He’s got the full list, but here are the ones that trip me up:

• During Bright Week, our prayers in church and at home are sung and not read as we sing all week the feast of the risen Christ: Christ is risen!
• During Bright Week, we do not read from the psalter at home or in church for the prophecies have been fulfilled: Christ is risen!
• During the entire Paschal season there is no prostrating or kneeling permitted in church or at home for we stand with the resurrected Christ: Christ is risen! [Ha! I did remember that one. Hooray!]
• During the Paschal season we begin all of our prayers at home and in church by singing the troparion of Pascha: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life!”
• During the Paschal season and extending to Pentecost, we do not pray “O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth…” for the Comforter comes on Pentecost. Christ is risen!

But the most important thing, really, is to remember your joy:  Christ is risen!

The reign of life has begun, the tyranny of death is ended … This is the day the Lord has made — a day far different from those made when the world was first created, and which are measured by the passage of time. This is the beginning of a new creation. On this day, as the prophet says, God makes a new heaven and a new earth.

ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA

The story on the photo is that several years ago during Bright Monday I went on my daily walk and came across a little robin’s eggshell, perfectly shaped but wide open where its little inhabitant had forced his or her way out. I tend to reprint the photo every year at this time, because apart from the icon of the Resurrection, it is the best image I can find for the occasion — a thing simple, delicate, beautiful, but also profound, mysterious and wonderful.
  

We are entering into difficult days today: days when we recall the Passion of Christ; days when it will be difficult for us to come to church and endure long services, to pray. Many ask themselves: is there any point in coming to services when we are so physically tired, when our thoughts are flying here and there, when we have no inner concentration and true participation in what is going on?

Therefore, no matter what we experience, or no matter how little we experience, let us attend these services, let us immerse ourselves in what they have to say to us. We will not try to forcibly squeeze some feelings out of ourselves: it is enough to watch; it is enough to hear. Let the events themselves—for these are events and not just memories—break us in body and soul. Then, when we forget ourselves and think rather of Christ, about what is really taking place during these days, we will reach also that Great Saturday when Christ is laid to rest in the tomb—and we also will find rest. When at night we hear the announcement of the Resurrection, we too will be able to suddenly come alive from that terrible numbness, from that terrible death of Christ, from Christ’s dying, of which we shall partake at least a little during these days of the Passion. Amen.

Liturgy is not a rigid thing to be repeated unconsciously. It is an expression of the human need to talk to the Lord, and to thank Him for His grace. Liturgy is spirit and life running through the veins of the body of the Church, and nurturing all its members. It revives the Church, the community and the individuals with the grace that is bestowed upon it. Hence, we are here before a precious gem.

We should polish it and reveal its glorious face, stressing the essence of the liturgical practice which leads the believer to grow in Christ. It is therefore important to resort to all tools that enable the people to reach the depth of this inspiring liturgy, that they may take from it that which will help them attain salvation and understanding of the mystery of God.”

– His Beatitude, Patriarch JOHN X (Antioch)

This was really timely. Here I am, chrismated 27 years, and I still need to grow in my understanding during Holy Week. First, I went through the honeymoon phase that every convert — especially every American convert — knows so well. The Holy Week services were so … different. So mysterious, so exotic, so otherworldly. And then, there were the real seeds of a nascent faith. But in my early years, I think there was a lot more that was external. I thought I had to feeeeel the liturgies, feeeel the Passion.

Lord, have mercy. I’m lucky I made it through that part.  But after that, after the novelty and the “different-ness” wore off, I also had years where I went too far in the other direction. I would be so detached that I’d arrive at Pascha without totally remembering how I got there. Or I would have spent time on any of the myriad details that accompany the Holy Week preparations, like Martha being anxious over many things. And then afterward, I would wonder where that “old flame” had gone.

So here I am, still in school at my age, trying to avoid falling into either the fire or the water. How good to hear that “It is an expression of the human need to talk to the Lord.” Simple, yet sublime.

Time to go — another service; another chance to talk to God.

