I awoke in the dark night, the cool air drifting into my room through two wide opened windows, the soft sounds of a gently falling rain soothing to my mind and soul. Healing rain, the heavens liquefying to lay down on hard, unyielding pavements and dry, thirsty soil a moist blanket of peace in the night, peace after a day satisfied with its work, peace and stillness.
Always welcome to me, rain by night or by day invites me to pause, to return to my inner home. I would curl up in a cushioned chair in a corner between two windows, maybe a light blanket over me, and read a good book, or
the Good Book, or even just the book of my memories. Taking pause, the
selah of the psalms, after words or work, to stop and consider, it is enough.
This night the rain remembered another day when it healed the earth and those that live upon it and are buried in it. That bright day many years ago when, after a week of my wife’s family reunion at Buffalo Lake, Alberta, some of us turned aside to a graveyard in Camrose to commit to the soil the ashes of one of its own, my father-in-law James Raymond Mabbott.
He had come home from Australia to die. After a stormy marriage that produced five children in short order, he had disappeared, leaving his wife and oldest daughter to manage a fatherless family. Canadian farm boy of good stock, he was descended from Christian people from England’s smallest county, Rutlandshire, that came to settle in Wisconsin before the Civil War.
That family fanning out over the great plains, always west and north, to the Dakotah Territory, then spilling over to fill the prairie provinces, to Saskatchewan, to Alberta, leaving sturdy sons and swarthy but fair daughters to build homesteads, first from sod houses, at last produced the generation that was cast into the fiery furnace of the second world war, turning farm boys into killers.
After that war, wishing to forget, one took to alcohol and riotous living, but obligations to kith and kin must still be met. A young man took a wife, daughter of Ukrainian settlers who wished to become ‘white’ as quickly as possible. To be like other Canadians, my wife’s grandmother Domka, daughter of Father Theodosius Taschuk of the Russian Orthodox mission, became Doris.
She sent her children to the Protestant school and church, never spoke the ancestral tongue, the better to make Canadians out of them. When my mother-in-law was six, the old country reappeared in Father Theodosius coming to the settlement, rounding up all the children who hadn’t been baptised, and giving them the triple dunk in a large washbasin. Nancy became Anastasia in a hidden moment.
Then, back to Nancy as she grew up, a nice ‘white’ girl like all the other Smiths and Gordons and MacDearmids, when she became ripe for wedding, the young school mistress became the missus Mabbott, and started bearing children for her gallant young man. But the war had left large scars on his soul, and Christian though he was, what little faith he had was traded for drink.
Before long, the inevitable happened. Paper Christianity doesn’t have much holding power, and the young family was torn in two. As usual the children weighted down their mother’s boat, almost capsizing it. And the father, clinging to his piece of driftwood, was finally lost at sea. They never saw him again for a decade, hearing only rumors that he, like many others, had gone down under.
When he finally returned, it was to come home to die. The family was mostly grown. His oldest daughter had just become my wife. He went about trying to gather his sons and daughters together, and to make amends, tried to give them what he thought they needed, but money can’t atone for missing years. Before long he couldn’t hide his throat cancer any more. He had to pay the piper.
I knew him very little, but I could see what sort of man he must have been, and could have been. He was no stranger to virtue, but even loaded with virtues, a man can still be felled by one carefully aimed vice. Not wanting to ‘be buried in the cold earth’ he requested, and was granted, to have his remains cremated, so his bones would not feel the frozen clay, but his ashes had no resting place.
Not even an urn, just a cardboard box contained him, or what was left of him, as we opened the trunk of my car parked at the roadside. His oldest son was angry, was outraged that his father had nothing to show for him but a box of ashes. It was a bright day, its sharp outlines blunted by the steady drizzle that drenched the ground and muddied our boots as we walked into the cemetery.
There was a grave opened and ready to receive his ashes. I don’t remember how they were interred, but someone took charge of them. My part was to perform the memorial service. James, my father-in-law, was not a religious man, but he was a Christian, not a victorious one, but a crushed one. He was a man who had to go through a dark wood by night and was attacked, robbed and killed by a brigand.
No one else in the family knew what to do, and the church affiliations of those present at the interment were sketchy, so it fell to us, to my wife and me, to ‘do something’ for a memorial. What we did was the Greek Orthodox memorial service, singing parts of it in Greek for that little crowd of pious but undiscipled Christian relatives.
