A meditation on the Annunciation

Among the hymns of the Feast of the Annunciation, we sing of the strange tidings: “that God as man would be born a child of her without seed, fashioning again the whole human race!  Proclaim, people, the good tidings of the re-creation of the world!”

These are strange tidings indeed.  God conceived of a virgin?  The re-fashioning of the whole human race?  The re-creation of the world?  Our hymn reminds us that the Annunciation was an event that did more than change history.  It was an event that affected all of Creation; that in fact made the entire human race new once again.  It was an event that is so astonishing, so unexpected, that it shaped our entire understanding of God.  It gave us Christ, the new Adam.  It gave us the most Holy Theotokos, the new Eve.

The Annunciation is an event that draws us in, that raises questions of enormous significance.  It is far more than a meeting of an Archangel and a young woman, even though that in itself is nothing to treat in an offhand way.  Rather, it is a event with ramifications that extend through all time and through all the universe.  It is a feast that offers us great depth and meaning; a seemingly simple conversation on which the salvation of the world turns.  For us today, as Orthodox Christians, it is important to remember at least a few of the consequences.  We need to ask ourselves what the Annunciation tells us about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  We need to ask ourselves what it tells us about our Most Holy Lady, the Mother of God.  And equally important, what does it say to you and to I, as ordinary Christians, struggling to work out our salvation.  The common thread that answers all three of those questions is this: put in its simplest terms, it is a story of self denial, of self emptying, of what the Fathers called kenosis.  It is, purely and simply, a story of love, a story we should never tire of hearing.

First, the Annunciation reminds us of the meaning of the Incarnation, of the very purpose and meaning of the work of Christ.  Why was it necessary that He come, that He take flesh, that He live, die and be resurrected?

After the Fall of our ancestors, Adam and Eve, the image of God that was contained within humans was dimmed and defaced.  Adam and Eve lived in innocence and without sin.  Their identification with God was complete.  In them, the image of God could be seen clearly and strong.  That image was not found in their looks or their mannerisms.  It was found in their intimate communion with God Himself.

After the Fall, and their expulsion from the Garden, that communion was destroyed, and it was further destroyed for their descendants.   It is not that our ancestors after Adam and Eve were guilty of the sin that led to the Fall.  Instead, they became subject to the consequences of that sin.  Without the communion and closeness to God, their minds became darkened.  They replaced the desire to please and know God with a desire to please themselves.  They became slaves to those desires and to evil.   They were separated from God.  And as that separation became more and more complete, men and women became increasingly subject to passions, to the darkening of their souls.  As time went on, the gulf between humans and God, the damage wrought by the passions and by evil, became so great that the image of God, which is stamped upon us in creation, became darkened, virtually unrecognizable.   And in that desperation, we were subject to death.  Worse, we were its slaves.  Where Adam and Eve were created immortal, after the Fall both they and their descendants died, were buried, and went to Sheol: a place of shadows.  It was not hell as we think of it, but it was a place of sorrow and imprisonment.  St. Athanasius described our plight in this way,:

Men, [he said] bowed down by the pleasures of the moment and by the frauds and illusions of the evil spirits, did not lift up their heads toward the truth.  So burdened were they with their wickednesses that they seemed rather to be brute beasts than reasonable men, reflecting the very Likeness of the Word.

But the terrible circumstances of men and women did not mean that God had abandoned us.  How could He abandon His creation?  He had formed us out of immeasurable love, and so cherished us that He made us in His very image. Nothing else in creation bore the image of God.  Nothing.  Not angels.  Not the Cherubim, not the Seraphim.  Not the principalities and the Powers.  Only humans.  Only men and women.  God would no more abandon us than a king would abandon his subjects, or a mother her children.  The question was not so much whether we would be abandoned in our despair, but by what means the rescue would take place.

Here is where the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, undertakes the needful task.  Why Christ?  St. Athanasius again explains, saying that:

Men could not have done it, for they are only made after the Image; nor could angels, for they are not the images of God.  The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image.

It was no accident, the Saint tells us, that creation was renewed by the very same Word of God who first made it.  The Exapostilarian is precisely right.  Creation was corrupted, it was careening toward destruction.  A new creation was required.

