Lexington, Kentucky...

It's around 9:30 PM and I've just gotten up from an evening's nap. You never how tired you are until you lay down on a really nice hotel bed for a few minutes and wake up four hours later.

Lexington, Kentucky is about 13 hours south and east by car from St. Paul, Minnesota and another Priest and I took the trip on Tuesday. The road was mostly fine with the usual gouging for tolls around Chicago and a few blinding rainstorms through central Indiana. We were up before 5 AM and then with travel and a few other things we needed to do were asleep sometime around 11 at night and then up again at 6 AM for Matins at St, Michael's Church in Louisville on Wednesday. Now you know why I drifted off before supper tonight and still may head right back to bed after this is done.

Kentucky was once the frontier in America, the edge of the wilderness and populated by hearty souls who put cabins on the sides of hills and cut fields out of the forest to make farms. It still has much of that wild beauty although now its thoroughly modern and punctuated with sky scapers. Only the heat, thick and beautiful in its own way as it flows through the shade trees, feels like the old south.

And yes, Orthodoxy is here in a kind of bustling athletic way at St. Michael's in Louisville with its hundreds of members and plethora of programs and in a more gentle, but no less vibrant, way here in Lexington and St. Andrew's, the host of our Diocesan Conference here at the hotel. Orthodoxy shows up in all kinds of places and is actually growing in the south far from the ethnic bastions of the American northeast. Quite under the larger culture's radar Orthodoxy is establishing itself across the United States, quietly doing its work, and subtlely planting its seeds.

We're subversives, you know, we Orthodox. Right in the middle of a crazy consumer culture where the ground seems to shake with every twitch of shallowness we're digging deep and building for the long haul, for forever for that matter. We're the real counter culture, the alternative to a world that sometimes seem to have gone blind stinkin' drunk on its own home brew. People are finding us, often despite our complete lack of inviting them, for the sake of sanity and for that something inside which drives thirsty people to water. Awed by what we have received through absolutely no worth of ourselves there are many of us who feel that if God will have mercy on us, and believe me we need it in buckets, the next great wave of the church in this land will not come from churches in auditoriums with television shows but in these little seeds of Orthodox life and faith being planted in places that only God knows why and the hearts of seekers of truth, beauty, and the God of the universe.

Watch for it.