The Communities of New Skete

Scripture Readings: Gen 28:10-17, Gal 3:26 4:5, Lk 1:39-56

Reflections from a Nun

Blessed are you among women” We heard from Mr. Jack Phillips Saturday that the meaning of the root of this word Blessed, in Hebrew, is - walking. It is not standing still or sitting but implies activity. It has come to mean happy also and if you think about it you can see that walking – going forward implies a certain kind of happiness.

Too often in the past we heard that Mary’s great deed lay in her virgin motherhood rather than that she heard the word of God and accepted it in pure faith. She was open to hearing the word of God and keeping it as Jesus described when his mother, and brethren came looking for him (Lk 8:21.) Her blessedness came from hearing and keeping or obeying the word. The first words she heard were the Hebrew law, the next were the mysterious words of the angel Gabriel, and the third were the words of her Son. Hearing and obeying were Mary’s going forward throughout her life. Her Falling asleep was also a going forward.

Today’s feast is the Falling Asleep of Mary. This icon shows us the moment of her passing into the next world. If you look at some icons of the Dormition two things stand out. The lower part shows us the great sorrow on the part of the disciples on their loss. The upper part the great joy of the heavenly spirits on Mary’s entering the heavenly realms. Christ is holding what looks like a small child in swaddling clothes, which is a symbol of Mary’s spirit that has been assumed into a new life. If we look at death as our being assumed into a new life, would we be so afraid of dying as we sometimes seem to be?

The white swaddling clothes reminds me also of the reading this morning about being baptized into Christ. By being baptized we put on Christ. Christ shares in our humanness and we all share one human nature. Valuing people based on opinions and ethnicity (either Jew or Greek, Protestant or Hindu, black or white) social status, (slave or free, rich or poor) or gender, (neither male or female) has no place when we realize we are all one. All of us are equal in our dignity of being human. All of us become the adopted children of God by believing in the Good News Christ taught us and is still teaching us through his Spirit. We are blessed when we can believe in God’s word.

There is a paradox about being blessed. Nowhere can we see this paradox better than in Mary’s life. To her was granted the blessedness of being the mother of the Son of God. Her heart must have been filled with a wondering, tremulous joy at so great a privilege. Yet that very blessedness was to be a sword that pierced her heart. It meant that some day she would see her Son hanging on a cross. To be Christ’s disciple so often means at one and the same time a crown of joy and a cross of sorrow. The truth is that God does not choose a person for ease and comfort but for tasks that take all that head and heart and hand can bring to them.

When that is realized, the sorrows and hardships that serving God may bring, are not matters for lamentation but can be seen in a different light. As Mary during her life was not told precisely what to do daily but had to ponder and decide how to carry out her task, so do we likewise need to pray and ponder daily how to carry out our tasks in life. Sometimes in living-in going forward- it helps to remember the answer of the man who was asked by Jesus if he believed and his answer was, “Yes Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.”

Christ is in our midst!

The schedule for our Annual Pilgrimage “Encountering God through Creation” is available here.

Scripture Readings: 1Kg 19:9-14; 2Pt 1:-10-18; Mt 17:1-8

Reflections from a Monk

In the 1890s a young German composer wrote a Tone Poem based on an unfinished poem by Ritter. The poem created a scene that was typical of the 19th century Romantic ethos. A sick man lies on a mattress in a poor room lit by a flickering candle burned down almost to a stump. The man is desperately fighting sleep, fighting death; all is silence save the ticking of a clock on the wall. Occasionally a plaintive smile crosses his face as he dreams of his childhood days. But death keeps plucking at him even though he fights against it. In the delirium of fever he sees his life unrolled before him: childhood innocence, the testing of youth, man in battle for the greatest prize, to realize a high ideal and make it higher by his act. All his life he seeks it but never wholly achieves it. Then comes death, but in its wake, from on high, the sounds of triumph, what here on earth he sought in vain, from heaven greets him: deliverance, transfiguration. Richard Strauss was in his 20s when he wrote his Tone Poem Death and Transfiguration. One might wonder why such a theme for such a young man.

And yet Jesus was also a young man when his transfiguration took place, as his journey to his passion and death on the cross, neared its end. We are all on that same journey, but we are not all in the same place on that journey. However, what happened to the three apostles, Peter, James and John, on the mountain with Jesus was like that last moment in Strauss’ Tone Poem: their own transfiguration. It was a moment when their eyes were opened to see beyond the surface reality not only of who Jesus was, but also to experience the presence of God and to see what that can mean in our lives. They saw the same man, the same mountain, the same surroundings they had been living with, but they saw it all anew. Jesus was no longer just their rabbi; this was God’s beloved son.

Seeing the same things we always see, but seeing them in a deeper way, is the fruit of transfiguration. In the 17th century, a Carmelite monk expressed in conversations and letters his understanding of The Presence of God. He gave reflections from his own experience in response to requests from visitors and correspondents. For Brother Lawrence, no aspect of life was too mundane to be understood as anything less than a gift from God and all activities were to be done to the glory of God: eating and drinking, working and resting, playing and praying. He worked in the monastic kitchen and even there, preparing even the simplest meal, was done to God’s glory. Do we have the eyes to see in such activities the glory of God? If not, we might learn from some of the greatest painters of all time what to look for, since simple “still life” paintings of fruit and other ordinary objects have become great masterpieces of art. Why? Because they show us how much more is there than we might otherwise realize.

The three apostles were thrown off guard by a wondrous vision, a vision that was actually a prelude to Jesus’ death. If you notice the scroll in St Silouan’s hand in the icon on the upper wall you will see the text: “keep your mind in hell and despair not.” He is saying, live every day as if it is your last and you will see things you never thought possible to see. My 91-year-old mother is moving out here from southern California. She tells me that every morning when she wakes up she thinks to herself, wow; I have another day to live! She wants to come back east, in part, to experience once more the four seasons, something she experienced in Nebraska as she was growing up. We live them now and may not appreciate them in the same way as she will.

Likewise, as we bless the fruit today we are reminded that these fruits, and indeed all of creation, are God’s gift. Too often we can take it all for granted. We get into a routine and miss the wonder of all that is around us. The plum is just a plum, bread is just bread and human being is just a human being. As Fr. Alexander Schmemann pointed out in a sermon on Transfiguration, “we know their weight, their appearance, their activities, we know everything about them, but we no longer know them, because we do not see the light that shines through them. The eternal task of faith and of the Church is to overcome this sinful, monotonous habituation; to enable us to see once again what we have forgotten how to see; to feel what we no longer feel; to experience what we are no longer capable of experiencing.” This is Transfiguration in our lives, it Is part of what Jesus was trying to get the apostles to see as well. We don’t have to wait until the end, as in Ritter’s poem, to be delivered from seeing only on the surface, the possibility of being transfigured is always present.

Christ is in our midst.