St. Botolph’s Parish, Veneration of the Cross,  7 March 2010

“Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.” (Mark 8.35)

What would you give for a moment of perfect joy? I said joy, not pleasure. Pleasure is the reverse side of pain: how quickly pleasure turns into the bitter aftertaste of pain. Joy, I mean, not happiness. Happiness is a dream that disperses, as soon as you rub your eyes in the morning. Joy is an awakening. It pierces you, transfigures you – and, once you taste joy, that moment stretches into eternity. An aging philosopher once sold his soul to the devil for a moment of perfect joy. Sick and tired of everything, wanting to end his life, he sold his soul for the moment he could say: ‘Stay awhile, you are so beautiful’. The devil tried everything to satisfy him. Give him back his youth; dress him up; pour the oceans of money into his pocket; give him the love, and the virginal body, of a beautiful girl – it all left him with heartache. So the devil gave him magical powers, power to direct world affairs – but it left him bored and empty. The pearl of great price that he sold his soul to have, he could find nowhere on earth. Only in the foretaste of one, selfless act to benefit mankind – the act of giving what he alone could give – did the old philosopher find his moment of joy. It took him out of himself, out of the devil’s grasp, and so, saved his soul.

What would you give for a moment of perfect joy? Would you sell your soul? Your life? Or would you save your life – and never taste that perfect joy?

A stranger strolls into an Orthodox church. Maybe he has read a book about us or taken a course. Maybe heard from a friend or found us online. Maybe she is bored with a ‘nine to five’ lifestyle, tired of designer clothes and broken relationships and a pointless dash for money that falls through your fingers in an economic recession. The devil tempts him or her with all that the world has to offer but it’s not enough. Sooner or later, he wanders in. Catches a glimpse of joy, real joy, in a whiff of incense or the face of a holy icon. And before you know it, he is instructed, sealed with the oil of chrism: united to the Orthodox Church. ‘The pearl of great price, I’ve found it’, he thinks – and he’s right. But what will you give for it? What will you give up? For a pearl of such price, Christ says, a merchant went and sold everything he had. What are you ready to give up? There are ‘converts’ who never convert. A body enters the Church, a soul remains Anglican, Baptist, what have you. Sentimentally, they cling to another identity: familiar hymn tunes, quaint little country churches, red mailboxes and misty mornings that all spell ‘Queen and Country’. What will they give up for the moment of joy? They’re like immigrants who live in ghettos or in-laws who never meet the family. Squeaky-clean ‘Christians’ who fit too neatly into nice society to give it up. What will you give for that moment you saw? A pint of beer for a chalice of wine? A bar of chocolate for the Body of Christ? Joining the Church means more than giving up chocolate for Lent. It means giving up your life. Are you ready to be re-written? Re-made? Reborn? Are you ready for New Life, or will you cling to the old? Will you keep your old, familiar world – and lose your own soul?

‘To begin a new life’, Saint Basil teaches, ‘you must first put an end to the old’. To enter the dawn of Resurrection, you must pass through the night of the Cross.

This is a hard saying. Deny yourself! Take your cross. It goes against our instincts, to preserve our selves and everything familiar to us. It crucifies the consumer inside us. A squeaky-clean, middle-class Christian pulls back, for fear of soiling his hands. A learned Professor of Divinity reasons it away – ashamed to confess that the mangled, bleeding body, slowly dying on the Cross, is God before the ages. If you come to church only for comfort, shield your eyes from the Cross. It confronts us. It appals us. Who but a lunatic would take up his cross, freely? Pay such a price for a moment of joy? Who, but the one who has nothing left to lose? One whose hands are not clean. A girl who sells her body, or gives it away, for an angry fix. A man, no longer young, who stares at his dirty secrets through the bottom of a glass. A woman – alone, abused, abandoned – with no one left to trust but God. Foreign faces, scarred faces on council estates: anyone who doesn’t fit in. Those who are ready to lose everything, surrender everything, for the God who alone can breathe life into them. They are ready to throw themselves into the fire: uncreated fire, the fire of the Divine Liturgy. The moment of perfect joy.

