting to encounter a contemptuous DEMON of alcoholism, a damned fear made manifest by seeming self-fulfilled prophecy. My family has a history of the disease, and being aware of this, I grew up in almost debilitating fear of succumbing to the grave infliction. Strangely enough, a man in Kodiak, Alaska supposedly told me that I would collapse under the hell of alcoholism while in a confessional. I thought that surely, I was destined for such a path if I did not follow God's path impeccably.

Around a year and a half or so ago, I was partnered with a few friends that attended St. Innocent's Academy in Kodiak, Alaska, an organization we were (and still are) convinced is a religious personality cult, headed by a man of unflinching stubbornness, despite his deposition because of the overwhelming evidence and testimony of spiritual, medical, psychological, and even physical abuse. I personally witnessed many inappropriate, outlandish incidents, much to my horror and confusion. This was a man of GOD! How could he do such things?! Yet here he was, assuring us and yet THREATENING us, saying that he knows what he is doing and no one else could do what he does, and yet, if we tried to report him to anyone, no one would believe us. No one would believe a snot-nosed kid over a priest! And surely one who has tried so hard to put on a happy-go-lucky, godly facade as him! To defy him was to not just defy him, but God and the community at large. Such was inverted death sentence. There was no escape on the Island. Yet so I thought...

Fast forward around 7-8 years, after my public face-off with the man at Kodiak and the episcopate via social media, a website, news  articles and news segments on news stations nation and world wide did a little bit of something come about. The man, Paisius DeLucia, was deposed and defrocked of his priestly title. Yet, horrifically, even though many of the core members, especially the families that supported him and his group leave and go to the adjoining church (including the two clergy at the Academy), he still insisted on wearing his cassock, a sign of clergy membership of many various ranks in the Orthodox Church! And despite his beloved bishop!

Yet, with this small victory, I actually felt ever the more confused, self-doubting. I tried so ardently to serve so many people during this period of my life, yet I felt all the more hollow, unfulfilled. I suddenly stopped going to church, my new beloved church here in Omaha, All Holy Spirit Greek Orthodox Church. I started spiraling around a drain of misery, losing/abandoning not only my center of life and focus, my faith, but I turned to the bottle for comfort in secret. Thorny weeds were springing up with shallow roots, choking me, blinding me.

Depression much of the time grips my mind, but quietly, subtly, as I try in all manliness and superficial pride to bury it. Yet, especially at night, when I try to sleep or in the middle of the night, the MONSTER, that old croke, sits upon my back crushing me, yet, at the same time, he digs his curling claws into my chest, pulling my ribcage. Psychologically, I feel my breath being squeezed out of me and then my sternum and ribs being pulled apart, the snapping, cracking horrifically echoing in my ears. The MONSTER laughs as you then convulse under his weight, drowning in your own pooling, hot, sticky blood. You cannot scream, you cannot move; you are in astute yet numbing pain. I scream, there is no sound.

This is my every day reality as of this point. Despite me having started going to AA and now having a sponsor, I feel this anxiety, this MONSTER in me, on me, around me every waking moment. I have made genuine attempts to make some reconciliations, to rebuilt relationships and started going back to church, along with my endeavours with AA. Yet the hollowness persists. The creeping hoarfrost has snagged my legs, my arms, my chest, and mind. But I am fighting to step into the morning sun, to bathe in it's warming rays, to melt this cold that has seized me. Oh, LORD, let this ice thaw from me, let the light cast away the shadow of the MONSTER that stalks me.

I am entering a time in my life where joy and light should outweigh and outshine the darkness. I am getting married very soon, to a woman that loves me, takes care of me, and knows me better than I know myself. And yet despite all my faults, she loves me all the same. This I try to focus on every day of my life. I only pray that the MONSTER is not just kept at bay, but that he is banished forever from my life and those around me. I want only light, love, joy, and PEACE to pervade.

And I want the same for all those struggling with addiction and/or depression. You are NOT alone! You never are, and never can be!

A Revelation Of The Father

As I mentioned before, my life was in shambles, my childhood marred, my innocence was given the taste from the Tree of Knowledge. Sadly, from what I can remember, much of it was brought about by my biological “father” Mack. To spare the details over the course of many years of pain, anger, sadness and confusion, I came to realize that he was manipulative and abusive liar.