The hymn highlights the woman who anointed Christ’s feet with oil. It is known as the Hymn of Kassiani and it comes almost at the end of the Bridegroom service tonight. The hymn is beautiful enough to stand out on its own (see the video and text below), but I admit that I may remember it more because of a story of how the hymnographer, the gifted and beautiful St. Kassiani, came by one of the phrases: She had some help from a would-be royal suitor.

The story (paraphrased from OrthodoxWiki) goes that Abbess Kassiani was in the garden composing the hymn, and had gotten to the phrase “I shall kiss Thine immaculate feet and wipe them again with the tresses of my head,” when she was informed that Emperor Theophilos had arrived at the convent. The emperor had been looking for opportunities to be alone with Kassiani, and she was afraid that he was interested in marrying her. So she hastily left her scroll and pen behind and beat a hasty retreat in order to escape an embarrassing situation. When Theophilus entered, he saw that she had left quickly, and he guessed at the reason. He saw her half-completed hymn left behind, and with some consternation mixed with amusement added a line.

When Kassiani returned, she saw that after the last line she had written, the emperor had added, “– those feet at whose sound Eve hid herself for fear when she heard Thee walking in Paradise in the afternoon –”. Kassiani left the phrase intact, and went on to finish the hymn.

Isn’t that fun? At St. Basil OC, my church in Kansas City, which had very Syrian roots, the hymn had a special place in their hearts, and the line that the emperor is said to have written would always be chanted by a woman and sung slowly and with emphasis.

Blessed Holy Tuesday-almost-Wednesday!

The woman who had fallen into many sins, perceiving your divinity, O Lord,
assumed the role of a myrrh-bearer, and lamenting,
She brings the myrrh before your burial. “Woe is me,” she cries,
“For my night is an ecstacy of excess: Dark and moonless
And full of sinful desires.
Receive the fountain of my tears,
You who gather into the clouds the waters of the sea.
Incline to the groanings of my heart.
You Who in Your ineffable condescension bowed down the heavens.
I will embrace and kiss Your sacred feet
And wipe them again with the tresses of my hair –
The feet at whose sound, Eve hid herself in fear,
When she heard Your footsteps while You were walking in Paradise in twilight.
O my Savior, Who saves my soul, who can ever track down the multitude of my sins
And the depths of Your judgment?
Do not disregard me, Your servant,
You whose mercy is boundless.

Fr. John at Mystagogy had two posts on movies about the Passion of Christ. On one hand, he has praise for Franco Zeffirelli miniseries “Jesus of Nazereth”; on the other, he relayed a Orthodox hierarch’s denunciation of movies like “The Passion of Christ.” (HERE and HERE, respectively). So is that a double standard, or what?

Maybe not. The article from Mpn. Hierotheos of Nafpaktos expounds three reasons why the Church usually doesn’t get behind big blockbusters depicting the Passion:

1. The tendency to disconnect the suffering death from the resurrection. Mpn Hierotheos notes that “when the Passion and the Cross are disconnected from the Resurrection of Christ, then they do not express the crucified-resurrection experience of the Church.”
2. Though the crucifixion and resurrection were actual historical events, our experience during Holy Week and Pascha is much more than that. “…It is ultimately a mysterious and lived experience within the heart of man, which is transformed with repentance, Orthodox asceticism, and the sacramental and liturgical life.”
3. Movies tend to elicit a purely emotional response that doesn’t come near to everything the Church is asking of us. It isn’t meant just to stick with us for a week or two, but to beneficially change us. “…It is not intended to emotionally charge us or to bring remembrance, but to transform our passions and to psychosomatically transform us.”

The reason that I can get behind a subsequent post praising the 1977 miniseries “Jesus of Nazereth” is that it may pass muster, or come close. It definitely included Christ’s resurrection in the narrative, which is more than either “Jesus Christ, Superstar” or “Godspell” could say. And I might argue, at the risk of being subjective, that by filming the epic with such unbelievable beauty, Zeffirelli carried it out of the realm of pure history and into something that begins in the known world and extends into the unknown. I don’t know how a person does the tricks with lights and cameras and direction that he did, but there’s something about this movie that is just unearthly.

