St. Botolph’s Parish, Sunday before Theophany, 2 January 2011

“The voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Mark 1.3)

Like a thief in the night, it comes when you least expect it. Like the morning sun, it melts away the mist and frost that gather around your windows at night. Like the first faint rays of dawn, it shimmers on the glass covered with frost – and slowly, slowly fills the scene with light. It comes in the winter equinox, when nights are bitterly cold but the days grow longer as the sun stands upright high on the horizon. It spreads across your life, like the sun standing straight over the snow. But it is brighter than the sun; and, unlike the sun, it appears only in the middle of winter. It appears when the piercing wind and bare trees  testify: this is the season of death – the death of the earth. It appears when death looms over us – and we pretend that it is not there. At parties and gatherings around the table, with relations that we do not want to see. Times that unite old friends – and old enemies.

Old memories, old wounds. Old unfulfilled promises; old unsatisfied desires, unrealised hopes. Advertisers jingle bells in front of us, crying: ‘Be merry, be happy, buy the latest gadget and forget your troubles’ – but it is usually at this time of year that we remember. We remember everything that we have lost. More people sink into deep depression this season than any other; and one in every few takes his own life. When the earth is dying, ‘it’ appears when you least expect and when you need ‘it’ most.

What is ‘it’? Hê vasileía tou Theòu – roughly translated, ‘the kingdom of God’. It is not a place. It is wherever, whenever – God alone is supreme.

The kingdom comes when life has grown old. When life itself has grown old from regret, from the sin that sticks in your soul like a thorn; when the weight of failure hangs heavily on the branch, until it falls frozen to the ground; when the ice in your soul spreads out to form a frozen wilderness – it is then, only then, that God is born. Born in a stable carved out of the rock that shall hold his body in death. Wrapped in rags, laid in the feeding-box of the animals who recognise who he is. Born poor, on the margin of society; born in the death of the year, when we are dead inside. Even the commercial glitter that surrounds the season cannot hide the miracle of Christmas: God is born, because we are old. God is born, so that everything begins anew. It is the season of equinox: from the moment of his birth in a manger, it all starts all over again. That is what the kingdom of God means; and that is what most Christians do not want to hear.

‘Give me my holly, my mistletoe; give me back my past’, no matter how full of delusions. ‘My childhood’, no matter how painful; ‘my hometown’, no matter how stifling; memories, no matter how poisoned. ‘Christmas’, we cry, ‘means nothing changes’. Christmas, says God, means everything changes. The cry of the Child, born in the manger in Bethlehem, is no different than a voice crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord. Clear away the dead branches, burn the dead leaves, drown the old death. Life begins again’.

Do we dare to begin again? Do we dare to live on the edge of the kingdom?

John the Prophet lives on the edge. Only a tunic of camel’s hair, bound in a homemade leather belt, to keep out the desert cold. Locusts and wild honey stolen from a hive. Like a beggar, he lives in a society that has forgotten God and grown poor without him; like a madman, he screams in a world gone mad. But he dares to say: ‘Life must begin again. Prepare the way, clear the path’. Clear the dead branches: your old beliefs, your habits, your upbringing, whatever you have assumed until now; your failures, your wounds, and all your regrets. Drown them in the river. In the winter of the world’s discontent, they run down to the edge of the river – from all Jerusalem and the towns and villages nearby. A crowd comes to see him drown sin in the river. But John warns: ‘I can only wash away your sins. I cannot give you new life. I am the past; he who comes after me is the future. I am the window that lets in the first faint rays of dawn; he is the Sun, who melts the ice.

I baptise with water; but he will baptise with the Spirit, the Giver of Life.

‘So greater is he than I that I am unworthy to untie his sandals. He will not confirm old, familiar, crooked ways. He will make the paths straight – for no one born of a woman is more radical than the Child born to make all things new’.

Beloved in Christ: nothing is more radical than the kingdom. Nothing, more on the edge; and to be a Christian is to live on the edge of eternity. It is to watch eternity rise like the sun and dissolve the snow; melt away the mist and frost that have covered the windows in the long night before – and slowly, slowly, light up the scene. It is to wait for Christ the Child in the manger to come, like a thief in the night, and steal back what is his own: our human race, created to live, not to die. Nothing is more radical than the kingdom; no joy, more joyous than to prepare the way of the Lord. As the old English carol declares, ‘The Old year now away is fled, the New year it is enterèd, then let us all our sins down tread and joyfully all appear’. Let us clear away the dead branches of the winter and the frost from before our eyes. Let us drown in the river all our failures, wounds, and regrets, all our past that stands between us and the kingdom of God.

But, above all, let us resolve this year to make his paths straight: for the word orthós in Greek means ‘straight, upright, correct’ – and ‘Orthodoxy’ is therefore nothing less than the ‘straight glory’ of God. The New Life at the edge of the kingdom.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Entry of the Theotókos, 21 November 2010

‘He it is who by dwelling in her sanctifies the creation and deifies the dying nature of man’ (Vespers of the Feast)

‘You were looking for something. Did you find it?’ A woman asked a pilgrim on the road. ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ All that the pilgrim was looking for was a holy icon. An icon that he bought in a shop, in a village. An icon of a woman dressed in blue, wearing a red cloak. Lifting up her hands and standing in a fountain. From the fountain, fresh water flowing in streams. Passers-by dip jugs into the fountain and wash their feet, themselves, clean in the water. Between the woman’s arms, secure and loved – a child, with the face of a man, his own arms outstretched. Mother and child, lifting up their arms in a fountain. The name in Greek on the top of the icon: ‘Hê zôodóchos pigê’ – ‘the Life-giving Source’. When the woman asked the pilgrim whether he had found what he was looking for, he had never seen her before. Who was she? And did her words mean even more than they said? Perhaps the pilgrim was looking for something more than an icon. Something lost, like a cloud receding on the horizon. Some half-forgotten image, a kind of memory half-remembered in dreams. That village was a strange place. A ‘thin place’, as they say, where light from the past illumines the present.

