The Light of the World

At the Hermitage our daily life is worship, prayer, and reflection. We also work an organic farm. And for the past several years, we have been building a monastery compound with our own hands receiving donated lumber. (Thanks be to God and through the mercies of Sr. Verlina Mescher of blessed memory.) This we have done through and with and by the Grace of God, the Protection of the Most Holy Theotokos, and in the Goodness of God's abundantly present Angels. We have re-dedicated our lives to God in this place named for Our Lady of the Angels, a name chosen by our Primate, Metropolitan Hilarion also of blessed memory.

We are two (now elderly) myrrh-bearing women and their humble and aged chaplain. The Hermitage Sisters have carried God's healing and anointing balm throughout the world: in Fourth World Haiti, in a leper colony in India, and in medical clinics in Asia and North America serving the sick, the needy, and the indigent.

For the past eight years we have shared the spiritual insights God has given us, which we dutifully have "broadcast" from this remote island on the edge of the earth and at the end of the day. This was not our idea. This was blantantly God's command.

Roughly five hundred reflections are posted on our website ( https://ola-hermitage.org), which receives thousands of readers on any given day.

Sadly, we must sign off from these "airwaves" for the remainder of the year. The Hermitage has entered a period of crisis facing the prospect of losing our right to complete our convent (our church, guest quarters, and workshop are safe for now). We must complete this work by December 14. We are short of money, and certainly the laborers are few. We pray that we will go back on "the air" in 2024. In the meantime, please pray that we meet our imposed deadline.

But who, especially in advanced old age, can promise to return on any future date? Therefore, this final spiritual reflection we offer as our message in a bottle — what we would wish to say to the world if this were our final opportunity to say it. It is good that we all share this bottle. For we all must give an account of ourselves (1 Pet 3:15). What would you say if these were your last words to those who love Jesus?

Before the beginning was God, Who is goodness (Mk 10:18) and love (1 Jn 4:8). The action of Goodness is always to love. Love must always be good, or it is not love.

Solitary love can never be other than self-love. God Himself, therefore, is a Divine Society of Three.

He is the Creator of every creature, and without Him was not anything created (Jn 1:3).

He Himself, the Highest and Best, is Uncreated.

He does not have being. He Alone Is Pure Being.

All that He creates is good (Gen 1:31), proceeding from His Own Nature ( &logos;ογος / logos ) (Jn 1:1-2).

His Nature is to make. The first verb in the Holy Scriptures is to create. He paints living landscapes beyond human capacity. He sculpts stirring, living forms beyond human ability. He composes Heavenly music. Have you heard the birds at dawn, the wind in the willows, the water ripples laced through with sudden gusts, or waves crashing on the sandy shore? But literature — which aspires to depict life in motion, in genius, in authenticity — is His favored creative form. Again, He Is &Logos;ογος, Word.

God, therefore, has filled a Holy Book, His living masterwork, the earth, with varied and beautiful creatures of every sort.

In this, the earth is unique in all the universe, which we have verified having wasted trillions of dollars in vain exploration.

Solitariness, contrary to God's nature, is not good (Gen 2:18). So God has made a society of holy creatures bearing His Image.

All literary artists aspire to breathe life into noble characters. Otherwise, their art would be lifeless and pointless.

The greatest Author making the highest art has breathed His own Essence into His creature, man (Gen 2:7).

To be real, His characters, the man and the woman, must be free — impeded in no way from making any decision or committing to any action.

Thus, a primary property of God's masterwork is His Own Goodness in tension with the freedom of His human creatures.

The icon of this freedom in harmony with Goodness is Eden.

As they are free, the man and the woman are able to choose against God.

This they do by invading God's prerogative to decide right and wrong (Gen 3:6). The woman seizes the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen 2:17), which is moral theology.

The human claim to decide right and wrong, with its inherent rejection of God, would characterize the remainder of human history. Certainly, this is the general catastrophe of our own time.

What can the Author do when His characters have taken over the plot, subverting it? He cannot force their actions, rendering His art lifeless.

This crisis is known to all authors. We have seen those floors strewn with crumpled balls of paper. He must begin again.

And this He does East of Eden, which would be marked with evil, even murder (Gen 4:1-18).

God alone is Heaven and life. Anything else, by definition, is Hell and eternal death. In Cain's murder of Abel, a new principle is revealed. The télos (the blueprint) within each living thing, which had been Heaven and eternal life with God, is now, in this new landscape of alienation, death: all things now must follow a withering and inescapable passage towards hideous finitude.