Whoever will follow me, says Christ, let him deny himself more than chocolate. Let him take up his cross: all your dirty secrets, all your sorrows and wounds that never heal, all your bad memories. Whatever torments you is your cross – as every prostitute in a back alley, every drunkard alone in his room understands. Let him take up his cross, says our Crucified Lord, and follow me to mine. This is the Gospel preached to the poor: anyone, in any kind of need. It will never be tame. It will never be ‘respectable’. It will never fit so neatly into ‘nice’ society. Flee it, deny it, cling to your comfortable life and ignore it – the Cross will never go away. Our God came in the flesh, and we killed him. Then, through his death – only through his death, on an instrument of torture and shame – he lifted us up to heaven and bestowed on us his Kingdom, which is to come. This is the Gospel of Christ. You may ask, can’t we have a softer, more ‘nuanced’ Gospel, more positive, less harsh? But the girl who sells her body, the addict who sells his soul, the convict with the stain of blood on his hands – and your own broken heart – these have no use for a tame Gospel. Anyone who has lost his life will surrender everything for the slightest chance to live again. For whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it.

Beloved in Christ: what would you give for the Gospel? A bar of chocolate – or your life? What would you give for a moment of perfect joy? You glimpse it in the fire of the Divine Liturgy, maybe in a moment when the grace of God descends on your prayer. But don’t be deceived. Life costs. Love costs. Anyone who has ever loved a single human being, knows this perfectly well. On this Sunday of mid-Lent, this Sunday of the Precious and Life-Giving Cross, we give what we alone can give: one selfless act to benefit mankind. This day, on the street, in the tube, you will see a face crying silently: ‘No one can help. No one cares’. Silently, look into the face and say: God cares. God dies, as we die; God is crucified, in everyone and everything that has nothing else. God, triumphant in glory, will be in agony until the end of time. God – is the pearl of great price, for which a man sells all his past – all his old familiar life – all that he has. God, crucified and risen: risen from the grave that is the only fountain of our resurrection.

For that moment of perfect joy, we bow down and worship a Life-Giving Cross, a tool of agony and shame; and the Holy Resurrection, we glorify.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas, 28 February 2010

I am the good shepherd; I know my own and my own know me. (John 10.14)

‘I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth …… in Leicester Square!’ If only it were that simple. In fact, the poet doesn’t know where the arrow fell. Shoot an arrow high enough into the air and you’ve lost it. It could end up anywhere. What’s the use of shooting an arrow in no particular direction, shooting it beyond your sight? Prayer is like shooting an arrow. What happens when you pray? Where does your prayer go? Up to God? Or just into the ether? Prayer comes from a place in you where you are really you. But how can it reach God? A God you can’t see or hear, touch or smell or taste? What makes you so sure that he’s there? ‘I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth……  I knew not where’. Most people in this country don’t know either. Earlier this week, I got a letter from a teenage atheist, in the typically rude, impudent style of a Cambridge undergraduate. ‘What makes you think that atheists hate God?’ he wrote. ‘Most of us atheists don’t think about God’. He’s right. The vast majority of people in this part of the world don’t pray. They don’t think about God at all. Fewer people in the UK– or Sweden, or France, or Germany today – think about God than anywhere on earth. Why shoot an arrow in the air? Why pray a God you can’t prove? A God who has nothing to do with your life? A God who won’t even buy you a pint at the pub? We live in a secular culture: a culture that thinks it has outgrown God. Churches are empty, universities are full. Why not close down shop altogether?

Praying to God in the twenty-first century makes as much sense as shooting an arrow in the air, at nothing in particular. Why pray to a feeling? Why pray to an abstract idea called ‘God’? ‘I shot an arrow into the air…’ But what if you were the arrow? What if prayer were not something you do – but someone you are?

Four decades have passed since 1968, since the ‘Secular Sixties’. The ruling atheists in this country grin at the sight of empty churches and snotty undergrads – the politicians of tomorrow. They cringe at newcomers from Barbados and Jamaica, from Ghana and Nigeria who still crowd into little chapels and believe in the power of the Holy Spirit. The ruling atheists say: ‘Let them shoot their arrows. They’ll find out, prayer goes nowhere’. Then, along comes the minister of a mainline church. She looks over those empty pews. She hears the smirks from Downing Street or the student common room of an Oxbridge college, and thinks: ‘My word, we’re behind the times. Let’s demystify our worship. Let’s update our doctrines. Church? It’s not about mysteries, but morals. Prayer? It’s not God but feelings. God is an idea. Maybe, secular people will buy that’. Public morals, private feeling: that’s all that’s left of the Gospel, tailored to a secular age. In a secular age, you don’t kill faith; you starve it to death. You don’t outlaw God; you ignore him, you deny him authority on earth.

