Tram brakes squealed and trolley wheels clacked as they whirred past. Marshrutka horns blared, and I barely noticed. I wandered listlessly through throngs of clicking heels and sweaty tracksuits that late May afternoon in St. Petersburg, Russia. It was 2007—sixteen years after the Iron Curtain fell, and while its fall had precipitated rapid growth, people were still clawing their way out of the rubble of a crumbled communist society. For seventy years, they had looked to the state to care for them—a job the state was more than willing to do, in exchange for its citizens’ bodies and souls. That state was gone—like an abuser dead and buried—but its survivors lived on.
Being spring on the Gulf of Finland, a sticky heat clung to everything. It dulled my senses and made my arms hang limp and my brain as sluggish as a snail. The humidity heightened the scents that hung heavy on the air: rotting root vegetables and decaying concrete buildings, cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies.
I had arrived in Russia four months earlier, a lone twenty-year-old on a study abroad/service trip to St. Petersburg. It was my fifth trip to the city, but my first trip solo. As a teenager, I had come with short-term teams who brought God’s love and humanitarian aid to orphans.. Every summer, St. Petersburg, which boasted around a hundred children’s homes for kids separated from parents through death, abandonment, or abuse, shuttled these children to retrofitted Pioneer Youth camps on the Gulf of Finland. This is where we stayed and played, laughed and learned with them.
Every year I visited these camps, I grew closer to the orphans, and I wondered what would happen to them after they aged out of the orphanage. These kids were a pariah in society—both pitied and distrusted—and few had the skills and support necessary to thrive as adults. I wanted to help them. I had studied Russian in high school and college, and I yearned for an opportunity to return and serve. Five years after my first trip to Russia, I got the chance to move to Russia. I lived and worked as a “big sister” in a transitional home for girls too old for state-run group homes. Without follow-up support after leaving the orphanage, many of those vulnerable young women end up homeless and abused. The time, teaching, and attention they needed was just what this home provided. Daily the girls and I cooked, cleaned, hosted, studied, and prepared for work. Slowly we weathered the long winter, and I acclimated to my surroundings. Through our rhythm of meals and chores and fellowship, we emerged from the deep darkness of winter into the growing light of spring.
During the days, while the girls studied or worked, I explored the city. Once the home of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky, St. Petersburg was also the site of the October Revolution which ushered in more than seventy years of Soviet socialist rule. Relics of its past surrounded me—the gorgeous, multicolored and textured cupolas of Orthodox churches, the spacious grounds of Catherine’s winter palace, the rows upon blocks upon acres of Soviet-era concrete buildings fashioned for efficiency, utility, and uniformity. From old to new, I witnessed man’s efforts at making meaning that would outlast him.
Walking the streets Dostoevsky had trod, now transformed by a communist architectural aesthetic whose soul-sucking power rivaled that of J. K. Rowling’s dementors, I longed for life. I had lived through the cold death of winter. Those I lived with had endured much worse. They had been abandoned. Their bodies had been cared for—yes—but their souls had starved. These girls as easily shared stories of cute stray kittens as of knife fights in communal kitchens; they told of parents who had turned them out or left them at group homes or broke under schizophrenia’s strain or died by the effects of lifelong alcoholism. These parents were to be pitied, too. They themselves had been broken by godless, autocratic rule that demanded everything. In Soviet society, human flourishing was not considered. Only output mattered. So concrete outpaced cupolas, and factories supplanted faith. Russia’s official newspaper, Pravda (translated Truth), proclaimed “We have no need of priests—we have our machines.” Mechanization, they were sure, would usher in a utopian state of purpose and equality. But it didn’t. It brought death, destruction, and disillusionment that was felt well beyond its dissolution. Communism as a cult sacrificed the lives and well-being of millions on its altar of progress. My friends’ stories, and those of countless others, were proof of that.
As I walked along the old streets that spring day, the oppressive weight of it all—the harsh Northern environment, the hardened faces hiding heartbreaking stories—bore down on me, and I wondered: Can anything live here?
Then, out of the corner of my eye, I spied it: a patch of green grass bursting from its bleak surroundings in militant, rebellious joy. Amidst the despair and decay, LIFE! Everything inside of me wanted to jump and frolic and roll around in its luscious life. (I didn’t, because it would have been highly improper in that stoic society, but I did do a little happy dance inside and smile like an idiot).