The murderer, Cain, would become a builder of cities, which would continue the invasion of God's domain as the tower of Babel invades Heaven itself (Gen 11).

Evil descends unto evil to the point that every intention of the thoughts of the human heart is only evil continually (Gen 6:5).

In his freedom, man has turned God's Creation upside down. The good is now not-good What had been godly life is only now anti-God. But He is unable, because of the man's sovereign freedom, to reduce His living art to a puppet show. So, using the writer's metaphor, He says, "I will blot out ( α&piαλείφω / apaleipho – erase from a wax tablet) man whom I have created .... for I am sorry that I have made them" (Gen 6:7). And He throws His beloved book into an endless sea of rain (Gen 6:9-9:17).

He chooses a faithful man, Noah, who will begin again with his family. Yet, this new and pristine world is stained by Noah's drunkenness and the incest of his wife and son, all three actions decided in freedom.

Nonetheless, God chooses to guide His human creatures with angels, even speaking to them Himself.

He chooses in one particular: Abram, of Ur of the Chaldees (Ur meaning the original city) calling Him away from this place which would become Babylon.

Abram and his wife Sarai are called into a purifying wilderness, notably avoiding cities such as Sodom and Gomorrah, living closely to God. God blesses them with Divine visitation near the Oaks of Mamre. Abraham and Sarah continue this journey of closeness to God becoming evermore like the faithful One, God (Rom 4).

Elsewhere, the human rebellion continues. After sending angels to instruct them, God edits two cities out of His Book: Sodom and Gomorrah.

Eventually, Abraham becomes father to a nation occupying a Promised Land. They call themselves the children of Abraham.

Roughly fifteen centuries later, these children would return to forbidden Babylon adopting its language (Aramaic), its customs, and its mindset.

Coming again to Judea, they institute a hybrid religion under the supervision of their Mesopotamian overlords, including animal sacrifice, supplanting Abraham's religion of closeness to and unity with God.

They revise the Scriptures and repurpose the Temple, which is financed by Mesopotamians.

By the first century B.C. this hybrid Mesopotamian religion, Judah-ism, named for its tribe, would dominate the Levant.

Following this course, Judah has risen to a position of power. Having been a client state under the Babylonian Empire, a client state under the Persian Empire, it is now a client of the Roman Empire. They send their sons to live in Rome and to be educated there.

During the first century B.C. and through most of the first century A.D., synagogues (literally, "gathering places") are built from Rome to Arabia indoctrinating historically Hebrew people with the new religion, which is mostly a civil religion — no angels, no afterlife, no direct communion with God — achieving Roman aims of good order.

Nonetheless, as one-third of Judeans had been taken to Babylon, two-thirds were not taken. Meantime, Hebrews from the historical Northern Kingdom of Israel had not been deported at all. These diverse Hebrew peoples continued to practice the faith of the Patriarchs.

Judeans opposing Roman subjugation would be brutally oppressed. Following one rebellion in the year 4 B.C. the Roman general Publius Quintilius Varus rounds up 2,000 rebels and in a single afternoon crucifies them three miles from the village of Nazareth. As each slowly dies, he must behold his family being butchered at the foot of his cross.

In a twist of irony, these rebels believed they were fighting for the true faith. Some years previously, they had destroyed the Northern Kingdom's Temple on Mount Gerizim in the Patriarchal area.

With the children of Abraham now being forcibly indoctrinated, with Mesopotamian Judah-ism being enforced everywhere with increasing severity, with the Land of Promise now occupied by the greatest military power in the history of mankind, and with a world of paganism and apostasy on every side, the Great Author faces an unprecedented crisis. Shall He now begin yet again? Shall He blot out the heritage of Abraham and Sarah, Naomi and Ruth, Jacob and the Twelve Tribes, David and Solomon?

Yet, they are lost, "the lost sheep of the House of Israel" (Mt 10:6). The Greek Fathers would write, they did not know who they were. They did not know to whom they belonged.

So instead of destroying His beloved masterwork, God sets down His pen and enters the story as a character: Jesus of Nazareth.

The shock of this — of the Creator more vast than the universe entering this little earth — is so great that the ancient blueprint of humankind reverts to the plan of Eden: from death back to life. (Cf. St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione).

As Jesus makes Himself known, He holds aloft the goodness of the faith of the Patriarchs, of Abraham's faith. All who heard Him were electrified. The Kingdom of Heaven religion would be exalted! The God of Abraham is among us (Mk 12:26)!