But what if you are the arrow? What if your prayer wells up straight from the core of who you are? What if you find yourself praying when you least expect to? What if your whole soul, your whole mind reaches out to God: a God you can’t see or hear, touch or taste? What are you to do with that hunger to pray? Turn it into a feeling, an idea – a delusion? Seven centuries ago, a scholar named Barlaam tried to do so. ‘Why waste your time at prayer?’ he told the monks of Mount Athos. ‘The light you see inside, it’s the light of your own mind. Study philosophy and science instead’. Demystify your worship, update your doctrines. Church? It’s not about mysteries, but morals. Prayer? It’s not about God but your feelings. God is an idea. One learned monk said: ‘No. I don’t pray to an idea; I pray to the Living God. I don’t stare at the light of my mind; I enter the Uncreated Light, the Light that is God himself. I don’t shoot an arrow into the air. I AM the arrow; and that arrow enters the very being of God’. That monk, the Archbishop of Thessalonica, was named Gregory Palamas.

When you truly pray, Saint Gregory taught, you are your prayer; and, by the grace of an invisible, incomprehensible God, you become the God to whom you pray. You become by grace everything that God is by nature. Is that difficult to understand? Of course – if you’ve never prayed, it’s impossible to understand. If you’ve never prayed, church is about morals, not mystery; prayer is about feelings, not God. If you have never tasted true worship, you will flee the might of a secular age and forsake the flock. ‘He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches and scatters them’. A hireling leaves the flock paralysed, helpless before the wolf – the Secular Wolf. The good shepherd confronts the Wolf; denounces the Wolf; and, if necessary, lays his life down for the flock. Imprisoned. Tortured. Held for ransom. Saint Gregory paid dearly for teaching one truth: your prayer is real, not an illusion. Your prayer is you; and each of you has the potential to become infinitely more than what you are. To become God.

Brothers and Sisters in Christ: the scribes – the academic scholars of the day – thought, ‘How pointless, how blasphemous, to forgive a paralysed man!’ Faith, they figured, was about morals; prayer was a feeling, an idea – not an arrow that carries you into the very being of God. ‘Which is easier for you to grasp?’ Jesus asks. ‘That I make a paralytic walk, or have authority on this earth? Behold, then, I raise the paralysed man from his pallet. I carry the arrow of your prayer into the heart of my Father in the heavens. I – am the God you can see in the holy icons, hear in the chanting of the prayers, smell in the incense, touch in wood and paint and brocade, and taste in the Mysteries of my Precious Body and Divine Blood’. The unbeliever has no eyes to see, no ears to hear. So long as he is too arrogant to see and hear, he never will. ‘But I am still the Good Shepherd’, says Christ. ‘I know my own and they know me’.

At the prayers of the holy hierarch, Gregory Palamas, we shoot an arrow into the air and follow it … all the way, into eternal life.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of Orthodoxy, 21 February 2010

You shall see greater things than these. (John 1.50)

Do you have a picture of a person you love? A person you admire or look up to: the one person who inspires you to be truly yourself. If you carry in your purse or your wallet the image of a loved one, maybe you take it out and talk to it. You kiss it, you handle it with  loving care. What if you lost it? It would devastate you. An image you can never replace.

A widow will talk to her husband whose picture hangs on the wall. She will reach up and touch his face. It isn’t flesh and blood, she knows it. To tell her so is cruel and pointless. So many years together, so many tears and smiles and secrets shared, have made the two one flesh. All she has now is the portrait – a window, a two-way glass, to speak with her husband and to hear his voice, sounding in her heart. Now, what would that woman feel if burglars broke into her house? Tore down her husband’s portrait, slashed it, cut it with knives, burned it – even urinated on the flames? Worse still: if a friend dropped by, telling her: ‘It’s only a picture, not really him’. Of course not! But, to desecrate the picture of the one you love is to desecrate that loved one. If your memories are enshrined in the portrait, to desecrate that portrait is worse than the damage to a photo, a piece of paper, or the paint on a wooden slab. To desecrate it is more than to desecrate your loved one; it is to desecrate your love.

