St. Simon of Mount Athos

Invariably, I find myself after the fast thinking of things I should have thought of during the fast.  For the forty days of the Nativity Fast, I was so busy whining that I failed to focus on the important things.  Things like love, and how it is expressed.  Just like last year, however, all of that changed on December 28, when I turned the page of the Synaxarion, and found that today is the day we commemorate St. Simon, founder of the Holy Monastery of Simonopetra on Mount Athos.

I have a disconcerting tendency to start to take the saints for granted.  After a while, we read the hagiographies, and start going “yeah, yeah…miracles, visions, healings, yada, yada, yada’.  We become out of touch with the stories because we are out of touch with the miraculous, and we are unacquainted with sacrifice.  On one level we appreciate the lives of the saints, even as we tidily file them away in that drawer which we reserve for things that are interesting, but we can’t quite figure out how to apply them to our lives.  Even if we make a pilgrimage to venerate their relics, we are unable to capture the full import of who and what that saint was.  They may be resting, incorrupt and palpably holy, in a monastery or cathedral.  But how do we draw that tangible connection between the life of the saint and life in this world as we know it?

With that in mind, let me introduce you to St. Simon.  First, a portion of the entry from my favorite Synaxarion, compiled by the Hieromonk Makarious of Simonopetra Monastery.  Although only four of the six volumes have been translated into English, this is my favorite reference for the lives of the saints, bar none.  This is not his entire entry on a saint who must be close to the hieromonk’s heart, but it is an important part:

Saint Simon flourished in the Garden of the Mother of God during the thirteenth century, in the years when the capital of the Byzantine Empire, which was weak and divided after the Crusades, had been transferred to Nicaea.  Fleeing the vanities of this world, he made his way to the Holy Mountain in order to labour beside a spiritual father for the salvation of his soul.  The Elder he chose was not only experienced in ascesis but also severe and demanding, and he submitted to him body and soul as to God Himself.  His exemplary obedience, humility and love for his spiritual father, who spared him neither rebukes nor blows, soon raised him to a high degree of virtue, which attracted the admiration of the monks of Athos and the respect of his elder, who in the end came to regard him as a fellow soldier in spiritual warfare rather than as a disciple.  But marks of respect did not suit one who had chosen to embrace the dereliction and Passion of Christ; and so, by dint of entreaties, he was allowed to go live alone.  At the end of a long search he chose a small, damp cave on the western flank of Athos 1,000 feet above the sea, for his habitation.  He persevered there day and night, exposed to incessant attacks from the Devil, armed only with faith, hope and invocation of the all-powerful Name of the Lord.

One night, some days before the Feast of the Nativity, he saw a star suddenly leave its place in the sky and come down to station itself above the precipitous rock opposite his cave.  Suspecting another snare of the Evil One who often disguises himself as an angel of light, the ascetic attached no importance to it.  The apparition was repeated several nights running, and on Christmas Eve, when the star took its position over the rock like the star of Bethlehem, there came a voice from the sky, “Be in no doubt, Simon, faithful servant of my Son.  See this sign, and do not leave this spot in search of greater solitude as you have had in mind, for it is here that I want you to establish your monastery, for the salvation of many souls.”  Reassured at once by the voice of the Mother of God, Simon was transported in ecstasy to Bethlehem into the presence of the Christ Child with the Angels and Shepherds.  On coming to himself again, he addressed the task of building the New Bethlehem without more delay.

There is a lot more, and those of you familiar with it will recall, for example, the story of the rescue of the youth who fell from the cliff during the construction of the monastery.  But for my purposes, let’s stop where we are.

You see, it would be easy to read this like any other hagiography.  You might leave it with feelings of awe, of respect, of great thankfulness for the glory of God, but if you are like me you would not leave it with a deep appreciation of who St. Simon is, and how he lived and suffered, or what his life means to you and I.  Even if you visited Simonopetra itself, a beautiful monastery soaring high above the blue Aegean sea, you would gain respect for Simon’s works, but not necessarily for him.

Unless, of course, you left the monastery and followed the narrow gravel road around the curve of the mountain, crossing a small bridge above a roaring stream that plunges swiftly down a deep and preciptitous ravine, and finally reached a spot almost exactly opposite the monastery.  If you look back across the ravine, you can see it, standing on the huge rock that gave it part of its name.  If you turn around, you see a small opening in a smaller rock on the hillside.  This opening is the entrance to the cave in which St. Simon lived.

Inside, you enter a very small chamber, about the size of a broom closet.  there is a small rock ledge, on which there is an icon and an oil lamp.  Cross the chamber, and climb through a very small opening into a slightly larger chamber.  It is perhaps four feet high, and the size of a closet — not a walk-in closet, a regular closet.  There is a rock ledge, just big enough for a person to lie down , although not comfortably.  It is here that St. Simon lived, and it was from the small opening of the ante-chamber that he watched to star shine over the top of the huge rock across the ravine.  At that place, the wind roars up from the sea almost incessantly.  Without the monastery there, it would be a dark and lonely place, one where it would be easy to take a misstep, and fall to your death.

