St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, 13 May 2012

“The water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
(John 4.14)

A young woman of around twenty to twenty-five stands outside the little chapel where the priest hears confessions. You sense her thirst; you smell her fear. You see her fresh face turn pale. Her sparkling eyes, nailed to the hard floor. Her lovely body, petrified. A massive stone, weighing her down. ‘What will he think of me?’ she asks. ‘Will he ever allow me inside a church again?’ Carefully, she steps up to the small table with the Gospel and the Cross. She crosses herself. She hears the priest, reading the prayer: ‘O God our Saviour, who through thy prophet Nathan…’ But the sounds seem to echo from a cavern far away. He bends low to hear her confession. At last she breaks the awful silence. At first, the usual trivia. A prayer omitted in a rush. A piece of toast breaking the fast. Then, as always, the tears well up and flow. She admits it. The years of multiple partners. That first boyfriend, who vowed to leave her – unless… Her friends at a party, after a few drinks. At the time, she thought nothing of it. Arms that held her, the night her father left. Bodies and beds. She hid her history from the latest boy, until he found out. He beat her, as usual; pulled a knife, as usual. It is the last time he will ever pull a knife on her again. But that blade is not so sharp as the word whore. It does not cut like the words: ‘Touching you make me sick. No decent guy is ever going to want you again’. The confession is over. She falls silent. What will the priest say to her ‘insatiable lust’? But the priest only smiles softy. And sadly.

‘Father, am I disgusting?’ she asks. ‘No’, he replies. ‘Do priests even talk with “whores” like me?’ ‘Yes’, he says. ‘Is that it? Won’t you pull out the book of rules? Won’t you force me to fast for weeks, or kneel on shards of broken glass?’ ‘No’, he replies. ‘Father’, she says, muffling a sob. ‘Will anybody, ever love me?’ ‘Yes’, the priest assures. ‘But how?’ ‘Can you still shed a tear?’ Her face is wet with tears. ‘Then the thirst inside you, welling up with a single tear, will wash your eyes – until you see the beauty in you, as God sees it’. As the priest says this, a burden falls. As the priest places his stole over her head and traces the Sign of the Cross, the stone inside does not crack. It melts away.

Why does the priest not judge? Because he knows himself. He sees with his own eyes, he hears for himself: no manual of Sharía blots out the human face. He knows his heart: a greater sinner than this poor girl ever could be. He feels in himself the insatiable thirst of the human soul and knows – this thirst, that bodies and beds could never quench, will lead her to the Source of life and save her soul. As it saved … his.

A priest worthy of the name stands calmly, quietly in confession. He smiles softly, as he holds a broken heart in his hands. His own heart broke many times, long ago. From that broken heart – shattered, melted, dissolved – flows a stream of living water that satisfies the insatiable thirst that defines what it means to be human.

But he can do it only if he has become a spring of water, welling up to eternal life.

The Tradition of the Orthodox Church does not permit every priest to hear confession. It is only for those who know the faith, not in the echoing halls of the head but in the heart. A heart where the blade of sorrow has carved the truth, where years of insatiable thirst, keen hunger, and a pain that reads human pain, have cleared the path: only a heart of this calibre can hear for itself and see for itself – the Source of life.

In a field in Samaria, Jesus stops by a well. A hot noonday sun beats down on him – and on a woman who comes to draw water. ‘Give me a drink’, he says. ‘What’s a good rabbi like you doing, talking with a woman like me?’ she asks. ‘Isn’t it against your “rules”?’ ‘If you knew who it was asking you’, Jesus replies, ‘you would not speak about “rules”. You would ask me for water: living water’. ‘Water that’s alive? Where’re you going to get it?’ ‘Drink from this well’, Jesus says, ‘you will be thirsty by tomorrow. Drink of living water, it will become a spring inside you giving life to others’. ‘So, give me some’, she demands of him. ‘First, call your husband’, Jesus challenges her. ‘I’m not married’. ‘True’, he replies. ‘You have been thirsty for a long, long time’, he says. ‘Did any of them quench the thirst inside? Five husbands? Your latest lover? Aren’t you still thirsty?’ ‘How do you know?’ A tear wells up in her eye. ‘The hour is coming’, Jesus assures, ‘when that insatiable thirst in your body and soul will open your eyes to the “One” you are looking for. But you won’t find him where you’ve looked. You will see him as he is’. ‘Yes, yes, I know, Messiah is coming’, she says, muffling a sob. ‘It is he who is speaking with you’.

The thirst that drove her from bed to bed, now drives a Samaritan woman into the city. The same woman who has known so many men, tells her neighbours: ‘You’ve got to meet him. He know everything I ever did – and judges nothing. Can he be the Christ?’ As she speaks, an insatiable thirst wells up in everyone who listens. Walking the streets by day, at table by night, heart after heart opens itself to him. People tell him hidden pains and hopes, a hunger that food does not satisfy – a thirst, quenched only at the Source of life.

It is not a virgin who becomes the spring of water for the people of Sychar in Samaria. It is a woman who has known too many bodies and beds, an insatiable thirst that kept her alive. Some might call her: ‘Whore’. We call her Saint Photiní – the enlightened one.

Beloved in Christ: a wise archimandrite, an old monk, his face careworn by nightly vigils and the school of prayer, once told his spiritual son – ‘Don’t worry about sex’. A flaming, insatiable thirst – misdirected – will find its way home. Instead, worry about letting the flame go out. Try to stifle it with sex and money, drugs that you sniff or drugs that you drink – so long as the flame burns, it will not be satisfied. Petrify it with ‘canon laws’, nail it to a floor as hard as your heart – you will never extinguish it. It is not the flame of lust. It is the thirst for God. When Saint Photiní the missionary lay dying – tortured, imprisoned, thrown into … a dry well – did she remember bodies and beds? She remembered another well that never ran dry. A hot, noonday nun. The face of the Stranger who spoke of living water. A tear in her eye. And an insatiable thirst that is quenched by nothing, nothing less than life without end.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Paralytic Sunday, 6 May 2012

“Rise, take up your pallet, and walk (John 5.8)

Al masih qam! Christos anésti! Christ is risen!

Do you realise what you are saying? Do you have any idea? You stand on the edge of a precipice. An edge of soft rock. Rotting, crumbling, beaten down by centuries of blustery winds and lashing rain. Your toe is less than an inch from the edge. If you moved it, you would lose your foothold. Glance down. Dare to look: you see? The cliff drops vertically. Nothing to break your fall. Can you imagine falling through miles of air, slicing through a stormy sea to the ocean floor – thirty-six thousand feet below? You would not survive it, of course. The fall would kill you, long before you reached the bottom. As if you ever did. If you say ‘Christ is risen!’ with all your mind, you do not leap off the cliff. You do not slip. You drop. Straight down into the abyss. Shout ‘Christ is risen’ with all your soul: you drop into the one depth that has no bottom. You leave behind a familiar edge of rock. You hear the soft, crumbly laws of nature, beaten by wind and rain, slipping off the precipice behind you. If Christ is risen, nothing makes sense again. But the fall does not kill you; it brings you to life. Stand on that precipice, glance over the edge. Are you too paralysed by fear? Do you hear the resounding echo of that fall?