Anyways, I was miserable and confused. I realized that I was fatherless. Then one day, during one of daily morning masses before school (or maybe it was during another service at the church, I can’t remember which), I remember looking up at the crucifix affixed above the altar, and FEELING these words:

“I will be your Father, and I will always be your Father. I will always look after you and love you. You will always have a Father.”

Now, I’ve always felt this to be something maybe lost in translation, but I’ve always disagreed with the lives of Saints where it is said that God merely spoke to them. It seems in my limited experience that an infinite, omniscient, and omnipresent God doesn’t merely “speak” to a person using words. In my experience, it is so much greater than that. When God speaks, He is both perfectly clear beyond all of our meager comprehension of reality and yet also ineffable. When God speaks, it is unmistakable and awe inspiring. Reading the Old Testament of the effects of the self-revelation of angels to men most accurately portrays this. It produces feelings of awe, terror, ecstasy, self-removal and yet a sense of hyper self-realization. When God speaks, every particle of your being resonates, physically and spiritually; the universe hears and trembles.

Growing up as a Christian, I’ve always felt that although miracles and revelations were amazing and yet cheap. As the Lord Jesus Christ states Himself, “Blessed are those that believe and yet have not seen.” The Christian experience is not bound up in petty shows of the supernatural or prophetic revelations (although these do have their proper place), I feel that what many in this day and age have lost focus of is that Christianity is a LIFE. It is a life not believed in, but acted upon and lived. Life itself is the revelation of God to the individual, and it is up to that individual on how they experience God through their thoughts, actions and words, to righteous freedom and joy or to painful anger and frustration.

Throughout my life, I have realized that God never once abandoned me. And not only that, He has always provided me with not just a singular father figure, but many of them. But regardless of this, I have not been spared trying and traumatic experiences after this revelation in the church. As I later came to realize, my relationship with God as Father, even though He is God, is not always easy, just as any familial fatherly relationship. This revelation, this knowledge from the Father has been and continues to be my faith, despite my desolate faith in humanity nowadays. It is this internal faith that has kept me together (at the moment, just barely, but still together) due to recent events that have shaken even my deep love and devotion to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Tasting Of The Tree Of Knowledge

Around when I was 7 years old, my parents started a bitter divorce. Some people incorrectly state that a divorce is an event, but this is woefully wrong. A divorce is a process, a period of life, one that is never easy, no matter who you are or the circumstances. Divorce is a horribly painful and wretched thing. Not one person walks away from such a thing unscathed, unharmed. Those most affected are the children, if any are involved.

As a kid, to the years leading up to my parent’s divorce I witnessed many verbal, emotional and physically abusive things. But in the mind of a child, these things never added up to create a bigger picture until later in my life of how things really were between them. It wasn’t until one day that my biological “father” moved into the house next door to us that I realized that something strange and bad was happening. Things were aloof and my young mind could not figure out what was happening. As time went on, I witnessed my “father” get into a fistfight with a friend of my mom’s one night, him say terribly hurtful things to and about my mom, and my mom freak out about him breaking into the house to move and steal things.

Eventually, we moved out to a house in Plattsmouth for a short time. I honestly can’t remember how long we lived there, but it wasn’t long. After this, we moved to a strange house out in the country, supposedly out in Greenwood or around there. It was at this time that or maybe before that I remember my mom saying that my “father” supposedly tapped our phones, as strange things happened once in a while, sometimes involving the police showing up once our mom left to go get groceries or run other errands. During this time, I began to horribly miss my friends and peers at St. Teresa’s in Lincoln. Some nights I would cry myself to sleep, wishing I was back there in my old house, not understanding why things have changed so much. It was during this time that I had the worst nightmare of my life thus far and started to develop a lifelong anger problem.

As a kid, no matter what school I attended, I was bullied by kids for my short stature. Because of being born prematurely I was afflicted with a deficiency of Human Growth Hormone due to my pituitary gland being underdeveloped. As a result, I had to take injections of HGH up until I was 16 or so. It was during this time that I not only lost my best friend, but he ended up becoming one of my worst tormentors in early elementary school. And because of this bullying and problems at home during this time, I became an unruly child. I acted out in boredom, failed to pay attention sometimes, and got into a great deal of trouble.

In 4^th grade my teacher thought that I might have a learning disorder, but this was not so. I was given an IQ test by my then wonderful counselor and tested above average. And yet, my teacher stubbornly kept me in the slow kid’s class for reading class. I would quickly blow through whatever book they were reading and then become bored at the slow progress of class, having already read the whole book. So this only created more behavioral problems.

Now I can’t possibly convey the anger, sadness, anxiety, confusion and therefore FRUSTRATION I felt at that age. I wanted to burn the whole world down. I wanted to hurt people, I wanted to be left alone and go by to my Garden of Eden, my time of bliss and ignorance, free from pain. I hated some people, jealousy grew in me, resentment found a home in my heart. I witnessed one day my mother being harassed by police one day when they showed up at our door and my mother telling them to leave, and instead of leaving, the wrestled her to the floor right in front of me, yelling at them to stop it and to leave her alone. I went to grab my foam Nerf baseball bat to hit one of the cops with it to help my mom, but by that time it was over. Very soon my grandparents were over at our house to watch us, all the while I stood in front of our prayer area praying the Rosary and reciting the Lord’s Prayer, begging for my mom to come back. This was all only the beginning of the hurt my despicable “father” would bring us.

Introductions

Greetings, friends.

My name is Ray, and this is my humble blog. Let me give some background on this blog and why I’ve decided to blog, as some of you many have been wondering why I have not attended church in a long time.

First of all, I want all of my readers to know that I am a person that understands life through a historical lens. I truly believe that life can be interpreted and understood through the lens of the past; through our ancestors and through our previous decisions. The choices of our ancestors and of our own define who we our, our times, and where we may go. It is my firm belief that those who forget their past lose their souls. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Let me give some background on who I am.

I was born on January 13^th, 1989. I was baptized Methodist, at St. Luke Methodist Church in Lincoln, Nebraska around 14^th and Superior Streets as a baby. During my childhood, I attended St. Teresa Catholic School from preschool to 4^th grade. During my time at St. Teresa’s I was confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church, receiving First Communion with my peers at around 7 years old. A year or so after starting to attend public school starting at 5^th grade I was Chrismated/confirmed into the Eastern Orthodox Church by my once neighbor and longtime father-figure and spiritual father, Fr. James Dank.

Now the Danks were not just once neighbors to my family, but dear friends as well. As a kid I grew up playing with Sam, Mary, and Greg Dank. They were my best friends, and to this day, I still consider as such, and not just this but as family as well. Throughout my childhood and early adolescence the Dank family made an indelible mark on my future ideologies, philosophies, ideas, values and overall worldview.

Around my First Communion in the Roman Catholic Church my parents began a painful divorce that seemed to stretch a few years, at least in my young, confused mind. I had no idea what was going on, why it was happening, or how to deal with it. I never got the sense growing up that my parents were particularly intimate or warm towards each other. Things seemed to be merely a strained routine by the time my young mind began to retain memories back then of my parents. My mom was a stay at home mom, and did all the cooking, cleaning, gardening, parental supervision and all of that ordinary parenting stuff. She took me to all of my doctor’s appointments, bought me toys afterwards for all of the poking and prodding that I had to endure from x-rays and blood labs. Strangely enough, I have very few memories as a young kid of my biological “father,”* as I feel as though he was never around, involved or interested. Such as, he left all of the raising to my mom and only got involved when it was for convenient him. Later in my life, I would made starkly aware of the truth of this observation all too well…


*  I use the term father in parentheses because of the fact that I hold the term “father” in such high regard. I feel that just because a man begets a child through biological means in no regards makes him a “father.” The term “father” has no relationship to the physical relationship of biology, but rather that of a man that has taken part in raising a child/children as his own, loving them, teaching them and protecting them. As rude and vulgar as it may seem to the reader, I consider my biological “father” Mack to be merely a disgraceful, selfish and backwards sperm donor, that has done nothing but harm to my mother, siblings, and myself throughout my life.