Ms. Elissa Bjeletich: It is Sunday night, January 5, 2020, and we are live on Ancient Faith Radio. I’m Elissa Bjeletich, and this is Everyday Orthodox. We get together here every Sunday night on Ancient Faith Radio to build community and conversation, to get to know another wonderful Orthodox person. I just want to say: welcome back from our break, Christ is born! to those of you who have celebrated Christmas already, and those of you on the old calendar: you’re almost there! Of course, a blessed Theophany coming up tomorrow to all those on the new calendar. What a beautiful season it is of wonderful, beautiful feast days.

I am so excited to have tonight a wonderful guest. I’m excited to be introducing you to this woman that I met at the Ancient Faith Women’s Retreat, which is an annual retreat we’re doing the first weekend of the Nativity Fast, every year I think. We’ve done it twice now. I think it’s just going to go on and on forever because we just keep selling out Antiochian Village in Pennsylvania, and we have people coming in from all over the country and getting together. We listen to wonderful speakers and we get to know each other. Honestly, it’s a really beautiful event. I met several people whom you’ll be hearing on this show at that event because there are so many fascinating people, and we could sit up late at night and hear people’s stories and be amazed.

So tonight I’m bringing you someone from that very event, and her name is Laura Lee Orser. Laura Lee is just fascinating. I love her. She is a convert, and actually in a way she has two life stories, because they’re kind of bifurcated. She was an entrepreneur. She had been a CEO and president of different companies, and she was a business woman. She converted to Orthodoxy, she was married, and then she lost her husband to tragedy. She did raise her two boys, and she had a good life. But then when she was 39, she had a terrible accident. She suffered a motor vehicle accident. She had brain damage and will tell us all about it. There’s some injuries that were really difficult to get past, but, you know, as it happens, God is always with us when we go through these things, and in the end I think she’s come away with a lot of wisdom. I really enjoyed getting to know her and hearing her story, and I can’t wait to have you be able to hear it as well, because in addition to these kind of crazy life events, Laura Lee is a poet and she’s an artist, and she’s just… she’s a kick. She’s really neat! So I think you’re going to love her.

Without any further ado— Oh, I do want to tell you. If you want to call in with a question, we are live tonight. It’s 1-855-AF-RADIO; that’s 1-855-237-2346. We have Bobby Maddex here, engineering; he’s taking your calls. Of course, we’ve always got our chatroom open. Come to ancientfaith.com/radio/live and you can join the conversation there. We have a lot of ways for you to get involved and we hope to hear from you. You can join this conversation—but, Laura Lee, welcome to the program!

Ms. Laura Lee Orser: Hello, hello!

Ms. Bjeletich: [Laughter] It is so good to have you on the show, Laura Lee. I’m so glad you were able to come.

Ms. Orser: Yes, I’m glad I’m finally through the door. It’s something to think about ever since you asked me. I was pretty excited, but time does take its time. We went through the holidays and everything like that. I’m glad to be here tonight. Thank you.

Ms. Bjeletich: It’s great. Yeah, it has been a while. It’s been a few months. I’m so glad that you’re able to join us. Now, start us out right at the beginning. You were born… You weren’t Orthodox, right? Where were you born and what was your childhood like?

Ms. Orser: I was born in Canada, in the northern part of Ontario, so it was very backwoods, really. It was outside even of a mining town, so there was a lot of impoverishment already, but then we had our own large family, yet there was also different… Polish and French that were up there, so we were really even a minority, being sort of more Dutch and Scottish. It was a mining town, and though my dad was a bush pilot up there and everything, a traveling salesman.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, wow. So wait, he was a bush pilot? You know what, nobody’s ever said that to me before: My dad was a bush pilot. What does that? I hear that phrase. What does that mean? You know what I picture, honestly, is a plane that lands on water, but it doesn’t, right?

Ms. Orser: Exactly, with the pontoons and everything.

Ms. Bjeletich: Was it? Really?

Ms. Orser: Traveled north. He had the most phenomenal logbook and everything. I mean, his passion. He loved flying. His life would have taken a whole different direction I think if maybe he had just done that instead of the traveling salesman part through the ‘50s and ‘60s and stuff.

Ms. Bjeletich: So was he traveling in the plane, or were those two separate things? One was that sometimes he went off traveling as a salesman, but at another time he was a bush pilot flying around, making deliveries and giving people rides places and things?

