The fast has begun. We have departed from our Babylon, our Luxor, and our Jerusalem. City limits fade from sight. The air ahead is lighter and clearer. We have departed: bound for the desert, for the wilderness, for any name you like pointing to that place which is near to God and distant from those places which do not honor Him.
This has always been the way of the pilgrim: the way of Abraham, of Moses, and of the Lord Jesus who kept Jerusalem at a distance. Here is the great pattern of Metanoiete, reversing the pilgrimage of Adam-Eve. You see, their journey from Eden departed into a distance from God in order that they might claim their own sovereignty.
And this is the spirit of the Great Fast. We turn away from the illusion. Secular world is not coherent, it is not permanent, and, notwithstanding all of its claim to urgent meaning, it cannot bear meaning, not any abiding way. We turn away from its throb and buzz and myriad claims to reality and importance. And we turn towards the only cohesion, meaning, and permanence.
How do we prepare for this trip? What shall the pilgrim bring? Our packing consists in our unpacking. We empty ourselves. We empty ourselves of offensiveness: our neglect of God, our inattention, our indifference to God's constant loving presence, and our tendency to dwell on ourselves rather than the ones around us.
As a parish priest, I understood why certain parishioners lived out the penitential season by giving up television or magazines or anything thick with pop culture. For they could sense the promise of freedom: a house freed from toxic yack and buzz; a breakfast table liberated from newspapers, smart phones, or radio. They saw the promise of a holy space opening around them. For silence marks the encounter with God:
| When He opened the seventh seal, there was silence in Heaven .... (Rev 8:1) |
.... at the most holy moment, silence.
We seek that silence and peace in our minds and hearts, removing the strain of alcohol, drugs, and stimulants from our bodies. The acceptable sacrifices of God are a purified heart and a mind attuned to Him (Ps 51:17), which is Holiness.
The gift we present to God turns out to be empty hands, open palms. And our offering turns out to be a receiving — receiving Him into our purified lives. "Let every heart prepare Him room!" declares the old Christmas carol.
This is the essence of our our Gospel lesson this morning, which we find eloquently "spoken" in silence. For this is the posture of Mary of Bethany.
Opportunities for busyness and distraction are all around her. Unfinished tasks, chores, and a stream of demands face her. Yet, she is still. Her sister is aflutter racing from thing to thing, yet Mary is silent. Her sister calls her to account, yet Mary does not reply. For she has opened around her a sanctuary of quiet and mindfulness right in the midst of distraction. Her whole being is focused only upon God. And the Lord Jesus bestows His blessing: This "is the one needful thing" (Lu 10:42). Two words stand out: one and needful: only this, and this alone is necessary.
Here is the sheltering sanctuary of the soul as bulwark against worldly cares. Here is the refuge, the place of transformed heart and mind. It is, Jesus says, "the good part." And as God alone is good (Mk 1-:18), here is the spirit of Heaven.
As we enter the first Sunday of the Great Nativity Fast, let us also be a sanctuary of quiet and mindfulness. Let us receive the Lord's blessing: "Makarios!" He says. "Happy is the one who hears the word of God and keeps it!"
The words appear to be plain. A simple invitation seems to be announced. In particular, two words command our attention: hear and keep. But the ones who have followed Him during these recent years do not perceive simplicity. "Did He say hear?" This was the language He used to challenge the multitudes concerning the identity of John the Baptist:
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"What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?
But what did you go out to see? A man clothed in soft garments? Indeed, those who wear soft clothing are in kings' houses. But what did you go out to see?" (Lu 11:7-9) |
Who is John the Baptist? He demands, by the report of your senses.
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And if you are willing to receive it, he is Elijah who is to come.
He who has ears to hear, let him hear!" (Lu 11:14-15) |
Seeing and hearing .... not as simple as we thought. And the Disciples are right. We know this signature formula spoken by Jesus. He calls our perception into question.
Let us return now to our lesson:
| Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it. |
It turns out that we cannot rely on our capacity to hear. For the subject matter is the "word of God" pointing to an atmosphere and sensibility far above our slender powers. We have already failed our first test: "Who is St. John the Baptist?" How shall we now arrogate to perceive God with these same human incapacities and shallows?