Is it any wonder, then, that the words ‘Christ is risen’ give wings to those who believe them? Is it any wonder that the heavens, the earth, the sea and everything in them trembles – no, freezes over, paralysed – when it hears: ‘Christ is risen’? Christ is risen – which is to say, nature has no boundaries. Everything you know or thought you knew has changed.

Blind. Lame. Paralysed. Most people cannot begin to accept it. Life simply ought to make sense. Streetcars and mailboxes, tube lines and television sets. Walls still continue upright, bricks meet, floors are firm below. Babies are born, old people die. No one in our day and age, some say, no one ‘sensible’, believes that ‘Jesus’ rose from the dead. Only crazy Evangelicals and nasty old Orthodox. Mention it in a divinity seminar. Jaws drop. Faces go blank. Why, if you believe that, you might as well believe that he was born of a Virgin. That plain bread becomes his body, wine his blood. That only Orthodox may receive Communion or only men become priests. If you believe that Christ is risen, you might as well be – Orthodox. What the blind cannot see, the lame will not walk out to and touch. Orthodox Christians, born and bred, who come to church (once in a blue moon) to cut a business deal, eat a bowl of borsht, dance the hasaposérviko at the Edmonton Greek Festival. Or – Orthodox ‘converts’, left to rot in some Western Rite parish, or make up services as they go along. ‘Super Orthodox’, with a book of canon laws dangling from the neck like a millstone and left to drown in the depth of the sea. All of them, the believers and unbelievers alike, searching for a familiar floor to stand on. A familiar pallet to lie on in a corner and just be left alone.

All of them, paralysed. Not one willing to rise from his pallet and drop into the abyss that is God.

This is the irony of the Christian faith. To those out there, it is the refuge for cowards: a down-soft blanket, wrapped round an old man waiting to die. The old man: bitter, sullen, boring, and sanctimonious. Incapable of joy. His mind, that endless circle of failures, going nowhere. Trivial flaws and rotten habits. Bad memories and crusty scars: that is what Christianity means to the secular world. An old man, paralysed, living in constant fear of everything in life. Are you not tired of carrying him around inside?

Do you not yearn to be free of him? A breath of fresh air, even if it shocks your lungs? A ray of sunlight in a curtained room, even if it startles your eyes? A single step on wasted legs – even if you fall off the edge into the abyss that is God?

In Jerusalem, by the pool of Bethesda, lie the blind, the lame, the paralysed. The ‘old man’ in all his guises. A few cynics lie by the pool, unable to see past opaque spots in a retina or in a soul. Like the cripples, clinging to a familiar crutch or tucked away in a soft blanket, they figure: ‘Life makes sense. Babies are born, the sick die’. But someone has cared enough to bring them there. Once in a while, the water stirs. For those who enter, immerse themselves – eyes open, legs move. One man, a living corpse lying in his own urine and faeces, figures: ‘Nobody cares enough to lower me in. No one has cared, for thirty-eight years’. Bitter, sullen. Left to rot. His mind, an endless circle of failures, going nowhere. Jesus sees him. He asks him the last question that he ever expected to hear: ‘Do you want to be healed?’ ‘Do I?’ he thinks. ‘What do you think, stupid?’ he says in his head. ‘But do I?’ he thinks again. ‘All my life, I’ve lain on this pallet, night and day. It’s familiar. It’s all that I have. No! Leave me alone’. Instead, he says: ‘I have no one to help me and if I did, a stranger would step in before me’. Jesus accepts no excuses. ‘Rise’, he commands. He does not invite. ‘Rise now, take up your pallet, walk!’ No sooner do the wasted legs take the first step but Jesus disappears into the crowd.

The ‘super Jews’, that is, the canon lawyers, tell him: ‘Don’t you know what day it is? It’s illegal to carry that pallet on the Sabbath’. ‘A man told me’. ‘Who told you?’ But, to the lawyers of the Old Law, spitting words from paralysed souls, Jesus is gone. Once more, the sick man sees him in the Temple. He says nothing. But Jesus gives him one word of advice: ‘Sin no more’. In other words – ‘Never look back’.

Beloved in Christ: standing on the steep cliff that we call faith, battered by blustery wind and lashing rain, it is easy to settle for … the old man. Wrapped in a blanket, he is warm and dry. It is easy to pull back from an abyss and cling to your old, familiar pallet, smelly as it is. It is easy to settle into blind unbelief, ethnic custom, or the comforts of the Law –especially if you imagine that no one cares. I care. Some say: ‘Let me cling to a pallet of sickness, that familiar smell, the texture of that wool. Leave me alone by the side of the pool, free from the terrifying abyss’. I say: ‘Rise, take up your pallet and walk’. Take your first step. I will hold your hand. Step beyond unbelief, beyond cosy custom, beyond the Law. I step with you. God willing, we leave behind the rotting precipice, crumbling rocks, and the old man drowned in baptism. We fall into a depth that has no bottom – the life in Christ – and, falling, we hear the echo resounding and breaking open all the structures in heaven and earth: ‘Christ is risen!’

St. Botolph’s Parish, Holy Myrrhbearers Sunday, 29 April 2012

“There you will see him, as he told you”. (Mark 16.7)

Al masih qam! Christos anésti! Christ is risen!

A small thorn tree, native to dry, rocky soil found in the horn of Africa. Its bark is as hard as the hot winds that blow around it, as brittle as a child’s skin – when desert air and the dried-up river leave it to die of thirst. A small tree, a dry tree. An emblem of death. But if you thrust a small rock between the thorns and pierce the bark down to the sapwood, the tree begins to bleed. A yellow sap leaks out, like pus flowing from the wound. As it cools and dries, it turns … clear. The blood of this tree is bitter to the nose and lips; but only sniff it more closely, you will detect a faint sweet scent underneath. Doctors of the Yellow River in ancient China melted it down, to ease arthritic joints and purge stagnant blood from a uterus. The Hebrews blended it with sweet spices and gums, to make the holy qetoreth, the incense offered in the Temple – before the face of God. Physicians of the Pharaohs anointed the bodies of the dead with this clear resin from the bark of the thorn tree. But Indian practitioners of Āyurveda, two thousand years before the birth of Christ according to the flesh, prescribed it to heal injured nerves and release pent-up grief.

Resin of a thorn tree that grows only in rocky soil. Not sweet pine, or delicate cherry, or a proud English oak that gives no resin at all. A tree called ‘bitter’ – in Aramaic, myrrh.

How far from the rocky soil of Somalia is a hospital room in a Western city, walls painted a sickly shade of bluish-green? A man of only fifty-nine, shrivelled in bed. His face, dark yellow from jaundice; reddish lines on his skin, open veins visible from cancer; a mouth, scarcely able to move. Every few hours, as he slips in and out of sleep, his dying body shakes in terror at the nightmares that plague him, night after night. A sound of bones, crunching, underneath the bed. A shadowy black shape. When he was a child and had nightmares, his grandmother hung a prayer in her cross-stitch needlework by the bed. Some placed the crucifix under his pillow, others the image of Jesus Christ. Charms – perhaps holy charms – against the night demon, the mara, that creeps into the heart of a child. But now that the fever dried his lips and his liver failed him, all that the doctors could do was to prescribe a medicinal oil. Resin of the thorn tree, applied to the cheeks and under the nostrils. Oil of bitter myrrh. His eyes, dry with fever, welled up with tears. Pent-up grief, memories as old as infancy, surged up in that soul. His look, once proud, softened with a compassion that only the dying ever know. To those of us who saw him silently make his ‘peace’, the scent of myrrh blocked out the smell from the catheter and the bag hanging by the bed. Inside a heart where only God can see, a stone was removed from the door of the tomb. His path was clear as myrrh – on the Saturday of Palms when my mother phoned from hospital to tell me and the first words I uttered were: ‘Thanks be to God’.