Ms. Orser: Yeah, they were two separate… Maybe I learned a lifestyle from him, because some of it overlapped and everything. At different points he owned planes, but the real money-making was in the sales. He had been in fixing TVs and really an electronic man and everything. He and my husband both would have been so great to live up to past 2000, because both electronically and Y2K and all this stuff with that would have been so exciting for them. But they both never experienced any of that. So he was gone a lot.

Ms. Bjeletich: Right, because both of those jobs require travel. He’s either off selling things, or he’s off flying off and doing other things. So what was it like at home? You mentioned there were a lot of kids in the family, and there was not a lot of money in the family or in the area. What was it like growing up with all your siblings and dad not home? How was it?

Ms. Orser: Well, I was second youngest of seven, and so we were all very close: not even two years; my one brother and I are 13 months apart. So we were the second youngest. As children I had a happy spirit in that I think God has always gotten me through life with, seeing the humor in anything no matter how dark.

Ms. Bjeletich: People underestimate that, right? Having a sense of humor will get you through a lot of tragedy, as you well know. That’s kind of the thing that keeps you sane through it, isn’t it?

Ms. Orser: Oh, these last years before coming into Orthodoxy, I had heard the expression, “Laughter is healing’s handmaiden.” I would say that all the time to everyone and get them to laugh, because when you have to do that… Anyways, it was certainly a handmaiden for me to get through, yes.

Ms. Bjeletich: That is beautiful. So as you’re growing up in this small town, did you think… Did you plan to go off to college or did you go straight into working afterwards? Was that even part of the culture there? How did your life begin to unfold?

Ms. Orser: Oh, no. Yes, I was raised in a very gender-biased home. Men weren’t allowed to cook or anything like that, yet my mother could not cook. She had been a nurse, but then married right away and never practiced later once the kids were older and she just sort of had to be a money source, doing a lot of raising us alone. But she gave really mixed messages, and I have really learned… So she has passed away, too, and everything; both my mom… My dad died when I was a teenager, and then my mom in my 20s when my kids were just toddlers, young. I had a lot then, just coming out of the teens myself. I hadn’t worked out things with my mom. I had gone through my teens, so it was a more tumultuous relationship and really unrequited tensions, and then she passed away within two months of cancer. Being younger in the family, she was older when I was through these teen years and everything.

There was a lot unresolved, but I learned in the last few years again, God keeps healing my story, and I heard someone say something one time. They were talking about their mom, and they said their “dear mother,” and God really put in it my heart, and I thought: No matter what the time… Because sometimes I have to tell for my own healing the story about my mom. It’s not how I want to have honor, and I have this really mixed experience of such respect for her, for the things that she was right in and had a real early wisdom in, and her hidden skills that she didn’t get to hardly show because of what was going on for her with very serious depression and very serious mental issues, very serious health issues. But I learned to say, “my dear mom,” and I decided that if I ever say anything about my mom, I’m going to say, “my dear mom.”

That has just been the last few years, and I love to sort of have that, remember that. I almost now, even right now as I’m talking about her, then I think to say “my dear mom” in anything that I’m going to say about her, because her heart, I know, was good. I feel like I got a lot of all of my anything that is innate… One woman one time—it was the most humble and wonderful compliment that I was able to hear, and she said, “You just have such an innate elegance. I have to work at that, and I’ll put a scarf on. You just…” It made me hang my head and feel my heart. I just thought that was such beautiful words. I’m always hearing in words, so that really landed. That is so from my mom. I get my brains, I think, from my dad, and my humor, I like to think, but I actually sometimes kid with my sons, because I do have the mother-humor that all mothers I think have, and it’s so corny.

Ms. Bjeletich: It is corny, but it’s wonderful and it keeps us going, I think. [Laughter] So your parents, though, passed away when you were pretty young. In your adult life you haven’t really had them around. Do you think that that…? Are there other people that you’ve leaned on instead, or did that make you sort of rely on yourself to take…? I’ve heard people say that their parents continue to take care of them as adults, that they’re always nurturing them. Some of us don’t really have that experience; some of us do. You didn’t have your parents around any more. What was that like for you? Do you feel like it mad you stronger?

Ms. Orser: Both of the shocking and sudden, so I had to sort of push me through, I call them port-holes, like a burning, fiery port-hole. I was through and into a different world then. I thank God, I always thank God that I had the best friends in my life. The one gift I got when my parents finally moved to southern Ontario—it was into a suburban area, and very even upper-middle-class families. We came down like the Beverly Hillbillies in all these cars!