Our next challenge, Jesus says, is to to keep what we have heard. Surely, this goes to a higher level of relationship with God. The Greek verb φυλάσσω / phulásso means "to preserve unimpaired, to guard it that it not be lost, to take care not to violate it." This is a keeping which is extreme reverence and veneration such that even our thoughts might must be watched lest they bruise or injure what we have received. Only a soul freed from the mind's calculations might be such a faithful repository.
In his landmark work, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Vladimir Lossky startles with the assertion, "In a certain sense all theology is mystical" (7). Our journey to God is an entrance into mystery. We may rely on our own human powers of knowledge, episteme, which is the report of our five senses and our rational machinery for processing this fragmentary information — what Jesus means when He demands "Do you have ears to hear? Do you have eyes that see?" But the narrow straits of our humanity are far too impoverished to apprehend the superabundance of God. Citing St. Basil the Great, Vlossky continues,
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There will always remain an "irrational residue" which escapes analysis and
which cannot be expressed in concepts;
it is the unknowable depth of things, that which constitutes their true, indefinable essence. (Mystical Theology, 33) |
Do you see this distance between what we see and reality? Relationship with God can only come through gnosis, Vlossky writes — a special kind of knowledge, which owes nothing at all to human capacities. Rather this relationship comes as a Divine gift. It is God's doing. "I chose you. You did not choose me" (Jn 15:16).
As Abraham and Moses had, we experience this relationship as an encounter with God, a revelation.
Many years ago, I was asked by the Episcopalian Bishop of Los Angeles, "What ought the Church to do? What is the Church?"
I replied that the Church must understand that the people coming to her have had an encounter with God, and they want to know, 'What must I do next?'"
The God thay have met is both immanent and transcendent, knowable yet unknowable. And our relationship is "participatory adherence to the presence of Him who reveals Himself" (Orthodox Theology, 16). By this Lossky declares, God is present. We attune ourselves to this Presence and account it to be the only reality. We calibrate ourselves for the life ahead. These are the first steps in our journey of theosis.
As children, we are born into this formation. God is all around us with His goodness, His right-and-wrong, and His Providence. We participate. That is, His world becomes our world. We never question it. As older children, when we begin a lifelong process of trial and testing, we know His boundaries very well. The difference between good-and-evil, between right-and-wrong, and between spiritual beauty and ugliness are not hidden from us, nor are they subtle. And the inner practices of putting God first will always reside in our modesty, our humility, and our mastery over self-promoting ego.
The great example of human beauty we celebrate today, in one of her many feasts (thanks be to God!), the Most Holy Theotokos enters the Temple. As the Disciples recorded, the experience of this imposing building might tend to over-awe the naive human, the outward looking human, the false-hearing and the false-seeing.
| "Teacher, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!" (Mk 13:1) |
But the Lord Jesus brushes it aside as rubble:
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"Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone shall be left upon another,
that shall not be thrown down." (Mk 13:2) |
On this feast day we countenance that the Zion Temple might indeed seem to be mighty. And the young Mary (barely more than a toddler) might seem to be of no account, especially a girl child. Yet does our episteme fails us again. As we failed to take the measure of St. John the Baptist, we utterly fail to see and hear what is right before us. We have it exactly backwards. The humble girl who enters this pile of clay and stone is the true Temple. She is the Holy of Holies. She is the only Temple whose scale and scope, having stature in Heaven, are permanent and real and true while the rest is an illusion .... (as we know) about to be carried away to the four winds.
