Tag Archives: time

It’s a joyful day, whatever day it is.

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Pascha goes on and on! So we have Paschal Bright Week services, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday….

Christ rose on the first day of the week, Sunday. The Church has always considered this to be be the eighth day as well, the beginning of a new order of things. I don’t really understand this. But our bishop mentioned it this morning, Bright Monday, when he talked about the grace that extends throughout the week hinting at the newness of life given us in Christ’s Resurrection.

We all are feeling the newness. Today we lived in the joy of Christ’s presence and celebrated it in many ways, including a loaf of bread. This year it was baked by a young girl with the help of a more experienced baker. It must weigh over five pounds — I know, because I was honored to carry it in the procession around the church, and then standing on the porch as the gospel for the day was read.

This bread is called the Artos and “symbolizes the physical presence of the resurrected Christ among the disciples.” It will remain in the church all week and be carried in procession after Divine Liturgy those days; on Saturday it will be cut into pieces and distributed to the parishioners.

Below is a photo I found online of a Bright Week procession elsewhere.  It seems it might be the only photo available — maybe everyone wants to actively participate in these blessed processions and not stand apart to be a photographer.

On Pascha night I remembered that I have a piece of last year’s Artos in my refrigerator. I’m sure I was saving it for a time when I was ill or afflicted, and I must never have thought that I was terribly bad off at any time during the year. Praise God for that. So I’ll have to eat it for joy this week and put a new portion in reserve for any upcoming needs. Having been exposed to the air for a whole week it becomes dry and keeps very well!

The day of our Lord’s Resurrection is another case, it seems, of how we live in the present life and at the same time we live in the reality and anticipation of God’s coming Kingdom. St. Gregory Palamas wrote in a sermon “On the Sabbath & The Lord’s Day”:

Whatever is said in praise of the 7th day applies even more to the 8th, for the latter fulfills the former. It was Moses who unwittingly ascribed honor to the 8th day, the Lord’s Day. The Jubilee year (Leviticus 25:8ff), which Moses regarded as a year of forgiveness and named accordingly, was not counted among the ‘weeks of years’ under the law , but came after them all, and was an eighth year proclaimed after the last of these 7 year periods. Moses did the same with regards to periods of 7 weeks.

However, the lawgiver did not only introduce in this hidden way the dignity of the 8th day, which we call the Lord’s Day because it is dedicated to the Lord’s resurrection, but also on the feast called “Trumpets” referred to the 8th day as ‘the final solemn assembly’ (cf. Lev.23:36 LXX, Numbers 29:35) meaning the completion and fulfillment of all the feasts. At that point he clearly said that the 8th day would be holy for us, proclaiming in advance how divine, glorious, & august Sunday was to be after everything pertaining to the law had passed away.

But I see that Metropolitan Anthony in a passage I quoted just last week tells us that we are living this present life in the Seventh Day:

…the seventh day will be seen as all the span of time that extends from the last act of creation on the part of God to the last day, the eighth day, the coming of the Lord, when all things will be fulfilled, all things will come to an end, reach their goal, and blossom out in glory. It is within this seventh day, which is the whole span of history, that the creativeness of man is to find its scope and its place.

In this whole span of history we have much work to do, including our bread-baking and flower-arranging to celebrate Christ’s rising from the dead. St. Isaac of Syria tells a bit about how the fullness of our Eighth Day is yet to come, and seems to see things somewhat differently from Met. Anthony:

The Lord’s Day is a mystery of the knowledge of the truth that is not received by flesh and blood, and it transcends speculations. In this age there is no eighth day, nor is there a true Sabbath. For he who said that ‘God rested on the seventh day,’ signified the rest [of our nature] from the course of this life, since the grave is also of a bodily nature and belongs to this world. Six days are accomplished in the husbandry of life by means of keeping the commandments; the seventh is spent entirely in the grave; and the eighth is the departure from it.

It certainly is a mystery to my small mind, but I am always comforted by these realities of the faith that show how great is our God, and His plans for us, so high as the heavens are above the earth, that they are hard to grasp with our minds. And I’m full of that joy that is not received by flesh and blood, of the glorious risen Savior Christ. He is here every day.

Every season feeds upon the past. -Gioia

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VETERANS’ CEMETERY
The ceremonies of the day have ceased,
Abandoned to the ragged crow’s parade.
The flags unravel in the caterpillar’s feast.
The wreaths collapse onto the stones they shade.
How quietly doves gather by the gate
Like souls who have no heaven and no hell.
The patient grass reclaims its lost estate
Where one stone angel stands as sentinel.
The voices whispering in the burning leaves,
Faint and inhuman, what can they desire
When every season feeds upon the past,
And summer’s green ignites the autumn’s fire?
The afternoon’s a single thread of light
Sewn through the tatters of a leafless willow,
As one by one the branches fade from sight,
And time curls up like paper turning yellow.
— Dana Gioia
Golden Gate National Cemetery

Lost in a very good dream…

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gooseberries

Coming home from the mountains last week, I didn’t have the usual thoughts of “That was lovely, but I have lots of things to do at home now and I can’t wait to get started.” No, this time I was mostly sad to say good-bye, and also couldn’t find good words to go with my pictures.

But one of our guests up there managed in her thank-you note yesterday to take away my sadness with her response to the few higher-elevation days we shared. I’m making her my guest blogger today. (Her thoughts in brown.)

