13 Years Ago

December 25, 2012 was the 13th anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood in the Orthodox Church. I remember how I was so hopeful and sure. I was also in disbelief that this was my life. I had fallen in love with the Orthodox Church after a prolonged search to quench my growing spiritual thirst.

Music had created that thirst. Beauty, simplicity, complexity, joy, pain, birth, death, order, harmony, dissonance, chaos, conflict and resolution, all filled my ears and welled up inside of me as I grew as a musician and was challenged by playing with musicians better than me. I tasted transcendence, something beyond the material that shook me to my core. There was more than just the here and now.

I moved to New York for the music, for Jazz and a life of art and creativity. I was accepted into a great jazz program. My transcript was rocky, but my audition got me in. 

I arrived and looked up a personal saxophone idol of mine. There he was in the phone book. Julius Hemphill  right there in the white pages. With trepidation I called, a women answered and gave him the phone. He said, "Sure, c'mon over." I was amazed, over-joyed. I headed uptown.

I arrived. He was on a bed with hoses and no shirt. He was dying. He was dying, but talking to a young saxophone player was worth his time. We talked. I was humbled. He gave me advice. He encouraged me to work hard. I left and knew I had experienced something truly special, a kind of blessing to follow my path. 

Somewhere that path and the Orthodox Church crossed. I had found an identity for my spiritual hunger. I found definition for all that the music had stirred inside of me. Over time, as I fell more deeply in love with the beauty of the liturgy, the certainty and antiquity, I felt I had found what music had been leading me to. I had found the place where I was to live. I always had problems with some of the teachings, but chalked it up to my pride. I believed that all would make sense in time. (That sounds so naive to my ears today). 

I wasted no time. Before I knew it, I had sold my saxes, and was applying to seminary. It all flowed. I had made musical connections in NY, but I let all of that go. There were chances to record, but I let that go. I had something better.

I struggled, I prayed, I learned and I advanced. I even legally changed my name from Wayne Christopher Swanson to my baptismal name of Christopher Adrian Swanson. By the time I left seminary, I was a priest heading off to my first assignment. Thirteen years after my ordination and I regret ever leaving the music and NYC.  The beauty and transcendence slowly faded into practice and form. The inspiration that fires so many who put theirs lives into the music they create didn't seem to emanate from all but a few. There was frequent talk, especially among clergy, of moralism and "right" this and that. Over time, that came to even mean politics. It seemed as if "preserving" this or that truth or practice was the most important task at hand. Somehow, God needed our vigilance for the teachings and traditions or the gates of hell would prevail.  I fought weariness more than anything. 

This was nothing like the experience of music that I had given up, but I was there and had hope that I would eventually see things differently. In my experience among jazz musicians, music was a place of good will, for the most part, and inclusivity. What mattered was whether or not you could play. Social causes and working toward something better for ourselves and the world was a common thread. We were called to give. In the end, the act of creating was a transcendent act of love of both self and other. 

Over time I grew to see that my hunger for the transcendence of music, was just that, a hunger for the transcendence of music. Rather than definitions and heaps of writings, rituals and rules, I needed to just grow and accept the unknowability of that transcendence. That's what inspired me. That's what made sense.

Now I doubt the very significance or relevance of a good deal of what the Orthodox Church teaches or does.  Of course, there is true beauty, piety, saintliness and holiness there. But, is it unique? Yes, in its expression. No, in its existence. One of my most powerful experiences with people absolutely fueled by an other-worldly goodness was at a Santeria ceremony in rural Cuba in 1991. It was part of my conversion. Oddly, I have hidden this story from many Orthodox Christians knowing that it would be dismissed or explained away as demonic. 

Is Orthodox Christianity the only path to God? No, maybe not even the best path. I've sincerely come to believe that it's just a path and maybe an unnecessarily thorny one. Are there teachings that fly in the face of my own conscience and sense of goodness? Absolutely. 1) Women are a second class, despite the party line. There is simply no theological reason for women to be kept out of the priesthood. The ranks of clergy is a boys club plain and simple. 2) I firmly believe that homosexuality is a living part of human sexuality. Paul is wrong and the Orthodox Church clinging to its opposition to it is hurting a lot of people and forcing others to live double lives. 3) Clergy and monastics are treated as superiors. All too often, they make their fringes long and covet the best seats at the banquet. I was right there too, but no more. Many of us are just fools. We are authorities on little more than a carefully constructed sense of our own authority as clergy. 

For years I have heard Orthodox Christians make critical remarks about how people would often say that they were "spiritual" but not "religious." I always understood what they were saying and sympathized. Now, I am one of those people. The Eucharist at its core has always been powerful and beautiful to me. So much in the Orthodox Church can calm and soothe with beauty and light, but the real message of the gospel, true love, openness and forgiveness are as present or absent there as anywhere.  I personally need to leave behind the beautiful, albeit incomprehensibly lengthy, prayers, concepts of heaven, medieval images of hell, grandiose titles and equally grandiose robes, and all the rest so that I can once again hear the still small voice of the divine in my daily life. I need to return to music, family, humanity and the inherent goodness I once knew there. To all my Orthodox friends and former parishioners, please forgive me if any of this causes you pain. The greatest joys in my priesthood and my life have been the people I have been blessed to meet and know. That will always be the case. The best thing about the priesthood is that close proximity to people whom you might never have met otherwise. I hope to continue my work in a way that still encompasses that reality. I'm not yet fully sure where "here" is for me now. Maybe I don't need to know. I honestly don't care enough to look for or to attempt to create a definition of this place. I know that I can no longer continue as I once was.

The heart of that will be me returning to music and hoping to once again build a life as an artist wherever that takes me. I'm reclaiming my given name and moving forward. This blog is about that.