On the second Sunday after Pascha, our tradition commemorates the women who came before dawn with myrrh and spices to anoint the body of Christ.
As I read the passage, what strikes me is their faithfulness to their religion.
In its original sense, Latin religio isn’t about beliefs – it’s the set of duties to which a person is bound. It’s his obligation to his family, his city, his people. Religion – and its synonym *piety* – for the Romans was the whole bundle of daily, monthly, annual practices that make society and the world work. Along with paying taxes and obeying the law, a pious person naturally practiced reverence and token sacrifice to the state and its gods, to his ancestors and household spirits. The network of patronage and mutual obligation was understood to include the living, the departed, and the gods themselves. So the new cult of Christians were denounced as atheists and impious. Christians’ scandalous refusal to hold up their social obligation to sacrifice was a disruption to society, to relationships between people, and potentially between humans and the gods; naturally the Romans felt Christianity needed to be stamped out.
• • •
Some time ago I overheard a conversation between a friend and her brother, a recovering alcoholic.
“Making the bed is silly because you are just going to unmake it tonight,” she said.
He answered, “I need this little routine. It’s good for me.”
To her, making the bed was an isolated, ultimately meaningless act. To him, as he went on to explain, it was one brick in something he was building. In his 12-step program, he’d been challenged to re-situate his life in humility and to find knowledge of himself in daily practice. He’s a nonbeliever, so his practice consisted of a number of simple, repeated acts and new habits to give his life rhythm and to anchor each day in normal, human life. Each day that he makes his bed, brushes his teeth, reads his book, etc., grounds him a little more in the world inhabited by people who are not one drink away from destruction.
He’s not a believer in any religion, but in the original meaning of the word he’s becoming religious – and it’s healing his soul.
Religion is more about what your practice is making you into, than about the individual acts in which your religion consists. No one drop of water, however fast-moving and abrasive, can reshape stone. But a river carves a canyon, one drop at a time. Each intentional act of ours makes us minutely more of what we aim to be. And, of course, each unthinking act of ours conforms us a little more to the noise and dissolution of the world around us.
• • •
On Friday evening, Joseph and Nicodemus hurriedly washed and wrapped the body of Christ, and placed it in Joseph’s own newly-purchased tomb. With the sunset came the sabbath, when observant Jews could not work – so Saturday, the second day of Christ’s death, began with his body only half-prepared and his disciples devastated, hiding in their homes for fear of arrest. On Saturday evening, at the end of the sabbath, began the third day of Christ’s death. Early the next morning, Mary Magdalene, Joanna and the other women got up before dawn to go finish the job of anointing and preparing Christ’s body properly.
They weren’t looking for a resurrection. “Who will roll away the stone from the door of the tomb for us?” Their early-morning mission wasn’t motivated by any hope or faith. They went to anoint Christ’s body because that is what you do. It needed doing, and the men were in hiding, so the women set out to do what custom demanded.
And it was when they undertook their “religious” obligation that their encounter with Life began.
• • •
How many times have we showed up for church out of habit, often grudgingly, with complaints about the early hour… and found by the end of the service that it’s changed us? Our dormant sense of awe and wonder didn’t fire up on demand, but the practical piety to which we’d trained ourselves put us in a place and among a people where we could be walked through our paces. We may not have experienced any glorious epiphany, but religious practice took us outside our own self-pity and sleepwalking, into intentional action.
I don’t awaken full of energy or faith. Most mornings I crawl from bed to shower to car with no sense of hope or conscious fellowship with God. I joke about not being a morning person, but when I awaken the world usually just looks grim. Memory of God comes along later, after I’m properly awake. If I’m going to do any serious prayer, it has to be in the evening. But it turns out stumbling half-asleep into the office is no preparation to live intentionally or meaningfully; experience says I need some kind of habit of morning prayer if I’m to be at all honest about being an alleged follower of Christ. Some days it may be no more than a moment’s quiet and the Trisagion Prayers,* but even that is one of the bricks going into a life that hopefully will look like a Christian when it’s built.
