Bonnie

A story I wrote for a discussion group I'm on. Someone mentioned he found it curious that so many 'counter-cultural' types were becoming Orthodox:

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I had this girlfriend once, her name was Bonnie. Pagan, wicca, vegan, into free love, occasional various mind-altering substances, you know the sort. Actually I liked her a lot. She had this way of pursing her lips and a strange hairdo that actually worked, which she made up herself. Met her at a poetry thing in San Francisco, on Bright Wednesday (the wednesday after Pascha ('Easter'), in other words after "the ordeal by fire and by water is over and we can once again draw breath", as the psalmist says (more or less)). Got a wild hair after talking with her about how she'd broken up the week before with her drug using boyfriend, and admittedly somewhat to impress her, i got up on stage, recited a poem i'd written a long time before about breaking up, and sang "Christ is risen" in Byzantine Greek, figuring no one would ever guess what it was, even though I said it was "a little chant I learned in a monastery in Greece once." Interestingly, right after I sang, some pagan lesbian wicca women came in from a meeting next door, and asked us not to be so loud, which we hadn't been.

Anyway, "Monastery in greece, huh?" she said when I sat back down.

"Uh, yeah. Actually it was a long time ago." Actually not so much, just three years, only I didn't say that.

Didn't mention too much about being orthodox at first, either, though it eventually came up one saturday a week or two into our relationship when we were at this party in the hills of Marin County and I went over to her and said, "Um, actually i'm minor clergy in the Russian Orthodox Church and I have to go to a service this evening, so i'm sure you won't mind if I kinda just drop out for about an hour and a half, will you?" She looked at me, pursed her lips, and said very slowly, "You.... what??!" So I had to repeat myself. "Uh, yeah sure, fine, why not?!" She had the most bemused expression on her face. "Be my guest!" We were both having a pretty good time with parallel and sometimes intersecting conversations, so she obviously wasn't dependent on me or I wouldn't have even tried to get away with it. But I just *hate* to miss saturday vespers when I don't have to, and the church was nearby.

So anyway I came back an hour and a half later as I said I would, and managed to rescue her from this sorta creepy guy who was trying to get her into the hot tub. It was pretty easy; I just said, "Hi, I'm back", and she turned and said to me, "You're the most fascinating man I ever met." Obviously she'd been thinking about it.

"Don't bet on it honey, you never know who else you're going to meet." I was trying to play it very cool, but I was really astonished i'd gotten away with it. This girl was totally cool. Independent! I like that in a person!

By some weeks later we were having some real conversations about Orthodoxy, off and on, and she was blowing her mind because she'd left christianity once and for all forever, some long time earlier. That was after trying for a year at the age of 14 to envision her newly departed father roasting in the pits of hell because he wasn't "born again", a practice her pastor had recommended she take up. You know, gotta get used to some ideas, sever those worldly attachments, we're all glory bound over here, nevermind those other ones. And she never figured christianity would seem attractive in any sense again, but here we were. Minor clergy in the ROC, and all that.

So she said to me one evening a little later, "My friends at the hospital [where she worked] all ask me about this Orthodoxy thing. I was telling them that, as near as I could figure, it was all a whole lot of total individuals doing the same thing together."

I said, "That explains a lot, doesn't it?"