Ms. Bjeletich: Coming down from the mining town with the bush pilot…

Ms. Orser: And the cats pouring out and everything. It was a place where a big family was like three people, if you had a third child. So we wheeled in there, and we all lived in this… It was a big house to us, because we had a bathroom and another toilet downstairs, whereas our bathroom up north had been… You actually had to go through it to get to the basement. It just was serving nine people, and the older ones had boyfriends and girlfriends over and everything. It was actually a sort of one-bedroom house, but my dad had put a division in the attic so that boys were in the one room, the girls were in the other, and then my parents actually divided the living room and had a bed in the… They put an accordion sort of room divider, and their bed was in there. We had a front door, like, this was it. As kids, it all seemed so fun, but the front door had no porch or stairs, so to us it was this door in the sky, like very C.S. Lewis. [Laughter] So they put the TV in front of it, and it was just one of those early TVs with the legs and everything. My dad, because of the company he worked with… Actually, that was another thing. We were always on leading technology. We weren’t allowed to go open that door; it was locked all the time. But my brother and I, when my mother most of my life was sleeping in bed, depressed, we did open that door a few times, and check what it was like to look down… When you’re only two and three years old, looking down… I mean, a porch should have been there. It was probably five or six steps down.

Ms. Bjeletich: And to a child’s eyes, this just becomes the most fun house, but in reality, looking back at it, your parents got a tiny, tiny house in the suburbs and moved all seven of you into a one-bedroom house, putting you up in the attic. That’s kind of amazing. How did you like the suburbs? I assume that the peer group was completely different when you got there. How did that go for you?

Ms. Orser: Yes, and we had been living in the one-bedroom house, and then we moved down south, and it had…

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, the new house has more room.

Ms. Orser: ...three bedrooms.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, okay!

Ms. Orser: And the basement was finished. Up north, my mother even used one of those wringer washers. She had to put nine people’s clothes through there. All I remember is this clothesline all the time and dishes all the time. She would actually have me iron the clothes. I would stand on a stool, and then the ironing board… You had to do it very militant. I had to do the collar first, and I had to do the heart-side down, the buttons and everything, and then the other side. I would say, “Well, why can’t I? What if I did the back first?” I was just not allowed. You had to obey. It was very “children are to be seen and not heard,” so you just didn’t even question. It was interesting until I had my own children to realize how much even my mom would say when I was holding—she did meet my children as infants—and I would talk to them and make sounds and help them and listen to their little sounds, and she’d look at them and say, “It’s like he’s really listening to you, Laura Lee!” What a novel idea, that children…!

Ms. Bjeletich: It had never occurred to her!

Ms. Orser: For her, it really was: feed them, change their diapers. It was a great time for her, because you needed her. An infant is just dependent. But it’s really just: you nurse them and change them, and then they… It’s almost like as they got older, you just… Whatever happened to them… It was very fair.

Ms. Bjeletich: It’s a little bit like growing plants. You water them, you take care of them, and whatever happens, happens.

Ms. Orser: Yep.

Ms. Bjeletich: It’s hard for me to imagine you with a parent who is sort of constantly having you work within the box, to have these rules about how things are done and always do it the right way. You strike me as a very free-spirited, creative person. Did you just kind of deal with that peacefully as a kid, or did you fight back?

Ms. Orser: Yes, that’s where I… I mean, I wanted to be a good child in my heart, but it was so… I had a great… I know now that I also had depression from childhood then, because it was a rejection all the time. It was always a sense that I could never be good enough. My siblings, each of us went through our efforts to find a way that would communicate to her that we’re trying to please her, or we did in some ways, but we just… By the time it was my turn, it really beat me down. It was like the little elephant who, when they chain them and they pull and pull and pull on it, and then they learn that they can’t so they just… It’s been the biggest struggle for me, even all these decades later, even to do my own writing and my own performance or any of the work that I do, the hardest thing is the mental message that is so subversive, that stands from even behind me, that’s invisible for me, saying, “You have no rights even to…” the metaphor of even the healing that came through my body that was saying, “Even breath you should share. You don’t have the right to your own breathing, your own space.” So I would write in the closet. It was funny when I said so literally that I was coming out of the closet with my writing, but I meant as a writer! [Laughter] And that expression has taken on new meaning now. I literally would be in the closet with the light, and my mom would open the door, and she’d say, “Now you don’t want to write anything people would want to read, Laura Lee.” So I would be obedient.

