St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of Zacchaeus, 22 January 2012

Zacchae’us, make haste and come down; for I must stay at your house today. (Luke 19.5)

My home. My castle. My lock on the  door. Whatever goes on behind closed doors is my business. My children. Mine to bring up, as I see fit. What agency – or what priest – is going to tell me what I may or may not do with what is mine? The headmaster of a boy’s school in London back in 1581 used these words to justify how he treated ‘his’ boys: the householder, he argued, is ‘the appointer of his own circumstance – and his house is his castle’. The phrase stuck. So did the method. Work that child to the bone. Starve him, if you like. Whip him until you break his spirit. In ‘my’ castle, I set the rules, I enforce them. As I please. Out there, I am just a little fellow; in here, I invest in what is mine – and I will see my return. The good sisters of the Magdalene asylums in Ireland expected to see a return on an investment, too. They set up ‘homes’ for wayward girls. A girl who was too pretty. A girl, pregnant out of wedlock by … her own father? Her parish priest? Lock her away. Put her to work in the steaming laundries. Shave her head. Humble her, like the hand of the priest that gropes her where no one sees. No one asks. No one hears. ‘No one tells me what to do’, says Sister Superior, ‘behind closed doors’. We have heard the nightmarish stories in the news. In all of them, it is apparent to anyone with half a heart that the worst pain is the silence. The fear of saying what goes on behind closed doors.

‘My home is my castle’. And the little child, cowering in the closet? Where is his castle? A child, swallowing hard to stifle his whimpers. An ear pressed up to the door, listening for my footsteps. An eye peering through a key hole, watching for the belt wrapped around my fist. ‘My home is my castle’ never takes into account those that I tyrannise. But is not the belt in my hand proof positive that I, the petty tyrant in my own domain, I am smaller, infinitely smaller, than the poor frightened child who quakes in fear of me?

The evil does not begin in the abuse. It begins in a principle: the principle that gives me the right to do as I please behind closed doors. The first principle of hell: I am my own.

Everything that we call secular depends on locking the door and doing as we will behind it. Pious, church-going folk like the Magdalene Sisters lock that door just as tightly as an atheist. Years ago, my wife used to work with children scarred in body and soul by what went on behind closed doors. Now she works with the women who were that child once: scratching the inside of a closet door … until the mind snaps. More than one transaction takes place, however, behind closed doors. A pious Christian who ‘takes’ Communion – takes, I say, not receives – may take higher prizes all week, behind closed doors. Come Monday, he plays fast and loose with a widow’s pension. Casts it on the gambling wheel of real estate. High risk, high gain. Lose it all? No matter. She the tax-payer will bail you out. That is business. God does not run the bank. Let him mind his own business. What I choose to do on this side of a closed door is mine.

Do as you please, this side of a locked door. On the other side is no one. Nothing at all – except the Judgment of God.

The door is locked to keep God out. Give him an hour, or two, on Sunday. Go to church. Sniff a little incense. Listen to a little chanting. Take a little bread. Take, not receive. At home, behind closed doors, what I do is my business – not God’s.

But do I calculate the cost of a life whose first principle is: ‘I am my own’?

A man named Zacchae’us, a rich revenuer from Jericho, works on that principle. On the Sabbath, you find him in the synagogue. On a feast, in the Temple. Sniff a little incense, give God his due. On Monday, back to business. What the government does not take, is his to invest – and he will have his return. The life savings of a widow, the last coin of an orphan, hiding in the dark from the man with the belt. You cannot pay up? He takes your cow, your sheep, your last piece of furniture. Whatever he pleases. Out there, he is just a little fellow; here in Jericho, he is the king of his castle. Zacchae’us, a petty tyrant, who expects his return. He even expects to see Jesus the rabbi pass by. Being as small as he is, he climbs up into a tree to see over the crowd.

Jesus does not set out to find him. He passes by. He does not sound the ram’s horn to bring down the walls of Jericho. His voice sounds instead: ‘Zacchae’us’, he commands, ‘hurry up, come down. I must stay at your house today’. No request; a command. Jesus leaves no room to hide. He enters where he is least welcome – behind closed doors. No sooner does his voice ring out but Zacchae’us blurts out of nowhere: ‘Lord, half of all my goods I give to the poor; and if I have gambled with the widow’s savings, or defrauded a child, all that I have done behind closed doors, I restore it fourfold’. He repents – that is, turns his mind around. He turns his whole life around. He holds nothing back. His home is no longer his castle. A stone falls from his heart, when the lock falls from his door.

‘That rabbi has gone to be the guest of that small-minded, small-hearted monster’, say his neighbours, his victims. ‘A man who lives off shady dealings, behind closed doors’. The Lord does not deny it. He smiles. ‘Today, salvation has come to this house’, he replies. An evil little miser becomes a son of Abraham. He who was lost, is found.

But only, only, only when the closed doors of a house are flung wide open … to God.

Beloved in Christ: repentance is not misery. It is the joy of turning from death to life. In a fallen life such as ours, it is the greatest joy. But it comes at a price. Before all else, you must fling open the doors. Claim nothing as ‘mine’; set ‘me’ and ‘mine’ aside; and so set all your captives free. A heart that repents is generous, not mean. It does not hide away in the shadow of its own castle. It does not exalt itself by breaking the souls of the weak. It falls at the feet of God. The heart that repents does not ‘take Communion’, as though Christ were an object, a ‘thing’ to consume. It receives, as Zacchae’us receives – in fear of God, in faith and love; and gives, as Zacchae’us gives. Its doors, once open, are never closed again.

If the first principle of hell is: I am my own, the first principle of heaven is: I am yours.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of the Ten Lepers, 15 January 2012

“Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” (Luke 17.18)

On the 29^th of April, a bride and groom stand, side by side, in front of a judge in a well-appointed room in a government building. The bride is a slim, brown-eyed brunette, age 33, photographer by trade. The groom is 56, a bit stocky, with straight, dark brown hair bordering on black and piercing blue eyes. A failed architect who recently turned to politics. She looks bubbly, if rather vacuous. He looks gloomy: his mind far off, distracted. Turning to the marriage register placed on the table beside him, the judge says, rather nervously: ‘In accordance with the law, I ask – are you of pure Aryan descent?’ Each one answers: ‘Yes’. ‘Are you free of hereditary disease?’ Each testifies. I should mention: the room is artificially lit. No windows below ground level. The year is 1945. The building is an air raid shelter called a Bunker, under the chancellery in Berlin. The bride is a rather naïve young lady named Eva Braun. The groom? Picture the judge when he looks Hitler in the eye and asks: ‘Mein Führer, are you of pure … Aryan … descent?’