But you might ask, why was it necessary that the Word take human flesh?  After all, the original creation was accomplished without that requirement.  The answer is found in death.  Death entered the World through Adam, and it would take a new Adam to remove it.  Humans must regain the deification that they had at creation, the spark of the divine.  Only a fitting death could accomplish that.  But the Word could not die unless he assumed human flesh.  Only then, by being ransomed for all, could He remove the curse of death that mankind had labored under for so long.  For our sake and for our salvation, Christ must assume humanity.  He must empty Himself of every divine prerogative, of every royal characteristic, of His own will.  He must walk in the flesh.  He must die.  As the Apostle Paul exclaimed, He “emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant…He humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death upon a cross.”

But how was that to happen?  God is not material, He does not walk about among us in any physical sense.  The answer to that riddle is found in the Theotokos.  On the one hand, she is utterly human.  She was born subject to the same corruption and decay that mark us all.  It would be wrong to say that she was born in an immaculate conception, because if she were somehow born differently from the rest of us, already freed from the passions and from corruption, then how could Christ have been fully human?  He would have been something other than human, and would not have achieved our salvation.  It was vital that Christ be one of us, and for that reason, the Virgin Mary was one of us.  So no, the Virgin Mary was not someone made artificially sinless, made and born to be different from us so she would be fit to be the Mother of God.

But on the other hand, it is also wrong to go too far and say that the Theotokos was just like any other young woman, like any teenage girl you might pass on the street.  Either extreme only serves to downplay how extraordinary the Theotokos truly is.

When the Archangel Gabriel visited her, the Virgin Mary was already full of virtue.  From her youngest days, she had been filled with the love of God, and sought Him in all ways, in all things and at all times.  St. Gregory Palamas tells us that she “kept all the powers of her soul and her bodily senses far above any defilement.  This she did authoritatively, steadfastly, decisively and altogether inviolably at all times, as a closed gate preserves the treasures within, and a sealed book keeps hidden from sight what is written inside.”

How did she do this?  Like her Son, the Mother of God is an example of kenosis, of emptying oneself.  She had free will, she could have pursued her own desires, her own goals.  But in all things she pursued her boundless love for God; she sublimated her own will to that of God.

Some of the Fathers tell us that when Gabriel sought out Mary, all of the righteous of the Old Testament, indeed, all of creation, waited breathlessly to hear her reply, fearful that they would hear her refuse God.  Others, like St. John of Damaskos, think differently.  Pointing at the Virgin’s complete kenosis, they tell us that she could only have given the answer that she gave.  She had, they tell us, perfect natural will, completely attuned to God, and allowing only one answer: yes.  In contrast to that, most of us have what is called “the will of choice”.  It is that will, that frame of mind which allows more than one choice, that allows us to waver and to fret.  We have that will when we are so burdened with our passions and desires that we do not recognize the will of God, or if we see it, we do not wish to assent to it.  My will is the will of choice.  It is the kind that virtually all of us have.

But not the Mother of God.  Yet she did not achieve natural will by some magical means, or by divine grant.  She achieved it by dedicating all of her young life, unceasingly, to the worship and contemplation of God.

So is it possible that the average person would have responded affirmatively to God as the Theotokos did?  It is actually very unlikely.  We might refuse from fear.  We might refuse because our plans do not include that baby, divine or not.  We think: how will this effect me?  Is it good for me?  The Virgin, however, has no such thoughts.  God asks, she assents.  As with Christ, in the Virgin we see the enormous rewards, the awe inspiring love that only the voluntary abandonment of self can bring.

And it is in that voluntary abandonment of self that we find our final lesson for the Annunciation, because that abandonment is the key to salvation, the key to selfless love of God and our neighbor.  While you and I cannot physically bear the God-man, while we cannot be the Theotokos, we can participate in our own Annunciation.  The word of God is the seed, and our nous, our hearts, are a spiritual womb.  By saying yes to God, by our faith, the word of God is sown in our hearts, and we are gifted with the fear of God.  In the fear of God – more accurately, in the fear of remaining far from God – we begin our struggles to purify our hearts and defeat our passions.  What happened physically in the Panagia can happen spiritually in us.  Christ always wishes to live in our hearts, but He cannot unless we give him room, unless we move our stuff – our passions and pride – out, and give way to Him.

The Theotokos bore him who created the universe, contained Him who cannot be contained.  Our goal, our destiny if we will but grasp it is to likewise hold within us the Divine fire, that we may, now and for eternity, burn with the love of God.