And as for the third objection, it is certainly true that watching a movie is not tantamount to a catechism. On the other hand, it’s interesting to note that Robert Powell, the actor who played Jesus in Zeffirelli’s film was changed by doing so.

“Prior to being cast in the part, my knowledge of Christ was limited to Sunday school teachings and religious stories, all on a rather immature level. I knew this would never be enough for me as an actor to work with in developing a character. So I read the Bible through thoroughly, which I’d never done before, taking it apart and analyzing it. I also consulted works of reference and commentaries on the Bible because I wanted to obtain other people’s ideas as well. An actor has to be objective when interpreting a part. Nonetheless, after playing Christ for all these months, it would be difficult not to really believe in Him….”

Personally, I loved this miniseries. But also, I find that I don’t want to watch it again. The problem I have had with movies like this is that when I read or hear the Gospel account, I see the scene the way it was in a movie. Jesus might look like this actor; Judas might sound like that one.

It’s not impossible to deal with, but it’s distracting. I’m reminded that my patron saint, Mary of Egypt, told Zossima that she spent years of her self-inflicted exile in the desert just getting certain songs out of her head. Fabulously crafted film offerings can be a boost, but they can also be a hindrance, and I find that I don’t get over the remembrance of movie clips nearly as fast as I do the remembrance of my sins. That has a lot to do with why I didn’t go see Mel Gibson’s movie — I just couldn’t lock myself into a movie theater with graphic horrors that I might never be able to get out of my head, no matter how many church services I went to.

All the same, I know that in their turn, even the bad movies about the life and teachings of Christ may have offered me a little help when I needed it.

I suppose I’m waffling here, but I can’t bring myself either to ban Gospel movies or to go looking for them in this week before Pascha. I’m interested how other people come down on this one.

In any case, blessed Holy Week to all. Come, Lord Jesus.

“…Regardless of your particular party affiliation, if you care about everything from stopping war to reducing the defense budget to protecting civil liberties to passing immigration reform, you should hope the bomber was a white domestic terrorist. Why? Because only in that case will [white male] privilege work to prevent the Boston attack from potentially undermining progress on those other issues.”

We know now that his prayer was answered, but also that it wasn’t. The Tsarnaev brothers are light-skinned, though their facial features might be described as Middle Eastern. (That’s the problem with using words like ‘white’ and ‘color’ to try and sum up everything you mean.) They were both naturalized American citizens, though the evidence indicates that one at least didn’t think of himself as such. (Tamerlan on his photo essay Webpage: “I don’t have a single American friend. I don’t understand them.”)

But all along, we knew what the Salon columnist meant: He meant that he hoped that whoever did it wouldn’t be Muslim. And they are (or ‘were,’ in the case of the deceased brother). He hoped that it wouldn’t be possible to pin these horrible crimes on radical Islamists. But the evidence is beginning to point in that direction.

At this juncture, the journalists, intelligence officials and opinion-makers have a decision. Will they keep looking for the truth or not? Will they report objectively and unblinkingly on the crimes, the criminals and their motivations or will they punt in the interests of diversity, enlightened thinking and a thin coat of whitewash to an “unprivileged” class? My prayer, more religious than secular, I think, is that they would look for the truth and present it honestly.

I don’t wish that because I want to pile on Muslims. I don’t want to hear about how Tamerlan was radicalized and who taught him to make bombs because I’m bigoted or morbid. I want to know because our societal IQ matters. Patterns of human behavior matter. As one ad campaign pronounces, the truth matters.

When David Sirota wrote about his fond hope, he did it because he didn’t like the narrative of Islamist terrorism. He fervently hoped that nothing would distract from the preferred narrative of disempowering the old guard and empowering the new. And he’s entitled to his opinion, but he’s not entitled to suppress and doctor facts in an attempt to alter what is factually true. His fellow journalists don’t have that right either.

For people that think Christians are reality-challenged, these guys certainly do have an odd relationship with facts.

I don’t mean to be harsh. But this kind of response goes beyond just being trite. I’m not so horrible as to blame people for being artless at a time like that, but have we disconnected our brains? Sending Facebook fuzzy thoughts would work for a sad day or a friend’s bad news. But coming after a bombing, it’s as if we don’t want to do the hard work of dealing with this reality.