The village was Little Walsingham in Norfolk. The pilgrim was I. The woman in the icon: the Ever-Virgin Mother of God. But who was the woman on the road who asked me, out of the blue, ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

When we grow up, we forget what we were looking for. We wander out into the street, to stand there, looking around, looking lost – we came looking for something, but we forgot

what it is. All the noises of ‘real life’ distract us. Traffic swishing past. A police siren. The laughter and shouts from the pub. A dog barking at four or five in the morning, the hours when most people die. The drunken girl shouting ‘Bastard!’ at a boy, who shouts… and you cannot get back to sleep. That is ‘real’ life. After years, you get used to it. Then, you

rise early, rush to work: more noise. Your boss, yelling at you. Co-workers gossiping, all because they can do nothing, about anything. Switch on the radio? More noise. Bankers making excuses, a politician lying through his teeth. ‘Real’ life: adult life. You get used to it. You bite your lip and say nothing. No other life, you figure, is even possible. What can you do, go off and join a monastery? Stop dreaming, you tell yourself. A child can afford to dream: lift up his hands and pretend to fly. We are stuck here. So, if the doctor tells us that we suffer from an ‘anxiety disorder’; if our thoughts are too troubled by real life to make sense of it; if a half-buried memory haunts us in our dreams – we say, it is all part of being grown up. We have learned how to survive … and forgotten how to live.

Somewhere inside us, we know that life itself got lost in a cloud receding on the horizon.

Life got lost in a half-forgotten dream. Life, the life that you and I crave so much – starts where the noise stops and you hear yourself saying: ‘Show me what “real life” really is. Show me what I am looking for’.

Real life is not ‘grown-up’ life. Real life is not noise. It is a little girl, wandering in the vast silence space of the Temple. A little girl who wanders in and out, past the silent columns and the court of the priests. Now and then, a priest passes and takes no notice. They all know who she is. Ever since her mother Anna brought her there, a tiny baby held in her arms, she has lived all her childhood in the Temple. She loves the silence: her prayer is as simple as her breath. There, in the place beyond the last veil, where even the priests never go, she stands quietly by herself. In front of the tabernacle, she holds up her arms and pretends to fly. As every child does. But here in the Holy of Holies? Where the High Priest never goes but once a year; where any grown-up would die if he set foot – a little girl holds up her arms and dreams. What is the light surrounding her? A light, ten million times brighter than the sun: a cloud, filling the holy space. No grown-up eye could see it and not go blind. But a little girl plays in that cloud of light. Whenever she sees the cloud of light, she knows beyond all words that everything is possible.

‘Fantasy’, you say. Childish make-believe. We are not a little girl in a Temple. We live in our world of sirens and gossip, barking dogs and angry employers. We are distracted by business; or, should I say, by being busy. We are anxious and troubled by many things.  More troubled, year after year, down the five centuries – since they burned the statue of that little girl in the village of Walsingham, and England grew up … and grew old. What is she now, in our troubled times, but a cloud receding on the horizon?

She is the memory that we are all looking for. She is the child in the Temple, who never grew up and never grew old. Playing in the Holy of Holies, she is the Holy of Holies: the womb that bears Christ. Lifting up her arms in play, she lifts up every prayer to her Son and our God. She, in her cloud of light.

Beloved in Christ: on this Feast of the Entry of the Most Holy Theotókos and Ever-Virgin Mary into the Temple, we remember what we call ‘real’ life … and what life really is. Our world grown old was already old for an old woman named Anna, on the day she brought her baby girl to the Temple. She promised God: ‘Give me a child and I will give her back to you. What we have lost in growing old, she will never lose. She will not be distracted with much serving; she will not be anxious and troubled about many things. She will not lose herself in the noise that we call “real life” – but will keep the silent dreams of a child who believes that all things are possible. She will live in the desert of false hopes, but in

the fountain that renews all life’. When the noise around us deafens our ears and we are tempted to call this our exile ‘real’ life, all that we need is to turn our minds to her in the silence of the Temple and say: ‘Most Holy Theotókos, save us!’ and her prayer, as easy as her breath, will call us back from death to real life.

Who is she who meets us on a road and asks: ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ Nothing but a little girl in the vast silent space of the Temple. A child who asks: ‘What is real life?’ and answers: ‘It is to lift up your hands in the holy place and bless the Lord’.

St. Botolph’s Parish, 25^th Sunday after Pentecost, 14 November 2010

“Which of these proved neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?” “The one who showed mercy on him.” (Luke 10.36-37)

A tower of conservatism, the Orthodox Church. The last bastion of Christian values. For fifty years, ‘conservatives’ of all kinds have come flocking to that tower: not on account of who we are, but who we are not; not for what we do – but for what we do not do. On the Last Day, I always imagine, Christ our God will ask this type of convert: ‘So, why did you unite yourself to my holy Orthodox Church?’ The convert will answer: ‘Because the Orthodox Church will never replace the Divine Liturgy with a “guitar mass”’. ‘Why else?’ says Christ. ‘Because the Orthodox Church will never ordain women as priests or bless homosexual unions’. ‘Why else?’ says Christ. ‘Because the Orthodox Church will never deny the Virgin Birth or the Resurrection of the Body’. ‘You have answered rightly’, says Christ. ‘Hold this faith, and you will live. But why else did you convert?’ A certain type of convert answers: ‘Because the Orthodox Church enforces the law of God. Because the Church upholds all my Christian values: little red mailboxes, old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the mist, gloomy Sundays, traditional families with the father at the helm. Neighbours who look like me, talk like me, think like me. Conservative neighbours who obey the law. That’s why I’m Orthodox’.

