Straight from the Heart: Orthodox Bible Study with Father Lawrence

I am making a change, switching my blog from this current site to blogger.com, since it is easier for those who are "challenged" in the mysterious workings of websites, such as myself.  Future posts can be found here.  See you there on the new site!

         Since the Church started its earthly sojourn about two millenia ago, it has waded through a lot of history, and this historical journey has left its mark upon it, for good and for ill.  One of the good things that our historical pilgrimage has given us is a wealth of saintly intercessors, who look down upon us from heaven, a “great cloud of witnesses” (see Heb. 12:1).  Their many names adorn our liturgical celebrations, and at each liturgical dismissal, we not only commemorate the most-holy Theotokos and the holy, glorious and all-laudable apostles, but also our local community’s patron saint and “the saint of the day”.  Pretty much every day on our church calendar has several saints, whose lives we celebrate and upon whose heavenly intercession we rely.  It was, of course, otherwise in the days of St. John Chrysostom, when the commemorations of saints and martyrs were mostly local affairs, with each community celebrating only its local martyrs.  But since the days of Chrysostom the Church has expanded its liturgical horizons, and commemorates not just its own local martyrs and saints, but also those of other communities.  Our heavenly family is very big, and it takes the entire year to remember the names of all the canonized. 

            Another fruit of such a long historical sojourn is the accretion of legendary material which adorn the stories of the saints.  The “official” Synaxarion (or books containing these stories of the saints) admits as much, for it describes this tradition as “a great river whose rushing waters carry along mud, stones, branches and a little of everything they have met with on their way, regardless of its value, but whose steam is life-giving”[1].  That is, along with the underlying stratum of historically reliable information, the official stories also contain legends and embellishments which are rather less reliable historically.  (A famous example of such colourful embellishment is the dragon in the story of St. George, which a foot-note in said Synaxarion acknowledges is not found in the earliest stories of St. George’s martyrdom.)  What to do with such embellishments?  One approach is that of the Bollandists.

            The Bollandist movement began with John Bollandus (hence the name of the movement), a Jesuit who published volumes of saints’ lives at Antwerp in 1643.  These volumes did not simply catalogue all the saints commemorated in the (western) church.  His aim was to “trim away any repetitions, track down any obvious falsehoods” and in general to edit out things which “turn out to be merely fables”.[2]  The work continued after him, with the Bollandists, who continue to research the lives of saints with a great amount of scholarship.  And their work is not of merely academic interest:  when they conclude that a certain saint never actually existed, the Roman Catholic Church drops him or her from its calendar.  If memory serves, St. Christopher suffered such a fate after being put under the Bollandist microscope, despite the many medals bearing his image that the Church sold to its faithful. 

            As mentioned in the title of this piece, history exerts a fair bit of weight, and centuries of Christian devotion need to be allowed to benefit from that weight.  It is easy—perhaps too easy, given the ever-shifting conclusions of scholars—to excise a saint from the calendar because a group of scholars bring forth negative conclusions.  But such easy excision runs the risk of doing a disservice to the hearts of the faithful.  The hearts and needs of the faithful call us to tread carefully.  Having said that, we should not, I suggest, simply throw out the work of the Bollandists and those like them, and retreat into a kind of historical fundamentalism which confesses that dragons must have existed because a late story of St. George says that he slew one.  This would be to sacrifice much of the Church’s credibility on the world stage, and to tempt unbelievers to say that Orthodox believe in the Resurrection of Christ simply because they are uncritical and gullible.  Adult believers have some sense of history, and of the differences between literary genres.  We can tell the difference between a first century eye-witness account testifying to the resurrection of Christ (see Jn. 21), and a late legend relating how St. George slew a dragon.  The first is clearly history; the second is not, and adult literary palates can easily taste the difference.  We need to deal critically with the lives of the saints, distinguishing the legendary from the historical, yet finding the value to the legends which led to their literary inclusion in the story in the first place.  If one were to refer to this approach as “Bollandist Lite”, I would not object to the designation.  The demands of both scholarship and piety must be consulted as we continue to tell the stories of the saints, the friends of Christ, who are also our friends. 