Ms. Bjeletich: Whoa.

Ms. Orser: I ripped all of those things up. I always shredded. I never would… When I would come to something that I thought, “Oh, someone might want to read that,” then I thought I’d better not write it. These were sort of almost pre-verbal messages. I had learned to read from the Bible, even before I went to school. Words were so powerful to me, and I loved that Jesus was the Word of God. These different messages, to learn them so early… God got to really speak to my life, but I have had to… The process of hearing God through the dark and the mixed messages. It’s almost like, as they say, when you’re trying to tune into a channel that’s so far away and you can hear it going wonk-wonk-wonk, but it’s like: Oh, there’s God! Oh, I heard that… Oh, there’s God!

Ms. Bjeletich: So did the family… Were you attending church? You had a Bible. Were they teaching you a lot about religion and faith as you were growing up, or is that more something that was happening to you on the side, that you were starting to hear bits and pieces and feel God, that he was somewhere out there?

Ms. Orser: Well, it was both because we were… My mom had come into sort of the mid-last century, the Pentecostal movements and stuff, but she, in her own depression, was sporadic at going, and then I remember one Easter my dad did show up and we went to church. We got Easter eggs and we got actually new clothes, a set of shiny white patent shoes. I would have black… I think my grandparents had sent the money or something like that. It was so phenomenal to remember getting this set of clothes.

My mom, she really knew the Bible so well. She would have me read. My sister got a… In those days, the kids in grade 5 were given little New Testaments, and they had the red words of Jesus, and they had the psalms and proverbs in the back. I thought this little book was divine, obviously. My mom had gone through a phase where—my dear mom… The idea of personal interpretations that can just be so… The enemy can use them so harshly. So my mom went through a phase where she understood that we’re to have no graven images, so she got rid of all photos, didn’t take pictures any more. She wouldn’t… She got rid of her good dishes, everything she felt she worshiped that was a false image that she didn’t want to put before God.

Ms. Bjeletich: Wow.

Ms. Orser: She had us sort of grow up in this, so we didn’t have even books. I have this Reader’s Digest encyclopedia/dictionary that she did have. My younger brother and I would do the classic looking through the Sears catalogues that came, and we would decide on each page: If you could only pick one thing, which would you pick? We would go through every page, the tools, the underwear. [Laughter] As kids, that was our… But we didn’t have toys. She didn’t believe any more in toys, anything that was a graven image.

Ms. Bjeletich: Wow. So in a way you can see there’s a consistency there: Don’t write anything anyone would want to read. Don’t own anything that you might love. It’s like, anything that opens you up and flowers too much is dangerous and you have to put it away. That’s a hard way to grow up. What ends up happening when you… I want to hear what happened when you left the house, because I know that you went into business and did all these things, and it’s hard to imagine how you moved from this to the next place. But I want to take a quick break first, because I definitely want to be able to hear the whole story. Just to remind our listeners, you’re welcome to call in at 1-855-AF-RADIO; 1-855-237-2346. We’ll be back in just a moment with Laura Lee Orser.

Ms. Bjeletich: And welcome back to Everyday Orthodox. Tonight we’re talking to Laura Lee Orser. Of course, we’re live so you’re welcome to call us if you like, at 1-855-AF-RADIO. That’s 1-855-237-2346.

So, Laura Lee, we’ve been talking a lot about your childhood, which was difficult and dark in a lot of ways. What happened when you left home? Because somehow you go from this life of… You go from this childhood to becoming Orthodox, getting married, having a career. What do you think… What was it like when you came out of the house, and what was it, do you think, that sort of opened everything up for you?

Ms. Orser: It definitely was more meeting my husband. He got to connect some dots for me that were just strings hanging with no knots or no connection. He sort of parachuted into my life, and my dad had just died. In our family it was sort of you had to marry and have children to get out quickly.

Ms. Bjeletich: Right, the fast path out.

Ms. Orser: So my older siblings were gone. Yeah, fastest.

Ms. Bjeletich: Really, that’s the fast-exit route. You set up a family, you’re done. So what was he like? What kind of a man was he?

