The Orthodox Parish of St Aidan & St Chad, Nottingham
ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE
EPISCOPAL VICARIATE OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Exarchate of Parishes
of Russian Tradition in Western Europe
Extracts from the Parish Newsletter, March 2007
FATHER DAVID’S LETTER:
To guide us into the right spirit of Great Lent, the Church encourages us to seek four graces. These are the themes of the four Sundays leading into the Holy Fast. The Sunday of the Pharisee and the Publican is about humility; of the Prodigal Son, repentance; the Sunday of the Last Judgement equips us to stand before the Throne of God at the end of time; then there is forgiveness on Forgiveness Sunday.
Great Lent will always bring blessing, however much or however little we keep it. St John Chrysostom, as we shall hear again at Paschal matins, teaches that even for those who arrive at the eleventh hour and who have not kept the fast will still be welcomed into God’s banquet. But, as ever, the more serious we are in our Lenten effort, the more helpful it will be for our spiritual life and if we are too lackadaisical and negligent we might, in any case, miss the eleventh hour.
These four graces are important because they unblock the way to God, the path of righteousness. The Pharisee (Luke 18: 10-14) was a righteous man, a pillar of the church, but so full of himself, so self-preoccupied, that he was not open to any change that God might want of him. Only the Publican, with the few words, ‘God be merciful to me a sinner,’ was ready to be changed and healed. His humility teaches us that only by presenting ourselves as we are, torn by the world and in sin, can we be open to God’s mercy.
Then we have the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-32) who has abused his son-ship and wasted his life in so many unproductive, selfish and unfulfilling ways. Until he was able to see that he was on a path to nowhere and turn again to his Father and the source of healing and blessing could his life be put right. In this act of repentance, he came to himself and moved on.
The story of the Last Judgement (Matthew 25: 31-46) is most telling. Our Lord teaches us that we are lost unless we recognise Him in our brethren, brothers and sisters in Christ, and reach out to them as we would to Him. We are to attend to their every need: in sickness, in destitution, hunger, thirst, poverty, nakedness and in captivity. All this should have a spiritual dimension, as well as a material one. When we do it ‘to the last of these’ Christ’s brethren, we do it unto Him.
Finally, there is Forgiveness Sunday (Matthew 6: 14-21), when we hear the most important lesson of all: if we do not forgive others, we will not be forgiven by God. In harbouring resentment, bitterness, and anger in our hearts we set up a block, which not only separates us from those with whom we have a difference but also separates us from God. Without forgiveness we are lost and the Lenten Fast is impossible.
So here is the pattern for Great Lent: four graces to carry us though. By taking up humility and repentance and attending to the needs of our brethren. By seeking forgiveness and asking God to unblock within us all that holds us back from Him, we can, with a clean heart, enter in to the Great Fast and be open to all that He wishes to give to us. This Holy Season will then lead us through to the joys of Pascha and a refreshment and a renewal which will stand us in good stead for the days ahead.
May God Bless you.
Great Lent will always bring blessing, however much or however little we keep it. St John Chrysostom, as we shall hear again at Paschal matins, teaches that even for those who arrive at the eleventh hour and who have not kept the fast will still be welcomed into God’s banquet. But, as ever, the more serious we are in our Lenten effort, the more helpful it will be for our spiritual life and if we are too lackadaisical and negligent we might, in any case, miss the eleventh hour.
These four graces are important because they unblock the way to God, the path of righteousness. The Pharisee (Luke 18: 10-
Then we have the Prodigal Son (Luke 15: 11-
The story of the Last Judgement (Matthew 25: 31-
Finally, there is Forgiveness Sunday (Matthew 6: 14-
So here is the pattern for Great Lent: four graces to carry us though. By taking up humility and repentance and attending to the needs of our brethren. By seeking forgiveness and asking God to unblock within us all that holds us back from Him, we can, with a clean heart, enter in to the Great Fast and be open to all that He wishes to give to us. This Holy Season will then lead us through to the joys of Pascha and a refreshment and a renewal which will stand us in good stead for the days ahead.
May God Bless you.