Thank God, he crossed the threshold. Thank God, he glimpsed the holy tree inside.

Two trees grow in the human heart. One casts a fatal shadow through broken branches, where restless ravens hold on with a cruel claw and ragged wing; and wherever this tree of knowledge of good and evil casts its shadow, nothing grows. But in every heart, the poet says, the Tree of Life grows from joy – joy in the rustling of its leaves, joy in its sure hidden root, springing up … from the tomb of Christ our Living God.

Joy is not closing your eyes but opening them. Joy is not the absence of sorrow but the presence of Life. Life released by the bitter perfume of a small, dry thorn tree.

The women come to the tomb to anoint the body with resin from that small thorn tree. Precious myrrh to heal nightmares and release grief, myrrh to ease aching joints and to cleanse the womb of this world from all its stagnant blood. Women disciples: Mary from Magdala; Mary, the wife of Cleopas; Salome, the mother of James and John; Mary and Martha from Bethany; Joanna; and Susanna. They leave the men behind, too proud – or too afraid. Only old Joseph dared to ask the governor for the body of Jesus, still hanging on the tree of death. Wind blowing in from the desert has dried his skin to a brittle bark; the heart of this world grown old hung him on the tree, in the Place of a Skull where nothing grows. Nothing, that is, but dry thorn trees, emblems of death, around a tomb hewn out of the rock. Lost hope, like a dried-up river, encircles the tomb; and each, looking at the grief pent-up in her own heart, asks her neighbour: ‘Who will roll away the stone for us?’ But the women, carrying oil of myrrh, do not arrive on the old Sabbath but – the first day. They arrive, not at sunset but at – the rising of the sun. They find no stone blocking that entrance – but a stone rolled away. They see no old man but a young man, dressed in a white robe, who tells them: ‘He is not here. He is risen. Go tell his disciples. Go north, to Galilee of the Gentiles. There you will see him, as he told you’. They run away, terrified. Astonished at what they have seen. Or not seen.

How else? Bearing myrrh to anoint the dead, they glimpse the shadow of the living God. Entering the narrow space of grief, they find a tomb more spacious than the heavens. In it, a small, dry thorn tree has become the ever-expanding Tree of Life.

Beloved in Christ: twenty-one years ago on the eve of his sixtieth birthday, my father fell asleep with the scent of myrrh in his soul; twenty-one years ago, our own ‘myrrh-bearer’ was born. Wherever her narrow path leads, let her remember: she was born on the New Day. Whenever her foot stumbles on rocky soil; whenever the hot desert winds blow on her soul; whenever the ravens craw from the broken boughs of her old life, or old death, let her remember: this is the first day of the week. The new day. She arrives, not on the evening of Sabbath but at the rising of the sun, when Life, himself, is ready to live anew.

When she doubts the myrrh, the brittle bark that bleeds a resin, sacred enough to fill our censer, to anoint our dead, or to make holy chrism to seal the brow of every Orthodox Christian with the gift of the Holy Spirit, let her remember the words that she learned many years ago: ‘Beloved, gaze in thine own heart; the holy tree is growing there’. Find him there: Vanquisher of death. There you will see him – as he told you.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Saint Thomas Sunday, 22 April 2012

“Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side.” (John 20.27)

Al masih qam! Christos anésti! Christ is risen!

How do you know? How can you be absolutely sure that ‘Christ is risen’? Surely, it must be written in the user’s manual. The Book of the Law. That vast, ponderous tome bound in leather, brass, burnished gold. Enthroned on a velvet cushion under a sacred canopy. Or is that the Guru Granth Sahib? And is this a gurdwārā, a temple of the Sikhs? Then surely, it must be written in the Word of God, dictated letter-by-letter from the Archangel to the Prophet. Or is that the Qu’ran? And is this a mosque? So surely, it is written in the scroll kept in the Aron Kadósh and carried by the rabbi in procession? Or was that the Torah? And is this a synagogue? But are we not ‘Ahl al-Kitāb, the ‘People of the Book’? Sola Scriptura! Everything that Christians need is found exclusively here, between these covers of the Book of the Law. We admit nothing but what we prove, like a lawyer, from every page that dropped, intact, into a farmer’s field in upstate New York. Or is that the Book of Mormon? But, surely, how can you know that Christ is risen unless it is written somewhere, in some book? Saint Matthew, chapter 28? Mark 16? Luke 24? Saint John, chapter 20? Surely, People of the Book trust in every word in the Book of the Law.

Unless we are not People of the Book. And this is not the ‘Book of the Law’.

There are Orthodox Christians who would never kiss the Torah scroll. They would never fall flat in front of a Qu’ran, quote its laws to justify hacking off a human hand, stripping a back to the bone with a hundred lashes, or crushing a woman’s body under a shower of stones. They would never proclaim a printed book the perpetual Guru of God. They hide behind different trees. ‘Christ is risen’ must be written in the 75^th Canon of the Council of Pompeiópolis. Even if there never was any council of Pompeiópolis. It must be written in the rubric of the ancient Týpikon from the Monastery of the Left Sandal of the Mother of God in Apollonía on the Borysthênês. Even if there never was such a monastery. Surely somewhere, they tell themselves, there must be an infallible text to answer all my urgent questions and dispel my doubts. Somehow, a saying from the Fathers. A quote, a case, a precedent. Something in print, a bit of pigment pressed on white paper. An expert in a tweed jacket with Ph.D. after his signature. A scholar with forty-eight books to his name, each arguing that Jesus could not possibly have risen from the dead. Or else, an ‘elder’, a hermit in a cave, who holds in his hands a manuscript to open the kingdom of God.

Are Christians, then, enslaved to a book? Is the key to knowledge – a written word?

A word in print, black pigment pressed on wood pulp. Is this Christ, risen from the dead? When I handle it, do I hold the hand that healed leper’s sores and raised corpses to life? When I touch it, do I insert a finger in the mark of the nails or thrust my hand where the spear wounded his side? When I kiss it, do I kiss those feet that walked on the waters of Galilee and climbed the hill of Golgotha? If this ink were red, the rubrics on how to offer the services; if this tome were the heavy Pedálion, the collection of the canons; if these were the words of a Greek Father or a Russian monk – would the ink change into blood, the paper to Living Flesh? But how, then, can I know for certain that Christ is risen?

Can I know, really know, from a word – any word? Or only … from a Person?