This is the One we love, here in a holy icon. We reach up and touch his face. Only a few short years we lived together when our Lord Jesus Christ walked the earth; but so many

tears and smiles and secrets we shared have made us one flesh. We eat his Body and drink his Precious Blood but we can no longer see his face on earth. Only here, in paint, wood, and egg tempera – the portrait of our husband, the Divine Spouse of the Church; the portrait of our mother; and the portraits of all those, like us, that he loved even to the point of death. One day, twelve centuries ago, burglars broke into our home. Soldiers of the emperor, sworn to protect us. They tore down the image of our Bridegroom, slashed it, burned it – and, calling it an idol, they urinated on the flames. Women toppled ladders laid against church walls to tear down the icons. Elderly monks refused to turn over to a mob of madmen the icons of the One they loved. Refused, tied to a chair: beards set on fire, hands that lovingly crafted the image chopped off at the wrist; eyes that looked with

love on the face of Christ, gouged from the socket. A hundred years of torture and blood was the price we paid for our faith. The Patriarch Gérmanos, dying in exile; Nikíphoros, Methódios, imprisoned for preaching what the Holy Church has always taught: I do not worship wood, but pay respect to the One depicted on the wood: to the Living God, who for my sake became flesh and blood. Our invisible Enemy was relentless: monasteries were dissolved, holy relics trampled, prayers to the saints declared illegal. More martyrs fell defending the holy icons than fell to Nero or Decius or Diocletian, combined.

Then, on the first Sunday of Great and Holy Lent, in the year 842, the council of bishops restored to us the image of our Bridegroom. Taking up a holy icon in his hand, Patriarch Tarásios led our Orthodox faithful through the streets into the Cathedral of Agiá Sophía, the Holy Wisdom. A new young emperor, Michael, and his widowed mother, Theodora, decreed: henceforth, to the end of time, on the first Sunday of Lent, all Orthodox people would take up icons in procession. The priest would read out the Synódikon, the decree of the council, casting out of the Church by anathema all those who reject the image of our Beloved. The feast was to be called hê Kyriakí tês Orthodoxías – the Sunday of the true worship, the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

But, Father, what has this to do with us? No one breaks into our church and tears down the image of the Bridegroom. Really? One week ago, a strange woman with a sour face was prowling around, agitated, at the back of this church. She rebuffed the kind word of one of our worshippers. At the end of the Rite of Forgiveness, she asked to speak to me privately. Standing here, she denounced the venerable icons and said that our traditions make ‘the Blood of Jesus’ of no effect. I smelled that ancient heresy. ‘For two thousand years’, I replied, ‘we have received the Blood of Christ at the hands of his Apostles and their lawful successors, in the Church that Christ founded. May you receive his Precious Blood someday’. Her stiff upper lip quivered. She turned around and stormed out. Why was she here? To denounce the holy icons? To confess Christ in words and, like a madman, to deny him in images? To say: ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ So I replied, as Philip to Nathanael, ‘Come and see’. She came at the start of the Great Fast in order to remind us: our enemy prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. But heresy turns and flees, as soon as we speak the True Faith.

Beloved in Christ: heresy is no light matter. The early monks of the Egyptian desert once tested Abba Agathon, a holy father known to be patient. ‘Are you Agathon the fornicator?’ ‘Yes,’ said Abba Agathon sadly, bowing his head. ‘Are you Agathon the proud?’ ‘I am,’ replied Agathon. ‘Are you Agathon, who talks nonsense?’ ‘Yes, I am’, he replied. ‘Are you Agathon the heretic?’ ‘I am not a heretic’, he said firmly. ‘But, Abba,’ the monks asked later, ‘why did you let us call you a fornicator, a proud man, a fool, but not a heretic?’ ‘I am a sinner and your words remind me – but to be a heretic is to separate yourself from God’. This Sunday of true worship, we unite ourselves to God. We say: you are the Bridegroom, whose image we honour in procession. With every step, he trample every lie and false doctrine and come nearer to the Orthodox faith. Taking up the holy icons, we declare: ‘You are the Son of God Incarnate, you are the King of Israel’. Then, the One we love looks through that two-way glass. He says to us, if we have ears to hear: ‘You shall see greater things than these. The miracle of the holy icons: what those who mock the faith of Christians can never see. A baby born in a cave, the God before eternity; a man baptised in a river, God before the ages; our God, fully man so he can die and fully God, so he can trample down death by death.’ In holy icons we hold in our hands, we touch, we kiss – we see the heavens open without stop, without pause until the end of the world. And, carrying our prayers, the eyes of true faith see the angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man’.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of the Last Judgment, 7 February 2010

