"I Will Dwell In You
and Walk Among You"

On the eighth day of our Exaltation of the Life-giving Cross, the Apodosis, we continue our meditation on friendship with God. In His farewell address, Jesus calls us to be His friends. He promises that we will be One with Him as He and the Father are One (Jn 11:17):

These Heavenly relationships are Christian life, worship, and salvation. This is the spirit of our Matins Gospel today, for it depicts an encounter with the Risen Christ, Who instructs us in life and worship:

The scene reprises the encounter with the Risen Christ on the Emmaus Road:

As the world will learn in due time, the Zion Temple, an unremitting scene of death and blood, will be reduced to rubble (70 A.D.). The new temple and new worship will be the gathering of God's people as we read in our Epistle lesson this morning,

The first Christians looked to the Holy Scripture for models of friendship. As the scholar David Konstan (Prof. of Classics, Brown University) has written,

The truth, taught by the Church Jesus founded, is this: God has indeed willed salvation for all from the foundations of the world. He has willed that everyone — bearing the family resemblance, invited to the Wedding Banquet, named His sons and daughters — should return home to Him, Who is "the God and Father of all" (Eph 4:6).

What is our part in this relationship? As we read in our Epistle lesson this morning, to remain clean, and as the Lord Jesus has said, to keep God's Commandments (Jn 15:14). That is, we need only retain the goodness with which He endowed us at birth and worship Him in this goodness — formalizing friendship with Him through Illumination (Baptism and Chrismation), gathering as family around our Him, and all centered on our Elder Brother, the First-born of Creation, Jesus, the Son of God. It is a Love Feast (agape), a Breaking of Bread. This is Christian worship, instituted by Christ and celebrated all over the world in the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, which He founded.

But if we should become preoccupied, not with His life, but with His death, then our sacred space and our prayers would take on a different character. In the West, which became dominated by this Italian theological innovation, all lines of perspective within the sacred space converged on a High Altar with neatly aligned pews set before it, invoking the scene of a High Gallows facing out on passive spectators.

Unfortunately, we do not know what worship looked like during the second and third centuries along the coast of Ireland, to which Orthodox Christians had migrated from the Black Sea along the northern Mediterranean shore through Gibraltar and on to the west coasts of Ireland and then Scotland. These are well-established facts. Long before St. Patrick, the Benedictines, Rome's religious foot soldiers, came into this area forcing their Roman / Italian religion on all Christians they encountered, destroying all Christian worship materials they found. Almost nothing has survived. Fortunately, the monasteries of these earliest Christians (bearing dates) have survived. We certainly know they were there. We also know they were there because their DNA (Y-chromosomes) has been studied, coming down from the Black Sea all the way to Ireland. We know they were there because linguistics scholars studying ancient texts and recording the way people speak and the words they use can trace vestiges of their language along this route. But we do not know what their worship looked like.

We may be sure, I think, that it was Love Feast. Their surviving structures are dominated by circular buildings (which archaelogists, having slender evidence concerning their manner of life, have named "ring forts"). They did not like hierarchy from what we can gather. I think that the first Christians, our Western forebears, celebrated a gathering of God's people making up a holy temple out of living stones and then breaking Bread.

We at the Hermitage were formed in the Western Catholic tradition. Our sensibilities were attuned to candle-lit worship spaces of pews, long aisles down a nave, Altar rails, and side chapels, and above all, a High Altar.

Ironically, during a pilgrimage to the twenty-one Franciscan missions from Sonoma to San Diego, we stopped in Calistoga a day or two for rest. We read in the local newspaper that a nearby religious house, the Monastery of the Assumption, was celebrating its patronal feast. How could we have known that a divine appointment lay ahead?

The worship space surprised us. For it formed a kind of circle as life-size icons stood all around us. We heard angelic voices lifting up harmonies that filled the space. It were as if we had stumbled into Heaven, whose wholesome fragrance filtered in on every side. Soon a liturgy would be celebrated from beyond where we were. I will not say that we were not part of it, for we could plainly hear its chanting tones. Then, the Lord Jesus appeared, for the sacramental Breaking of Bread had occurred, and like the disciples along the Emmaus shore, "He was known to us." Somehow we found ourselves beyond the limits of time and space. It was a mysterious experience, to be sure. The saints in icons and the flesh-and-blood Christians around us blurred into one cloud of witnesses.