Father David
Good News from the North
Father David has asked me, an Anglican recipient of the Sts Aidan and Chad Newsletter living in Northumberland to pen these lines for this edition. It is a privilege to be asked to say a few words about a project developing here. Not all readers may realize that your priest has been making missionary journeys to the north! For some years now, Fr David has been making retreats at Shepherd’s Law, a small monastery founded recently on the site of an abandoned hill farm in the wilds of Northumberland. Started by an Anglican Franciscan, it has always held two aims in view: 1) being rooted in the Tradition of historic faith, and 2) dedication to Christian unity.
It was here that some five years ago I, as a local and a frequent visitor myself, had the good fortune to meet Fr David, and I at once got the strange sense that here was both the prophet and the prophecy. In the Nottingham area churches are not uncommon, easily reached and services frequent. Shepherd’s Law is a mile up a rough farm track situated nearly halfway between St Andrew’s in Edinburgh and a college chapel in Durham borrowed for Orthodox worship, both seventy miles distant!
But at Shepherd’s Law the Holy Liturgy is served two or three times per year and the attendance has been growing each time, with up to three or four local Orthodox and half a dozen or so Anglicans and others. It is always a great occasion despite the small handful that attend, and two or three of us even manage to get the singing together. There is even something catacomb-like about the hasty provisionality of it all in a borrowed building and melting away again afterwards ‘before we get caught,’ and this heightens the effect of heaven bursting down on us in the liturgy.
So, Shepherd’s Law’s second aim is being fulfilled, but what about its first? I have been rereading Bede with my orthodox spectacles on and I have been surprised by what I have found (subject for another article); suffice it to say that Northumbria was the ancient kingdom where in the seventh century western orthodoxy came from Rome via St Paulinus (the east!) and eastern orthodoxy arrived from Iona via ST Aidan (the west!). I have formed the conclusion that had the Synod of Whitby gone in favour of the Celts, England might have remained orthodox! There can be no doubt that the distinctively monastic origin and pattern of the Irish church of the seventh century was eastern. It is often said that Northumberland is a ‘thin place’, and that’s not a reference to the weather!
It is my view that here in the north is a desert thirsting for the re-establishment of Orthodoxy. Numbers will inevitably never be enormous and it is unlikely that a new parish could be set up in my lifetime, but that does not matter. There are other models for Orthodox presence, such as pilgrimage centres and monasteries. Sadly, Northumbria is a part of the country where eastern Christianity simply does not impinge on peoples’ minds; even Catholics are not numerous. But the monastic base that exists at Shepherd’s Law could become the focus for a small Orthodox lay community such as is found in other parts of the country; it may in the course of time be possible to hold Reader services there, and as a member of the Shepherd’s Law Advisory Group, I will do my best, under Fr David, to promote this. And you in the parish of St Aidan and St Chad can make an enormous contribution by praying constantly for the growth of this project. Please do, especially for locally-based Orthodox including John and Irina, who had their first child in December, and Natasha and her child Nadia and her non-Orthodox husband.
The Revd John-Michael Mountney
(Vicar of Embleton, Rennington, and Rock, Northumberland)
What is the significance of Koliva?
Koliva is the name given to the mixture of boiled wheat, sugar and other ingredients (such as raisins, almonds, spices) presented at Memorial Services.
Wheat is a symbol of the resurrection. Our Lord said: ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit.’ (John 12:24). When we offer Koliva, or wheat, we are declaring: ‘I believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’ The sugar, or honey, is added as a prayer that the deceased’s resurrection will be a sweet and pleasant one. When we share the Koliva we offer a personal prayer for the deceased such as: ‘Lord, forgive and grant eternal rest.’
On February 17th, we also remember the miracle of the boiled wheat performed by the holy great martyr St Theodore the Recruit. Fifty years after the death of St Theodore, the emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363 A.D.), wanting to commit an outrage on the Christians, commanded the city ruler of Constantinople to sprinkle all the food provisions in the market-places with the blood offered to idols during the first week of Great Lent. St Theodore, having appeared in a dream to Archbishop Eudoxius, ordered him to inform all the Christians that they should not buy anything in the market, but instead to eat cooked wheat with honey (kolyva).
In memory of this occurrence, the Orthodox Church annually celebrates the holy great martyr Theodore the Recruit on the first Saturday of Great Lent. On Friday evening, at the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, following the prayer at the ambo, the canon to the holy great martyr Theodore, composed by St John of Damascus, is sung. After this, kolyva is blessed and distributed to the faithful. The celebration of St Theodore on the first Saturday of Lent was established by Patriarch Nectarius of Constantinople (381-397 A.D.)