‘Meta pnevmaton dikaion teteleiomenon…’
I had printed out the memorial service and the few parts that were in Greek I translated, but no one holding a copy in their hands was looking at it. Something I learned early about the rain: you can cry in it and not be ashamed, because no one can tell the tears from the raindrops on your face, unless they look very closely. One of my wife’s sisters joined in as we sang
‘Aionia i mnimi…’
That simple melody,
Aionia i mnimi, ‘Eternal be his memory,’ still hung in the air as we slowly parted from each other and returned to our cars. Some of the family had stayed in their cars because they were afraid of the rain. It made me wonder at the time, and even now, what people think is important, and why. Me, I am as much an Indian as I can be, bare-chested I love to go out in the rain.
As I sit here by my open window, that beautiful, constant sound of water plays music on the dark hardness outside, finding echoes within me, and I hope that when the sun rises in about an hour, the rain will continue. The world and I both need healing right now, and we cannot heal ourselves. Our memories cannot heal us, our doctrines and covenants cannot heal us, only the rain.
The rain, no, not the water falling that I love to run in or sit quietly under cover and listen to, not that rain, though it can be the harbinger. No, the real rain, that which God sends to water the earth, to water the heart, that is the rain I am talking about. We know the name of that red rain that washes away all stain of sin and the sting of pain. It is blood. It is grace. Healing rain.
Blessed is he who, with a hunger that is never satisfied, day and night throughout this present life makes prayer and the psalms his food and drink, and strengthens himself by reading of God’s glory in Scripture. Such communion will lead the soul to ever-increasing joy in the age to come. 
The art of invisibility, the practice of vacancy, define the life of the modern corporate office. If Christians find themselves working there, they are more terrified of revealing their identity as Christians, even to each other, than the early Christians were of being discovered by the Roman authorities. And if you make the mistake of calling them out, they look stunned and are struck with speechlessness. If they hear a particle of the Word of God spoken in their presence, they race to fill its aftermath with mysterious giggling laughter or guffaws and references to some movie they have just watched. Anything to avoid coming into contact with the living Christ, anything to acknowledge the One they say they have given their lives to, or at least been baptized into as infants.
Continuing my probe, I asked him, ‘If you were heading one way, and you met a funeral procession carrying the dead only son of a widow going the other way, wouldn’t you take a moment to stop and raise the dead?’ (cf. Luke 7:11-17) This is the way I am used to talking, bringing the Word of God into a conversation, whenever it enters my mind to do so—in this case, an extreme example of the willingness to be interrupted, even when you’re ‘on a mission.’ I knew that my friend was knowledgeable in the bible, as he is a faithful church-going Catholic and hears it read at mass, though he rarely reads it himself.
Whether you have a degree or not (I don't), whether you're ordained or not (I'm not),
The language—that is, the vocabulary—that I read in a lot of Christian blogs is very technical and sophisticated, such as ‘for a Church to reach it's culture with the gospel it must contextualize itself…’, etc. This way of talking, and the thinking that goes with it, seems alien to the plain words of scripture, of the gospels and the apostolic letters. Neither Jesus nor the apostles spoke like that. In fact, the way Jesus did speak made his enemies say things like, ‘No man has ever spoken like Him before! We just couldn't arrest Him!’ (John 7:45-53).
I want to love you, Lord,
What is the work of epiphany, and who does this work, and when?
I awoke in the dark night, the cool air drifting into my room through two wide opened windows, the soft sounds of a gently falling rain soothing to my mind and soul. Healing rain, the heavens liquefying to lay down on hard, unyielding pavements and dry, thirsty soil a moist blanket of peace in the night, peace after a day satisfied with its work, peace and stillness.
Eloquent speakers and articulate writers produce compelling expressions of truth, some to entertain others for the sake of praise, others because they have given themselves over to Christ without reserve. He can use both kinds of people and He does.
I have learned to be indulgent with, but not submissive to, the human weaknesses, whether intellectual or moral, that I find in the clergy. It is so difficult to walk that tightrope for a good priest or other clergyman (not now speaking of just Orthodox clergy). I have known a few Orthodox and Protestant (Episcopalian) priests and bishops who somehow have managed to not walk the tight-rope at all, but merely to fly or leap across the divides among their people.