Sixty-seven years later, it chills the soul to remember how easily people forget. Forget what that question means. And where it leads. A young man from an age of ipods, or i-Pads, in an elegant uniform of green, complete with its ‘cool’ Swastika armband. An elderly lady in a small parlour in North Oxford, old enough to recall the whirl of the air raid siren and the V-1 bomb crashing through the roof of her East End flat. She asks: ‘Will we ever understand what happened there?’ Then, in the same breath, she remarks: ‘You can’t go anywhere in this neighbourhood these days without hearing Polish, or seeing a sooty-faced “Paki” behind the counter of a corner shop. At least the Jews moved out, years ago’. Educated people on both sides of the Atlantic assure me solemnly: ‘You know what the Germans are like. It could never happen here’. Unemployed gangs and mafia-bought politicians in Eastern Europe, chanting: ‘Out with the foreigners! Romania for the Romanians! Poland for the Poles!’ Do your grandfather’s eyes, I ask them, still shine in the shade of a concentration camp where he died for being an Untermensch: that is, a sub-human – a foreigner? But, as in the Weimar Republic, when a certain party called National Socialist was on the rise, there are those at the Club, cocktail in hand, who comment: ‘Of course, I’m no grubby racist, but you have to admit: there are an awful lot of Jews working in the City. And look at all those foreigners they let into this country! Tell me, honestly, would you want your daughter marrying … one of them?’ That old lady in Oxford asked: ‘Will we ever understand how it came to that?’ ‘Madam’, I almost replied, ‘you know perfectly well how it came to that’.

Six million Jews. One and a half million ‘Gypsies’. Almost nine million soldiers and more than fourteen million civilians, to a total of twenty-three million victims in Russia and the Ukraine. Seventeen per cent of the population of Poland … exterminated. Why?

Because a nice, clean Aryan father did not want his daughter marrying ‘one of them’.

Are you, then, of pure Aryan descent? How do you know? Quite evidently, your hair need not be blond, your eyes blue, your skin lily-white. Hitler himself did not fit the bill. Race is rather like artificial lighting: no windows below ground level. In the dark, all cats are grey. Fear of the foreigner is a phantom, hiding in a dark closet. It comes out when we are afraid – and when the image in the mirror elicits no respect. ‘Gotta be better than someone’. So I ask: What makes a native? Birth? A dog born in a stable, a certain British political party tells us, is not a horse.

And what makes a ‘foreigner’? Skin a shade too dark? Or like a leper, a shade too light?

In a region as poor as Galilee, a scanty diet and drinking water polluted by animal waste  can damage the skin, the nerves, the limbs and eyes. White lesions left on the wrinkled, crumpled skin brand you a leper, unfit to live with. You are the ultimate foreigner – and if your blood is mixed with Gentiles, like most natives of Samaria, who but another outcast will call you his neighbour? As Jesus enters a village, he sees ten lepers afar off. They do not try to come near. ‘Jesus, Master’, they call, ‘have mercy on us’. He lays no hands on them privately. This is not a private disease. ‘Go, show yourselves to the priests’. As they set out, in fear of staring eyes and wagging tongues, smooth healthy skin appears in place of the lesions. Eyes, half-blind, see clearly. But only one of the lepers runs back and falls on his face, at the feet of Jesus. He is not of … pure Jewish descent. He is not free of hereditary disease. He is free of much, much more. A Samaritan: a foreigner, or, if you prefer, a sub-human. What indigenous native would let him marry his daughter? If his skin looks pure, how pure is his blood? But Jesus does not ask stupid questions.

‘Where are the other nine?’ Jesus asks. ‘Is no one left to give praise to God except this foreigner?’ But he is no foreigner. There is no such thing any more. ‘Rise’, says He who rises from the dead. ‘Your blood counts for nothing. Your faith has made you well’.

Beloved in Christ: no one here is of pure Aryan descent. We are not born of blood but of God. We are offspring, not of the womb but the baptismal font; sealed, not with the pure pedigree of a horse – but the chrism of the Holy Spirit. No one here is free of hereditary disease. So long as a single human soul falls into sin, the fear that generates it and the bigotry that keeps it alive; so long as a man, made in the image of God, is nothing more to us than a Jew or a Pole, a ‘Paki’ or … a Samaritan; so long as the lie of race lives on,

we all carry the lesions of leprosy on our souls. That which is born of flesh, is flesh; and that which is born of Spirit, is Spirit. To settle for less is to renounce our baptismal vows; it is to blaspheme the name of Christ and forsake the name of a Christian. There is only one cure: the true faith. An enemy of that faith once branded me a ‘cosmopolite’, citizen of the world, for upholding the faith of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic Church against a tide of national, tribal churches whose name, like that of the demons that founded them, is legion. A ‘cosmopolite’? I wear that badge with pride. As I look out on a Sunday morning, I see no American or Australian, no Canadian or Cypriot, no British or Irish; no Bulgarian, Romanian, Russian, Pole; no Persian, Swede, Jamaican, Lebanese; no one from St. Vincent or Martinique, or the thousand lands of origin that make up our family in Christ. I see no foreigners – only the éthnos ãgion, the one holy nation, born of the Spirit of God. I see no shade but sin and no light but Christ.

This foreigner sees only a faith called Orthodox. The faith that has made us well.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Holy Theophany of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ (deferred), 8 January 2012

“For those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned.” (Matthew 4.16)

A cup of water. Nothing special. Drink it or dump it, as you will. Pour it out on the pavement. Empty it into a bowl. Or a baptismal font. Nothing is so common as water. But, if I were to trace every drop of water to its source, every drop – all the waters on earth – would remind me that I am a handful of dust, cast into a boundless ocean. Look at this planet from space: what colour is it? Brown, as the dead leaves trampled down under my foot? Green, as the oak at the side of the house, slowly poisoned by city fumes? Or is it … blue? A vast blue canvas: 1,330 million cubic kilometres, or 319 million cubic miles, of … water. Ten times the mass of those eroding slabs of rock that we call continents. Two-thirds of the earth is water. Even if ‘progress’ exhausts the soil and ravages the rainforests, how will it subjugate the waters? Follow every stream out into the open ocean. Land recedes from your sight. Your mind tells you: from where my arms flail, the deep will drop as far as thirty-thousand feet below the surface. As my foot brushes against the smooth back of a living creature rising from that deep, do I not shudder at the thought: man is not the master here? Only a small, frail body, shuddering at the deep.

As I shudder at the deep, the deep shudders at God. Small as I am out in the great sea, the sea itself is only a speck of dust floating in an immense beam of light.

Here in the secular city, it is easy to forget the vast blue canvas and the immense beam of light. What does ‘secular’ mean – if not this world, closed in on itself? My ego, so vast I must make everything around me as small as it can be. Planet earth, pared down to a few dead leaves under my feet. Church services, jazzed up, pared down to satisfy – me! Earth, wind, and sea – dead ‘things’ for me to use. From the moment that I exile God to the margins of my life, where is the wonder in the earth? I deplete the soil with impunity. I pour my toxins freely into the rivers. I clog the gills of a fish and blacken the wings of a dove, flying overhead. All things are mine to use; and all they that I use, are things. The lover that I betray, whenever the fancy takes me. My spouse of twenty years that I ‘trade in’ for a new model, when I get tired of her face. My pet – or my child – that I leave to fend for itself, as soon as a tearful eye or a pleading look stand in my way. Common as water: use them, discard them – as you will. Where nothing is special, nothing is sacred; and where nothing is sacred, nothing is loved. What is left in the earth stripped naked of the icons in nature? Only barren rock. The region and the shadow of death.