“As you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me” (Mt 25.45)

Look in a mirror. What do you see? Yourself? Only an image of yourself. A soiled mirror may show you only a bare outline of your face. A warped mirror, a distorting mirror – the kind you find in a carnival – shows you the distorted face of a monster: the bulging eyes, the wide mouth. Your face, stretched and compressed all out of proportion. Only a clean mirror shows you your real face. Now imagine you saw that grotesque, distorted shape, not in a carnival mirror but in an ordinary looking-glass. That image is you. You want to scream, to run away as fast as you can. But the mirror has done nothing to you: it only shows you as you really are. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall…’ Fairy tales are full of mirrors: a magic mirror that talks, a mirror that invites you ‘through the looking-glass’ into the place where everything is topsy-turvy. Everything unexpected, turned inside-out. A mirror has a strange power to hold us captive. If you like what you see, you stare into the mirror for hours. But if there’s something there you don’t want to see, you hate a mirror. You avoid it, you run away. You throw a sheet over it – in case you caught the slightest glimpse of yourself, out of the corner of your eye. If you’re frightened enough, you smash the mirror with a bottle. But, no matter how many pieces go flying, each piece tells the truth. The mirror has done nothing to you. It only shows you the truth.

The truth! That’s what most of us fear. We walk around in a fog, a dense fog of half-lies: not the lies we tell our neighbours, but the lies that we ourselves half-believe. In French, we call it la mauvaise foi, ‘bad faith’. Deep inside, you know it’s a lie – but you believe it, anyway. You all but convince yourself. So, living in a fog of half-lies, you live in constant fear. A liar only conceals the truth; the half-liar forgets where he put it. What if the truth comes out? What if I pass by the mirror and glimpse my own face – my real face? In our terrible fear of the mirror, we construct a way of life. We stuff our bodies with heavy food and drink; we stuff our heads with chatter: ‘avoid the negative, accentuate the positive’, anything to help you run, run, run, far away from the mirror that shows us the truth about who we are. It’s hard work living with bad faith. An alcoholic lives with it all the time. Bad memories burn up your body and your soul. You try to drown the fire with another shot – but, with every shot, the fire burns worse. Some fires, you can’t douse with a shot of gin. But liquor isn’t the only bottle used to smash the mirror. Women in the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, where my wife used to work, sell their diseased bodies to pay for the next fix; they crawl on all fours in the alleys, scrounging for an infected hypodermic needle. In this very city parish, I’ve seen homeless men stinking of vomit. I’ve taken a man’s soiled hand in mine when he was hungry for more than food. If you’re like most of us, you want to look away, don’t you? Snap out at them, when they scream out? Imprison them in an institution, abandon them to the hands of some burnt-out, abusive nurse. When they cry ‘I’m hungry, thirsty’, you shout: ‘Pull yourself together! Don’t make a scene!’ But has it ever occurred to you: that soiled, drunken face is a mirror of your own. A mirror of what we all are, stripped of our gloss – a mirror of broken humanity. If you run away from it, throw a sheet over it and pretend it isn’t there, maybe it’s because you don’t want to see the truth about yourself reflected in that face. You don’t want the sun to come out and burn away the fog.