I hope you know I am not your average Orthodox zealot out looking for converts. I'd rather have anyone go to his or her own church of choice or heritage, if coming to Orthodoxy in any way would muddy or prevent their relationship to Jesus. But for those who are already Orthodox but can't see ‘over the wall’ or ‘find the door’ I am Johnny-on-the-spot to provide a ladder or be a friendly door-keeper. In fact, that's what I've thought my place in the Body of Christ to be almost from the first moment of my conversion: I'm just a humble porter, here to carry your luggage (and you) to a place of safety—one meaning of ‘porter’—or here to guard the doors from enemies and open the doors for friends—the other meaning. Yes, ‘the doors! the doors! tas thíras! tas thíras!’ Another favorite moment of mine in the Liturgy. Deacons can call out the words; I try to obey them. 
You are blessed, Lord,
Usually, it’s the church I once attended and ministered out of, St. Mark’s, what I once considered my “family” church, a miniature masterpiece, architecturally a basilica with Italianate bell tower, interior based on the famous church in Venice, replete with frescos and icons. The first few scenes in this dream sequence were based on St. Mark’s and had the same themes, me trying to explain to visitors why the great church was no longer what it once was. The last thing I remember out of those scenes was taking an embroidered icon cloth out of the church, rescuing it from oblivion because the “remodel” had no place for it, and unrolling the cloth on my bed, so I could look at it more closely…
I was just bidding farewell to an Eastern European new immigrant, a young man, a musician, who had just received some kind of blessing from the church. It seemed like he had been in need of a new musical instrument so he could support himself, and maybe the church had just helped him out in some way.
“Don’t let this matter of having two cows get in the way of your salvation. If you want another cow and can buy it, go and buy it. Then, go to your priest and ask him for his blessing. If he refuses to give it, thank him, say ‘That’s alright, father, that’s alright,’ pay your respects, and leave. Then, come to the Greek priest. He will give you the blessing, because we don’t have a ‘one cow’ rule.”
The human condition, my condition… When I can forget myself, all is well, I live for the Other, grace has blinded me to my failures and to my accomplishments, to my sins and to my virtues, to my weakness and to my strength. When I look at myself, all is lost, as I find myself either skillfully descending into sin, or painfully arising from having committed it. I say to myself, “I am so small, so weak, one among so many, with nothing and no one to save me except God, but He is so great, so beyond me, perfect and righteous, maintaining all, why should He even notice me? I am nothing.” Whether slipping into sin or climbing out of it, or even while committing it, thinking of and looking at myself, I say these things, a sick man, paralysed and blind, naked before myself, before all, and like many others I cry “Have mercy on me, a sinner!”
The psalms for the 12th Day speak as they always have, the words of the King that only kings can pray, no one else. We have been recreated a nation of kings and priests to the Most-High, the Only God, and so we are beckoned to enter in. The words envelope us as water envelopes us as we enter, as with trepidation the diseased would enter the healing waters of Bethesda, seeking the angel’s touch, changing us utterly, and arising no longer we look the same, no longer we see the same, anymore unto the ages.
Whether such a word exists or not, it is a logical possibility from a Greek point of view. For example, we say evkolo, ‘easy’, and dyskolo, ‘difficult’.
People miss the significance of this question, and go on, to launch themselves into intellectual and emotional crusades as to whether or not Adam and Eve were real historical persons.
At the very moment of their call, men find that they have already broken with all the natural ties of life. This is not their own doing, but His who calls them. For Christ has delivered them from immediacy with the world, and brought them into immediacy with Himself. We cannot follow Christ unless we are prepared to accept and affirm that breach as a fait accompli. It is no arbitrary choice on the disciple’s part, but Christ Himself, who compels him thus to break with his past.
The appearance of virtue, of correctness, likes to express itself in an ironic tone, but very piously and politely. True virtue, when it is expressed at all, is either very subtle, almost invisible, or else so bold and direct, that it is accused of being uncharitable and demanding, but never of being polite.
I saw this story of Ahmet the new martyr on Fr Milovan's blog, and I am familiar with it through reading it in the book New Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke, so I didn't think any more about it. But looking at it again, I thought to myself, ‘Perhaps some Muslim brothers might be visiting my blog, who don't know about this saint,’ and so I decided to copy it here in its entirety. Though we are in modern times, similar things are still happening today.
In accordance with Ottoman law, since he did not have a wife, he had a slave instead, a Russian woman. Another captive from Russia lived together with her, an old woman, also a slave. Both these women were very pious.
Alison Litherland, 