Today I finished my first paper after three years away from scholarly activity. It feels good to create something, stretch my mental muscles, string together a narrative and once again encounter the world outside what is totally familiar.

I also walked around campus - and to the Caisse Populaire to get money - while practising a breathing exercise I learned in Fr. Simeon Roger's book. It was odd. At first I noticed, "Hey, I'm walking like an Asian person right now!" and then "Hey, I feel more peaceful than usual" and then I started to pray.

Let me explain the breathing exercise a bit. Normally, North Americans breath shallowly from the chest rather than from the gut. The exercise teaches you to 1.) have correct posture 2.) to breathe from the below the belly button in such a way that your whole abdominal area and kidney area feel like their expanding like a balloon. It's strange; it takes me out my head and makes me more aware of my body while at same time helping me be more clear in my head. There's a bit more to it than that but it really seems to make a difference.

Throughout the day I felt more at ease, more aware and most importantly, more able to pray. Then tonight when Cheryl and I prayed together, I felt as though I was consciously presenting more of myself before the Almighty. It's strange.

I really do live most of my life in my cranium and forget my body. Even this small reminder of my corporial being seemed to aid in prayer. I don't think Orthodox Christians merely pray "with" the body. Too often what I have implicitly meant when saying we "pray with the body" is that we pray with our body in an instrumental sense as though the body simply follows or gives way to the thinking mind. What we as Orthodox Christians really do, is teach our whole being, body and all, to pray through spiritual discipline, the sacramental life and the remembrance of God. When the nous takes up residence in the heart, the body actually prays with the nous. The Holy Relics plainly show show it to be true. The incorrupt body of St. John Maximovich clearly shows it to be true. If the body can be holy, the body can pray. It all seems plain and self evident when I read about things like this but I don't yet truly comprehend it - I do not yet comprehend the psychosomatic unity of our created composition. I barely see the salvific magnitude of Christ's coming flesh, suffering in the flesh, dying in the flesh, glorious rising in the flesh and ascending to the Father in the flesh.

Usettling times.

From my observations, a blog is an uncertain environment with an unusual and ambiguous nature. My intent for this blog is to avoid that, not because the typical blog is bad, but because I need something of a fixed place to spread out and arrange my disparate thoughts. Moving and adjusting to a new city, finding myself in a university setting where ideas shift and change like fall or spring air, being close to other Eastern Christians like Melkites, Copts and Ukrainian Catholics that seem to blur the typical Orthodox lines we draw and simply being exposed to Orthodoxy in a different place, with a different feel and different set of issues gives rise to a lot of confusion. This blog will be a bit serious for a while and maybe a bit too bland or arid but by God's grace it will open up a bit eventually.

What follows will hopefully avoid mere academic or dull peripatetic prose. Because I am still stuck in my mind I will probably do more thinking and pondering than is good for me but I need to do it. I'm in school and I need to think, reflect and all that. But God help me, I do not want to "mistake my mind for a nous."

Number 1
If I am going to reach any positive end in my studies, I have to discover my heart - my gut. I spent the day infront of the computer writing an extremely broad research paper on relationship between Coptic and Eastern Orthodox Churches and our prospects for reunion. It was interesting but I wasn't there. My brain was there but I was not. Living out of the to 1/8 of my body gets boring. My heart was invisible and mostly forgotten. Thankfully my memories of the priest at St. Mary's Coptic Orthodox Church in Ottawa, Fr. Shenouda, gave me some inspiration. I got the feeling he is a man composed in his heart, in his body. A beautiful man. He gave me a beautiful traditional leather cross hand crafted by monastics in the deserts of Egypt.

St. John Chrysostom says, "When you discover the door of your heart you discover the gate of heaven." Thankfully there are people at the Cathedral who also live in the heart, who have the grace of God dwelling in them and actually know how to share it. There are people here who like Fr. Maximos in "Mountian of Silence" think prayer is a teachable "science" with techniques that can be learned and lived. There's hope for me yet.