Why I Built the Vessel
Piece of Humanity did not begin as a website.
It began with a question I carried for most of my life:
Why, when so many people love God, love the saints, and want to follow Christ, do we sometimes seem so determined to stand apart from one another?
I grew up seeing Orthodoxy from several very different places.
For twelve years, I saw village Orthodoxy in Nikolaevsk, Alaska, while my father served as a deacon. I knew people from priestless villages and from priested communities. I loved my friends, but even as a child I encountered divisions that I did not understand. Some of my priestless friends could get into trouble simply for playing with me because we belonged to different churches.
I remember wondering why an entire village of people who loved God—and who even carried the names of saints—could not simply pray together.
That question stayed with me.
I Saw Another Possibility
Later, in Sydney, Australia, while my father served as an archdeacon, I experienced something beautiful.
Church was community.
People stayed after services. They invited one another into their homes. Families did life together. Children participated. We went caroling for Christmas and Easter. My sisters and I would go along with my father as people welcomed us into their lives.
I saw what it could look like when faith became something people shared, rather than something that separated them.
That memory became important to me.
Then I Came to Oregon
In Woodburn, Oregon, I lived among Old Believers and encountered something very different again.
I saw an extraordinary seriousness about ritual and a deep desire to keep holy things holy. That reverence taught me something important, and I still believe that holy things deserve reverence.
But I also encountered walls.
I wanted to sing. I was told that women would have to wait until older people died before that could happen.
I asked questions. I was told that questioning was itself wrong.
I wanted to understand the language of the Church. I encountered the idea that I needed to learn Russian in order to understand Church Slavonic.
I remember thinking:
Was God really hiding behind a language?
Those experiences hurt me deeply. At the time, I did not have the words to distinguish between the holiness of the Church and the human rules, fears, customs, and divisions that people sometimes build around holy things.
I only knew that something felt wrong.
I began calling those barriers Satan’s walls.
And I became angry.
I even became angry at Slavonic itself because I had come to associate something beautiful and ancient with division.
That was not the end of my story. It was part of how I learned that loving something does not mean refusing to question how people have handled it.
I Saw What Division Could Do to People
I watched young people drift away.
Some did not understand the language being used in church, so they went outside during services. I watched people leave. I watched communities become isolated. I watched harsh judgments, gossip, and divisions become part of people’s identities.
Eventually, I stopped going.
And I have to be honest about what happened to me next:
I became hardened and judgmental too.
The very thing I was angry about began growing inside me.
That realization matters to Piece of Humanity.
I do not tell this story because I believe I was always the person who understood what was right.
I wasn’t.
I was hurt.
I was angry.
I made judgments.
I walked away.
And I had to keep searching.
The Search Took Me to Russia
When I was told I needed Russian to become closer to God, I decided to go to Russia.
I wanted to see Orthodoxy in its homeland.
I did—and then I nearly died.
I fell from a building, broke my back, and eventually needed permanent spinal fusion surgery. I came home knowing something I had not understood before:
I had a reason to stay.
God had been with me through all of it.
And whatever unknown part my patron saint, Christina of Tyre, may have had in my life, I do not take glory from it.
The glory belongs to God.
Then I Heard “Lord, Have Mercy” in English
While recovering in Arizona, I visited a ROCOR parish and heard “Lord, have mercy” in English for the first time.
I wept.
I could feel the prayers in my own language going through my soul.
I couldn’t explain it. I only knew that I loved it.
I had been told that I was sinning by not praying Old Rite. But then I visited an Orthodox church in Portland and found the same beautiful singing and community.
Later, during a trip to Seattle, I did not want to miss Pascha. I asked a local Orthodox parish if we could come.
There were multiple languages.
They even sang in Greek.
And I realized something.
The Saints Had Already Crossed the Walls
Maybe the walls I had been seeing were sometimes man’s walls—traditions, rules, customs, divisions, and fears that had grown around holy things.
I cannot judge every tradition or explain why every wall was built.
But I could see something clearly:
We were still human beings praying to God.
And the saints had lived through these differences long before us.
They spoke different languages.
They came from different places.
They lived different lives.
But their witness survived because they suffered, endured, and sometimes died so that Christ would not be forgotten.
We know the famous people of 2026.
We remember famous people who changed history.
But what about the people who died for Christ?
What about the people who gave their lives so His memory would not fade?
