Nancy Holloway,
D.Min.

Nancy Holloway

Nancy, a former Southern Baptist, was chrismated in 1982. Since becoming Orthodox, she has been active in parish life. She has served on the parish council of her home parish, St. Andrew Orthodox Church (Antiochian) in Lexington, Kentucky, and on a number of other committees. In addition, she has led retreats, given homilies, and conducted seminars on St. Gregory of Palamas and the Theotokos.

“Christ Born Anew in our Hearts” was the theme of an Orthodox women’s retreat held at St. Andrew Orthodox Church in Lexington, Kentucky, November 15 and 16, 1997. Over seventy women from a seven state region attended the event which was modeled after the conference, “A Journey in Faith: A Conference for Orthodox Women,” held in Milwaukee in February 1997.

The Wilderness

The Lenten journey begins in the wilderness—a place of tangled vines, disorder, rank growth, and spiritual twilight. The wilderness represents the interior self, our spiritual dimension, which, when due to the scant attention we give to it most of the year, becomes thick with overgrown weeds that choke our life and openness to God and to each other.

In view of the Green Mountains of Vermont and enclosed within the liturgical richness of Matins and Vespers at New Skete Monastery, I have spent a number of weeks attempting to capture the likeness of Theotokos with the use of egg, water, pigment, and wood.

Nancy Holloway: How would you describe your experience growing up in a Greek Orthodox family in the first half of this century?

Eva Topping: The daughter of Greek immigrants, I was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia (in 1920, I’m exactly the age of the amendment that gave women the right to vote!). At that time and when I was growing up, there was no Orthodox church or Greek community near my home. A priest from Washington traveled by train to Fredericksburg and baptized me in a washtub. So I have been Orthodox all my life, even though I grew up in the Baptist church. As long as I can remember I knew that I was Greek Orthodox, and I was proud of it. Thus, the many prayers of a Sunday school teacher that I should one day become a Baptist missionary in Korea were never answered. My first prayer was in Greek and to the Theotokos, taught to me by my mother when I was a little girl. I still pray those few lines.