Once, God looked down on this handiwork that he loved. Out of deep sorrow known only to God, he said: ‘I will destroy man whom I created – from the face of the earth’ that he has desecrated. I will drown him in the vast blue canvas of the sea, until nothing is left.

Only a dove, carrying in its beak an olive branch. A pledge of an age to come.

Remember Noah and the Flood, if you would understand Theóphany: the appearance of God. The fountain of the sea unleashed. Two-thirds of the earth’s surface, consuming the rest. Even the boundless ego of an atheist cannot think away a thousand-foot wave. When the rains recede, Noah opens a window in the ark. He releases a raven to search for dry land. Scavenger that he is, the raven seeks his only own. He never returns.

Only a dove, carrying in its beak an olive branch. A budding fruit whose oil, mingled with myrrh, is called chrism. The one anointed with that oil is called The Christ.

From Galilee of the Gentiles, Jesus travels to the Jordan River. He stands on the bank, watching the ebb and flow of the stream rolling down to the vast ocean. John the Prophet, dunking heads under the water and raising them up. Drowning sin in the rushing waters of the Flood. He spots Jesus. ‘I can’t baptise you’, he says. ‘You’re without sin. It is for you to baptise me’. ‘Let it be so’, says Jesus. ‘I descend into the waters for my own reasons. A stream flows from Jordan into all the waters: the polluted rivers, the great blue canvas of the sea. A cup of water in the hands of a believer. As man desecrates the earth’, says Christ, ‘I consecrate it. As man enslaves himself, at the expense of all creation, I set him free. As he corrupts the soil, I shall make the waters a fountain of in-corruption. As he leaves nothing on earth but barren rock, I cleave the rock: and from, flow rivers of living water’.

Jesus sets his foot in the river. It reaches … thirty-six thousand feet to the ocean floor.

In an instant, everything is revealed. The deep shudders at a shaft of light, dispelling the shadow of death. The heavens open to consume the earth: not with a flood this time, but a Voice: ‘This is my Beloved Son’. The light that shone on the first day of creation now shines on the wet hair of a Man who appears to us - as he is. But what is this? Hovering over that head, over the waters that run down and recede from his body?

What else but a dove, blessing – and sealing – the One Anointed With Oil?

Beloved in Christ: this day, more than a man named Jesus is baptised. The universe is. Depleted soil and poisoned river, wings of the bird and gills of the fish, the dead leaves and tainted oaks that we have done everything to destroy – all reveal themselves as the icons of mercy, when Christ descends into the waters. The rocky heart of a secular city, rainwater in a gutter, the cry of a child shivering in the shadow of death – all this, swept up in the current, carried away in the flood flowing out of the Jordan today. What we kill on this earth, Christ brings to life today; what we desecrate, Christ sanctifies; what we call as common as water, Christ signs with a seal of his unapproachable Light – just as we have signed and sealed a new brother in Christ today.

Descending into the waters, Christ re-consecrates all that is. Below us, is sin: a handful of dust, cast into the boundless ocean of mercy. Hovering above us, the Holy Spirit, the Giver of Life … in the form of a dove.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Circumcision of Our Lord / Saint Basil’s Day, 1 January 2012

His mother kept all these things in her heart. (Luke 2.51)

‘The white men are strange creatures’, said the shaman – the ‘medicine man’ – sitting by the camp fire on a winter’s night. ‘I believe that they are crazy’. ‘Why do you believe that the whites are crazy?’ the anthropologist asked. ‘They seem to think with their heads’. ‘And how does the red man think?’ The medicine man looked surprised. ‘Why, with his heart’. Mark well his words: he thinks with his heart. Thinks, not feels. We feel with our gut. The heart flutters; but fear, anger, grief take hold of the entrails before the heart. The heart does not feel, it sees. The heart does not analyse, it understands. What the head must break down, the heart grasps. As the head turns what it sees into an idea, a shadow on the wall, the heart recognises. No more mysteriously than I recognise your face. Consider: what does it take me to know you? With my head, I can know a set of traits: your name and age, your shade of skin, or the colour of your eyes. But do I know you? I look at you through the ‘veil’ of my own ideas. I look at you; I do not see you. To think with the heart is to roll away the veil. It is to see your face, your real face – and, seeing you, to see the face of all beings. The bird and beast, wind and water, earth, flame, and sky. All that is, is alive – if I think with my heart. If I think only with my head, I project my own ideas. I do not recognise a face. And who mistakes his own ideas for faces, and faces for ideas? Who indeed, but a madman?

The medicine man is not alone. Up until a few centuries ago, every monk in his cell had the eyes to recognise: if it is our head that invents ideas, it is our heart that understands. Every mother knows it. Her own child is not an ‘idea’; it is the face of the person that she knows because she loves. Every child knows the truth. Every child sees the face behind the flower, a mystery in the water and in the wind. Every child thinks with its heart. And sees. Until someone blinds its eyes.

In places called universities, there are madmen who can think only with their heads. Madmen can only break down, not build up. They cast shadows on the wall and mistake them for reality. A name, an age, height and weight, a strand of DNA, an abstract ‘idea’ quoted from some ‘expert’ – that is all they need to imagine that they know someone. Back in the fourth century, a scholar named Eunomius taught: God is a word – ‘Unbegotten’. If only I analyse that word, if I define it, I know what God is. I bind God in a book and place it on my shelf. As for Jesus, he is ‘begotten’ – in other words, a man. Nothing else. Churches that called themselves ‘Christian’ followed the views of Eunomius and his teacher, Arius. Jesus, the good man. A ‘God’ who is only an idea – without a face. Some churches that dare to call themselves ‘Christian’ still do. Why not compromise the faith and yield to the ‘expert’?

It is fashionable to follow an expert – even if he blots out the face of God and replaces it with an ‘idea’. But, in blotting out the face of God, he blots out … your own face.

It takes a man of truth to expose this deadly lie. A bishop called Basil the Great.

A bishop of Cappadocia, where no one compromises. In Cappadocia, the hot winds and bitter blizzards howl through columns of naked, volcanic rock. A hard land. It is said that a serpent once bit a Cappadocian – and died! Basil is educated, to the highest degree. But what Christian, he asks, can divorce his head from his heart? He warns the faithful: ‘God is no idea. God is no shadow cast on a wall. God has a face! Let that lunatic called Eunomius project his idea of the divine. I do not worship “the Divine”. I worship the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Persons, not ideas. As they are persons, not ideas: so am I’.

The champion of us persons does not live to see his victory. Within two years after Basil falls asleep, the followers of Eunomius ad are scattered. All Arian churches are closed by law. But the great Basil left us one invaluable gift: a great high priestly prayer, at the centre of the Divine Liturgy today. A tale of salvation that rolls away the veil between the heavens and the earth. Written not from the head, but from the heart.

