Connecting the Dots...: An Unanticipated Journey of Finding Faith

By Dimitria Christakis

For those individuals who are educated or more rational-minded, for those who have a passion for various cultures and unique perspectives, for those who love literature as well as logic, or for those who have been searching and yearning, but not yet finding, this book is for you. Quite simply, it will take you by storm. If you are already a Chri

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publisher
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781954932197

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Connecting the Dots…

Copyright © 2021 by Dimitria Christakis

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible (NASB) from Bible Gateway.

Living Stones: 52 Love Letters is available as another work written by this author.

ISBN

978-1-954932-21-0 (Hardback)

978-1-954932-20-3 (Paperback)

978-1-954932-19-7 (eBook)

This book is dedicated to those who helped me come to faith,

in the hope that those reading this might also come to believe in Him, and with love to My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who lives.

You shall not delay the offering from your harvest…

Exodus 22:29

Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

Matthew 5:16

Table of Contents

BOOK 1: Me in B.C.

Chapter 1: Growing up in S-P-G

Chapter 2: Mother Russia

Chapter 3: The Call to Teach

Chapter 4: Booze and A Power Greater

BOOK 2: D.C. in A.D.

Chapter 5: Year 1, Salvation: Accepting the Invitation

Chapter 6: Year 2, Growing Pains

Chapter 7: Year 3, Becoming Fruitful

Chapter 8: Year 4, Be Anxious for Nothing

PREFACE

You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13)

If you have ever wondered how a person comes to faith with scant spiritual nurturing or how God draws people to Himself, follow my story. You will discover through my childhood, my calling and vocation — teaching, travels, and through the faithful friendship of a pastor, how I became enthusiastically receptive to God’s gift of grace! How did this come to be? In America, where everything at your beck and call and arm’s reach to satisfy our every whim and wish, I craved pitch and purpose of lasting value; I was searching a sense of belonging in a manner and measure for which I had no words. Little did I know at the time that there was no person or place, let alone thought, action, or acquisition could provide the profound love I was seeking.

Let me also thank you for picking this book to read; you are in for a spiritual adventure of a lifetime! I hope that you will recognize the common thread running through my journey to salvation, that everything had been leading inexorably towards my coming to know Christ. When you start out reading this book, it might not initially seem like it. I’m going to look like a confused child who was interested in her heritage. Some may wonder why I spend so much time talking about theology or Russians or all things Greek, but in seeking the divine, my mind went about it through a convoluted process, possibly more common than not. There will be some who might appreciate this book because I am passionate about making a difference in a child’s world through teaching. Others who read this may have a fascination with theology and various religious studies, and this book will pique their interest. There are those who have a passion for American literature; you will appreciate parts of this book. Lovers of travel will find merit in this book, particularly if you are interested in Russia or Greece. Perhaps you have been in charge of a group that had to be in the public eye. I have led many student trips abroad, and I always told them that they should consider themselves ambassadors for the United States. Little did I know then that I would come to consider myself a representative for Christ, and I have a message to convey on His behalf. Perhaps if I had chosen to write this book ten years later, it would be completely saturated with Scripture and my favorite Bible passages, but I’m nowhere near there yet, and I chose purposefully to write a book at this early stage of my Christian development. I wanted to convey the supernatural change within me as it was transpiring to be as authentic, accurate, and true to the experience as I could. Memories fade, and recollections collide and can get jumbled, and my acceptance of Christ was too vital not to record the transformation while it was occurring soon after the spark of conversion. As time passes by in this story, you will witness the mental switch’s flip regarding my heart’s desire. The cynic might quip to me, Oh, your brain has fallen out, you are no longer rationally thinking about things, you have become ‘one of them,’ you decided to ‘join them instead of beat them,’ and so on and so forth. Yet I know at my very core that is not the case, and the evolution within me has shaken my foundations and solidified the sense of what I am here for, and that is to share what I’ve come to know and love about Him with you.

When I was younger, I used to think that becoming a Christian sometimes occurred when people who were desperate to change their lifestyle went overboard the opposite way and adopted a set of values that put God in charge. Indeed, a full recovery would nearly necessitate the intervention of clinging to a higher power to empower them to let go of some horrid activity that was killing them. Such tales of deprivation, extreme suffering, or wrongdoing are not what you will find in this book. You might also wonder why she talks about Russian or American literature? Why would she probe the theology of Puritans, on the one hand, and the mindset of Unitarians, on the other? Or why is she exploring aspects of Greece and Greek culture? Never having put all the pieces together before, this has become my way of revealing what lay beneath the veil: all roads in my life, all my choices, passions, and life events have been leading me to Christ, and in so doing, have launched me into a destiny of serving the Lord in this manner. Why would I write this now, you may ask? I mean, it’s not like I am about to rewrite Scripture or say anything new, but I can share the perspective of someone as she was undergoing a supernatural transformation, a regeneration, a bonafide metamorphosis into a Christian pilgrim. Such progress! I am well aware that you, my gentle reader, can easily access weighty and authoritative books by theologians or talk to seasoned pastors about the nuts and bolts and the finer points of Christianity. I heartily encourage you to do so! However, if you are curious about what it was like for an ignorant and stubborn rebel such as I not only to come to Him in the first place, but stay with Him, and if you want it straight from the horse’s mouth, this is your book! For me, this is precisely the point: how it all starts. That I have become a Christian and am compelled to share my testimony this way reveals to me that the Holy Spirit is urging me to strike while the iron is hot. There’s not a shadow of a doubt. I don’t want to wait until I’m retired, or my memories have faded or become distorted to the point that I could not relate my experience. I am filled with a reverberating reverence; I am basking in the Holy Spirit’s prompting to share this while these changes are going on inside me. I have almost a decade left before I retire, and so many times, I have daydreamed about writing something and someday after I retire. However, currently, I have a different perspective: there is not enough time to tarry and wait; nay, I cannot wait to convey the good news of my life. The time is now.

