Ecclesiasticus I: Introducing Eastern Orthodoxy
Ecclesiasticus II: Orthodox Icons, Saints, Feasts and Prayer
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"Nowadays,
with so much of its surface in wreckage and filth, it is the Earth that
faces us with moral demands. The spiritual merges once again with the
natural, from which, disastrously, it has been separated for some centuries."
If we are not given opportunities in some places to escape the triumph
of the trivialization of modern life, "we are all impoverished, in
our relationship to the past, to nature, to the influence of solitude
and space." [Tim Robinson, Oileain Arann, a companion to the map
of the Aran Islands, p 84]
Tim Robinson, in the twenty years he spent
mapping the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, hoped to give
a gift to the islanders of the value of their own place, and to impress
on outsiders the great need to support them in their "priestlike
task." "To live on Aran is a rare and demanding privilege;"
he says, "it is to be the inheritor of something both awkward and
valuable, like a Stradivarius, or intangible, like a talent that rewards
long commitment."
During our trip to Ireland this past November
we were allowed a glimpse of another attempt to preserve something awkward
and valuable, another reminder of our relationship to the past, to nature
and the influence of solitude and space.
Rather than at the edge of Ireland we spent
time in the very heart of the country. In County Offaly is a small town
called Ferbane (Fir-Bann) with its parish church of the Immaculate Conception.
The pastor of the parish, Fr. Frank Grey, has been restoring the hundred
year old church for the last 8 years and, in so doing, has employed local
materials. "Everything meaningful must be local," he said. "Some
places need to create a heart for their new community. We in Ferbane need
to discover the heart that is already there."
In the front of the church is a baptismal
font made of bog oak. The parish sits on the edge of the Bog of Allen,
and for centuries the local people have dug turf from the bog for their
winter heating. Often pieces of old trees would be found, preserved for
6,000 years and more by the lack of oxygen in the layers of peat. Most
often these are left aside. Fr. Grey, and a local sculptor, Michael Casey,
have taken large roots of bog wood and cleaned and polished them into
striking and useful liturgical art. The font looks as though it might
be a winged being, seven feet tall, holding the bowl of water for baptism
in its hands. Another piece, in a side chapel, serves to hold the consecrated
Eucharistic bread for adoration by the churchgoers.
It was this second piece that was most striking
to me. This devotion to the "Blessed Sacrament" is familiar
to me from my early years as a Roman Catholic. The body of Christ is reserved
for adoration and using this particular piece of bog oak to hold the body
of Christ connected that practice with the some Orthodox elements I have
come to know in later life. The piece of wood was not tall but quite wide,
and concave in shape. The body of Christ was held in its deep center,
so that the side arms seemed to sweep out toward the person in front of
it, gathering in all of what made that person up. In this it was strongly
evocative of the icon of the Holy Trinity called the "Hospitality
of Abraham." That icon, too, seems to reach out toward all that stands
before it, gathering it in to itself, sweeping it up into God. By that
same token, the sculpture seems to embody the title of Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s
wonderful book, For the Life of the World. At the same time that
it gathers up all that is in front of it, it also shares itself in an
outward motion, offering all that it is and has, that is the whole of
Christ, with all of life. This dual motion, gathering in and sharing out
is the essence of hospitality, of the Trinitarian life, of the life Jesus
Christ - truly human and divine.
So, what does this all say about the holiness
of place, and the priestly function of preserving that holiness in the
communion of place and people?
First, as Robinson says, the spiritual merges
with the natural. We as Christians can say it even more strongly, that
creation in all of its forms, is filled with the Spirit of God. Fr. Alexander
Men says that the tiniest bird is more an icon of the holy than anything
painted on a board. This wood from the bog is an icon for the local place,
for the holy that is in it. It speaks to us of the hospitality of the
earth, of creation – of creation being the image of God in his generosity
to us. The form of the bog wood says this to us, but the earth itself
says it to us in its gift to us of something it has held dear and cared
for over millennia of time, and now given back to the local inhabitants.
Second we must attend to the purely local
character of this gift. One of the common failings of human beings is
to see the greener grass on the other side of the fence, to pay more attention
to what we don’t have than to what is ours. The use of this bog wood,
humble refuse of 6,000 years ago, reminds us that we must value the local,
what is home to us. That we can find right here, under our noses, what
is most needful, what is most helpful to our lives both physically and
spiritually. And that we must value the local by preserving it, even more,
by celebrating it.
Third, the local history of the people is
confirmed as sacramental in itself. This confirmation is the result of
the specifically priestly function of offering an essential element of
the local landscape to God by naming it and calling it good. Without that
priestly function being performed, we are all deprived of an important
element in recognizing the holiness of place.
As I think of the place where I live, on
the edge of the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, I think of the charred
remains of the frequent forest fires in the barrens. During these fires
the cones on the pine trees fall to the ground and are opened up by the
intense heat. They then can let go of the seeds for the trees that will
replace them. Those cones have the same omnipresent quality of the bog
wood. They are ordinary in appearance, of no consequence because of their
numbers. But they carry the same sacramentality of place that the bog
wood does for much of Ireland. It is local, it is important to the physical
world and the culture of a large area. Both bog oak and pine cone carry
the image of the dying, buried and risen God we worship. Both of them,
and any local, natural part of creation has the potential to teach us
the value, the sacredness, of the place in which we live.
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Robert
Flanagan is a member of The Orthodox Church of the Holy Cross, Medford,
NJ
From Jacob's Well
Newspaper of the Diocese of
New York and New Jersey
Orthodox Church in America
Fall/Winter 1999-2000
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