Three Circumcision Poems by Robert Herrick

The New Year's Gift

That little pretty bleeding part
Of foreskin send to me :
And I'll return a bleeding heart,
For New-Year's gift to Thee.

 Rich is the gem that Thou did'st send,
Mine's faulty too and small ;
But yet this gift Thou wilt commend
 Because I send Thee all.

The New-Year's Gift: Or, Circumcision's Song
[Sung To The King In The Presence At Whitehall]

 1. Prepare for songs; He's come, He's come;
And be it sin here to be dumb,
And not with lutes to fill the room.

 2. Cast holy water all about,
And have a care no fire goes out,
But 'cense the porch and place throughout.

 3. The altars all on fire be;
The storax fries; and ye may see
 How heart and hand do all agree
To make things sweet.

 Chorus: Yet all less sweet than He.

 4. Bring Him along, most pious priest,
And tell us then, whenas thou seest
His gently-gliding, dove-like eyes,
And hear'st His whimpering and His cries;
How can'st thou this Babe circumcise?

 5. Ye must not be more pitiful than wise;
For, now unless ye see Him bleed,
Which makes the bapti'm, 'tis decreed
The birth is fruitless.

 Chorus: Then the work God speed.

 1. Touch gently, gently touch; and here
Spring tulips up through all the year;
And from His sacred blood, here shed,
May roses grow to crown His own dear head.

Chorus: Back, back again; each thing is done
With zeal alike, as 'twas begun;
Now singing, homeward let us carry
The Babe unto His mother Mary;
And when we have the Child commended
To her warm bosom, then our rites are ended.

Another New-Year's Gift: Or, Song For The Circumcision 

1. Hence, hence profane, and none appear
With anything unhallowed here;
No jot of leaven must be found
Conceal'd in this most holy ground.

 2. What is corrupt, or sour'd with sin,
Leave that without, then enter in;

 Chorus: But let no Christmas mirth begin

Before ye purge and circumcise
Your hearts, and hands, lips, ears, and eyes.

 3. Then, like a perfum'd altar, see
That all things sweet and clean may be:
For here's a Babe that, like a bride,
Will blush to death if ought be spi'd
Ill-scenting, or unpurifi'd.

 Chorus: The room is 'cens'd: help, help t' invoke
Heaven to come down, the while we choke
The temple with a cloud of smoke.

 4. Come then, and gently touch the birth
Of Him, who's Lord of Heaven and Earth:

 5. And softly handle Him; y'ad need,
Because the pretty Babe does bleed.
Poor pitied Child! who from Thy stall
Bring'st, in Thy blood, a balm that shall
Be the best New-Year's gift to all.

Let's bless the Babe: and, as we sing
His praise, so let us bless the King.

Chorus: Long may He live till He hath told
His New-Years trebled to His old:
And when that's done, to re-aspire
A new-born Phoenix from His own chaste fire

Christianity was a doctrine not of the immortality of the soul, but of the resurrection of the body.

Inner contradiction is a sign not of falseness, but of inner honesty.
- Pavel Florensky

The language of souls is their desire.

- St Gregory the Great, On Job

Мандельштам.: И поныне на Афоне (1915)

There's still a marvelous tree
blowing on Mount Athos,
singing God's name
on the steep green slope.

The muzhiks-of-God's-own-name
rejoice in every cell:
the Word - is pure joy, is the
healing of all anguish!

Monks are scolded,
loudly, all over the country
but there's no need for us to save ourselves
from beautiful heresy.

Every time we love
we fall again.
We destroy some nameless One,
and the name of Love, together.


- translated by Burton Raffel

И поныне на Афоне
Древо чудное растет,
На крутом зеленом склоне
Имя Божие поет.

В каждой радуются келье
Имябожцы-мужики:
Слово — чистое веселье,
Исцеленье от тоски!

Всенародно, громогласно
Чернецы осуждены;
Но от ереси прекрасной
Мы спасаться не должны.

Каждый раз, когда мы любим,
Мы в нее впадаем вновь.
Безымянную мы губим
Вместе с именем любовь.

Cave, make ready; for the Ewe-lamb has come, bearing Christ in her womb.
Manger, receive the One who by a word frees us who are born of earth from irrational action.
Shepherds abiding in the fields, bear witness to the fearful wonder;
Magi from Persia, offer gold, frankincense and myrrh to the King; because the Lord has appeared from a Virgin Mother.
Bowing low like a slave his Mother worshipped him, and cried out to the One in her arms, ‘How were you sown in me, or how did you grow within me, my Redeemer and my God?’

IS THERE ANYTHING more familiar in Christianity than the Christmas story? The child in the manger, the shepherds watching their flocks, wise men from the East, and angels singing, “Glory to God in the Highest!” There is something that warms the heart in the familiar. It is safe. It shelters. It is sort of like home. Certainly, there is a place for this aspect of the Christmas experience. The gentleness of the Mother and Child, the simplicity of the shepherds, the piety of the wise men, and the radiance of the angels soften our souls in the midst of the harsh winter of this life. And yet, where we grow as human beings, where change and transformation take place, is not in the familiar, but in the startlingly new, in the strangeness that alters our perspective about ourselves and about our world. Mothers can see this as their children explore the world. Psychologists have written much on this topic. But most importantly, this is something that the Nativity of Christ should do for us all.

For the Church fathers, what happened in Bethlehem of old was “the only new thing under the sun” (Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, book 3, chapter 1, PG 94.984bc). Looking upon the events recounted by the holy evangelists, the response of the Christian that brings forth change is given in the hymnology of the Church: “I behold a strange, most glorious mystery! Heaven—the cave! The cherubic throne—the Virgin! The manger—the place where Christ lay, the uncontainable God, Whom we magnify in song!” (Ninth Ode of the Canon for the Nativity of the Savior). Everything is much more than the familiar. It is a mystery that is glorious and strange, blinding and unfamiliar, radiant and new. Nothing is precisely as it seems, but incomparably more profound, infinitely more holy, and indescribably more divine than anything the human mind can grasp. God becomes man. For our sakes, the pre-eternal God is born a young child. All the rules of logic, all the rules of the creation, all the rules for all things human melt before the fire of divinity that burns, but does not consume, that is majestic, yet humble, and that is our salvation.

