The first time I saw my father cry was a day of deep tragedy. An aunt, my mother’s oldest sister, had been brutally murdered by a stranger who came into her office off the street. It made no sense. I was nine years old. I opened the door to my father’s bedroom and saw him lying face-down on his bed. The bed shook as he wept. Grief had consumed him. The days that followed would see many tears, along with voices of anger and confusion.
My father lived to be 87 (he was received into the Orthodox Church at age 79). After my Dad’s death, his priest told me: “Your mother was a mystic and your father had the gift of tears.” Indeed, across the years, I saw his tears many times, frequently at the dinner table on those occasions in which he was asked to “return thanks.” His tears were evidence of his heart.
We did not discuss religion to any great extent in my home. We were not taught to pray at bedtime. We attended Church sporadically. I have fond memories of walking down the railroad tracks with my older brother to the small Church about a mile away. It made everything seem like an adventure. My brother tells the story that he was teasing me one Sunday as we walked along. I was carrying my small Bible. He said, “Why are you carrying that Bible? You can’t even read!” He laughs when he recalls my answer. “It doesn’t matter. It’s the word of God!”
The Scriptures are a true sacrament. Indeed, St. Maximos the Confessor describes three “incarnations” of the Logos: as a human being in the God-Man Jesus Christ, in creation itself, and in the Scriptures. It is very strong language to describe how God permeates His creation and has done everything to make our communion with Him possible.
The Coptic monk, Fr. Matta Al-Miskin, once wrote that if we were to take but a single saying of Our Lord and apply it with all of our might and strength, it would become for us the gate to the Kingdom of God. I have pondered the saying, on and off, for nearly 50 years. It goes far to explain the phenomenon of sanctity that is sometimes experienced outside the visible bounds of the Orthodox Church.
I have written and spoken often about my father-in-law, a devout Baptist. He was a living example of this principle. He took the saying, “Give thanks for all things” (in its various versions) as an inviolable law. There were a number of other such examples in his life. But I can say of him that his life answered the question: “What would it look like if I actually practiced this saying?” The result was astounding. Such is the sacramental reality of the Scriptures.
That same small Bible that I carried with me to Church had a frontispiece (picture) in it of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna. That painting was treasured by Dostoevsky. A copy hung over the couch that became his death bed. It was only in my adult years (as an Anglican) that I learned of devotion to the Mother of God. But, she had been with me through all those years just as the Scriptures themselves had been. The Fathers of the Seventh Council declared that “icons do with color what the Scripture does with words.”
That “reflexive principle” (“this does with this what that does with that”) is deeply revealing. Working with words, we tend to become enmeshed in ideas and abstractions. We quickly forget that the One whom we name as the “Word” (Logos) is fully human as well as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. The Logos has fingers and toes.
In our own lives, it is possible to concentrate on the ideas to the exclusion of all else. There is a genius in the life of the Church. Though the great decisions of the faith often seem to concentrate on the finer points of doctrine (ideas), the true life of the Church is primarily expressed as worship. Orthodoxia is best translated as “right worship.” I have smiled through the years as I have watched toddlers in Church gradually learn to make the sign of the Cross in an Orthodox manner. At first it may be little more than knocking themselves on the head. But you know it’s the sign of the Cross when it’s followed by a kiss (or hug) to an icon. Pre-verbal, children are learning how to worship “by heart.”
My father phoned me during his first experience of Orthodox Great Lent. “Son, they brought out the Cross today,” he explained. “Yes, Dad. It’s the third Sunday of Lent. The Sunday of the Cross.”
“Well, I wanted to get down,” (we make a prostration before the Cross on that day). He went on, “But they had to get me back up.” I strongly suspect that the whole exercise involved tears on his part. But he said nothing about them. Words simply cannot be that eloquent.
It was his gift.
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