Tag Archives: Fr. Stephen Freeman

Jesus, unbind us!

church, Lent, quotes,

For Orthodox Christians, today is Lazarus Saturday. We don’t celebrate Easter until next week, but the raising of Lazarus gives us a glimpse of Christ’s own rising from the dead a week later, and of our own coming resurrection.

This year I am a sponsor/godmother to a catechumen who will be baptized a week from today; last night I attended the last of her classes with her, and listened in on the explanation of all the services to come this week, and their meaning in our lives.

I was reminded of my own baptism five years ago, and also filled with joy in remembering and anticipating the many stops along this last stretch of the journey to Pascha. The liturgical landscape is marked by beloved hymns and prayers I have sung year after year, and which will bring me into the shining presence of Christ again, by His grace.

It’s easy to be emotional today, even thinking about an experience that is not primarily emotional, because I am housebound for a relatively minor disability, and have to miss a few services this coming week. So I’m feeling sorry for myself, but trying to be thankful at the same time, and accept all the blessings God is giving me.

When God is constantly pouring down love and blessing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed or confused. One day, the blessings look to any passerby to be good fortune, and another day, it takes a discerning eye to see Him, and be at peace. Even in the church services there are so many “things” going on that I can never attend to them all at once. One time I notice a particular hymn and how it blends perfectly into the whole message of the day; another time I spend most of the service in a battle just to return again and again from my distracting thoughts.

In my large parish we have numerous opportunities to participate in the services held, especially during Lent and Holy Week. I’m sure there is no one who can attend all of them, even the priests. Because circumstances change, including the circumstances of our own hearts and health, every Lent is at least a little different in how God deals with us. The upcoming week is part of that reality of having to live day-by-day and moment-by-moment, in thankfulness.

So often I come up against my own weakness and laziness. Father Stephen touches on this in his recent blog post about Lazarus, relating his meditations while sitting in the tomb of Lazarus a few years ago:

For me, he is also a sign of the universal entombment. Even before we die, we have frequently begun to inhabit our tombs. We live our life with the doors closed (and we stink). Our hearts can be places of corruption and not the habitation of the good God. Or, at best, we ask Him to visit us as He visited Lazarus. That visit brought tears to the eyes of Christ. The state of our corruption makes Him weep. It is such a contradiction to the will of God. We were not created for the tomb.

I also note that in the story of Lazarus – even in his being raised from the dead – he rises in weakness. He remains bound by his graveclothes. Someone must “unbind” him. We ourselves, having been plunged into the waters of Baptism and robed with the righteousness of Christ, too often exchange those glorious robes for graveclothes. Christ has made us alive, be we remain bound like dead men.

I sat in the tomb of Lazarus because it seemed so familiar.

Whether you celebrate tomorrow or next week, may your celebration of the Resurrection be a glorious feast.

Sweep away all false things…

quotes, reality
St. John the Forerunner

“The sweet work of repentance that is set before us as followers of Christ, is nothing other than the return to reality.”

“How we feel about many things has this same make-believe quality. We find certain styles of clothing and certain products (cars, houses, etc.) attractive and desirable, but often with little more than subjective reasons for our desires. The power of this make-believe is so great that it is well-known that many people “go shopping” to battle depression. It is a strange therapy.”

Read the rest of the article by Father Stephen Freeman here — about the real cause of so much of our grief and misery in everyday life, “a ceaseless struggle with things that have no true existence.”

When I look around his blog I always find plenty to provoke my thoughts in a good direction. I’m assuming his book Everywhere Present that just came out will put a lot of this food for the soul together in one nourishing bowl.

Blessing the Waters

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from Google images

Church fathers tell us that the love of God warms the soul. Hell and sin are cold. So this photo, so striking in its whiteness and cultural drama, also is highly symbolic of Christ’s incarnation and salvation of the world.

I begin to grasp what Fr. Stephen writes, (link from yesterday) how the tradition of the Church “sees the Baptism of Christ in the context of Pascha (Easter) as it sees everything in the context of Christ’s Pascha. Christ’s Baptism is a foreshadowing (and on more than a literary level) of His crucifixion and descent into Hades, just as our own Baptism is seen by St. Paul as a Baptism into Christ’s ‘death and resurrection.’ ”

These Christians are blessing the waters on Theophany as Christ blessed and baptized a cold and needy Creation when He went down into the Jordan.

Theophany

church, feasts, quotes, Theophany, water

It’s the Feast of Theophany. Special services for the commemoration of the Baptism of Christ began yesterday and culminate tomorrow. I was so happy to be able to have a fairly contemplative day, morning and evening.

In the middle of the day we celebrated at church with a Vesperal Liturgy, after which nuns from a nearby monastery (a different monastery from the one where I got the big squash) brought food for us who had been fasting: warming vegetable soup, salad with lots of trimmings, bread and spreads, and even halvah for dessert.

Last year I wrote a bit more about Theophany. This year I don’t have anything new to say about the feast; I am trying to just soak it up and be changed by it, though I feel too dull to follow Father Stephen very far on the topic. I do want to share an icon I found on http://www.icon-art.info where I spent a while browsing. This mosaic is from 11th-century Greece.

Here’s a teaser clip from Fr. Stephen’s post that I linked to above:

     The world and all that is in it is given to us as icon – not because it has no value in itself – but because the value it has in itself is the gift of God – and this is seen in its iconicity.

At Theophany, the waters of the world are revealed to be both Hades and the gate of Paradise…. Love alone reveals things for what they are, and transforms them into what they were always intended to be. It is the gift of God.