No scholar rolls away that veil. No scholar can. Only a twelve-year old carpenter’s son – without a university degree! Circumcised according to the Law, travelling with his parents to Jerusalem, year after year, at Passover. But this year is different. He stays behind. For three days, Joseph and Mary search frantically for him. They do not find him in a synagogue, that is, a school. Only in the Temple. Grey-bearded scholars, hanging on every word from this twelve year old boy’s lips. Unlettered, unlearned. It is his heart that understands. What they analyse, he grasps. What they define, he knows – even as he knows each of them, each from his mother’s womb. ‘Where were you?’ his mother Mary asks. ‘Didn’t you care that we were worried sick about you?’ ‘Didn’t you know’, the boy replies, ‘that I must be in my Father’s house?’ Mary his mother does not know what he means. At home in Nazareth, she never speaks of it again. She has no need. She keeps no shadow in her head, no ‘idea’ of what happened on that strange day in the Temple.

She keeps the mystery in the only place that understands it: her heart.

Beloved in Christ: to think with the heart is not sentimental. Anything but. Feelings cloud us; the heart sees. The opinions of ‘experts’ cloud our mind with the ideas borrowed from others; the heart recognises, face to face. It holds no theory, no degree. Only a face: a young boy found in the house of worship. At Passover, when the old ideas of God pass away and persons obedient to his Law pass from death to life. After – three days: the time that it takes our God, in the flesh, to empty the prison of the dead and roll the stone of unbelief from the door of the tomb. Basil, the bishop of Caesarea, rolls away that stone for us. In denouncing Eunomius and every academic who thinks like him, he uncovers the face of God in the flower, the mystery in water and wind, the eye of the bird, the soul of the earth, the sky, and the flame. He makes manifest to us the nature of all things: no more, no less than the unlettered boy from Nazareth, on that strange day in his twelfth year.

For the head that divides, like Eunomius, all things are dead. For the heart that unites, like Basil the Great, all things are alive.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Nativity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ according to the Flesh (by anticipation), 24 December 2011

Opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. (Matthew 2.11)

Cold out there, warm in here. Dark out there, bright in here. ‘Real life’ out there in the bustling, brutal streets. ‘Make-believe’ in here? Say rather: death out there, Life in here. Death does not begin when the heart stops pumping blood and breath no longer enters and exits the lungs. Death in all its forms, small and great, haunts the shopping districts. Death clings to the frosty window of an office. It lives in the tensed-up fist, punching thin air. A sigh of boredom, a sad glance at unwanted gifts. Death is in eyes that never meet at the office party. Lips that snarl ‘Pass the sprouts’ to your mother-in-law – whoever it is across the table, the last person that you want to see. Death is in grief blocked up, petty injuries stored away, rudely awakened when a sharp wind blows outside. This season of winter has the power to stir up ghosts. A lover now hated. A friend’s betrayal. The family that you lost long ago. For the forgotten and unloved, this season will see many a soul reach for the pills before the night is out. Some feel guilty if they are sad at this time of year. But in here, we too are lonely and haunted, wounded and afraid. Cold winds batter our cheeks, too, and faces of lost loves look through our windows. How, then, do we the ‘believers’ differ from those out there?

Only in having eyes to recognise Life in the most unlikely places.

Pity the poor unbeliever. He sees nothing ‘unlikely’ in those busy streets at this time of year. Crowds, jostling to get to a shop. Lonely, loveless faces. Where we see death, he calls ‘life as it is’. He sees things ‘as they are’. A stable of oxen, for him, is only a stable. A child born to penniless refugees on the run, born in a corner of that ox’s stall, is only a baby. A cave, carved out of the rock to shelter an ox or an ass, is only a cave. For us, they are not a stable. A baby. A cave. Say rather: a palace. A God in the straw. And a stable carved out of a cave that is the fountain of our life.

An unbeliever brings nothing to that stable. He ‘invests’ nothing in a fragile little body, shivering in the cold. That child of asylum seekers is likely to be dead by day. So what do we bring? Gold, to adorn the walls of the stable – because it is the palace of a king. Incense to burn before God in the flesh. A tiny hand, wrapped around his mother’s finger: the hand that set the planets in orbit around the sun. But most of all, we bring myrrh. Resin of a thorn tree growing in dry, rocky soil. An oil for anointing the dead and bringing healing tears to grieving eyes. Gold for a king, incense for God. And myrrh? The most unlikely gift for a newborn child. The atheists of his day did not notice. Neither do ours. Too busy, rushing up and down a high street, buying gifts for a holiday that they think is nonsense. Snarling at in-laws across a dining table.

Too busy to notice that they are dead; or notice a Child, born in a cave to give them life.

Death hangs in the air at Christmastime, for those who feel its lonely weight. But, for all the tensed-up fists, the bored sighs, and the snarling lips of those who do not recognise them, grief and memory do not just go away. Ghosts roam the high street this season.

For both the lonely and the unbelieving – God is born today. A strange and marvellous mystery: out of a dark cave rises the Dayspring from on high.

Herod the king, unbeliever that he is, is troubled at the words of the wise men. Learned priests of Zoroaster, who read signs of heaven in the fire and in the stars. ‘We have seen a Star in the East’, they tell Herod, ‘and followed it all the way from Persia to this land of yours’. Herod tenses his fist. He calls his experts, learned and sceptical academics. ‘Who is he, this child? Where is he born? Doesn’t he see things as they are: that I am king, I alone?’ Summoning the wise men, he snarls at them: ‘When you find this child, tell me – ‘so that I, too, can “worship” him’. But he is far, far from Herod’s palace. He is nowhere near the capital. He is born in the most unlikely of places: a cave hewn from solid rock, on the far outskirts of a little provincial town. A stable of stone. A filthy trough, only cleaned out to contain … the Un-containable. How do the wise men know who it is? Why do they bring, not only gold and incense, but myrrh? They have eyes to find Life - even in a tomb.

Was it all a dream? A dream warns them to return to Persia. Avoid Herod and his snarl. He is the ghost of the old death. This Child is the new Life.

Beloved in Christ: a Child is born this day to put every ghost to rest. A Child is born this day to unclench the fist, to breathe life into the bored, sad eyes, the lonely heart of bitter despair and barren unbelief. But, to those who expect to find him in a king’s palace or in the tinsel on a tree, he is born in the most unlikely of places. A stable, not of wood but of rock. Herod the unbeliever, like every unbeliever, is too proud to worship a baby born to the poor; too proud to shed a tear for souls that will not live out the long, wintry night. He is too busy with ‘life as it is’ to notice: it is not life but death. He is already dead. And the gifts of the Magi? Fit for a king? Gold: sure! To fashion a new crown. Incense to burn at the shrine of Caesar. But myrrh? Why anoint a king with the oil of the dead?

Because our king is born this day to deliver us from death. Death in all its forms. Into the bustling, brutal streets of unbelief; into wintry greed and lonely, loveless hearts; into the pain and want that are keenly felt this time of year, our king enters. As one of us. Let the Let the gods of the pagans be born in spring. Our God is born in a winter of discontent. Let the unbeliever shield his face from death, or drown his sorrows in a martini. Our God is born in the cave of his death, to drown death in the waters of baptism and consume it in the fire of his love.