(Father David, Précis of a piece sent to ‘Orthodox Theology’)
Prayer and Forgiveness
Pray for me…
What does this mean? What are we doing when we pray for someone? What happens when they pray for us? Are we aware of the prayer that happens?
I have been reflecting on this recently. A friend said to me once, simply enough, when he found out that I was troubled, ‘I was up in the night, praying for you.’ I was very struck by this. Was I so much on this person’s heart, along with the other matters he considers, that he woke in the night, got out of bed, stood before his icons and held me up to Christ, in the love he bears me? Beseeching our Lord that all that prevents my straightness, my cleanness, my purity before God be taken away, and that I become what I am designed to be, fully alive in Christ, in the whole body of his Church?
I think it is so. For my part, there have been many people on my heart at various times, when I have wanted with all my strength that they would be healed, freed of the griefs that bind them, able to rejoice. So I have stood before my icons and considered how much I love these people, how much beauty I see in them, even if it is not always apparent, and I have witnessed to the best in them. This perhaps is the essence of intercessory prayer for each other, in that we hold up to God our own love for each other, and help to make a path where God’s power can flow for that person. This is an aspect of what it means to be the Body of Christ. It seems to me that it is an organic, living phenomenon, not a dry theological concept. In the East, we say theology is prayer, and it is real, not an intellectual construct.
So when we pray for one another, it really matters. It really makes a difference, and the person’s path is smoother in ways that would not be so if we had not so prayed. In this life we often hesitate to say to our friends, ‘I love you.’ Perhaps we feel embarrassed, that we are a bit ‘over the top,’ that it’s not very English to be so forthright. If we feel that then we can still pray and it is just as effective for the person we pray for, whose ultimate good we desire.
After all, that is the point of love, not that we get from the person pleasant feelings and good things, although of course we may, but that we desire, in Christ, what is best for them. On the other hand, it also matters if we hold resentment in our hearts against anyone. We cannot help what we may feel, but we are certainly responsible for what we do next. This is where forgiveness comes in—it is an enlargement of our heart, to take in the hurt we have suffered and then, by God’s grace, to accept and transfigure it. It isn’t that the hurt doesn’t matter—it is plain that it does—but that we go beyond it. This cannot be done without God’s grace and a true honesty within ourselves, perhaps learned most intensely, over time, in the Confessional, in the healing sacrament of repentance which the Church provides.
Barbara Bates
(Originally published in the Newsletter of the Parish of St Aidan and St Chad, November, 2001)
(Originally published in the Newsletter of the Parish of St Aidan and St Chad, November, 2001)
In our first meeting, led by Father David, we discussed passages from an article by Panagiotis Nellas, entitled ‘Redemption and Deification’, which comments on Nicholas Cabasilas’s The Life in Christ. Cabasilas lived in the fourteenth century in Thessaloniki and wrote two important works, that mentioned above and a Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. In his study of the The Life in Christ, Nellas emphasises Cabasilas’s view that Christ, the incarnate Word, is the archetype for human beings. This means that we possess both a ‘structural correspondence’ with Christ, because he physically took on a human form, and a potential to become like Christ if we turn towards him as God. These two stages, or models, of imitation correspond to the fact that we were created in the image and likeness of God. Cabasilas also explains that even before Christ became incarnate, he represented the prototype for the creation of the first man. The mystery of the incarnation thus transcends history: it is a mystery which gives meaning to every aspect of existence and of redemption.