Advertising for God or “Feed me, Seymour!”‘

The longer I am out of the religious mainstream, the more puzzling the formerly familiar environment becomes.  I spent a long time in a world marked by frequent revivals, special music and outreach marketing plans.  At one time, it seemed the most natural thing in the world, since it operated from a fairly simple logical syllogism:  people must be reached for the Lord, our culture reaches people through events and marketing, therefore the church must market.  The way in which this was actually done varied greatly.  Tons of smaller churches advertise as being a place filled with friendly people.  I always had doubts about that one.  I had trouble imagining the church shopper stopping and saying “Marge!  These folks say they’re friendly!  We should go visit.”  Frankly, I would probably be more prone to visit a church that advertised itself as cranky and irritable, just because that describes me so well.  Kindred spirits and all that.

On a bigger scale, my old denomination, the United Methodist Church, has been running slick spots on television for several years, touting that they have Open Hearts, Open Minds and Open Doors.  I left the denomination shortly after these began running, but even then I was confused by it.  I remember sitting at a clergy meeting in Lake Junaluska, getting a sneak peek at the first ads, which were pretty artsy, and thinking “What the heck is that all about?”  Very nice ads, but very little substance.  To many Methodists, the slogan and campaign seemed to suggest an overly inclusive philosophy they did not agree with.  Nonetheless, as far as I can tell, the denomination seems to think it works, despite the fact that the church loses members every year.  I don’t know.  When they started, there were big meetings about preparing the local churches for huge influxes of people drawn in by the ads.  In my churches, I don’t recall a soul who came in as a result of them.

Of course, the Methodists can’t hold a candle in the mass marketing department to the Mormons.  Presumably pictures of fresh faced young men and women work well for them.

Most churches, though, rely on two strategies:  BIG EVENTS and revivals.  BIG EVENTS are things like guest speakers, concerts, special conferences and the like.  To be perfectly blunt, most of it is entertainment.  It is a sad thing when entertainment becomes a primary motive for church attendance, yet many churches are built on that philosophy.  Drama programs, big musical productions, flashy techno-shows, new and exciting messages.  In my local paper this week is an advertisement for a new congregation in town, which promises that the pastor will bring “an anointed, fresh word for the people”.  Anointed is just one of those buzz words, but fresh?  Is the truth freshness dated?  Apparently so.  If it takes this to make you love God, I suspect there is a problem.  I know many people are entranced with this kind of thing, but I am not among them.

But revivals are the marketing tool par excellence, at least in my neck of the woods.  Get people together for several nights running, make them endure truly wretched special music, and then relentlessly work on the guilt.  Here in the South, you could go to a different revival every week, and if a church wasn’t having one, there would probably be a big tent nearby. I know people who have been saved a dozen times at revivals, weeping and lamenting as they stagger down the aisle, entering a transformation that typically lasts a week or two.

I know.  This is terribly snarky, and I’ll be the first to tell you that churches are full of well meaning people who love God.  But isn’t there something fundamentally wrong with making church entertainment, with making salvation an emotional experience, with defining the success of a church on the basis of whether or not people leave saying “Boy, I was really fed the word today”?  Where in that equation does one find a simple devotion and love for God, for a life of holiness, for a truly transformational ethos?

I’m grateful the Orthodox don’t bother with that.  Oh sure, we have revivals.  We call it confession.  We have a BIG EVENT.  We call it Pascha.  We have some friendly people.  We call them the people who aren’t choir directors.  (Sorry Quasi!  I couldn’t resist!)  We even run a few ads.  But mostly we market using ourselves.  The late Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh said that Orthodox Christians should be such people that if the Gospels were lost, they could be rewritten by looking at us.  Truly transformational.  Truly based in love.  A place where the only time people think about getting fed is at coffee hour after Liturgy.

The end of one adventure. The beginning of another

A whirlwind weekend.  Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Johnstown, back to Atlanta, and finally home, dragging through the door.  A snowstorm in Johnstown made for mild excitement, but the weekend was fun.  On the way back, however, my suitcase decided to take a solo trip.  It likes to do that.  A couple of years ago, it wandered off to Zurich, and just last summer it went to Los Angeles.  When I got it back several days later, it was tanned and buff, but a little sheepish.  I don’t know where it went this time, but when I went back to the airport this afternoon, I found it looking a little bleary.  Chicago?  Vancouver?  San Francisco?  Where was it and what was it doing?  It wasn’t saying, but I had a talk with it on the way home.  I can understand how going back and forth from Pittsburgh to Atlanta would get old after a while, but it has got to stop running off all the time.  The suitcase didn’t say anything; it just sat mutely in the back seat.   But I understand.  We all get that urge sometimes.  I told it if it behaved itself I might send it to London with my wife in a couple of weeks.  I think that helped.  I just had to forgive the travel stained, frayed old friend.

