Pictures: (Above) “The Arming and Departure of the Knights of the Round Table on the Quest for the Holy Grail,” by Edward Burne-Jones. (Below) Entering our Church with her new Onion Dome and Slavic Cross last night.
An Homily for the Tenth Sunday of Pentecost from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers.
Two great quests in modern Western imagination have been the quest for the lost Ark of the Convenant and for the Holy Grail. We have found both in the Orthodox Church, and brothers and sisters, this is our open secret, that they are both with us here in our humble country Church today in Appalachian America. Let’s first, though, consider a holy Orthodox pilgrimage place far away as we contemplate how we also have with us here in Winfield, Pennsylvania, the fulfillment of the Ark and the Grail.
Indeed, today Orthodox Liturgy is being said on remote Spruce Island, Alaska, to commemorate the glorification of Saint Herman of Alaska on this day in 1970. Our Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia has an important part in that tradition, which made today one of the great feasts of that founding missionary to America. Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of Blessed Memory with his monastic brothers spearheaded the canonization of St. Herman. It occurred simultaneously with services in Alaska and at the Cathedral in San Francisco where lie the relics of our patron St. John. Although in Alaska St. Herman’s relics are at an Orthodox Church in America cathedral, the churches around Spruce Island are peopled by American Serbian Orthodox monastic communities that originally were from Blessed Seraphim’s ROCOR monastery in California. So we all in America across jurisdictions join today in commemorating Saint Herman.The Irish Orthodox Christian writer Paul Kingsnorth, whose visit here our mission co-sponsored a few years ago, wrote this about his pilgrimage to Spruce Island:
“The skiff drops us on the sands of the appropriately-named Monks Bay, and Fr Adrian points us through the vast, mossy, Tolkeinesque forest, up a path through the trees. Head up there, he tells us, and we will reach the little church which is built on the spot where St Herman lived. Fr Adrian tells us he will catch us up when we have had time to savour the place and its atmosphere.
“And it needs savouring. There is something about this forest that I have never quite experienced anywhere else: a deep and abiding peace. It is very hard to put into words. At first I assume that the whole of the island must feel like this, but after I walk on later I realise that, in fact, it is only the area around St Herman’s cell that has this atmosphere. There is a kind of radical stillness. When Fr Adrian arrives ten minutes he later I tell him about it. ‘Yes,’ he confirms, ‘everybody who comes here feels this, whether they’re Christian or not. It’s as if the forest itself is praying.’ Or, I think, as if St Herman is praying too, somehow, for or in the place he once called home.
“A tiny wooden chapel stands today on the spot where St Herman lived as a hermit in these woods. Walking on from the chapel, winding paths take us through forests studded with icons and hung with huge lampadas of green moss.
“Deep in the forest, we pass the cell of Fr Gerasim Schmaltz, whose life deserves an essay all of its own (and in fact you can read one here.) He was a Russian monk who was sent to Alaska in 1916, only to be stranded here when the Bolshevik revolution happened. He lived the rest of his life on Spruce Island, often entirely alone ….Soon enough we come to another chapel – a bigger one, this time, and with a curious little door which appears to lead to a dark space beneath…. Pilgrims today still crawl beneath the chapel here to pray at the saint’s original grave, and sometimes to collect some soil to bring home. I have a little pot of it on my icon table as I write this.My daughter and I both pray at the grave site. Then we all picnic outside the church before Fr Adrian leads us through an open meadow studded with iris and salmonberry that looks like it ought to be in the Alps rather than in Alaska….
“[Spruce and a neighboring island] iare strewn with little wooden cells which at different times have been inhabited by hermits or pilgrims. The monks and nuns catch their own king salmon in the water around the island, and share food, firewood and prayer…..
“I have been on pilgrimages to many Orthodox places in many different countries since joining the church, but this place speaks to me in a way that none of the others quite have. I don’t know why that is, but there is some affinity. Overall, I am left with a wonderful confirmation of the mystical wildness of Orthodox Christianity. Monks stomping through mud in long black cassocks and wellington boots; sleeping in crumbling log huts in a forest of moss; netting salmon from skiffs; picking berries in mountain meadows. Compost toilets, fires on the beach, icons affixed to tree trunks. A forest of prayer. It’s all primal and real and full of the Spirit, and you can feel it everywhere. It feels like you have fled far from the over-civilised West – and yet this is modern America. Orthodoxy is a paradox, all the way down.”
Brothers and Sisters, truly Orthodoxy is a paradox or a mystery, even while offering us reason for our hope in God. Part of the mystery is that what pilgrims may find on their quests to Spruce Island, metaphorically their Grail or Ark but in actual lived faith, can also be found right here in rural Union Township, both in modern America and in timeless experience, and again not only metaphorically but literally so. This is the paradox of Orthodoxy all the way down, as Paul Kingsnorth put it. Blessed Seraphim Rose wrote that he felt no need as an American convert to travel to far places of Orthodoxy. Pilgrimages are beautiful and important to the spiritual life of the Orthodox Christian. We may go even in our Appalachian region to Jordanville, to White Haven, to Wayne West Virginia, and we should, as pilgrims to Orthodox monasteries. Maybe we someday will go to the Holy Land or Holy Russia or Mount Athos. But, as Blessed Seraphim noted, we also can find, like St. Herman on Spruce Island, our own pilgrimage each week and even daily, to the holiness of the holy of holies of the Ark and the Holy Grail of legend, right here, fully realized even in our little Church, a portal to the biblical Israel fulfilled in the Kingdom of Heaven, right here in Penns Woods.