On the evening of the first day, the disciples are gathered together in a room. For fear of the authorities, the doors are shut. Jesus appears among them and says ‘Peace be with you’. How do they know that it is he? He opens no book. He shows them his hands and his side. He breathes on them the Holy Spirit. ‘You are my Body’, he says, ‘my one and only Church. The shadow of the Law passed, when grace came – and you, my apostles and your successors, now hold the key of knowledge. If you forgive’, says Jesus, ‘then I forgive; and as you judge, I judge’. Thomas is not with them when Jesus appears. They tell him: ‘We have seen the Lord – with our own eyes’. Thomas does not ask: ‘Where is it written? Show me, in black and white’. He says: ‘Unless I see the print of the nails and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe’. After eight days, Jesus appears again. In his hands: no collection of canons. No rubrics. No Book of the Law! How is Thomas to recognise him? No volume in his hand. Only … the mark of nails. ‘Put your finger here’, Jesus says, ‘place your hand in this wound’. Thomas does not believe when he reads – only when he obeys; and in his blessed doubt, more sacred than a lawyer’s certainty, the apostle first utters the words: ‘My Lord and my God!’

Does Jesus scold him? No. Does he remind him? Yes. ‘Have you believed because you have seen me?’ he asks. ‘I am no book. I am no law. I am no manual of the Pharisees. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed – in my Body: the Church of my Apostles. He who has seen me, has seen God the Father; and he who hears my Apostolic Church, hears me’.

Beloved in Christ: a Pharisee once was shocked to see the Lord fail to wash his hands at table. Is it not written in the Book of the Law? Who is he to disobey – the Law? ‘Woe to you lawyers!’ Jesus declares, ‘for you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering’. But, if this Bible is not the Book of the Law, why honour it? It is an icon; and, like all icons, it points not to a law but to a Person. A Person who did many other signs, not written in this book; and these, the signs of his Risen Life, are written not to testify to a written code but that you may know: life is found in no Law but in the Key of Knowledge himself – Risen, in flesh and blood.

If you would know for sure that Christ is risen, look to his Body. His only Body, in flesh and blood, left on earth: his Orthodox Church. When you have immersed body and soul in true worship; submitted yourself to his apostolic priesthood; and touched his Precious Body with your lips, will you say with absolute certainty: ‘My Lord and my God!’

St. Botolph’s Parish, Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem (Palm Sunday), 8 April 2012

The house was filled with the fragrance of the ointment. (John 12.3)

A shadow, flitting in front of your eyes – then, all of a sudden, gone. A shadow cast from an unseen object. Hidden – behind the eyes of someone you love. Propping up her head in your palm, you look into her face. Glazed and empty. Her mind dried up; her tongue paralysed in her mouth. Confused, lost in an ever-expanding desert inside that you have no power to enter. A rush of pure terror invades those eyes, stinging them, waking them as they glimpse into the black pit that your eyes cannot fathom. Maybe you pound at the door of her soul and cry out: ‘Don’t leave me, damn you for leaving me!’ Or maybe you shut yourself up inside your mind and are no longer there. Perhaps you take her weary, wasted body into your arms, wrapped in its down-soft blanket. She stares out into space and you have no idea, none at all, whether she recognises you. You whisper: ‘You are always mine, always. When the sun rises, you will be in my thoughts. When night falls, I will dream of you and pray for you. Until, one day, my body falls asleep, I see you on the horizon, I run to you. Then nothing, nothing at all will take you from me again’. You hold her hand but her fingers no longer close around yours. You press your ear to her chest. No pulse. No breath. Her body crumples up inside its skin, crumbles apart in your arms. Like so much sand, seeping through your clenched fist, falling into that … black … pit.

No one who has clung to a loved one, when she or he lay dying, ever forgets it. None of us who has ever passed through that unnatural hell ever recovers. Twenty, forty years ago? Time does not pass. A part of you dies at that deathbed. A mother who held your hand after a bad dream; a spouse who reached across the dining table to take your hand in hers; a child that you protected from the dark forms lurking in the closet but you could not protect from the darkest form of all – these are not dead flesh. This is not carrion, waiting to be host to a million single-cell organisms. This is the one I love. The shadow hidden behind those blank eyes; the enemy who steals her from me and tosses her, like a broken toy, into a black pit, is the enemy called … Death.

Death has his apologists. Death has his allies and accomplices in high places.  Passing a sherry to his colleague in the senior common room, a professor of the public understanding of science says: ‘Death is natural. A rat runs his course, his heart stops beating. A cockroach crawls under my feet. No halo, no harp, no nothing’. His colleague, in a stiff white clerical collar, confesses: ‘You know, you’re right. Resurrection? It’s a metaphor. Jesus didn’t really rise in his body. His teachings went on until today. The Church? Well, you must admit, occasionally it can make some bad men do good’. Standing stiffly, awkwardly adjusting a necktie and lapel at the funeral, waiting for the conveyer belt to carry the coffin to the cremator unit, Uncle Bill tells Aunt Martha: ‘Thank God, no one cried’. A young man, stifling his tears, digging his nails into his suit, feels his rage rise up when he takes one last glance at that face in the pine box. ‘If they are right, and death is only a part of life’, he asks, ‘is the hand that I love nothing more than the paw of a rat?’

In the sterile air of that crematorium, the epitome of our secular society, nowhere is found the fragrance of precious nard.

We Orthodox, being primitive, do not stand stiffly at a funeral, watching the dark shadow flit before our eyes. We do not stifle our tears, seal up a coffin – or a heart – and neatly, discreetly, cremate our dead. We reach inside the open coffin. We offer a last kiss to the hand, the face, of the one we love; and, if our tears do not flow freely enough, we anoint the body with Nardostachys grandiflora, the oil of a pinkish, bell-shaped flower native to the Himalayas. A healing oil called spikenard.

Distilled from the stem of the plant, the amber liquid cures insomnia. Heals diseases of the heart. The Hebrews blended it to make incense, fit for the Temple. But from Tibet to the Nile, the ancients used nard to release deep grief and clear a path from life to death.

Six days before the Passover, Jesus sits at table in Bethany with his disciples and three special friends. Lazarus, still smelling of the grave. His hand, feeling the wood of the table, trying to make sure that it is there. Martha, the practical one, waiting table – as usual. But something is unusual. Mary, the youngest, sitting at the feet of Jesus. She senses a shadow, spreading across the room. Opening a box, he takes out a pound’s weight of ointment and anoints the Master’s feet. She wipes them with her hair. Within minutes, the scent penetrates the wood. The linen. Every crack and crevice, the stone around the house. The clothes of the Master. ‘Nard!’ cries Judas. ‘Pure nard! Do you have any idea how much nard costs? A year’s wages worth of nard. Go sell it, give it to the poor. Who knows? It could get the homeless off the streets. It could change a bad man’s life for the better’. ‘Leave her be’, commands Jesus. ‘Let her keep it for my burial’. Jesus casts his eyes on the shadow, spreading, blinding, deafening Judas to what he is really saying. I come not to give a code of laws. Nothing so petty as that. I come not to congratulate the righteous. I come not to make bad men good – but to make dead men alive.

Down the streets of the city, Jesus rides. The crowds carry branches of palm trees, they throw them at his feet. ‘Hosanna! Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord, the King of Israel!’ But the King of Israel is silent. His eye is solemn and stern, fixed on the horizon. A fragrance flows from his robe, wafting down city streets, into unlit alleys, into the bleak, back rooms where a soul lies on the edge of the black pit. The fragrance fills valleys and high mountain crags, desert wastes, and the depth of the sea. The earth as a house, filled with the fragrance … of pure nard. The scent to clear the path from life to death. Or death to life. In the path of this fragrance, the shadow of death melts away.

