Welcome to the inaugural episode of Light Streams In. I’m Elissa Bjeletich Davis, and I’m really glad you’re joining me. This is our first episode, so I feel like I need to tell you who I am and what we’re doing here.

We’ll start with who I am. I’m also the host of Everyday Orthodox on Ancient Faith Radio, and I love Everyday Orthodox. On Sunday evenings we get together, and I interview a different Orthodox person every week. We just sit and listen to their life story. I feel like we need some practice listening to people, and I just feel like our world, everybody’s so divided. We Orthodox are divided into jurisdictions and use different calendars and languages, but also we’re all divided politically, and we’re divided in a million different ways. And I think it’s so beautiful to get together and listen to each other and get to know each other and start to be connected. So that’s what that podcast is, and I really love it.

Actually, I’m sort of thinking about that as part of a project for Light Streams In as well. I find that there’s just a lot of darkness in the world right now. I want to help all of us turn and look at Christ, and look toward the light. So I can tell you, I got started with Ancient Faith about ten years ago. I actually had a child—I have a whole lot of kids, but my youngest was in liver failure and was awaiting a transplant in the hospital, far away from my home. So I was writing. I was writing this blog, giving people updates on her health. And while I was doing it, I needed something to write every day, and if you’ve ever had someone with a long, chronic illness, you know that there’s not an update every single day. So I would make one up, and I would just tell my friends what I was thinking about, and it ended up being a really lovely collection of reflections, and it was published as a book by Ancient Faith. It’s called In God’s Hands, and it came out in 2013.

But when we were working on that, Katherine at Ancient Faith asked me, “How are you going to market that?” and I didn’t want to sound dumb and be like: “I don’t know how to market anything,” so I said, “Well, what is usually the most effective marketing strategy for this demographic?” And she said, “Our podcasters sell a lot of books.” And I thought, “Oh! Podcasting! I love podcasts.” So I have been listening to Ancient Faith Radio from the beginning, and I have learned so much from Ancient Faith. I love it so much—I’m a donor; I’m a fan. So I was like: “Yeah! I’d love to write a podcast!”

So I started a podcast called Raising Saints. And Raising Saints is about religious education, really. It’s for teachers and for parents and for anyone who talks to kids about the faith. And we did 85 episodes here on Ancient Faith, and I kind of ran out of topics, honestly, after a while. But also, the more I was working in religious education and I started going to conferences and talking to people and the more I thought about it, I really felt like we can do whatever we want, educating kids, but when you send them home, if the parents don’t love the faith, too, then it doesn’t take hold in the same way.

So I started thinking about family ministry. And my friend, Caleb, and I actually wrote a book called Blueprints for the Little Church, and it was aimed at families. Then I also wrote a book called Welcoming the Christ Child, which is still one of my favorites. And it’s about the Nativity Fast. It gives readings for a family to go through on the Nativity Fast. Like a Jesse Tree, it moves through the whole Old Testament, but it talks about how God prepared the world and how we prepare our hearts for Christ. It’s got matching ornaments; it’s very cool, so I love that project. And I just kept going with stuff aimed at families after that. So my friend, Kristina, and I started Tending the Garden of Our Hearts, which is a podcast and a book and all that stuff. And you can find that on Ancient Faith, too.

But now I find that I’m writing a lot of things that are aimed at children and their families, and the thing is that I spend a lot of my time talking to adults! [Laughter] And sometimes people invite me to a family retreat or a women’s retreat, and I would be talking, and I’d find that we really wrestle with a lot of different issues as adults. And the truth is being a teenager, being a kid is a really hard time, but being an adult is also a really hard time. And there are all kinds of topics we just don’t necessarily cover enough in the Church, like parenting teens and single parenting and divorce and all kinds of stuff, and people who want to have families and don’t—what about all of this stuff? There’s so much struggle in the Church.

So anyway, I’m thinking about that. And the other big thing is when you work in youth ministry you hear a lot about: Why are all the young people leaving the Church? Like, what are we going to do about all these college students and young adults who leave the Church? But the thing is, if you look at the research, if you go to the Pew Research website and look at their recent stuff from September 2022, they actually say that everyone’s leaving! Not everyone, but every age group. People in every age group—baby boomers, people like me who have adult and middle teenage kind of kids. All sorts of people, at any age, might be rethinking it right now, and honestly I think a big part of it is COVID. We’ve gone through a collective trauma in this culture.

