What? Already?

How did this happen?  It’s the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee, and I flat out didn’t see it coming — which is distressing since I noted that last Sunday was it’s forerunner, Zachaeus Sunday.  Be that as it may, the Lenten Triodion opens now, and it is a quick three weeks until Forgiveness Sunday on March 13 and the beginning of true Lent.  I love Lent.  You will get tired of hearing me say that.

For my non-Orthodox readers, this is the Sunday that anounces a week in which we don’t fast at all.  In a typical week, we will fast on Wednesday and Friday.  By fast, I mean that we will abstain from meat, fish, oil, dairy (in many jurisdictions) and wine.  This is pretty average for us.  During this week, though, we can eat whatever we like.  The teaching is to remind us that it is not our works that bring us to salvation, like the Pharisee liked to think.  Instead, it is the repentance of the Publican that brings us closer to God, the “joyful sorrow” that brings us to God, and then keeps us there.  So even though it is cheeseburgers galore this week, it is not exactly festive, like, say, the fast free period after Christmas or Pascha.

(For you Orthodox out there, am I the only one that does this?  As the beginning of Great Lent draws nigh, I find myself thinking “I should have a cheeseburger before the curtain drops.”  I end up eating more meat over the next week or two than I normally do.  A bad habit.)

Anyway, having returned from Johnstown, I find that my fellow Ortho-bloggers are showing signs of frenzied pre-Lenten hilarity.  We seek out goofy humor before Lent, just like I look for cheeseburgers.  Clifton provides a link to yet another version of “Baby Got Back”, this one called “Baby got Book”.  Oh yeah.  Those girls with ten pound King James Bibles!  Hot!

And Erica, who is making her way into the Church, looks back and finds the Narrower Catechism (like the Shorter Catechism, you know) for Evangelicals.

That’s right guys, we better have our fun while we can.  Lent’s a comin’.

Thank God.  Sure, I love the minor key melodies we sing, I love the unexpected beauty in singing Psalm 137, I love my annual reading of St. John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent — how did St. John, who died some 1500 years ago, come to know so much about me?  I love the liturgical richness, the sense of community as the whole parish shares their struggles and trials as one body.  I love Forgiveness Sunday, when I get to kiss each person in the parish (right cheek, left cheek, and then because my Church is slavic, go back for a third on the right), and both give and receive forgiveness.  But most of all, I love the concentrated period of prayer and repentance, the battle to reclaim our souls, leading up to Holy Week, and the most marvelous, incredible, joyous, earth shaking feast of all, Pascha.

St. Anthimos of Chios

A particular love of mine is finding out about great contemporary saints of the Orthodox Church.  Elder Porphyrios, who I wrote about a couple of months ago, is one example.  Another that I am very fond of personally is Papa Nicholas Planas, a humble priest in Athens in the early twentieth century.  When we were in Athens, we were able to venerate his relics, and see the altar at which he served at the Church of St. John the Hunter.  I was very happy to find an icon of him to bring home, which now resides in our prayer corner.

So I am always happy to run across new contemporary saints that I was not aware of, and today I found such a saint in the Synaxarion.  Among those commemorated on February 15 is our Venerable Father Anthimus.  He was from Chios, an island off of Greece in the Mediterranean.

The Saint was born in 1869 to a poor family, and left school early to take up the shoemaker’s trade.  At the age of 19, he had occasion to visit the nearby Monastery of the Holy Fathers.  There, he was very much taken with the angelic life, and on returning to his village began to try to emulate the life of the Fathers.  The Monastery’s founder, St. Pachomius, the spiritual father of the great St. Nektarios of Aegina, declared to his monks after Anthimus left that “that young novice is already a mature monk, and he is destined to become an eminent Father.”

St. Pachomius was indeed right.  Anthimus began a life of prayer and ascetism that astounded everybody.  Even during a time of poor health, when he was sent back to his own village to recover, he prayed almost continuously.  He worked during the day, providing for his aged parents and giving the rest of his earnings to the poor, and customarily spent each night praying inside the hollow trunk of an old olive tree near his cell.  During one period, he prayed for nineteen nights without sleep, taking only a little bread and water every two days.  At the end, his spirit was carried into paradise, as he repeated unceasingly Kyrie eleison.  Over the years, through the grace of the Holy Spirit he performed many miracles, and throngs of people trekked to Chios to visit him.  He was finally ordained a priest in Smyrna, and after a pilgrimmage to Mount Athos, he returned to Chios and worked as a chaplain at a leper hospital.  He cared for the most desperately ill patients himself, and many of his patients found renewed faith in God, and themselves became monks and nuns.

