My apologies for too long an absence between updates. Daily life insinuates itself between my best wishes and me.

But now, for a glimpse under a leaf—a page of my journal written the day of my first experience of the Divine Liturgy. I had hoped that it might convey some bit, some small essence of the impact those 150 minutes had upon me. But it seems I retreated to the intellect, recording thoughts and sensing towards conclusions rather than yielding up the images with which my head was reeling.

So be it! This is what it is—I was what I wrote, in all the insufficiency it exhibits.

I enter the little church seemingly out in the middle of nowhere. It is only dimly lit by the morning sunlight, the few candles which stand before large icons on what I recognize as being the iconostasis, and by a few votive candles which burn before a painted wooden cut out of Christ upon the Cross. There are a few other people within the church, but they are either sitting silently, or quietly moving about making some kind of preparations.

Once upon an increasingly distant time there was born to a husband and wife a male child. And his name was not Xenophon, though it was Jones. The husband and wife were loving and godly parents, to the best of their abilities, which is all that any young boy (or girl -- we must consider these things) could ask for. They raised him as a Christian -- a conservative, evangelical Christian. And it was pretty decent. He was loved and fed and taught to read the Bible and to pray as his parents were accustomed. Usually he was taken to church three times a week. And as he grew in mind and stature he learned many verses of the Bible by heart, and he was taught how to understand these verses, as well as many others left unmemorized, according to the sound discernment and exegeses of his family's doctrinal persuasion. And it was pretty decent.

…a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

So, what is this about, you ask? It is about questions. What kind of questions, you ask? Indeed. What kind? Perhaps a few that are difficult to ask, or possibly not so difficult to ask, but for which it is only too easy to receive poor answers, depending upon whom you ask.

Little questions about what it means to be truly catholic and traditional in light of what could be called a "humble epistemology." What does right belief and right practice mean in light of both the revelation of the Logos and the post-modern skepticism regarding our ability to really understand what is truthful? Perhaps this isn't so new a question, but a reformulation -- perhaps this question is not so unrelated to those confessors and professors of apophatic theology, the theology beyond words and image, of a transcendance of which our tongues are unable to give voice except in metaphor.

In the coming days I, Xenophon Jones (perhaps not the everyman, but certainly a man, if not exactly this man, and not exactly not this man), will give a brief account of how I got to Eastern Orthodoxy from the fundamentalist evagelicalism of my youth and early adulthood, and then what has brought me to my current place of questioning.

After that it will be a free process of looking under stones and leafs and happened upon doors, through which I hope I will be accompanied from time to time by strangers, friends, and the occassional rogue (whether traditionalist, modern, post-modern, or any combination thereof) who will help this expedition be both a fruitful and interesting one.

Until then...

+Xeno

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

from O Lost, Thomas Wolfe