The mark of Christianity

Theology | Quotations | Good Ideas

This is the mark of Christianity — however much a man toils, and however many righteousnesses he performs, to feel that he has done nothing, and in fasting to say, `This is not fasting,’ and in praying, `This is not prayer,’ and in perseverance at prayer, `I have shown no perseverance; I am only just beginning to practice and to take pains’; and even if he is righteous before God, he should say, `I am not righteous, not I; I do not take pains, but only make a beginning every day.’

– St. Macarius the Great

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Monasteries

Life

Yesterday was an interesting day for me, as I spent nearly the entire day in Orthodox monasteries. In the morning I went and woke up my brother while Larisa was getting her hair cut, and we headed over to the monastery of St. John the New. This monastery is close to downtown Suceava, so it wasn’t hard to get there, and it features a very beautiful, ancient church that is currently being restored. The church and monastery are named for St. John the New, who was martyred by the Turks in the fifteenth century and whose relics are in the middle of the church in a large, fusty reliquary. We were lucky, because they happened to be doing services as we arrived as yesterday was the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and we were able to listen to the Gospel reading (though of course my brother didn’t understand it). After that we headed to the gift shop, where I stumbled upon a large reproduction of Rublev’s Holy Trinity that I bought for a mere $20, and my brother got a small, hand-painted icon of Christ Pantocrator for his girlfriend.

After that we drove out to the main goal for the day: the Putna Monastery, the burial place of Stephen the Great. Stephen the Great was a king of Moldova in the 15th century who fought some forty battles with the Turks, defending his country, and still finding time to spare for founding two dozen churches and monasteries. For this (the churches more than the battles) he was named a saint, was genuinely very pious and God-fearing, by every account I’ve ever heard of him, and his icon names him “The Right-Faithful Lord Stephen the Great and Holy.” He is usually depicted holding a monastery or a fortification and presenting it to Christ seated, or sometimes to the infant Christ in the arms of the Theotokos (this latter being the icon that’s painted above his tomb). Aside from his tomb and the tombs of several other Romanian nobles from that time period, the church itself sports some fantastic iconography and an especially ornate iconostasis, as well as a museum showing all sorts of artifacts from Stephen the Great’s time period.

The monastery Putna was chosen as his burial place because it was close to the hermitage of his spiritual counselor Daniil Sihastru, another famous Romanian saint. Daniil Sihastru spent most of his adult life in a home he hollowed out of a rock, a few miles away from the site of the Putna monastery, where he prayed and dispensed spiritual guidance to anyone that was willing to hike up to his rock. Stephen the Great evidently did this a lot. Today it’s much easier, as there’s a road, so it only took us a couple of minutes to arrive, climb up to the rock, and take some pictures.

I have pictures of all of this, but we’ll wait until we get home to Seattle to upload them.

As a final stop, we ran by a large church in the Burdujeni district of Suceava so that I could take a picture of a particular icon that had struck me two years ago when I was first in Romania. I couldn’t make out the name at the time, but now I know who it was: St. Peter the Athonite (look at the second item listed). The following is not the same as the icon that first struck me, but it’s similar:

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There are sins, and there are sins

Theology

A few days ago I picked up a Romanian Orthodox prayer book, which I’ve been paging through and working with ever since. Most of the prayers are familiar to me at least in translation, but in the section on confession I found a ranking of sins that was surprising and delightful.

When I saw the section entitled “The Gravest Sins”, I was expecting the familiar list of seven deadly sins that most people know, however vaguely, from the Roman Catholic church. However, this is not what I found. The sins are given three ranks: The Gravest Sins, Which Are Against the Holy Spirit, The Sins Which Cry Out To Heaven, and The Chief Sins (my own translations. There are probably customary English names for these ranks, but how could I resist a name like “The Sins Which Cry Out To Heaven” ?) The third rank, The Chief Sins is very similar to the seven deadly sins that we know: pride, love of wealth, fornication, greed, envy, anger, and sloth. The only thing that I find especially interesting here is that “love of wealth” is listed separately from “greed”, which could occasion a comment at another time. Likewise, there are five sins listed in The Sins Which Cry Out To Heaven: murder and abortion, the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, withholding the workers’ pay, oppression of widows and orphans, and mockery and oppression of parents.

Let’s take a quick moment to marvel at these two lists. I find it remarkable how little space on the lists is taken up with culture-war preoccupations: only three items named here (abortion, sodomy, and fornication) hold any interest for the usual suspects on the Christian right, and they’re sharing space with greed, workers’ pay, and oppression of widows, which are usually hobbyhorses for the left. And then there’s the ones that no one pays any attention to: who cares about sloth anymore? Or mockery of parents? And where are things like theft and lying?

So it’s good to be reminded that the priorities of the Church, when properly ordered, do not necessarily match up with our current cultural and political points of contention.

But it’s the first set, the Sins Against the Holy Spirit that most intrigues me:

1. Unfaithfulness or indifference to God, who is magnified in the Trinity.

There’s a whole post somewhere to be written about indifference to God and how easy that is. And I like the fact that they specify the Trinity: it’s not the vague, monist “God” of Hallmark cards and politicians that we must be faithful to, but the God who is worshipped as Three in One.

