SAINT GEORGE THE TROPHY-BEARER

Apolytikion in the Fourth Tone:
Liberator of captives, defender of the poor, physician of the sick, and champion of kings, O trophy-bearer, Great Martyr George, pray to Christ God that our souls be saved.

Kontakion in the Fourth Tone:
Cultivated by God, you became manifest as an honourable tiller gathering for yourself the sheaves of virtue. For you sowed with tears but reaped with gladness; in the contest you competed with your blood and came away with Christ. By your prayers, O Holy One, all are granted forgiveness of sins.

Beloved Christians,                                                                                                                                           

Today is the Feast of Saint George, one of our most beloved saints, brutally martyred for the True Faith, and among other things, the patronal saint of England.
Today’s feast is not a feast of “Englishness” or of an “English” saint, certainly not a secular day of “national pride”. There is an important distinction to be made here. We do not celebrate Saint George because he is English. He wasn’t!
Sadly, Saint George has been hijacked by thugs and nationalists. Let it be underscored that tribalism, division, ethno-centrism, hatred of any kind, must find no place in our society, and has no legitimate place within Christianity. On the contrary, the Orthodox Church is untainted (unlike Anglicanism) by historical links to slavery-colonialism-western imperialism, and has always, in its teaching (if not always in some of its parishes!) shown itself to be multicultural and Christocentric: a celebrant of diversity and at the same time a demonstrator of union in ONE BODY AND BLOOD.

‘And the Lord said, “Behold the people are one, and they all have the one language”‘
Genesis 11:6

The Orthodox Church has declared – and continually demonstrates in word and deed – that phyletism (i.e., that which is commonly called “racism”) is a grievous sin and an anthropological heresy. Bigotry – of each and every kind – has no place in the Church.
Of course, we gratefully acknowledge that some of our saints were local women and men; but we are equally grateful that many of our “British saints” were not even remotely British by birth or blood or heritage: Saint Theodore was Greek, from Tarsos; Saint Adrian was African; Saint Paulinus and Saint Augustine of Canterbury were from Italy; and Saint George, does not possess one single drop of English blood– he was from the hellenic world, from what is now Turkey.

‘For where you treasure is there your heart will be also.’
 Matthew 6:21

It is not nationality or skin colour or class or education that is critical, it is the contents of our heart – and how we put Christ’s teachings into practice – that is our true witness. We must give God everything and have full trust in Him, we must make a total commitment to Him if we are ever to share with Saint George and all the saints in God’s countless blessings; we must, like Saint George, endure our suffering if we are to attain salvation in Christ.    

‘Do not think that I came to bring peace to the earth, I did not come to bring peace but a sword.’
Matthew 10:34

We who are here, now, are charged with a holy mission: to assist in the uplift of our culture from secularism to holy Orthodoxy. We do this by contemplating every moment of creation, by suffering for its renewal, by commitment to local parishes, commitment to helping the Church to grow at a local level, and to give back to England what is hers by right: her holy and ancient Orthodox heritage. To that end, let us all fervently ask the holy prayers of the patron saint of England:

Saint George, pray to God for us!

A very happy feast to you all!

Father Jakob                
unworthy presbyter and fellow struggler

‘DAYS OF THE EPITAFIOS’ a poem sequence for Great & Holy Week

‘DAYS OF THE EPITAFIOS’
a poem sequence for Great & Holy Week

Nikos Gatsos (Νίκος Γκάτσος, 1911-1992) had a profound influence on modern twentieth century Greek poetry; and his lyrics for major Greek composers (Manos Hadjidakis, Eleni Karaindrou, et al.) and for performers such as Nana Maskouri, and the score for Elia Kazan’s movie ‘America-America’ (1963), have secured him a place in Hellenic literary history. However, in the anglophone world, despite friendships with Philip Sherrard, Desmond O’Grady, and Peter Levi, Gatsos’s reputation is founded almost solely on a single work, his Αμοργός, of 1942. Even in Greece, the vast majority of Gatsos’s works remained unpublished until after his repose. Among the 166 poems collected as Φύσα Αεράκι Φύσα Με Μη Χαμηλώνεις Ίσαμε (1992), we find his Great and Holy Week sequence, ‘Days of the Epitafios’.
Poetic lines are interspersed with Scriptural quotations (sometimes modified) and extracts from Orthodox liturgical texts. This sequence of poems allows us to share in Gatsos’s profound insight into the week of Christ’s Holy Passion, and thereby, opens unto us a window into the poet’s belief. For although he was a staunch modernist (a surrealist; and translator of Strindberg, Lorca, Jean Genet), Gatsos’s faith resided in Christ as the singular redemptive hope for humanity.

GREAT MONDAY

The One who is and who was and who is to come.
The Alpha and the Omega.

Wait for me mother, wait for me
until Spring arrives in the frozen land.

The architect of the infinite.
The shepherd of the stars.
Wait for me mother like the bird of the south
that aligns sight and wing to find its heaven.

The ruler of Numbers.
The tamer of Signs.

Wait for me mother on a Friday
by the gates of heaven by the well of the abyss.

Near. The time is very near.
The One who is and who was and who is to come.

GREAT TUESDAY

The kings indulged in fornication and the people of the
earth became intoxicated with the wine of fornication.

Under the banners of Rome
in Magdalene’s tent
you, the father of forgiveness
and we, the children of pleasure.

Gloomy and moonless is the desire of sin.
A hoarse cry was heard
in the city’s taverns
you, a lamb for slaughter
and we, the rams of sin.
The harlot mixed the precious myrrh with her tears
and poured it out on your sacred feet.
The Pilates didn’t frighten you
nor did time that’s at hand
you, in broad heaven
and we, the intruders of the earth.
I have come as a light into the world} so that whoever
believes in Me should not abide in darkness.

GREAT WEDNESDAY

From the caves of the mountain came out the demons.

Wednesday of ashes and suffering
death has no past.
Wednesday of the souls and angels
death has also no future.

A sea of glass like crystal.

The pendulum of the universe strikes
wake up so that we may render honours.
The heavenly commanders have appeared
like the Gauls of dark Rubicon.

Faith, hope, love. These three. Love, the greatest
of all.

The earth’s wounds took courage.
When will the sun light the fires
to burn Herod’s palace
so that the flower of evil become a pomegranate?

Do all these things so that you may become blameless
and harmless in the midst of a corrupt and perverse
generation.

GREAT THURSDAY

His works are true and His ways straight.

He who suspended the sun
in the hatch beam of heaven
is hung today upon a tree–
Lord be merciful!
And in the furzes of the desert
a mother cried out: “my son” !

By way of the Tree the children of Adam became the
settlers of Paradise.

With April’s ancient charms
with the demons’ kiss
an owl came into the house
and a crow into the yard.
And all ·the wild beasts in the ravine
took off to Hades.

He came upon this earth to bear witness to the truth.

He who nailed the stars
on heaven’s holy dome
again will sow summers
in the mind’s bitter cold.
Then you and I, we and the rest
will be born again.

He is the life, the light and the peace of the world.

GREAT FRIDAY

Worthy is He who suspended the earth on the waters.

I trudge along
in the dim light of the day
I bring you Spring lilies
and lay them on your cross–
tear-drenched friend
first among the first and foremost
first among the first and foremost.

Worthy is He who adorned the firmanent with clouds.

Time rolled away ailing
and the sun comes out crippled
like the swallow’s wing
that time has maimed–
most blessed friend
best of the best
best of the best.

Worthy is He who painted the earth with flowers.

Today Hades opened up
Calvary became a bridge
and on the banks of death
you follow a nameless path–
You, the near by and the far away
greatest of the great
greatest of the great

Worthy is the sacrificed lamb.

GREAT SATURDAY

Remember!
Little by little everything ran dry.
The doves fly slow
over dried up lakes and wet marshes
over thirsty gardens and fields.

Remember the children God gave you.

Behind low hills
among prophets and insane men
three children stand aside
like seagulls on the sand.

The words that You spoke to us are spirit, and they are life.

Sun, in these ailing times
chase away the north and the north-eastern wind
and return to earth
with the cry of your triumph.

For You are the truth, the life and the resurrection.
The One who is and who was, and who is to come.

GUARDING THE HEART: Houédard distils Abba Abraham via Kassianos

The following poem is by the Benedictine (roman catholic) monk and concrete poet Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924-1992)¹. It attempts – albeit in a somewhat idiosyncratic way – a distillation, a reductio, of the hesychastic essence of the teachings of Abba Abraham, a fourth-century higumenos of the Nile Delta. Abba Abraham’s teachings were recorded by Saint Ioannes Kassianos (John Cassian) in the Conlationes or Collationes patrum in scetica eremo (Conferences of the Desert Fathers).

(By way of comparison with the present poem, see the full text of Abba Abraham’s homily, at Conferences 24.iii.1ff.)

THE FISH-DOME SERMON OF ABBA ABRAHAM c.392 AD

The ease with which concentration of thoughts scatters to the four
    winds mean safeguarding vision one-pointedly
To keep the target in view
    sit motionless on the high rock of your mind:
    a mystical fisherman
    eager to catch food by the apostolic art
eyes sharpened at the point of thoughts
    swimming below in the calm depths of your heart
    watching, selecting, rejecting.
The name we give this art of watching
   is 'Guard of the heart'
we use it in stilling thought-storms
    on our mental lake.

The method of fixing attention one-pointedly
    we call 'the remembrance of God'.
As thoughts rise
    lead them to circle round this one point
    like an architect building a dome;
he measures the rope
    ties it to an unchanging centre
    and at that distance
    exactly fits each stone.
Kept unceasingly
    by these mystical compasses of love
   whatever swims into mind
    the centre tells us if it fits
    or needs to be thrown away
Easily lost
    recover it with accuracy:
    guesswork is blindness
    to what spoils the beauty of true roundness.

Lost
    there is nothing can determine the one right point at
    which the dome must finish:
so establish the centre
    and keep it unceasingly
    for the one point
    round which mind is to work without ceasing is God.

And the building we dome
    the spiritual edifice describe by Paul
    is that house desired by David
    the beautiful palace where glory dwells.

Built by pointed-mind
    the dwelling is worthy of spirit
built otherwise it collapses
    ruined
    before any glory
    is received from the blessed inhabitant.

( source: D.B. Fry, The Nature of Religious Man. The Octagon Press, 1982, pp.149-150. )

1. It is not without interest that Houédard and others within the western avant-garde – – notably, Ad Reinhardt (“ultimate” paintings, 1960s), Susan Sontag (‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ 1967), Gustav Metzger (DIAS: Destruction in Art Symposium, September 1966), Ernst Jandl (in particular, his reading at the ‘International Poetry Incarnation’ at the Royal Albert Hall, 11th June 1965); Robert Lax (Patmos poems), John Cage (4’33’‘, 1952), Samuel Beckett (The Unnameable, 1953); and, slightly earlier: Wallace Stevens (‘The Snow Man’, 1921) – – were drawn to the apophatic. One of the fundamental questions for creative artists in the middle of the twentieth century was how to continue making meaningful art in the shadow of the catastrophic events of war, the holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Abstraction can now be read (historically) as a strategy: an apophatic silence in the face of secular man’s mechanised cruelty- some artists dispensed entirely with the figurative; concrete poets abandoned coherent words.

See ‘The disappearing Figure: Art after Catastrophe’ (Tate Modern), which brilliantly surveys the impact of the events of the Second World War on the art that followed. However, it is worth pointing out, that the overwhelming majority of art-historians have, in their short-sightedness, mistakenly identified the apophatic as a uniquely Zen Buddhist phenomenon.

Some useful critical and historical studies:

On Dom Sylvester Houédard, and other concrete poets:
Greg Thomas, Border Blurs: Concrete poetry in England and Scotland, Liverpool University Press, 2019.
Especially relevant is Chapter 5: ‘Apophasis: Dom Sylvester Houédard’, pp. 159-202.

On Ad Reinhardt:
William Lyons, ‘Ad Reinhardt, Theology, and ‘Apophatic’ Art’, Brooklyn Rail [n.d.].
Lawrence S. Cunningham, ‘The Black Painting in the Hermit Hatch’, Merton Seasonal, vol. 11, no. 4, Autumn 1986.

On Gustav Metzger, et alia:
Johanna Malt, ‘On Not Saying, Not Knowing and Thinking About Nothing: Adorno, Dionysius, Derrida and the Negation of Art’, Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Theory, vol. 41, no. 2, July 2018.

On Ernst Jandl:
Katja Stuckatz, ‘Atemschrift: Ernst Jandl’s Experimental Poetics of Affirmation’, Journal of Austrian Studies, vol. 45, no. 1/2 (Spring/Summer 2012).

On Robert Lax:
Robert Hirschfeld, ‘The Mystical Poetry of Robert Lax’, Dappled Things, 2021. Hirschfeld writes of Lax’s poetry that it ‘was quiet to the point of evanescence, his minimalism and hyper-minimalism creating a meeting place for the seen and the unseen’.

On John Cage:
Nathaniel Woodward, ‘John Cage and the aesthetic pedagogy of chance & silence’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, nos. 1-10, 2003.

On Samuel Beckett:
Sandra Wynands, ‘Negative Theology and Samuel Beckett’s Strategies of Reduction: Visuality and Iconicity in Beckett ‘s Later Works for the Stage’ (M.A., University of Victoria, 1999). Wynands makes the acute observation that ‘[t]he apophatic moment draws its force from the semantic overflow that results from the clash of […] incompatible statements as human reason grapples with something that does not fit a logic of non-contradiction.’ p. 3.

On Wallace Stevens:
William Franke, ‘The Negative Theology of Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”’, Religions, 8(4), 54, 2017.
Darlene L. Bird, ‘(Extra)Ordinary evenings in New H(e)aven: the religious element in the poetics of Wallace Stevens’ PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003.

On poetry and the apophatic, in general:
Graeme Watson, ‘Poetry and Prayer Beyond Words’, The Way, vol. 46, no. 1, January 2007.

On God’s Will

“When you wish deeply to act always according to the Will of God, He will reveal It to you. This is what He asks. He wants us to reach out our hand for His Grace, so that His Grace may guide us and His Holy Spirit may shine on us. And then, it is Paradise on Earth! Have no doubts whether it is or it isn’t the Will of God. Because when you doubt about what is to be done, it will not be done properly. Don’t forget that when it is not the Will of God, He makes it quite clear, for then He shuts all the doors. When you go here and there and find obstacles everywhere, change course, don’t insist on your own will. Make your Prayer and change your mind.”

Gerontissa Gavrilia [Papayiannis]
(b. 02/10/1897 + 28/03/1992)

‘SIGNPOSTS TO THE UNMENTIONABLE’

‘SIGNPOSTS TO THE UNMENTIONABLE’¹: AT THE THRESHOLD OF THE INEXPRESSIBLE –
THE NON-LINEAR NARRATIVE AS SPIRITUAL PHENOMENON
[ some initial ramblings of the problematic of the non-linear narrative ]

TIME IS MONEY, MONEY IS TIME
Capitalism is heavily invested (no pun intended!) in the hegemonic version of linear time². Linear time is an algorithm that has become so incontrovertible, so deeply foundational to the secularised worldview (and to Facebook and Twitter and all other platforms), that it is almost impossible to legitimately conceive of time in an alternative (non-linear) way.
When time is seen only as something that is segmented into neat blocks of past-present-future, it becomes something that passes away and runs out. And in this way, it is all to easily commodified, and a commercial value applied to it.
On the other hand, non-linear narrative (in film or literature) is all too easily dismissed as willfully obscurantist, incomprehensible, and pointless; as yet another exemplum of the Rimbaudienne ‘dérèglement de tous les sens’³. The negative (materialist-mimeticist-utilist) reading of the non-linear gesture (in film, art, literature) diminishes this particular creative modus to little more than a wilfull non-sensibility. However, if we approach the non-linear not as technique but as phenomenon, it may be read differently – an attempt to express the inexpressible, to evoke that which is beyond physical apprehension.
This latter reading repurposes an avant-garde technique into a tool for approaching apophasis and atemporality.

MALEABLE TIME
Time, is of course not “stuck” in one particular form. Its plasticity is intrinsic: time slows to a halt at the event horizon of a black hole, passes slower on a theoretical speeding starship; nor are our perceptions of time ‘frozen’. The ways that we actually perceive and experience time are determined – to a great extent – by our imagination (and age) and by our language-culture.
One recent study⁴ which shows that bilinguals think about time differently from monolinguals, is the first demonstrate the first tangible evidence for cognitive flexibility in bilinguals. As Ted Chiang has said in ‘The Story of your Life’⁵: ‘Learning a foreign language rewires your brain’. By way of example, in English and Spanish the future is ‘in front’ and the past ‘behind’, whilst in Mandarin Chinese the future is ‘down’ and the past is ‘up’. This flexibility of perception is treated in a speculative fashion by Kurt Vonnegut. In The Sirens of Titan (1959), the ‘chrono-synclastic infundibulum’ – the point at which all apparent temporalilty is reconciled: ‘where all the different kinds of truths fit together’ we are offered a science-fictional eikon of the eschaton – the un-time/timelessness of eternity. In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) we have a traumatised Billy Pilgrim who is unstuck in time, and the placid and fatalistic Tralfamadorians who, being able to experience reality in four dimensions, have total access to past, present, and future, are able to perceive any point in time at will. The Tralfamadorians may be seen as eikonic of God’s perception of the entire timeline of the kosmos⁶.

TWO WAYS OF TIME
Χρόνος (kronos) and καιρός (kairos) are oppositional but also interpenetrating. Chronological time (personified by the titan Kronos devouring his own offspring) is quantitative, and opposed to the qualitative ‘solid state’ (immutable, eternal) time of kairos the non-linear, non spatial, non-moving ‘time’ of the age-to-come (and one would speculate of the ‘time-before-time’ the ur-non-linearity of the pre-creational).
Kronos and kairos are overlapping venn sets: at the Incarnation of Christ, there was a disruption when the eschaton (kaironic, uncreated) broke into this world (created, chronologic), when Christ came down, into His creation; and with Christ’s Holy Ascension the human person is taken up (from the created into the eternal).

SCIENTIFIC SOLUTIONS
Basically, linear problems are easily separable, and hence solvable, due to the superposition principle, projections onto orthonormal bases, and so on. Thus, many such scientific problems have been ‘solved’ over the last two centuries, most often analytically- that is, with pencil and paper or with rudimentary computational devices. And these ‘basic’ methods are still of great value in deriving and determining the properties of tangent linear equations, adjoint operators, and many other mathematical approximations of real-world problems.
The advance, since the Second World War, of ever-more-powerful computational devices has changed our way of thinking about what the solution to the mathematical formulation of a physical problem really is, that is, not necessarily an analytical expression but an algorithm for obtaining information about such a solution with prescribed accuracy. This change (improvement?) in observational methods- in the geosciences and elsewhere, whether in vitro, that is, in the lab, or in vivo, that is, outdoors- has also contributed greatly to our appetite for moving beyond linear approximation to model, simulate, understand, and predict the complexity of the phenomena under study.
However, although non-linear concepts and methods have greatly expanded the range of problems which we may address, there is still only a small but increasing number of non-linear methodologies. Prediction is a great test of our mathematical and physical understanding⁷.

SHARED(?) PERCEPTIONS
Herakleitos⁸ distinguished the narrow tribal world around man as the ίδιος κόσμος (idios kosmos), the private and privative order, and contrasted it with the κοινός κόσμος (koinos kosmos), the universal order, where man, fully awakened, grows to participate in the universal logos or reason above all narrowness, privacy, and limitations.
That your idios kosmos is yours and not mine (or theirs) is a given, but our own experience of the koinos kosmos is – even though a shared experience – always undercut by the failure of language to convey personal perception. Language and perception are cognitive systems, the former affecting the latter⁹.

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
The collision of utterly transcendent and utterly immanent is an ungovernable, it is wild and unpredictable: ‘Suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm, and it filled the house where they were sitting’ (Acts 2:2); ‘At the blast of your breath, the waters piled up! The surging waters stood straight like a wall; in the heart of the sea the deep waters became hard’ (Exodos 15:8); ‘A breath from God destroys them. They vanish in a blast of his anger’ (Job 4:9); but whilst it is always ungovernable and often materially-imperceptible, it is still manifestly affecting: ‘Him, though you have not seen, you love; and even though you are not seeing Him [now], you believe in Him and are exulting with an inexpressible joy and are filled with glory’ (1 Peter 1:8)- our experience of which is utterly dependent upon grace: ‘the πνεῦμα [pnevma: breath, wind, spirit] will blow where it wishes, and the sound of it you will hear but will not know where it came from and where it goes’ (John 3:8).

A SPIRITUAL PHENOMENON
The non-linear narrative as disjunctive technique is often dismissed as confusing/confused. Whilst in the scientific realm non-linear solutions are seen as entirely valid, standard responses to the advent of calculus. In contrast with these utilitarian techniques, we propose the non-linear narrative as a spiritual phenomenon which is a reflective response to time’s inherent plasticity; it may not always be babbling, or incoherence for the sake of incoherence, but an honest – humble – response to that which cannot be voiced: the inexpressible. The non-linear narrative might be itemised as —

that creative act which is informed by a transcendent urge that continuously points beyond this world. This urge is a desire for totality. Such framing collapses the immanent back into transcendence and as such re-infuses its radical power. Only as a beyond that remains beyond, that is not reclaimed for the totality of all that is, can the immanent ever be truly transcendent. And only as truly immanent can the beyond offer us a radically new vision.

At the τόπος (topos) where language and perception fail, the mystery remains. But, it is also there, at that place, that created and uncreated meet. And where, as Robert Lax says, with God’s grace…

The mystery and the mystified,
the wonder and the wondering
mysteriously move
mysteriously merge
move toward and merge
with one another.¹⁰

Notes:
1 This title is an adaptation of Simone Drichell, ‘”Signposts to a world that is not even mentioned” – Janet Frame’s Ethical Transcendence’, in Jan Cronin and Simone Drichel, eds., Frameworks: Contemporary Criticism on Janet Frame, a special issue (vol. 110, 2009) of Cross/Cultures. Also crucial to the genesis of these musings was an anonymous review of Jack Dann’s Starhiker.
2 Siobhan Leddy, ‘Time after Time’, in Real Life, 4th October 2017. Leddy goes on to say; ‘Time’s arrow has provided vital bedrock for the formation of contemporary capitalism. […] Chronological time relegates the past to an increasingly remote distance from our present. It creates a feeling of scarcity, where the past, once lost, is lost forever. Such scarcity contributes to the capitalist commodification of time, in which time — through waged labour — is reified as a measurable unit, synonymous with its monetary value. If run out of time, we might pay someone to cook or clean or walk the dog on our behalf. Time is money, which can be invested, lost, or worst of all, wasted.’
3 Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en enfer, Bruxelles: Alliance Typographique, [October] 1873.
4 Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos, ‘The Whorfian time warp: Representing duration through the language hourglass’, in The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, July 2017, 146(7), pp. 911-916.
5 First published in Patrick Nielsen Hayden, ed., Starlight 2, November 1998, later collected in Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002.
6 For more on time and its perception in the works of Vonnegut, vide Samet Kalecik, ‘Dispersal of time and trauma in postmodern novel: Slaughterhouse-Five’, in RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 33, April 2023, pp. 1239-1252.
7 Michael Ghil, ‘A Century of non-linearity in the Geosciences’, Earth and Space Science, 17th May 2019.
8 Fragment B89 (Diels–Kranz numbering).
9 Mila Vulchanova, Valentin Vulchanov, Isabella Fritz and Evelyn A. Milburn, ‘Language and perception’. [Introduction to the Special Issue of] Speakers and Listeners in the Visual World, 14th October 2019, vol. 3, pp. 103–112.
10 Unpublished, c. late 1990s[?].

THE GREAT BANQUET

LUKE 14:16-24: THE PARABLE OF THE GREAT BANQUET

This Holy Gospel tells us of the ‘great banquet’ of Christ’s Eucharistic Feast, and of those who make excuses not to attend.
We see that those who are the first to be invited politely ask to be excused; their “good manners” display an apparent humility but their actions show only pride. 
Instead of the proud attending, it is the ‘poor, the maimed, the lame, and the blind’. The proud decline; the poor are chosen, and accept the invitation!
We see the paradox;  the proud are rich in material things but are poor in judgement, whilst the humble have nothing but are rich in grace!
We are all called to be Saints – but few respond positively to the invitation. Many – perhaps the majority – will ignore Christ’s call or will make excuses – I’m too tired, I’m busy, it’s so boring, too demanding, it doesn’t suit my “lifestyle”… Lord have mercy! 
We should pray that everyone eventually chooses to come to be with Jesus Christ.
Those who have ears and answer that call, who are Baptised and Chrismated in Christ, are called upon to make many sacrifices; and let us be clear: serving Christ is very difficult! But for those who attend the Eucharistic Feast the reward will be life eternal! 

PREPARATION FOR THE GREAT BANQUET 
No one has an automatic “right” to partake….too many are casual, coming late, undergoing inadequate preparation or not preparing at all.. Such behaviour is dangerous to themselves and those around them.
Partaking of the Holy Eucharist must be done always with a sense of our complete unworthiness before God, with fear and faith and love. 
We hear in Holy Scripture a great deal about fearing God- this is because fear of God is a prerequisite of our spiritual life. The awesome mystery of the Holy Eucharist is not to be partaken of, let alone even approached, without adequate and necessary preparation. It is spiritually dangerous to encounter almighty God in a casual manner.
All Orthodox Christians aged seven-years and above will aspire to be granted a worthy Holy Communion through the following essentials:

FAITH:  The certainty of belief that Christ is God and that we unite with Him in his Most Holy Eucharist.

ATTENDANCE:  We love to be in God’s holy temple; we come on time to the holy temple, and we come as often as we are able. 

HOLY SCRIPTURE:  We read from Holy Scripture every day. (There are prescribed Epistle and Gospel readings for every day of our life.)

PRAYER:  We pray every morning and every evening, and throughout the day, whenever else we can.

FASTING:  We joyfully and obediently follow the guidance of the Church, and avoid particular foods, and bad behaviour, and wasting our time.

CONFESSION:  We regularly confess to Christ in the presence of a priest. We take responsibility for our faults.

ABSOLUTION:  Following confession the priest grants us absolution of our sins.

By God’s grace, through faith, regular attendance, holy scripture, prayer, fasting, confession, and absolution, we are made worthy of humbly partaking of our Lord’s most Holy Body and Blood.
Without these things, we are not living-to-the-full an ‘orthodox life’, and should AVOID partaking of the Holy Eucharist until we have TAKEN STEPS to change. We should take steps to do so today! Do not delay…Christ is calling us to His great banquet!

THE LOVE OF CHRIST
We need Agapē – SELF-EMPTYING LOVE. Holy Scripture is emphatic: without Agapē, we are nothing and we will gain nothing (1 Korinthians 13:2-3).

LOVE BEFORE LEGALISM

LOVE BEFORE LEGALISM

‘I will sacrifice myself in order to save the Kanons of the Church, but in the case of saving one person, I will sacrifice all the Kanons.’

~ Saint Justin [Popović] of Ćelije  
(reposed in the Lord, 25^th March 1979)

ORTHODOXY 101: HEAD-COVERING IN THE HOLY TEMPLE

During Great Lent we all attempt to adhere more firmly to ancient Church custom and practice. It has been the practice from Apostolic times that all Christian women (and girls aged seven-years and above) veil the head (i.e., cover their hair) in the holy temple. Most orthodox women do so instinctively, emulating the most holy Mother of God and all female saints. In covering (i.e., veiling) the head Christian women wisely place themselves under the holy veil, under the Αγία Σκέπη (Agia skepi), that is, under the holy protection of the Mother of God.

The holy Apostle Paul instructs, offering a choice:

if a woman will not cover her head, then she should shave off her hair. But if she is ashamed to shave off her hair, then let her cover her head. 

(1 Korinthians 11:6)

Incidentally, these behavioural injunctions apply also to men: ‘A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image of God and reflects the glory of God’ (1 Korinthians 11:7). Men, too, are to avoid vanity and disrupting the eikonic order: ‘long hair on a man is nothing to be admired’ (1 Korinthians 11:14). Men (laity) do not cover their head in the holy temple. The holy Apostle’s teaching is emphatic: 

Every man praying or prophesying with his head covered dishonours his head. Every woman praying or prophesying with her head uncovered is dishonouring her head; it is better that she shaves off her hair.  (1 Korinthians 11:4-5).

The joint-customs of non-veiling of men and the veiling of women is a beautiful duty, it is eikonic- it emulates the divine hierarchy: ‘Christ is the head of every man, man is the head of every woman’ (1 Korinthians 11:3); shows our reverence for ‘a symbol of authority’; and is done so, ‘out of respect for the angels’ (1 Korinthians 11:10).

And let it be clearly understood– the holy Apostle tolerated no complaints: ‘To anyone who is inclined to be contentious: there is no other custom with us, nor in the Churches of God’ (1 Korinthians 11:16).

If you arrive at the holy temple and have forgotten your head-covering please speak with Presbytera Susanna who always has a selection of nice clean scarves.
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Most Holy Theotokos, save us!

A POET SEES BEYOND THE HORROR: Robert Lowell ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’

A poetic masterpiece, bleak, irritating, stunning, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’ (1967) is at once a eulogy for the shabbiness of a contemporary (1960s) American culture denuded of faith and compassion, and a quiet, resilient attempt to persevere, to excavate a deeper stratum of truth. The poem examines the futility of existence, through the exemplum of a spawning salmon dying, the paltriness and tawdriness of contemporary religious life (‘electric bells…hymns we hear but do not read…stiff quatrains shovelled out’), material things reduced to clutter and fuel for conflagration (‘dregs and dreck…candle ends…old lumber…useless things’), the vacuity of ‘military splendor’ (‘little redemption in the mass / liquidation of their brass’). Then, that unforgettable penultimate (eleventh) stanza, which concludes

Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind 
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life . . .

This is not a wail of hysteria but the clinical observation of a poet-physician. Cool and lambent, the simplicity of Lowell’s depiction – it’s near muteness – the only legitimate response to the stillness of the Lord’s day desecrated by brother killing brother. The televisualisation of mechanised bloodletting (in Vietnam – and of any, every, conflict) sears, overwhelms- the ploughs turned back into swords denote the worst of the perceivable world in all its bloodied causticity.

In ‘Jonathan Edwards in Western Massachusetts’ (1962),  Lowell asks that most perennial question

we know how the world will end, 
but where is paradise?

A mere five years later, in the final stanza of ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’, even the possibility of paradise has gone. Lowell, venting fear, speaks of the aftermath of world-consuming fiery holocaust; the satirical adoption of the eight-line tetrameter stanzas of Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650) adds to the pain:

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war– until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost 
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

Destruction seems inevitable. And for some – seduced by despair – it will be. In Joseph Conrad’s, Heart of Darkness,  Kurtz dies on the steamboat, his last words a summary of his life and of the fallen human condition, “The horror! The horror!” Kurtz ultimately is corroded by darkness. Although, at first he wants to bring civilization to the natives (sic.), at the end his humanity is blunted, razed, he wants only to “exterminate all the brutes”. 

Dostoevskiy said that “Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.” True . . . probably. And yet, for Lowell and for us, even within the horror, “sadness” is not the final word, for there is always hope. Lowell reminds us that, we read things the wrong way round – despite the horror and inhumanity, Christ is always there, always HERE.

‘Death is slain, so we are given life’.
If we are resistant to culture’s ongepochket and metastasising immediacy, if we look again, look through, look beyond the carnage, we will not be left with a burning after-image of casual cruelty but of its resolution in the inescapable and purging mercy of the Lord. 

Even in the midst of pain, perhaps most especially in the midst of that pain, Jesus Christ is with us:

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.

THE DANGERS OF AN UNCHANGED HEART

‘Be sober-minded, watch; your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking whom to devour’ (1 Peter 5:8)

If we are not fully assimilated into Christian life it is because there is a residual mass that has remained unchallenged. Sometimes the “conversion to Christ” is not fully effective because it is is merely partial – perhaps only the head has been changed (stuffed with information), and the heart has not (yet) been purged. We are emphatically warned that this is dangerous: ‘But by your hard and unchanged heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of the revelation of God’s judging in righteousness’ (Romans 2:5).
In recent years, and increasingly since the Covid “lock-down”, large numbers of people have turned to Orthodox Christianity. However, as evinced from personal encounter, significant numbers of those “converts” received into the Holy Church have retained a distorted and fallen outlook¹. Such a distortion is the result of spiritual delusion². What is required to combat delusion is spiritual discernment³.

What can we do for these sufferers?
Priests should catechise fully and receive with caution; and focus on building healthy communities not little empires. And all of us must pray! We must love, be attentive to, and pray for, the afflicted. And, also, pray for ourselves, for the incorrectly-assimilated present a genuine danger to the health of Christians (cf. Matthew 7:17; Acts 20-29).
The “conversion to orthodoxy” might be only an outward change masking personality disorder or identity crisis; that is, something pathological rather than a genuine transformation of soul.
Seekers who are thirsty for Christ are blessed (Matthew 5:6), and must always be encouraged and supported with love (John 21:15-17), but they need also to be examined, and tested by their fruits (Matthew 7:15; Galatians 5:22-23).
Quite often the newcomer will teach us invaluable lessons! Sometimees the seekers are not as lazy as some of the old-timers who do little or nothing to help in a parish, nor are they as lackadaisical as those who consistently arrive late or skip holy services; the newcomers are often “keen to help”. All these are positive qualities. However, the enthusiasm of the seeker might mask a clawing after advancement (and I quote from real life: “I’ve always wanted to be a priest…“), an impudent impatience (“How much longer is it going to take…?”), or a vainglorious desire to display a recently-acquired “deep knowledge of orthodoxy”. In such ways is exhibited that which Saint Paul accurately records as zeal, ‘but not according to knowledge’ (Romans 10:1-3). Pride precedes ignorance (Ephesians 4:18); and both pride and ignorance are only overcome by the grace of God, through vigilance: ‘Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life’ (Proverbs 4:23).

1 φρόνημα, phronēma.
2 πλάνη, plani; пре́лесть, prelest. It is a rather telling side-effect of centuries of protestant-secularist hegemony that there is no single word in English for the critical concept of ‘spiritual delusion’.
3 διάκρισις, diakrisis; again no single word in English for ‘spiritual discernment’.