In the old age of this world, our God is born … a little Child.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday before the Nativity, 18 December 2011

Behold, a virgin shall conceive. (Matthew 1.23)

Are you old enough to remember? A wrinkled, feeble old man, half-blind, half-deaf, and always short of breath. A few thin, grizzled hairs on his bald head. A man hunched over with arthritis, unable to sleep at night, or recall what you told him a moment ago. A sorry old ‘tattered coat upon a stick’ as the poet calls him, sitting by a fire, telling his grandchildren: ‘When I was your age…’ Generations ago, it was still rare to live to ninety or one hundred. It was still rare to leave home at sixteen or even eighteen. Never to see your grandfather, your grandmother. Never to watch them grow old. We did not bury our elderly alive in care homes. They were there by the fire rocking away, telling the tedious tale year in, year out. We smiled when we heard them say: ‘When I was your age…’ We knew what was coming next. Some tale of hardship, or fanciful yarn, newly embroidered each time. ‘Six hundred years ago’, said old King David to his young son Solomon, ‘our poor ancestor Abraham drove his flocks from the Euphrates to a land of milk and honey, where we are kings now’. Fourteen generations ago. ‘Four hundred years ago’, said the old blind Jew, Zedekiah, exiled to far-off Babylon on the Euphrates, ‘David and Solomon were kings, robed in silk, when our chosen people was free’. Fourteen generations ago. ‘Six hundred years ago’, said Joseph the carpenter to his elder sons, and the youngest, born of his new young wife, ‘our people were carried off to Babylon and we have lived under foreign rulers ever since’. Fourteen generations ago. Over some fourteen generations, it is possible to develop a mental condition called … nostalgia.

What is nostalgia? Nóstos in Greek means returning home and álgos, a pain or ache. You ache to go home again. The smell of old leather, the touch of a tattered coat: these sensations can pierce the amýgdala, the seat of emotion in the brain. But nothing does it like music. How often, as we grow older, does a melody lodge itself in the brain, conjuring an image of a happy time now lost – or a loved one half-forgotten, now remembered? A melody in the brain, teasing us, mocking us: ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion?’ Our stiff joints and wounded heart reply: ‘How can I sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’

Nostalgia warms us but it also hurts. We search for something lost, then suddenly forget what it is a moment later. We search our memories, digging up the buried corpses from our past; we live through the pain, tear off the scar, feel the wound bleed and suppurate – all over again. Just to go home again, to a home that we know full well is gone forever. Over the generations, many people have joined the Orthodox Church in search of something lost. A Latin mass, the beads of a rosary. The Book of Common Prayer and a church that will never ordain women priests. A time when prayer counted for more than professors; and no ‘expert’ denied that Christ was born of a Virgin. Cradle Orthodox, too, long for a lost empire and forget its sins; or a village in Cyprus, artificially rebuilt in … Enfield.

We long for every home – except our real home. So God himself takes us home again.

In this season of short days and sharp winds, we do not need snow on the ground to tell us that the earth is dying. When the sun sets by four in the afternoon, we feel it. A few of us feel it in our joints. But, young or old, when you hear a familiar melody this season – a carol, a pop song piped over the speaker system in John Lewis – you may recall a pain from the past or a moment when life was happier than now.

To this nostalgia, God says: ‘Yes, remember. But not the glory, or the suffering, fourteen generations ago. Instead, remember where your home really is’.

An old man named Joseph, a carpenter by trade, is not yet quite a tattered coat upon a stick. His thin hair, streaked with grey, is still mostly black. He sees, he hears, he recalls what you tell him. But, since his wife died, he is too old to look after James and Joseph, Judas and Simon, his sons. ‘You should get married again’, his neighbours tell him. ‘An innocent, hard-working young girl, a nice Jewish girl who wants only to keep a good tidy house and raise a family’. Joseph wants nothing more. All his life, he has listened to the same tedious old tales about all his illustrious ancestors, patriarchs and prophets, kings of the lost Israel. He is tired of nostalgia. He is no king. A poor man, struggling through life, he is more akin to the sinners in his lineage: Tamar, who slept with her father-in-law Judah; Rahab, the whore of Jericho; Ruth, the voodoo priestess. David, the king, was himself a hero on the battlefield but a coward, an adulterer, a murderer at home. Manasseh built a high altar and sacrificed new-born babies. So much for fourteen generations of … glory.

Nostalgia cuts both ways. So get engaged to a virgin, raised in the Temple. A young girl who knows nothing about your past. Bury the past with you. It is gone forever.

When his virgin bride is found to be pregnant, the past comes rushing in. Is she Tamar, Rahab, Ruth? ‘Slut, slag, whore!’ Joseph is too old for scandal. Put her away quietly, let her past die with her. Hide in those memories of kings, robed in silk. Then one night in a dream, a voice says: ‘Joseph, son of David, don’t be afraid to take her for your wife. It is not she who has lost her virginity. It is the world. As you are old, feeble, blind in spirit if not in body, she is young, strong, and sees what no one else on earth can see. A Child in her womb: he is not the past but the future. He is the loved one, half-forgotten and now remembered. But it is not the past that men will remember when they gaze into his eyes. It is the future.

‘He who is older than Judah the rapist and Tamar the whore, Ruth the pagan priestess, Manasseh the Satanist, David the adulterer and Solomon the womaniser; older than the glory that you have lost and the exile that you have not yet overcome – he is conceived only of Love. A Child, conceived in a virgin’s womb, makes everything new again’.

Beloved in Christ: are you old enough to remember the future? Are you half-deaf – or do you have ears to hear the melody, the sound of the Lord’s song echoing in old Joseph’s dream, telling him: the real nostalgia that haunts you, the real home that you long for is Emmanu El … God with us.

St. Botolph’s Parish, St. Nicholas the Wonderworker (deferred), 11 December 2011

“Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven” (Luke 6.23)

‘Wherever Christ went’, said a bishop once, ‘they threw rocks. Wherever I go, they serve tea’. Wherever Christ preached, the eyes of murderers, harlots, and con men streamed with tears. ‘Wherever I preach’, says a vicar, ‘bankers and stock brokers yawn’. ‘Ha!’ says an Orthodox priest. ‘I’ve solved that problem. I don’t preach!’ Wherever Christ went, a filthy crowd of blind beggars, homeless cripples, bleeding women, naked men racked with the demons inside and bound in chains, trailed along. Whining and pleading, throwing up on the soil. Wherever his ministers go these days, they are lucky to find a seat on the train. Bishops are meant to be discreet these days. Priests, all the more so. Unseen, unheard. Hidden away. Orthodox priests are not immune. Some hide by dressing up like the vicar in a little white dog collar peeping up through a black clergy shirt. A soft, beardless face. Perfectly incognito. Passing through the blind, jostling crowds on Oxford Street, heaving a sigh of relief: ‘Thank God, no one knows I’m Orthodox. No one guesses I’m a priest!’ You can hide effectively behind a smokescreen of incense, in words mumbled into your beard in a dead language. You leave well enough alone. Hide away discreetly from the snickering laughter and cold stares. This season, you can hide in a little wooden crèche. A tree decked with tinsel. Best of all – the fat jolly elf with a snow-white beard, the merry old gentleman in red and white called … Santa Claus. A friendlier face than the icon of Christ, with those piercing eyes. No one throws rocks at Santa Claus. More tea, vicar?