Beloved in Christ: this day, our King rides forth to war. He rides in the name of glazed and empty eyes. He rides in the name of weary, wasted flesh and everyone, frightened and confused from the dawn of time. He rides out in the name of every mind demented, every body slipping like sand through a clenched fist. He rides quietly into an ever-expanding desert. On the horizon, his enemy rides a pale horse and laughs at this ‘king’ on the foal of an ass. But our King rides straight into the black pit. His only weapon, the flame of Life that will burn out the pit from inside. When the sun rises, he will take up a Cross. When night falls, he will plunge it deep – straight into the heart of death itself. Some day, when our bodies fall asleep, we will run to him on the horizon. We will run straight into the arms of the Vanquisher of death. And nothing, nothing at all will ever take us from him again.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Saint Mary of Egypt, 1 April 2012

‘Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?’ (Mark 10.38)

Clean hands. Are your hands clean? Are mine? Spotless – as far as the naked eye can see. No sweat on these palms. No dirt, crusted in around these nails. Immaculate! Only this morning, these hands were scrubbed in brand-new anti-bacterial soap blended with aloes and fragrant lavender. No foreign molecules here. But what if a tiny, airborne droplet, wafting on the breeze, suddenly landed on these hands? A stranger coughs on a train, a few feet from me. A miniscule drop of saliva, ever so small, enters my lungs. It lingers, replicating itself, inflaming the tissue until blood flows. Tuberculosis begins this way. My God! Should I fit a mask neatly over my nose and mouth and never breathe the unclean air? Should I wrap my hands in skin-tight gloves, never touch a surface that you have touched? At least, I can refuse to drink from the cup that your lips have soiled. But if I never breathe the air, if I never touch a surface, or a cup, how shall my system resist the virus? Seal myself off from every ‘foreign’ molecule, my immunity grows weaker and weaker. And what if the virus comes not from outside me but inside me? The cup that I refuse: what if I have been drinking from it all my life? The hand that I thrust away: what if I look in the mirror and see – that hand is mine? Set myself apart from contagion – if the evil is within me, I do not stay healthy. I suffocate.

What, then, can I do but face the contagion? Bit by bit, step by step, until my system is immune? What can I do but pass through the fire – until every part of me is whole and new?

Clean hands fear contagion. So do some Christians. Sweating palms and crusted nails, as foreign to them as hands that refuse to clap, or a life weighed down by regrets. What is the image that greets this Christian in a mirror? A clean face, young and healthy. But, above all, unstained. She regrets nothing. She remembers nothing. She gazes down at her lily-white hands and remarks: ‘Immaculate!’ No spot on her snowy-white blouse. Her hands are clean, empty as the white-washed walls of her own parish church. No priest comes between her and God. No bloodstained Cross. No icons of Jesus and Mary. This was all cleaned away, centuries ago. A simple service, accessible to any ordinary mind. A plaque of the Ten Commandments on the wall: the code that everyone can – and will – obey. Her mouth abstains from drink. Her ears hear no evil words. Her eyes see no evil: none, that is, but the figure lurking in the shadows. Dark eyes, tumbling hair, long legs and full bosom of … another kind of woman. A woman no longer young. Her sunburnt face has seen sights that the healthy young face cannot imagine. Bodies lying in the city streets. Back alley brothels. Her lips that too many men have kissed drink from a chalice said to hold the actual Blood of Christ. Scarcely the image of a clean Christian woman. Our Christian girl would never drink from a common cup, stained by that unclean mouth. A woman like that is full of loathsome diseases. What if a drop of her saliva … ?

But the stained cup that the girl refuses, she has been drinking all her life.

There are ‘Christians’ who consider themselves, as it were, ‘set apart’ – in the Hebrew, pârûsh. If they have a mind to, they figure, they could pass a full day without committing a sin. Set apart, like the Pĕrûshîm: the Pharisees. The party of simple faithful, following a code that anyone can – and will – obey. No priest comes between them and the Law. Speak no evil, hear no evil, see no evil. And never, ever drink from the cup of a woman like that.

Yesterday and today, Simon the Pharisee forgets: sin is not a ‘foreign’ molecule. It lives on a clean hand as on a dirty. The only cure: not a code of law but a stream of tears.

A woman no longer young stands at the doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. She has travelled to Jerusalem for the Exaltation of the Cross. She has paid her passage, as always, with dark eyes, tumbling hair, legs spread apart. Since she came to Alexandria, at age twelve, what has she not seen? Bodies lying in the streets. Back alley brothels. A poisoned cup, a bloodstained whip. Every cruel pleasure that passion can buy. Lips, stained red. She stands there, fixed to the threshold, unable to move. She lifts her eyes to the icon above the door. Another Mary, just as immaculate as she is stained. But the eyes of this Mary do not judge. They whisper: ‘Take my hand, sister. Now it is as immaculate as mine’. Crossing into the church, she hears a Voice: ‘If you would find peace, cross over the Jordan into the desert. A blazing sun will scorch your face, a flood of tears will scald your soul’. ‘How then will I find peace?’ she asks him. ‘Are you able to drink the cup that I drink?’ asks the Voice, ‘or to be baptized with the baptism with which I am baptized?’ She does not answer. She flees into the desert. There to shed … a lifetime of tears.

Forty years later, an elderly monk called Zosimus finds in the desert a woman no longer young. A sunburnt face, a wasted body that rises in ecstasy and walks on the surface of the water. But she has paid the price. Burning tears on forty gloomy nights. Howls in the icy, desert wind. A withered hand, clawing the cold rocks. A lifetime of tears that change the heart of stone into a heart of flesh. Mary of Egypt: a pair of dirty hands.

Beloved in Christ: who here has clean hands? No stain nor spot, no history, no regrets? Maybe a nice little sect, founded only yesterday by the will of man. But not the Orthodox Church. Maybe an affluent sect, set apart on fresh, green lawns amid dreamy spires. Maybe it has clean hands. But not the Orthodox Church. After two millennia, our hands are anything but clean. We have sold our souls to emperors and commissars, the sultans and the KGB. Our martyrs have given more blood to Christ in one century than in the first twenty centuries of the Christian era. Our palms are sweaty, our nails crusted with dirt – and she who intercedes for us today is a woman no longer young. Her body is not lily-white but sunburnt; her skin, not healthy but emaciated; her eyes, streaming with tears; her lungs, filled with sighs. Above all others, she knows that there is no man who lives and does not sin. But she, like us, has passed through the fire. She, who drinks the cup of Christ down to the dregs. Mary of Egypt, the exact image of a Christian. Stained with sin, and rising, rising, eternally rising in hope.

Holy Mother Mary, pray to God for us!