The Christmas story is not meant to just warm our hearts. It is meant to enflame us with divine love, to cause us to embrace the humility of Christ and become humble ourselves, to embrace the impossibility of the union of heaven and earth and to become earthly angels and heavenly men and women. It should fill us with boldness in an inhospitable world, spontaneity to look and see where the young child is laid, and a readiness to follow the star of Christ’s truth wherever it may lead us. All of this is possible if we but humble our hearts and seek to worship Christ, praying that He gives us new eyes to behold, not just the familiar story, but the strange and glorious mystery of God becoming a child, so that we who are in so many ways still children might become gods by grace, coheirs in Christ’s heavenly kingdom. A strange, most glorious mystery, indeed!,

- Father Alexis (Trader) from Ancient Christian Wisdom

In the church it is not correct to say one thing and do another

"Nedostatki klirosnago Peniia." Sputnik Psalomshchika: Pi︠e︡snopi︠e︡nīi︠a︡ Godichnago Kruga Bogosluzhenīĭ S Treboispravlenīi︠a︡mi. Jordanville, NY, U.S.A.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1959

Archbishop Arseny of Novgorod's Address to a Conference on Church Singing in the Novgorod Diocese (1911)

In most cases at the present time, uneducated readers (psalomshchiki) perform the singing in church. The usual contingent of reader candidates are subjects kicked out of seminary and other theological schools for “poor results, boisterous conduct and old age.” They perceive their work most often as a way of earning money to pay for their daily bread. Because of the lack of suitable candidates for reader duties [in parishes], the latter are often granted to unworthy people. If there is not an honorable reader candidate, it would be better for the Church and clergy to get by with a lay singer. I repeat that, generally speaking, unprepared individuals render church singing in the diocese.

In some places, amateurs take the place of readers in church singing. I need to say that they are most often guided by love for their labor. They wish to satisfy the needs of the people, who want to listen to good singing in their churches. I think that you are acquainted with the type. Often dropouts from a theological school, they assemble choirs and become masters of the kliros. They are haughty and do not want to consider the legitimate wishes of the priest with regard to singing. They are not satisfied with simple melodies, but try to keep pace with city choirs that sing with “parts”. Their ideal is to perform something a little more risqué. What they do with church hymns, perhaps nicely harmonized, ruins the taste of the people – it is sad and hurtful to speak of this.

What is the result of church singing being rendered by unprepared readers and amateur directors? The church singing from a musical perspective and, more importantly, from a theological perspective, does not satisfy the most basic needs. These blighters of church singing do not understand that church singing is a component part of the church service. The soul, which entreats God, praises, and gives thanks, is poured out in it.

They think about one thing – how to produce an effect. They come to church with the goal of impressing people with their artistic, and if true be told, illiterate singing. They absolutely must perform a complex thing. They do not sing simple melodies, but in parts. They let the old reader on the left kliros sing the simple melodies that, according to their ignorant opinion, do not have any significance.

They forget the goal of the church service, which is to teach and maintain the faith. The goal is obtained by chanting verses and other church hymns, which comprise a precious characteristic of our church services and their spiritual beauty. Look through all the verses of the Ochtoechos and Triodion written for feast days and days recalling holy events in the history of Christianity and you will see the rich treasury bequeathed to us from the great enlighteners of the Greek Church, the preservers of its dogmas and traditions, and the artistic creators of its liturgical rite. The people love to sing, read or listen to the hymns because the soul of the people derives from them lessons about the main dogmas of the Christian faith! During the first centuries of Christianity, these hymns served as the main weapon in the struggle against heretical teachings of sects, which also sought to spread their teachings among the people by means of hymns and songs in their prayer gatherings. Teachers of various mystical and rationalist sects are embracing this method in our day, compiling hymns in illiterate transpositions from a foreign model. Is it possible in our time to disdain this powerful tool to understand the faith and repulse every type of sect? We see this disregard in amateur directors who consider themselves called to every kind of “part singing”, leaving no attention for that which is fundamental and salvific for the soul. They do not consider it necessary to consult the church ustav, and each one cobbles together an ustav that fits his purposes. Unfortunately, such an ignorant director is given the right to lead on the kliros.

We forget the very foundation of church singing – the eight tones. Is it necessary to tell you how gradually the specific character of Christian church singing came about? When Christianity began to spread, freedom with regards to church singing reigned in the Church. Christians sang chants borrowed from Jews and pagans, along with their own authentically Christian ones. St. John of Damascus brought an end to this variance in church singing with the introduction of the eight-tone system. We who have inherited this heritage of the holy father should treasure it. Moreover, we have forgotten the beauty of Znamenny, Bulgarian and Greek Chants passed down to us.

From the beginning of the 19th century, the Holy Synod and certain diocesan bishops have struggled with the deterioration of church singing. However, the measures taken by the Holy Synod to extirpate concert singing unsuitable for church services have not been effective. Church singing continues to deteriorate. The same phenomenon that occurred with iconography in Russia is happening with church singing. There was a time when icon writers approached the images of the Savior, the Mother of God and the saints with fasting and prayer and did not view their work as handicrafts. Iconography in ancient churches dating from the 12-16th centuries has a particular character. It is true that the images written at that time had no subtlety or strict proportionality. However, they have one advantage, which elevates ancient over modern iconography: holiness is imprinted on them. Why are people now searching for ancient icons? Why are Saint Sophia and the Savior Church on Nereditsa especially valued? Because the iconography in them refers back to a time when icon paining was viewed as a spiritual struggle and a holy matter.

When in the 17th century we began to turn our attention to the West, we changed in everything. When foreign influences strengthened, the entire organization of our lives changes: iconography changed in the same manner as singing at church services. After the introduction of Christianity, we heard singing that was meaningful to the heart, intimate singing and therefore fundamental. With the strengthening of foreign influences, the goal of church singing became the creation of art. The singers, singing in the church, to their shame, thought about one thing – springing an intricate surprise. Russians little by little lost the taste for ancient chants, such as Znamenny and others. The vestiges of this singing are preserved only in a few ancient monasteries, not in the singing of monastery choirs, but in old hook books.

