Tag Archives: Paradise

We express ourselves in thanksgiving.

humanity, quotes, , , , , ,

At this season of Thanksgiving as a holiday, it seems good to consider thanksgiving as a way of life, even a way to Life. First, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones brings up a good point about the Garden of Eden:

“. . . The terrible fallacy of the last hundred years has been to think that all man’s troubles are due to his environment, and that to change the man you have nothing to do but change his environment. That is a tragic fallacy. It overlooks the fact that it was in Paradise that man fell. . . .”

—D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Studies in the Sermon on the Mount (1971)

Mikael Toppelius, Expulsion of Adam and Eve, Finland

Fr. Alexander Schmemann also mentions that garden:

“In the story of the Garden this took place in the cool of the day: that is, at night. And Adam, when he left the Garden where life was to have been eucharistic — an offering of the world in thanksgiving to God — Adam led the whole world, as it were, into darkness. In one of the beautiful pieces of Byzantine hymnology Adam is pictured sitting outside, facing Paradise, weeping. It is the figure of man himself.”

But that sad picture is not the end. The Son of God became incarnate, and Jesus Christ is the New Adam. He has fulfilled all that the first Adam failed to do, and now in the Divine Liturgy we can:

“…ascend to heaven in Christ to see and to understand the creation in its real being as glorification of God, as that response to divine love in which alone creation becomes what God wants it to be: thanksgiving, eucharist, adoration. It is here — in the heavenly dimension of the Church, with ‘thousands of Archangels and myriads of Angels, with the Cherubim and Seraphim … who soar aloft, borne on their pinions …’ — that we can finally ‘express ourself,’ and this expression is: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Sabaoth. Heaven and earth are full of Thy glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord. This is the ultimate purpose of all that exists, the end, the goal and the fulfillment, because this is the beginning, the principle of Creation.”

“In thanksgiving we recognize and confess above all the divine source and the divine calling of our life. The prayer of thanksgiving affirms that God brought us from nonexistence into being, which means that he created us as partakers of Being, i.e., not just something that comes from him, but something permeated by his presence, light, wisdom, love – by what Orthodox theology, following St. Gregory Palamas, calls the divine energies and which makes the world called to and capable of transfiguration into a ‘new heaven and a new earth,’ and the ruler of creation, man, called to and capable of theosis, ‘partaking of the divine nature.’”

-Fr. Alexander Schmemann

These three quotes from Fr. Alexander are from the book, For the Life of the World, an incredibly rich and deep explanation of Orthodox Christian theology. Our women’s book group and sisterhood at church are reading it right now during our Nativity fast, and I discovered that it can be found on YouTube being read in its entirety. You can listen for free here on the channel The Orthodox Voice: For the Life of the World.

If you want to read for free instead, a pdf file is here: For the Life of the World

“In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God.”
I Thessalonians 5:18

Getting back to thanksgiving as a holiday, this year I’ll be giving thanks and praise with the angels in the morning in Liturgy, and in the afternoon feasting in the traditional American way. Whether your celebration is small and quiet, or large and festive, I hope you remember much to be thankful for ❤

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Currier & Ives, Home to Thanksgiving

 

 

 

 

It was legislated in Paradise.

Lent, quotes, ,

“Do you think that I posit the antiquity of fasting on the basis of the law? Indeed, fasting is older than the law. …Fasting is as old as humanity: it was legislated in paradise. It was the first command that Adam received: You shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You shall not eat legislates fasting and self-control. …It is because we did not fast that we were banished from paradise. So let us fast that we may return to it.”

-St. Basil the Great, “First Homily on Fasting,” On Feasting and Fasting.

I feast on the garden and my cold dinner.

books, my garden, quotes, work, , , , , , , ,

Today I spent most of the afternoon and evening working in my garden, happy to act out the quote from Elisabeth in the last post. Often on Mondays I end up trimming and weeding, because it’s tonight that I put out the garbage cans to be picked up in the morning, including the big green bin that is for all green waste.

The lettuces that had bolted I chopped up and gave to my worms. Out there I set up a board by way of a chopping block just for this purpose. I probably have four times as many worms as I started with last fall, because the man who gave me my starter batch moved far away and couldn’t take his worm farm; he gave them all to me! He consolidated all three or four of his bins into one new one, before bringing it to my house, so I fear that they are overcrowded, and I plan to modify my set-up so that they have more room. But they seem to be doing well on the diet I provide.

I tied the new tomato stems to the long tree prunings I am using for stakes; I removed a lot of spindly new nigella sprouts that are still coming up everywhere even though the weather is not conducive to their health. And I picked lots of kale and Swiss chard.