Ms. Orser: His mind was so amazing. I mean, I could sit… Even the friend who introduced us said, “You’ve got to meet this guy.” She goes: “I don’t know how to say it, but he talks like you.” What she meant—she didn’t mean that disparaging or anything, and it was true. I have never met anyone to fill that other than… Just the great conversations we had. He was interested in psychology and history and sort of humanity, languages. He was going into seminary, a Baptist seminary, and he was going to be a minister, just at the cusp that I met him. We left the Pentecostal church, and I sort of had to do some rebelling with my mom because she had left the Baptist church to become Pentecostal, and then being so much at home with the TV evangelists, at that sort of time, by the ‘70s.

So I met my husband, and we were just very good friends. We were having prayer meetings together from the Pentecostal influence, the whole… We went to church sort of every day, we did Bible studies, but he was great with working with people on the street and working with developmentally challenged and working with… He just loved a broken soul, feeling that he himself, he understood so clearly. It was sort of tragic for me that I didn’t get to learn all of that until he was passed away and as the story unfolded, it did take a couple… It was mystical how much the truth of his story unfolded and came to me and then what I learned.

As I was this little young seminarian’s wife, there were some things I knew so darkly from the world and my house, my home life growing up had been… It was a sense of home, and I would go out. I literally didn’t know you go to a teacher, when I was going to school for… I didn’t know that they had any knowledge for me, that they had any… All I worried about my mom at home. I was her caretaker in my mind, even from the beginning. So it was sort of like: Why would I leave my mom? She needs me. You know, to do the ironing and to do the dishes and everything, and that will make her happy. So I ended up by then, even by grade 9 I was having trouble to understand even how you… That you have do study and you have to have a home setting and a social setting that supports that. I didn’t get even my high school [diploma], so it was nice to start. Even at seminary, they accepted me as a mature student and everything, but I got pregnant within the first year. So I didn’t get to…

Ms. Bjeletich: You didn’t complete the degree.

Ms. Orser: Yes, and then I didn’t also… I had no concept of how you’d be a mother and a working mother. All I had sort of was one step at a time. My brother was saying the other day, it was like we really only understood how to grab at the next opportunity, and especially if it seemed like a good opportunity. So you went with that. There was no concept of planning, because it was always sort of like a survival level, really. So everything that seemed… There would be almost no foundation under any of these opportunities, so it was the same. My husband and I, we went to seminary, but in his fourth year—by the third year, even—by all his research, he was beginning to say: There’s these people in California, and they’re trying to go back to being the authentic Church and the apostles. I remembered all these words. It was interesting, because even in his third year he was having me read Pelikan’s history—or Penguin’s, I forget which one—but they do this history of the Church, and that was phenomenal for me, that there was anything before King James!

Ms. Bjeletich: Right.

Ms. Orser: It was like, who was King James, even? People don’t realize all these things. So my husband had me learn even all the creeds. He had me learn what conference they came from—I’m forgetting the word right now.

Ms. Bjeletich: Councils.

Ms. Orser: The councils, yeah. So as I came up, there was nothing like that in Ontario or Canada at the time. To us, anything Orthodox was another language, was another… Everything up here was very… So the Romanians were Romanian, and the Greeks were Greek. You didn’t even really think even that much division. I would not have been able to tell you… I don’t think I ever used the word “Orthodox” in my life. I don’t think I ever…

Ms. Bjeletich: I think that’s so common. It’s common. I tell someone I’m Orthodox, and they’re like: “What?” Well, Greek Orthodox. “Oh, yeah, I guess I have heard of that, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox.” But it’s not… It doesn’t feel like an option. It feels like something people are born into.

Ms. Orser: I had a friend, and I said, “I ended up going into an Orthodox church. I’ve become Orthodox.” He goes, “Why would you even do that?” [Laughter] That question challenged… I was like, “Well… It was interesting! And it made me see how sometimes there’s no mindset to even explore it, and certainly the people that I have, as I’ve referred to anything of the Protestant… I got such a sound… God was in my heart, and all the women in Sunday school who taught me to memorize also, and they were there. Church was a very safe place. It was the only thing that… And it was actually a bus service that got me there on Sundays, not my parents or anything. So I went alone. They’d come, and I’d be in my pajamas. The bus captain would say, “Well, how long will it take you to get dressed? We’ll wait for you.” I’d run and get changed and go to Sunday school, and they’d pick me up for a Wednesday mid[-week] program, and they’d pick you up for prayer meeting.

