On the wings of a Church song
It started on Friday, a simple and honest mistake that carried all the way into Sunday morning. I thought I had a jug of water on my job site. I didn’t. Saturday, out in the sun all morning watching Von’s first football game, a quart wasn’t enough. By lunch time, I was exhausted with dehydration. Three beers into the evening down in Quarryville and my eyes were purple and puffy. It’s finally Sunday morning and I can’t get out of bed. The clock ticks towards 9 and Matins has already begun. Church is over 40 minutes away; No time for pre-communion prayers. We arrive just as the Symbol of Faith (Nicene Creed) is being chanted in its beautiful Russian glory. There isn’t much time left in the liturgy. A normal Sunday is so much work to get to this point and it climaxes with Holy Eucharist. Being unprepared, I may not receive, and I’m reminded how much the effort is worth it. This Sunday, while not entirely incomplete, mostly falls flat. The struggle through proper preparation, the lengthy liturgy, the lack of food & coffee… its all worth it to have Christ coursing through ones very body! Do not forget this! The fight for glory, for communion and salvation doesn’t end in this life and the fight, the struggle, is all so fulfilling.
A decade in the making.
I started this blog almost ten years ago as I was trying oh-so-hard to get my photography feet on firm ground. I’d just spent a few weeks the prior autumn photographing corn farmers in central Illinois and I did this self produced fashion shoot with Melissa Choi that came out fabulously (I just love using the word fabulous to describe my art-fag days). I figured I was gonna catch a real break in the very near future. At the same time, I had just gotten back into doing construction work and I was motivated. The starving artist trope is romantic and all, but it’s a life not worth living if stability of any sort means anything to you. And then there’s the religious themes, that no matter how much I try to keep them separate from anything I put out there — on, say a blog or any other sort of social media — never can be suppressed. So there’s always this blurring of the lines of personal and private and I don’t know, honestly, how much those two things can be kept apart. The libertarian non-sense about waving your arm in the air as hard as you can, so long as it doesn’t hit & hurt someone is intentionally naive. It’s an nice way of saying “let’s all give in to our vices and pretend the cumulative effect is zero”. Oops. Didn’t mean to get on my soap box there….No, actually, I did. I hate libertarianism.
All of that to say, I never quite wondered what to do with this blog. I like to write, but most days I turn my brain off and don’t make the effort. It’s wayyyyyyy easier to zone out watching Instagram videos of house-painters who do cool stuff. So, hey, let’s try to be a little more disciplined. Maybe I’ll even take a few more photos than I typically do. I always like to look back on the things I wrote years ago and find myself a little bit amazed at the insight I had into something when I was so much younger — typically, insights I wouldn’t even have today on a topic. Ironically, there was not alot of good application of those insights as I find a lot of the vices I struggled with the same ones I do now.
But, you know, there is no such thing as progress.
Demon Hunting; Brief Thoughts on the Nativity Fast
Real demons are not like the demons in the movies. They’re far less sinister. Remember, they’re angels of light. Not true light. Imitated light. They show up promising pleasure and of course, who doesn’t deserve a little pleasure? We all think we can fight the demons. Let us go toe to toe and win this monumental battle of good vs. evil; Heroize and glamorize the fight. This isn’t glamorous. This isn’t fabulous. Go toe to toe with a real demon on your own and you’ll lose. You have no chance. You think you’re stronger and bigger and badder than you are. You’re mortal. You’re nothing. They have all the edges in this temporal world.
You wanna fight a demon? Fast. Just try it. I dare you. The battle is won in the mundane and boring. Two cups of coffee instead of three; one beer instead of two; leave that cheese off the cheeseburger. Start here. This is how you kill demons. Stay humble. You start slaying them and Bigger and Badder ones will show up. They have huge swords. Your shield is paper. They will stab you. Endure the suffering. This is how you are saved.
You wanna fight a demon? Pray. Not some emotive vomit, but the prayers tested by the ages. Let it bore you to death. It surely will. You killed another one. The battle isn’t glamorous. Few will see it.
Sometimes it looks like sitting in a hut and weaving baskets in the desert. Sometimes, it’s just one less coffee
Timothy Becker
One dark February night in 2007, I attended a little gathering in the basement of the In The Blood Tattoo Shop on Carson St in the South Side neighborhood of Pittsburgh. There, I met this long bearded fellow named Peter and eventually when spring blossomed out of that gloomy winter, I happened to leave my little Nokia phone in his car. When I went over to his house to pick it up, I met his older brother Tim and the legendary Matt Bell.