Greg said something on Facebook last night that got a lot of Likes and Shares. At the risk of sounding too incestuous, I’m going to quote him:

Just saw my first “wear purple tomorrow for Boston” FB meme image. Stoppit.

Support might take the form of donating time, money or blood to those affected by this event. Support might even take the form of advocacy, if you passionately believe policy changes might keep something like this from happening again. And if you are a person of faith, then of course you believe prayer is support. (Whether *talking* about praying on FB is effective is another debate entirely.)

Wearing purple is not an effective way of helping people impacted by today’s events. It’s just one more box to check off in an age when talking about being concerned and talking about taking action is confused with actually getting something done.

I worry about us these days. I worry that we’re less and less able to identify and combat evil at just the time when we need to get better and better. We don’t like to find out that people do monstrous things, with only the mildest excuses. We’d rather find ways to turn everything into a kind of pre-processed spread, just another opportunity to leave teddy bears and send virtual hugs (which have no warmth and do nothing at all). We’d even rather try to redirect the focus into something political — the Sandy Hook shootings by an insane man have almost wholly been subverted into a blame-the-weapons campaign.

Anything at all, rather than think that this is what we’re capable of, absent the love and fear of God.

Unfortunate is he who loves haste; he will meet with a multitude of obstacles, with thousands of unpleasantnesses and inward straitness through his haste, and will have many occasions for irritation.

ST. JOHN OF KRONSTADT
My Life in Christ (pg 382)

(Interesting for me to note after I posted this that I did a post a couple years ago when I came across this same reflection in My Life in Christ. Not too surprising, given my lack of patience. Anyway, HERE is that post if you want some personal remarks on this quote.)

The book seems like one long essay on prayer and the encounter with God (but then couldn’t you almost put all of Mpn. Anthony’s books end to end and say that about them?). And in a section entitled ‘The Stilling of the Storm,’  he has this to say about effective prayer in times of distress:

Often we are in tumult, … but we surrender to it and are defeated. That is why our prayer is trembling and hesitant, a prayer of tumult, uncertainty and incoherence. Isn’t this the story of the storm on the lake of Galilee?

The Lord and his disciples are on the lake. A tempest comes up when they are out to sea. Death threatens them, the waves are huge, the winds beat against them. They fight for their lives as hard as they can, and all this while the Lord is asleep on a cushion at the prow. He looks comfortable to them. They can’t bear him looking comfortable, his indifference. In their wretchedness, they turn to him, wake him up, try to force him to realize what is happening. ‘Lord, do you not see that we perish?’

But what are they doing by asking this question? Are they appealing to the Lord to control the storm? Yes and no.

First of all, they want him to share their suffering. They want him to be as anxious as they are. They think he will not help them unless he shares their anxiety. The Lord gets up, he refuses to share their panic. He keeps his own serenity. First, he turns to them, ‘How long must I be with you, men of little faith?’

And then he turns towards the storm and casts his own serenity onto it. He orders the waves to be still and the wind to be silent, and his own peace to come down on everything about him. The storm is still and the disciples fall at his feet. Who is he? They are still doubtful.

We often make the same mistake. Instead of seeking to share God’s serenity, we ask God to share our tumult. Of course, he does share it, but with his own serenity. This turmoil, disorder, disharmony, discord often enter our lives both in us and around us. They are caused by events we do not understand and human actions which are also tormented.
And this is the essential problem, the link between the turmoil of life and our prayer, disturbance and serenity.

We must realize in advance that in every confrontation between our inner peace and the hurly-burly of life, victory will go to the turmoil, because our prayer is weak and life is hard. Life is ruthless, whereas our prayer, our inner peace and serenity is fragile. If we want to keep it and gain the victory over life, this must not be by open confrontation, but as water waters the earth.

The Fathers said that water is an image of humility. It goes to the bottom. This is quite true, but water is also invincible. When through its weight it reaches the bottom, it begins to rise and nothing can stop it. This is what our prayer should do.

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