Reading the obituary of the Russian Orthodox priest and writer Sergei Hackel (whose recent illness prevent him from coming to speak to the study centre last month) I found this; ‘On one early visit (to Russia whence his family had been exiled by the Revolution) he witnessed a physical assault against the Easter procession that, deep in the night, wends its way round the outside of the church, seeking the body of Christ.’ There are many elements to the Orthodox celebration of the ‘Feast of Feasts’ which are unfamiliar to us in western Protestant (or Catholic for that matter) Christianity, but this must be one of the most imaginatively provocative.
Holy Week is a week full of liturgical symbolism and trying to explain it is dangerous, for a symbol or image that needs explaining has ceased to be effective. The effectiveness of the liturgy depends on our knowing that we relate to our world in other ways than words. Part of our contemporary religious dilemma is that we have so few images and rituals that are natural and inherited and resonant without explanation. On holiday we may see other religious communities in Spain, or Greece participating in religious rites that are still part of their communal life and perhaps we envy them, though even these rites are often in danger of becoming a tourist spectacle and a way of hanging on to a past with which the participants are not at heart spiritually connected. Modern liturgists have tried to revive or invent new rituals and yet such things have not perhaps embedded themselves as yet in our religious lives whether they ever will in such a rapidly changing church is uncertain.
Holy Week is, we might say, ‘the test case’. Does what we see in this week strike us as ‘artificial’, or ‘high church’, or ‘superstitious’? Do we prefer those parts of the week in which we think we have learnt something from the words spoken? Or do these actions communicate something at another level about our humanity and the energy and grace of God. Are they ‘pre-theoretical’ in that they ‘say’ something above and beyond theory in the same way that a gesture, a movement in dance, a painting or music speak to us without words and thereby ‘make grace’ in us? When Jesus takes his last supper with his disciples, he says ‘Do this’, rather than ‘Think it.’ He gives us a sign which in its efficacy is perhaps closer to art than explanation.
Holy Week focuses our attention on this sign of bread and wine on Maundy Thursday, but the liturgy of that evening associates it with the washing of the disciples’ feet, as we witness the priest washing the feet of members of the congregation. Then in the stark simplicity of Good Friday we kneel before a cross that has been carried into the church and set up before the congregation. In some places people will even come forward and kneel alone before the cross and touch or even kiss it again as a sign of a devotional remembering that speaks louder than words. And then on Easter Eve we carry a newly lit Easter (paschal) candle into the darkness of the church before proclaiming ‘Christ is risen!’
Some sorts of symbolism are effective because they seem ‘natural’; they relate perhaps to something ‘archetypal’ in our consciousness. Why, we might ask ourselves, does carrying a newly lit candle into a dark building ‘say’ more than going in and waiting for someone to turn the lights on? Why is it always in fact something of a disappointment when having filled (well not exactly as there are never enough people there for that) the church with candle light we then turn the electric light on? Is it just to do with atmosphere or should we ask ourselves what creates such an atmosphere on this particular night of the year? Why is a candle more ‘profound’ than a light bulb?
When the women went to the tomb they went looking for the dead body of Jesus so that they could ‘pay their last respects’ by anointing it. And when they found the tomb empty they envisaged a further distraught search in the darkness, just as the procession winds round the churches of Orthodox Russia, ‘seeking the body of Christ.’ In our Christian journey we can find ourselves looking for an explanation, a way of putting things that will finally make sense of a faith that is often threatening to go dead on us. We seek explanations and definitions and when we find them they do not provide what we need. They are somehow dead. But the point about Holy Week is that if we begin to emerge ourselves ‘pre-theoretically’ in its liturgies, something comes to us as individuals and as a community. A sign comes alive in us in ways we may least have expected and we respond, ‘He is risen indeed!’ With my love and prayers for Holy Week and Easter,
Father Stephen
May he rest in peace.
Just as we were preparing this magazine for publication we learnt the sad news of the death of Dick Rubinstein, a faithful, gentle, lovely and distinguished man whom we shall miss deeply. More will be written about him next month, but now we extend our love and prayers and to Gay, James. Simon and their families.
His funeral will be on March 10th at 11.30am in Church.