Writing this book while I’m still in the full throws of my career as a teacher proves that Christ is leading me to do what would seem impossible. Considering the workload of what an English and foreign language teacher has to do outside school hours, I never imagined I would start on a book now, let alone one with this subject matter. Further, that this book has seemed to write itself, which also defies logic, is surefire proof that He’s behind the idea, inspiration, and me all the way. I would never have thought, let alone spoke of, let alone wanted to write you, a stranger, about Him! Some might think I have become obsessed or possessed. It’s not that I have become overtaken by anything; I am filled with the Holy Spirit. I now use vocabulary that I never knew existed before, but such has to be used because it accurately conveys what I now know. The bare fact is that it could and did happen to me: I am a follower of Christ, and I answer to God and seek His wisdom for my life. One additional benefit in writing this is to help people who do not fully understand Christian-based terminology. I certainly do not want to reinvent the wheel by what I have to say, but I do have a strong desire to stir the hearts and minds of the people who have been turned off to Jesus because of the institution of the church.

Often, I feel like I am a modern-day Samaritan. Just as the Samaritans were looked down upon by some during Christ’s day because they were not pure enough in their bloodline or belief system for the Jewish of that time, I had never been an accepted member of a so-called real church. I didn’t believe! For much of my life, I straddled the fence where faith is concerned, which, for some, might disqualify me right off the bat from being His. This is not the case. When doubt comes my way, I now know to keep my eye on Christ! I’m not really into dedicating books, but my reason for writing this, first of all, is to glorify God. This book would never have gotten off the ground had it not been for the desire to share what He put in me. This book is also written especially for those of you who, like me, might consider yourself an intellectual, a thinker, a doubter, a rationalist, a curious dabbler of various philosophies and religions. Maybe you have a droll sense of humor and finds yourself thinking irreverent thoughts when observing so-called spiritual people. Perhaps you never even searched for God or thought about your place in the world. I did. I have realized that the stakes are just too high to remain in pride or ignorance, which leaves you alone in a state of beguiled narcissism, self-justification, or a sense of superiority or entitlement, which, in turn, leads to a final cessation that was never intended. Am I trying to change you? Well, not exactly. As Walt Whitman would say, You must travel this road before you for yourself. Anyway, that’s not on me, and I don’t possess that kind of power; however, the Spirit of God inside me does. All I can do is show you through what I’ve learned that somebody like you who thinks that religion is not for him, who thinks there are many different and equally valid paths to God, or who believes he is pretty good, very much need to reconsider.

There is an invisible battle out there to win you over, and it’s not one of flesh and blood, but spiritual forces of wickedness (from Ephesians 6:12). I don’t want you to be caught unaware in stubbornness, nonchalant disbelief, or blithe ignorance. You may rightfully ask how a person goes about determining and deciding which religion is the best, most suitable, or truest? You may think you should opt for none of the above. If so, this book is for you! And last but not least, to my fellow Christian brothers and sisters, I prayerfully, lovingly dedicate this book to you because you might find this tome another way to present His truth to someone. Yes, there are thousands upon thousands of testimonies, one each for every Christian. I suspect many who identify as Christians were raised or grew up in a Christian-identified household, even if nominal or quasi. It goes beyond my text’s scope to discuss mission fields of peoples who have never been exposed to Christ. Maybe you are already a Christian, but I feel like you haven’t done much lately. Maybe you feel stymied or in the doldrums. Do you desire to grow in your faith? Do you long to be more patient and loving and shed the familiar cloak of self-satisfaction that curbs this? Then join me, and, as Hebrews 12:1–2 says, let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus! Of course, we must dive deeply into the word of God, and we will. Hopefully, you’ll never get your fill, and with God’s help, we both can bear much fruit for Him. This journey is presented from the perspective of one who grew up in a household that was neutral, disinterested, or indifferent to Jesus at best, and ridiculing, critical, or rejecting of Christianity at worst. Ultimately, looking back and connecting the dots, what I know is that this lesson in perspective into the divine, to the Lord of lords, is available to all who are open to Him. Therefore, I present this kaleidoscope, this unique key that I hope will fit into a previously locked door, such that it can be opened and that you have the most mind-blowing and life-altering experience that you never thought was possible! I love you already!

BOOK 1:

Me in B.C.

Chapter 1:

Growing up in S-P-G

I don’t know how to love him...

— from Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)

"They say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away, but if there is a God, we need Him now...

and I say it’s taken Him so long ’cause we’ve got so far to come."

