Archive for January, 2010

THE FAST OF DEMONS (Lk 18.10-14)

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ONE GREAT BAPTISMAL FONT (Mt. 4.12-17)

Thursday, January 14th, 2010

St. Botolph’s parish, Afterfeast of Theophany, 10 January 2010

Save me, O God, for the waters are come in unto my soul. (Psalm 69 [69].1)


Our people fear death by water. Drowning, suffocating, as that fierce current wraps itself around you and pulls you down. To this day, when a man lies dying, we read the psalms that speak about drowning: ‘I am stuck fast in the mire of the deep, and there is no sure standing. I am come into the deeps of the sea, and a tempest hath overwhelmed me’. A people who live in dry deserts fears death by water. Water is the oasis that breathes life back into your flock, your camels, and you. Our Orthodox ancestors loved an oasis. But water is also the sea – the dread, alien sea: everything you fear. The sea, so terrible the Apostle John tells us: at the end of time, there is no more sea. Our people fear death by water. Imagine: you swim out, farther and farther from land, out into an open space. You no longer hear the gulls; you feel the velvet current around your body. Then, out in that unfathomable deep, your foot hits a smooth, moving surface. The back of a fish – or is it a whale – or worse? The terror of the deep strikes you. No foothold out there so far from land. At the mercy of the water – and all the nightmares that live in it. Your oldest fear, the fear of the little child, comes rushing in. Fascinating, yes: but fearful, because, there, in the deep, you have no control. Your foot touches the heads of the dragons that lurk in the waters.


That’s what dying is like. If you look deep into the eyes of someone who’s dying, you will see: we were not meant to die. Death is our enemy; and every death, is death by water. Drowning, suffocating, in the fluids of your own body. You struggle to free yourself from the wild current, as it wraps around and pulls you down. Every old childhood fear; every unfulfilled pledge, every bad memory comes flooding back. All the dragons that lurk in a deep sea. You swim out, farther from land, into a terrifying open space. Aren’t you afraid of it? Of course. Let your faith be as strong as steel, you’re no stronger than God. Jesus Christ, our God, feared death. His sweat fell like drops of blood, when he prayed to his Father: ‘Let this cup pass from me’. Anyone who’s fully human is afraid to die. But listen to the voice of the angels, whispering to him in the garden: ‘Don’t you remember? Years ago, in the River Jordan. John baptised you in the waters. You drowned in the waters of the Jordan – and, drowning there, you drowned death’. Plunge a Holy Cross, the icon of Christ, into the waters and they change. The heavens open, when the voice of God the Father says: ‘This is my beloved Son’. The farthest planet, the smallest star, unites with every creature on earth down to the tiniest speck of dust – when a dove hovers over the waters. Who is it? The Spirit that moved over the waters at the dawn of the world. Death is drowned – in the instant, when the Body of God, in the flesh, touches the waters. Why else would he accept to be baptised? He has no sin. He consents to be baptised in order to drown death. To dare to enter the unfathomable deep, and there, in the deep, to pull death down – death in all its forms, and to turn the deeps into the well-spring of life. What else is death but a mere biological life, cut off from God? A cockroach dies and doesn’t know it. We humans hate death because we know it. Like insects fallen into the middle of a pond, we can’t pull our bodies out by our own strength. So God descends into the waters, the terrible waters. In the waters, where all our dragons lurk unseen, Christ our God makes a pathway as over dry land. It all begins now, on this feast of Theophany.


Our Father Michael fell asleep around four o’clock on the eve of Theophany. Just as the bell tolls Vespers in a monastery, calling the brothers and sisters to the feast, Christ our Saviour called Father Michael. His soul knew it was the appointed time, the kairós – just like the kairón prayers at the foot of the iconostasis that the clergy say before they enter the holy altar. When I was writing these words, I could hear Fr. Michael telling me, as he did so often: ‘Do what you need to do, Father, I’ll say my own kairón prayers now’. God! But this kairón, how blessed it was! It wasn’t Fr. Michael’s time, but ours. It was a time for the farthest planet to unite with the smallest speck of dust. Time for the River Jordan to rush back and the mountains to leap for joy: because Christ our God was about to set foot in the waters. Since at least the eighth century, without interruption, our holy mother the Orthodox Church has blessed the waters at this season. We don’t call it Epiphany. It isn’t ‘the manifestation’, like a magic act. It is Theophany, when God manifests himself: in the depth of winter, he enters the waters of death in the flesh – and all the waters on the face of the earth are changed into one great baptismal font. At that moment, when in a monastery the Feast of Theophany was to begin, the holy angels whispered to Father Michael: ‘It is time for the Lord to act. Father, give the blessing’.


A priest lives in order to offer the Divine Liturgy. He lives, lifting up the holy vessels and offering to God his own of his own, on behalf of all and for all. When the time had come for the Lord to descend into the waters, Fr. Michael descended, too. As he went down to the deep, surely he carried our prayers with him – into the deep open space, where the dragons lurk. We descended with him, with every tear, every howl of pain from us, with everything inside us that shudders and pulls back at the unjust horror of death. There, in the depth, Christ our God plunged us into the great baptismal font. There he drowned all our fears. There, he who tramples death, smashed the head of the dragon lurking in the water, and carried Father Michael upward, with him, into the Divine Liturgy.


Beloved in Christ: Theophany, not Christmas, is the Winter Pascha. In the early Church, this feast was second only to the Resurrection of Christ: because it is our Resurrection. As we plunge the Life-Giving Cross into the font, then draw water from the font to bless our homes and heal us of everything that afflicts us in the year to come, we draw on the prayers of the Archpriest Michael, who has fallen asleep. From this time forward, we will sanctify the day: January the Sixth, the eve of Theophany, when Father Michael went to serve the Divine Liturgy. Our people, who fear death by water, now find in all the waters an oasis – a place to rest in the desert, a cool drink, and fresh water, to wash us clean of all the worst that life – and death – can ever do. On this feast of Theophany, God has manifested himself as never before. Our Fr. Michael has embarked on a journey: toward the sea, across the Jordan. We who have sat too long in the darkness, in the region and shadow of death, see the light that began to rise around four p.m. on the eve of the holy Theophany: the light that burst from the heavens, on that day when God descended into the waters; the light that guided our Fr. Michael and Khouriya Jeanne into the One, True Church; the light in the holy water; the light that we draw on, for the rest of our lives, whenever we pray:

Holy Father Michael, if you have found favour with God,

pray to God for us!

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