That is where my search eventually led me:
to the old books, and to the saints.
I Found Love Outside the Place I Expected
For a time, my family attended a non-denominational church.
I remember crying.
People welcomed us. They loved one another. Nobody seemed interested in making me feel small. I wore my sashmura head covering and nobody judged me for it.
A pastor explained Christ to me in a way that reached something wounded in me: Jesus was not standing on a distant pedestal waiting for me to earn His love. He loved me.
My children loved the English singing.
I experienced something real there.
But I still longed for the deeper life of the Church.
I didn’t want to choose between love and truth.
I wanted both.
I Learned Another Lesson About Following People
I also spent time in business communities, including Amway.
There were things I genuinely appreciated: community, optimism, entrepreneurship, helping one another, and the idea that people could build something together.
But I also saw how easily a movement can begin to revolve around its leaders.
People could become almost venerated. Relationships could begin to feel connected to success. The person at the center could become more important than the mission itself.
That experience gave me another question:
What would it look like to build something where the person who started it was deliberately not the center?
I did not know the answer yet.
Then We Came to Oklahoma
Eventually, the cost and isolation of life in Oregon led our family to Bixby, Oklahoma.
There I encountered another expression of Orthodoxy.
I saw a growing community. I heard extraordinary singing. I heard the priest speak of thousands of angels and archangels, and something in me came alive again.
I saw people confessing regularly and receiving Holy Communion every week.
I saw differences from what I had known before.
And I caught myself judging those differences.
So I had to learn another lesson:
I could not build the Church I wanted by becoming another person who judged everyone who did not practice Christianity exactly as I did.
I had to let go of that too.
There was peace there.
My marriage improved.
My children began singing because they understood what they were singing.
And I began to heal.
For the first time in a long time, I could say:
This feels like home.
That community also showed me something else. People were coming who had never heard Church Slavonic. People from different Orthodox backgrounds visited. Newcomers were learning. People were finding a place where they could participate.
I began to see that the things I had experienced as walls did not have to remain walls.
So I Started Asking the Bigger Question
After seeing priestless communities, Old Believers, different Orthodox traditions, people deeply committed to different calendars and customs, and people who sometimes believed that separation itself protected the faith, I became hungry for something deeper.
I wanted to know:
What did Christians share before all of these later divisions?
What did the Church look like before the divisions that had become so important to the people I knew?
What did Christians believe before arguments over jurisdiction, language, calendar, custom, or historical identity became the first thing people saw?
I began looking for the center.
I thought of it as the center of a Venn diagram.
Not my church.
Not their church.
Not the people who had the strongest argument.
What had actually been preserved?
I was told more than once:
“Read the old books.”
So I asked:
Which books?
Then I Remembered the Books
My parents had old volumes of the Lives of the Saints in Russian and English.
I knew those books.
They had been sitting there.
And suddenly I understood what I had been looking for.
Those books.
The lives of the saints were not another argument I had to win.
They were witnesses.
People who had lived.
People who had suffered.
People who had failed and repented.
People who had fasted, prayed, served, forgiven, endured persecution, entered the clergy, raised families, lived in solitude, cared for the poor, and sometimes died for Christ.
The stories moved me deeply.
Some of the accounts of persecution and martyrdom made me cry.
I began to realize:
What draws us together is not that we all have the same personality, language, customs, or history. We have people whose lives were remembered because they bore witness to God.
And I realized something else.
I did not need to reinvent those books.
Then I Found Rostov
I discovered the enormous work of Saint Demetrius of Rostov.
He had spent roughly twenty years compiling the Lives of the Saints.
And I thought:
Why would I try to build another version of what he had already spent his life building?
I didn’t need to reinvent the wheel.
I needed to give life to what had already been preserved.
So Piece of Humanity began to take shape.
I started reading the daily Rostov entries aloud online.
At first, almost nobody was listening.
My pronunciation was terrible.
But I kept going.
Then something happened.
People who used the newer calendar could hear the saints.
My Old Believer mother could hear the same saints thirteen days later according to the Old Calendar.
People from priestless communities could see Russian names and hear the stories.
Catholics could recognize saints they also commemorate.
The old book suddenly became a bridge.
Not because I had solved Orthodoxy.
Because the source was already there.
That Changed What Piece of Humanity Became
Piece of Humanity is therefore not an attempt to create a new authority.