So the same thing that occurred with iconography happened with singing. Instead of the serious images of the Sofia Cathedral and the Savior Church on Nereditsa we find images of the saints written in a completely different style and icons of the Mother of God depicted in a décolleté. Some depicted their mistresses on icons, as Arakcheyev had the famous Nastasya Minkina portrayed. We forgot the beautiful Znamenny, Bulgarian and Greek Chants. Church singers imagined themselves as artists: they began to think that their singing, foreign to the character of church services, was pleasing to the Lord; they imagined themselves as masters of the kliros; they forgot the most elementary truth – that those standing on the kliros should be first of all prayerful, and not artistic. The more church chants were harmonized in a risqué and illiterate manner, the greater the delight it brought to such singers. Instead of performing, for example, the Cherubic Hymn in strict tones, they adopted vulgar melodies. They are prepared to introduce romance music fit for the stage into church chanting. They are ready to make a scene from the kliros. And this is during the time when the clergy are preparing for the culmination of the Christian Mystery of the Eucharist. Are we not ashamed! Don’t we find it sinful? We do not think about what kind of responsibility we will bear for this profanation of church services by their singing?

Recently, an interest in archaeology has come about in Russian society, and, in particular, in ancient Russian singing. Russian society is beginning to understand that a culture is durable only if it is founded on the firm foundation of the past. You know that there are already schools that have been opened and are functioning where ancient chants can be studied, for example the Moscow Synodal School. Composers are studying with interest examples of ancient Russian singing.

But we need to work in our own place in order to enliven interest in this new current of church singing. In the matter of the standardization of church singing, I still cannot count on the current readers and various amateur directors due to the above stated reasons. I can count on the theological school and seminaries in the matter of the restoration of strict church singing only when teachers are made aware of the importance of church singing and, not limited to classroom instruction, will lead the singing of the students in church, and not present their own muddled tastes: classroom instruction should have its appropriate application in the church services. The opening of a school attached to the Archepiscopal House in the ancient Likhudov building this fall, where most serious attention will be directed toward singing, should help in the matter of the restoration of strict church singing. And I am calling you to serve in this matter.

The goal of the present Conference is to compile а choice of uniform, specific church chants from the vast available church singing materials, which include synodal church service books using notes – the Training Obikhod, Octoechos, Irmologion, Triodion and the Feasts, along with their ancient chants: Znamenny, Kievan, Greek and Bulgarian. The absence of uniform chants in the churches of the Novgorod diocese, which is connected to the poor condition of church singing in the eparchy, makes this a necessity. The existing typical chant is a distortion of the melodies that are included in these books with notes, or it is the traditional concoction of singers, passing along melodies by ear from one singer to another. In the books that use notes, the same chant is transposed in a different manner depending on the year of publication. Therefore, there is a great “discrepancy” in the performance of church hymns. Such a phenomenon, which is not in accordance with the decorum of church services, should be eliminated. We need to select from the vast materials of church singing, check the chants that are most appropriate for use in church, and make their study compulsory for all readers and students in theological institutions and church schools.

The harmonization of church chants is too varied. It is the illiterate work of ignorant composers who make it hard to distinguish the foundational melody of the chant. In view of the necessity of forming church choirs, especially from among students, it is necessary to indicate the transpositions that would more simply and clearly preserve the melody of the chant.

Regarding the importance of resolving the issue of ancient church singing - on the one hand, it is in poor condition. On the other hand – I will not say much to you. You, of course, know why it is necessary to value our ancient church singing. It is the expression of the spirit of the people educated and brought up under the influence of the Church, which was its guide and loving mother. But if the Church rendered religious-moral influence on the people, then the people introduced much from its natural abundance and talent into the bosom of the Orthodox Church through its melodies, in which is expressed the depth and power of its religious feeling and spiritual characteristics. The people gave these melodies, some simple, serious and important, others soft, touching and full of feeling, as its best possession, to its mother – the Church. That is why these native sounds are dear to the people – they imagined and experienced them. They speak to the Russian person about much: about the past, the present, and what awaits them in the future. They arouse in the people the best, most noble impulses, holy feelings of love for the faith, for the Tsar-Father and the Fatherland. That is why it is necessary to value these native melodies, as memorials of religious-moral singing creativity. Unfortunately, we do not value them. True church singing is being forgotten. New melodies foreign to the soul of our people are being contrived. Concern with regards to the preservation and restoration of ancient church singing is one of the main concerns for those for whom the interests of the Church and people are dear. With this goal in mind, I have called the present Conference, which should work out measures for the appropriate organization of church singing in spiritual and second-class church schools. You should be guides of true Orthodox singing by teaching students. The Conference should indicate that there should not be phenomena in the church such as when the cleric exclaims the prokeimenon in the fourth or seventh tone and the kliros holds one and the same note. In the church it is not correct to say one thing and do another. When selecting hymns for church services, the members of the Conference should give preference to the melodic before harmonized settings: the latter delights, but does not arouse a prayerful mood. Church singing should be strictly prayerful. Have you noticed that during melodic singing prayerful silence is heard in the church? This is not the case with harmonized singing, especially when it is illiterate. In this case, the person standing in the church pays attention to how his part will be performed by one or another voice, to the director etc. But the kliros is not a stage for actors. Everything in the church should be holy.

Labour a little now, with God’s help, in the manifestation of the indicated objective of the current Conference of the Novgorod diocese. May God bless you.

translated by RWM

Tree at Christmas

Tree at Christmas
Madeleine L’Engle,

The children say the tree must reach the ceiling,
And so it does, angel on topmost branch,
Candy canes and golden globes and silver chains,
Trumpets that toot, and birds with feathered tails.
Each year we say, each year we fully mean:
“This is the loveliest tree of all.” This tree
Bedecked with love and tinsel reaches the heaven.
A pagan throwback may have brought it here
Into our room, and yet these decked-out boughs
Can represent those other trees, the one
Through which we fell in pride, when Eve forgot
That freedom is man’s freedom to obey
And to adore, not to replace the light
With disobedient darkness and self-will.
On Twelfth Night when we strip the tree
And see its branches bare and winter cold
Outside the comfortable room, the tree
Is then the tree on which all darkness hanged,
Completing the betrayal that began
With the first stolen fruit. And then, O God,
This is the tree that Simon bore uphill,
This is the tree that held all love and life.
Forgive us, Lord, forgive us for that tree.
But now, still decked, adorned, in joy arrayed
For these great days of Christmas thanks and song,
This is the tree that lights our faltering way,
For when man’s first and proud rebellious act
Had reached its nadir on that hill of skulls
These shining, glimmering boughs remind us that
The knowledge that we stole was freely given
And we were sent the Spirit’s radiant strength
That we might know all things. We grasp for truth
And lose it till it comes to us by love.
The glory of Lebanon shines on this Christmas tree,
The tree of life that opens wide the gates.
The children say the tree must reach the ceiling,
And so it does: for me the tree has grown so high
It pierces through the vast and star-filled sky.