‘But are you so sure that the Church prefers “the law of God” to his mercy? says Christ. ‘And are you so sure you that know who is your neighbour?’

There are converts, even convert priests, who live in a little red mailbox: they look to us, the Orthodox Church, for a fantasy of yesteryear. A real priest does not live in a little red mailbox. He lives in the holy altar. He trembles at the altar of God  – as at the Judgment.

The God who stands here invisibly before him is not a cosmic police officer appointed to enforce ‘Christian values’; not an old maid, cycling through the mist. God is not mist, but fire. To offer the eternal sacrifice before the Living God – a bit more terrifying than a little red mailbox. More terrifying still, to lift up to heaven the holy chalice and diskárion, filled with particles of bread for those for whom you are asked to pray. But, the most terrifying of all for a priest: to hear the confession of a soul in pain. What happens in confession? Does the priest produce out of his cassock a manual of rules? Nothing so conservative.

He finds a soul by the wayside. Stripped of every defence. Beaten – by its own thoughts.

He hears words, whispered in strictest confidence; he honours that trust, as he honours his own life. He binds the wounds with a word. Pours on the oil of a prayer of absolution, and the wine that is the Precious Blood of Christ. He carries the burden of what is told in trust, and ‘pays’ with his own heartfelt tears – each tear, a prayer for a soul in pain.

On the Last Day, Christ will not ask the priest: ‘Did you enforce the law of God?’ but ‘Did you honour that trust? Did you pour in the oil of mercy? Did you prove neighbour to the one who fell among the robbers?’

One day, a lawyer decides to test Jesus. No mistake, it is a lawyer. He wants to test: will this teacher enforce the law of God? Or will he be… ‘soft’? ‘Tell me, teacher’, the lawyer asks: ‘What do I do to get into heaven?’ ‘What is written in your law?’ Jesus replies. ‘Ah, that’s easy. Hold the right doctrine! Love the Lord my God with all my heart and soul, all my mind and strength. Oh, yes, uh… and my neighbour as myself’. ‘You have answered rightly’, says Jesus. ‘Do this, and you will live’. But the lawyer wants to ‘justify’ himself: to prove that what he always believed, still holds: his little red mailboxes and old maids cycling through the mist. ‘Who is my neighbour? Surely, anyone who looks like me, talks like me, thinks like me. Anyone who obeys the law’. ‘Who is my neighbour?’

‘A man once fell among robbers’, Christ tells. They strip him, beat him, leave him dying. Now the law states: touch a dying man, you get in trouble. You are unclean. So a priest, passing that way, figures: ‘Better play it safe, cross over to the other side of the road’. A deacon, passing by a few minutes later, figures: ‘I’m not getting involved. I’ll pretend that I don’t see. After all, the law comes first’. But a certain foreigner passes by and sees the dying man. ‘To hell with the law’, he says. He binds up the wounds. He pours on healing oil and cleansing wine. He takes the human burden on his own donkey to a nearby inn. He pays out of pocket. Why? What does he get from it? Nothing: but he honours a trust.

He takes pity on the soul in pain. He discards the letter of the law but fulfils its intention. He gives glory, not to the law, but to the Living God.

‘Which of these’, Christ asks, ‘the priest, the deacon, or the foreigner, proved neighbour to the one who fell among the thieves?’ Even the lawyer knows perfectly well: ‘The one who showed mercy on him’.

Beloved in Christ: what is written in the eternal law? To love the Lord your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. To keep the Orthodox doctrine, whole, unchanged: to cling to the apostolic faith – as to your life. But what is this apostolic faith? What is the true worship of the Orthodox Church and its unchanging doctrine but a living icon of the mercy of God? The energy that shone at creation; the light without beginning or end; the light that changes the first of sinners into a saint – what is it but the mercy of God? I can no more hide from it in my ‘bastion of Christian values’ than in some little red mailbox; no more hide from the pure flame of mercy, than turn a blind eye to ‘my neighbour’: any suffering soul, as weak and as fallen as I. So – if mercy is the divine energy of God, is it not so: that he who shows mercy is of God; and he who denies it, is of the Enemy.

Today, when you find a soul fallen among the robbers, what will you do? Whip out your ‘Christian values’? Pass over to the other side? Or, knowing that you too are weak, will you show mercy on a soul in pain? Will you prove, in your life, that the icon of the Living God is not found in little red mailboxes, or neighbours who look and act exactly like you.

It is found, not in the priest – nay, the Christian – who enforces the law, but in the one who shows mercy.