During the great exile of the Greek population from Asia Minor in 1922-24, great numbers of refugees arrived in Chios.  The Saint was particularly struck by the desperate position of many women and girls, who arrived destitute and homeless.  Pursuant to the direction of God, Anthimus undertook to construct a monastic community for women on a steep mountainside.  He himself took responsibility for its construction, and two years later, his own wonder working icon of the Mother of God was moved into the newly completed Church.  The Saint lived in that monastery for the rest of his life, providing spiritual guidance and direction not only for the nuns, but for thousands of pilgrims.  Through prayer and constant intercession before the icon of the Theotokos, many, many people were healed of their physical and spiritual illnesses.

Saint Anthimus reposed on February 15, 1960, after giving his blessing and counsel to his disciples.  Like all of the great saints, he remains active today, in prayer and intercession for the faithful before the Throne of God.

Intimations of mortality

I have always been a strong person.  In my adult life, I was really only truly ill once, almost twenty years ago when a case of the flu left me unable to raise my head, much less stand upright.  It was a memorable day because a federal judge refused to postpone my case that day, and threatened to put me in jail if I didn’t show up.  Only the swift intervention of my doctor, who called the judge and said he was hospitalizing me, saved my hide.  The odd thing is that I was so out of it that the whole drama was beyond my comprehension at the time.  My wife, my secretary and my doctor pulled me out of the fire that time.

Other than that, I have been unusually healthy.  Everyone else around me would drop like flies from one malady or another, and I felt not the least bit bad.  Even when I caught something, I would shake it off in a matter of hours and be back to normal.  At 48, I am not necessarily young, but not old either.  In the last year or two, though, I have begun noticing unsettling reminders of mortality, wake up calls if you will.  Nothing major, but things like what has happened this week.  A nonspecific illness, without any truly alarming symptoms, which just lays me low.   A general level of exhaustion.  Just a feeling, as it were, that things are no longer the way they once were, that the inexorable progress of time is beginning to chip away, bit by bit, at youth.

I don’t necessarily mind this.  Often I need the reminder.  When I was young, I was game for about anything.  A little rock climbing, frequent winter backpacking trips in terrible conditions, 70 hour work weeks.  Why not?  When you are young and strong and successful, what is there to fear?  What was more important than fun or money or success?  Very little that I could see.

I don’t live in fear of death, but I have learned to live in remembrance of it.  Every Sunday in the Liturgy the Deacon sings, leading us in prayer: “That we may complete the remaining time of our life in peace and repentance, let us ask of the Lord.”

In the choir, we sing out “Grant this, O Lord”

The Deacon continues: “A Christian ending to our life, painless, blameless, peaceful and a good defense before the dread judgment seat of Christ, let us ask of the Lord.”

“Grant this, O Lord,” we chant, and the older of us, including myself, make the sign of the cross, a quiet yet fervent endorsement of the sentiment.  When I was younger, I would have thought the petitions to be irrelevant at best, unnecessarily morbid at worst.  Now I don’t.  I can’t see the train yet, but I am beginning to hear it’s whistle, lonely and distant.  When I hear that whistle, I know that it is living faith that prepares us for the grave, that it is the communion of the spirit with the love of God that consoles us as we wait at the station.

A long time ago I read a fascinating book by a French historian, Phillipe Aries, called The Hour of Our Death.  Aries looked at death through the centuries, and using evidence from writings, art, and even epitaphs on tombstones, concluded that in former times people had an opportunity, in many cases, to prepare for their death.  They seemed to know it was coming, and that they needed to make amends with those around them, and to make peace with God.  Yet, Aries concluded, as the pace of life picked up, people no longer perceived the approaching end; they no longer could hear that distant whistle over the noise of modern life.  People in modern times seem surprised by death, blinking in astonishment as it roars down the track in a sudden explosion of startling intimacy.

I am not, mind you, anywhere near death, at least to my knowledge.  My family is long lived, and I am feeling somewhat better today than I was yesterday.  But I am grateful for the occasional reminder, for the quiet voice that reminds me that like all of our kind, somewhere my grave awaits.  The whistle in the distance.  The end of the beginning, and the beginning of Eternity.