The Elder Aimilianos of Simonopetra Monastery said, "If you can't become saints, at least be gracious".

bitter-sweet Prudentius...

Rorate caeli desuper, et nubes pluant iustum. Ne irascaris Domine, ne ultra memineris iniquitatis: ecce civitas Sancti facta est deserta: Sion deserta facta est: Jerusalem desolata est: domus sanctificationis tuae et gloriae tuae, ubi laudaverunt te patres nostri. Peccavimus, et facti sumus tamquam immundus nos, et cecidimus quasi folium universi: et iniquitates nostrae quasi ventus abstulerunt nos: abscondisti faciem tuam a nobis, et allisisti nos in manu iniquitatis nostrae. Vide Domine afflictionem populi tui, et mitte quem missurus es: emitte Agnum dominatorem terrae, de petra deserti ad montem filiae Sion: ut auferat ipse iugum captivitatis nostrae. Consolamini, consolamini, popule meus: cito veniet salus tua: quare maerore consumeris, quia innovavit te dolor? Salvabo te, noli timere, ego enim sum Dominus Deus tuus, Sanctus Israel, redemptor tuus.

at liberty to be uncommitted, sterile, and promiscuous.

I don't know what you think about those female saints - some of them a tadge mythical - who sprawl all over the Analecta Bollandiana and whose sanctity appears to lie at least partly in their heroic and determined protection of their virginity. It's easy to call this dualist or paranoid; to complain about an unnecessary denigration of the holy estate of Matrimony; even to speculate along Freudian lines. Just possibly some of these points could have been validly made in earlier generations. But in our culture, surely, a quite different point has to be made. Our Zeitgeist has its own novel superstition: that everybody is inevitably going to express genitally the sexuality in which they say 'God has created them' ... whatever their circumstances, whatever their orientation [....] The point which these Armoured Virgins - even the mythical as well as the historical ones - make is that it is neither compulsory nor inevitable to be sexually active. Our Christian cult of Virginity teaches that if you want, or, rather, are called, to be a male or a female who is not committed irrevocably to pursue fruitfulness with another individual 'in bed and at board', the consequence is simple. You offer up to God a sexually abstinent life. The assumption all around us is that since mechanical means exist whereby sexuality may now be divorced from both fertility and commitment, we are all at liberty to be uncommitted, sterile, and promiscuous. This preposterous nonsense is now solemnly enshrined in the 'laws' of this land! It is one of the most superbly crafted of the deceits of the Evil One. Day by day, it becomes increasingly clear that it is only in a culture which values Virginity and Celibacy that Matrimony itself can flourish ... paradoxical as that may seem to us. - Fr John Hunwicke at http://liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com/

Reinhold Niebuhr put it, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime. Therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history. Therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do however virtuous can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we must be saved by love. NO virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.” - quoted by David Brooks

the church preaches resurrection but effectively denies the death out of which alone the grace of resurrection proceeds

Too often, the church preaches resurrection but effectively denies the death out of which alone the grace of resurrection proceeds. Its cure of choice, for its own ills or for the world’s, is not death but simply more doomed living. The church, for example, will keep sinners (the morally dead) in its midst only as long as they do not presume to look dead – only as long as they can manage to make themselves seem morally alive. Moreover, ecclesiastical institutions are no more capable of accepting death for themselves than they are of tolerating it in their members. Like all other institutions, they cannot even conceive of going out of business for the sake of grace: given a choice of laying down their corporate lives for a friend or cutting off the friend at the knees, they almost invariably spare themselves the axe. Worst of all, when the church speaks to the world, it perpetuates the same false system of salvation. It is clearly heard as saying that the world can be saved only by getting its act together. But besides being false, that is an utterly unrealistic apologetic. For everyone knows perfectly well that the world never has gotten its act together and never will – that disaster has been the hallmark of its history – and that if there is no one who can save it in its disasters, there is no one who can save it. And therefore when the church comes to the world mouthing the hot air that the future is amenable to reform – that the kingdom can be built here by plausible devices, by something other than the mystery of the passion – the church convinces no one. Murphy’s Law vincit omnia: late or soon, the world is going down the drain; only a Savior who is willing to work at the bottom of the drain can redeem it. The world does indeed have a future and the church alone has that future to proclaim. But that future is neither pie on earth nor pie in the sky. It is resurrection from the dead – and without death, there can be no resurrection.
- Robert Farrar Capon

Love is necessary to men: it brings us face to face with death, it causes the learned to lose their wits and those who are untaught to become learned. [Says Avtandil to Tariel]
- Shota Rustaveli, The Knight In The Panther Skin.