And it’s a lot of things about COVID. I think COVID obviously isolated us, but it also really divided us. We fell into two camps. And in the Church, sometimes we fell into two camps, and sometimes in our parishes it’s like half the parish is angry because they don’t want to wear masks and the other half of the parish is angry because they won’t wear masks. It’s divisive, and it became political, and it’s ugly. And the truth is, we have a huge political divide in America. We have some, I would say, even cultural divide between conservatives and liberals. And it’s funny, because when you talk about people leaving the Church, if you’re talking to a conservative, they assume everybody’s leaving because all the liberals are talking down God. And then liberals immediately assume everybody’s leaving because all the traditional hardliners are pushing people out of the Church.

And I’m just really tired of the division. I’m really tired of it, and I think that God’s project is always to unite us; it’s always to bring us together. And Satan’s project is to isolate us. He wants to get you alone in a corner, as isolated as possible, so that you will destroy yourself—because you’re built for relationship. We’ve got— The Holy Trinity is a community of love. You’re built in God’s image, and you’re trying to grow into his likeness. We need community, and the enemy knows that, and he wants to divide us, and, oh my gosh is it working right now! It’s so painful. It’s so painful. I hate the feeling of being divided. I hate seeing friends of mine feeling divided. I hate all of it.

I think the Church has to witness to our loving God at all times, and that is not the hierarchs and the priests—that’s us! That’s every one of us. We are responsible. If the Church is divided, that means we are divided. That’s not somebody else’s problem; that’s my problem! That’s all of us. You think about the good Samaritan. It’s not just: this guy got beat up on the side of the road and people are passing him by, and what they really need to do is stop and take care of him.

He’s not just gotten beat up by robbers physically, but that can mean someone who’s going through a spiritual battle, too. That could be he’s been beat up by the enemy, he’s been beat up by the difficulties of the world, he’s been beat up by political division and COVID and all these things, like so many of us are kind of broken and beaten up and left for dead on the side of the road right now. And we need to be the good Samaritan, the unexpected one, who shows up and who cleans his wounds and puts healing oil to make him feel better, puts him on our donkey, and we’ve got to carry him to the hospital. And we’ve got to take care of each other. We have to take responsibility for each other. I don’t quite know how to make that change, but I do feel like, one person at a time, we can talk to each other, and we can take care of each other.

So I’m involved in a group called YES; that’s Youth Equipped to Serve. It’s a part of FOCUS North America, and it’s amazing. I think it’s the best youth ministry in the world. I think it’s fantastic. I was blown away by it the first time I saw it, because it really witnesses to Christ and to his love. We just sit down with kids and sometimes adults, and we talk to them about the kingdom of God, what’s it like in the kingdom of God. And there’s no division in the kingdom; there’s no pain, there’s no suffering, there’s no hunger. You feel loved in the kingdom; the kingdom is love.

And so my friend, Christian Gonzalez—you probably know him from other Ancient Faith places—he worked with YES when he was younger, and he would say to the kids, “Pretend you’re an alien from outer space, but the planet you’re from is the kingdom of God. Like, I come from the kingdom where there’s no suffering, nobody’s ever mean, nobody’s ever nasty, nobody’s ever hungry. And I’ve come down to earth, and I’m looking around, and it’s breaking my heart, what I’m seeing here. And so I want to bring a little glimpse of the kingdom to all these earthlings who haven’t seen it.” At YES, we would call those kingdom moments. There are moments when the kingdom breaks through and you can see the kingdom around you.

So we would say, if you go to someone on the street, say, and you’re talking to them and you’re looking them in the eye and you’re listening to them and you’re giving them dignity and love, that’s actually more important than giving them food—but also give them food. We’re doing these things to meet their needs, and that’s communicating the kingdom; that’s witnessing to the kingdom. And so this is something that we can experience in our own lives. We can feel the kingdom of God, and then we can share it with others.

And we teach kids how to do it in YES. We talk to them about listening. We teach them something called active listening, which should come naturally to all of us, but it doesn’t. And it’s stuff like, when someone’s talking to you, listen. Don’t interrupt. Don’t be thinking about what your response is, because too often we do that, like someone’s telling you, “I’m really struggling with this class. It’s so hard,” and you should not answer, “Oh, yeah, I struggled with a class one time…” No, just listen. Don’t think about your answer. Just hear them. Nod; let them know that you’re listening. Communicate that you’re listening. Don’t look at your phone. And when they finish, take a breath, and respond thoughtfully to what they’ve said—not telling them your story, but just listening to theirs and responding to theirs.

That’s a powerful thing, and the truth is I’ve been to family ministry conferences where they’re talking about how to try to create ministries to take care of people in our parish, like what if there’s someone who’s widowed and what if there’s someone who’s divorced and what if someone’s going through addiction: how do we take care of them? I feel like if we were better listeners, we’d be halfway there. If we knew how to listen compassionately, how to put our own ideas and thoughts and kind of our arrogant idea that we know the answers, if we could put that away and just listen, I think it would be tremendous.