It helps me to remember that cave.  You could look at it and say that a person would have to be crazy to live there.  But a crazy person could not undertake to build the magnificent and beautiful monastery that now stands on that rock.   A crazy person could not live in such ascesis, could not live in such dedicated and concentrated prayerfulness, could not be so wholly devoted to God so as to fold their body each night onto a cold and uncomfortable ledge of rock.  To see that cave is to understand what a saint is.

Not all saints lived in caves, but all of them struggled mightily to pursue God.  Fr. Seraphim Rose, not officially a saint but venerated by many, lived in a ramshackle hut, not much bigger than St. Simon’s cave.  St. John Maximovitch, his spiritual father, was a bishop, but never slept in a bed, only napping in a chair.

I need to remember the necessity for struggle during the fasts, but I fail miserably at it.  But every year, by the grace of God, during the days of feasting following Christmas, I run upon St. Simon and I am humbled.  We don’t need a lot to seek holiness.  Arguably, we need to dispose of a lot if we are serious about our faith.  Every time I get whiny and feel needy, I need to remember that cave.   We can live in a beautiful and wonderful place, like Simonopetra monastery.  But for the sake of our soul, we should keep our minds in the cave.

St. Spyridon the Wonderworker

Here in North America, we were pretty preoccupied today with commemorating St. Herman of Alaska. There is no question that St. Herman is a wonderful saint, but I took a moment as well to remember another one of my favorites, St. Spyridon, Bishop of Tremithus.

St. Spyridon reposed in, more or less, the year 348. His relics, completely incorrupt, are kept in the cathedral on the island of Corfu. He has a reputation as being an unusually active saint — he is seen here, there and pretty much everywhere, interceding for the faithful. Oh pshaw, you say. How do you know that?

There is some unusual proof to the statement. Every year they take his relics and process through the streets of the town. The relics are so incorrupt, so soft and flexible, that they bounce slightly as he is carried, as you or I might bounce when being carried in a chair. After the procession, they do one other thing. Every year. For the who knows how many centuries. What do they do?

Every year, they change St. Spyridon’s shoes. The reason is that the old ones — which were just put on him the year before — are worn out, with holes in the soles. Just like they would be if worn by a man who had just spent the last year covering a lot of ground.

~deep sigh of satisfaction~

I love this Church.

Reversal of affect

I was scheduled to be in Johnstown this weekend, but the snowstorm that blew into the Northeast on Thursday put the kibosh on that trip. So I found myself sitting in my office Thursday morning, pondering my options. On the one hand, just staying home looked very good. On the other hand, it occurred to me that I had not yet done any of my required continuing legal education. And it was December. Maybe, I mused, this would be a good time to take care of some of that.

So Thursday afternoon, I drove to Raleigh — which is way too far from my house — and attended a workshop on representing parents in DSS court that was held yesterday. I do a lot of that kind of work, so it was a good fit. The seminar was OK. Not great, but OK. I learned some things, so I can’t complain. I met a person who makes a living by handling appointed appellate cases from her home and, as far as I could tell, never sees her clients. That sounded very appealing, except it would mean I’d either have to live in Raleigh or travel there frequently. Ix-nay on that. But the most interesting thing for me was a phrase one of the presenters made reference to, which I immediately put into another context, because it fit something I had been thinking about.

Reversal of affect. That, he said, is the phrase for something you might see in your clients, a kind of false bravado that masks the person’s true interior affect. The interior affect might be fear, or depression, or some other more or less pathological condition. In day to day life, of course, we call that “putting on a good face”, but this is a more profound disconnect.

I had never heard the phrase before, but Lord knows I’ve seen it’s manifestation. Being naturally preoccupied, however, with the spiritual side of life, hearing the phrase made me think immediately, not of a client, but of a person I have occasional contact with. This man has his own set of problems. When I first met him, he was a man deeply concerned with his golf game and quality time on his pontoon boat. For various reasons, his marriage disintegrated, and he fell apart as well. I tried to avoid learning the gory details, but it was plainly ugly, and he ended up more or less haunting the courthouse as he answered various criminal charges and domestic violence petitions filed against him. Predictably, his response to all of this was to become saved, and in very short order thereafter to start preaching. I say predictably, not because he was a religious person before, but because a conversion experience is a common factor for people in legal trouble. When I did criminal work, we called them “jailhouse conversions”, and everyone in the courtroom, from the judge to the court reporter, was uniformly cynical about the validity of the process.