Tim was a student at Pittsburgh Theological and we had many conversations about Christianity. I was ultra-Reformed/Puritan in my thinking then and he constantly challenged it with more ancient ways of seeing the world. Years later, when I first visited an Orthodox church, I called Tim and bluntly asked him – you act like an Orthodox; why aren’t you Orthodox?
In those intervening years, we had many interactions; always charitable and always faithful to the Truth. I did some photos for Tim’s study groups, which eventually became the House of St Michael at the Union Project. And then a few months after I was christmated, his entire family was received into the Church and they moved back to Philadelphia.
He visited me once in Lancaster around 2015 and I last saw him this April at a gathering for the St Basil spring lecture in East Stroudsburg. Then yesterday, he suddenly was with us no more. I can’t even fathom this. He was someone so close, but yet so far. After I moved away from Pittsburgh, we only spoke or saw each other on miscellaneous occasions. And now, those have been put to an end. Though we know it’s not, Death seems so final. Come Lord Jesus, Quickly.
The Earth is Flat / Hobbits are Real
The nihilism of the modern age has pressed so hard into many of us that meaning has been subdued, even squashed out of life. The individual pursuit of pleasure in all forms dominates all Western thinking. It is a horrific and meaningless way to live; the embodied form of Secular thinking, which can be traced back at least to the Reformation, and at least a little beyond it. A few months ago, I attended a lecture by the Orthodox icon carver Jonathan Pageau. And a few months before that, I’d been texting with some friends about the flat earth. My brother in law was in the thread and he kept poking at the idea that the Earth is spherical because he doesn’t seem to experience it as spherical – it appears to be “flat”, so why can’t one say it’s flat. He was certainly on to something.
These strange anti-intellectual groups like the flat earth society have risen up in recent years, but they don’t come out of a vacuum. There is a reason such strange wonders are being pondered upon. People are tired of meaninglessness. Modernity obscures the enchanted. Humanity is so disconnected from a true way of life that we cease to see the beauty in it. Our technology has purposely obscured it. A few years ago, I came across this essay and was quite moved by it. I am even moreso today. What is technology other than the tool to hold back chaos? Or, rather, what should it be? We have made it more than that and now our world suffers under the ecological impact of our insistence on absolute control of the natural world. But it simply cannot happen. Nature will fight back and it will overtake us. We are only beginning to see the limits of our frailty as global temperatures continue to rise. A little humility is coming our way.
But what does this have to do with the flat earth and hobbits? Few works of the modern age are more true than Tolkien’s. But what do you mean that Tolkien’s works are true – are they not fiction? How can the earth be flat when we’ve known for centuries that it is mechanically spherical? These, of course are metaphysical questions. Meaning is more important than fact. And this is what these crazy flat earthers are aiming at; to bring meaning and enchantment back into view. It’s quite possible that they’re mostly unaware of this, in fact, it’s almost a certainty. However, this is what is happening. The idea of a flat earth is a rejection of nihilism, scientism and absolute rationalism and even post-modernity in a backwards sort of way. And thank God for that, for we all need a little more beauty and enchantment in our day to day existence.
black coffee in the afternoon, baby
Now that i’ve made a concerted effort to write every day about something, it is really hard to want to sit down and do it.
The second cup of coffee is never quite as good as the first as the first is never quite as good as what I remember coffee tasting like. So, what does coffee taste like? Or, at least, what does good coffee taste like? Who gets to define good? Is everything subjective? Is a complex Ethiopian better than Maxwell House with peppermint creamer? And what makes it better? There is a joke amongst friends that whenever I get a Starbucks (mostly out of convenience) that goes like this : “they call this coffee, but it doesn’t taste like coffee.” So back to the question that continues to befuddle: what does coffee taste like? and/or what does good coffee taste like?
Maybe it tastes like cold winter days on the South Side of Pittsburgh. Those oh-so-grey never-getting-above-twenty-degree days in the middle of February are just brutal. There is ice and snow and slush and dirt and volkswagens pushed sideways into parking spots in the middle of the night. Maybe good coffee tastes like that white hot Americano from the beehive and maybe it tastes like nothing more than that. Maybe it tastes like the longing for a deep community that is tangible and elusive and never-quite-yet all at once. Maybe the taste is embedded into the grain of the film and the binary of the digital file that clank, clank, clanks out of the shutter. What if it is still in there? Can it ever possibly emerge from the fixer?
If one takes a drive from Pittsburgh to Bloomington and then on to Des Moines, maybe then it tastes like hazelnut; hazelnut is the locus of all interstate coffee songs. It is Dunkin Donuts, the one in Richmond too where maybe a little bit of the North can be found, if only for about three minutes.
And so, here we are going back deep into the past to penetrate these deeper flavors of coffee and we neglect the all important question: what will good coffee taste like in the future?
Tomorrow, coffee will taste like today. Or at least some glimmer of today. Today, the snow is coming and there will be paint applied to a wall that was black. Like coffee. In the afternoon. While smoking a hand rolled cig in center city Philadelphia.
catechized by pop music
Yesterday, instead of delving into hours of lengthy, mind taxing podcasts on heavy topics, I listened to some pop music. I really do think that having had listened to so much of this from ages 29-35 had a net negative effect on my maturation and development. In 2009, I had a pretty mundane existence in Lancaster and I became unsatisfied with it. I wanted to make good on my photography degree and a faster paced version of life. I wanted to let loose and find excitement (which is a pathetic drug). So, I moved to Philadelphia that spring. I left behind some really good friends and my family (who seemed exasperated by yet another move) to live in a tiny little sublet on Titan Street near the Italian Market. Later that year, a friend put on Party in the USA one night in the car and I was instantly hooked on pop. It was all I listened to all the time. I started to go to clubs. My life revolved around this trashy music that was obsessed with youth, immature behavior, destructive tendencies, etc.
In 2012, I read James KA Smith’s “Desiring the Kingdom”. In it, he puts forward arguments regarding cultural liturgies and how they form us. It changed the whole lens through which I see the world. In my early 30s (!!!) I was regressing to some sort of college kid and maximizing childish behavior — and i wondered why I couldn’t get a date! The music I was daily pouring into my brain was forming a worldview that was literally dominated by toxic themes. And I willingly embraced them. Instead of looking forward, I was looking backwards while pretending to look forward.
I have this tendency to look backwards while engaging in severe nostalgia. It is an effort to minimize the effort needed to adjust and mature. And in some sense, it seems to be an act of self-preservation — “if I could only go back to _______, then all would be well in the world.” I mummify a previous version of myself inside of myself. Then, I don’t have to deal with the present. I can look back, but looking back is senseless and self-destructive. I can only move forward. I can bargain with the future.
On the topic of photography — it comes up a lot in general conversation. I’m no world-beater in terms of photographic skill, but there is something there. I’m more than capable. It took me a long time to accept this. Again, it was an act of self-preservation because, if in the past, I could say that I wasn’t skilled, then that accounted for the fact that I couldn’t monetize my work. Well, that’s not an accurate picture of reality and it’s time to adjust that.
Beauty is objective and the resentment for traditional beauty continues to grow. I am un-studied enough to know that I don’t know when this resentment began, but I could at least manage an assumption that it came about with WWI. But there is objectivity and in a world that is dominated by chaos and lack of real, functional order, it needs to be put forth. I can contribute to this. I am capable and instead of hoarding my skills and letting them deteriorate, it’s time to move forward, out of the muck and self-destructiveness and do my best to let light shine through me.
the path forward
There are these deep resentments inside of me that I’ve found by un-earthing just a little bit below the surface. And there are these tendencies and trends in my life that I don’t understand how they came to be. Many days, I act like a 37 year old infant and it struck me the other day – this is not normal for a properly developed man of my age. I dig down in my memory and wonder what happened that kept me in such a child like state? I don’t know, but I’ve always had younger friends – when I was in college, I’d come home for the summer and play whiffle ball with kids who were in high school and middle school. In HS, I always got a long with the class that was one year younger than me than with my class. And even now, so many of my friends are younger and single… what in the world?
I was thinking about my earliest competent photos and so many of them were laden with a deep resentment, even hatred of women (I’m assuming because I always had trouble with dating, but it could have been something else!). Those resentments faded over time and women became idolized – the zenith of humanity, sinless in everything they did, while men themselves were more lowly of a creature. (There is a lot to be said for this given our current political moment!). I wonder how these ideas became so powerful in me.
I was an arrogant photographer and it was bourne out of the fact that I knew I was skilled and saw those others who were lesser skilled as somehow less human. And then when I wasn’t able to secure jobs, my arrogance turned to self-loathing. But now, I can see that I was skilled and that I was not a good marketer and that there is something to be done about both. I’m never going to be a professional photographer, but I can do my best to bring a little beauty to the world that is so full of apathy and nihilism. So that is the goal. And it is the goal to see men and women differently too. Women are not perfectly benevolent and men are not perfectly tyrannical. There is balance to both of those extremes and to live in the extremes is to give in to the poison of the trendy Satanic lie that women are more than men.
And so here we go.
david schrott is everywhere 
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