            The title of this post referred to “a commercial”, and here it comes.  Noting the pastoral need of producing a synaxarion which attempted to combine the demands of both scholarship and piety, I wrote one (a project which took boldness, since I had neither the sufficient scholarship nor piety for the task).  It was published by Light and Life Publishing in 1997 under the title A Daily Calendar of Saints.  Their proof-reader perhaps could have used some Bollandist attention himself, since his spell-checker “corrected” my work, producing some odd results:  St. Timothy, bishop of Brussa became “St. Timothy, bishop of Prussia”, and Christ, instead of “restoring Peter to the apostolate” after His Resurrection, restored him “to his apostate”.  Oops.  The book sold well even so, given its niche market, and since 1997 has gone out of print.  Also since 1997, a number of saints and holy men and women came to the Church’s attention—women like St. Maria Skobtsova of Paris and new-martyr Fr. Alexander Men of Moscow.  Thus new saints needed to be included in the work, and a number of already-existing stories needed to be expanded.  Also included in the work is an appendix, listing the saints and occasions commemorated in the Paschal cycle.  It has been a labour of love, with encouragement and suggestions from many (including especially my fellow-priest and friend, Fr. Mark Hodges).  The book is available for purchase now (in time for Christmas, if you please), for $17.95, from Lulu.com.  Just go to the Lulu site, and search for A Daily Calendar of Saints, and there it is.  An image of the book, with a direct link to the Lulu site, is found in the post immediately prior to this one.

[1] The Synaxarion, by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra, vol. 1, (Chalkidike: Holy Convent of the Annunciation of Our Lady, 1998), p. xix.

[2] Cited by “Reading the Lives of the Saints” by James Skedros, in Thinking Through Faith, Papanikolaou and Prodromou ed., Crestwood:  SVS Press, 2008, p. 165.

revised and corrected, with a new cover:  

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/a-daily-calendar-of-saints/18696267

           Readers of my vintage (and historians) will recognize the above title as the first line in the song extolling motherhood, with each letter in the word “mother” standing for a particular maternal attribute.  (‘O’ means only that she’s growing old; ‘T’ is for the tears she shed to save me, etc. etc.)  The song was popularized by Eddy Arnold.  My own biological mother was a woman of faith and love, and I will not speak of her here.  But I do want to speak of my ‘other’ mother and yours:  the most-holy Mother of God, the spiritual mother of all who confess the Name of her divine Son.  And as the Eddy Arnold song does for his biological mother, I would like to extol the Mother of God for the million things that we receive through her prayers.

           Protestants have always pointed out in their polemics that the Mother of God (or “Mary”; they resist calling her the Mother of God, even though they acknowledge Jesus as God and Mary as His Mother) is not much mentioned in the New Testament.  This is true; she is not.  But what they take as evidence of her unimportance, I take as evidence of her greatness and her humility.  She is not much present in the pages of the New Testament because she chooses to be not much present.  That is, from the day of the wedding of Cana in Galilee when she uttered the words to those present, “Whatever He says to you, do it”, she was content to vanish behind her Son.  That is, as her Son’s first and best disciple, she recognized that it was not all about her.  It was about Him.  She remained in the background, keeping all that she saw in her heart (compare Lk. 2:51).  We see this in the picture of the seminal Jerusalem church offered in Acts 1:14:  here St. Luke gives a list of those present in the upper room, awaiting the day of Pentecost.  It included the Twelve, “the women, Mary the mother of Jesus, and His brothers”.  Note that she does not even come at the head of the list, but in the middle of everyone else.  It is as if she is intent upon disappearing into her Son and His body, the church.  It is this kenoticism, this self-emptying, that is the source of her greatness—and of the original incarnation of her Son (see Phil. 2:5-11).  The Lord promised that those who humbled themselves would be exalted, and she led the way in her kenotic humility.

            Anyway, Eddy Arnold could sing; I cannot.  But I can write, and therefore I offer this poem about my Mother.    Through her prayers and the tears she shed to save us all, may we all reach the Kingdom of her divine Son.

 Three Songs:  a Triptych of Love

I

The baby was crying (as all babies do), tiny lungs tearing

the still air of a Bethlehem midnight, inconsolable, wracked

with gas or indigestion or

some secret knowledge of Herod’s hooves approaching 

to paint the little town red with

the spilled blood of prophecy.  His mother was singing softly over His tears,

a gentle Hebrew lullaby to drown out the frantic wailing.

Joseph was packing the last pan on the donkey,

dream-born fears speeding   

his fingers as they prepared for their flight.   The young mother's song

was having no effect whatsoever,                                           

but still she bent over Him and whispered the melody like a family incantation, and prayed,                                

and prayed, and the sweet notes lingered long in the air like a supplication: 

the Mother of God, singing to her Son.

 II

The afternoon sky was black as midnight as she knelt                                                                                               

at the foot of death and cradled in her arms the nailtorn corpse.  The blood 

from His scourged back stained her sleeves as she rocked back and forth, back                                                          

and forth, shrieking like a mad woman, wailing out the grief of the world, inconsolable,                                    

wracked with a swordthrust that pierced her heart.    