— from Stevie Wonder’s Heaven Is Ten Zillion Miles Away,

from the album, Fulfillingness’ First Finale (1974)

1.1 From Eden to the South

I, Dimi Christakis, a follower of Jesus Christ, by the will of God and the Spirit of Jesus Christ,

To both the church of my heart and to those curious and yearning for more than what you find in this beautiful world at large, Grace to you and peace from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The introduction above is, more or less, how all the epistles or letters start out in the New Testament, so I thought I’d humbly borrow from the best in this opening chapter of my life to you. My real name is Dimitria, a name I hated as a young girl just because it sounded weird; therefore, I just shortened it and went by Dimi. At that time, I didn’t know that it originated from the Greek goddess Demeter, goddess of the harvest. Then later, Saint Dimitrios, a warrior, was credited for some miraculous defending of the Greek city, Thessaloniki. My last name, Christakis, though I was quite aware and proud is Greek, meant precious little else to me, the import of the first syllable of which was as unknown to me as I was lost to Him. It would not be until a month before I turned fifty that coming to Him got up close and personal. Exploring and discovering this my identity — from an inchoate, primordial, and amorphous albeit lovely and dying one to one that is unique, specific, and brightly everlasting — will crystallize before your eyes now and before I could have known then. And so, I wish for you that the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all (2 Cor. 13:14 NLV).

Before we moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina, the day before Labor Day in 1969, life for me was exhilaratingly free! I felt no restraint to do whatever joy and goodness my heart desired; I was a little girl who loved to climb trees, make forts, and dance; I walked to my school every day by myself, joyfully and safely in a world that wasn’t fearful for its children. Pippi Longstocking would soon be my literary heroine. My dolls were all carefully put to bed permanently in shoeboxes like little coffins lining the baseboard of our guestroom. I loved my collection of stuffed monkeys. My mom, understanding my wanting for these pets of mine to have a home, spray-painted a tree branch gold and stood it in a base in the corner of my room so that I could put these little playmates on the smaller branches thereof. And speaking of branches, at five, I was quite the happy tree-climber, and a couple of years later, I lived to make forts, both inside and out-of-doors. I still recall imagining how I would survive storms if I could adequately fortify the semicircular teepee of a wooden tent made up of boards and branches leaning against a thick oak tree. It was like an eagle’s glen for this girl-child. Soon after we moved to Spartanburg, there was one particular fort I erected at age eight that would be my masterpiece and a hideout from life’s storms. Like many kids, I often got stopped in my tracks by things of rushing beauty I saw in Nature: I can still recall with such vividness seeing in wonderment my first rainbow reflected in a large puddle, created by the spray I had made with the garden hose, yes, the one with the metal nozzle from which I would gratefully drink. In the fall, my mother would have my younger sister and me making shish kebabs out of the burnt-orange fall leaves skewered on a stick in the front yard. On weekends or after work, my father would play his Greek records and sing along with them, probably trying to evoke a trace of a world then gone to him. I remember loving the sound of the bouzouki so much that I would try to replicate the notes on the piano in a made-up Greek song for my father, hoping to please him. My father and I had a favorite trick we did together: he would lay on his back, hold his legs straight up, and I would stand atop and on his feet, like a mirror image of himself four feet up. In the evenings, we would lie on the floor beside one another holding hands and just gaze at the fish in his saltwater tank; he also had sea horses, one of the few animals that have the father take care of his young. And at five, I would proudly proclaim to my mother that I would marry Mr. Rogers when I grew up. My favorite movies were The Jungle Book and Mary Poppins. My maternal grandparents once recorded on an old 8 mm movie camera free-spirited me dancing like King Louie. Numerous times, I attempted to launch into flight by jumping off the top of the jungle gym, umbrella in hand, high above my head. Even today, I remain convinced that all parents should interact with and instruct their children as Mary Poppins did. Later in life, I would subconsciously use her approach as a model for how this teacher should treat her students.

The move to the South from Akron, Ohio was quite a scary prospect as I thought that we would move into the side of a cave den and live as coyotes do. I was so unprepared for and unknowing of how southerners thought little girls were supposed to act, and I did not fit in at all. I remember in first and second grade, we had mandatory chapel service every Tuesday morning. We’d all file in the auditorium, not knowing if the minister de jour would be a young or older man, but it was always a serious or solemn occasion; now and again, one would get particularly flushed and frothy. At the end of this routine service, we were told to bow our heads, something that struck me as odd and pray along with the man who’d say words in a strange tone. I didn’t know what either meant. I only bent my head slightly and, out of curiosity, kept my eyes open to furtively glance around the auditorium. Most of the time, we ended the service with something called the Lord’s Prayer. My head tucked even lower so that my chin nearly touched my chest, I noticed everyone was chanting something in unison, and everyone knew it but me. I didn’t know if I should feel embarrassed, but I did feel awkward and shy. So that nobody would know that I didn’t know the words, I decided to move my mouth anyway, as if I, too, were speaking these mysterious utterances. I remember doing this more than once, and even then, it made me feel like a fake. At the same time, I must admit I was not so much curious about what they were saying as much as I was hyperaware that I felt very different. It’s not that I wanted to join them or be a part of this whole affair.

