The Great Round

We have also found Him: Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy One, the One Who Is Coming into the World, the Everlasting Desire of the Hills, our Teacher, our Guide, our Master, our Brother, our God. We have found Him. And He is our All and our Life. He is no less than the Lord of all life, the Creator, the Alpha and Omega, first and last,

We follow Him. We follow Him round and round. Did you know that the Christian life is round? The circle signifies eternity precisely because it returns to itself — in completeness, in wholeness, and in reliable and reassuring beauty.

We close the circle of the year this week once again. We prepare for our Savior's Nativity thus beginning our journey by Him and with Him and in Him. Each year we make our way through His perfect thirty-three years culminating in a three-year ministry, and then the Heavenly part: His mighty Resurrection, the luminous teachings of the Risen Christ, His glorious Ascension, the the Giving of the Holy Spirit, and the Christian life modeled by the Holy Apostles.

Today is St. Philip's Day. We honor the All-praised and Holy Apostle Philip (not to be confused with the Apostle Philip of the Seventy, one of the Seven Deacons chosen to minister to the needy of Jerusalem). Tomorrow marks the beginning of St. Philip's Fast, also called the Nativity Fast.

Yes, we celebrated Orthodox New Year last September following the custom of the ancient Church's harvest season. But the harvest now is over. The fields all lay bare. A hard frost has come into the ground. And all things begin to die .... at least in appearance. The days grow shorter and colder as our light and the sun's warmth begin to ebb and seem to run out.

This circle is drawn by the will of God. He sends His Son to be born on the darkest and longest night as the death of the world becomes palpable to all (at least in the world known before the fifteenth century). A cosmic stage is been set from which no one escapes: the Winter Solstice, for

To this crucial turning point (we might say, burning point) of the world, we must return year after year unto the ages of ages.

By God's will the Annunciation to the Most Holy Theotokos occurs at the Vernal Equinox signifying the long-awaited thaw and the stirring of Eden's gates bound by ironclad winter.

The Forerunner, the Man of Eden, the breath of eternal summer, is born at the Summmer Solstice.

And the most fearsome tree ever seen against a blasted night sky is discovered by an Empress, which Holy Cross we Exalt near to the Autumnal Equinox.

We need hardly say that the renovation of our lifeworld by and at Great Pascha is the archetype of the world's eternal springtime.

Yes, by the will of God, the circle of the year is fixed and consecrated. We do not say, weakly, that the Feasts of the Lord and our greatest observances are a human response to astrophysics and the turning of the seasons. No. We boldly state the opposite: that God has crafted the universe through these Most Holy Lives, fixing its points upon them, setting out cosmic-scale monuments to guide our path to Him.

Our integral, meaning-bearing year (and planet) both are round pointing to perfection. In the Maker's hands, it is a round staircase turning in to our interiors and ascending upward towards Heaven. It turns within its celestial boundaries. Its borders guide us so that we do not stray. You see, our journey is not an outward one into new territories, but rather home to God. Always home.

To our culture and world in the twenty-first century, this will seem quaint. The secular view sees a timeline that projects ever outward, a linear progression, always discarding the claims of the past. Indeed, the New World was founded specifically upon this ethos — to be rid of Old World errors as the new age of empiricism and scientism was being born. Any truth worthy of the name must be free of the benighted past, said men like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. They sought to wipe clean the slate of old conceptions, ever seeking new, scientific "truth," which lay inevitably just ahead. Always the new thing! This had become a mania during the time of our country's founding. And it would forge the American scientific-technological juggernaut, which would crush all claims to spiritual life, topple High Heaven and God in the minds of its people, and today insist that objective morality is a pipe dream.

I have shared the story of an interview I heard with an editor of that once respected journal Scientific American. She sat listening to her interviewer on National Public Radio .... who happened to use the word morality. She started from her silence and said, "What?! Morality?! The superstitious horsefeathers of the past, you mean?! Good riddence!"

In lock-step, a new government would be formed whose Constitution was drafted to protect individual rights — you see, individual truths. The Old World view concerning the moral good of the whole was specifically not to be part of it — as the Great Chain of Being seen to descend from God down through earthly rulers was dismissed as a fairy tale. The great American toast in every tavern during the eighteenth century was, "No Bishop! No King!" And everyone is cut down to size in our democracy.

During the twentieth century, the Supreme Court sharpened the claims of individual rights to an unprecedented degree, always battling against what they called "the tyranny of the majority." Thus could a court case brought by Madalyn Murray O'Hair in 1962 cause prayer to be banned in all U.S. schools and eventually nearly every other public sphere. So-called artists, too, were held harmless against the so-called tyranny of the majority as pornography began to appear everywhere during the 1970s. You could not walk into a small town Vermont country store without seeing it. Even child pornography won Supreme Court protections in 1972 so long as the subjects did not depict actual persons. Yes, they were children, real children, but edited so that they were no one's children in particular — not, say, Johnny Brown of 123 Main Street in Anytown, USA.

Eventually, every moral claim would be laughed off the stage. And objections would increasingly be labeled, even criminalized, as "hate speech." In due course, marriage would be toppled, family would be gored beyond recognition, and decency itself would be held up to public ridicule as we might see any evening on the television.

Our entire lifeworld, at least as we see it projected by the culture and our present government structures, looks outward in a stubborn posture of wrong-headed hope: The new! The new will save us! Work for change! Any thought of a spiraling staircase inward and upward has long been consigned to the dust heap by worldlings.

Nonetheless, those who love God are not of this world. Yes, we use the world's offerings arising from science and technology. (By virtue of the worldwide web, roughly three thousand living souls visit the Hermitage website each week to share in these reflections on God, to be together as a people, as a holy people.) An important distinction is that we do not abuse the world's offerings in the sense of making them our gods, to borrow a distinction from St. Augustine (De doctrina Christiana). We use the world. We do not abuse it.

