Sunday With St. Paraskeva

A Day Of Resting With The Saints (And Martin Shaw)

St. Paraskeva of the Balkans

Today I went to liturgy at the local Serbian church, which was celebrating the Feast of St. Paraskeva of the Balkans, an 11th century holy woman very dear to Balkan peoples. From her life story:

At only 27 she gave her holy soul in to God’s hands, Whom she had loved since her childhood. Her body was buried by the sea. Many years passed by. The natives forgot the stranger who toiled and took care of their church. But God, who praises those who love Him, never forgot her.

After many years, the sea brought on the shore the dead body of a sailor. It stank terribly, and nobody dared to pass near that place. There lived nearby a stylite monk who prayed days and nights. As he could not stand the terrible smell anymore, he descended from the top of his pole, and asked some neighbours to bury the corpse. The moment they were digging, they found an unaltered body. They were amazed, but being simple men, they were not too much impressed by that and threw the stinking body of the sailor in the same hole, and covered both bodies. Everything was forgotten.

A pious man in the village, named George, who loved Jesus, prayed for hours and hours during the night. Once, at dawn, he took a nap, and dreamed of a young woman dressed in white like an empress, sitting on a bright throne, surrounded by a lot of bright soldiers. When he saw that, he was so frightened that he fell down, not daring to look at their brightness and beauty. One of the brightly dressed soldiers took his hand, raised him and said to him: “George, why haven’t you taken care of the Pious Paraskeva’s body? Take it quickly and put it into a bright coffin, because the Heavenly Emperor praised her in Heaven and wants her to be adored on earth too”. And the emperess dressed in white told him: “Take my relics soon and place it in a respected place, I cannot stand the stinking smell of this man”. She told him the place she was buried, her name and birthplace.

In the same evening, a pious woman in the village, Eftimia, had the same vision during her sleep. The next morning they both told their visions to the peasants.

They all ran to the grave and found the untouched body of the Pious emanating a fine perfume and working a lot of wonders when they removed it when a group of priests and believers to the church “The Holy Apostles” of Kallikrateia.

I love stories like this. Because the liturgy is in Serbian, a language I do not speak, my mind sometimes wandered during the service. I found myself for some reason thinking of the martyrdom of St. Polycarp, circa the year 155. Polycarp was a disciple of St. John the Apostle, and the Bishop of Smyrna. From an eyewitness account:

As Polycarp was being taken into the arena, a voice came to him from heaven: “Be strong, Polycarp and play the man!” No one saw who had spoken, but our brothers who were there heard the voice. When the crowd heard that Polycarp had been captured, there was an uproar. The Proconsul asked him whether he was Polycarp. On hearing that he was, he tried to persuade him to apostatize, saying, “Have respect for your old age, swear by the fortune of Caesar. Repent, and say, ‘Down with the Atheists!’” Polycarp looked grimly at the wicked heathen multitude in the stadium, and gesturing towards them, he said, “Down with the Atheists!” “Swear,” urged the Proconsul, “reproach Christ, and I will set you free.” “86 years have I have served him,” Polycarp declared, “and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King and my Savior?”

“I have wild animals here,” the Proconsul said. “I will throw you to them if you do not repent.” “Call them,” Polycarp replied. “It is unthinkable for me to repent from what is good to turn to what is evil. I will be glad though to be changed from evil to righteousness.” “If you despise the animals, I will have you burned.” “You threaten me with fire which burns for an hour, and is then extinguished, but you know nothing of the fire of the coming judgment and eternal punishment, reserved for the ungodly. Why are you waiting? Bring on whatever you want.”

It was all done in the time it takes to tell. The crowd collected wood and bundles of sticks from the shops and public baths. The Jews , as usual, were keen to help. When the pile was ready, Polycarp took off his outer clothes, undid his belt, and tried to take off his sandals – something he was not used to, as the faithful always raced to do it for him, each wanting to be the one to touch his skin – this is how good his life was. But when they went to fix him with nails, he said, “Leave me as I am, for he that gives me strength to endure the fire, will enable me not to struggle, without the help of your nails.”