In a similar vein, the move down south also introduced a mindset difficult for me to fathom: why were girls were supposed to act a certain way? Why did boys get to do cool stuff like play freeze tag, and I had to ask to join? Even though I was teased and mocked, I did so anyway. One teacher in particular made it her calling to teach me how a girl should act by punishing me to break me of everything I did to the contrary; this was my second-grade teacher, Miss Sally Fillmore. She looked like the bride of Frankenstein and had one streak of white hair traveling north by northeast through that helmet head of otherwise blackish hair. Before we’d go out in the world outside her little kingdom of a classroom, she took forever to powder her nose as there was that one humongous and irksome age spot that stubbornly resisted her efforts. Like most elementary school-aged children, I lived for the freedom of play period, and I was quite the daredevil. I was that one you’d have to worry about standing on the swings because I would intentionally go so high that catapulting myself off might either make me airborne for the next state or go splat on the unforgiving concrete beneath. I would hold hostage the smaller kids sitting at the upper end of the seesaw, or, like some chimpanzee, I would play leg war on the jungle gym set. One particular day, I climbed up the very tall, steel ladder of the slide designated for the big kids and noting the 200-degree surface of the slide that could have melted my hide, I elected to hurl my shoes off go down while standing ski-style. It was like flying! It was brilliant and fabulous! Miss Fillmore did not think so. The next thing you know, many of the kids imitated in like fashion; the instigator had to be stopped. The next day, I learned my sentence of losing my play period for an eternal week. Our P.E. teacher, a burly older woman named Miss Cox, had us play one sport and one sport only: killer kickball. Miss Cox combed back her graying and slick-backed hair, dyed a curious blue, and she possessed a constellation of dark freckles on her cheeks. She issued short, guttural commands to us, and while she watched us, fist on hip, she’d spit out the dark juice from her chewing tobacco. We dared not give it our all for her, and I’m sure I didn’t disappoint. This same year, I lost my play period again for inadvertently taking an extra set of silverware in the cafeteria. I remember this because I got lost in thought staring at the framed picture of the blonde and rather girly-looking Jesus on the wall; I’d never seen a man look like that! The worst transgression I committed that led to a showcase showdown happened when Miss Fillmore, bound and determined to have me play with and behave like the other girls playing with their Barbie dolls, grouped me with them. Having just quit Brownies the week before for refusing to cut out dresses for Barbie dolls and now finding myself thrust into a pile of such girls, I retaliated in the way that would shock the class: I pulled off Barbie’s head, yes, decapitated my assigned doll, and, in protest, flung said head across the room like a rocket. One girl cried. Another boy’s jaw dropped. It was then that Miss Fillmore and I reached a sort of non-verbal truce. I would quit being an instigator, and she would leave me alone and happy to play with my Lincoln Logs, my clackers, or my slinky. I didn’t even know how to jump rope; playing hopscotch seemed silly.

Trading Wacky Packages and wearing my favorite green poncho and camouflage hat for days on end was more to my liking as I did my time at what felt like a prison. I return to the Tuesday morning chapel service because one incident led to my mother extracting me from this school routine.

1.2 Mandatory Chapel Service

On Tuesday mornings, there were these men in stiff, dark suits who would come to talk to us in our school’s auditorium. Each would tell us a story from a sizeable black book that was always brought along, and I didn’t know one of these tales. One time in spring, we were told a particular story that alarmed me. I went home that afternoon and repeated it in an anxious and confused state to my mother: I warned her that she would have to paint the door red, or else I, as her eldest, would be killed! First of all, she didn’t even know (nor could have imagined) that we had chapel service; she just kept repeating incredulously to us both, "You heard that in school?!?" The next thing you know, she swiftly had me pulled from this activity. After that, all I remember was having to sit in the main office’s entry, right next to a tuba that was stored there, as the rest of my class walked to the auditorium. Looking out that open door, I stared out at all the rest of the school children who filed by on their way to chapel service, and many would point at me, whisper, and giggle among themselves. I would have preferred to go chapel and take my chances with impending death than feel the burn of shame of ostracism for what I didn’t understand. In particular, I recall the Fanning brothers from our neighborhood who all three in unison would hiss that I was an atheist; I had no idea what this was, but I could tell it was terrible. Other kids caught on to their label, and I was called this over and over again mercilessly. It didn’t make me feel sad, just bewildered and a little scared; their faces were filled with hatred. Another source of rejection I experienced was because I was a young tomboy, so I wasn’t winning popularity contests in this department either. My bucked-toothed chum, Tom Jordan, would earnestly ask me, "Do you really think girls are as good as boys?"