I’ve thought often of that moment of joy and its meaning. After the cold and dark of a long Russian winter, spring had arrived. Its light awakened in me a longing for life. And in a patch of urban grass I found it—something ephemeral, yet real. Defiant in its changeability, welcoming in its vulnerability, arresting in its verdant beauty, it stood out as real in a world of crumbling artifice. It screamed” Be Here! Be loved! This brief life is all you have. Receive it!”
Long years before I strolled the streets of St. Petersburg searching for life, the prophet Isaiah wrote: “A voice says, ‘Cry!’ and I said, ‘what shall I cry?’ All flesh is grass and all its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades when the breath of the Lord blows on it; surely the people are grass. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.”
We are grass—living and beautiful and almost gone. The Soviet Union is no more, perhaps because it forgot this fact. It tried to turn man into a machine and make its works immortal. It failed, for it forgot the fundamental truth that “things are precious before they are contributory.” We matter not because of what we make, but because we are made by the Love that holds the world together. When we lose sight of this, we must lament. As Reverend Capon puts it: “Poor earth, poor stars, poor flesh. Without a Giver they never become themselves.”Yet, when we remember that God is our Maker, and not we ourselves, we have jubilant praise, joyful delight, and confident purpose. This knowledge— that they were loved just because they were His, and they were always in His hands—was a gift I joyfully shared with my Russian housemates.
It’s been twenty-one years since that spring day in Russia, and I am still learning the truth I discovered that sticky-hot afternoon. I returned home from my time in Russia, resumed studies, graduated (twice), taught, married, turned homeward to care for my children, and somewhere along the way forgot that my meaning comes not from my productivity, but from my presence. I spent years trying to do more and be more by cramming more voices into my already crowded mental space. I wanted to know (through a tightly-controlled study regimen) and be known (through a tightly-crafted self-narrative). Yet my frenetic efforts at finding meaning fell flat. I became tired and anxious and depressed, despairing even of life. Until I let go. I surrendered my illusion of knowledge and control, and I embraced rest. I stopped sprinting through podcasts, racing though audio books, and proudly posting about #whatiamreading. I let myself feel the anxiety of withdrawal and, beyond it, the underlying ache for identity that my constant consumption had masked. Slowly, slowly, I looked up. I saw what was right in front of me, what I had missed in my race to make meaning. I received what was real without demanding or prejudice, and I found hope and purpose.
Upon returning to teaching, this discovery of reality is what I longed for my students to experience. In the fall of 2025, I was beginning my second year teaching middle-and-high school at the same school where my children studied. I had just finished Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb, a book of culinary reflection as replete with wisdom as any philosophical treatise. Capon waxes eloquent about orange peels and onion skins, and he begs his readers to pay attention to these delightful daily gifts. He writes: “Man’s real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are. That is, after all, what God does, and man was not made in God’s image for nothing.”
Yet looking and loving is not always what we do. Reverend Capon knows this. He writes: “But if man’s attention is repaid so handsomely, his inattention costs him dearly. Every time he diagrams something instead of looking at it, every time he regards not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to him – every time he substitutes a conceit for a fact …Reality slips away from him; and he is left with nothing but the oldest monstrosity in the world: an idol. Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods – to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.”
This idolatry is what the Soviet Union had attempted, and it was what I too had tried, with heartbreaking results. We both needed something better. The solution to meaning-making idolatry, Capon believes, is loving attention. He writes: “Only a daily renewed astonishment at things as they are can save us from the idols; it is our love of real processes and actual beings that keeps us sane.”
This is what I wanted for my students: to look and to love. I was teaching rhetoric for the first time, not because I was especially gifted at it (I was still learning), but because I couldn’t shake the call to do more than have them scribble off a thoughtless essay on a throwaway topic to check a curricular box (or worse, turn a blind eye while they let AI do their thinking for them). I longed for my students to look up from their screens and see. I wanted these students to be good people speaking well (Quintilian’s definition of rhetoric), and I knew that vision required the hard but good work of knowing through attending, gratefully receiving and appreciating, and then graciously responding in writing and speech.
So, we began. After reading an excerpt from The Supper of the Lamb, we went outside and walked. We ambled past ripe, blushing cherry plums thick with sweet syrupy scent, down steep hills dotted with Italian plums and hard little crabapples and soft-petaled wild roses on toward an old cemetery tucked away in a hillside surrounded by towering pines. I encouraged my class to find some object to see—truly see—and appreciate. Some students found amber maple leaves, others hard green pinecones, and one a silky-white sac of insect eggs. We marveled at creation’s intricacy, and we talked amicably as we walked back to the school where the students reflected on their experience in a short essay.
Not long after that late summer day, our school rolled out a bell-to-bell cell-phone-free policy. My students, all seniors, had personal phones. Some were addicted to them. These students became angry, depressed, and withdrawn. Some even threatened to leave the school and pursue GEDs. They stayed, though, and they gradually grew accustomed to life unmitigated by screens. They were like flowers unfurling before the sun, and it was wonderful to watch them bloom.
Together we read Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, pausing often to discuss what words meant or how his insights applied to our lives, insights like: “Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” As we read, we wondered and were delighted; we saw and welcomed again what was really true and beautiful.
By the end of the year, G.K. (as the students affectionately called him) was declared to be “tough”, and on the day we finished the last chapter of Orthodoxy, one boy surprised me with his humble, vulnerable question: “Do you think G.K. would like me?” I was taken aback by his artlessness. “Yes,” I reflected, a smile broadening my face, “I think he would. He would have loved your levity and friendliness.”
As the students discussed having G. K. as a fun uncle or mentor, I considered the gift the year had been. My students—first shy and diffident, checked out and lazy, sullen and displeased—had become passionate, thoughtful, diligent writers. They did not lose their silliness (I have vituperative essays on the evil of shoe pebbles to prove it), but they channeled their delight into creativity that astounded me. They beheld, then they became. For what we behold is what we become. This is our purpose as educators: to see and to say; to let the light shine through us in a way that inspires awe and a similar surrender in our students.
In our age of deadening distraction, perhaps the first step to this vibrant life is longing. For my students, having their phones taken away was like ripping a scab off a raw wound—they felt everything viscerally. Yet it was in this state of heightened vulnerability that they were most receptive to something beyond the faux reality that dumped relentlessly from their devices. When that steady stream of cybertrash stopped flowing, they discerned in the silence the echo of a tune they had never heard calling them to a place they had never been but had always longed for. Tentatively at first, they left their screens to experience something better, something living and life-giving. They saw, felt seen, and then loved in response.
The same is true for us. Plastic facsimiles, digital simulacrums—they may outlive us, but their remains are like the ruins of Ozymandias—shattered, lifeless, broken bits that bear despair. Like communist concrete and credo, they harm those who inherit them.
In contrast, consider the ephemeral beauty of grass. It withers and dies, often unseen and unsung. Yet in its short life, it nourishes its environment. And in its death, it prepares the ground for the life that will follow it. Maybe that is what we as teachers and parents and leaders are called to do, too: embrace what makes us real; humbly accept the grace that it is to be finite and mortal; live fully and give freely; enrich the lives of those who follow by showing them how to do the same. All our frenetic attempts at having impact and being remembered are so much digital detritus. Like the barely visible remains of Ozymandias, they warn: “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Our works, too, will meet such an end, where “nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck; boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The works that last, the fruit that remains—they start with being; they begin with abiding. Socrates never wrote anything, but his words live on in the people he loved, in the pupils he taught. Like his, our most lasting works will be born of love, because love lives beyond us.
Spying that patch of green amidst the decaying ruins of Russian greatness and despotism so many years ago reminded me of what was real, of what I needed to live. It is the reminder I need now, too: to look and to love, to behold and become. For, as Josef Pieper writes in Only the Lover Sings: “Whenever in reflective and receptive contemplation we touch, even remotely, the core of all things, the hidden, ultimate reason of the living universe, the divine foundation of all that is, the purest form of all archetypes…whenever and wherever we thus behold the very essence of reality—there is an act that is meaningful in itself taking place.”
Image Credit: Cole Thomas, “The Course of Empire – Destruction” (1836)