…the meaning of life is frighteningly simple: to strive always and in every circumstance to preserve the warmth of the heart, knowing that it will be yet needed by someone, that we are always yet needed by someone. - Sergei Fudel, At the Walls of the Church

Fr. Nikolai Golubtsev was bravely facing his approaching death. He said to his brother, "Sing me my favourite prokeimenon". To the dying man, the brother sang "Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints". - Sergei Fudel, At the Walls of the Church

If you sin, the word of God is your adversary. For example, suppose you enjoy getting drunk, it says, ‘Do not do it.’ Suppose you enjoy extravagant performances and vain amusements, it says, ‘Do not go there.’ Suppose you enjoy committing adultery; the word of God says, ‘Do not do it.’ In whatever sin you will to do, it says, ‘Do not do it.’ It is the adversary of your will, until it becomes the author of your salvation. What a wonderful and useful ‘adversary’! It does not seek our will, but our advantage. It is our adversary as long as we are our own adversaries. As long as you are your own enemy, you make the word of God your enemy; become a friend of yourself and you will be in agreement with it. ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’ Listen and you have agreed with it. ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Listen and you have agreed with it. ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ Listen and you have agreed with it. ‘Thou shall not give false witness.’ Listen and you have agreed with it. ‘Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s wife.’ Listen and you have agreed with it. ‘Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s goods.’ Listen and you have agreed with it. In all these things you have agreed with ‘your adversary,’ and what have you lost for yourself? You have not only lost nothing, but also found yourself who were lost” - Blessed Augustine, Sermon 59 on the New Testament

Auden: Ode to Terminus

Ode to Terminus

The High Priests of telescopes and cyclotrons
keep making pronouncements about happenings
   on scales too gigantic or dwarfish
   to be noticed by our native senses,

discoveries which, couched in the elegant
euphemisms of algebra, look innocent,
   harmless enough, but, when translated
   into the vulgar anthropomorphic

tongue, will not be received with hilarity
by gardeners or house-wives: if galaxies
   bolt like panicking mobs, if mesons
   riot like fish in a feeding-frenzy,

it sounds too like Political History
to boost civil morale, too symbolic of
   the crimes and strikes and demonstrations
   we are supposed to gloat on at breakfast.

How trite, though, our fears beside the miracle
that we’re here to shiver, that a Thingummy
   so addicted to lethal violence
   should have somehow secreted a placid

tump with exactly the right ingredients
to start and to cocker Life, that heavenly
   freak for whose manage we shall have to
   give account at the Judgement, our Middle-

-Earth, where Sun-Father, to all appearances,
moves by day from orient to occident
   and his light is felt as a friendly
   presence, not a photonic bombardment,

where all visibles do have a definite
outline they stick to and are undoubtedly
   at rest or on motion, where lovers
   recognize each other by their surface,

where to all species except the talkative
have been allotted the niche and diet that
   become them. This, whatever micro-
   biology may think, is the world we

really live in and that saves our sanity,
who know all too well how the most erudite
   mind behaves in the dark without a
   surround it is called on to interpret,

how, discarding rhythm, punctuation, metaphor,
it sinks into a drivelling monologue,
   too literal to see a joke or
   distinguish a penis from a pencil.

Venus and Mars are powers too natural
to temper our outlandish extravagance:
   You alone, Terminus the Mentor,
   can teach us how to alter our gestures.

God of walls, doors and reticence, nemesis
overtakes the sacrilegious technocrat,
   but blessed is the City which thanks You
   for giving us games and grammar and metres,

by whose grace also every gathering
or two or three in confident amity
   repeats the pentecostal marvel,
   as each in each finds his right translator.

In this world our colossal immodesty
has plundered and poisoned it is possible
   You still might save us, who by now have
   learned this: that scientists, to be lucky,

must remind us to take all they say as a
tall story, that abhorred in the Heavens are
   self-proclaimed poets who, to wow an
   audience, utter some resonant lie.

Divine life on earth begins to celebrate its victory with Pentecost,
but that victory is a hidden one, a victory to be revealed beyond the
bounds of history.

- Sergei Fudel, Notes on the Liturgy and the Church

People, .... who somehow believe in God but do not believe in the Church ordinarily say, Can it really be that God is in need of rituals? Where is the need for this formality?   You only need love, beauty, and human compassion...

 

When, on his way to see a girl, a man who is in love sees flowers, he picks them, or he buys flowers, to take to her; in no way does he see it as merely a formality. That is precisely the idea behind church ritual.

 

Love toward God naturally gives rise to beauty and the expressive humanity of ritual, apprehended as flowers brought to the feet of God. Faith is love, and the essence of Christianity is being in love with our God and Lord and also sensing that His Body, the Church, remains and lives on earth. How could those perceptions not find expression in the external actions we call rites and rituals?

- Sergei Fudel, At The Walls Of The Church

Lord, you are hidden behind so many enigmas, shadows,
     dark sayings - how am I to find you?
But there are moments when I recognize you: a sudden excess
     in my heart betrays you.

- Tasos Leivaditis, Conversations: 4

Wounded with longing for his sweet love, you bring sweet spices to the one who breathes life into all, now slain and lying in a tomb, holy Mary Magdalen, and pour out the fragrant scent of tears.

- Theophanes, Canon to St Mary Magdalene

Το γελαστό παιδί

Ήταν πρωί του Αυγούστου
κοντά στη ροδαυγή
βγήκα να πάρω αγέρα
στην ανθισμένη γή

Βλέπω μια κόρη κλαίει
σπαραχτικά θρηνεί
σπάσε καρδιά μου εχάθει
το γελαστό παιδί

Είχεν αντρειά και θάρρος
κι αιώνια θα θρηνώ
το πηδηχτό του βήμα
το γέλιο το γλυκό

Ανάθεμα στη ώρα
κατάρα στη στιγμή
σκοτώσαν οι δικοί
μας το γελαστό παιδί

Ω, να 'ταν σκοτωμένο
στου αρχηγού το πλάϊ
και μόνο από βόλι
Εγγλέζου να 'χε πάει

Κι απ' απεργία πείνας
μεσα στη φυλακή
θα 'ταν τιμή μου που 'χασα
το γελαστό παιδί

Βασιλικιά μου αγάπη
μ' αγάπη θα σε κλαίω
για το ότι έκανες
αιώνια θα το λέω

Γιατί όλους τους εχθρούς μας
θα ξέκανες εσύ
δόξα τιμή στ' αξέχαστο
το γελαστό παιδί. 

From palms and branches, as we pass from divine Feast to divine Feast, let us believers make haste together to the solemn and saving celebration of the Sufferings of Christ. Let us look upon Him as He undergoes voluntary suffering for our sake and let us raise a fitting hymn of thanksgiving to Him crying out, ‘Source of compassion and harbour of salvation, O Lord, glory to Thee!’ (from the apostikha at Vespers on the Leave-taking of the Feast of Palms)

This verse marks the transition in our journey from the celebration of Palm Sunday to the gathering darkness of Holy Week. The Great Fast came to an end on Friday. On Saturday we recalled our Lord Jesus Christ weeping at the tomb of Lazarus, how He raised Lazarus from the dead. Today we have joined the children of the Hebrews in their joy, acclaiming Him as He enters Jerusalem. We held high our palms and pussy-willows: Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is He that comes in the name of the Lord! And yet this feast is ephemeral, this celebration lasts but a day. Some terrible darkness descends. The Lord is abandoned, condemned and vilified. In the course of this week things move inexorably to betrayal. abuse, crucifixion.