St. Botolph’s Parish, 24^th Sunday after Pentecost, 7 November 2010

Jesus said, “Some one touched me; for I perceive that power has gone forth from me.” (Luke 8.46)

You know what she is, a woman like that. You know the sort, sponging off the state and everyone else. ‘If they cut off her benefits, she would pull herself together soon enough’. ‘You’ve got to get tough with them, you know’. ‘Just smack her across the face a couple of times, she will wake up’. ‘Take her children away, she’ll get with the programme’. But, for heaven’s sake, whatever you do, do not let her come close. Do not let her touch you. Do not let her tears get to you. What nice clean person would touch a woman like that? What sort of bleeding-heart, sentimental sob-sister defends her? Are there no standards left? What is the point of coming to church if you run into her? If the Church turns a blind eye to a woman like that? A girl who sleeps with her boyfriend. A young girl of fourteen -  or was it forty? – who shoots herself high with amphetamines, or else cuts her wrist with a razor. A woman who drinks herself senseless and collapses into a pile of soiled linen, littering the floor. What nice, clean religious man would soil himself with her? ‘Cut off her benefits. She isn’t really a person. What sort of person would have anything whatever to do with … her?’

What sort of person? God. God – in the flesh. Those who have eyes to recognise God in her, do so because they live in God. Those who do not, do not.

I have heard all those words about women like that. Along Queen Street East in Toronto or the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, you walk along the pavement and trod on the fingers of women like that, scrounging around for needles on the street in the middle of the afternoon. My wife works for the NHS with women like that. One woman, diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder – call it ‘insane’ rage – once gave birth to a stillborn baby in a hospital. A baby born out of wedlock. The ‘sister’ on the ward showed her the dead baby, covered in blood, placed in a bedpan, then went on to lecture her piously on Christian morality. Nice, clean Christian people do not have babies out of wedlock. ‘You got what you deserved’, the nurse said. Now, I wonder why the woman went through life hating the very name of a ‘Christian’. If the devil disguises himself in the mask of Christ, why should people not hate him? But the icy-hearted puritans who speak those hateful words – the Bible-thumping, icon-hating evangelist, who covers the Gospel in ice; or the black heart of the Puritan, whipping his child; or the shadow of death that crept over the land, when they burned the statue of our Most Holy Theotokos, the ever-virgin mother of mercy – all those generations of repressed anger speak only one word to ‘a woman like that’: ‘You are unclean. You are filthy, your body is hateful. How can any man stay clean around you unless he seals himself off in a bottle that your fingers can’t touch?’

One man at least does not seal himself off in a bottle – even from a woman like that. The precious ointment in the bottle is not cut off. It passes, through the glass, into her body and her soul.

By the shores of Galilee, Christ passes among the crowds. They press tightly in around him. A man pushes his way through the crowd and flings himself at Jesus’ feet. His only daughter is twelve. When her flow of blood began, it did not stop. She lies on her bed of death: untouchable, unclean. Nice clean religious people will tell you: it says in Leviticus that anything a woman touches during her time of the month is itself ‘unclean’. But, just as this sentimental sob-sister called Christ makes his way to her house, a strange hand reaches out and touches the fringe of his garment. A woman, not so young and fresh as the dying girl. A woman like that, with a flow of blood: we know from what. How long has she had it? Twelve years: as many years as the girl has been alive. Christ does not pull away. ‘Who touched me?’ he asks. Peter says: ‘Someone in the crowd brushed against you’. ‘No’, says Christ, ‘someone touched me. I felt power pass out from me’. Power? Is it like touching an icon? A holy vessel? The crowd parts. The woman falls at his feet and cries out: ‘I touched you. I polluted you. But, as soon as I did, the blood stopped’. What nice clean Christian would believe that? But Christ only says: ‘Daughter’ – not slut, not slag – ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well’.

Are there no standards left? No sooner does he ‘approve’ of a woman like that but some man from the dying girl’s house shows up. ‘Don’t bother the teacher, she’s dead’. ‘She’s not dead’, says Christ. ‘She’s not unclean, any more than the woman who touched me. She’s only asleep’. The nice clean people laugh: does he not know? It says in the Bible: anyone who touches a corpse is unclean for seven days. Christ leaves those ‘puritans’ outside. Only the parents and Peter, James, and John stand with him by the bed. Christ takes the unclean hand in his. ‘Child, arise!’ As her soul flows back into her body, Christ commands the girl’s parents: ‘Tell no one. The nice clean people will never understand. All that they see is unclean flesh. All that I see is my “Daughter” – whoever she is – for whom I lay down my life’.

Beloved in Christ: when an Orthodox priest passes by in the Great Entrance, carrying in his hands the gifts of bread and wine, it is a pious custom to touch the fringe of his robe. Why? Is he ‘holy’? God forbid. When you do it, I am reminded: one is holy, one is Lord. I tremble – because the power that passes forth from me is not mine. It is the Holy Spirit, living in the Body of Christ. The priest is only the glass in which the ointment is poured. But, when you touch the hem of this robe, you are the icon of everyone ever thought to be ‘unclean’. Everyone who ever hurt. Everyone, stained by the disease that we call sin; and by the hardness of heart, which is the only sin that God cannot pardon. You are the woman who knows all the harsh cruelty that life can inflict – and is not healed, until she touches the hem of Life Himself. The body of our Lord Jesus Christ is only the glass that the nice clean religious people shatter on Calvary; but the precious ointment inside it, is the Spirit – the Giver of Life. The ‘power’ that passes through the glass, not to condemn, but to save all the weak and broken people of this world: you, me, and, especially, … a woman like that.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Protection of the Most Holy Theotokos, 31 October 2010

“Between us and you a great chasm has been fixed” (Luke 16.26)

A child cries in the night, held in its mother’s arms. Thin, wasted arms. A mother in rags, cradling a child in rags, on a bitterly cold winter’s night. A child that she gave birth to out of wedlock. Mother and child, huddled against the cold stone wall of the alley behind the row of houses. She cannot protect herself against the piercing wind that slices through her. She can barely protect her child. If a window opened and a hand threw down a few leftover scraps, they might get through the night. Left to themselves, the mother is sure that her child will be dead by daybreak. They are left alone; yet not alone. All around are shadowy hands, reaching toward them; shadowy shapes hover around but never reach them. They do not see the shadows. Only a man in a window above watches. ‘Who are the shadows?’ he asks. A voice answers: ‘They are the shadows of the dead, who seek to intervene for good in human life – and have lost the ability forever’.