The second meeting of the discussion, led by Mary Cunningham, was also well attended in spite of the frigid weather and an impending snowstorm. At this meeting we talked about the role of the bishop in the early Church. We read passages from St Ignatius’s letters to the churches of Ephesus and of Magnesia, along with sections of Metropolitan John Zizioulas’s book, Eucharist, Bishop, Church (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001). St Ignatius was an early second-century bishop from Antioch, who was arrested, taken by land to Rome and eventually martyred in the arena there. He was nevertheless able to write letters to churches along his route, somewhat in the style of St Paul, intended to strengthen them in discipline and orthodoxy. These are among the most moving documents of the post-apostolic phase of the early Church. St Ignatius stresses the importance of obedience to the bishop, who provides stability and unity to a Church which had already become widely spread throughout the later Roman empire and beyond. Zizioulas also stresses that Christian unity, which is based on universal participation in the eucharist, depends on the sacerdotal function of the bishop. Unity in the Church was under threat at this time not only from pagan rulers, but also from heterodox, sometimes Gnostic, sects who called themselves Christians. While noting this very early stress on the ecclesiological importance of the bishop, we were especially struck by one passage which compares the body of clergy to a harp:
The second meeting of the discussion, led by Mary Cunningham, was also well attended in spite of the frigid weather and an impending snowstorm. At this meeting we talked about the role of the bishop in the early Church. We read passages from St Ignatius’s letters to the churches of Ephesus and of Magnesia, along with sections of Metropolitan John Zizioulas’s book, Eucharist, Bishop, Church (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001). St Ignatius was an early second-
‘…your justly respected clergy, who are a credit to God, are attuned to their bishop like the strings of a harp, and the result is a hymn of praise to Jesus Christ from minds that are in unison, and affections that are in harmony.’ (M. Staniforth, ed., Early Christian Writings [Penguin Books, 1987], p. 62)
Turning to our present situation in the Exarchate of Western Europe, we agreed that this passage expresses well our feelings of loyalty towards our Bishop Basil of Amphipolis. For many of us, he represents a source, not of rigid authority to whom we must give blind obedience, but of wisdom, discernment and love. As the ‘rational flock’ of Jesus Christ, we turn to our bishop for guidance. Or, as St Ignatius put it:
‘When someone is sent by the master of a house to manage his household for him, it is our duty to give him the same kind of reception as we should give the sender; and therefore it is clear that we must regard a bishop as the Lord himself.’
(Ibid., pp. 62-63)
While the study group thus explores deep and sometimes intellectually demanding issues, it is notable that the atmosphere remains friendly, relaxed and enquiring. Sometimes we digress into lighter, or more controversial topics: it is clear to me at least that no one is afraid to speak openly or to ask searching questions in these enjoyable evenings of discussion.
The next meeting, to be held on March 8th (Thursday), will be led by Barbara Bates. She will introduce passages by St Maximos the Confessor that deal with the problem of unruly thoughts.
Mary Cunningham
Other News
From Romania:
Iulian Popescu writes that he has now settled back home in Romania. He is presently building a house with his brother. He sends his good wishes and expresses his appreciation of the three years that he spent in Nottingham as part of our community. We wish him well with his building efforts and for his future life.
Sweden:
Michael Brooke has sent the following report on a Russian church in Stockholm:
Iulian Popescu writes that he has now settled back home in Romania. He is presently building a house with his brother. He sends his good wishes and expresses his appreciation of the three years that he spent in Nottingham as part of our community. We wish him well with his building efforts and for his future life.
Sweden:
Michael Brooke has sent the following report on a Russian church in Stockholm:
‘The street maps of Stockholm said “Russian Church”, so, knowing nothing of jurisdictions, I went to it on my visits to the city, and it was not until two years ago that I realised that the church was part of the Exarchate of the Orthodox Parishes of Russian Tradition in Western Europe. The church building must date from the early twentieth century and has been fitted into the yard (gård) of a typical apartment house of that period, natural light coming into the church from the ceiling only. From what I knew of the Exarchate, it was surprising to me that the only Swedish used in the Liturgy was for the Gospel, everything else being in (presumably) Slavonic.’
‘A word should be said of the Swedish-language Orthodox press, which consists of one monthly, Ortodox Tidning, founded in 1960 by Wilmar Hohnström, who is still its editor. It is not connected to any jurisdiction, but tries to speak for Orthodoxy both as a whole and in its various forms. One should bear in mind that the number of Swedish-speaking Orthodox is considerably less than that of English-speaking Orthodox in our own country.’
ANNOUNCEMENTS
The AGM of the Parish of St Aidan and St Chad will be held at 7.30 p.m., Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 in the Parish Rooms.
Father David will next visit Alnmouth in the week beginning June 18th 2007. The time of the liturgy there will be announced.
Father David will next visit Alnmouth in the week beginning June 18th 2007. The time of the liturgy there will be announced.
The Fellowship of St John the Baptist will take place at Swanwick, Derbyshire, 6th- 8 th July 2007. The title of the conference will be: ‘Revealing Christ to the World’. For further details, please write to: Bede Gerrard, 26 Denton Close, Oxford OX2 9BW. E-mail: bjgerrrard@compuserve.com