It wasn’t only in chapel that I came to know of the Bible. My first-grade teacher had us memorize Bible verses that she would neatly write in thick chalk up on the blackboard every day. Thanks to her, there are two verses I still can recall: The first is This is the day which the LORD has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it (Psalm 188:24). And the second was "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness: come before his presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord he is God: it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves; we are his people, and the sheep of His pasture." I italicize those words in particular that struck me then. She had a soft heart and an essential goodness to her. She wasn’t trying to push anything onto us; her faith came from a wellspring that gently overflowed from within. We were all glad to be her little lambs, which she would call us; we made our own joyful noise in her classroom. Not all shepherds were as kind as she, as I would find out a few years later. Another memory came about when I was in the second or third grade, and our whole grade level went to the area’s planetarium. Oh, it was spectacular and phenomenal to gaze up in wonderment at the re-created heavens while a deep voice pointed out and explained what all we were beholding! At the very end of the presentation, we were asked if there were any questions. I stood up and asked, Where did all this come from? Who made it? And the man looked back at me and queried, "Who do you think made everything? All the kids around urged and prompted me to say what to them was the obvious, easy, and correct answer: God!" Yet I, in good conscience, couldn’t say this because I didn’t know who or what God was, let alone who made Him for Him to have created the Milky Way, etc., to begin with! I was stumped; therefore, much to the kids’ shock and disbelief, I replied not a word to him and sheepishly sat down. You could’ve heard a pin drop as my classmates were agog and bewildered by my apparent and vast ignorance. Later on, under the helm of our fifth-grade teacher, whose hair, lips, and toenails were all the same loud shade of coral and whose dragon breath reeked of Salem cigarette smoke, Miss Linda Sprint taped up an old poster depicting calm, majestic mountains that were way beyond the reach of her classroom. It had part of Psalm 121 (KJV) written in bold calligraphy beneath: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. We all looked to this Lord to liberate or preserve us from her reign of terror. There were no joyful noises here, and we were painfully aware that we were there to either serve her or, at the very least, not bother her. We knew she didn’t care for us, and she let us know by her attitude that she would rather have been anywhere else but with us. Daily she transported herself to other vistas, all to the musical backdrop of Charlie Rich, who was played on the transistor radio behind her desk. He serenaded us as we did long division from a stale workbook, while in the meantime, she clipped grocery coupons from the newspaper. Once, we even tried to set fire to a tiny piece of paper in her cloakroom using a magnifying glass that someone excitedly snuck into class one day. I was right there with the instigator, busily working as the sun was streamed down on our project. Alas, these attempts were in vain. It was in this grade that our class advanced to Bible study every week. I didn’t attend even one of these classes, so promptly did my mother again intervene and circumvent another misread Bible story. On her own, she re-separated church and state and whisked me to the library, where I completed a year’s worth of spelling lessons in a month. I read a lot and daydreamed of being set free from Washington Jail, as we called George Washington Elementary School. The following year, when I was in the sixth grade, we had a commencement ceremony for which we were all to memorize as a class the entirety of 1 Corinthians 13. It’s just what we did, and I didn’t question (or inform my mother) anymore. There was one line in particular that I didn’t understand: For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known (NIV). The prospect of being known, something I certainly didn’t feel at the time, compelled, excited, and mystified me. Though we memorized this chapter, we never discussed what it meant. I still hadn’t even fully memorized the Lord’s Prayer. It’s important to remember my feelings during all of these experiences; none of these experiences made me particularly curious about God or Jesus; in fact, the whole affair made me feel different and somehow unlovable. To say I didn’t have any traditional religious foundation would be an understatement. On Sunday mornings, my parents tuned the FM dial to fill our living room with classical music. In fact, that was the only station that even played music because most of the other AM stations were devoted to live church broadcasts where preachers would speak like no adult I’d ever heard. Their voices would either emit odd ululations, or else the tone would seem angry. Sometimes they spoke with such vim and vigor, and in such a strong southern accent, it became indecipherable to me! "Jeeeeezzus Krahst daaahd on thuh cross fer yore see-uhnz, uh!" The voice sounded like the Loony Tunes character, Foghorn Leghorn, only in a nasal pitch. I didn’t understand what they were saying, let alone what all the fuss was about. I just knew it was very odd to be living in a land where everybody thought this type of speech was normal. The lone tri-cities Unitarian Church my mother took us to when I was little taught us about the existence of many gods, but not about the God everyone at school or in our community knew. My mother was on the warpath to protect us; my father was oddly mute.

1.3 Strangers in a Strange Land

Early on, it became evident that our family’s values and priorities were radically different from those who lived around us: we lived in an affluent neighborhood with a golf course, but we never joined the country club. Indeed, my mother would brag that our family was more interested in art, culture, and travel than tennis lessons, brand-name clothes, and golf, all of which was dubbed a waste of money. As a youngster, though, I was often jealous and would long to swim at the nearby Country Club swimming pool with all the other kids, who gleefully whizzed on their bikes just a short way past our house there. Our family had an opposite value construct: we were anti-elitist, cultured ones, if you will. I didn’t remember feeling snobbish or superior, but I did recall feeling like an outcast in every way and all the time. Sometimes though, it was a good thing. For example, when I was six years old, I recall coming home from school one day playing the air violin, and my mom responded swiftly by getting me started in violin lessons. Learning by the Suzuki method, I would initially learn to play by ear, memorizing the records I’d listened to over and over again. I would continue to take private lessons for the next sixteen years and play in our high school orchestra. Only my consuming passion for mastering the Russian language in graduate school would supplant the time and energy I had spent on music. Russian became like music to my ears, and, later, when I would come to teach Russian in high school, to hear it pronounced with a southern twang or valley girl monotone would grate my sensibilities. But back to my misfit maiden years: I remember for my eighth birthday, I had my first slumber party. It was my idea to have my girlfriends come to my solo violin recital, then come back home with me and dance to the Jackson Five or the Stevie Wonder albums I had gotten. This struck them odd. While all the other little girls swooned over and read about the latest about Donny Osmond and Keith Partridge in Teen Beat, I was smitten with Michael Jackson and his older brother, Tito. I loved dancing to the Jackson 5 songs. My absolute favorite song of Stevie Wonder’s would come to be Heaven Is Ten Zillion Miles Away; it spoke to and reflected my deep longing for God to be closer to me and for humanity not to be so far in faith from Him.

