(Above, the medieval ruins of the old Kileavy churches, on the site of the older Orthodox convent founded by St. Monenna)

An homily for the seventh Sunday after Pentecost from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Christian Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.

In early Orthodox Christian Ireland, archaelogists say there was a landscape of small country churches and then large monasteries with a cluster of laity living around them. Sound familiar? This is not unlike our own country Church in relation to the monastery at White Haven, which by the way is the largest Orthodox women’s monastery in the country according to one survey.

One especially beloved early Irish Orthodox saint was the Venerable Monenna, the Abbess of Killeavy, whom we commemorate today. Her life illustrates how we can think of Orthodoxy in its influence and presence as opening up a kind of spiritual landscape through communities that are “not of this world,” and that have both earthly and mystical layers to them.

Even here in our modest parish we have of course the Church where we worship, soon God willing to have an onion dome and Cross on the roof linking it symbolically on the exterior to the Russian Orthodox tradition. We have a cemetery, with an Orthodox graveyard inaugurated recently by our beloved departed brother John, with its connection to the afterlife, as well as a community cemetery. And the white Cross that was the first Orthodox structure placed on this land, in front of the Orthodox cemetery, is a link to an earlier history of Orthodox missionary work in the coal region, for it comes from the former St. John the Baptist Orthodox Church in Shepton, now no longer extant, where Patriarch Confessor Tikhon once served. And then we have our open fields where, God willing, in future we may build new structures and also garden and tend bees. Around us are farm fields and a quarry and ridges of this part of the Appalachian range, whose seasonal scenery is often reminiscent of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which end not too far south of us according to geologists (the origins of our river system in the central Susquehanna Valley have been placed by hydrologists at our Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville NY).

All this echoes on a small scale the spiritual network and landscape of the missionary work of the Venerable Monenna back in the 400s and early 500s in Ireland. She was born in County Down northern Ireland around 432 A.D. (This account follows that of Dmitry Lapa https://orthochristian.com/123323.html ) She was the daughter of a local king and of a local princess. The holy maiden founded and became the first abbess of Killeavy Convent in what is now County Armagh also in Northern Ireland. It became probably the largest monastery in early Christian Ireland. She is also known as St. Darerca.

At the start only eight maiden nuns and a widow with a baby were her companions, but by the end of her life she had gathered around 150 disciples. The nuns led an amazingly austere ascetic life, living in extreme poverty and at a bare subsistence level. They chose the Prophet Elias and St. John the Baptist as their heavenly patrons. St. Monenna lived mainly on a mountain and was nicknamed “Prophet Elias’ spiritual daughter.”

Once a wealthy man brought new clothing as a gift to the community because the old robes of the abbess and her nuns were tattered. But Monenna said that the Almighty provided them with all they needed. She sold the clothing and distributed the money to the poor. St. Monenna was renowned for her generosity and mercy; she cared for the poor, and illnesses were cured by her prayers. Once she healed a mute man. She brought up and educated the son of a widow and her fellow nun, who became a bishop named Luger.

Although the monastic community originally was in an area of pagans practicing cruel customs, little by little they embraced the gospel and came to the nuns for spiritual help. 

Traditions say St. Monnena personally knew well-known saints of Ireland from her time, such as Patrick and Brigit. St. Patrick may have baptized St. Monenna when she was an infant, and she may have lived with St. Brigid at her celebrated Kildare Monastery for some time. She and her community may have stayed at a monastic site near Begerin in County Wexford briefly and were trained by St. Ibar, which is in an area where my own ancestors lived. She and some of her nun-sisters also are said to have trained at St. Ninian’s monastery in Scotland. Toward the end of the saint’s life it is reported she was visited by angels. 

St. Monnena with God’s helped founded and shaped communities of believers, and with her holiness the uncreated light of God brightened and energized new landscapes of faith in early Ireland. These landscapes were networks of faithfulness, ascetisim, spiritual beauty, and mission work, much like the networks of Orthodoxy we see emerging here in Northern Appalachia. We may travel to Jordanville and to White Haven, we engage in confession, we connect with layers of history, and in our own lives and the lives of our families we practice an ascetic community that merges with our parish Church family. This is the spiritual ecology of Orthodoxy made manifest in our earthly lives. It helpssustain us with God’s grace. We see this in the life of St. Peter the Aleut that was highlighted in our parish film showing on Friday night, and how an ecology or landscape of Orthodoxy emerged in California in early times, out of Alaska. That legacy spread to our own mission’s neighborhood through the influence of St. John of San Francisco and his disciple the Blessed Seraphim of California.

Dear brothers and sisters, I would like to mention one more saint whom we commemorate today who contributes to this ecology or landscape of Orthodox faith. He is St. Andrei Rublev, the great iconographer, whom we commemorate today with the Synaxis of Saints of Radonezh, for he was part of the Orthodox network founded by St. Sergius of Radonezh long ago in a forest in Russia. In our modest country Church in Applaachia, here in Penns Woods, we have St. Andrei’s famous icon of the Holy Trinity depicted in our worship area, and also on the high place of our altar area. St. Andrei shaped landscapes of Orthodoxy in his iconography, in which we venerating the icons can enter wherever we are in place and time. His depiction of the mystery of the Trinity is symbolic and taken from the biblical account of the Hospitality of Abraham, where the Father of Nations gave hospitality to three men described as Angels, although one of them the Lord. This was a theophany of Christ and the Trinity to the Holy Father Abraham, around 2200 BC following Byzantine reckoning. In the icon we see the Oak of Mamre, where our Russian Church Abroad has to this day a Church and monastery in the Holy Land. A piece of the Oak of Mamre with a carving of this icon greets visitors to our monastery at Jordanville. It is a reminder of all the connections to the Holy Land spiritually in each Orthodox Church. Likewise the three figures represent to us the inter-relationality of the love of the Holy Trinity as a model for our Church and our lives in the world, on earth as it is in heaven. The Oak itself can be a symbol of the Tree of Life in Paradise, which St. John Damascene identified with Christ. The Mountain behind the figure associated with the Holy Spirit, representing Mount Moriah where Abraham brought Isaac for sacrifice, is also identified with the Temple Mount, so indicating the role of the Holy Spirit in the founding and sustaining of the Church.

We are so blessed, brothers and sisters, to live within the landscapes of Orthodox Christianity, within the ecosystem and ecology of our the Providence of our God, and Christ’s Body the Orthodox Church, which is the real biblical Israel. 

Let us find rest, support, and sustenance in this ecology and landscape of Orthodoxy, groundedness, balance, and connection, as did Saints Monnena and Andrei, asking for their prayers. Let us remember the response of St. Peter the Aleut in California repeatedly when being threatened to leave his faith for a heresy. He kept repeating simply “I am a Christian.” For Orthodoxy is the Church of Christ, and in Him as the Apostle Paul said, we live and move and have our being.

Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory Forever!