In any event, returning to my acquaintance, he was pretty well et up with it. He shaved his head, except for a patch on the back which he left cut into the shape of a cross. Whenever I ran into him, usually in the courthouse, he was declaiming loudly and to no one in particular exhortations to “Praise the Lord” and “The Lord is good!”. Sometimes flashes of his old self came out, like the time that he told me that God had told him that I needed to buy a hot tub for my wife and myself. You might guess that hot tub sales and installations are his line of work, and you would be right.

(My wife, in turn, put on a brave face. “If God wants us to have a hot tub where we can sit and drink wine together,” she said with faith and fervor, “then I think we had better do it. Neither one of us wants to go against God’s will!” Good girl.)

Still, it was apparent to me that the old time religion was more an expression of fear than anything else. I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve seen plenty of jailhouse conversions, and it has always seemed to me that they had two elements. The first is that they are experienced in a context of great fear, and the loud expressions of faith are, on some level, intended more to convince the speaker than the hearer. The second is that the new convert desperately wants to believe that he or she is not a bad person, that they are beloved and have value, even if the change is utterly superficial. Thus, my acquaintance can be called to preach even as he is mired in an endless succession of domestic violence incidents. Similarly, a domestic client of mine several years ago came to introduce me to his new girlfriend, a married woman who he had just moved into his house. He was also excited, he told me, because his own pastor had told him that he “could see an anointing upon him”, and my client was going to start preaching. I eyed the girlfriend, who had not yet even removed her old wedding ring, and murmured congratulations.

I sat in the seminar yesterday, and thought about those things and realized that reversal of affect can often have a religious face. It is a danger when it is grounded not on love but on desperation. Mind you, desperation is something that can bring anyone to his or her knees, and can be a determinative factor in making us look at ourselves realistically. In the Orthodox tradition, it is frequently recognized as a gift from God. The question, however, is what we do with that desperation. Simply saying we have found God or been saved is meaningless. The key is how we take that experience and process it inside ourselves. If it brings us to humility and quietude, then it may be that we are indeed on the path. If, however, it is manifested in loud and noisy ways, in expressions of pride and achievement, then it is probably not a real experience at all, and may even be demonic in origin.

Well, I’m no expert. I should also say that judging another’s spiritual life is one of the most dangerous and ill advised things you can possibly do. But I run into people like this very frequently, and I worry about them. It goes without saying, I suppose, that typically people who go through this type of experience rarely, if ever, remain religious after the passage of time.

Here, I think, is the key. Whether or not a religious experience is valid at its outset, the only way it will remain valid is if it is thoroughly integrated into the whole of life. So long as it is simply a layer over other quite distinct layers, it will be of no consequence. It is in that light that I truly appreciate many of the features of Orthodoxy. Fasts and feasts, confession, prayer books, frequent communion — all of these are things which serve to bring our entire life into a single focus, to integrate all of our layers, to help us locate the true center where God lives.

Is our salvation in Walmart?

An interesting controversy has reared its head this holiday season. Major retailers — Walmart and Target among them them — have shifted their marketing to refer to the season simply as “the holidays”, as opposed to Christmas. This has many, including many Orthodox, in an uproar. My question: why do we care?

North America and western Europe have allowed Christmas to become nothing more than a commercial extravaganza, a process which has developed over a number of decades. As one columnist noted, it is almost a patriotic duty to spend extravagently, so much so that economists become all gloomy if spending slips a bit. We give lip service to the idea of de-commercializing Christmas, lip service that lasts roughly as long as it takes to slip the credit card out of the wallet or purse. We tsk-tsk at the uncivilized images of people fighting over material items, forgetting that those people are…well, that’s us.

And now, Christians of all stripes are furious that the leading purveyors of commercialization have decided that they no longer wish to acknowledge that it is Christmas that happens to fall on December 25. It is as though we are crying out “Yes…the entire season depends on your earnings report, and yes, we have substituted material gratification for spiritual peace, and by golly, that means Christmas!”

Is there something wrong with this picture?

I am as bad as anyone to spend money at Christmas, but certainly we, as Orthodox, should have a firmer grasp on the meaning of this season. The fact of the matter is that no one has ever achieved theosis or aided his or her salvation because Walmart or Target or any commercial entity said “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays”.

A modest proposal: lets be counter-cultural. Isn’t that what true Christianity is all about? Anti-world? Anti-materialism? Pro-Christ? Let the world reinstitute Saturnalia or whatever pagan holiday was displaced, because that will bring people to Christ.

I know, it sounds crazy, but I do not doubt its truth. It is only when people become so exhausted, so sickened by the exhibition of greed and materialism that they will themselves seek the Truth, the Light, the Word that has become flesh. When they become exhausted and seeking, let them find our churches, open and joyful. Let them find us, with no trace of guile or commercialism. Let them find us, with only hearts and candles ablaze. Let them find us, saying not even “Merry Christmas”, but crying “Christ is born! Glorify Him!” Let them find Christ. In us. Not in Walmart.