These thoughts were embryonic then, but my latent desire to make Him real would make me seek Him in all sorts of places. Who or what He was, I surely didn’t know. Perhaps seeking that which is richer, deeper, and different from us, I got from my mom. Maybe God was as an attractive force as was my father to me. I think half the reason why my mother married my father was to escape the stultifying, provincial outlook and add an exotic touch to the way too squeaky-clean, very white, and boring Midwest background. She also had a longing for more. Meanwhile, my father, ever the free-spirit, sought to escape the heavy restrictions and all-too clear expectations of his Byzantine background, wherein everything was known either by his mother at home or by God at church. The icon of the eye of God peered down on my dad from the cupola, high above the sanctuary. There was no escape. His whereabouts and activities were closely scrutinized and general Greek values and culture fervently guarded. At the end of the Greek Civil War, when my father was just eleven, his family moved to America, after which, his mother went on a mission of her own to shelter her sons from the many evil temptations in this country. At stake was the possibility of losing one’s Greek identity, heritage, religion, and family; ultimately, his parents would lose this battle, and my father flew the coop. My father felt trapped and longed to escape such stultifying strictures. In short, both of my parents were renegades, rebels who ran toward each other but missed their mark in uniting. Every sensitive, inquisitive, and quietly spirited mother had her religious wings clipped at a tender age. I can imagine her pride at being the only one in her Sunday school class asked to read the nativity scene from Luke; nobody from home even showed up to watch her. Her father was an unabashed atheist. Later, I would wonder if she had committed apostasy in my journey by liking Jesus but rejecting His divinity. I was told that, no, she never even had any real chance to develop as a Christian. The world of art and architecture and being exposed to many international cultures— primarily South American Middle Eastern — captivated her attention and held her in wonder when she was in college. So many things to see, taste, and try! My mother said that upon getting serious about her relationship with my dad, when she probed and asked him to explain his religious beliefs, he turned away from her, cried, and got up and ran out of the room. I believe she misinterpreted his being unable to verbalize about matters of his faith to her. She erroneously took his inability to speak to mean that he was afraid of the imposing God who looked down on him from the Orthodox dome. I think that he was so stuck and in love that he felt like bolting with such a potentially game-changing question. He had to have realized the magnitude of what marrying her would mean: a severance from everything and everyone that had shaped who and what he was, and, religiously speaking, this went back centuries and connected him to generations before him. Was he concerned with the ramifications of abandoning his family and community, not to mention his faith and God? Did he consider that his mother tongue would not be spoken anymore, let alone to his yet unborn children? Was he thinking about the fact that no one would be preparing Greek food for him? Probably, but he had fallen head-over-heels in love with my mother, for better or for worse. As it turned out, it would turn out for the worse for both of them. One of the first things my father did after they got divorced was to come back attending to the Greek Orthodox Church.

Do know, however, that we had some really wonderful years as a family. My parents fostered a passion for that which was not the norm, and we had spice in our life. They loved and promoted music and world culture over sports and materialism. Whereas avid sports enthusiasts tend to look down on people who don’t do sports, I was raised by parents who could have cared less about athletics. Later, when I was in college, I would announce that I would go to a football game when a university football player would attend a symphony concert. I thought sports fanatics were modern-day Neanderthals. My father clung to his own team, his tribe, and both of my parents would see the likes of golf and tennis and keeping up with the Jones as superficial, not enriching, and wastefully extravagant. When I saw men shout or cheer at their television sets and women happily huddle in the kitchen, I didn’t see the attraction, let alone the point. And quite frankly, I didn’t view there being much of a difference in the way most folks participated in church life from how they viewed sports: both to me seemed exclusive, excessive, and way too expressive. I even heard a minister half-jokingly once say that with a little imagination, the T from the University of Tennessee looked similar to the Christian cross! In short, like football and country clubs, we pooh-poohed religion and churches growing up. Our way of thinking heralded intellectualism, rationalism, science, and the power of the mind, but looking back, we were as snobbish and judgmental as the very ones we complained about. As a child, I was taught that religion could evoke strong feelings but that its ideas or beliefs — no matter to which version one subscribed — were not based on fact. My parents tended to look down on conventional churchgoers, but each for a different reason: dad because Protestantism wasn’t part of his back-story and mom because she’d rejected anything smacking of inauthenticity or impossibility. Plus, neither of my parents fit in with people down here. My mom, a Midwesterner, wasn’t like the other Southern women who coiffed their hair into a beehive and wore lots of makeup, and my short and very Greek dad in no way resembled the tall men who stood with legs wide apart, jingling their pocket change, and talking of sports. The likes of these were aliens to them.