For Orthodox Christians, Holy Week is an extraordinary time. We can hardly bear to be at work or at school. We want to be in the church following the Gospel accounts and the hymns and prayers that provide the teaching and commentary we need to hear. In our homes we try to create a certain quiet, a reverence and respect. Holy Week is the Big Thing and all else is distraction. It is something we participate in. It is as if we enter into Holy Week, stepping out of time as we usually experience it, and are ourselves caught up in the sacred drama.

Of course, it can be difficult to make the time to attend to Holy Week with the full attention it calls for. Each person will do his or her best to participate in the mystery of the week and honour this most special time of the year. 

On Holy Thursday we hear the Lord say to His disciples in the garden at Gethsemane, “Wait with me.”  Is it so much to ask?

On the one hand, it seems we do a lot of waiting in life. On the other, we are always in a hurry. And so waiting infuriates us, for we are busy people, the centre of our universe.

The disciples could not wait and watch with the Lord, and they were not even in a rush. They just fell asleep. Perhaps they were exhausted. Perhaps they needed to give themselves some 'me-time'. But was it so much for the Lord to ask them to wait with Him on this night?

When someone we love is dying everything seems to be a in a rush - this appointment, that appointment, these things to be picked up, those things to be scheduled - but then - then there is the waiting. And when we have done everything there really is nothing left to do but wait. Death comes on its own time-table. Our beloved says to us: please, will you stay with me? Of course we will! How could we do otherwise? Or?

To wait, to keep vigil, is not easy. It is hard. We are so busy, we have so much to do....  But why is it that the slumber of the disciples - their inability to wait with the distressed and suffering Lord, even though He asks them repeatedly, pointedly  - why do we find this moment in the garden so sad, so charged with emotion? Why do we want to shake them and even shame them - can't you even watch with Him for little while? Is it our conscience that recognizes something of ourselves in them?

Can't we spare some time from our busy lives on this of all weeks to be with Him?

veiled language

She says that secular historians of the early Soviet period have overlooked, misunderstood or dismissed the particularly Orthodox Christian content of Patriarch’s responses to Soviet authorities, and this is what she is exploring. Indeed, the secret police themselves labeled his speech as “the veiled language of Tikhon,” because he spoke in Church, canonical and Christian terms that befuddled them, including love of enemies and his responsibility for all who were once baptized, even them. 

- from a researcher at the OCA archives looking at St Tikhon's correspondence in light of his later words to his Soviet interrogators

ghost and machine

... our mechanistic paradigms trap much of our thinking about mind and body within an absurd dilemma: we must believe either in a ghost mysteriously animating a machine or in a machine miraculously generating a ghost. Premodern thought allowed for a far less restricted range of conceptual possibilities.

In Western philosophical tradition, for instance, neither Platonists, nor Aristotelians, nor Stoics, nor any of the Christian metaphysicians of late antiquity or the Middle Ages could have conceived of matter as something independent of "spirit" or of spirit as something simply superadded to matter in living beings. Certainly none of them thought of either the body or the cosmos as a machine merely organized by a rational force from beyond itself. Rather, they saw matter as being always already informed by indwelling rational causes, and thus open to - and in fact directed toward - mind. Nor did Platonists or Aristotelians or Christians conceive of spirit as being immaterial in a purely privative sense, in the way that a vacuum is not aerial or a vapor is not a solid. If anything, they understood spirit as being more substantial, more actual, more "supereminently" real than matter, and as in fact being the pervasive reality in which matter had to participate in order to be anything at all. The quandary produced by early modern dualism - the notorious "interaction problem" of how an immaterial reality could have an effect upon a purely material thing - was no quandary at all, because no school conceived of the interaction between a souls and body as a purely extrinsic physical alliance between to disparate kinds of substance. The material order is only, it was assumed, an ontologically diminished or constricted effect of the fuller actuality of the spiritual order. And this is why it is nearly impossible to find an ancient or mediaeval school of thought whose concept of the relation of soul and body was anything like a relation between two wholly independent kinds of substance: the ghost and the machine...

In Platonic tradition, the soul was not conceived of merely as a pure intellect presiding over the automaton of the body. The soul was seen as the body's life, spiritual and organic at once, comprising the appetites and passions no less than rational intellkect, while the body was seen as a material reflection of a rational and ideal order. Matter was not simply the inert and opaque matter of mechanistic thought but rather a mirror of eternal splendors and verities, truly (if defectively) predisposed to the light of spirit. For the Aristotelian tradition, the human soul was the "form of the body," the very essence and nature of a human being's whole rational and animal organism, the formal and vital power animating, pervading, and shaping every person, drawing all the energies of life into a living unity. For Stoic tradition as well, the indwelling mind or "logos" of each person was also the rational and living integrity of the body, and was a particular instance of the universal logos that animates, shapes, and guides the whole cosmos. For pagans, Hellenistic Jews, and Christians alike, the soul was the source and immanent entelechy of corporeal life, encompassing every dimension of human existence: animal functions and abstract intellect, sensation and reason, emotion and ratiocination, flesh and spirit, natural aptitude and supernatural longing. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, spoke of the soul not only as intellect but also a gathering and formative natural power, progressively developing all of a person's faculties, physical and mental, over the entire course of a life....

- David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

The last day of Constantinople - Runciman's account

"On this Monday, with the knowledge that the crisis was upon them, the soldiers and citizens forgot their quarrels. While the men at the walls worked to repair the shattered defences a great procession was formed.

In contrast to the silence in the Turkish camp, in the city the bells of the churches rang and their wooden gongs sounded as icons and relics were brought out upon the shoulders of the faithful and carried round through the streets and along the length of the walls, pausing only to bless with their holy presence the spots where the damage was greatest and the danger most pressing; and the throng that followed behind them, Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholic, sang hymns and repeated the Kyrie Eleison.