Ms. Bjeletich: That sounds wonderful.

Ms. Orser: Yeah, it was quite…

Ms. Bjeletich: That is, it’s wonderful. I’m curious. Did you and your husband convert together, or did he pass away before you converted?

Ms. Orser: Yes, we actually even left faith, because we explored as far as we could, and it was just a ceiling. Even some of what happened with the church that we were working through to get his degree, he switched into social work at the university instead. Then we started doing a foster care. So he passed away before… He actually, he really returned to the world in a lot of tragedy. That’s a whole other story with an addiction history that I didn’t know of.

Ms. Bjeletich: Wow. Okay. So he passed away tragically, and you were left with two boys. Is that the point at which you went to work and became a businesswoman, developing… Was it a linen company? Was it a laundry service? What was that?

Ms. Orser: That was a major one, yes. It was a developing career. Everything I did business-wise, I just loved. I finally met a partner who became like a life partner, too, then, and I just loved business, and my dad had been working in business. I did so many business careers at one time. I do not know how I juggled everything. I was involved with a mall kiosk, owning a restaurant that had rental units upstairs, that people would eat out of the restaurant, and then I had a catering division to it, and then we had this laundrymat that was becoming the linen company incorporated into it.

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s so amazing!

Ms. Orser: Yeah, it just got done. I sold cars… You did things to make money at different points. I’d go out and get a job so that I could also get a second car. Very resourceful! It was an amazing story, yeah.

Ms. Bjeletich: So as you’re doing all of this, and meanwhile are you still writing poetry and performing poetry at the same time, or does that come later?

Ms. Orser: I was trying to write. It was always like this. The story, the short story, the novels, even trying to do some basis from my own story. I would always put things over my sink like biographies of people who made it. My partner became very destructive to tell me… It was again that message that said: Nobody’s going to read what you write, or Why bother, or You’ve got to do real work and get a real job, or We’ve got to make a thousand dollars more. So I had to, again, write in the closet, sort of. It was even having to learn the idea of whom you tell, especially the creative process. You have to go to safe… And now I have. I’ve learned… And even at the time, I would share with my friends or my sons would listen, and they would say, “Wow, that’s really good.”

But it wasn’t until the accident that I had this poetry start coming as this verbal cascade, I would say, that seemed to come from heaven or the sky. It just poured down on me like it was one word at a time, one syllable, and I would have a prompt that would say… One of the first ones that I did was called Stretch—my—heart—to love more. That line, which I’d have to run and get a pen, and the whole poem really came. Each sound, because by then I had had the car accident…

Ms. Bjeletich: Let’s slow down. Let’s slow down. So tell us what exactly… You were in a terrible car accident, right?

Ms. Orser: Yes.

Ms. Bjeletich: What kinds of injuries did you have? What exactly happened to you?

Ms. Orser: I was driving on a highway, one of the main… 401 in Canada, and it had been a beautiful January, so the days were being very almost summery that year. But then they would… You’d go into the night and the winter. This is years into my career, my husband was passed away, my partner and I are separating, and I had gone… On my own I had decided maybe I should consider: What if there’s no God? I had never thought that, but instead of having any resources that would… Because I had no church, I had no friends who were…

Ms. Bjeletich: You had no support team that would come in and say to you and encourage you to say: Reach out to God right now. You didn’t have any of that, so of course you’re just sort of struggling to figure it out.

Ms. Orser: One wonderful story: My partner, his mother had been—he’s older than me—but his mother had been a devout Catholic woman, always praying. I never met her; she had passed away, but through some of her things. She had the most beautiful Theotokos.

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, like an icon!

Ms. Orser: The bust of her. They often more will have [them in] the Catholic worship. I have a Scottish background, so my grandmothers would not have… They would roll in their grave, you know. [Laughter] They were very discriminating and prejudiced. Those were the times, and vice versa. We were not allowed to… Actually, the street I grew up on, the Catholics lived on the one half, and anything else lived on the other half. We were not allowed to talk. We’d talk at the end of our boulevards, and the mothers would come out, and they’d say, “Come on in, get in the house.”

Ms. Bjeletich: Oh, that’s bad! Oh my goodness!

Ms. Orser: I know! And we had the divided… There was the big St. Mary’s High School and St. Jerome’s, and then the public school that everybody else went to. It was fortunate, because when I got to high school, it was the first year that even the Catholic school started saying if people want to go to the public school, they can. So we started mingling more and getting to realize we’re all human together. Even when we were little kids and wanted to talk or play with the people who lived across the street from us, we missed some of that. We got to talk.

I always think of how she was just so beautiful. I put her in—I had a big walk-in closet, so I put her in on my shelf, and I would… I didn’t know to cross myself at the time, but it was like: God forgive me if my grandmothers would roll in their grave, but… [Laughter] When I think, after I became Orthodox, it was a way that showed me how much the Theotokos has always been in me, and even with Scottish background, my mother was a Mary, her mother was a Mary, and we have names like Alexander and Andrew. So I always tell the story of my grandmother who knelt down every night and every morning, and you could hear her list everyone’s name. All I wanted to do when I was little was be able to pray at the side of my bed when I would visit at my grandmother’s house longer than her! [Laughter] But as a little child, I didn’t have the… [Laughter]

So these are the things. And to learn that the Orthodox, like the apostles each went all over the world! St. Thomas went to India, and St. Mark went down through Africa, and St. Andrew went up through all of my country, and the Russians, and everything like this. These things are hidden still, or are at least practiced without even people knowing the reasons. Here it had transversed, or whatever the word would be, all the way to me, generations later. Now as I do those lists, now I pray for my grandmothers and their parents and my parents; my children and grandchildren who have yet to be born, sort of.

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s right. That’s right, it’s so beautiful.

Ms. Orser: And for all of us.

Ms. Bjeletich: It’s so beautiful a thing to be connected in that way. I love that, as someone who grew up in a Protestant tradition as well, it is really healing to feel that there’s a connection with your grandmothers, although of course they weren’t Orthodox and they probably wouldn’t have liked the idea of Orthodox, but there is this connection in praying for other people. That’s very beautiful.

I want to make sure that we talk a little bit, before the hour is up, about how you fought your way out of the brain injuries that you’ve had, because you had really significant injuries after this car accident. You were 39 at the time?

Ms. Orser: Yes, just about turning 40.

Ms. Bjeletich: It’s hard when we’re older to redevelop our brains and to rebuild and to fix everything. What gave you the strength to be able to get through that? What were you doing? Because you weren’t yet in the Church. You were on your own. How did that unfold for you, and how did that end up bringing you into the Church?

Ms. Orser: Oh, it was very hard. It was actually nothing that I would have chosen. I mean, my life only kept getting darker. My choices would just… It’s almost like even when you do one sin, it’s easier to do the next ten or to do that one again. And then once you have an accident, one of the things that has been part of the healing to forgive myself is even… Because there was frontal brain… I was hit, first of all, right in the driver’s side, right by the first transfer, and then the second one hit from behind, so it was all forward motion. Everything was very internal, which was so interesting. I had no scarring on the outside. It was like my life always had been this. We would present… We were a very sort of handsome family. My parents were both attractive people, professionals and everything. They would be like, “Well, these are nice people.” It just didn’t… One neighbor had always thought it was there. The police when they came [thought] they were there for the neighbor’s teenage boy. They didn’t realize that it was ever… So this accident continued to be that same…

My lungs were hemorrhaging down to a sac of blood on my abdomen, and it would just blow into my heart. It was up through my brain. They were saying it was so amazing… I would lie in bed sometimes and think before I had come back to faith that the God of my childhood in my heart, I know that I still had a sense of prayer, too. It was like there must be something that I continue to live, because even when my husband died, I would just feel… It was so hard to feel like: I have to live now. When I had the car accident, I said to the ambulance driver—I came to for a minute—I just needed her; I grabbed her arm to say, “Please tell my sons I tried to live,” because when you have that, everything’s passing before you as all the windows are shattering and your car is spinning and you’re out of control and your life passes, my sons were the main thing in my life and in my mind everything was about…

I didn’t want them to live the long life without a parent that I had, even at that stage, at 39, they had already had to… They had participated in my husband’s parents passing, my parents… So it’s sort of like: I wanted, like I said to them: Parents don’t usually die like this. My one son did have two of his young friends also have their fathers pass away. By the third one, I said to my son—he was only, like, eight years old—and the mother had the boy called him, because Matt would know how to handle things; he’s had it. Matt hangs up the phone, and I said, “What was that conversation?” So he tells me so-and-so, his good friend’s father had just died. I sat him down, and I said, “Matt,” and that’s when I said that. Parents, fathers don’t die. I know you’re having this situation…

Ms. Bjeletich: I know you keep saying this again and again, but I promise you, this is not how it always is.