Last Saturday my patio got scrubbed and power-washed. I’d noticed only this spring how black it had turned over the winter; it hadn’t been cleaned since it was installed twenty years ago. While that was happening I picked a few of the sweet peas from the vines that are crisping up, as I pulled out the plants. The patio was left to dry and won’t be sealed until later this week, so in the meantime all my potted plants are waiting on the paths. I was watering them this morning when I noticed the manzanita’s bark curling as it does at this time of year. Here are new pictures of that artistry.

At six o’clock I was still going strong, and I didn’t want to stop and cook dinner, so I came in and just found cold things in the fridge to eat quickly — a lamb chop and a few roasted Brussels sprouts. There was cold tea as well, pretty fancy stuff that had just arrived today.

Last year I gave my grandson Scout a subscription to a few orders of Tea Runners blends of tea, and when I visited him recently he made tea for me from a flavor of my choice, from his collected packets. I was so impressed with the various flavors I decided to order a few for myself, and today I made Burgundy Blast as iced tea. Its color and flavor reminded me of the Kool-Aid that my siblings and I used to drink in the summers of my youth; I say that, quite glad not to have drunk Kool-Aid for many decades. But this was just barely sweet (I see from the ingredients list that the mangoes included were sweetened), and so fruity and yummy. And beautiful. This is what it looked like before the boiling water was poured over:

For several years I used to pick lavender flowers from my many plants, hoping to put them into sachets. I stored them in the freezer against the day I would have time for that project. But it never happened, and I stopped trying. This year I got the idea to make lavender simple syrup, but I didn’t pick the buds in time, and now they are fading. Oh, well, I gathered a cupful of blooms anyway, and maybe I will make lemon & lavender shortbread… maybe.

A lovely thing happened on this gardening day: I received in the mail this book The Fragrance of God, by Vigen Guroian (2006). I noticed it online when I was buying the new edition of Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child’s Moral Imagination. The Fragrance book seems to be on the same theme as the author’s previous book, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening. I couldn’t help leafing through it right away, though I was too busy to give it proper attention. Just now I did take time to glean one quote with which to end my mostly garden post. I am reveling in my own heart’s portion of Paradise tonight.

“When Adam left it, he took a portion of Paradise with him. That piece of Paradise is more deeply etched in the human soul than all the memories of this impoverished world. Scratch beneath the skin of a genuine gardener, and you will find this memory of Paradise. When he looks into his backyard, Paradise is what he envisions. But Paradise is not just inside of every man and woman. In these regions of ‘sin and woe,’ William Cowper remarks, ‘Traces of Eden’  may still be seen, ‘where mountain, river, forest, field, and grove’
remind us of our ‘Maker’s power and love.'”

A prayer for my friend.

death, love, prayer, , ,

A dear, almost lifelong friend of mine passed from earthly life last night, on the feast of St. Brendan the Navigator. I found comfort in praying for him the Akathist to Jesus Christ for a Loved One Who has Fallen Asleep. Every phrase of the prayer is full of meaning, but something about the following section made me want to share it.

It makes reference to the “soul stripped bare.” This image follows from the fact that the soul and the body are aspects of a whole person, made in God’s image and designed to be a unity; and when you think about how the soul and the body have never had to be fully separated before death, it seems natural that the soul, no matter how pure, should grieve at this loss.

We don’t think of the body as a shell from which our soul ultimately emerges — our bodies are us, and they are temples of God at the same time, in which we worship. If at the end of our lives our Lord takes our spirits from our bodies, it is not because they aren’t precious. They will be resurrected at the end of time.

O Thou Who wast crucified for us and Who for us wast tormented: Stretch forth Thy hand from Thy Cross and with the drops of Thy poured-forth blood wipe away his sins without a trace; and with Thy beautiful nakedness warm his soul, now stripped bare and orphaned:

Jesus, Thou didst know his life from birth and didst love him.
Jesus, Thou didst see him from afar from the height of Thy Cross.
Jesus, suffering painfully on the Cross, Thou didst stretch forth to embrace him as he came from afar.
Jesus, Thou didst cry out for his forgiveness on blood-stained Golgotha.
Jesus, Thou didst in grievous torments meekly die for him.
Jesus, Who didst suffer to be laid in the tomb, sanctify his repose in the grave.
Jesus, Risen, raise up to the Father his soul which was embittered by the world and saved by Thee.
Jesus, All-merciful Judge, vouchsafe Thy servant the sweetness of Paradise.

–From The Akathist to Jesus Christ for a Loved One who has Fallen Asleep