The sounds she made were unintelligible, but still                   

she kept wailing, still the sound poured from her lips, like blood from an open wound.                                            

The terrible sound hammered the hearts of all who heard, and men clamped their hands                                          

over their ears to stop the endless lament 

the Mother of God, singing to her Son.

 III

In the high halls, an endless multitude offers hymns to Christ enthroned, crying out                                                 

with full throats, and the sound drowns earthly sorrows like a mighty flood.  

One song

ascends above the others, humbling the descant of the cherubim and the seraphim,                                                    

its victorious notes lingering long over the whole assembly like a pillar of fire.                                                          

The song is wild as the winds of Pentecost, a hurricane of joy,                                                                                 

an ecstatic storm of exultation, tearing 

and melting and breaking the heart,                       

and all who stand before the throne 

fall silent as they drink it in, and listen, and wonder, and weep,                                                                                  

and pray that it will never stop:                                  

the Mother of God, singing to her Son.

           I am delighted to report the painfully obvious, that today is October 22, 2011.  In the Orthodox liturgical calendar, it is the feast day of St. Abercius, a second century Bishop of Hierapolis.  It is also the celebration of the Kazan icon of the Theotokos.  And, more particularly, it is the day Harold Camping said would never exist.

            You remember Harold Camping, Founder of FamilyRadio.com., and radio evangelist mogul, head of the multi-million dollar Christian media empire.  He became famous earlier this year by predicting that the Rapture, Judgment Day for Christians, would occur on May 21.  Many of his devout followers believed him, and spent much money on signs and billboards to advertise the fact.  “Judgment Day May 21”, the signage said, “the Bible guarantees it”.  Some even sold their businesses, expecting The End.  For his part, Harold retired to his home and waited for God to fulfill Harold’s own predictions.  God did not, and May 21 came and went in much the same way as May 20.  Ninety year old Harold was (quote) “flabbergasted”.  Flabbergasted enough, it seems, to have a stroke in June, from which he is slowly recovering. 

           But evidently not flabbergasted enough to rethink his whole approach to Scripture, spirituality, Christianity or his own infallibility.  Nope.  He was not flatly wrong, just out a bit in his interpretation. “We had all our dates correct”, he insisted.  The promised Judgment Day did come on May 21, alrighty.  It just came spiritually.  The world will end—that is, END, on October 21, five months after its predicted demise.  No more fooling around, no more Mr. Nice Guy.  This time, The End will come.  “It won’t be spiritual on October 21st,” Camping said, adding, “the world is going to be destroyed all together, but it will be very quick.”  Good to know, Harold.  (Readers of the Orthodox philokalia will have no trouble in diagnosing prelest, or impenetrable prideful delusion.)

           As I said and as you noticed when you got up to begin your day, it is October 22.  Harold was wrong again, in a kind of apocalyptic deja-vu.  How he will handle this information in whatever months or years he has left quickly becomes uninteresting.  God bless Harold Camping; I leave him to the judgment of God and the hard ridicule of history.  I only mention him and the obvious fact of his highly public second humiliation because he serves as a cautionary tale for all of us.

           That is, Harold Camping’s insistence on plugging away in the original path he chose and his extraordinary refusal to admit that he was simply wrong illustrates the folly on spiritual stubbornness.  We none of us like to admit we have been idiots, that we were colossally wrong, that all those irritating people who said we were going the wrong way were in fact right.  It hurts our pride.  If the sin of pride really has us by the throat, such an admission feels like we are dying, and we would do anything to wriggle out of it, and not have to admit that we were wrong all along.  But such humility is the only way forward, into both sanctity and sanity.  Orthodoxy declares that all spiritual progress is rooted in the soil of humility, and that without humility—the willingness to say loudly to any within ear-shot that we were misled, foolish, wrong and that we chose stupidly—there is no hope for us to grow in Christ and inherit joy. 

           May God have mercy on Harold Camping.  I would suggest that October 22 be named Camping Day in the secular calendar in his honour, as reminder to all of the folly of prelest and pride.  And the alternative to Harold Camping’s way of living, and the legacy he leaves?  Humble submission to the apostolic Tradition of the Church.  This is, I suggest, the only true alternative.  All other paths involve trusting our own judgment, or the judgments of those whose fallibility has been abundantly demonstrated.  We see where such paths lead—they lead to fatal confidence in October 21 and to the ultimate humiliation of facing October 22.  In Christ and His Church alone we can find a wisdom beyond our own, a wisdom which has been proven by the experience of the saints and the test of the passing ages.  It comes down to this, a stark choice between only two alternatives:  the way of Camping, or the way of Christ.  Camping Day shows us which alternative to choose.