So they simply bound him with his hands behind him like a distinguished ram chosen from a great flock for sacrifice. Ready to be an acceptable burnt-offering to God, he looked up to heaven, and said, “O Lord God Almighty, the Father of your beloved and blessed Son Jesus Christ, by whom we have received the knowledge of you, the God of angels, powers and every creature, and of all the righteous who live before you, I give you thanks that you count me worthy to be numbered among your martyrs, sharing the cup of Christ and the resurrection to eternal life, both of soul and body, through the immortality of the Holy Spirit. May I be received this day as an acceptable sacrifice, as you, the true God, have predestined, revealed to me, and now fulfilled. I praise you for all these things, I bless you and glorify you, along with the everlasting Jesus Christ, your beloved Son. To you, with him, through the Holy Ghost, be glory both now and forever. Amen.”

Then the fire was lit, and the flame blazed furiously. We who were privileged to witness it saw a great miracle, and this is why we have been preserved, to tell the story. The fire shaped itself into the form of an arch, like the sail of a ship when filled with the wind, and formed a circle around the body of the martyr. Inside it, he looked not like flesh that is burnt, but like bread that is baked, or gold and silver glowing in a furnace. And we smelt a sweet scent, like frankincense or some such precious spices.

Eventually, when those wicked men saw that his body could not be consumed by the fire, they commanded an executioner to pierce him with a dagger. When he did this [a dove flew out and] [*this may well be a later interpolation or transcription error] such a great quantity of blood flowed that the fire was extinguished. The crowd were amazed at the difference between the unbelievers and the elect – of whom the great Polycarp was surely one, having in our own times been an apostolic and prophetic teacher, and bishop of the Catholic Church in Smyrna. For every word he spoke either has been or shall be accomplished.

I found myself asking God this morning to give me the kind of faith that would allow me to die as holy Polycarp died, if it were asked of me. This brings to my mind this great quote from St. Ignatius of Antioch, another disciple of St. John the Apostle, and an early church martyr (in 108).

Christianity is not a matter of persuading people of particular ideas, but of inviting them to share in the greatness of Christ.

That is a fundamental insight of Eastern Christianity. Yes, I want to believe all the right things, affirm the correct doctrines, and so forth. But more than that, I want to share in the life of the living God, as St. Polycarp and St. Ignatius did. But: do I really know what I’m asking? They both died martyrs, as did Our Lord. I fear that I’m like the little girl in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, who was sure she could never be a saint, but thought she might could be a martyr if they killed her quick.

I don’t know that my friend Martin Shaw will become a saint, and I certainly hope and pray that he doesn’t become a martyr, but he has become a Christian — indeed an Orthodox one! — and in so doing, embraced a kind of martyrdom to himself, as all us Christians who are serious about the faith must do. It was three years ago tomorrow that the miracle that led him to Christ happened. He writes about it on his Substack today. Excerpts:

What I learnt in the last three years: people love you when you’re searching, they hate you when you find something.

Current company excluded, this rather pithy statement does have truth in it. We all respond to the quickening of riding out, can all feel the majesty of the quest. Myths, movies, plays and books all attest to this. It will never go away, this love of the adventurous spirit, nor should it. We get old quick without it. But it can’t be the whole thing. That way we may not get old, but we may not get wise either.

To search can be a wonderful thing, to not settle for the status quo, to push yourself. You may search for love, or home, or treasure, or God, and we can’t help but nod along to the aspiration. We understand. Pith helmet and smoke-stained map in place, we launch our kayak out from the shore and hope for the best. I love this kind of romance and at the very least we should get a story out of such pluck.

Martin Shaw

I certainly got a story out of searching. Hundreds of them. Big ones, small ones, funny ones, deep ones. I unexpectedly got a good living out of those stories and their exploration, the search took me from a black tent to working in one of the finest Universities in the world. I cheer the search, endorse the search, celebrate the search.

But then, almost three years to this day, I had to admit something to myself.

I had found something.

Or more accurately, something had found me.

My little boat had struck a shore, no longing gliding endlessly on shimmering and rather elegant waves.

You likely have half an idea of what happened. I visited an ancient English forest for 101 dusks, and on the last night – an all-night vigil – I had an experience of the profoundly marvellous. Even so, it took another eighteen months of ungainly wrestling to really sift to consciousness quite who I’d met out there under the oaks.