In short, my parents’ values and priorities were divested elsewhere. My mother, ever down-to-earth, practical, was at her core a social activist. She and my father were both frugal, and my father all the more so from having experienced the war first-hand. For my father, money should go to acquiring land, advancing one’s education, and putting Mediterranean food on the table, which was nearly impossible. Once a year at Christmas, we would receive a CARE package from my Greek grandparents; it was bursting with Greek goodies! Living in South Carolina, they knew that we couldn’t get the good stuff, meaning real Greek food, so they sent us Greek Easter bread, Greek pastries and cookies, olives, and the like. The package was always wrapped up in brown paper with strong twine and addressed in a belabored English script in capital letters; it seemed as if it had been sent from Africa. My mother created her own world culture for us, and in the rich nest of our home, each room was uniquely inviting; none was limited to its original purpose. Nothing ever matched, but everything went together; each of us got to decorate his room, and I slept under a psychedelic sky scene copied from a Peter Max mural that my mother painted on my ceiling for me. In the late afternoons when I got home from school, I remember avidly reading one page in the newspaper without fail: it had my horoscope, the advice of Dear Abby, and a column of guidance from an older man named Billy Graham. Between the three of them, I always gleaned some piece of wisdom. My mom wanted us to feel special by making sure we had music, art, and other types of lessons, and as the oldest, I was the greatest beneficiary of this value construct. My father occasionally tried to fit in and would experimentally try to imitate what he thought was a southern accent, but we kids looked at him in shock, as if he’d turned into someone from outer space. Though we never talked about it in private, we all knew that what was normal outside our home made no sense to my dad and was rejected by my mother. This attitude took hold in me, too. In the summertime of my grade school years, we all would go to Camp Big Forge. It was a Christian-based camp, but one both my mother and grandmother went to as girls, so it was acceptable. Coming up the gravel driveway, the first thing you saw greeting you was an Indian totem pole (on a painted telephone pole), and every morning, here, too, we would have chapel service. This was not nearly the scary affair I had experienced in my elementary school in South Carolina. Teenage counselors with their long hair and wearing embroidered bib overalls would read a book called The Way, and they treated us kindly. The daily chapel service was held in a diminutive amphitheater at the shore of a lake, and it became both regular and special to start our day like this. In the evenings, we would all sit around a spectacular bonfire around which the counselors would passionately play their guitars and sing both camp tunes and popular songs from the ’70s like Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. Though I didn’t really have a clear notion of who Jesus was or what He was all about, we would also sing a few Christian-based songs after lunch. For example, it was there I was first introduced to Noah, who built him an arc-y arc-y, made of hic’ry bark-k-y bark-y. In my infantile seeking to make sense of the world around me, including matters of life and death, I would next turn with keen interest to an old and yet new-to-me figure on television: Dracula.

1.4 Dracula and the Undead

When I was in third grade, I was smitten with Dracula, as best enacted by Bela Lugosi and later by the intense Christopher Lee. Every week I looked forward to watching old horror movies on Shock Theater, a program that came on TV late Saturday mornings right after Soul Train. There were many creatures of fright to watch, but Dracula was in a league of his own. I was mesmerized by his power, his enigmatic ways, his intelligence, and his immortality, or, rather, his state of being undead, as it was called. As legend had it, Count Vlad the Impaler was so upset over the fact that his wife died while he was in battle defending Christianity; out of spite and in anger, he made the fateful decision to worship the devil. In so doing, he turned from a righteous leader to an evil one and became infamous for impaling his victims and drinking their blood; this, in turn, allegedly gave him a quasi type of eternal life. My attraction to Dracula held me captive for several years; I felt like I understood him; anyway, his decision to turn away from good was motivated by disappointment and love. Plus, Count Dracula had such a keen mind and overt power over many; I was amazed at his ability to hypnotize. (I’m sure that Bela Lugosi’s native Hungarian accent didn’t hurt either.) I just wished my mind and will were as strong as Professor Van Helsing’s because he could withstand Dracula’s attempts to put him under his spell. I was impressed with Dracula’s ability to bend the laws of physics and change at will his physical form into a wolf or bat; why, his image did not cast into a mirror! Dracula needed people to sustain his vitality, so he seduced women and took their lives to remain undead himself. It made sense to me, and I accepted it as gospel. I always rooted for Dracula and would lament when he was killed by having a stake driven through his heart. Looking back, I see this innocent fascination with Dracula as a misguided yearning to unite with that which possessed the power of life over death. Clearly, Dracula isn’t Jesus, but, in retrospect, this particular attraction I had indicates I was seeking some lasting connection between love and death, fascinated by the concept of eternal life, and yearning for someone more powerful than anyone in this world could offer. The crucifix, in particular, proved repellant to Dracula; I was also fascinated but not so troubled by this symbol. When approached by some well-intended pastor at chapel service and asked if I had repented or if I were saved, I would recoil and turn away, much like Dracula did when he caught sight of the crucifix. I couldn’t get away quick enough from such aggressive types. The words that came out of their mouths or stern countenance they held, I could not have fathomed was based on concern for my very soul.

Meanwhile, my parents created their refuge from a society in which we did not fit, and they never sought; neither Jesus nor God was a part of our world either. I was taught that the church was a source of most of man’s wars and strife; I didn’t disagree and could definitely and personally relate because if Christianity came up as a topic around me, I was the one treated like a witch. I cannot say there was no church impact or presence in my life; my mother was a Unitarian and my father defaulted to going with her to the one lone U.U. Church in the area; often though, he stayed at home in those early days, sulked until she and I got home. There was no Greek Church, let alone a handful of Greeks within thirty miles of where we lived. I attended Sunday school at the Unitarian Church off and on from age seven to eleven, when I began working in the nursery. I did take one trip to Boston when our high school youth group conjoined with the one from the next nearest church, ninety miles away. I now turn to why my parents chose to attend the Unitarian Church.

1.5 What Unitarianism Means to a Child

Defaulting to the least common denominator so they would not have to be confronted by a Christian minister who might question their discordant beliefs, my parents were married by a Unitarian minister. Unitarianism would be the faith of choice for my mother; my father defaulted to her decision as it was just easier to go along the path of least resistance. Unitarians were nonjudgmental, welcoming, and imposed no rules or regulations, and that may have included the Ten Commandments too! My mother had home-court advantage and the ultimate say about their place of worship. I do not think my dad thought this counted as worship.. Therefore, my parents did not have a traditional, let alone a Christian ceremony. Their wedding was not based on a holy matrimony. Decades later, while obtaining my Greek citizenship, I learned my father did desire such. My mother confided that my father had also wanted to be married in the Orthodox Church as if to validate or sanction vows made in an unremarkable house by a minister that wasn’t even Christian.

