Category Archives: church

The moral is short — one word.

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“Turn your cares into prayers and you will change ice to flowing water.”

This is my paraphrase of a quote from St. Nikolai that we heard in church this morning. His feast day is March 18. St. Nikolai Velimiroviç was born in Serbia in 1880. He graduated from seminary in Belgrade in 1905, and then got two doctorate degrees. The doctoral thesis in theology was presented in German; his thesis in philosophy was prepared at Oxford and defended in Geneva, in French. I am amazed at the academic intensity represented by these facts.

At about the same time he was also entering a monastery and advancing from monk to priest to archimandrite, and becoming a professor at St. Sava Seminary in Belgrade. St. Nikolai was ordained Bishop of Žiča in Serbia in 1919. The Nazis arrested him in 1941 and he was confined and possibly tortured until the end of the war, when he came to the United States and taught at Orthodox seminaries. He has often been referred to as Serbia’s “New Chrysostom.”

Many times I have quoted from his Prologue of Ohrid, but today I offer in his honor a portion of one of his Prayers by the Lake (Lake Ohrid). This is from Number 13:

Stories are long, too long; the moral is short — one word. You are that word, O Word of God. You are the moral of all stories.

What the stars write across heaven, the grass whispers on earth. What the water gurgles in the sea, fire rumbles beneath the sea. What an angel says with his eyes, the imam shouts from his minaret. What the past has said and fled, the present is saying and fleeing.

There is one essence for all things; there is one moral for all stories. Things are tales of heaven. You are the meaning of all tales. Stories are Your length and breadth. You are the brevity of all stories. You are a nugget of gold in a knoll of stone.

When I say Your name, I have said everything and more than everything….

Lake Ohrid in Macedonia

Tears on our wedding robe.

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There are many kinds of tears, and it is important to discriminate between them.

So writes Bishop Kallistos Ware in The Inner Kingdom, in a chapter on “The Orthodox Experience of Repentance.” He has much to say about tears, which requires seven paragraphs, and I include this one sentence as a means of introducing the fact that in the Orthodox understanding, tears are a great and even necessary gift. Being reminded, I read the chapter’s closing paragraphs with a new perspective:

John Climacus 1
St. John Climacus

Filled with grief yet at the same time filled with joy, repentance expresses the creative tension found at all times in the Christian life on this earth, and described with such vividness by St. Paul: “…always carrying in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body…dying, and behold we live…sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor 4:10; 6:9-10).

As a life of continual repentance, our Christian discipleship is a sharing at one and the same time in Gethsemane and the Transfiguration, in the Cross and the Resurrection. St John Climacus sums the matter up by saying, “If you put on blessed and grace-filled mourning as a wedding robe, you will know the spiritual laughter of the soul.”

From generation to generation.

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Long before I found my home in the Orthodox Church, a friend introduced me to the Private Prayers of Lancelot Andrewes, which sustained my devotional life for a long time. Andrewes was one of the translators and editors of the King James Bible and died in 1626. Various arrangements of his prayers and sermons have been compiled; the edition I have uses the F.E. Brightman translation (from the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew of the original) of 1903, and includes an essay by T.S. Eliot, which I am reading again after a long time, having taken the book of prayers from my shelf to refresh my memory on several points.

Eliot compares the homilies of Andrewes with those of John Donne, and says that Andrewes is “the more medieval, because he is the more pure, and because his bond was with the Church, with tradition. His intellect was satisfied by theology and his sensibility by prayer and liturgy.”

When he writes of the emotional sensibilities of the preacher, it reminds me of the tone of our Orthodox worship:

“When Andrewes begins his sermon, from beginning to end you are sure that he is wholly in his subject, unaware of anything else, that his emotion grows as he penetrates more deeply into his subject, that he is finally ‘alone with the Alone,’ with the mystery which he is seeking to grasp more and more firmly….Andrewes’s emotion is purely contemplative; it is not personal, it is wholly evoked by the object of contemplation, to which it is adequate; his emotion wholly contained in and explained by its object.”

That dear man loved Christ! Here is the first of his Morning Prayers, typically rich in the words of Holy Scripture:

Following closely from that, the ancient prayer hymn of the church, known as “Gloria in excelsis Deo” or the “Great Doxology.” This was the one in Andrewes’s collection that most thrilled my heart and made it say, “Amen.” When prayed aloud it seems to carry the soul quickly to heaven while the body is most feeling its lowliness and affinity with the humble earth.

In the Orthodox Church we have begun the weekday Lenten Matins, and I managed to get there this morning and make that wonderful start to the day. One of the best parts of the service for me is our version of the “The Great Doxology,” which made me think about Christ-lover Andrewes, one of my first mentors in the kind of prayer that connects me to the church that has prayed through the ages.

Below is the text as we sing it in my parish, and here: The Great Doxology, is a video I found, if you would like to hear it sung, not too differently from what I’m used to. Of course, every parish and every choir does it uniquely, and I like the way we sing it the best.  🙂  This morning I was sitting on the other side of the cathedral from my usual, and enjoyed the perspective on the dome and the icon of Christ Pantocrator, with the words in the encircling border: “He hath looked out from His holy height. The Lord from heaven hath looked upon the earth, to hear the groaning of them that be in fetters.”

THE GREAT DOXOLOGY

Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace, good will among men.
We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we glorify Thee,
we give thanks to Thee for Thy great glory.
O Lord, Heavenly King, God the Father Almighty;
O Lord, the Only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ; and the Holy Spirit.
O Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,
that takest away the sin of the world, have mercy on us;
Thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer;
Thou that sittest at the right hand of the Father,
and have mercy on us.

For Thou only art holy, Thou only art the Lord,
Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father, Amen.

Every day will I bless Thee, and I will praise Thy name forever,
yea, forever and ever.

Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.
Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the God of our fathers,
and praised and glorified is Thy name unto the ages. Amen.

Let Thy mercy, O Lord, be upon us, according as we have hoped in Thee.

Blessed art Thou, O Lord, teach me Thy statutes.
Blessed art Thou, O Master, grant me understanding of Thy statutes.
Blessed art Thou, O Holy One, enlighten me by Thy statutes.

Lord, Thou hast been our refuge from generation to generation.
I said: O Lord, have mercy on me, heal my soul,
for I have sinned against Thee.
Lord, unto Thee have I fled for refuge;
teach me to do Thy will, for Thou art my God,
for in Thee is the fountain of life; in Thy light shall we see light.
Continue Thy mercy unto them that know Thee.

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,
both now, and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.

Gospel for Forgiveness Sunday

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For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Moreover, when you fast, do not be like the hypocrites, with a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces that they may appear to men to be fasting. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that you do not appear to men to be fasting, but to your Father who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.

Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:14-21 – Gospel for Forgiveness Sunday

Expulsion from Paradise – Palatine Chapel, Palermo, 12th century