Tag Archives: Pentecost

Sleepy celebrations of Pentecost.

May 31, 2026church, feasts, my gardenDianella tasmanica, Greece, Holy Spirit Day, housemates, marble, Pentecost, pincushion flowers, sleep, Tasmanian Flax, ThessalonikiGretchenJoanna

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 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 carpets are fresh and clean.

May 27, 2026bees, creativity, home, my gardenborage, G.K. Chesterton, housework, mock orange, Pentecost, squash, thriftGretchenJoanna

The most encouraging news of the day is, the sun is shining, and the garden is growing. There is already a little Delicata squash on one of the two plants I started from seed in March.

I hired a man to clean about half of my wall-to-wall carpets. Last night and this morning I pushed and hauled furniture around so that I could thoroughly vacuum all the places beforehand. “Kyle” came this morning and was a very conscientious worker with a good deal of experience, and also lots of information for me about the various fibers he’d be cleaning, and how carpets wear, and how stains are removed. He told me that he usually vacuums himself, and was reluctant to skip that step. He asked if I had a good vacuum…? I do, but I let him do that part everywhere again with his machine, for his peace of mind.

I am so happy to have this job done. I don’t have pets, and all the grandchildren have been trained by their parents to remove their shoes in the house, so my rugs get along without frequent shampooing (this is an understatement which I won’t elaborate on); but I had reasons for deciding that this was the time.

While this thorough maintenance was happening over the course of several hours, I cooked up a pot of split pea soup; I roasted eggplant, toasted walnuts and made a batch of quinoa. The flannel bedsheets went into the washer and were replaced with the summer type, and I checked off several other tasks around the house, some of which have been delayed a couple of weeks, and some for months. It’s uncanny how every time I whittle down my to-do list, a few more things break or come due for maintenance.

Checking off the carpet cleaning, which should have been done years ago, felt really good. But — there was a little problem, which immediately added another task to my list. A solution that Kyle used, on a spot barely visible before, reacted with something I evidently used sometime in the past, and left a bleach mark in the middle of my hall. I usually only use water on spots, because they are most often just garden dirt, and I have no memory what it was I put there. Anyway, I will be contacting someone who can patch it, and I’ll have to take a piece from the back of a closet in order to match it. It will probably look fine, and anyway, people are not taking time to notice the carpet when they are walking down the hall. It will give me the pleasure of checking one more thing off the list — yay!

This Sunday we Orthodox will celebrate Pentecost, and I am getting excited thinking about the day. We decorate with greenery of all kinds; in our temple it’s often whole trees that are brought in for the feast, and in some parishes around the world they cover the floor with grass and wildflowers.

The thought of decorating the church floor takes me back to my new problem of an ugly spot on my floor. It makes me think about how many times I covered a stain on some garment or bath mat, etc, with embroidered flowers. My mind did immediately go in that direction when I saw the small bleached area in the carpet, wondering (very briefly) if there were a comparable fix that I could accomplish in a homey DIY way. It’s not easy to give up doing those creative things, especially when Chesterton’s words linger in my mind: “Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance… But the thing is true; economy, properly understood, is the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is creative….”

I’m so happy that I can still be creative in the kitchen and garden. That is about all the creativity I have time for anymore! The borage (pictured just above) is blooming and the bees are loving it; they don’t mind having to hang upside down to drink. So many things are blooming, but I will just show you one more, the mock orange. Two bushes were planted on either side of my patio so that their scent would drift across the space where one might sit of a spring evening. Alas, spring evenings aren’t conducive to being outdoors in this neighborhood, neither does this particular mock orange have a strong scent; I have to put my nose right in the flower to detect it. So nothing is lost! And the loveliness of these flowers to the eye is great wealth. Thank you, Lord.

The Holy Spirit at the peak of Mount Sinai.

June 23, 2024icons, monasteries, mountainsDivine Liturgy, Fr. Justin Sinaites, Fr. Justin's Blog, Holy Spirit Day, libraries, Mount Sinai, Pentecost, St. Catherine's MonasteryGretchenJoanna

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.

Ascension, looking toward Pentecost….

June 13, 2024church, feasts, historyAlbrecht Dürer, Ascension, Book of Jubilees, Jonathan Pageau, Pentecost, Peter Brueghel the Younger, podcasts, Richard Rohlin, Tower of BabelGretchenJoanna

Today was Ascension Day for the Eastern Orthodox. During his homily our pastor drew our attention to the fresco we could see behind him, of Christ ascending, with the disciples looking up at him, 40 days after his resurrection. He said that in our temple that event is depicted above the altar as a reminder that in the Divine Liturgy we also ascend to Heaven. The icon shows what St. Luke tells in the first chapter of the Book of Acts:

“The first account I composed, Theophilus, about all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when He was taken up, after He had by the Holy Spirit given orders to the apostles whom He had chosen. To these He also presented Himself alive, after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days, and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God.

“And gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, “Which,” He said, “you heard of from Me; for John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

“And so when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, ‘Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.’

“And after He had said these things, He was lifted up while they were looking on, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And as they were gazing intently into the sky while He was departing, behold, two men in white clothing stood beside them; and they also said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into the sky? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in just the same way as you have watched Him go into heaven.'”

St. Paul mentions our own situation when he writes to the Ephesians :

“God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him
in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.”

In our daily prayers, we no longer start with the Paschal Troparion, “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life,” but replace that line with the Troparion of Ascension:

Thou hast ascended in glory, O Christ our God,
and gladdened Thy disciples with the promise of the Holy Spirit.
And they were assured by the blessing
that Thou art the Son of God, and Redeemer of the World.

In only ten days we will come to Pentecost, and return to the usual beginning, “O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth….” But for now, we are with the disciples, waiting for the Spirit, Whom Christ said would “come upon” them.

^“They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’

^“Then the apostles returned to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day’s walk from the city.When they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying. Those present were Peter, John, James and Andrew; Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew; James son of Alphaeus and Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.They all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.”

In anticipation of Pentecost, I might revisit the history of that feast in the Old Testament, and in the Book of Jubilees, which Richard Rohlin and Jonathan Pageau discuss in two podcasts, which are also about the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, and about the Tower of Babel. What — are all these connected? Yes.

Pentecost is traditionally considered an inversion of the curse of Babel. I heard some of these thoughts at the Symbolic World Summit I attended earlier this year, but it is a lot to stretch my mind toward. To consider how “the confusion of tongues is resolved,” explained by a philologist like Rohlin — I have to say, it reveals God’s glory, and His wonderful plan through the ages.

Here are the two podcasts, if you want to check them out:
The Tower of Babel with Richard Rohlin
and
The Tower of Babel Part 2 with Richard Rohlin