When the Son of Man comes in his glory on the last Day and sits on his glorious throne, he will shine a million times more brightly than the sun. But we won’t see him. We’ll see his face, sure enough, but it won’t look like the familiar face of Jesus Christ in the icons. We will see a mirror. According to Saint Basil the Great, all that Christ does on the Day of Judgment is appear. No thunder. No lightning from the sky, no ball of fire hurled from some wrathful God. That’s Jupiter, not Jesus. All Christ will do is appear. But, in his face, we will see ourselves – just ‘as in a mirror’. As a mirror does nothing but reflect what is there, Christ will do nothing. But ‘the sheep’ will see one face, and ‘the goats’ another. We will see, in our own image reflected in his face, the faces of all the hungry we’ve fed, the thirsty we’ve given drink; the lonely strangers who found a home in our lives; the naked, we clothed; the sick and imprisoned, whose tears we dried when we showed mercy to them. As in a mirror, Saint Basil tells us, we will see all those in need that we helped: all of them, fixed forever in the features of our own face. If, once in our life, we took pity on someone who hungered for more than food, we will recognise that face in our own.

But if, in our fear of the truth, we’ve thrown a sheet over the mirror and smashed it into a million pieces, there will be no place left to hide. The sun will burn away the fog, simply by rising in the morning; the mirror will do nothing to us, but reveal the truth – the whole truth. In the loving face of Christ, we will see the image we dread. In his loving voice, we will hear a voice crying: ‘I was the woman in the alley who sold her body, who crawled on all fours. I was the drunkard with the dirty hands. I cried out, and you shouted at me; I reached out to you, and you pulled back your hand. I asked for bread, you gave me a stone’. Now, you can no longer look away. The faces of all those who needed you – the faces that you rejected – are eternally etched on your face. No thunder, no lighting, and no ball of fire from the sky. At the Last Judgment, the fire will be in us: the fire of hatred, or the fire of love. Christ our True God, who cannot lie, will say to us: ‘I loved you then, I love you now – but if you turned your face away from the mirror, you can turn no longer; if you hid from my love, you can hide no more’. On the terrible Day of Truth, no one will be able to hide. In the face of Christ, we will see our own face as we have never seen it before. Will it be the face of love – or a face that can never love again?

Beloved in Christ: always remember the words of Marley’s ghost in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol – ‘I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it’. God judges no one. God damns no one, not a single human being from the dawn of time till now. A mirror doesn’t judge you: the mirror only shows you the truth. The sun doesn’t judge the fog; but, when the sun rises, it burns away the fog. Your eternal destiny is in your hands. This very day, the Sunday of the Last Judgment, someone will need your love. Someone will reach out a hand to you: perhaps a hand bruised and soiled. A hand seeking your love. Will you take that hand in yours or not? Don’t get me wrong: God will not love you less if you pull away. But this is the logic of love: every cruel act binds us; every kind act sets us free. Every cruel act warps and distorts our features; every loving act shapes in our face the features of Jesus Christ. On the great and terrible last day, the Day of Judgment, no one will ask: ‘Did you keep all the commandments, say the prayers, observe the fasts?’ No Judge will even ask us: ‘Did you love – or did you hate?’ Instead, we will read the answer in the face of Christ himself – in our real face – as in a mirror.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Publican and Pharisee, 24 January 2010

Standing far off, [he] would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me the sinner!’ (Luke 18.13)

Would you eat a roast dinner on Holy Friday? How about a fillet mignon, all wrapped in bacon, smothered in a sauce of the finest Bordeaux wine, blended with Norman cream? It’s not really fasting fare, is it? Great and Holy Friday, the strictest day of fasting in the entire Orthodox year. A steak in wine and cream sauce. You couldn’t go much further in breaking the fast, could you? What would you deserve for breaking the fast? There are priests who would bar you from Communion for eating an olive on Holy Friday. We don’t eat or drink anything on Holy Friday. Doesn’t it say so in the how-to manual, the manual with all the rules? All real Orthodox keep the rules – how else are you going to buy your way into heaven? You’re not like everyone else nowadays, in this self-indulgent society. You’re Orthodox. You don’t swear, or tell lies, or cheat, or steal. You don’t drink, smoke, look at pornography. You don’t sleep with your girlfriend or boyfriend. You fast on every Wednesday and Friday. You come to church every Sunday. You read all the prayers in the Prayer Book, every morning and evening. That’s what makes you Orthodox, isn’t it – keeping all the rules? So, when you stand in front of your icons in the evening, you can thank God: ‘I’m not like the sinners’. Eat steak in Lent? ‘I’d rather starve’. Or would you rather starve someone else?