“The Emperor himself came to join in the procession; and when it was ended he summoned his notables and commanders, Greek and Italian, and spoke to them. (…)

“Constantine told his hearers that the great assault was about to begin. To his Greek subjects he said that a man should always be ready to die either for his faith or for his country or for his family or for his sovereign. Now his people must be prepared to die for all four causes.

“He spoke of the glories and high traditions of the great Imperial city. He spoke of the perfidy of the infidel Sultan who had provoked the war in order to destroy the True Faith and to put his false prophet in the seat of Christ. He urged them to remember that they were the descendents of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome and to be worthy of their ancestors.

“For his part, he said, he was ready to die for his faith, his city and his people. (…)

“All that were present rose to assure the Emperor that they were ready to sacrifice their lives and homes for him. He then walked slowly round the chamber, asking each one of them to forgive him if ever he had caused offence. They followed his example, embracing one another, as men do who expect to die.

“The day was nearly over. Already crowds were moving towards the great Church of the Holy Wisdom. (…) Barely a citizen, except for the soldiers on the walls, stayed away from this desperate service of intercession. (…) The golden mosaics, studded with images of Christ and His Saints and the Emperors and Empresses of Byzantium, glimmered in the light of a thousand lamps and candles; and beneath then for the last time he priests in their splendid vestments moved in the solemn rhythm of the Liturgy. (…)

“Later in the evening the Emperor himself rode on his Arab mare to the great cathedral and made his peace with God. Then he returned through the dark streets to his Palace at Blachernae and summoned his household. Of them, as he had done of his ministers, he asked forgiveness for any unkindness that he might have shown them, and bade them good-bye.

“It was close on midnight when he mounted his horse again and rode, accompanied by the faithful Phrantzes, down the length of the land-walls, to see that everything was in order and that the gates through the inner wall were closed.

“On their way back to Blachernae the Emperor dismounted near the Caligarian Gate and took Phrantzes with him up a tower (…) from where they could peer out into the darkness both ways (…).

“Below them they could hear noises as the enemy brought up their guns over the filled-in foss. This activity had been going-on since sunset, so the watchmen told them. In the distance they could see flickering lights as the Turkish ships moved across the Golden Horn.

Phrantzes waited with his master for an hour or so. Then Constantine dismissed him; and they never met again. “

From The Last Days of Constantinople by Steven Runciman, 1965 - pp 129-132

The great liturgical artists unite gift, skill and spirituality. This is because making liturgical art is a priestly and prophetical act. Creation can praise God of its own accord, but it gives thanks through us, its mouthpiece. We are ourselves a union of matter and spirit, and so we are the meeting place of the material and spiritual worlds. In the words of the seventh century St Leontius of Cyprus: The creation does not venerate God directly by itself, but it is through me that the heavens declare the glory of God, through me the moon worships God, through me the stars glorify Him, through me the waters and showers of rain, the dew and all creation venerate God and give Him glory.

Each work of sacred art is an instrument within a larger liturgical orchestra, and so its design needs to harmonize with the whole. Egotism and the desire to make a statement has no room. Panel icons hang within a church and are venerated as part of liturgical ritual; murals are painted on the surfaces created by the architect; chanters sing music composed by composers and words written by hymnographers; clergy and laity have processions in a sacred choreography wearing woven and embroidered vestments. Each sacred artwork is part of the whole.

- Aidan Hart

To me there is something at once marvellously mystical, and a bit sinister and disturbing about the Orthodox liturgy.

- Patrick Leigh Fermor, 'Mount Athos' in The Broken Road

The Law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken; only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish. If the lawbreaker is stronger than the legal authorities, they are powerless to do either. The decision to grant or refuse pardon must be governed by prudent calculation – if the wrongdoer is pardoned, he will behave better in the future than if he were punished, etc. But charity is forbidden to calculate this way: I am required to forgive my enemy whatever the effect on him may be.

Justice is able to pardon what love is commanded to forgive. But to love, it is an accident that the power of temporal justice should be on its side; indeed, the Gospels assure us that, sooner or later, they will find themselves in opposition and that love must suffer at the hands of justice.

- W. H. Auden, 'The Prince's Dog'

Be suspicious of your love for God if you worry about being lost but not about losing Him.

- Francisco J. Garcia-Julve

How are we to journey on that long and unending road, if we have not obtained the necessities for the journey?

How are we to journey on that long and unending road, if we have not obtained the necessities for the journey? How are we to take our stand at the judgement seat of Christ, to whom ‘every knee shall bow and every tongue confess’, if we have a bad conscience? Will we not inevitably be sent away from there to the place ‘where the fire is not quenched and the worm does not die’, where there is ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth’. But, brethren, so that this does not happen, ‘Come, let us worship and let us weep to our good God. Let us come into his presence with confession’, supplication, compunction, tears, prayers, fasts, purity and every form of good conduct. ‘He is expiation for our sins’, and he has not shut the doors against us, he has not turned away from someone who turns back, but he lets them approach like the harlot, the prodigal and the thief. Yes, brethren, I beg you, let us stand up, let us rouse ourselves and let us compete, so that, like school children, who are ready learners, when they are dismissed, go home rejoicing, we too, as genuine disciples of the Gospel, when we have been dismissed from the life here, may depart with joy for the everlasting life in Christ Jesus our Lord....

- St Theodore the Studite, Catechesis 103

no compulsion is contemplated in Him but all is voluntary

Concerning the natural and innocent passions.

We confess, then, that He assumed all the natural and innocent passions of man. For He assumed the whole man and all man's attributes save sin. For that is not natural, nor is it implanted in us by the Creator, but arises voluntarily in our mode of life as the result of a further implantation by the devil, though it cannot prevail over us by force. For the natural and innocent passions are those which are not in our power, but which have entered into the life of man owing to the condemnation by reason of the transgression; such as hunger, thirst, weariness, labour, the tears, the corruption, the shrinking from death, the fear, the agony with the bloody sweat, the succour at the hands of angels because of the weakness of the nature, and other such like passions which belong by nature to every man.

All, then, He assumed that He might sanctify all. He was tried and overcame in order that He might prepare victory for us and give to nature power to overcome its antagonist, in order that nature which was overcome of old might overcome its former conqueror by the very weapons wherewith it had itself been overcome.