St. Botolph’s Parish, The Annunciation, 25 March 2012

For with God nothing will be impossible (Luke 1.37)

What do you see in a piece of glass – a ‘looking’-glass? An image in a mirror? Maybe a face full of wrinkles, sprinkled with liver spots? Without our glasses, some of us cannot see the mirror. Time dims our eyes, dulls our ears. Chills our flesh. White hairs in a beard. Silver threads woven in and out among the black. A slow pulse. Aching muscles, soggy lungs, and dry, flaky skin remind you: time is catching up with you. Run! But you cannot outrun him. Look at him in the shadows there, peering over your shoulder. Do you recognise that hollow face? Do you sense his bony fingers prodding, tapping you, pursuing his prey? Now turn around. Open your eyes. That hollow face is … yours. Our enemy waits until your legs give out and you have no energy left to run. Do you recognise his image in the glass? From that fleshless grin, you hear the only word that the enemy ever speaks out loud: ‘Impossible’.

Give me back my health, let me sleep through the night. Impossible, he says. Give me back my body that reasons and remembers, dreams and hopes. Impossible, he smirks. Beside a lonely hospital bed, the enemy waits. Arms folded. A sardonic grin on his face. A frail, broken voice wells up from your dry throat and lungs, pleading: ‘One more hour’. Bending low, the enemy whispers one word in your dying ear: ‘Impossible’.

Our enemy wins by the order of nature. Sooner or later, every kingdom falls. Every man, woman, and child slips into his hands. Our oldest enemy: Death. He will have – his hour. But when? When your brain wave goes flat on the screen? Your breath no longer shows up on the glass? Or does Death win when the only word you know is: … ‘Impossible’?

Walk the streets of the secular city. Everywhere you see the hollow face of Death. Cold, stiff bodies jostling on a bus. Dull masks of boredom: all that they ever see in the mirror. Like all ghosts, most are unaware that they are dead. An office worker walled up inside a cubicle, staring for hours at an empty screen. A woman waiting angrily in a queue, her mind as numb as his. Watch her eyes grow dull, as the commuters on the late suburban train. She no longer sees or hears the child pulling at her sleeve. Leave him a stale slice of pizza, shove him in front of the TV. For dead bodies, wandering in the secular desert, the sun never rises. It is an optical illusion. Another day of misfiled papers, nothing more than that. An empty glass in a pub. Why ask for the impossible? Beyond the edge of the monthly pay cheque lies – nothing. Tossing and turning in the night when they are unable to sleep, a question – unanswered, unasked – presses on a secular mind: Is life nothing more than this? Wrinkled skin and brittle bones: these are not the real signs of age, the harbingers of Death. A culture has grown old when it has lost … its hope. Death lives on the lips of a professor, pronouncing: a human ovum cannot possibly fertilise itself inside a virgin’s womb. Death dwells in a divinity lecturer, declaring: dead cells cannot possibly reconstitute themselves in a grave. Sprinkle a drop or two of water on a baby. Why not?

Perform a wedding for two atheists, whom you will never see again until you lay them in the grave. Harmless customs. But no miracles, please. After all, they are impossible. Impossible: as a God who becomes man. Impossible: as a God who makes all things new.

Walking the streets of the secular city, you see crowds of the walking dead. Bored faces and aching muscles. A consumer culture has sold them all that it has left to sell; and, as the last gadget sinks into yesterday, the consumer gazes into a looking-glass and asks: ‘Is that it?’ The last big deal, the last fake tan. Is there nothing more?

Then, one day, the face in the mirror is not the dry, hollow face of Death. It is the face of Life. The face of One who makes … all … things … new.

In a provincial backwater called Nazareth, forgotten by the consumer culture of Rome; a dusty, defeated land of aching muscles; in a land, and a time, grown too old with regrets to conceive of a God who cares – a teenage girl, newly engaged to a carpenter, sees an image. A figure blazing like fire but fuzzy … like a light, reflected in a looking-glass. She cannot make out his face. ‘Hail, favoured one’, he declares. ‘The Lord is with you’. What is she to make of it? Her mind races. ‘Do not be afraid, Mary’, says the face in the light. ‘You will conceive a son and call him “Jesus” – and, when the last kingdom has fallen, his kingdom will never end’. ‘How is it … possible?’ the girl asks. ‘I have never been with a man’. She can see the hollow, wrinkled faces in her mind, mocking her, whispering and gossiping. She can picture the sardonic grins. ‘When God wills’, the angel tells her, ‘the order of nature is – overcome. You will overcome it. Has the world grown old? You, who are young, will give it a new birth. Has a people without God lost its hope? You will carry Hope Himself inside your womb. Is the land dry and cracked, barren and empty? In you, it will become a fountain. You are the looking-glass, in which those who have seen only the face of Death will gaze on the face of Life’.

That young teenage girl, in a time grown old, does not analyse the words. After all, they are … impossible. She says only: ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord. Be it so!’ – and a Son rises inside her womb, never to set again.

Beloved in Christ: today, as a young girl passes from death to life, we honour the voice of an angel that spoke the impossible. We honour the voice of a young girl who replied: ‘Yes, it is possible’. To the numb mind and the hopeless heart, in a world grown old, we say: it is time for the Timeless God to become a little Child. A Child, born only of hope in the womb of a teenager who knew only how to hope. Our God could have descended in fire and flame, in lightning and thunder and cloud. But no. Our God could have slain the enemy, Death, with his own right hand. But no. Death has his hour, his final hour, when the fleshless grin turns to terror and he falls prostrate at the feet … of the young girl who dares to say ‘Yes’ to Life. As we lift up her holy image today, on the feast of her glorious Annunciation, let a young girl newly baptized see what we – grown old – cannot. Let her scale every mountain, let her plumb every depth that jaded man calls impossible. When dead men fill her ears with barren lies, let her remember that she passed through water and the Spirit from death to Life on the Feast of God’s Unwedded Bride.

Let her look in the looking-glass and remember: with God, nothing will be impossible.

The “I “crossed out- Third Sunday of Lent St Botolph’s 2012

An Orthodox boy took one of his non-orthodox friend’s to Church with him and at the end of the Holy Liturgy he asked his friend what he thought of the service. His non-Orthodox friend, who had never been to an Orthodox Liturgy before, thought for a moment and said : “ It was very good how people kept crossing themselves out.” His Orthodox friend asked what he meant. “It’s like a big letter I that people put a line through!” In his own way the little boy had observed an important truth about the nature of Christian discipleship. For we live in the me generation where everything is geared to satisfy the desires of the individual for personal self fulfilment and self discovery.

On this third Sunday in Lent we Christians look to the Cross of Jesus. I love that phrase in St Paul’s letter to the Hebrews 12:

Hebrews 12:1-2

12 Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, ² looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

1. You +1′d this publicly. Undo

That phrase “Looking unto Jesus,” is all important. We need to keep our eyes fixed on him.

Why, you may ask is this necessary, surely we have that in Great Holy Week. We are in mid Lent, but it is important to focus on the purpose of our journey. Someone once said it is more important to remind ourselves of ancient and eternal truths than to espouse modern and passing fashion. At this time we are feeling the physical and spiritual effort of fasting and our fatigue more evidently. We need help, refreshment and encouragement at this point in our pilgrimage as we travel towards the centre of our faith, the rays of Easter light.

“If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Mark 8:34

As Fr. Alexander Schmemann says in his book on Great Lent:

“……we can not take up our cross and follow Christ unless we have His Cross which He took up in order to save us. It is His Cross, not ours, that saves us. It is His Cross that gives not only meaning but also power to others.”

St. Paul in his second letter to his spiritual son Timothy warns of the coming danger of this egoistic and hedonistic generation.