An Orthodox priest once rushed to a hospital in Holy Week. A little girl, about a year old, lay in intensive care, burning with fever. Debilitated, dehydrated. Abnormally low level of iron and protein in her body. He asked her father, one of his parishioners, what in God’s name had happened. During the whole of Lent, it seems, the father had imposed a fast on his baby daughter. According to the ‘how-to’ manual, the strictest monastic rules: no meat, fish, eggs … or dairy. He deprived the child of milk. When she cried from hunger, he restricted her to one meal a day – just like the monks, according to all the rules. The priest ordered him to come to confession. ‘If you want to receive Holy Communion ever again’, the priest told him, ‘on Holy Friday, on the most solemn day of prayer and fasting in the year, you will sit in front of me … and eat a steak’. ‘But that’s against the rules of the fast!’ the man shouted. ‘Your fast’, the priest said, ‘is the fast of demons. They never eat anything – except human souls’.

It’s not a parable. It really happened in Montreal, years ago. The priest made his point to that recent convert, loud and clear: Orthodoxy is not a set of rules. What is the use of a fast that hardens your heart? A fast that makes you angry and irritable, harsh and cold, eager to punish others or punish yourself? What use is a fast that hardens you against your fellow man – even against your own child? What is it, if not the fast of the demons? Does that mean, then, that we should ignore the fast altogether? By no means. Fasting is not a law; it is only a means to an end. ‘Why do you Orthodox fast?’ an Anglican once asked a Russian philosopher. He answered perfectly: ‘It helps us to pray’. Fasting melts your heart. Fasting takes your heart of stone and melts it into flesh. Try clearing out the animal fats, the heavy drink and oil from your body, and something changes inside you. You feel joy and pain more sharply than before. Your eyes fill up with tears. Old wounds long covered with scars re-appear and you realise: we are all wounded. We are all only frightened, hungry children, stumbling in the dark. When every mask of meat and wine falls away and lays bare the real you, the frightened, wounded you, hidden behind your stiff upper-lip, the only prayer you have left is: ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner’.

Two men went into a church to pray. The religious man prayed: ‘Thank God, I’m not like those sinners. I keep the fasts to the letter. I donate ten percent of my income to charity. I don’t cheat or steal or extort money; I don’t swear or lie or sleep around. Thank God, I keep all the rules’. The religious man stands there, praying with himself, listing virtues to himself. And that’s exactly where his prayer remains. Hidden back there in the shadows, a sinner – a dirty, corrupt extortionist, the kind who gambles with other people’s savings; the kind you’d like to spit on if you met him in the street – stands there in the dark, with his eyes nailed to the floor. He won’t lift his eyes, in case someone catches his gaze. He is alone and afraid. Who hasn’t he cheated, stolen from, or deceived? He hasn’t given a coin to the poor; and you can be sure, he doesn’t fast at all. But he who has deceived all others, can no longer deceive himself. ‘Lord, have mercy’ is the only prayer he has left. ‘God, be merciful to me, the sinner’. The righteous Pharisee has only a list of virtues, of rules to tick off; and the prayer turns in on himself. The sinful publican keeps no rules at all; and his prayer turns him away from himself to God.

Brothers and sisters in Christ: this day, we open the Triodion, the book of the services of Great and Holy Lent. With the forty-day fast only three weeks away, our Holy Mother the Church teaches us not how to fast but how not to fast. Let it be the fast of God, she tells us, not the fast of demons. May it soften your heart, not harden it. May it prove you, not strong but weak; not a self-declared saint, but a self-confessed sinner; not your Creator, but his creature, always in need of his great and rich mercy. Orthodoxy, real Orthodoxy, is not proclaiming: ‘Lo, I have kept all the rules, fall down at my feet and worship me’. It is the cry uttered in the dark: ‘Lord, have mercy’. It is the cry that reverberates inside us with every Lord, have mercy. It is not a cry of despair to a cruel Judge – but a cry of love to the heavenly God we dare to call our Father.

Are we then a Church of rules, or of mercy? Here in the front, on the wall in front of you, you see no wooden plaque inscribed with the Ten Commandments. You see the sacred image of Christ our true God, who died for love of you, and his most pure and holy virgin Mother, who felt a sword pierce her heart, and has prayed for you ever since. You see the faces of mercy and you pray, with me: God, enlighten my darkness. God, drown my sins in the ocean of your mercy. God, be merciful to me, the sinner.