Ms. Orser: So I think when I had the accident, that was still… He was 15 when that happened, and my other son was almost 18 or whatever, and so all of it to say… In all of the aloneness, I also just ended up… There was so much going to ground. Again, I didn’t know, like going to teachers for help. I didn’t know a doctor would help you. We were even very… I was raised against most… to not trust professionals. So fortunately when I came into Orthodoxy, that was one of the things my priest, Fr. Christopher Rigden-Briscall, he was just such a shepherd, and he even saw right through all of these things. He got me down a stream of the people who, even after a lot of struggle, both alone and through the professionals who were doing literally harm—but they couldn’t have done otherwise—in a way I wouldn’t have known how to stay on the different supports that would have been able to help me, because that was the thing. I had been trained: You don’t trust them. I was sometimes in shelters.

Ms. Bjeletich: Right, so all of these various things available to help you, you’re struggling against this training to distrust it and not to take advantage of it. Oh, that is… That’s really a profound impact from your childhood and growing up. So eventually, though… I mean, now you’re doing so much better. Before, you, of course, as you said, you were struggling to breathe. How did you come out of this? What do you think it is that got you through it?

Ms. Orser: Oh, definitely to me, I was able to come back to faith and God. It was such a welcome. It was truly like the prodigal. I was in the pig-pen. I describe it as I was in quicksand up to my face and I couldn’t even move any more. I even knew I’m sinking. All I can do is sort of… So this amazing process of being… It was miraculous that I ended up being taken to this English-speaking Orthodox church that had just opened up a year or two before in our area. There were so… I have never learned so much in my whole life since I came into the Orthodox Church, for everything, and just constant. Healing, healing, healing, the washing. I would say to my priest: It is brain-washing! My brain was so dirty! [Laughter] I needed it like a car wash, and it felt good. I was so happy. I got back to the joy of life, back to a forgiveness of myself, to find even the hierarchy that I could have a respect. For the first time I could experience self-respect because I could respect an external authority and love them and be loved by them safely and wonderfully and healingly and provisionally and protectively. I just say so many… I’ve learned a compassion that is truly the idea of the world doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, so it doesn’t know the Church, this gem in the world that we do. We’ve all been praying for the monastics who are up there doing their work, like the one poet Orthodox, the one monk. He describes it, St. Ephraim, he goes: They’re bees in a hive. It was so beautiful.

Ms. Bjeletich: Yes, it is beautiful. Oh my goodness. So as you’ve come out… I’m just so, first of all, impressed with how well you’ve managed to come through all of this, because of course you start out with such a difficult situation and you lose your husband. And here you are, the mother of two boys, you have this wonderful history, first of business and then of really clawing your way back from injuries. How is everything now? How is your life? What are you doing?

Ms. Orser: Well, the last two years have been some type of turning that I have been able to have… This year I go in with the most hope I’ve ever had coming into a year, the most peace regarding the past year. Last year was the first I did resolutions almost since I was… I’ve always liked the idea of them. Since I was 35 or something I thought so discouragingly and so bitterly that there’s no use to do resolutions, because I cannot make any change in my life. I was like a victim. I would work as hard as I could, but everything was going to go wrong, or decide things that were going to hit, like Mack trucks. But the last two years… So this year, too, I am so happy, Elissa. And it’s a happiness that only… It’s that deep… It’s from the love of God, the joy of Christ, of all of these amazing witnesses, like his Mother, his friends the apostles, and the truth of this story that has begun to live in my life, in my heart, in my body. I mean, as we go to the chalice and the priest says, “For the healing of soul and body,” and as we do the service we cross and we touch the ground—I always touch the ground when he says, “And for all mankind,” and I have such a…

Ms. Bjeletich: That’s beautiful.

Ms. Orser: Yeah, the promise of that: all those that we love, yes.

Ms. Bjeletich: And we carry it right here in the new year. Ah! Glory be to God. Laura Lee, thank you so much for coming on the show. It has just been absolutely a joy to be here with you tonight.

Thank you so much to our audience for tuning in. Join us again next Sunday to meet another wonderful everyday Orthodox person. Good night, all of you. Thank you so much!