Hell is not fire and brimstone and pitchforks. Hell is the inability to love. Hell is the heart, so hardened against pain, that it no longer feels anything. Hell is the stern, cold, pitiless face that even so-called ‘Christians’ put on. The cold eye of morality that would deny the unwed mother a slice of bread or a blanket to wrap her child. The parent who leaves his frightened little child to cry himself to sleep in the dark, to ‘make him strong’. But hell is not strong. It is weak. Nothing is weaker than a heart that is afraid to feel pity. So, then, nothing is stronger than a heart that is full of limitless pity for all.

A chasm opens up between those with pity and those without. A great chasm between a cold-eyed father and a frightened child, left alone in the dark. A chasm between the rich, righteous folk in the windows above and the unwed single mother in the alley below. It is a chasm that we dig, whenever we harden our faces and declare: ‘life is hard, so we are as hard as life’. ‘Life is hard, says a mother who pushes away the hand of her own child. ‘Life is hard’, we say when we ship our children away to the ‘best schools’ and the joy of learning dries up. ‘Life is hard’, we explain, when we climb up the ladder of success only by kicking our co-workers down the rungs. ‘Life is hard’, we say, when we ridicule a little child’s dreams, and sell a sacred object to the highest bidder – then drown the nagging, irritating itch of conscience in another pint. ‘Life is hard’, we console ourselves, when we finally snuff out the last spark of feeling in us. A great chasm widens around us. ‘Control yourself’, we whisper, tensely, when we feel the urge to touch a soft little animal or shed a tear at the sight of a sunset. ‘Don’t be silly’, we tell ourselves, when the child inside us wakes up at four in the morning and gropes for a mother’s touch in the dark. Why do we take the stiff limbs and the cold eyes for granted? Why are we so ashamed to cry, even here, before our loving God? We call ourselves strong if we become as hard as rock.

We boast that we have outgrown our Mother’s home. But our Mother has never outgrown us.

She has watched and waited over the centuries, here in England, in her holy house in the village of Little Walsingham. Our Lady’s Dowry, they called England: what English man or woman did not long to wander with a pilgrim’s staff in hand, to sit at our Mother’s feet and pour out his secret hopes and fears? To drink healing waters from our Mother’s holy well? Then, in 1537, our Mother’s own sons betrayed her. Lawless men tore away the gold and silver from her shrine. They hanged and dismembered her priests. At last, they took her image, full of pity and love; carried it here, to London; and burned it within the city walls. But our Mother never ceased to pray for them and for those they rejected: beggars, drunkards, and unwed mothers – for she herself is the Unwedded Bride.

From the moment that these lawless men burned our Mother’s image, a shroud fell over the land. Life grew hard; the heart of Christians grew hard. A chasm widened between the winners and the losers, while men grew rich in everything – but pity.

The rich man, clothed in purple and fine linen, had everything – except pity. Did he know that Lazarus lay in rags, night after bitter night, huddled against his cold gate? If he had opened a window above, would he have thrown down a few leftover scraps of food? An immense chasm opened between the rich man and the beggar; between the stern, cold, pitiless eye and the eyes flowing with tears. The cold face and stiff limbs of the rich man said: ‘Life is hard. Leave him alone, to cry himself to sleep in the dark’. So when the rich man died, he saw dead Lazarus afar off – Lazarus the soft and weak, held in Abraham’s bosom like a child in its mother’s arms. ‘Send Lazarus to cool my thirst’, he begged. But Abraham, full of pity, said: ‘My son, I cannot. A great chasm lies fixed between us. It is a chasm that you fixed, long ago. You reach toward us now, you hover around, but you cannot cross over to us, or we to you. You fixed that chasm in life, the moment that you shut your heart … to pity’.

Only one heart is free to cross the chasm. One heart filled with a limitless pity, the love of the Son conceived in her womb. The womb that bore us all; the heart that hears the word of God and keeps it. The heart of the Most Holy Mother of God.

Beloved in Christ: if you are English, she is your Mother. If you live here in England, she is your Mother. If you believe in her Divine Son, she is your Mother. Of course, you are free to burn her image in the marketplace and turn your heart to stone; but, equally, you are free to reverence her image and feel your wounded heart come to life. She above all others is the mother that we long to have. She will never leave you to huddle in the cold, to cry yourself to sleep on a winter’s night; she will never mock you, or scold you, or turn her face away. She is the Pietà – pity itself – who wraps her protecting veil of pity around you when you need her most. The shadows of the dead flee away, as soon as she lifts her hand. As we lift up her icon on this feast of her Protecting Veil, we cry to our Mother: ‘Rejoice, O Unwedded Bride! Inexhaustible fountain of pity in a pitiless world! We, your children, have finally come home!’

