By Elizabeth Condra
It was the summer of 2015, if memory serves, when my mother posed me and my sister in front of the monument of the fallen Confederate soldier on the town square. The monument towered above the oak trees and dour Spanish moss, and despite the oppressively humid environs, my smile was bright. I was touring my parents’ alma mater, a university nestled in the Deep South that I would later attend and graduate from. By then I was used to posing for photographs. Years earlier, on a separate trip, my grandmother snapped shots of me and the rest of my siblings in front of the wax figure of John Wilkes Booth at the Lincoln Library, while open-mouthed Midwesterners tried to contain their shock and disapproval.
For most of my adolescence, I begged my worn and overworked father for a vacation. Disney World, Six Flags, a water park. Anywhere at all, so I’d have a few stories to bring back to school when spring break was over. My father relented periodically, in his characteristically dry way. One year we went to Atlanta and toured the Margaret Mitchell house, posing with the cutout of Scarlett in her crimson velvet dressing gown. A few summers later, we went to Charleston in the dead of summer and took the ferry across the harbor to Fort Sumter. My classmates came back with offensively vibrant Disney accessories. I came back with a sunburn from the ferry ride and slightly less hearing from the cannon demonstration.
From a young age, my siblings and I were steeped in our heritage, for as much or as little as we cared about it. But there was an unusual duality to our family specifically. Years after my parents married, they left the Episcopal church and converted to Orthodoxy and as the fourth of their five children, I was the first to be baptized.
My father would expound on Civil War battles after dinner, then call us to the family shrine in the dining room for prayers. He was determined, as O’Connor said, to push back against the age as hard as it pushed against us. He succeeded, though I didn’t appreciate this until many years later.
My parents carted us to battlefields, cemeteries, and museums all over the region, in tandem with churches and monasteries. “I wonder if we’ll make it to Gettysburg,” my father mused one year as we headed to the Monastery of the Transfiguration in Ellwood City. Field trips and pilgrimages masqueraded as vacations, long-winded lectures about our ancestors and theology and our lineage, none of whom were Orthodox. From my infantile view, these excursions were fulfilling some boyhood fantasy of his, and I cared little for it then. Like any other kid in the throes of puberty, all I cared about was being “normal.”
In school, I was the odd one out. My parents were still married, for one thing, and they devoted time to teaching us who our ancestors were. Our church didn’t have a praise band with a drum cage or a sanctuary coffee bar, and most people thought I meant Jewish when I told them I was Orthodox. I found it Herculean to voice the complex and manifold differences between the Orthodox Church and her former sister. The one time a year I felt truly at home, in both my faith and my heritage, was at church camp in South Carolina. For one week out of the year every summer, everyone else was like me.
This was largely due to the fact that the church in the South then wasn’t what it is today. When we attended Vespers or weekday services, which we did more often than not, attendance was sparse. That evolved over time, and when I entered college, I noticed when I came home to my parish on Christmas vacation, perhaps with surprise, that my parish was growing and there were more and more people whose names I didn’t know.
My identity crisis came to a head in college. My faith faltered, with the nearest church fifty miles away and Orthodox students on campus few and far between. It was also the earnest desire of nearly all my professors to make me see the error of my father’s ways. I craved community and they knew it.
I knew earlier then I can recall that the majority of my ancestors fought for the Confederacy. From family trees my father spent decades organizing, I knew there were brothers in our lineage who fought for different sides, and that for those who did return, sickness and penury awaited them. That my ancestors who were Confederates existed at all was a great tragedy to everyone around me. That a war which bred monuments and down through the years, eventually bred me, was unacceptable to the elder millennial generation which had come from institutions all over the country to ideologically liberate the South (and people like me) from their bloodline. The South as both a familial monolith and the one I knew intimately from childhood as a spiritual well had to be razed from my consciousness.
My peers skipped class to protest the Confederate monument on campus. Their professors waived their absences and their photos were plastered on the front page of every newspaper in town, heralded as an unapologetic, forward-thinking generation—even in the same newspaper which published the names of the students, teenagers then, who left school to join the Cause, known as the University Greys. The entirety of the student body, 135 men, left to join the infantry. Only four returned.
As this was happening, I was desperately attempting to be anyone other than myself. I pierced my nose and dyed my hair. I dated boys who were “spiritual but not religious.” I went to yoga classes, to Mass, and even to the non-denominational Campus Crusade—which I was ambivalent about even before the football team’s star linebacker began his closing supplication, “daddy Jesus …”
At different times throughout my education, I see-sawed between delusional intellectual superiority and profound self-loathing. I drove to Liturgy when I could, but these attendances were scant. My Saturday nights were dedicated to line dancing at seedy honky tonks, not to preparing myself to receive the Eucharist the following morning. By the time my years were up, I had a job offer awaiting me in Washington, D.C. at a public relations firm. I was ready to commit, until they told me they’d be transferring me to an office in Boston. As much as I ached to get away from the humidity, it sounded cold and unpleasant to be so far from home.
I graduated magna cum laude in three years and returned home, unsure of what awaited me. I began attending church again regularly, and it was as if my entire self exhaled for the first time in years. I sought God’s forgiveness first and then forgave myself for ever thinking that in knowing where I come from and who I am—an ineffable knowledge my father instilled in me—I could be anything other than what I was. God’s grace and His breath of redemption began to stir in me, unworthy as I am, and a quiet acceptance led me to the words of St. Seraphim of Sarov: “There is nothing better than the peace of Christ.”
My duality of homeland and faith is my entire self, and the comfort and richness of the South is not only what pulled me back but what keeps me here. The mysteries of our homeland and the mysteries of the faith entwine in seamless accord, a gift I continue to discover. It’s brought me my brothers and sisters in the faith, an ever-growing community in our parish, my husband, and our daughter. All I ever wanted was to belong somewhere—but I know that I always did, here at the foot of the Cross and in the bosom of this land.
Though I left college debt-free, I did pay a kind of penance. But it was a justified punishment for abandoning myself and what I know to be true. And for the first and perhaps only time in my life, I began to understand my father. The field trips, the lectures, the maps, and assigned reading and after-dinner discussions. The prayers and discipline and obedience. It wasn’t to push the virtues of a bygone era or even to understand our ancestors. It was as if he meant to say, “This is who you are, and it’s a knowledge some will never possess. Some will go their entire lives searching for this. You can fight it all you want, but none of us can change where we come from.” Nearly a decade after my college years, it’s a wisdom I seek every day to impart to my own daughter.
Elizabeth Condra is a cradle Orthodox Christian and an Alabamian. A former social worker, she now writes full-time. She and her family attend St. Symeon Orthodox Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