He tells His followers they would see Heaven open (forbidden) with angels descending and ascending (forbidden), recalling the Patriarch Jacob at Peniel. Angels! The Afterlife! The Kingdom of Heaven! Unity with God! Truly, this is the religion of the Patriarchs .... with every detail repudiated by Second Temple authorities.

In like measure He would deplore the idea that blood sacrifice could be a substitute for personal transformation, beating functionaries who propped up the cult and throwing them out of the Temple.

His message is always the same: "Be transformed!" And He points to St. John the Forerunner as the great exemplar, for he is the man of Eden, like Abraham, living in a wilderness. He is fragrant of the morning of the earth. He wears only natural clothes. He lives on a kind of manna — honey cakes called enkris. He abhors the degradation of city life.

When He sees Jesus, he says, "Behold the Lamb of God," which is to say, "the pure One, the unblemished One."

Jesus promises a Kingdom of Heaven, which He also calls the Bosom of Abraham, or Paradise, reopening the doors of unblemished and pure Edenic life.

Jesus is God, the Logos, the Creator. He belongs to no sect. He reveals and evinces the truth of Eden: God is with us.

He does not run the world. God is not "in charge":

God is with us. This is what He says to His most favored ones:

And this, He promises, will always be so:

The purpose of life on earth as it was in Eden is to be close to the One Who has pledged to be always close to us, becoming more and more like Him unto Unity with God (Jn 17:21).

He is the God of all (Eph 4:6, 1 Thess 3:13). He has sent His Apostles to the furthest ends of the earth (Acts 13:47) announcing good news that all who bear His Image were created to be the adopted children of God (Jn 20:17), to claim a birthright to the Kingdom (Mt 3:9), and to be heirs (Rom 8:17).

How do we practice this closeness? He tells us to follow Him (Mt 4:19), to pick up our crosses (Lu 9:23). He commands us to put on His yoke, which turns out to be a cross. We are to be crucified to the world as Abraham also remained aloof from the cities of man. We are to live in a spiritual wilderness seeking intimacy only with God and with our brothers and sisters who also seek Him. This is transformation here and now and always.

To say that Jesus will save us, to say that He is Lord, to ask Him to be Master of our lives, and to praise Him and worship Him .... these are the first steps of the journey. This is the baby food which St. Paul mentions (1 Cor 3:2).

As we at the Hermitage now complete our journey following decades of laboring in the fields of the Lord, we have set our hearts and souls and minds entirely on the first years and centuries of His Advent, of His Disciples and Apostles, and of His nascent Church. For this reason, we are Orthodox. Unlike every other Christian tradition, Holy Orthodoxy is not a sect.

The Roman Catholic Church, which we served most of our lives, became a sect in the eleventh century when it set up its own Church and quickly devolved into Western Philosophy. In particular, its theology of sacrificing Jesus at the Mass, which developed at the time of the Great Schism, has been ruinous.

The Protestant revolution within the Roman Catholic Church is entirely founded on sixteenth century theology. This is true of the Evangelical movement, as well.

But Holy Orthodoxy practices the faith founded by Jesus upon the Apostles. The people of this Mediterranean region continue to practice the faith ordained by the Lord and evangelized by St. John, St. Andrew, St. Paul, and the others.

Its primary tradition, as it was in Eden, as it was with Abraham, as it was for John the Baptist, as it was when Jesus called the Twelve, and as it ever shall be is the religion of personal transformation. This was the cry of the Baptist, of Jesus, and of St. Paul:

Its other name is theosis, which is the consummation of a lifetime of discipleship as the Lord promised: that we be One with Him as He and the Father are One — organically united, indivisible, with all being in all (1 Cor 15:28).

This is the joyful work of a lifetime .... unto eternal life. It is the work of love. It is the work of goodness. It is the life of single-minded devotion, which we call faithfulness, the hallmark of Father Abraham. We pray that you will join the Hermitage in this closeness, in this faithfulness, on this journey. We pray that we will return to an active communion with you all in 2024 by means of our weekly reflections.

But if this is not to be, then we ask that you pray for us as we pray for all of you each day — the world of men and woman, of boys and girls, who love God, who are privileged to be His witnesses in this dark age, and who will become, by and by, through faithfulness and love, the Kingdom of God.

May His light shine into us and through us and radiate out of us now and forever (Mt 5:14).