St. Botolph’s Parish, 20^th Sunday after Pentecost, 10 October 2010

“Young man, I say to you, arise.” (Luke 7.14)

‘Do you believe that Jesus was God?’ a lady asked me years ago, when she first visited my Orthodox parish in Toronto. She was not being in the least bit ironic. She did not ask me: ‘Do you seriously believe that a teacher from first-century Palestine – a dead Jew – was God? Do you, as an educated man, honestly believe that rubbish?’ Remember, this was Toronto, not Oxford. The lady did not deny it disdainfully. She simply asked me, like a naïve, curious little child: ‘Do you believe that Jesus was God?’ Notice how she asked me: ‘was’, not ‘is’. ‘Yes’, I told her, ‘he is’. Anyone who ‘was’ God, presumably still is – ‘Christ our true God’, as we call him in the Orthodox Church. She looked puzzled. ‘But I always thought “God” was God’. Where do you begin? When I asked the lady what she believed about Jesus Christ, she looked even more puzzled. ‘Oh, um,’ she said, ‘I guess I’m a follower of the Grail’. The Grail?

Oh, um. Did she ever stop to think what the Holy Grail was believed to be: a chalice that caught the Precious and Life-giving Blood of Christ, our true God? A little more than the blood of a teacher. More than the blood of a dead Jew.

Where do you start? Coming from the largest Protestant denomination in Canada, there was no mistaking this lady. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed, stately, decked out in the latest light pink designer dress. Two cars in the garage, a swimming pool, a solid job in real estate. Everyone’s image of a Canadian from a Toronto suburb. Everyone’s picture of success. At forty-five to fifty, she was as ‘normal’ as Canada itself. Her denomination had always taught her what Christianity is: a matter of behaviour, not belief. Yesterday, that meant: no drinking, no cards, no mini-skirts, and no dancing on a Sunday; no icons, no incense, no vestments, but a sixty-minute sermon about ‘values’. Nowadays, it meant: no Virgin Birth, no bodily Resurrection, and a thirty-minute sermon about … ‘values’. Yesterday, it was: ‘no sex before marriage!’ Today, it was: ‘abortion on demand!’ But the sermon was still about values. Not Christ. A good Christian is a ‘nice guy’. A Muslim, a Buddhist, or a Hindu who helps a little old lady across the street, she believed, is a good Christian, too. Christianity means following ‘the precepts of Christ’. Whoever he is. Or was.

But why keep on and on? Why not leave ‘other churches’ the little bit of Christ that they have? A great prophet, a teacher of values. Surely, that is better than nothing. It is like a Greek Orthodox lady who had her child baptised in the Church of England because the Orthodox church was too far. Better than nothing, right? Why not let all those poor, rich, bored, middle-class Canadians believe in ‘Jesus the prophet’: like Muslims? ‘Jesus, the teacher of morals’. So long as no one drinks or plays cards or wears a mini-skirt, who in his right mind cares whether that teacher of morals ‘was’ God?

Because a teacher of morals cannot conquer death. He cannot say to the dead: ‘Arise!’

Christianity is not about ‘values’. Go become a Muslim, if all you want is ‘values’. It is not about ‘following the precepts of Christ’, whatever presidents may say. Christianity is about life and death. Who am I to think myself more ‘moral’ than a prostitute? Or, for that matter, a real estate agent? But even real estate agents die. No matter how you live your life, sooner or later death stares you in the face.

So ‘Jesus, the teacher of morals’ is useless to you. Go follow the Buddha, if you think that morals are, well, better than nothing. Christ is not a teacher of morals. Christ is the Conqueror of death.

Near the gate of the city, they carry out the body of a man. A good man? A bad man? A dead man. The only son of a widow. Her last link to life. Now, she is nothing. When you lose your parents, you are an orphan; you lose your husband, you are a widow; but lose your only son, you are … nothing. Christ does not tell her, ‘He was a good man, he paid his taxes, he never cheated or killed’; Christ speaks to the death that she carries inside: ‘Do not weep’. He offers no more cheap words. He touches the casket. He does not say to the corpse: ‘You were a good man, a moral man, an upright citizen’. He says: ‘Young man, I say to you, arise!’ When he hands the boy back to his mother, the crowds do not clap hands. Fear seizes them. Would you not be afraid, too? They have not listened to a sermon on ‘values’: they have looked in the eyes of death, then into the eyes of life. The crowd shouts out: ‘A prophet has arisen, like Elijah, a prophet who can bring the dead to life!’ But only a few catch a glimpse of the True Light, flashing before them. This man is no mere prophet. He is certainly no teacher of morals. ‘God has visited his people’. God stands in the midst of his people: our God in flesh and blood. The hand that touches the coffin is the hand of God.

Beloved in Christ: a Christian does not follow ‘the precepts of Christ’; a Christian is born from above. A Christian is not a good person but a new person: new, re-created in God, won back from death by the Blood shed on the Cross. Lifted from the grave, ascended into heaven in the Body of Christ our true God, risen from the dead: the Body and Blood that we drink in the Divine Liturgy. How far we are from that lady’s image of a Christian! We drink, we play cards, we dance on a Sunday; our churches are filled with vestments, incense, and holy icons. Few of us have two cars in the garage or a swimming pool in the suburbs – but we taste life to the fullest, because we have passed from death into life. Do we believe that ‘Jesus was God’? Do we believe that the ground is solid beneath our feet? Do we believe that our face in the mirror is really ours? What you live from day to day, you do not believe. You know. You settle for nothing less than Christ our true God, the Conqueror of death; and nothing less than the Orthodox Church that Christ himself founded when he walked on earth.

