Category Archives: quotes

Prayers rise like incense from funerals.

death, grief, love, quotes, , , , , , ,

Last week, I returned from Washington and my grandson’s wedding. On that travel day, before I left my Airbnb for the airport, I learned that a beloved sister in Christ, C., only 40 years old, had passed from this life after many years of suffering. It was arranged via texts while I was going through security at Sea-Tac that a friend of hers named Tia, who was coming from New York for the funeral, would stay at my house.

I’d left my place fairly disorderly, but as soon as I got in the house I changed the sheets on the guest bed, and made sure that a table was cleared, where we might sit to eat. I remembered to restore the setting on the water heater to normal. A brief glance out at the garden gave me hope that it could wait to be tended to. Soon came bedtime and I was very glad.

Tia and I met for the first time at the funeral the next morning. It was a typically lengthy Orthodox funeral, but it didn’t feel long, maybe because all the many and repetitive prayers seemed necessary to satisfy our hearts, and to proclaim the conquering light of the Resurrection in the face of death. Friends from three different parishes met that morning to pray at C.’s funeral, and it was comforting to be with so many people with whom we shared a love for this dear woman. If more time had been given, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some of them pulling up chairs near the casket, just to sit a while with her sweet spirit. But that’s not the tradition. Instead, we will pray especially for her for 40 days, and be with her that way…

“For Thou art the Resurrection, the Life, and the Repose of Thy servants who have fallen asleep, O Christ our God, and unto Thee we ascribe glory, together with Thy Father, who is from everlasting, and Thine all-holy, good, and life-creating Spirit, now and ever unto ages of ages. Amen.” -From the Prayer for the Departed

The evening of her funeral happened to be the beginning of our celebration of the Feast of the Cross. Tia and I attended the Vigil for the feast, after a busy afternoon visiting with church friends. She was suffering jet lag, and I a more general travel fatigue, but we lasted till the end of the beautiful service. I still hadn’t been out to water the garden when we came home and crashed; I finally got to that after she departed the next morning.

The repose of such a young wife and mother, who had been a bright light in the world, was hard to feel easy about, even though we were glad that her suffering was ended. Not a month before, we’d said good-bye to a man in his 80’s who also had been ill for a while, and who no doubt is happy to have finished his race; but he had found the Church and a wife late in life, and it wasn’t comfortable in his case, either, for her or for any of us to let go of him. Is any human death insignificant, that we who are left behind can be left unchanged?

The day after the feast, another death in the parish. Lord, have mercy! Stephen’s passing has affected me the most, I think, of any since I became a part of this parish, because the total time the two of us were worshiping together in church far exceeds that of anyone else who has died. I heard early in the morning that he had died, and the whole day my mind and heart were so full of him, I could not attend to anything else. He was a good example of a living icon of Christ, always ready, “instant in season and out of season,” (II Timothy) to sing, to pray, to help anyone in need. And he loved my late husband, which means a lot. “He had love in his veins,” our rector said.

Last night the church was filled, for the singing of the first panikhida service for this brother. The gathering in God’s temple of our communal love, grief and Blessed Hope was a powerful experience for me, in a way I hadn’t known in the hundred other panikhidas I’ve sung in the past.

I realized that I was joining my heart – and my tears – with my late husband too, by my prayers, and with every soul whom God loves, no matter which side of death they are on. It made me oh so thankful for the Church and her traditions that impart these vital realities to us. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom expresses it very well:

“The life of each one of us does not end at death on this earth and birth into heaven. We place a seal on everyone we meet. This responsibility continues after death, and the living are related to the dead for whom they pray. In the dead we no longer belong completely to the world; in us the dead still belong to history. Prayer for the dead is vital; it expresses the totality of our common life.”

My grief is being changed into joy.

The greatest of which we are capable.

beauty, love, quotes, , , , ,

“Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness, nourishment of mind by His truth, purifying of imagination by His beauty, opening of the heart to His love, and submission of will to His purpose. All this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of all expressions of which we are capable.”

-William Temple

Shame is turned into glory.

church, feasts, quotes, ,

But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
-Galatians 6:14

Monument of St. Sava is seen in front of the temple during Good Friday in Belgrade

Thy Cross is for all men a well of blessings
and a cause of thanksgiving.
Thereby for them that believe in thee,
weakness is turned into strength,
shame into glory, and death into life.
-St. Leo the Pope (d. 461)

Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross — September 14

Poetry is on the side of being.

culture, poetry, quotes, , , , , ,

A Touchstone magazine article from a while back ponders “On the Loss of Poetry as Necessary Knowledge.” In it Stephen Faulkner warns,

“Our modern poetry is in pieces…. This makes a defense of poetry difficult. But defend it we must, for poetic knowledge is an essential kind of knowledge. Without it, our understanding of the world suffers a severe distortion. It is as if we have grown up in an age of one-eyed men who have heard rumors that people could once judge distances, depths, and colors by the use of two eyes, but are now reduced by this flat, prosaic information age that relies on scientific analysis as virtually our only source of knowledge. We are a century of Cyclops.”

Though Faulkner wrote that in the 20th century, I doubt whether he would think the situation has improved in the 21st. In the same year as the Touchstone article, Czeslaw Milosz published this offering that is a form of therapy for our distorted vision: In the introduction to the anthology of poetry that he compiled, The Book of Luminous Things, he writes:

“Many poems that I like or admire are not in this anthology because they do not correspond to my criteria of size and accessibility to the reader.”

“My proposition consists in presenting poems, whether contemporary or a thousand years old, that are, with few exceptions, short, clear, readable and, to use a compromised term, realist, that is, loyal toward reality and attempting to describe it as concisely as possible. I act like an art collector who, to spite the devotees of abstract art, arranges an exhibition of figurative painting….”

He also thinks we moderns are missing something essential to our soul’s health. Whereas Faulkner writes metaphorically of a problem with our eyes, Milosz says, also metaphorically but more generally, “We seem to be missing some vital organs…”

“I have written elsewhere of this deprivation as one of the consequences brought about by science and technology that pollutes not only the natural environment but also the human imagination. The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days, and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief.

“Poetry is quite different…. Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot — if it is good poetry — look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting; and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.”

Almost all of the poems are introduced with a line or two about what he likes about that one, as an example of good poetry. None of his own poems is included. Here is one from the collection with a teacherly comment from Milosz to introduce it:

Walt Whitman

“The strong presence of a thing described means that the poet believes in its real existence. That is the meaning of a programmatic and unfinished poem by Walt Whitman, ‘I Am the Poet,’ which rehabilitates a ‘naïve’ approach and rejects philosophy’s unfavorable opinion on the direct testimony of our senses.”

I AM THE POET

I am the poet of reality
I say the earth is not an echo
Nor man an apparition;
But that all the things seen are real,
The witness and albic dawn of things equally real
I have split the earth and the hard coal and rocks and the solid bed of the sea
And went down to reconnoitre there a long time,
And bring back a report,
And I understand that those are positive and dense every one
And that what they seem to the child they are
[And that the world is not a joke,
Nor any part of it a sham].

-Walt Whitman