For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, inhuman…..swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God….(2 Timothy 3:2-4)

Fr. Anthony Coniaris points to the consequences of self obsession:

If you want to be thoroughly miserable talk about yourself, use “I” as much as possible in your conversations- you will not only bore others you will find that you even bore yourself. Listen with wrapt attention at what people say about you. Be jealous and suspicious of others and expect gratitude. Never accept criticism and don’t trust anyone who does not agree with your opinion. Sulk and show your disapproval for those who give you the cold shoulder. Consider ways how you can shirk responsibility…… Look for distractions.

These are just a few ways to be miserable-there are many more and they all have one thing in common, all are totally self-centred.

It is true that we should know ourselves and be aware of our weakness but we should not indulge in self pity or resort to the failed principle of better the devil you know. When we lift up our hearts to God and stretch out our arms to others then we find the source of our hope and our life.

The glory of God is a human being fully alive; and to be alive consists in beholding God.”
― Saint Irenaeus

Beholding God and looking unto Jesus. This is why the Holy Cross is placed before us in the middle of Lent

As C. S. Lewis observed:

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

As Christians we each have a cross to carry: If any man would come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. There is no room in this pilgrimage for passive resignation or individual indulgence but only for active engagement and fellowship together. In the prayer that Jesus taught us this corporate understanding of faith is expressed:

Perhaps the strength of that prayer is summed up in this poem found in a letter from the Omaha Home for Boys:

You cannot pray the Lord’s Prayer and even once say “I.”
You cannot pray the Lord’s Prayer and even once say “My.”
Nor can you pray the Lord’s Prayer and not pray for one another,
And when you ask for daily bread, you must include your brother.
For others are included … in each and every plea,
From the beginning to the end of it, it does not once say “Me.”

Deny; take up; follow!

These words of Our Lord tell us that Discipleship is about what we must do. Our faith is composed of verbs rather than nouns, it is activated by Him who emptied Himself gave himself for the life of the world. It is not I who live but Christ who lives in me:

Galatians 2:20

²⁰ I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.

In the prayer that Jesus taught us the corporate expression.

The little boy was right, the Cross is the “I” crossed out; it is putting on Christ and following Christ to the Cross and beyond to Resurrection glory. Not I but Thou O Lord. As often as we sign ourselves with the Cross of Christ we proclaim His death and until He comes again. Even so come Lord Jesus! Maranatha.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of Saint Gregory Palamas, 11 March 2012

He flees because he is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep. (John 10.13)

When you pray, what happens? Nothing, you say. Unless, maybe, you relax. Go Zen. In a manner of speaking, chill out. Repeat a mantra like ‘O-o-o-o-m’ until the rear cortex of your brain sends a mild sedative to the front. Like sitting in a hot tub. So prayer is … a sedative? Maybe, as an Evangelical preacher once said, when you pray, ‘you get stuff’. A 160-inch flat screen TV. The latest Bugatti sports car: £1,644,000 without prayer. The power of positive thinking. Like inserting a coin in a slot machine. So prayer is … a slot machine? Then there is the Cambridge don who told me: ‘Prayer is like navel-gazing. A useful exercise, perhaps, if a tad bit “organic”. But if you want to know about theology, just read my paper for the symposium, published in the’ – blank-blank – ‘review’. Blank-blank. Prayer is like talking to a ‘God’ who may, or may not, be there. Gazing at an idea, concocted in your own mind. So prayer is … an idea? Sedative. Slot machine. Idea. For a psychotherapist or televangelist, or the career academic who strives to ‘make sense’ to our secular age and tell it what it wants to hear, these are good working definitions of prayer. They sell ­- to people who never think about prayer. Or ever think. They fit – the spirit of our times; and those who want to fit into our times, find ways of fitting them in. Prayer can be ‘useful’. Well, maybe.

But after all, I admit over my sherry in the New Common Room, it has nothing to do with life. You cannot scale any heights with prayer. Come down off it. Come down to earth.

A whole established order banks on lowering prayer to a sedative, a slot machine, or an idea. Something useful. A woman in a black clergy shirt with a tiny white collar looks out over an old Victorian church: the empty pews, the hymnals gathering dust. She switches on Radio 4, hears Professor What-Not debunk the Virgin Birth. She hears the smirks of Downing Street politicians; echoes of ‘higher critical’ studies of the Bible ring in her ears, and, in short, she is afraid. She ponders: ‘We’re a bit behind the times. At this rate, we’ll close shop in five years. Let’s make prayer … “useful”. Demystify our worship. Incense, images? Out the window. Prayer? Lower the intensity level. Popularise it. That is sure to bring in the young people’. After ten more years of empty pews and dusty hymnals, a real live youth shows up. A girl of seventeen, in tight jeans and angry looks, asks the Reverend Doctor Who’s-It: ‘But what about God?’ ‘Oh, we don’t talk about him, dear, it embarrasses people to talk about God’. ‘So, who do I pray to?’ returns. The sedative approach, it seems, does not work. The Secular Sixties are over. They sold nothing but tawdry rock concerts – in church, out of church – and the clergy who bowed before them are a dying breed, waiting for the shop to close. Aging academics, cowardly clerics, bowing low to the wolf of unbelief.

In a secular age, you do not kill faith; you starve it. You do not outlaw God; you ‘re-write’ him. You lower him. When the wolf comes, you hand over your sheep and flee. It is only then that the Good Shepherd steps in.

For forty-five years, mainline ‘churches’ have seen the wolf of unbelief coming, and fled.

Some Orthodox bishops and priests, too, have said: ‘We’ll keep quiet about our prayer’. Lay scholars, afraid of forfeiting a salary to colleagues who tow the atheist line, say: ‘Yes, sir, naturally, sir, whatever you say, sir. We’ll lower our standards. We’ll meet the unbeliever, halfway’.

He who does so is a hireling and cares nothing for the sheep.

Seven centuries ago, on the eve of the age of unbelief, a scholar named Barlaam heard people tell of  monks from the Holy Mountain seeing … a light. A Light – unlike any other. It enveloped them, it raised them up in prayer. ‘A sedative’, Barlaam thought. ‘An “idea”, concocted in the mind. Positive thinking: look long enough at your own mind, you will see whatever you wish’. God may be there. Or maybe not. Omphalópsychoi, he called them. That is, navel-gazers. If they really want to know about God, Barlaam figured, they should read philosophy. Study the new science. A bit behind the times, those monks. ‘So’, asked the most learned monk, ‘what do you think they see?’ ‘The light inside their minds’, Barlaam said. ‘They see the Primal Mind’, the monk responded. ‘Absurd!’ said Barlaam. ‘You can know God philosophically. You can follow a code of conduct. But to see – God Himself?’ ‘Nothing less’, said the monk from Constantinople. ‘To pray is not to see the light of my mind’, he explained. ‘It is to see the Uncreated Light: the Living God’. ‘Rubbish!’ said the professor. ‘You shoot an arrow into thin air and mistake it for God’. ‘I am the arrow’, said the monk. ‘I enter God; God enters me. By his grace, I become the very God to whom I pray’. Inconceivable? Yes. To one who has never prayed.