It is easy to forget the gulf that separates ‘Christendom’ and Christ. Or Father Christmas and Saint Nicholas.

Christendom is pretty. A nice, white, clapboard or stone Victorian church, very suitable for concerts. A place to fawn over newly-christened babies; or cut business deals, make matches, get a tip on a property investment; or arrange the quiet funeral for the ‘dearly departed’ – at which no one cries. Christ is not ‘pretty’. He had no beauty that we should desire him. Pierced, crushed. A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. The voice that prostitutes loved and Pharisees hated. Born not in a rich suburb but in an animals’ cave. Christendom is pleasant. Well-trained choirs, hardbound hymnals. A ‘talk’ about … well, after all, if all else fails, butterflies. Nothing too controversial. Christ is not ‘pleasant’. His first words in the Gospel according to Mark: ‘The time is fulfilled. The kingdom is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel’. Is this a pall of sorrow – a heavy, wet blanket laid on those poor losers called Christians? By no means. It is joy. Pure joy. So pure that the heart pounds in your chest, your breath surges upward. The soul leaps inside you, the eyes flash, and prayer shoots forth from your lips. Joy – real joy – is not the absence of sorrow. It is the presence of life. Life, bubbling up, erupting, streaming out and giving life to the dead.

Life that dares to take on everything. And everyone. A life like that of Saint Nicholas.

Bishop of a town near the mouth of the River Mýros, in the rocky little county of Lycia, a few miles ashore from Rhodes. They are poor, the people of Myra. Tombs, hewn out of solid rock, hold the dead. Like the cave in Bethlehem that held an ox, an ass, and a very unusual Child; and the cave outside Jerusalem that could not hold his Body, taken down from the Cross. Poor people. And a bishop, who is anything but discreet.

A poor man sits up all night, unable to give a dowry for his three daughters. His heart is heavy at the thought of them selling themselves, night after night, on the streets. After sleep overwhelms him, three sacks of gold drop ‘indiscreetly’ into three pairs of sandals left by the fireplace. Who else dropped them through the window but Nicholas, that most indiscreet of bishops? All night at the inn outside town, the remains of three schoolboys lie rotting in the barrel where the innkeeper hid the pieces. At dawn, three boys are alive again. Who prayed for them all night but Nicholas, the bishop who would not leave well enough alone? A judge, with a splitting headache, releases the three condemned felons from custody. Why go through with a death sentence when that meddling bishop stands over you for three hours defending the innocent? A calm sea and a safe voyage to the Holy Land. Who would know that gale-force winds whipped the little ship only last night, until the sailors gave up hope? No one but them – and Bishop Nicholas, who would not remain unseen, unheard, hidden away, but prayed up on deck until the storm ceased. A bishop who never held a word back, when the lives of poor, maimed, blind, lame souls, entrusted to his care, were placed at risk.

No soft, beardless face in a dog collar. A bishop that everyone on the street recognised. A bishop that some called evil – especially Arius, that pious priest, when he denied that Christ is God, and Bishop Nicholas slapped him in the face.

What? Santa Claus hit someone? Assault and battery, with intent. But at dawn, those politically correct bishops found Nicholas in his jail cell. The vestments that they stripped off him the night before, all perfectly in place. Bishop Nicholas had no time for excuses. The man who negotiated a field or five head of oxen. That young man who just had his wedding in church. No time for Communion. Nicholas had no time for ‘Christendom’. He had Christ on his mind, the poor in his heart. The maimed, the blind, the lame: all those wounded in body or spirit. The homeless from the highways and the hedges. The losers in the sight of this world, who need the Precious Body and Divine Blood offered here, at the banquet of the Master, who vested Nicholas that night – as they need Life Himself.

Excluded, reviled, his name cast out as evil. Or at least, indiscreet. Nicholas of Myra is a bishop that you throw rocks at and seldom have home to tea. But, beloved in Christ, he leaps for joy this season – whenever you have the eyes to recognise him under his red coat and white muffler, his snowy beard, his eyes twinkling with the pure flame as they always did. His voice – rich, round, and full – that never holds back a word of Life.

Holy Hierarch Father Nicholas, pray to God for us!

St. Botolph’s Parish, Saint John of Damascus, 4 December 2011

“Ought not this woman … whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” (Luke 13.16)

A headline in a Toronto newspaper once read: ‘Going to church can teach children our values’. Values? ‘Especially’, the editorial added, since ‘the Church’ in recent decades has shed its old ‘dogmas’ and ‘rituals’. (Evidently, the writer never heard of the Orthodox Church). Who, in this day and age, the editorial suggested, believes in the Virgin Birth? Who imagines that the body of ‘Jesus’ got up and walked out of the tomb? And who, in the name of Karl Marx, needs clouds of incense? Candle wax? Icons, embroidered vestments – in gold and scarlet, no less? Give us a ‘plain’ Christianity, for plain people. Plain pews and plain walls, and plain sermons about plain ‘values’. Pennies for the poor. Taxes, paid on time. So long as you do not kill anyone, sleep around, tell lies, or steal a Cadbury bar; so long as you do not drink, smoke, dance, play cards on a Sunday, or kiss icons … a certain type figures, you are all right. That is all Christianity is: a code of conduct that all good citizens obey. Only last week, a young man in a ‘Christian’ study circle asked me: ‘Why should I find Jesus in an icon? Why not in the poor? And what’s the difference if I, as a Christian, help the poor or a Muslim neighbour does it?’ ‘The difference’, I told him,  ‘between you and a Muslim. Is your Christianity really nothing more than a branch of the NHS? And who heals broken souls and bodies: you? The welfare state? Or Christ?’ No answer. Only the stiff, joyless look of a ‘Christian’ with no idea who Christ is.

Sad to think, that pale young man is about eighteen. From childhood, he probably never has seen the eyes of Christ, looking from behind paint and wood. An unseen paralysis twists his mind, bending him over, unable to straighten himself. For eighteen long years, his Christianity has been nothing more or less than social work.

Eighteen years is a long time to be paralysed.

Christianity without Christ, pared down to a code of conduct. What is it but paralysis? An empty wall of a white-washed tomb. Or – a man-made church. Unadorned, empty. Only a plain cross and a plaque of the Ten Commandments: ‘Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy’. I ask you: what do empty walls know of the Sabbath? The Lord’s Sabbath is not empty but full. It is not the tomb of a good man, Jesus. It is a table, laden with Life Himself. What does a code of conduct know of holiness? Holiness is not the spine, bent over in fear. It is the flame of the candle leaping upwards; the incense, rising up with the prayers of the saints. But above all, the eyes of the icon. Our merciful God, who became flesh for our sake. His most holy Mother, who cradles us, her children, in a gaze that we can see. When an emperor named Leo once convinced himself that the holy icons were idols, he said: ‘Tear them down! Tear down the image of Christ! Replace it with a “plain” cross. Pare down those rituals. Replace them with a code that all my subjects will obey’.