Why settle for a bit of Christ, when you can have the whole? Follow his ‘precepts’, when you can have his life? For us, Jesus is not something ‘better than nothing’. Christ is all – or nothing.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Hieromartyr Dionysius the Areopagite, 3 October 2010

“Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.” (Matthew 13.52)

‘How long has it been since your last confession?’ If you still expect a priest to ask you that question in confession, the chances are that you imagine yourself saying, ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned’. You may see yourself kneeling in a little wooden confessional box, facing a priest seated across from you, his own face hidden behind a grille. Seated, like a judge. You read out a long list of sins, answers from a manual used to interrogate you about every detail of your private life – especially your sex life. You expect the judge to pass a sentence: ‘Ten “Our Fathers”, ten “Hail Marys”’; and perhaps a sign of disgust; or the terrible, awkward silence, followed by the words: ‘You have seriously offended God. You may not take Holy Communion until further notice’. Is that how you imagine confession? A judge, a plea, a sentence? A list of crimes? What should you say? ‘Guilty as charged. Kick me, abuse me, I deserve it!’ Maybe that judge in black will shine the glaring light off your face. Perhaps he will spare you the thumbscrews or the rack. Is that really how you imagine confession? A court of law?

Look at any Orthodox Church. No wooden box. No grille. No throne of judgment for the priest. He is a witness, not a judge. You do not kneel before him; you stand, facing … a code of law? Only a Bible and a Cross. The priest stands to one side. He does not face you but the Gospel and the Cross. For all you know, he is a worse sinner than you ever were. You do not read out a long list of indictments. You simply say aloud whatever it is that weighs most heavily on your heart. A priest who knows his own heart will never say ‘You have offended God’. You have not ‘offended God’ – as though God takes offence! Perhaps, you have injured your neighbour. Definitely, you have injured yourself. You are not in a court of law but a doctor’s surgery: not there to be judged but to be diagnosed – and healed. If the glaring light of judgment shines on anyone, it is the priest, unworthy to enter the all-holy sanctuary of your soul. The only light that shines on you is the light of an infinite mercy.

What, then, of the Law, especially the Ten Commandments? Are there no consequences if you kill or steal or commit adultery? If you follow ‘other gods’ and refuse to honour the one true God? Is the Law dead? No. Neither is the voice of the holy prophets. You hear it in the ‘hard words’ of the Gospel. You hear it in the homily – in the voice of the Church that denounces what is false, exposes lies and liars, and casts fire on the earth. But why denounce sins, only to forgive them? Why preach a ‘hard line’, then ‘let them off easy’? Because the house of God is no court of law but a doctor’s surgery. The homily sets a standard of truth as high as the heavens, while confession gathers in all the fallen, the weary, the broken-hearted, and afraid. The homily scales the heights of Sinai, where the Law was handed down; confession abounds in mercy, as the Sermon on the Plain. A priest ascends the heights, then descends to your depth – all, in a single act of mercy.

How could it be otherwise? A priest is the bishop in the parish; a bishop is the heir of the apostles; and every apostle is a scribe trained for the kingdom of heaven. A scribe who brings, out of his treasury, things both old and new.

How could it be otherwise? The God who gave us the Law, gave us the Gospel. He who commanded us to worship him alone, also gave us the pearl of great price, so precious, so valuable that a man sells everything to possess it. What is the Law, the old covenant with Israel, but one commandment: ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve’? But who is this Lord our God? A judge in a black robe? Our God is no judge, fastened to a code of law. Whoever that petty tyrant is, he is not God. Our God is ineffable, beyond words to describe; inconceivable, beyond theory or thought; invisible, beyond sight and sense; incomprehensible, beyond mind; ever-existing, beyond time. Is it possible to know him at all? We do not know God in thunderstorms, tidal waves, or the motions of the planets. God is not a what but a who. We do not know God by his power. We only know God by his mercy.

How many atheists know the mercy of God, if a car swerves suddenly around the corner and misses them by an inch? How many hardened criminals know his mercy, when the charge is dropped or the sentence commuted? If God loved us only if we loved him, not one of us would be alive. If God did good to us only if we did good to him, how would we recover from sickness or enjoy life’s pleasures, if ever we missed the Divine Liturgy on a Sunday because we had better things to do? If God lent to us only hoping to receive, no one would be healthy or well-off, beautiful or clever, generous or kind. What can anyone give God, equal to these gifts that we receive? If God set conditions on his mercy, none of us would be here. None of us would be. So if our Father is infinitely merciful, how can any priest in confession be less?

Beloved in Christ: no word is more Orthodox than mercy. No word resounds more often in the Divine Liturgy. Mercy set the People of God apart from the nations, teaching them to worship God in place of all other gods; and mercy revealed that God in the flesh: God who opens the eyes of the blind, casts out demons of fear, and brings the dead back to life – just as a priest, a scribe of the kingdom, does in confession. Who should know this treasure better than the saint that we commemorate today? Dionysius, learned judge of the Areópagus in Athens, the high court of appeal. How easy for a judge to reduce God, as heretics have, to that black-robed tyrant, invented in the image of your anger or your disgust? But, baptised by the hand of Paul the Apostle, Saint Dionysius confirmed what the apostles themselves knew firsthand: it is impossible to know what God is, only who. It is impossible to know God in the thunder, in the lightning, or in the rain: what God has created cannot tell us what he is. We know God in his holy Body, broken for us, and his Blood, shed freely for the life of the world – and in a word of mercy from a priest, uttered in a holy mystery called confession.

A word of mercy that does not judge us but sets us free.