A whole established order in the West awaited Barlaam and his theology of the head. A pay check, a Latin mitre. Universities, convinced that ‘theology’ is a subject to analyse – not a Person to love. What awaited that learned monk, his opponent? Prison, exile, the slander of colleagues, and perhaps … a seventeen-year-old girl, a nun, hungry for the Living God who draws her into himself. Hungry for the Uncreated Light.

That monk refused to flee, whatever the fad or fashion. He refused to abandon his flock to the darkness of unbelief or the atheism that dips in and out of suicide, whatever the cost to himself. That monk’s name is Gregory Palamas.

Beloved in Christ: the Good Shepherd does not forsake his sheep. He does not see the wolf of unbelief smirking, growling, and re-write the faith, lest he succumb to those jaws. As the end draws near, he is not confounded. He stands his ground. For the sake of the little ones: hearts, un-sedated, unsatisfied, that hunger for more than a flat screen TV or a shiny sports car. Hearts, bored and betrayed by a generation that sold its hope, when it sold its faith. Hearts of the young, unwilling to settle for a system of logic that caters to the atheist; a code of conduct that panders to the prude; and a hireling, who hands them over to the wolf of souls – and flees. Eight years after a council in Constantinople upheld his doctrine over Barlaam’s, Archbishop Gregory of the house of Palamas lay on his deathbed. Still, he refused to lower his vision, to come down to earth, like Barlaam, the scholar. In his heart he held the young, who someday would have the eyes to see the Uncreated Light with eyes of flesh and to enter it, whatever the cost. On his lips, his last  words – his will and testament to the one, Holy Orthodox Church: ‘To the heights! To the heights!’

St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday of Orthodoxy, 4 March 2012

“Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!” (John 1.47)

A rabbit made of velvet, spotted brown and white. Whiskers of thread, ears of pink satin. A body stuffed with sawdust. Is he real? For two hours one Christmas morning, the boy loved him. Then away into the cupboard. The model boat and toy soldiers mocked him, saying: ‘You’re not real. You can’t even move’. So the little rabbit asked the old rocking horse: ‘What is “real”?’ The wise, old, worn-out rocking horse said: ‘When a child loves you for a long, long time – not only plays with you, but really and truly loves you – then you become real’. ‘Does it hurt?’ asked the rabbit. ‘Yes’, said the horse, ‘but it’s good to be real’. ‘Does it happen all at once?’ ‘No’, said the horse, ‘only after your hair is loved off, your eyes drop out, and you are worn very thin. But to a child, you’re not thread and velvet – only to the grown-ups who do not understand’. One night, when Nana could not find the china dog, she placed the velveteen rabbit in the little boy’s bed. He fell asleep, holding it. Night after night, month after month, stroking its velvety fur and kissing its nose, until the threads fell out and the velvet rubbed away. As the boy lay sick with fever, he clung to his rabbit through the night. At dawn, the doctor ordered: ‘Burn everything the child has touched: it is a bag of germs’. Lying in a rubbish heap, consigned to the flame, the rabbit watched the house and the boy at a distance. Discarded, forgotten, he shed a tear.

As soon as the tear rolled down his worn-out fur, an angel appeared. ‘I am here to make you real’, the angel said. ‘Aren’t I real already?’ the rabbit asked. ‘To the boy, you were real – and now you will be real forever’. Carrying the shabby little body to the woods, the angel kissed him. Then something remarkable happened.

Years later, the man visited the house where he grew up. Looking into the garden, at an old fig tree, he spied a rabbit, spotted brown and white, staring right at him. ‘You know’, he thought, ‘it looks just like my velveteen rabbit that I lost when I was a child’. Little did he know that it was his rabbit, whom his love had made – real.

Every child, in every culture, in every age, knows what a holy icon is. A child who clings to a rag-doll, or a teddy that has lost his hair. He would not take an I-Pad to bed. What if the threads fall out and the velvet wears off? Do thread and velvet make you real? Or is it the love of a child without guile? A lonely child, afraid in the dark, clutching a felt rabbit for fear of the black abyss under his bed? Who are you to tell him: ‘It’s only a toy’? And the child who roams freely in an Orthodox church, as the eyes of the icons and mosaics gaze at him from the walls. A child stroking the face of his Saviour, kissing the wood rich with the odours of incense and burning wax. Who are you to tell him: ‘It’s only an image, it’s not real’. Who are you to pervert the heart of a child? Go, tell a widow: ‘That portrait of your husband is only paint and wood. Dump it in the rubbish. Throw it in the fire’.

Are you too full of guile to see what a child sees? An image becomes real if you love it.

A child does not ‘think’ that his toy is real. He loves it; and his love sees what grown-ups cannot. He does not really mistake velvet for fur, or threads for whiskers. Any more than the widow imagines that wood and paint are flesh and blood. But the image is real: much more real than the wood. What she loves is not wood but the one depicted on the wood. What that child loves is not a velveteen rabbit but every rabbit, every tree, every garden: and a distant memory of a certain Garden, where Adam walked as a little child.

Unless you become like a little child, you cannot enter the Kingdom of God.

Twelve centuries ago, grown-ups who called themselves ‘Christians’ tore the velveteen rabbit from the child’s arms. Everything that the child touched, they burned. As though it were a bag of germs, they tore the image of our Bridegroom from the wall of his church.

They dragged our Mother’s image into the public square and set it ablaze. ‘It’s an idol’, they shouted, ‘it’s not real’. Eyes of the Mother of God, gouged from her sacred image – the eyes of a monk, who lovingly crafted the image, gouged from the sockets. Hands of our Saviour, mangled with blades – hands that crafted his image out of paint and wood, hacked off at the wrist. All the while, soldiers mocking: ‘It’s only an image. It can’t move’. Monasteries, forcibly closed. Bones of the saints dug up, trampled. Patriarch Gérmanos, dying in exile; Nikíphoros and Methódios, rotting in prison – all for believing, with the faith of a child, that our God who took flesh and blood can reach us through paint and wood. He who raised the dead by his touch: do we imagine him? Or do touch the hem of his robe? A hundred years of martyrs’ blood we gave for the One who gave his Precious Blood for us. For a century, we longed only to kiss his sacred image and see that he is real.

On that first Sunday of Great Lent, in the year 843, when the Emperor Michael and his mother Theodora gave us back the image of the One we love, we watched the patriarch lift up a holy image in his hands. We followed him out onto the streets, to the Church of the Holy Wisdom. Restoring the image to its rightful place – on earth, as it is in heaven -

he declared this the Sunday tēn Kyriakí tēs Orthodoxías: the triumph of Orthodoxy

Beloved in Christ: if you can recognise the Christ in the image of a man, you will see the heavens open. If you can kiss his hand and touch the hem of his robe, you will see holy angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. To the enemy of the holy images, under all his names – Leo or Mohammed, Latimer or Ridley – we say, on this Sunday of True Worship, what we said eleven centuries ago: we are the Israelites in whom there is no guile. Each of us, a child, who sees that a tear really can fall from wood. Paint, reflect Divine Light. A God, become flesh and blood; and a kiss, bring the lifeless to Life. Each of us is the child whom Christ saw in the garden under the fig tree, and called by his real name. When God loves you, really, truly loves you; enough to take upon himself a body of flesh and suffuse all of this creation with divine beauty, you are not velvet and thread, consigned to a flame.

You have become real.