Why would this be important, you ask? I have since come to believe that the basis of such a hallowed commitment as marriage should compel one to have sacred vows taken. This foundation was never established with my parents. My father didn’t even tell his parents about his getting married until sometime well after the fact! But I digress. Life was free and easy for us kids, and we never really even thought about going to church, but when we moved to South Carolina, we found the oasis in the desert, a Unitarian Church in a sea of Christian ones. My parents took us there. There they accepted everybody, celebrated differences, and didn’t make a fuss over Jesus or anybody for that matter.

My early experiences in the Unitarian Church as a youth were gratifying, as they were concerned with cultivating our minds and imagination. There were many trips to nearby places that explored history and science, and other ways of life. As you can imagine, the Unitarian Church membership in this area was minuscule. Its members were well-educated, good-humored, liberal-minded, and tolerant folk and certainly unreligious in any conventional sense. Most had rejected the religious foundations of their youth, so there were ex-Catholics, former Jews, those who had no raising whatsoever, a few displaced Yankees, and then the garden variety disbelievers who chose to divest their energies elsewhere. I remember with fondness my Sunday school teacher, Miss Sylvia Tan, who took me under her wing. Our little clutch of youth was separated from the teenagers’ side of the doublewide that served as our classroom. These teenagers cut out pictures from Life magazine to paste onto a wall that was to be covered by a mass mural, a collage of images that depicted their feelings about the Vietnam War. By and large, they were photos of demonstrations or gatherings of hippies promoting peace and free love; I thought it was so cool. Jesus, however, was not in the mix. Our class focused on Nature, like universalism plus pan-theism. Being in nature, learning about ecology, exploring how Indians (who were not yet Native Americans) lived and what other (primarily non-Christian) religions espoused was their cup of tea. I just had no idea what they believed in other than choice. We took many field trips to nearby farms and went on short day hikes at popular trails in this mountainous region. In adolescence, I received several books on Native Americans, complete with impressive photographs of them in various stoic stances and explanations detailing their sad historic plight. I would peer into their stoic countenances and poured over the details of their way of life for hours on end. I became fascinated with their honoring spirits in sacred locales, their concept of life being cyclical, and I would love to draw pictures of them astride their horses. When my Great Aunt Carrie would come and visit us, she bought me books to encourage whatever passion I had; she also gave me many picture books on Native Americans, or Indians, as we called them back then. I recall a commercial that showed an Indian with a single tear running down his cheek, expressing silent anguish over the damage we Americans had done to the land once we had taken it from them. That they saw all of life interconnected and that we don’t really own anything, that we are here to borrow, protect, and preserve life, made total sense to me! Their conservationism and respect for life I adored and emulated as I innately knew that there is an order to things, and part of this order precludes we are to take care of the planet because something even greater takes care of us. I didn’t know what or who this was, but the fact held, and the search was on.

As I grew older and moved to the next youth group, we investigated what other religions espoused. We were told repeatedly that whatever we ultimately came to believe would be what we decided upon for ourselves. This approach sounds good on paper, but it is not a particularly helpful or useful answer to a pondering youth not knowing what the adults around her believed. My younger sister latched onto a girlfriend of hers with a more conventional family; they went to a regular church, and she was taken in by the love and tender attention she felt when she attended a local Methodist Church with her friend’s family. My mother bided her doing this because she understood that, more than anything, my sister’s motivating force was just to fit in. She was too young to understand their beliefs. I was older, and my pursuit was more intent. In fact, at the time, had I gone to this church, I’m not sure I would have thought that Jesus loved me or that I had a friend in Him. After all, seeing as how He was dead and that the people I knew who went to His church weren’t particularly fond of me reduced the chances of creating interest. Such a spark starts with one person caring, and I had no such person take me in and in this manner. Yes, I did have my uncle, who was also technically my godfather, but he lived nearly a thousand miles away, and he was more of a stranger than family to me. We had no other family or relatives down here. I would yearn for and subconsciously substitute other dear ones for lack of aunts, uncles, and cousins nearby. Little could I have known then that at midlife, I would come to gain a church family that would grow on me to the point that they became my brothers and sisters in Christ. In some sense, I felt closer to them than my flesh and blood siblings because we had the same foundational beliefs; the adults in my family avoided the topic of religion, especially Christianity. As far as visiting relatives went, we only saw only our maternal grandma and grandpa twice a year and my dad’s parents every other year. We eagerly awaited my grandparents’ big, blue Buick, full of Santa’s presents at Christmas time, come up our driveway.

Christmas meant Santa Claus and gifts; we never mentioned baby Jesus in our house unless He happened to come up when we sang Christmas carols. My sister and I loved to sing Silent Night in harmony together, and I did have an oddly special and sweet feeling inside when I sang about the little Lord Jesus. In general, though, He was not in my life. The second time we spent time with my grandparents was for a month during summer vacation. My parents packed up us kids along with our flowered suitcases in the Plymouth Fury station wagon. We drove for ten hours up to their cottage, which was situated on a small, pristine lake in northern Indiana, and there we’d hunt for turtles and frogs, swim daily, and generally romp about like children are meant to. Later, I would compare this place to our own Garden of Eden, as it represented our family’s time of innocence. I turn back to the topic of my religious foundation again, however.

At our local Unitarian Church, not only did we have one black family and my Greek dad who attended, but