Mountain time is a time-out from time, 
like the timelessness of being 
lost in a very good dream.
little lupine plants

When we came down from Gumdrop Dome the ground under the forest was scattered everywhere with tiny lupine plants. I wonder what month I would need to be there to see the slopes covered with tiny purple spikes?

… the dilated twinkle of 100 billion stars in the night sky (which reductionistically would take 3,000 yrs. to count.)

Of our three nights at over 8,000 feet elevation, we had only one night’s opening in the clouds to see the star glory. We missed most of the meteor shower — still, we saw a few shooting stars. And we gawked at the Milky Way, and were happy that the air was unbelievably warm all during our stay, day and night, so that we could gawk longer.

overlooking a canyon
All the sweet consolations of fragrant fresh mountain air, delicious soft water, 
warm sleepy nights… 

…laughter, storytelling, hiking and/or trying to chase Mr. Glad up Gumdrop Dome (in a loony-tune cartoon, some of us could take a running start up a sheer vertical rock face, hauling a low center of big gravity, our momentum so great that we actually overshoot the summit –beating him to the base – but unfortunately, not in one piece).

swooping in to join the fray
…the terrible joy 
of ecstatic hummingbirds 
a-feeding.

Waiting and Weakness – Christmas

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Holy Trinity Cathedral in San Francisco

The greatest pleasure and thrill of Christmas can’t be had without a little waiting, something like children of yore had to do, when their Christmas trees weren’t even ready for viewing until Christmas Day.

That thought is on my mind as I say Hello! to all the friends I see here at Pom Pom’s Childlike Christmas (blog) Party, a party for which we can show up four times over the next month! I had barely noticed the open invitation, with no time even to lay a finger aside of my nose, when she added me to the published guest list — I was signed up! I am happy to attend, Lord willing, by posting a blog each Wednesday.

It seems to me that the way we Eastern Orthodox Christians get into the Christmas spirit can be combined with the theme of children and simple pleasures that Pom Pom describes:

“Yesterday I asked my students, ‘Why the big greed festival over the holidays? Aren’t we fine right now? Don’t we have enough?’ …Here at Pom Pom’s Ponderings, we are going to think about the simple pleasures of the holidays, the childlike wonder that doesn’t involve the ka-ching ka-ching of the cash register….four holiday Wednesdays of posts that attend to the simple childlike thrills of Christmas. ….that babe in a manger and the children He loves and cherishes.”

The modern world likes to jump into Christmas immediately after Halloween or Thanksgiving, but the more traditional way to celebrate involves some Anticipation and Preparation. Children might think of it as Waiting and Getting Ready. Some of us have been in Advent, which we call the Nativity Fast, since November 15th.

I’m not experienced in helping children to forgo the treats that are pressed upon them in every shop and neighbor’s house at this time of year, but even before I found the Church and its traditions I tried to keep the family thinking ahead to a special Holy Day, and not just because of the presents.

We need some weeks to sing “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel!” and for it to register in our minds that God’s people had to wait many generations and thousands of years for the coming of the Savior. A little bit of suffering in the form of doing without the usual quantity of food, or rich foods, (in the Orthodox Church we eat less, and almost vegan, when fasting) can make it more real for us that the world before Christ was suffering under the curse of sin. We feel our own weakness, too, when eating less, and that can soften our hearts.

Why the photo of Holy Trinity Cathedral above? My church and sister churches sponsor Advent retreats every year, usually a day or half a day when we can hear a lecture and attend services together to help us focus on the coming feast in a fruitful way. Last year I went to one at Holy Trinity and took the picture. (By the way, I saw the same flowering plant at a winery last week and still don’t know what it is.)

One children’s book that might contribute to a child’s understanding of time and the processes that are necessary preliminaries to accomplishing a goal, in particular a few points on the timeline of our salvation history, is The Tale of Three Trees, “a traditional folktale retold by Angela Elwell Hunt with illustrations by Tim Jonke.”

Three small trees stand on a hilltop and dream about what they might do when they are grown. One wants to be a treasure chest, one a sailing ship that carries kings, and one just wants to stay where it is and point to God.

It takes many years for them to get big enough to be cut for lumber and fashioned into items that play a part in the earthly life of our Lord. The first tree is made into a manger — and this first creation of wood that the Christ Child came in contact with establishes the story as one for Christmas.

All the trees feel initial disappointment and humiliation, none more so than the one that is made into a rude cross and used for violent purposes: “She felt ugly and harsh and cruel.” But in the end all of the trees realize the blessedness of being used for the glory of God, and the young reader is reminded of the reason a Baby was born at Bethlehem.

Even our Lord Jesus went through a period of preparation, growing up as a man for 30 years before He began His ministry, but He surely wasn’t idle during that time. As we wait for Christmas we can prepare our hearts by prayer and fasting and acts of love.

Those of us with families are blessed to have many possibilities under what might be the Acts of Love category. (They might even include some noise of cash registers, but I won’t say any more about that at this party.) I know I have cookie-baking, doll-clothes-sewing, decorating and menu-planning and making up beds on my list.

The truth is, I’m not very good at being child-like before Christmas. I feel so many responsibilities that children don’t have to concern themselves with, and I get pretty busy with all the fun type of preparations.

Somehow, though, all of that, when combined with participation in the church traditions and services, adds up to make me feel some of the longing and the weakness that are appropriate right now.

I’ll post on Wednesdays more about some of the simple pleasures that our family has enjoyed over the years, even while remembering that the fullness of joy, the acting like a child, will start on December 25th. And won’t it be wonderful!