Here is the open secret, the supposedly lost Ark and missing Grail are here with us in the Church. As the Apostle Paul noted in Hebrews, in the original Ark of the Covenant of the wilderness tabernacle, made according to the pattern revealed to Mose by our Lord Jesus Christ on Mount Sinai, were the tablets of the Law of God, the bowl of manna, and Aaron’s blooming rod. Nearby in the tabernacle and the bowl of incense and the place of sacrifice, from which the blood of lamb was scattered over the altar and the veils of the holy of holies at Passover. Some of these items disappeared when the Phillistines seized the tabernacle and art as the people of Israel were unfaithful. Then the Ark itself seemed to permanently disappear with the furnishings of the Tabernacle when the Prophet Jeremiah hid it just before the destruction of the Temple at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. Scripture describes how the place of its hiding was unknown and the Prophet said it would be revealed only in God’s time. In the book of Revelation indeed the Ar is described as reappeared.
We know in Church Tradition how the Theotokos the Mother of God fulfilled the symbolism of the Tabernacle as bearing the Body of Christ, which became His Church. We have in the altar area the Gospel book fulfilling the tablets of the law, the Body and Blood of Christ in the bloodless sacrifice of the Lamb at the Liturgy, which has replaced the pot of manna with the paten and chalice, and the blood of the sacrificial animal lambs of the Old Testament tabernacle and temple with the transformed gifts. We have the candle stand at the altar as there was in the tabernacle. We have the Cross standing at the altar that fulfills the type of the blooming rod of Aaron, which symbolizes the turning of suffering into resurrection through the Crucifixion and Rising of our Lord. Brothers and Sisters, the Ark of the Covenant is found and fulfilled in the altar of the Orthodox Church, our Lord’s Church. Likewise, the Holy Grail is found here in our Chalice, from which we partake in the Body and Blood of Christ at each Holy Eucharist, even in a small country Church reminiscent unworthily perhaps of little chapels of Arthurian lore and historical Celtic Christian landscapes, glory to God!
Early tradition in Britain says that St., Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Glastonbury, where it became associated with Arthurian legends and quests, and my research on this long ago helped lead me to Orthodoxy, thank God. Some scholars even speculate that the Holy Grail legends originally reflected the amazement of Western Crusaders encountering the Byzantine Orthodox Liturgy for the first time.
But our quest for the supposedly lost Ark of the Covenant and for the Holy Grail is fulfilled right here in a little country Church of our Lord too. May we be reminded of this as our Onion Dome and Cross rise above our Temple for the first morning ever, glory to God! The Onion dome echoes the domes of the great ancient Byzantine and Holy Land Churches in the humble forest traditions of Russian hermitagee, as well as the flame of Pentecost alit in the uncreated energies that we may experience in each Orthodox Church and in our lives as Orthodox Christians with God’s help. The Cross is our Lord’s emblem of suffering and victory, with the cross bar in the Russian Cross reminding us of the Wise Thief helped into Paradise. Let us remember today on this feast of Saint Herman, and each day, how we have the most precious pilgrimage each time we come to the humblest Orthodox Church in the countryside here, and dwell in our hearts in this pilgrimage, so that we don’t want to miss a worship service however far or arduous the journey. Because in her we fulfill those ancient living and timeless quests for the Ark and the Holy Grail, which are not lost at all, but dwell in our heart right here, in our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. Glory to God for all things!
The Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew,
§72 [17:14-23a]
At that time, a certain man came to Jesus, kneeling down to Him and saying, ‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is lunatic and sorely vexed; for ofttimes he falleth into the fire and oft into the water. And I brought him to Thy disciples, and they could not cure him.’ Then Jesus answered and said, ‘O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I suffer you? Bring him hither to Me.’ And Jesus rebuked the devil, and he departed out of him, and the child was cured from that very hour. Then came the disciples to Jesus apart and said, ‘Why could we not cast him out?’ And Jesus said unto them, ‘Because of your unbelief; for verily I say unto you, if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, ‘Remove hence to yonder place,’ and it shall remove. And nothing shall be impossible unto you. However this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.’ And while they abode in Galilee, Jesus said unto them, ‘The Son of Man shall be betrayed into the hands of men. And they shall kill Him, and the third day He shall be raised again.’
Holy Gospel according to John,
§ 52 [15:17-16:2]
The Lord said to His disciples: ‘These things I command you, that ye love one another. If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love his own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. Remember the word that I said unto you: “The servant is not greater than his lord.” If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept My saying, they will keep yours also. But all these things will they do unto you for My name’s sake, because they know not Him that sent Me. If I had not come and spoken unto them, they would not have sin, but now they have no cloak for their sin. He that hateth Me hateth My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no other man did, they would not have had sin; but now they have both seen and hated both Me and My Father. But this cometh to pass, that the word might be fulfilled that is written in their law: “They hated Me without a cause.” But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of Truth Who proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of Me. And ye also shall bear witness, because ye have been with Me from the beginning. These things have I spoken unto you, that ye should not lose faith. They shall put you out of the synagogues; yea, the time cometh that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.’