You see, reading the word Assumption in the newspaper, we had thought "Catholic," and indeed this place is Catholic, original and Orthodox Catholic, not Roman Catholic. We were surprised by joy, to borrow C. S. Lewis' phrase.

We could not receive the consecrated Bread, for we were not in communion with the Orthodox Church but were invited to receive Blessed Bread abundantly heaped on a silver tray. We certainly felt ourselves to be among those who were interdwelling with God. We most certainly were present at the Banquet wedding Heaven to earth. For in this place the veil was lifted.

In succeeding weeks we pondered these things. All our lives, we had prayed before the consecrated host in monstrance understanding that Jesus was present. But unavoidably (and I'm speaking for myself now) that monstrance, so like a reliquary in appearance, for me was an encounter with a kind of "super-relic" .... I do not know how else to say it. I must admit that the host I received at communion, so intimately associated with the monstrance (after all, I could see the priest removing that same host), was unavoidably also an encounter with a "super-relic." The emphasis, you see, was not on life, but on death. By contrast, the circular space we experienced at Assumption Monastery, overflowing with witnesses to Divine friendship, was something else: an encounter with the mystery of Life. Living, breathing, joyful people had gathered, all loving God, all striving to please Him in the dimensions of their lives. Truly, these people were living temples who had gathered as precious stones built into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5).

Now, the Hermitage has not yet built its church building. (To those listening thousands of miles away, this will come as a surprise.) Naturally, a consecrated Altar was erected from our Community's beginnings. A bishop visited us. But the church building has waited while we have labored to construct our dormitories, refectory, and our barn, which is the center of our agricultural ministry. But the Church of our Lady of the Angels, named by our Primate and First Hierarch of the Russian Church Abroad, Metropolitan Hilarion, has waited.

If we had built — after all, we had planned to build a version of the Church of St. John Chrysostum (Delafield, WI), one of the most beautiful Gothic Revival churches in the U.S. — we would have built the wrong church: with its pews, center aisle, and High Altar.

The Sisters might say, we simply have not had the time, for we needed to construct an entire farm, a business yet-to-be-developed, and a place to lay our heads each night. But I would say, "No. God has held this from us." All along, we have been approaching a divine appointment. He has been preparing us. And He was about to change everything.

With a sense of shame, I might add, "Not what we sought, but what He sought." This has been the pattern of my journey. It was not I who initiated. But He gave me no other choice. This is His hallmark: turning our world upside down and laying us open to His will and high expectations for us. You see, falling into the hands of the Living God is a fearful thing. It pierces "even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow" (Heb 4:12). In journeying toward Him with sincere hearts, God has re-assembled us. He has made us new creatures in the beautiful, prismatic, and on-going Creation called Divine friendship.

The "first church" of our Russian Orthodox tradition (Moscow Patriarchate) is the Cathedral of Christ our Saviour in Moscow. Viewing its liturgies on YouTube, we at the Hermitage have watched God's people assemble. They are not seated in pews. They are on their feet, reverently, expectantly, anticipating the appearance of the Lord Jesus. They are among ancient friends expressed in life-size icons and know themselves to be among loved ones who have preceded them into the Greater Life. Within this enormous space is a beautifully adorned eight-sided Sanctuary.

Franciscans might think of the Poriuncula in Assisi — an enormous building with soaring spires and domes. But inside is a little, holy house.

The Russian Sanctuary's appearance suggests a kind of "Chapel of the Eighth Day of Creation." Mysterious happenings occur there as throngs of people stand ready to greet the holy ones inside. They hear prayers being chanted and hymns wafting through the gorgeous caverns around them. Then suddenly, a door opens and the holy bishops, priests, and other ministers proceed out. And Jesus appears.

There is nothing to impede your approaching Him. He has summoned you as His friend. But you do not have to file down a pew and then make your way down a crowded aisle. God has promised to walk among us, and sacred ministers appear seemingly everywhere in this sacred space offering to commune the faithful. Here is good fellowship, the circle of life, and the God Who promises that we have been invited: