Tag Archives: Holy Spirit Day

Sleepy celebrations of Pentecost.

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Pincushion flowers

My celebrations of Pentecost last year and this had one thing in common, that I was running short on sleep. Last year, in Thessaloniki*, it was because I had stayed up late the night before talking to an old friend. Today, I had waked at about 4:30 and was a bit dopey for the next twelve hours, until I came home and took a nap.

I just noticed that I never wrote here about Pentecost in Greece. I celebrated the feast at the The Church of Panagia Archeiropoietos that I had toured with my guide Maria a few days before. In the linked post I told about the blue-veined marble floors from the 5th century, symbolically arranged so that near the front, curvier veins make it look like rivers flowing out from the altar out to the back of the temple.

A few days later I attended Divine Liturgy in that church. On Pentecost we Orthodox have Kneeling Vespers shortly after Liturgy. This service includes three long prayers, “Again and again on bended knee,” and there I was down on that venerable floor, listening to the prayers in Greek, not knowing the language. I was beginning to feel sleepy, and almost dozed off. As special as it was to kneel there, I didn’t want to hit my head on that marble, knowing that any new cracks that might develop would be in my skull. So for the second two prayers I sat.

Today

Today I was in my home parish, and it was a very joyous day! We received five new members into our church family before Liturgy, and that is always cause for celebration in itself. We typically have a potluck on Pentecost for our agape meal, instead of our usual arrangement of having a different team each week that plans and cooks a meal for 200 people. Today lots of people brought desserts, which were very popular. I was working in the bookstore, which is in the fellowship hall, and I got to meet two new catechumens and sell lots of books.

At Vespers, I didn’t kneel on the (cement) floor, because there was space on a rug. But it was a strain to make my groggy mind pay attention to the words. Soon after I came home I slept. Sunday afternoon naps are so often needed, and such a gift.

Just after I woke, a friend from church texted me that he could come over and help me move the last of my furniture back into place, things that had been moved for painting and carpet cleaning. I’m still able to move a lot of stuff myself, but this afternoon we needed to put a twin bed back together and push-pull a chest of drawers into the bedroom where my new housemate will be living. I don’t think I told you about her before, and I probably won’t tell you much about her in the future, but I’m very excited to have a student living here, a dear girl whom I’ve known since she was a baby.

After that, there was still enough sunlight for me to wander a bit and take pictures of the garden. The Tasmanian Flax, Dianella tasmanica, is at the berry stage, covered with its grapey fruits. Those beautiful fruits are toxic “to an unknown degree,” at least to humans, but birds are said to enjoy them in the plant’s home territory of southeastern Australia.

What a wonderful day it has been. Tomorrow is Holy Spirit Day, and it would be lovely to continue the overflowing blessing of Pentecost into another day, and attend Divine Liturgy. If I go to bed early enough (like now), it could happen.

I wish you all a Happy June ❤

*If you’d like to read my other posts from Thessaloniki, they will all open up when you click on this tag: Thessaloniki. 

The week previous to being in that city, I was with family on the Island of Paros, Greece, and the posts I wrote about that time are here: Paros.

The Holy Spirit at the peak of Mount Sinai.

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When the Getty Museum in Los Angeles hosted the exhibition “Holy Image, Hallowed Ground: Icons From Sinai” in 2006-07, the courier and caretaker of the artifacts on display was Father Justin Sinaites.

He is the librarian at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, where the extremely dry climate has kept ancient manuscripts from deteriorating the way they might in many places in the world. This monk librarian came from Texas to the Egyptian monastery many years ago; at least once before I mentioned him on my blog after my late husband and I heard him speak in Berkeley, California.

As I write, the sun has set on this Sunday of Pentecost, a celebration full of joy and light. So we are now, according to Church Time, in the day after, on which the Orthodox Church celebrates Holy Spirit Day; Father Justin has written a blog post about how they keep the feast at St. Catherine’s: “Liturgy at the Peak of Mount Sinai”:

“Every year, we celebrate the Divine Liturgy at the peak of Mount Sinai on the day after Pentecost, the Monday of the Holy Spirit. This year, we were joined by pilgrims from Greece and Russia. We made the ascent in the night, and began the Liturgy at 4:00 AM.”

The blog post consists mostly of Fr. Justin’s own photographs, which I always find very appealing. I learned more about the monk himself in this interview on the Travel Potpourri website: “Saint Catherine’s Monastery Interview with the Librarian Father Justin.”

One paragraph:

“I didn’t go from El Paso, Texas, to Sinai, in one big step. There were lots of little steps. But even in El Paso, I read the account of Moses and the Exodus in the Bible. I saw Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” which contains scenes filmed at the traditional Sinai, with Charlton Heston climbing up the mountain, and walking along a ridge with the Sinai range in the background. Also, El Paso is a desert. I used to wander in the desert for hours and came to love the stark beauty of the desert landscape. All of this was in the background when I began to read about the history and the theology of the Orthodox Church.”

If you are interested in the manuscript collection itself, you may want to look at: This Reuters article, which explains that the abbot of the monstery feels an urgency about completing the project of digitizing all 4500 manuscripts in the library, many of which are in the Syriac and Arabic languages, and very rare.

But today, all I want to do is visit Fr. Justin’s blog, and through his photographs get another glimpse of the daily life and worship at Saint Catherine’s, Sinai.

We are not describing the Holy Spirit.

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In the Orthodox Church, when we celebrate a feast commemorating an event in our salvation history, such as Pentecost, also known as Holy Trinity Sunday, it is followed directly by another feast honoring a person who figures heavily in the previous day’s event. In the present case, tomorrow is Holy Spirit Day. It seems a good time to post these thoughts from Metropolitan Anthony:

When we say that God is spirit, we say simply that he is not matter as we know it, that he is something quite different. In that sense it is a negative description that belongs already without the word, to that form of theology which is negative theology, apophatic theology, a theology of paradoxes, a theology that uses words to point toward the ineffable — that which can neither be described nor put into words and yet which must be indicated somehow in speech.

One could avoid speech. In Siberia there were pagan tribes that had deliberately rejected every human word for God. And when in conversation they wanted to indicate God they raised their hand towards heaven. This is possible in a civilization of direct communication by speech. It is no longer possible in a civilization of books. But whatever words we use we have got to be aware of the fact that we are not describing, we are not defining what God is, because the very thing we know about God is that he is beyond defining, beyond describing. So that when we say of God that he is a Spirit, when we speak of the Holy Spirit in particular, we do not mean to give a concrete definition or any description of what he is. We point towards the fact that he is beyond our conceptual knowledge, beyond every formulation, that is is what we don’t know, and this is what we mean to say by saying that he is a spirit as contrasted with us.

–Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, excerpt from “Our Life in God,” from Essential Writings

Pentecost icon (fresco)

Now you are light in the Lord.

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The Monday after Pentecost Sunday, we Orthodox celebrate Holy Spirit Day.

When He came down and confused the tongues,
the Most High divided the nations;

but when He distributed the tongues of fire,
He called all people to unity.

Therefore, with one voice, we glorify the most-Holy Spirit.

(Hymn of the Feast)

For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), finding out what is acceptable to the Lord.  And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret. But all things that are exposed are made manifest by the light, for whatever makes manifest is light. Therefore He says:

“Awake, you who sleep,
Arise from the dead,
And Christ will give you light.”

(From the epistle for the day, Ephesians 5)