The other big thing we teach with the kids in the YES curriculum is we talk about the difference between the words “fix,” “help,” and “serve.” In a nutshell, if you think, “Oh, I’m going to fix this person,” that assumes that that person’s broken, you are whole, you have all the tools, you know what the problem is, and you’re just going to come in and fix them: you’re going to make them function properly. It’s arrogant! It’s very arrogant. That’s not what our Lord did. Christ goes up to people who are paralyzed, and he doesn’t even say, “Obviously, you’re paralyzed!” He says, “Do you want to be healed? Do you want to walk?” We need to start there. We need to have some humility, like Christ.

Even the word “help,” like we should help one another—we should help one another. When I say, “help,” what do you picture? I picture a hand coming down, like I’m standing and you’re lying on the ground, and I reach down, and I take your hand and I pull you up. The word “help” implies a difference in standing. The helper is higher than or doing better than the helpee. If you need to receive help, you’re in trouble.

But then there’s “serve,” and that’s the word our Lord uses, and “serve” is really different. “Serve” is like a server at a restaurant. If I’m the server, I’m lower than the guest. The person sitting at the table, ordering, and I’m bringing them their drinks and stuff: they’re higher. To be a server is to place the person you’re serving higher than you. It’s a position of humility, and all good Christian activity begins with humility.

So it’s just simple. It’s a simple thing. Listen to people. Look them in the eye. Think of yourself as serving them. Ask them what they need; don’t just assume. That’s really simple, but something amazing happens. At first, I think YES was teaching kids how to talk to homeless people, to people who were different than them, to people who were living a totally different life. Over the years, as you would talk to the kids as the years went by, it seemed like really digital devices were the problem, and the beauty of YES was that they were putting them down and interacting with people in person, like making eye contact and having these beautiful interactions, and that really was amazing to them and transformative to them, and it was beautiful.

And so after COVID, it’s changed again, and it’s like kids can’t even talk to each other. It used to be trying to help the kids approach people who were different; now it’s like: let’s just try to connect to people who are the same even! Can you talk to someone your own age, your own ethnic group, your own parish, your own town? Can you just interact with them? And sometimes that’s hard, because we’re just all so disconnected right now.

But I love the YES curriculum, and I love this whole idea, and I think it’s very true that when we’re prayerful, when we have an attitude of humility and we’re willing to empty ourselves to serve others—whether that’s in our home, at work, in our parish, in the community, wherever—I think when you have that, when you start from that foundation, that God rewards it, and he loves it, and he sends you connection, and not just to one another but to the kingdom. And you can feel the kingdom, and it’s amazing. I think that’s all that happens on YES trips. I think that’s what happens on pilgrimages. You put in the effort and you do something inconvenient, and that puts yourself aside and focuses on Christ, and Christ, he rewards it! He’s trying to train us to do it all the time.

But we’re all on this journey together. We’re all learning and growing, and we all fall down and get back up. That’s the rhythm of the Orthodox life: fall down, get back up, again and again and again. And sometimes that means that we help one another get up, or that we just sit around asking for God to help us get back up!

But I love St. Porphyrios. He’s my favorite saint, and he’s actually the inspiration for the title of this podcast, Light Streams In. He encourages us to really trust God. We don’t have to work to dispel darkness. We don’t have to fight darkness with darkness. If you see that the world is evil, you don’t have to spend all of your time just battling evil. Porphyrios teaches us that we just have to look to Christ, just open a window and the light will stream in and the darkness just disappears. You don’t have to figure out a way to eradicate darkness; you just turn on the light! And the darkness goes away, obviously. Because the truth is Christ has already defeated darkness; you don’t have to defeat darkness. Christ has defeated darkness; we just have to trust that.

So it’s my prayer that light will stream in for all of us, in all of our lives. I feel like we’re in a dark time and we need that light, and we need to remember to open the window. I think it begins with humility. I think we need to remember that we are limited and we’re not the ones who are going to fix everything, and we’re not expected to fix everything. God is going to fix everything. God is in charge. God has all the power, and we are just servants. We’re just here, below God and loving God and receiving good things from God. And when we can start with that humility and when we can begin to trust that God is going to send us good things, then we can come to a place where we can really believe that good does defeat evil and that Christ is truly good and that all we have to do is call in Christ, call in the good, and the evil will flee.