Forgiveness was the theme of the whole weekend, in fact.  In Johnstown, my classmates, the monks, our professor and the Metropolitan all exchanged the kiss of peace.  Not that anybody has done anything I need to forgive them for (although I can’t be so confident about the opposite), but it reminds us that we are dependent on each other, that our salvation is a community journey, and that we are not free agents in the quest for theosis.  It was a pleasure to embrace my fellow cassock wearers.  It was also more than a bit intimidating to embrace the Bishop.  “Forgive me”, he said.  “God forgives”, I reply, but I can’t imagine that he needs to ask.  But the bishop knows better than the rest of us that we must genuinely love and forgive, or our Christianity is in vain.

It was because of that fact that I was particularly anxious to be in my own parish this morning.  Aside from my immediate family, these are the people I love.  None of them has offended me in the least, and whether I’ve managed to offend them or not, I want to look in their eyes and ask for forgiveness, and gratefully receive it.  So after Liturgy is completed, everyone stays in the Church.  Father starts it, standing next to the icon of Christ, and as each parish member finishes with him, they stand in a line next to him, so that eventually every person in the parish passes by you.  Three kisses — right cheek, left cheek, back to the right.  We embrace.

“Forgive me, Father.”  A request, not a demand.

“God forgives,” he replies.  “Forgive me.”

“God forgives,” I reply.

So many people, so much love.  Father.  Pani (the priest’s wife).  My fellow minor clergy, who is still getting over the fact that I told him with a straight face that the required reading for the last class was St. Ignatius’ Epistle to the Marietteans.

K., an alto with the voice of an angel and a spirit to match.  “Forgive me,” I say.  She smiles and replies, and we hug.

B., my colleague in the bass section.  Like the rest of us in the choir, he must have been a class clown as a kid.  But behind his jokes is so much joy.  “God forgives.”

Quasi, our choir director and my pal.  She, of all people, could hesitate on this forgiveness business — we give her a very hard time.  Well, more accurately, I give her a very hard time, but she never loses her sweetness.  “Forgive me,” I say as we embrace.

A., a little four year old girl, who will come into the choir to be held sometimes during Liturgy.  She cannot know how much happiness it gives me to pick her up, when my own girls are now so far past that stage.  I kiss her and she giggles.  Her brother, also about four, will get in my lap sometimes during coffee hour and pull on my whiskers.  He likes to call me Mr. Walrus.  “I know you are,” I fire back with great originality, “but what am I?”  “Forgive me, Mr. Walrus,” he says.  “Forgive me, Mr. Walrus,” I reply, and tousle his hair.

My younger daughter.  “Forgive me,” she says.  It chokes me up.  “God forgives,” I say, “forgive me.”  “God forgives,” she answers.

My wife.  The one who bears the brunt of my moods and my frustrations.  “Forgive me,” I say, and while I know how she will answer, I hang on the words when it comes.  We hold each other until the line makes us move on.

So many people.  So much love.  Smiles and laughter and tears.  As a ritual, it sounds like it could be perfunctory, and it probably could.  Yet I have never seen it not be moving, not be important, whether in the parish or in the kitchen at the seminary.  All of us know that when the sun sets, the Great Fast begins, and the next seven weeks are hard ones.  We need each other.  Together, we are with Christ.  Together, we confront our individual fears and sins.  Together, we work out our salvation in fear and trembling.  And together, on the night of Great and Holy Saturday, we will gather for the beginning of that great feast, the most joyous of seasons, Pascha.  We will sing “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.”  And we will know in our spirits exactly what that means.

As I finish writing this, the sun is setting outside my window.  In a few minutes, Great Lent, that terrible and joyous journey of the soul, will begin.  For my Orthodox readers, may your Lent be a blessed one.

And for all who read me, forgive me.  Consider yourself both forgiven and kissed.  Right, left, right.  God forgives.