St. Botolph’s Parish, Holy Apostle and Evangelist John, 26 September 2010

From that hour the disciple took her to his own home. (John 21.27)

‘Do you believe in God?’ a little African girl once asked my wife, who was babysitting for a co-worker, a single mother from Ghana. ‘Do you believe in God?’ she asked, warmly and hopefully. ‘Why, yes’, my wife replied, crossing herself in the Orthodox manner. ‘That’s funny’, the little girl observed. ‘Most white people don’t believe in God’. The little girl was all of six. At that age, she told it like it is: most white people in England do not believe in God. At least, they do not act on it. Fifty-three percent of the British population still calls itself Christian; about ten percent goes to church weekly. Of that ten percent, there are three Christians of African or West Indian heritage to every ‘indigenous’ White British. Is it surprising, then, that the six-year-old immigrant from Africa observes: ‘most white people do not believe in God’?

In view of some interviews during the recent papal visit, if that little girl were to ask some ‘indigenous white British’ what she asked my immigrant wife, they would take a positive pride in these statistics. ‘We have better things to do on a Sunday than go to church’, a teenager boasted on Radio Four. ‘If the Pope only played basketball with young people rather than talking about dogmas, people would take an interest in religion’. But nothing tops this: ‘The Pope calls us “secular”’, one panellist said, ‘just because we don’t go in for incense and fancy robes and rituals’. When the interviewer asked who the ‘we’ were, the panellist admitted: ‘Anglicans … uh, English people’. (I doubt that she got to church much). Is it surprising? Two-thirds of the United Kingdom has no living link to any place of worship. Were it not for a constitutionally established church, this country would be in name what it is in nature: secular. No, not atheist. An atheist cares. Secular: that is, composed of bland, self-interested consumers who watch ‘telly’ on Sunday morning and are content – nay, proud – to have no idea what they believe. Only Africans, West Indians, and a few other ‘savages’ from Eastern Europe are out of step. They still go to church.

Our mission field is not Africa; it is here. We need not take the Gospel to darkest Congo but darkest Dagenham. We need to evangelise … the British. But how? By showing the natives who they truly are. But where to find it, after all the centuries of oppressive rules, repressed longings, abuse, and neglect? Only at the foot of the Cross.

Hanging from the life-giving Cross, Christ sees none of his disciples but one. All of them have fled: all but one. Alone he stands, with the women: Mary Magdalene, and Mary his mother’s sister, and his own mother, her virgin soul crucified with his on the wood of the cross. No man is there but John. Who else but John? To John, he gives his very last command on earth. What is the last commandment of Christ? Feed the poor? ‘The poor’, he says, ‘you have always with you’. Keep the rules: no sex before marriage? A Muslim could do as much. Love one another? Not even this. Christ turns to the All-Holy Virgin, and then to his disciple, and says: ‘Behold your mother’.

From that instant, the lifeline to the Gospel is clear. ‘Behold your mother!’ From that very hour, the disciple John takes her to his own house: Mary, the mother of Jesus; the Holy of Holies, the unwedded bride of God – the woman from whom God himself takes up his human nature. Who else to entrust her to, but John? To the disciple that Jesus loves, he gives his last message to all mankind: ‘As he who honours me, honours God the Father, so he who honours her, honours me’. Who else but John could hear and understand? A Christian is one who believes that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate; and God is incarnate, only by the love of the Virgin who said: ‘Be it done to me according to your word’.

England was Mary’s dowry. From across Europe, pilgrims came here to pray at her holy shrine in Walsingham; so hallowed was this land to her, as she was to the Apostle John. From the hour that those lawless men tore apart her shrine, and threw her holy image into the fire, a plague came over the land. A plague of unbelief. First, the monasteries, seized by a greedy, lawless king; the images, in wood, glass, and stone, destroyed or defaced; the Gospel of love, changed to a pitiless code of law; and finally, eyes blinded to every truth that the Apostle John could see. Who else but John, the wisest of apostles? One of only three to look upon the face of Christ transfigured, then to witness his agony in the garden. John, who leaned his head against Jesus on the night in which he was betrayed. John, first of all the apostles to believe that Christ is risen from the dead. John, who lived to see a vision of the future life revealed. John, at the foot of the Cross. From the moment that this land forsook its mother, a plague of unbelief began to wipe the Gospel from its memory. But John, to whom Christ entrusted his mother, did not forget – and neither do we.

Beloved in Christ: it is so easy to look upon this plague of unbelief and give up the task. We see the fruits of unbelief around us every day. It is easy to say, with Simon Peter: ‘Master, we toiled all night and took nothing’. Even Peter abandoned Jesus, as he hung on the Cross. But not his pure and blessed virgin mother. And not John. Never John. He who has seen the face of Christ transfigured in glory and the vision of the world to come can no more forsake Christ than forsake his own soul. John, the Apostle and Evangelist, stands on the ruins of Christian England and says to you what Christ our God once said to him: ‘Behold your mother’. Each candle that you light in front of her holy image; every prayer that you bring to her, asking for her mighty prayers; every pilgrimage to her shrine; every loving glance toward the Mother of Life – by your love for her, you ‘redeem’ this land for Christ. You buy it back; you re-consecrate it; you make England what it truly is – Mary’s dowry, where all Orthodox believers are embraced and healed.

A foolish theory, practically a joke, once linked Saint Peter to the Church of Rome, Paul to the Protestants, and John to the Orthodox Church. But let us never forget: Peter denied his Master three times, and Paul never knew him until he had risen from the dead. Only John, the beloved disciple, never forsook him or his mother. The Apostle and Evangelist John, the eagle that flies into the eye of eternity and brings back the vision of the age to come. John, the beloved disciple, to whom Christ our God entrusts the Mother of Life.