So I’m perversely encouraged by the example of the myrrh-bearing women who set about the duty piety demanded of them without any hope or belief at all. It was simply their practice, and only their own integrity compelled them to fulfill their religious obligation. That gives me hope and confidence that my daily practice, however unimpressive, can put me in a place where I can at times encounter God; can shape me by Grace into the image and likeness God plans for me; and that neither God’s act nor my daily practice depends on the level of spirituality, peace or faith I’m able to bring to the act.
it’s by Grace we’re saved, through faith which is the gift of God. That’s all about relationship with God and his people. But don’t sell religion short; it’s how we work out that salvation here and now.
*The Trisagion [“thrice-holy”] Prayers appear at the beginning or end of just about every service or private prayer in the Orthodox tradition:
Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal: Have mercy on us (3x)
Lord, have mercy (3x)
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
O most holy Trinity, have mercy on us. O Lord, cleanse us from our sins; O Master, pardon our iniquities; O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy name’s sake.
Lord, have mercy (3x)
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
Our Father Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come. The will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.
Saw this quote today:
“Shame feels the same for men and women but is organized by gender. For women it’s this web of unattainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we are supposed to be and it’s a straight-jacket. For men it is one expectation—never let them know you’re weak.” —Brené Brown.
I’m sure Brown had a particular context in which her comment made sense. But it baffles me how so many people (and not only women, thanks) let themselves be defined by what other people expect. Look, if someone else has expectations, prejudices, or standards you can’t or don’t choose to meet: SCREW ‘EM.
Be true to yourself, pursue repentance and virtue, embrace freedom and freely-chosen self-denial, and so grow into the image of Christ. Do that and you’re going to annoy and disappoint people when you break their image of what you ought to be. THAT’S THEIR PROBLEM.
An Olympic athlete or master musician commits to a single coach’s mentorship, and doesn’t get distracted by what others think. As long as a woman (or man) permits family or co-workers without invitation to shape her with their constraints and expectations, she’s surrendering the keys, not only to self-respect, but to any hope of fulfilling her potential in Christ.
Either we choose our obligations, mentors and disciplines, and find fulfillment in the doing and the results, or we will despair of trying to conform to someone else’s uninvited, unwelcome vision for us.
That’s not a gender thing. That’s just self-respect.
Fr Stephen Freeman writes:
“You cannot know God — but you have to know Him to know that.”
- Fr. Thomas HopkoThis small quote from Fr. Thomas has stayed with me since I first heard it. It says so much by saying so little.
I find two groups of people increasingly common in my conversations – those who profess to not know God (agnostics) – and those who struggle greatly with what they have been told about the Christian God. The largest group within my conversations are those who feel very secure in their knowledge of God but who believe a lot of strange things that they cannot possibly know. I feel a calling to help people know a lot less so they can know anything at all.
Those who are engaged in spiritual warfare must always keep their hearts tranquil. Only then can the mind sift the impulses it receives and store in the treasure house of the memory those that are good and come from God, while rejecting altogether those that are perverse and devilish.
When the sea is calm, the fisherman’s eyes can see the movements of the fish deep down, so that hardly any of them can escape. But when the sea is ruffled by the wind, the turmoil of the waves hides from sight the creatures that would easily have been seen if the sea wore the smile of calm. The skill of the fisherman is of little use in rough weather.
Something of the same sort happens with the soul, especially when it is stirred to the depths by anger.
At the beginning of a storm, oil is poured on the waters to calm them, and in fact the oil defeats their commotion. In this way, when the soul receives the anointing of the gift of the Holy Spirit, it gladly gives in to this inexpressible and untroubled sweetness. And even if it is continually attacked by temptation it maintains its peace and joy
— St. Diadochos of Photiki, Spiritual Works, 23 (SC5b, pp. 27ff.) 5th century