This is her name: Theotokos. She is the repository of God. Her relationship with Him is one of knowing and unknowing. She is truly and eternally united with Him as an enduring sign of our theosis. Her beginning as the God-bearer has been set out before us as our destination and home, the mutual in-dwelling for which we pray every day. She is the Most Holy Lady of the Sign, the Virgin Who shall bear, Isaiah's prophetic vision for the salvation of mankind (Isa 7:14). This is the Divine:
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.... the beginning of our salvation and the revelation of the mystery
which is from eternity: the Son of God becometh the Son of the Virgin, and Gabriel proclaimeth good tidings of grace. (Troparion, Feast of the Annunciation) |
And Mary participates:
| "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word." |
She responds by emptying herself in a statement of pure servanthood and ego. She is the obedient one, the Holy Mother, who recapitulates the disobedient one, our common mother, Eve. In this, the Holy Theotokos does not know God, does not calculate advantage or disadvantage, but offers herself in her unknowing. This is the purity of her gift: without comprehension or appraisal. And this has opened the door to union with God and to sublime relationship, a Divine-human complementarity.
The holy dimensions of this moment are scarcely to be grasped. We turn to the words of St. Philaret, Patriarch of Moscow:
| "During the days of the Creation ...., when God uttered His .... mighty words: "Let there be," the Creator's words brought creatures into existence. But on the day, unique in the existence of the world, when Holy Mary uttered her humble and obedient "Let it be," I would hardly dare to express what took place then — the word of the creature caused the Creator to descend into the world. God uttered His word here also: You "will conceive in your womb and bear a son .... He will be great .... and He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever." But again that which is divine and incomprehensible occurs — the Word of God itself defers its action, allowing itself to be delayed by the word of Mary: How can this be? Her humble "Let it be" was necessary for the realization of God's mighty "Let it be." What secret power is thus contained in these simple words: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your will" — that it produces an effect so extraordinary? This marvelous power is Mary's pure and perfect self-dedication to God, a dedication of her will, of her thought, of her soul, of her entire being, of all her faculties, of all her actions, of all her hopes and expectations." (Choix de Sermons, Paris, 1866, T.1, 187) |
It is the unknowing and selfless humility of Holy Mary that has comprehended, mysteriously, the incommensurable greatness of God. As we empty our minds before this sublime humility, Uncreated Light floods into our souls illuminating human surmise:
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The True Holy of Holies is brought to dwell near the false Holy of Holies of the Mesopotamian Temple.
The Eternal and Life-giving Sanctuary is brought to dwell near the scene of death and carnal sacrifice. Her Ever-Virginal Wholeness is brought near to the coming disintegration and destruction. The perfectly prepared Dwelling-place of God is brought near to the place where God has been defiled and rejected. |
Lossky speaks of this union as I-Thou. The Second Temple from the time of the Return from Babylon has signified a pure I: the ego seeking power, political alliance, and social rule. The Most Holy Theotokos, by contrast, is united to pure Thou seeking powerlessness, subjection to God alone, and Divine society.
In all human history, Hers is the purest encounter with gnosis / revelation. And Her complete self-emptying and personal presence to it — without hesitation, without condition, without understanding — has rendered her One with God: literally with God and through God and in God as God is in Her. She is human deification, perfect union with God.
And the marks of it must always be our unknowing:
At the scene of the Nativity,
| .... Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. (Lu 2:19) |
And then, Jesus telling her that He must be about His Father's business,
| But [She] did not understand the statement Jesus spoke to [Her]. (Lu 2:50) |
Makarios!, Jesus declares. "Blessed are you when you hear and keep."
Today, we venerate the One Who heard and Who kept God's Word in perfection. She is the personification of theosis, our common journey to God. So what then is theosis? It is faithfulness. It is all of our belief. It is all of our love — to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind.
Let us not hear any nonsense about God welcoming our doubts, which I have heard from too many Western Catholic priests. Such a priest has a devil. God no more welcomes such a thing than a woman would want her husband to tell her that he is not sure if he loves her. As the Lord Jesus would say of doubts, "Who has ears to hear let him hear! Who has eyes to see let him see!" Can you see love? Can you see God? Then get out of your way, and see Him, and love Him.
Today we celebrate the One has eyes to see and ears to hear.
We see her now in our own mind's eye
ascending the steps to the Second Temple's Holy of Holies.
She is seen by those present but not seen.
She is known by those present but not known.
She is the Silent One containing within her all the world's hopes and possibilities.
And her word to us is the very essence of our life in Christ:
"Let it be unto me according to thy Word."
In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.