Soul Saturday

This morning I got up early, and left the house way before the sun rose.  I don’t normally do that on Saturday, given a choice, but today I wanted to be up and out, because I had something important to do.  The occasion was a Liturgy we served this morning, in which we offered prayer for those who have passed on.  And it was not just our little parish.  In every Orthodox parish around the world, the faithful gathered this morning to pray for the dead in Christ.

Prayers for the dead is one of the things that draws the most disdain from non-Orthodox.  Protestants simply don’t do it, and argue vigorously that there is no scriptural authority for the practice.  Of course, there is authority — read 2 Maccabees for starters.  It may not be in your Bible, but until 1500 or so it was in everyone’s Bible.  But the truth of the matter is that I don’t try to argue scripture.  Instead, I ask a question:

“Do you pray for those you love?”

Well, of course they do.  We all do.

“Has anyone you loved died?  You didn’t stop loving them did you?”

Of course love is still there.  That is the true bottom line.  I can marshal theological arguments all day, I can engage in a scripture shoot out, I can argue until I am blue in the face.  But why bother?  We pray for the dead because we love them.

Love.  Purely, simply love.

In the normal course of things, we offer prayers at particular times after death, and at each anniversary thereafter.  These are done in short services we call pannikhidas, and they are often done at the end of liturgy.  In a parish of any size, it is pretty normal to do this for someone’s loved one pretty much every week.  No one minds.  No one leaves before it gets started.  We may not have known the people we are singing for, but we know who in the parish they are important to, and if nothing else, we love that person.  It is a service of prayer and song, in a minor key.  It is surprisingly powerful.  The first time I had one served for my mother, I had to stop singing, something I never do.  To hear the prayers, the voices of my brothers and sisters, offered lovingly for someone they had never met, but whom they knew through me, was more than I could bear.  I could not speak, I could not see through the tears in my eyes.  On some level, I felt not only my own gratitude, but that of my mother.  On a level deeper than can be defined, at that moment I was linked with my brothers and sisters, who were linked with my mother, who was linked to me.  It was a perfect circle of love.

Soul Saturdays, which we serve on a number of occasions through the year, are specifically done for all who have passed before us.  In a church 2000 years old, that is a lot of people, in a lot of places.  An awful lot of people have walked this path that I am on.  Kings and Queens, Patriarchs and Metropolitans, soldiers and merchants, farmers and shepherds, moms, dads, monks, nuns.  Enormous numbers of souls, all worshipping, praying, living as we do now.  Not in a superficial sense marked by technology and modern progress, but in an ancient rhythm consisting of fasts and feasts, liturgy and prayer, sacraments and sacrifice.  I do not see them, but they and I await the same thing, we are all alive in Christ.  I cannot help but love them, and praying for them on this Saturday morning is the most natural thing in the world.

In the depths of Thy judgments, O Christ, with fullness of wisdom Thou hast preordained the end of each man’s life, its appointed moment and its manner.  Therefore, All-Merciful, at the judgment save those in every land whom the grave has hidden.

Give rest, O Lord, to the souls of Thy departed servants.

To those hidden by the deep or cut down in battle, swallowed by earthquake, murdered or consumed by fire, grant in Thy mercy a place with the faithful and the righteous.

Give rest, O Lord, to the souls of Thy departed servants.

Overlooking all the transgressions of the flesh, our Saviour, in every age, by every nation of mankind, grant that, as they make their defence to Thee the Creator, they may stand before Thy judgment seat uncondemned.

And so we pray.  We sing.  We worship.  At the end, we serve the familiar pannakhida, but this time, as we sing the slow haunting melody, its focus is broadened, even as it stays narrow:

Eternal memory, eternal memory.  Blessed repose, eternal memory.

I stand and my mother’s face comes unbidden to mind.  She is followed by friends, by my wife’s parents, by others close to me who have reposed.  The woman standing next to me sees her parents and her eyes tear.  My priest, as he slowly swings the censer before the altar, has his own faces, his own images in mind.

Eternal memory, eternal memory.  Blessed repose, eternal memory.

I think of the long line of brothers and sisters I have never met, who lived in places and times I cannot imagine, but who still share my faith.  Husbands and wives, monks and nuns, moms and dads, little kids and the elderly.  There are millions and millions of them.  We sing for them.

Eternal memory, eternal memory.  Blessed repose, eternal memory.

We sing one final time.  The faces are still, the voices are quiet.  We sing for love.  The icons look out at us, and we look into them as the candles flicker.  We sing for love.  Christ is ever in our midst.  How can we do anything, but sing for love?