As his men tore down the icons, all spines bent over in fear. All, that is, except one.

Yuhanna al-Mansûr ibn Sarjun, chief secretary to the caliph of Damascus. A Christian in a Muslim court, on the border of the empire. From age twelve, he studied the Sharía law that kept its followers bent over in fear. The Qúran and the Hadith that men claimed had forbidden holy images of any kind. The new faith called Islam: submission to an unseen God. Yuhanna al-Mansûr, who believed in a God seen in the flesh, studied astronomy, mathematics, music, and law. He wrote prayers to a God, not of justice but of mercy.

So, when he learned that a Christian emperor, like a Muslim, forbade the holy icons, he aimed his scholar’s pen – straight for the heart. ‘I do not worship paint and wood’, he wrote, ‘but the One depicted in paint and wood: Christ, my God, who became flesh for my sake’. What Christian, he argued, could replace the icon of the Living God with a dry code of conduct? To do so is to find your faith … paralysed.

For eighteen years, the woman in the Gospel is paralysed. An unseen sickness stiffens her body, bending her over, unable to straighten herself. Where does it hit but the spine: where worry and fear grip our body, where guilt over a code imposed from above twists and deforms the soul. When Jesus sees her, he does not call out: ‘You are forgiven’. He says: ‘You are free’. Jesus Christ, the icon of the Living God, lays his hand of flesh and blood; and a woman, hitherto bound by a sickness – and a code of law – stands straight and tall. The head of the synagogue feels his spine twist with rage. ‘Come here any day but the Sabbath to be healed. Not the Sabbath, never the Sabbath’. One word from the mouth of Jesus, like a bolt of lightning, strikes at the heart. ‘Hypocrites!’ he shrieks. ‘Will you not untie your ox or your ass on the Sabbath and lead it to water? And should not this woman, bound by Satan for eighteen years, be loosed on the Sabbath day?’

But the ruler of the synagogue, the emperor Leo, and every iconoclast who replaces the living icon with a dead code of conduct: they are bound, where she is set free. They are lost, where she is found. They die, where she lives.

Christ unbinds the twisted body, loosens the knotted soul, heals those who only touch the icon that is the hem of his robe. Christ knows his own – and Satan knows his.

Beloved in Christ: Yuhanna al-Mansûr, better known to us now as Saint John of Damascus, so enraged the emperor by his piercing words that Leo sent a forged letter to the caliph. The letter implicated Saint John in a plot to overthrow the Muslim city and restore the icons. The caliph, it is said, ordered his executioner to cut off the right hand of the saint. Praying at the icon of the most holy Theotókos, John felt bone, muscle, and tissue re-attach itself to his arm. On the Holy Mountain of Athos, the icon called Tricheróusa, Our Lady of the Third Hand, depicts a silver-plated hand below the hand of the Mother holding her Son. Is it not the hand of Saint John of Damascus? Harp of the Spirit, guide of the Orthodox? Defender of the holy icons – that is, of the icon who is Christ himself.

Yuhanna al-Mansûr, who never reduced the Gospel from an icon to a code of conduct. Yuhanna al-Mansûr – that is, literally, John the Victorious.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Saint Catherine of Alexandria (deferred), 27 November 2011

“One thing you still lack.” (Luke 18.22)

Nothing is quite so sacred, so revered, indeed, so powerful in many traditional cultures around the world as … a virgin. Why? Are they all repressed? Do they hate sex? On the contrary: often, the more ‘erotic’ the culture, the more highly virgins are revered. A virgin is not a girl who has never had sex. A virgin is the earth, whole and intact. The rich dark soil, full of limitless growth, as yet untouched by a plough. A virgin is the cool, clear rays of the moon, sacred to Isis of the Egyptians, Artemis of the Greeks, Guan Yin of ancient China. She is the light of a star, guiding weary travellers home at night: Zórya, the virgin goddess of the Slavs, suspended high above the earth. A virgin is not cold flesh. She is ecstasy, Déva Kánya Kumári of India or Ánat of ancient Syria, sister of the thunder-god. She guards the underworld like Túonetar of the Finns. She keeps the secrets of wisdom like Athêna Parthénos, whose great temple, the Parthenon, overlooks the city of Athens.

But of all the pagan goddesses of earth, moon, star, or wisdom, none is so mysterious as the guardian of the flame. The Greeks called her Hestia, the goddess of the hearth; the Romans, Vesta: and the Vestal Virgins, who kept a holy flame burning in her temple, feared that the Eternal City would fall should the flame ever burn out. In 394, a Christian emperor finally extinguished the vestal flame – in the name of Christ, our true God, and his Ever-Virgin Mother. She, the Virgin of virgins, reveals what every ancient people and culture knew. Virginity is not an absence, but a presence.

A virgin is not one who has not had sex but one is who pure in heart; and purity of heart is nothing more, or less, than to will one thing. Our whole being, devoted to a single holy cause. A virgin is not untouched by flame. A virgin is she who keeps the flame alive.

A girl who has never known a man’s embrace is still able to lose herself, to ‘scatter’ her thoughts and impulses over a million men – or, for that matter, a million designer outfits, handbags, Blackberry’s, job offers or career moves. As many as a middle-aged man. Is she really a virgin? And a woman, married at sixteen, with seven children and forty-nine grandchildren? An old woman who lights a candle in the corner and immerses herself in an ecstasy of prayer. Is she not a virgin? Or a woman, once beautiful, who has seen too many beds and alleys. A woman to whom life – and the men in it – have been .… unkind;

but who pours all her life into one pure prayer. Is she, too, not a virgin, that is, a keeper of the holy flame? Look through the window of an Orthodox monastery. There, you see a full spectrum of virgins. Old and young, wounded by life or as yet untouched; widows, divorcees, bachelors and spinsters; a former soldier, his memory still stained by conflict; and a little child, who never heard any sound but the monastery bell and the chanting of prayers. Each, a virgin re-born: rising up from under a black sheet to hear her own, real name spoken for the first time.

A virgin is not a slab of ice, untouched by love; but a soul aflame with the love of God.

Behind the walls of a monastery, there are enough twisted souls, hiding from life. Angry souls, not living off ‘the fat of the land’, as our enemies say, but off dark pain and regret. Scattered among them are a former dancer, so stunning that the heart skipped a beat to see her. A genius, who used to write books in his spare time. A billionaire, who bought mansions – or was it islands? – in his. What did they ever miss out on in life? They had it all, and gave it all away, when they found … something even more.

A flame that gives all. And demands all.

A rich, young beauty from Alexandria once caught sight of this flame. She was anything but timid and repressed. Daughter of the governor of Egypt. She slept on silk, in a room adorned with ivory tusks and ostrich feathers. Stunning, voluptuous, like all the beauties of Alexandria: Mary, who slept with men, women, children; Pelagía, who paraded naked through the streets. Her suitors would sell anything to win the hand of this beauty – were it not for a tongue trained in rhetoric, a mind as proud and sharp as tempered steel. She refused every man who came to court her. She held out for something more: a spouse, in her words, ‘more radiant than the shining of the sun’; wise enough to govern creation; whose riches spread beyond Egypt to every corner of the world. Who could satisfy her? Nothing. No one. Until she found him, hanging on a Cross; and, risen from the dead, he reached out to take her hand.