The spiritual life is hard. It’s really tricky. I mean, it all sounds so simple, but it’s not a straight line. You don’t just get holier and holier as the years go by—and it should be, in a way! Listen, when I’d lived through ten Lents, I was this much holy, but now I’ve lived through 30 Lents, I should be so holy!—no, it doesn’t work that way. There are ups and downs, and we fall. We run into problems. Our life circumstances change, and we have to adjust to those and figure out how our spiritual lives adjust to those. So I think we have to go easy on ourselves and recognize that sometimes we’re going to do really well, and sometimes we’re not, and we just want to hold onto the prayer of the father in the gospels, who brings his son for healing. Christ says, “If you believe, I can heal you,” and he says, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” Isn’t that us always? That’s me always, for sure. I believe—help my unbelief. Search around and find the corners where I don’t, and fix those.

So this podcast is not about keeping our youth in the Church; it’s about keeping anyone in the Church. The Church is not a prison where anybody needs to be locked in! [Laughter] We can build fences, but let’s not! This podcast is not about any of that, but it’s really… That idea is making me think: What is it that people need today that we aren’t getting? What is going off the rails? And I think we need the same thing that people have always needed. I think we need connection. COVID for sure interrupted that. Our increasing immersion in digital communication, social media, technology, that’s isolating us; that’s probably not helping with connection as much as we wish it would. I think that our politics isolate us. I think we need to connect to each other and we need to take care of each other in our parishes and in our homes.

I have friends who are frustrated with their parishes right now. Years ago, people used to say to me, “Oh, my parish doesn’t have a Sunday school,” and I’d be like: “Well, you know, I guess that means you need to start a Sunday school. You’re the one.” And if our parishes aren’t being loving and kind, that means we need to start being loving and kind—we’re the one! We’re the one who has to do it.

But I think the number one thing that we really need, that humans have always needed, is the kingdom. We need to experience God. We need to feel the peace of God. We need to be overwhelmed by the beauty and the generosity of the Father; we need to feel the love of the Son; we need to feel the Holy Spirit alive in us, energizing us. Orthodoxy tells us that God is everywhere present; he fills all things. But do we know that in our hearts? I think sometimes we do, and sometimes we don’t. And when we don’t, we need to remind ourselves: “Show yourself, Lord.” Just pray honestly. “Lord, I can’t find you. Show me. Come to me.”

And so I think we need to know that God is everywhere and that he’s right here with us, in our hearts. We need to know that we can pass that along to others and that we can help light the way for everybody else as we’re all sort of stumbling through this journey. So this podcast hopefully is going to be about opening the window and letting the light in, and it’s going to be about this journey of all of us trying to remember that God is always here with us, and trying to see him in all things.

So I want to close with St. Porphyrios, with a quote from him, because he’s our sponsor, of course; he’s our patron saint of this podcast. St. Porphyrios said,

All things around us are droplets of the love of God. The beauties of nature are the little loves that lead us to the great love that is Christ. Take delight in all things that surround us. All things teach us and lead us to God. All things around us are droplets of the love of God, both things animate and inanimate, the plants and the animals, the birds and the mountains, the sea and the sunset and the starry sky. They are little loves through which we attain to the great love that is Christ. Flowers, for example, have their own grace. They teach us with their fragrance and with their magnificence. They speak to us of the love of God. They scatter their fragrance and their beauty on sinners and on the righteous.

For a person to become a Christian, he must have a poetic soul; he must become a poet. Poetic hearts embrace love and sense it deeply. Make the most of the beautiful moments. Beautiful moments predispose the soul to prayer. They make it refined, noble, and poetic. Wake up in the morning to see the sun rising out from the sea, as a king robed in regal purple. When a lovely landscape, a picturesque chapel, or something beautiful inspires you, don’t leave things at that, but go beyond this to give glory for all beautiful things, so that you experience him who alone is comely and beauty.

All things are holy, the sea, swimming, and eating—take delight in them all. All things enrich us. All lead us to the great love. All lead us to Christ. Whoever loves Christ in other people truly loves life. Life without Christ is death. It is hell, not life. Life is Christ. Love is the life of Christ. Either you will be in life or in death; it’s up to you to decide.

Of course, that’s all from Wounded by Love, which is the most wonderful book about, at the time, Elder Porphyrios, who’s now St. Porphyrios.

I want us to go on this journey together and to look for God everywhere, to look for Christ everywhere. I want to work on becoming more aware of him myself. I figure you’re welcome on the journey, and you can do it with me! [Laughter] So, God willing, St. Porphyrios has agreed to be our patron saint. May he pray for me and for you and help us develop that beautiful certainty that the saints have, and may he help us truly feel the kingdom inside ourselves and amongst one another when we gather. I’ll see you next time on Light Streams In.