The wicked one, then, made his assault from without, not by thoughts prompted inwardly, just as it was with Adam. For it was not by inward thoughts, but by the serpent that Adam was assailed. But the Lord repulsed the assault and dispelled it like vapour, in order that the passions which assailed him and were overcome might be easily subdued by us, and that the new Adam should save the old.

Of a truth our natural passions were in harmony with nature and above nature in Christ. For they were stirred in Him after a natural manner when He permitted the flesh to suffer what was proper to it: but they were above nature because that which was natural did not in the Lord assume command over the will. For no compulsion is contemplated in Him but all is voluntary. For it was with His will that He hungered and thirsted and feared and died. 

 

- St John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (III.20)

Marriage changes our loneliness but rarely cures it

 .... Marriage changes our loneliness but rarely cures it. There’s a reason the final section of Sigrid Undset’s great novel of marriage, Kristin Lavransdatter, is entitled “The Cross.” 

But for a long time American Christianity has sought to fix loneliness and suffering rather than accepting them as part of the core of Christian experience. We’re a prosperity-gospel, “Go out and get that blessing!” people, enthusiastic and hardworking and unwilling to believe that some things can’t be fixed.... 
- Eve Tushnet, 'Coming Out Christian'  

.... It is not that physical 'sex' is basic and 'God' ephemeral; rather, it is 'God' who is basic, and 'desire' the precious clue that ever tugs at the heart, reminding the human soul - however dimly -  of its created source. Hence... desire is more fundamental than 'sex'. It is more fundamental, ultimately, because desire is an ontological category  belonging primarily to God, and only secondarily to humans as a token of their createdness 'in the image'. But in God, of course, 'desire' signifies no lack - as it manifestly does in humans. Rather it connotes that plenitude of longing love that God has for God's own creation and for its full and ecstatic participation in the divine, trinitarian life.

.... a deeper, and more primary, question: that of putting desire for God above all others, and with judging human desires only in that light. Ascetic transformation, ascetic fidelity: these are the goals that so fatally escape the notice of a culture bent either on pleasure or moral condemnation. And to escape between the horns of that false dilemma is necessarily a spiritual and bodily task, involving great patience and commitment. From 'sexuality' and 'self' to participation in the trinitarian God: this way lies a long haul of erotic purgation, but its goal is one of infinite delight.

- Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self

Remorse

Robert Burns: Remorse (A Fragment)
Of all the numerous ills that hurt our peace,
That press the soul, or wring the mind with anguish,
Beyond comparison the worst are those
That to our folly or our guilt we owe.
In every other circumstance, the mind
Has this to say, 'It was no deed of mine;'
But when to all the evil of misfortune
This sting is added - 'Blame thy foolish self!'
Or worser far, the pangs of keen remorse;
The torturing, gnawing consciousness of guilt,--
Of guilt, perhaps, where we've involved others;
The young, the innocent, who fondly lov'd us,
Nay, more, that very love their cause of ruin!
O burning hell! in all thy store of torments,
There's not a keener lash!
Lives there a man so firm, who, while his heart
Feels all the bitter horrors of his crime,
Can reason down its agonizing throbs;
And, after proper purpose of amendment,
Can firmly force his jarring thoughts to peace?
O, happy! happy! enviable man!
O glorious magnanimity of soul!

the practical need of ecclesiastical life

The Church is one and has never been divided, but heretics and schismatics fell away from her in the first age, have fallen away since, and will fall away again until the Lord’s Second Coming. Therefore, there can be no question of Union with heretics and schismatics, but only of their restoration to union with the Church from which they fell away.

If Roman Catholics should renounce their imaginations, then their restoration to union with the Church would be a matter for the greatest joy to the faithful and to the Holy Angels, not only for the sake of their soul’s salvation but for the realization of the restored fullness of the Church’s life to which our brethren of the West would bring that corporate ecclesiastical activity which is characteristic to them. In the circumstance of the renunciation by the Roman Catholics of their pseudo-dogmas, and in particular of that absurd one of them which ascribes Infallibility to the Pope in matters of Faith, the Holy Church in restoring them to union with herself, would not only certainly restore to the Roman Primate that primacy which was assigned to him before his falling away into schism, but would probably invest him with such an authority in the Oecumenical Church as had never hitherto been assigned to him – inasmuch as that which he formerly possessed was confined to Western Europe and North-West Africa.

But such authority, assumed as being given to the Pope after his return to Orthodoxy, would be based not on Roman fables about the Apostle Peter as chief over all the Apostles, about the succession of the Popes to the fullness of his imaginary authority, about indulgences, purgatory, etc., but in the practical need of ecclesiastical life by the force of which that life was gradually centralized: first, in the metropolitanates (from the third century) and then in the patriarchates (from the fourth and fifth centuries) with the result that the authority of the metropolitans and patriarchs in their areas was continually and gradually strengthened in proportion to the assimilation of the people to Christian culture. We admit for the future the conception of a single personal supremacy of the Church in consonance with the broadest preservation of the conciliar principle and on that condition that the supremacy does not pretend to be based on such invented traditions as the above, but only on the practical need of ecclesiastical life.

Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky)
Lecture in Belgrade, August 5 / 28 1923
Translated from the Metropolitan’s summary in Tserkovniya Vedemoste, 15/ 28 October (1923)
Source: The Christian East, February 1924, vol V no 1

The Principle of Maximum Diversity

And then life will diversify to fill the infinite variety of ecological niches in the universe, as it has done already on this planet. If you want an intellectual principle to give this picture a philosophical name, you can call it “The Principle of Maximum Diversity”. The principle of maximum diversity says that life evolves to make the universe as interesting as possible.  A rain-forest contains a huge number of diverse species because specialization is cost-effective

- Freeman Dyson

"I feel like hollerin'"

Leon Wieseltier, who has published some of Morozov’s most acid criticism at The New Republic, compares him to the ferocious jazz musician Charles Mingus, who once responded to an interviewer who accused him of “hollerin’ ” by saying, “I feel like hollerin’.”

- Michael Myer in 'Evgeny vs. the internet'(Columbia Journalism Review)