When the emperor – crude, peasant soldier that he was – demanded that she lay off her speeches in defence of the fanatical little sect called ‘Christians’ – what did she do? She converted his wife. Each philosopher sent to convert her, she tied in knots of arguments and handed over to Christ. When she refused the emperor’s advances, he locked her in prison, condemned her to be broken on the wheel – which shattered in pieces, as soon as it touched her body. When a sword to the neck finally shut her up, angels carried her body to Sinai, where God set his People apart and where her monastery still stands.

She was set apart. Pure as the cool, clear rays of the moon and the light of the star. But she was no cold flesh. The flame entrusted to her care, too hot for any man, she kept as pure as her name … Catherine. The virgin. Keeper of the flame. Whole and intact.

Beloved in Christ: is it not enough to marry, like anyone else? To have children, like the rest of mankind? To abstain from adultery, murder, theft, and perjury? To honour father, mother – and the governor of Egypt? For most, it is enough to keep the commandments and let the flame that we remember from our youth slowly go out. But for some, there is still … something more. Something that they still lack – unless they are prepared to give up riches, a career, even the hope of a spouse and child to find it. The flame that the Vestal Virgins mistook for the hearth, the Egyptians and the Chinese took to be the moon, the Greeks the wisdom of Athena, the Finns and Slavs the secret of the afterlife. The flame of virginity, too vibrantly alive for this world to contain. The pearl of great price, for which we sell all that we have. The flame that is treasure in heaven.

Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple (by anticipation), 20 November 2011

“… you are anxious and troubled about many things.” (Luke 10.42)

On a clear, frosty morning, when the first radiant beam of sunlight hits the drops of dew, you wake from sleep. Rubbing your eyes, you catch a glimpse of a tiny object clinging to the window pane. A snowflake. A pattern as intricate as fleece, covered with dew. A tiny object, so fragile that it could melt at your touch. So delicate, the sun melts it in minutes. Then it is gone forever. What can you do with something so magical? Enter it! Yes, you can. If you try, enter a world enclosed, frozen, delicate, as pure as … ‘the driven snow’? Open a gate into an unknown horizon. Follow lines and patterns that no impure hand of man has crafted, follow them into a new dimension. Wherever they lead. ‘Impossible!’ a voice inside says. ‘How can I enter a snowflake? And how can living inside a snowflake make me a good person?’ What makes you so contemptuous? What makes you forget? A child has no difficulty entering a snowflake. A child sees a world in a grain of sand. Or a raindrop. What child has not lifted a rusty bolt, flung open a great moss-covered gate, and discovered a secret garden hidden behind the wall? What child has not opened the hidden door at the back of the wardrobe and stepped into a strange new country? ‘But it is only fantasy’, you say. ‘In time, you grow out of it’. Do you, now?

Were it not for secret gardens and hidden doors, and a world hidden in a snowflake, no artist would ever put paint to canvas. No poet pen a line. No scientist search for new life under a microscope. No one would lift up his soul and his mind to God.

Only by opening a gate into a new horizon do we become who we really are.

Every child knows how to open a gate into a new horizon. It is we adults who force them to forget. A cold look, a harsh word is enough to stifle the little laughter and repress the tears to a dark, dead place inside. We tell a child: ‘There really is no “Father Christmas”, no knight in shining armour. No princess, no bridal chamber. There are only predators in business suits, clawing each other to death’. We clamp the brakes of our own fear down on the mind of a child. We carve our own disappointed hopes and failed plans into that young soul, we warp it with our own anger and greed – and, because we have forgotten how to dream, we teach a child to forget. No child is a racist: we must teach him to fear another shade of skin. No child is an atheist: it is we who tear them from the arms of our loving God. We grab the tiny snowflake from a child’s hand and watch it melt to nothing in ours. We teach a child to fear the secret garden beyond the gate. We condition him to deny that there is anything more to discover, anything new to find. Instead we pull down our barns and build larger ones, stuffing them with rotting grain and goods that we take no time to enjoy. Eat, drink, be merry, and forget – that there is more to life than this.

We so despise the child inside us that we forget. Only a child can heal us.

To become a child again: that is the secret hope that we, disappointed adults, are afraid to admit. Secretly, we all long for one place where our soul can breathe free. Where we can laugh and no cold face will silence us. Weep floods of tears, and no harsh word will ever tell us: ‘Pull yourself together’. We long for a secret garden beyond the gate, where one snowflake opens up into a world all its own: cold, crisp, and pure. The more anxious and troubled we are, the more we long to be a child again.

Our soul, when it is required of us, will remind us of what we have always known: ‘Unless you turn and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven’.

Today, a little child enters the gate of the kingdom: the Temple in Jerusalem. Only a tiny girl, a snowflake. Her hand is cold and clean, wrapped in a mother’s hand as Anna, the once barren, hands her over to the high priest. No impure hand of a man will touch her -  not even Joseph, the old widower, who will be a father to her and her strange, unknown Child. Anna tells the priest: ‘Take the child of my old age whom I once promised to God. Let here grow up here, in the Temple. Let her prayer be as simple as her breath, free of disappointed hopes and failed plans. Free from all anxiety and fear: here, at the gate of heaven’. ‘She is the gate of heaven’, the high priest says. ‘Don’t you hear all the angels shouting in surprise? Don’t you see the little girls, dancing around her? She will dance in the Holy of Holies, where no grown man dares to enter. There, in front of the holy ark of the covenant, covered in a veil, she will play her childish games – this little girl of yours, who teaches us to hope again. She will restore the child, buried away inside us. A bride, unwedded to anything but hope. A virgin, from this day prepared to give birth … to God’.

Beloved in Christ: what would you give to be a child again? Would you have eyes to see the first radiant beam of sunlight, tracing the patterns on a snowflake? Would you follow them, wherever they lead? This little girl who enters the Temple today did nothing more, or less. She followed her hope, where it led. She lifted a rusty bolt, flung open the great moss-covered gate, and found out that she is the gate. She herself is the secret garden, hidden behind the wall. Every monk, or nun, who ever lived, learned as much. Did they reject Martha for Mary, leaving the anxious and troubled world behind? Say rather, they unite Martha and Mary in one. Labour, as simple as prayer; prayer, as simple as breath. Fathers and brethren, mothers and sisters – all around. The life of a bride, unwedded to anything but hope. But that hope, like the hope of the Mother of God, opens the gate to a new horizon. A world enclosed, like a snowflake – and full of the hope of mankind.

Today, a little girl heralds the coming of our salvation – simply by being a little girl. She welcomes God into his bridal chamber – simply to being a child, who plays and dreams. She cuts away the dead wood of our disappointed lives – simply by being a child of the Temple, who has never forgotten how to hope. Without a word, she declares what every monk or nun says, living as it were inside a snowflake:

There is always something more to discover. There is always something new to find.