It is not an attempt to become the person who has all the answers.
It is not an attempt to replace priests, parishes, monasteries, worship, confession, Communion, or the living Church.
And it is not really about me.
My life explains why I built the vessel.
The sources determine what I put into it.
That sentence is at the center of everything I do here.
My experiences are testimony.
They explain why I care about division, language, calendars, forgotten books, translations, saints, and the human beings behind all of them.
But my experience does not become historical evidence simply because I experienced it.
When the saint speaks, I want you to see the source.
When Scripture speaks, I want you to see the passage.
When the Church preserves something, I want you to know where it came from.
When scholars disagree, I want that disagreement to be visible.
When nobody knows, I want to be able to say:
We don’t know.
Why the Saints?
Because the saints were not another kind of human.
They were human beings.
They had parents.
They had bodies.
They had families.
They worked.
They made decisions.
They suffered.
They were afraid.
They repented.
They loved.
They sometimes failed.
And they died.
Their stories matter because the Church remembers them as witnesses to life in Christ.
I want people to encounter them as people, not as flat religious characters.
I want a child to discover a saint.
I want an old believer to recognize a name.
I want someone who only speaks English to hear a story that was preserved in another language.
I want someone who reads Slavonic to be able to examine the original.
I want someone in Russia, Romania, Serbia, Greece, Alaska, America, or anywhere else to be able to say:
“Wait. I know this source. I can help.”
Many Eyes. One Source at a Time.
That is why Piece of Humanity is being built as an open, living record.
A Russian reader may recognize a name I missed.
A Slavonic reader may correct a transcription.
A Romanian reader may know another edition.
A historian may identify an older source.
A priest may notice something that needs correction.
Someone may find an old book I have never seen.
Someone may tell me that I got something wrong.
Good.
The goal is not to protect my work from criticism.
The goal is to make the work more faithful to the source.
I don’t want to own the saints.
I don’t want to own their memory.
I don’t want Piece of Humanity to become dependent upon me.
I want to build something that can continue when I am gone.
Where Others Find Walls, I Want to Find Doors
This is perhaps the simplest way I can explain what I am trying to do.
I have seen walls around language.
Walls around calendars.
Walls around jurisdictions.
Walls around communities.
Walls created by fear.
Walls created by history.
Walls created by people who were trying, sometimes sincerely, to protect something holy.
But I have also learned that a wall can become so important that we forget what it was built to protect.
Piece of Humanity is looking for doors.
A source can be a door.
A translation can be a door.
A saint’s life can be a door.
An old book can be a door.
A correction can be a door.
Another person’s knowledge can be a door.
Even discovering that I was wrong can be a door.
I Am Not the Destination
If you find something beautiful here, I hope you don’t stop here.
Read the life.
Listen to the reading.
Look at the original.
Follow the sources.
Ask questions.
Find the people who know more than I do.
And then go to a living Orthodox church.
Meet the people.
Stand in the services.
Ask questions.
Speak with an ordained priest.
Receive pastoral guidance.
Live Christianity with other human beings.
Piece of Humanity should never become a substitute for that.
This website is a lamp, not a parish.
The Human Vessel
I called this project Piece of Humanity because I have come to believe that every human life is part of a much larger story.
The saints are the subject.
The testimony is the foundation.
The human is the vessel.
I am simply the person who happened to start building this particular vessel.
I give it my time.
I give it my attention.
I give it the things I have learned through years of searching, questioning, getting angry, being wrong, healing, discovering, reading, listening, and beginning again.
But I do not want the vessel to belong to me.
I want it to be useful.
I want it to be examined.
I want it to be corrected.
I want it to be expanded by people I will never meet.
I want it to outlive me.
And if, someday, someone finds an old Orthodox book through Piece of Humanity that they otherwise would never have known existed, reads the life of a saint they had never heard of, hears a story that brings them back to God, or finds a living church where they can finally ask someone to walk with them—
then the vessel has done what I hoped it would do.
The original was preserved.
The door was opened.
And the light was passed on.
A small closing statement
Piece of Humanity is my offering.
Not because I have all the answers.
Because I spent a long time looking for them.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that perhaps my job was not to become the answer.
Perhaps my job was simply to build the vessel that helps people find what was already there.
My life explains why I built the vessel.
The sources determine what I put into it.
Where others find walls, we look for doors.