Kites on Clean Monday

Kites on Clean Monday

Guest Writer Susan Cushman

Orthodox Christians worldwide will enter Great Lent on Clean Monday, March 3, this year. You can read about why Western Christians (Catholics and Protestants) celebrate Easter (Orthodox Pascha) on a different date here. But this year, we celebrate together on April 20. I love it when our dates converge!

At St. John Orthodox Church here in Memphis, we began preparing for this day at Great Vespers on Saturday night, when we chanted verses about Adam and Eve’s expulsion from paradise and commemorated the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. If you’re unfamiliar with this story, you can read it here. There are three things we learn from these martyrs that we need to enter into any kind of martyrdom, any kind of self-denial, even if it’s only increased fasting and prayer for forty days (Lent):

40 Martyrs of Sebaste

(1)  love for Christ,
(2) love for one another, and
(3) courage.

Why courage? For some of us, denying ourselves the things we use to numb pain or escape the reality of life at times takes courage. But also love.

Sunday night at Forgiveness Vespers, we exchanged the rite of forgiveness. You can read a good article by Fr. Alexander Schmemann on this here.

There are almost always tears as we ask one another for forgiveness, “Forgive me, a sinner,” and offer the response, “God forgives, and I forgive.” At the end of the rite, the choir leads us in a few Paschal hymns. The joyful, victorious message of those hymns reminds us, at the beginning of Lent, that we’re heading towards the Resurrection. Without this goal in mind, our prayer, fasting, and almsgiving—our ascetic struggle—could easily become legalistic actions rather than life-giving vehicles of God’s grace.

The Greeks have a beautiful tradition—they fly kites on Clean Monday to celebrate letting go of our sins that weigh us down. I love that image. It reminds me that even this extra body weight I’m carrying around because of gluttony keeps me earthbound. I hope to lose some of it during the Fast, but mostly, I hope to draw closer to God.
May God grant us all a Good Lent!

Susan Cushman

Susan Cushman is a convert to Orthodox Christianity (since 1987) and is married to an Orthodox priest, Father Basil Cushman, who is Associate Pastor at St. John Antiochian Orthodox Church in Memphis, Tennessee. Susan is a retired iconographer, a published author of five books, and editor of four anthologies. In her personal and spiritual memoir, Pilgrim Interrupted, which was published in June of 2022, she shares much of her journey to Orthodoxy and its healing impact on her life.

 Joanna  joannaseibert.com   https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Transfiguration and the Last Sunday of Epiphany

Transfiguration and Last Sunday of Epiphany

"If we want to find God, then honor God within ourselves, and we will always see God beyond us. For it is only God in us who knows where and how to look for God."­—­­ Richard Rohr Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (The Crossroad Publishing Company: 2009), 159-161.

Today is the last Sunday of Epiphany, where we say goodbye to Alleluia and prepare for Ash Wednesday and the first day of Lent. Sunday, we hear the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus when he is revealed on a high mountain to three of his disciples as the incarnation of God. Anyone in 12-step recovery can identify immediately with transfiguration, seeing the light, a moment of clarity, encountering the God who has been there all along within us. Still, we never saw the light within because we were busy making "dwellings" for other idols, alcohol, food, drugs, work, etc.

Moments of transfiguration occur in our lives when we are transported from our deep unconscious sleep to a moment of conscious bright light when we see, feel, taste, and touch God within. Transfiguration is about experiencing our true nature, the part of God inside ourselves. It is the moment when all else falls away, and we are simply of God and desire to turn our life and our will over to the care of God. It is that moment when we let go and let God.

Richard Rohr believes we cannot see God in others until we first see God within ourselves. So, recovery is seeing God first within ourselves, which leads us to being able to see God in others. We encounter that person who once annoyed us, and we begin to notice a tiny glimpse of the face of God, and our only response is now love.

Frederick Buechner reminds us that as we see God within ourselves, we begin to see God in situations we never saw before: "the face of a man walking his child in the park, a woman picking peas in the garden, sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just sitting with friends at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once in so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it's almost beyond bearing." 1

Transfiguration is the message and the promise of a new way of living, seeing God's face in others and ourselves.

Today, we are gathered on the internet over many miles to celebrate the new eyes that transfiguration continually brings to our lives and the face of every person we encounter.

1Frederick Buechner in Whistling in the Dark (HarperSanFrancisco 1988), p. 120.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Guenther: At Home in the World

Guenther: At Home in the World

“Inevitably, even if we are persistent and faithful, there will come a time when God seems not to be listening or speaking to us. We have entered a desert time. Maybe our icons-our windows to God- have turned into idols. That is, the form of our prayer has become more important than the prayer itself.

We can find ourselves attributing almost magical power to our methods of centering prayer, Ignatian meditation, or reading the daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer. We can become so preoccupied with following our rule of life that we can forget where we are going.” Margaret Guenther in At Home in the World, A Rule of Life for the Rest of Us.

Well-known author and Episcopal priest Margaret Guenther reminds us that we do not come into the world equipped with a spiritual road map or owner’s manual, so we must write our own. We cannot download a spiritual MapQuest from some celestial source with precise directions for turning each corner.

Guenther gives us an easily readable book about how to follow a rule of life and still live in the world. Our rule will be different at varying stages of our lives.

She offers ways to live in the awareness of the preciousness of each day, living every day as if it were our last, constantly reminding ourselves that time is a gift from God. Each chapter discusses a distinctive aspect of our lives: our families, our solitude, our creativity, our money, our fear of abundance, our friends and enemies, our prayer, and our use of power.

The chapters are followed by questions for reflection, making the book an excellent choice for a small-group study.

I first read At Home over ten years ago, but I still learn something new or a new practice whenever I pick up the book. Whenever a person comes to mind, I call, visit, text, or pray. I also learned this from my spiritual director in deacon training, Dan McKee.

Guenther discusses how Sabbath is not merely ceasing to work but celebrating something that makes us new and re-creates ourselves. She reminds us that an ongoing association with children, “who live closer to the ground” than we do, can be a powerful source for re-creation, a new creation.

Guenther consoles me when forgiveness comes too slowly. She describes forgiveness as a great block of ice that melts slowly and cannot be hurried. “There is no spiritual equivalent of a microwave.”

Joanna joannaseibert.com