2. Hatred for God.

Which isn’t a surprise.

3. Despondency before the great mercy of God and His care for us…

I did a double-take when I read this, and went back to make sure that I understood it. But, no, this is exactly what it says: lack of faith in God’s goodness, both to forgive sins and to care for His people, is a sin equal to hatred of God. The significance of this, and what it means for every bruised soul in Christendom can hardly be overstated.

… or too great a trust in the all-goodness of God, trust which makes you to commit sins without cease, reckoning that God will forgive you even if you do not correct yourself.

This is the continuation of number 3, and it expresses the opposite pole. This is the pit into which I have fallen: allowing myself to sin, knowing that God will eventually forgive me. Which He does (see above), but we must repent of the pride of leaning on His mercy.

It seems like there should be much more that I can and should say about this. My entire Christian life has been lived between the poles marked out by this third item. Doamne miluieşte…

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Merry Christmas!

Life | Limba română

Merry Christmas! Christ is born, God is with us!

Crăciun fericit! Hristos s-a născut, Dumnezeu e cu noi!

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16 Years Old

Theology | Good Ideas

This Christmas season I have been filled with thoughts of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Last night I had a dream which was, for the most part, pure silliness: I dreamt that a girl at my high school had been discovered to be the Virgin Mary. No, this doesn’t make any sense, and the dream ended with me realizing as much. But the image that stayed with me was the fact that Mary was only a high-schooler when she gave birth to the Savior. Tradition says that she was sixteen, in fact.

Sixteen.

At sixteen years of age, she had found favor with God and was named “blessed among women”.

As a teenage girl she was already closer to God than I will ever be.

At sixteen she became the Mother of God.

It blows my mind to think that Jesus came into the world through the womb of woman much younger than me. It blows my mind to think of a shy, meek teenager holding the Son of God in her arms, kissing Him and being kissed. That’s why I like the icon at the beginning of this post: it’s a simple moment of familial intimacy, filled with eternal significance because the child is the Eternal Son.

It is truly meet and right to call you blessed…

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Prayer Request

Life

A friend of ours here in Romania named Ana is having extreme difficulties with her mother. She has over the last few years, slowly gone completely insane. She now has the trifecta of dementia: hearing voices, paranoid, and hypocondriac, to the point where she refuses to turn on lights, believing that diseases will come through the wires and refuses to allow Ana to turn on the radio, television, or computer because she thinks she is being watched through them. Ana is the only one that works in her house and has to provide for her mother and siblings, and her mother’s growing dementia make it difficult to do this.

We are trying to get her mother committed to a hospital soon, though obviously this is the lesser of two evils. Please pray for Ana and her mother.

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Romania!

Life

Salutari din Romania, Americans.

Today Larisa and I begin our long vacation: three weeks in Romania, enjoying the weather, the food, and our family. This morning has been a relaxed chance to recover from our trip over here, which was terrible. It was by far the most difficult travel experience I’ve ever had.

First: there was a windstorm in Seattle the evening before we were to leave, which knocked out power and disrupted flights at the airport. Our flight was long after the storm had abated and the radio led us to believe that normalcy had resumed at the airport… which appeared to be true for everyone except Delta, our first flight. Delta had an extremely long line of people whose flights had been delayed or canceled, and was servicing them incredibly slowly with TWO people. One of them was on the phone trying to get a team of twelve to South Africa, and the other one was occupied with getting everybody else going.l They were so inefficient that the person in front of us actually missed her flight because they moved people through so slowly. Eventually they expanded their team with a few more people and got things moving, but the line that we were moved to was held up by an angry traveler who simply refused to believe that he couldn’t fly out of the country without a passport, and who wouldn’t leave the woman alone in order for the rest of us to move on.

The result: despite arriving almost 3.5 hours early, we got to our gate just when it should have been boarding. Fortunately (?) the flight was a half-hour late, so we were fine.

So we got to Atlanta for the first plane change. Because the next flight was more than six hours away, we had to get our luggage and then check in again, but the line for this was the longest thing I have ever seen. It completely filled the large waiting area, straggled down the hall next to the domestic check-in area, and doubled back on itself. Eventually we moved through that line and got rid of our baggage, only to go to another, equally enormous line for the security checkpoint. There Larisa had to hand over two bottles of perfume that had passed in Seattle, but not, evidently, in Atlanta. Then we waited several hours for the next flight, which got us to Paris.

The Paris airport is without a doubt the ugliest, least efficient, and most unfriendly airport I’ve ever been to. Fortunately we only had to wait three hours there. We hated it.

We did, eventually, get to Romania. Larisa was absolutely sick of travel by that point, so we paid to fly to Suceava rather than taking the ten-hour bus ride. This was the only fun part: it was a propeller plane, which I had never had the chance to ride in. It made a terrible noise when we took off, like the plane was coming apart, but it did, somehow, get us to Suceava. Yeah!

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