We continue to be guided foremost by two essential Christian teachings in the practical living of our lives. First is our Lord's declaration that He does not pray for the world (Jn 17:9). His embrace surrounds those whom God loves, which is everybody, and who return that bountiful love with all their hearts, with all their souls, and with all their minds. Here is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Second are the teachings of St. John the Theologian:

We give thanks to Almighty God for our golden circle. It is our surety and our home on earth. The Orthodox Church observes four annual fasting seasons but anchors itself primarily in two great fasts — the Nativity Fast and the Fast of Great Pascha, that is, the great wheel of Birth and Death and Resurrection.

Unlike the four weeks of Western Advent, the Nativity Fast is forty days. It is rooted in the Lord's forty-day fast in the wilderness and patterned on the forty years in the wilderness as the people Israel were prepared for the Land of Promise. That is, these two Great Fasts of the Church are given for our preparation. Serious reflection. Penance. We take stock: who we are and what we are and, of course, where we are going, which defines us. We have this time to recall recall our days of innocent childhood, the significant things that happened to us our parents and families and the past holy seasons. We meditate on our own spiritual growth, consulting each other, or perhaps we see the lost chances we had for spiritual maturity.

We go round and round and see this perfection everywhere: in the round circle of the sun's rays; in our planet home, the only life in the universe; and in our journey from birth to death as we become tranformed into the frailty and neediness and vulnerability with which we began, always looking to the God Who loves us and provides for us and protects us. Unless you become like children, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Mt 18:3).

Lest we be tempted by our secular world to forget the round nature of time, then I share with you a golden truth. The perfect round of our seasons is captured in a stunning detail, which is the essence of the circle: π / pi. It turns out that π is the tiny nucleus lying at the center of our time scheme. For pi seconds is a nano-century. Yes, the illusion of an outward, linear path is just that: an illusion. We do not have a time line. We have a time circle.

That is, we go, and we return, and we are enclosed in something — a mutual indwelling as we orbit the Kingdom of Heaven in our yearly round, and perfect Heaven turns within us as a moral compass, circles within circles. But that moral compass is in motion, a kind of gyroscope. And, to be sure, when that gyroscope is disturbed, the consequences are felt reverberating everywhere within us, even thoughout our material bodies. And we feel the weight of depression and sadness ..... seeking a material cure, in most cases, which only worsens our state.

But, you see, this moral compass is fixed within us for our safety. It is the enduring sign of God's love .... however much the sheep might object to the goodly proddings of the Shepherd's staff.

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Now, why should we mark the year's end with St. Philip's Fast? As we have said, the Church year, following the Life and Teachings of our Savior, following His Resurrection and Ascension, following Pentecost and the Acts of the Apostles, finally points to our own lives. You see there is a volume after the Acts of the Apostles: the acts of the Revd Sister Mary Anne and the acts of the Revd Sister Mary Martha and the acts of the unworthy priest Father Columba and all of the rest of us.

The Apostle Philip's life was exemplary. As an evangelist, he understood the new age announced by the Master: the "Kingdom of Heaven" age, the "Angel Life" age. He led Nathanael to God, who also recognized it instantly, signifying a lifetime of conversions carried out under Philip's pastoral hand.

We have meditated on this in the past. You recall the reflection "Under the Fig Tree." Philip is from Bethsaida. Jesus also calls those from Capernaum. These are all Northerners. Their heritage is the Age of the Angels, the Kingdom of Heaven Age, stripped from their lifeworld after the Return from Babylon. And what does Jesus say of Nathanael? "An Israelite (not a Jew) .... in whom there is no guile." He gives the "high sign," the fig tree. And the response is, "You are the King of Israel!"

How quickly these conversions take place! From "Can anything good from Nazareth" to "King of Israel" in a nonce! It is a foreshadowing — a foreshadowing of the great efflorescence of conversions to come recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. How many of these took place under Philip's Apostolic hand as the one before us has taken place?

He labored in the vineyards of ministry preparing for this under the Master's guidance. He distributed the Lord's manna, looking ahead to Eucharist, at the multiplication of the loaves and fishes (Jn 6:5-14).

It was Philip who asked that the Disciples see the Father (Jn 14:8-21), which, after all, was the essence of Jesus' spiritual ministry, thereby modeling the path for every Christian: to be One with the Father as the Son and the Father are One (Jn 17:21).

And then Philip went out into the world completing his Apostolic labors, preaching, healing, raising the dead. He rose early on that Apostolic day, and he labored down after dusk. His crucifixion was ordered as penalty for saving the life of a procurator's wife .... pointing back to Pilate's dynamic and marriage. He was seventy-six years old. He had fought the good fight. He had run the race .... round and round and round, year after year, always following the Master, fixing His soul always on Heaven, and ever averting His eyes from the toxic world.

This is Christian life. And here, my brothers and sisters, is theosis in action. We go round and round faithfully. God opens doors to us on account of our faithfulness. And we learn more. We develop. We rise higher and see more. God refines us in His holy fire.

Seventy-six is our average age at the Hermitage. We are near the end of our journey. We shall continue in our prayers, in our worship, in our long labors on Hermitage Farm, sharing our love of God and of each other, unto the ages of ages, we pray.

We bid you all as we begin the golden circle once again to make this your life. For there is no other life, not one worthy of the name. The circle alone will you guide you home. And all else is chaos and madness.

Let all of us always be of good cheer. For we are surrounded by angels. The Kingdom of Heaven alone avails. And we cannot fail in our journey, for the path ahead never strays.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.