A vow of conversation

Afrikaans liturgical chant

Macrina Walker — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:06:50 +0000

In case anyone is interested, I have recently uploaded two files of Orthodox liturgical music in Afrikaans. The Kontakion in Tone 3 can be found here and ”All the generations…” from Good Friday Vespers can be found here. They come from CDs that Father Zacharias has produced and I have uploaded them because I am busy working on a new website for Bedehuis Bethanië which I’ll link to once it has been made public – which I hope will be reasonably soon!

Grasping the plot

Macrina Walker — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:46:26 +0000

The Scriptures are the “ground and pillar of our faith,” says Irenaeus. If the Bible is dismembered to serve an exotic theological program and biblical texts are deployed willy-nilly (as the Gnostics did), the Scriptures will remain a closed book and it will not be possible “to find the truth in them.” Without a grasp of the plot that holds everything together, the Bible is as vacuous as a mosaic in which the tiles have been arbitrarily rearranged without reference to the original design or as a poem constructed by stringing together random verses from the Iliad and Odyssey and imagining it was Homer. In Clement of Alexandria the Bible’s plan is implicit, suggested by a word here, a phrase there; in Irenaeus the outline is set out in bold. So successful was Irenaeus’s approach to the interpretation of the Bible that it informed all later interpretation. Whether one reads Athanasius against Arius, Augustine against Pelagius, or Cyril of Alexandria against Nestorius, all assume that individual passages are to be read in the light of the story that gives meaning to the whole.

Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought. Seeking the Face of God, 67-68.

This really is an extraordinarily good book, despite the fact that my reading of it has been terribly disrupted. The chapter on Scripture is particularly good. Highly recommended so far!

Simplicity of soul and a pure eye

Macrina Walker — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 06:24:22 +0000

They said of Abba Macarius the Great that he became, as it is written, a god upon earth, because, just as God protects the world, so Abba Macarius would cover the faults which he saw, as though he did not see them; and those which he heard, as though he did not hear them. “Christians,” he said, “should judge no one, neither an open harlot, nor sinners, nor dissolute people, but should look upon all with simplicity of soul and a pure eye. Purity of heart, indeed, consists in seeing sinful and weak men and having compassion for them and being merciful.” On the subject of prayer he counselled, “It is enough if you will often repeat from your whole heart, ‘Lord, as it pleases Thee and as Thou knowest, have mercy on me.’ And if temptation comes upon you: ‘Lord, help me!’ The Lord knows what is profitable for us and has mercy on us.”

Source

Having missed Saint Anthony and Saint Athanasius, let me at least post something on Saint Macarius. It’s been a great week for Alexandrian saints and we really should be doing more to make them known around here!

By the way, for those interested, the fresco is by Andrei Rublev and comes from this helpful site which I recently discovered.

Orthodoxy is shown not proved

Macrina Walker — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:49:07 +0000

… the life of the Church is assimilated and known only through life—not in the abstract, not in a rational way. If one must nevertheless apply concepts to the life of the Church, the most appropriate concepts would be not juridical and archaeological ones but biological and aesthetic ones. What is ecclesiality? It is a new life, life in the Spirit. What is the criterion of the rightness of this life? Beauty. Yes, there is a special beauty of the spirit, and, ungraspable by logical formulas, it is at the same time the only true path to the definition of what is orthodox and what is not orthodox. The connoisseurs of this beauty are the spiritual elders, the startsy, the masters of the ‘art of arts’, as the holy fathers call asceticism. The startsy were adept at assessing the quality of spiritual life. The Orthodox taste, the Orthodox temper, is felt but it is not subject to arithmetical calculation. Orthodoxy is shown, nor proved. That is why there is only one way to understand Orthodoxy: through direct orthodox experience… to become Orthodox, it is necessary to immerse oneself all at once in the very element of Orthodoxy, to begin living in an Orthodox way. There is no other way.

Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. An Essay in Orthodox
Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. by Boris Jakim, Princeton NJ, 1997, pp. 8–9.

Quoted in “Lecture I: Thinking and doing, being and praying: where do we start?” which is the first of a series of lectures by Father Andrew Louth on “Orthodox Theology. A Personal Introduction.” More information here. Of course, if you should be anywhere near the Netherlands, you would be well advised to go and listen to the lectures!

The Life-Giving Spring site is up

Macrina Walker — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 14:53:55 +0000

As I mentioned previously, I have been working on a new site for Life-Giving Spring and it has just gone public. I was originally just going to make a page on this blog for those who may want to contribute to what we are doing, but realized that making a separate site allows one more freedom for putting up material that one will need to have somewhere in the long term anyway. I will hopefully develop it more before too long once things are more organized.

As one can see on the news page, I am making slow progress and have had to accept that it will take time to settle. And I am having to get used to living in two places at once – the biggest disaster so far happened this week when I forgot my laptop’s cord in Robertson, when I had been planning to do serious computer week on the weekday evenings! But overall, I have been delighted with the way things are coming together there and with the space that is emerging… and I am very grateful to God for the people who are supporting this venture!

Spiritual sobriety

Macrina Walker — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:18:19 +0000

One of the characteristics of a genuinely healthy spiritual life is temperance. We know in ordinary speech what sobriety means in comparison to drunkenness. One can get drunk in various ways, and not only through wine. Everything that fascinates us so much that we no longer can remember God or ourselves, nor the basic values of life: this is a form of drunkenness. It has no connection to what I have called inspiration – the inspiration of a scholar, of an artist, to whom God has given the ability to see behind the outward form to that which surrounds it: a certain depth of being, which he can draw out and express in sounds, or lines, or colours so as to make it accessible to the people around it who were blind to it. But when we forget specifically that very meaning revealed by them and create an object of delight out of that which should be an object of contemplation – then we lose our sobriety. In Church life it happens so often and so destructively, when people come to church because of the singing, or because of the emotions that are aroused by the harmony of the mystery of the divine service, when God is no longer in the centre of everything but only the experience that is the fruit of his presence. The essential feature of Orthodox piety, of Orthodox spirituality, is sobriety, which transfers everything of value and its entire meaning from itself to God.

Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh: Essential Writings , 132-133.

A blessed Christmas!

Macrina Walker — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 06:07:32 +0000

The feast of Christmas is the feast of the mystical Body, for it is through the Incarnation that men have become members of Christ. Whatever theological interpretation we give to this great scriptural and patristic affirmation of our incorporation into Christ, we must believe that with the Incarnation, an ineffable union – that passes all understanding – began, in human flesh, between Jesus Christ and men. Beyond the particular historical event which took place at Bethlehem and through which the Son of God took on a visible human body, another event took place that concerns the whole of the human race: God, in becoming incarnate, in some way weds and assumes the human nature which we all share and creates between himself and us a relationship which, without ever ceasing to be that between the Creator and his creature, is also that between the body and its members. There is union without confusion. Christmas allows us to become most deeply conscious of what is our true nature, human nature, regenerated by Jesus Christ.

Father Lev Gillet, The Year of Grace of the Lord: A Scriptural and Liturgical Commentary on the Calendar of the Orthodox Church, 70-71.

A blessed Christmas to all, whenever you celebrate it!

A union which is forever

Macrina Walker — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:00:29 +0000

In the Incarnation God enters into human history. God enters into the becoming and the destiny both of mankind and of the cosmos. He takes complete, full, crucifying responsibility for His original act of creation and for all that has ensued. On the one hand, the Son of God becomes the Son of Man; on the other hand, the Word of God becomes flesh, so that the fulness of God is seen in the flesh, is present in the created world, visible, tangible, yet more unfathomable than before. In the Incarnation God enters into history. It means that He not only launches the process of history, not only watches it, intervening in it by grace through the men who know Him, the prophets and the patriarchs, and the saints and the angels, not only waiting for its end, but that entering into it He accepts becoming somehow part and parcel of this becoming of mankind and of the world. He is incarnate once and for all. He will never cease to be the Son of God who has become the Son of Man. And after His resurrection, when He ascends into Heaven, He does not shed the flesh He has received from the Virgin, but this flesh, still bearing the marks of the nails, still pierced at the side by the spear, still bruised on the shoulder by the carrying of the cross and on the forehead by the crown of thorns – this flesh is taken by Him into the very heart of the divine mystery, and it is the incarnate Son of God who is at the right hand of the Father. In that sense the whole of history, the whole of human becoming is already, in an exemplary way, fulfilled, realised and revealed to us now already. And this is why St. John Chrysostom said, “If you want to measure the greatness of man, look up towards the throne of God, and you will see a Man seated at the right hand of glory”. And moreover, the glory of God is this victory won by man, not by a man called Jesus Christ, but in Him, through Him together with us, by man, again in an incipient, germinal way now, which will be revealed in its fulness when the time comes, so that in the end, in the words of St Irenaeus of Lyon, the glory, the splendour, the resplendence of God is man fully alive, fully realised.

So we see that in the Incarnation God enters into the world of men, becomes one with us, not pedagogically and not temporarily, but by a union, a commitment which is for ever. And He enters into a world which at times is a world of horror, and is there in the anguish and tragedy of mankind, never escaping it.

You probably remember from the Old Testament the story of the three children thrown into the furnace – the three young men. And the Assyrian king, looking at the furnace into which three young men tied have been thrown, says, “Didn’t we throw three men into the furnace and lo, they are walking about in the flames, and I see a fourth one whose face is that of the Son of Man.” Wherever man is, God is present.

Metropolitan Anthony (Bloom) of Sourozh, here.

The Image of Christ

Macrina Walker — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:22:06 +0000

Deep within Shinto temples in Japan yοu find οnly a mirror. It is a symbol and a riddle. The risk there is of turning in upοn the Self. Βut the Christian knows that the Self is the image of Christ. And Christ is the faithful mirror who reflects the truth not only of creatures and objects, but also of the Self that is nο longer an undifferentiated abyss but the interior expression of a face.

Olivier L. Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, here.

Psychology and Orthodoxy

Macrina Walker — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:01:17 +0000

For anyone in or around the Cape Town area who is interested in the interface between psychology and Christian faith, the Orthodox Archbishopric of Good Hope is hosting a lecture by Professor Renos Papadopoulos, director of the Centre for Trauma, Asylum and Refugees at the University of Essex and Honorary Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, London. As consultant to the United Nations and other organisations, he has been working with refugees and survivors of political violence and disasters in many countries. He consults and offers specialist training courses internationally.

***

Psychology and Orthodoxy:
Complementary or Contradictory

Thursday, 5 January at 7 pm for 7.30 pm

at the Hellenic Community Centre, 24 Bay Road, Mouilles Point.

***

The outline for the lecture reads:

In our increasingly demanding, perplexing and oppressive modern world, people are constantly looking for answers. They often turn to psychology to find comfort, meaning and reason. Is psychology able to provide reliable and appropriate answers and solutions? In this talk, Professor Papadopoulos will explore the relationship between psychology and Orthodoxy, their similarities and differences. Particular attention will be given to the issues of suffering and traumatising experiences, within the context of both everyday living as well as in situations of natural or man-made disasters. The talk is aimed at medical practitioners, other mental health professionals, students, as well as the general public. There will be plenty of time at the end for questions, discussion and dialogue.

There is no entry fee, but please call Erine on 021 433 2374 to reserve seats or Evgenia on 082 311 9885 for more details.