It was no longer an unknown God. He had made himself known and now I had to live with the intensity of that disclosure. The consequence. If we keep searching we may actually locate – not, as Moriarty reminds us, marvels, but actual, proper healing. I didn’t even know I needed such a thing. I would have regarded that as a rather overblown statement. But I was wrong. I needed it. I was wounded, I was fallen in my way. I was hurting others.

More:

One of our guest teachers a few weeks before was Iain McGilchrist, who had us all spellbound by talking poetry and the sacred (not a dry eye in the proverbial house). Towards the end of our time together, he leant into the notion that we are tuned for theosis, to lean towards the divine, that it was as natural as sunlight and sleep. He said this:

A plant knows it has within it the knowledge of what it wants to do, how tall it wants to grow, the flowers it wants to make. I can't make it do anything different. But what I can do is very important. I clear ground for it, so that it can flourish and give it some water, that's about it. After that the thing will do its own thing. But if I try doing too much I will stunt it, and anything else.

I could conflate a very, very long story into the simple saying, This is what we were born for. This is why evolution has done the extraordinary thing it has done, which is very counterintuitive: of producing these exotic beings that are not long lived, that use a lot of energy, that suffer a great deal, but it all, in the end, is towards the incubation of love in eternity.

That extraordinary statement came from something I’d muttered just beforehand:

In every experience of beauty we are being prepared for eternity.

And I wish such experience to fall on all of us, here today. That’s my birthday wish.

Yes, indeed! What Iain said recalls the bit in Living In Wonder in which I say, borrowing from Elaine Scarry, that enchantment is not achieved by conveying information, but from preparing yourself so that you are looking at the right corner of the sky when the comet goes blazing past.

And, what Martin — who is profiled in Living In Wonder, talking about his conversion — says about beauty preparing us for eternity reminds me of what Andrei Tarkovsky said about art:

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

Isn’t that a version of what old Ignatius of Antioch said (“Christianity is not a matter of persuading people of particular ideas, but of inviting them to share in the greatness of Christ”)? What we’re all getting at here is that Christianity is fundamentally participatory — participating in the life of God, knowing him not as concept, but as percept. Those categories are Marshall McLuhan’s; McLuhan, the great midcentury media theorist, was a daily massgoing Catholic. From Living In Wonder:

In other words, to fully accept the message of Jesus is to unite oneself to Christ, in the way we have been talking about in this chapter. McLuhan spoke openly about the left-brain way of confronting Christ versus the right-brain way. The left brain construes Christ as concept; the right brain as percept—something directly perceived by the senses. If you want to have a living relationship with Jesus, said McLuhan, you must relate to him primarily as percept—or, as an Eastern Christian would put it, noetically.

“I am myself quite aware that there is a great contrast between perceptual and conceptual confrontation; and I think that the ‘death of Christianity’ or the ‘death of God’ occurs the moment they become concept,” said McLuhan. “As long as they remain percept, directly involving the perceiver, they are alive.”

He went on, “I never came into the church as a person who was being taught. I came in on my knees. That is the only way in. When people start praying, they need truths; that’s all. You don’t come into the church by ideas and concepts, and you cannot leave by mere disagreement. It has to be a loss of faith, a loss of participation. You can tell when people leave the church: they have quit praying.”

Today is the birthday of my friend Matt Burford, the happy genius of Tactical Faith, which organized the Living In Wonder events, and the Kingsnorth events, in Birmingham. Look what he got for his birthday!

Ol’ boy gonna be reading that from here till eternity. Great, great book. I need to re-read it.

I’m going to have a lot going on this week, doing a bunch of podcast interviews in the US and UK for Living In Wonder. Today, though, is a day of rest. I’m going to read and make a pot of red beans and rice.

If you haven’t yet purchased a copy of Living In Wonder, I invite you to do so. (UK readers, buy here.) This edition of Rod Dreher’s Diary is going out to the entire list, though only subscribers may comment. Why not become a subscriber? It’s only six dollars per month, and you get at least five newsletters each week (I think this is the seventh one in the last seven days).