BBC Radio Northampton did a slot about the St Crispins area of Northampton, where the community of St Neophytos have their church. The story was about the downturn in the building industry and the fact that the new development there has stopped and the place once again looks like the wild west. The concern is that the dereliction on site, of the old hospital, is going to attract vandals again- which almost bankrupted the congregation.
BBC Northampton rang me to talk about our more positive attitude in Northampton now- listen here about five minutes in.
Thursday, 18 September 2008
Tuesday, 2 September 2008
The Sunbeam
Many years ago, when I had more time on my hands, I wrote a little poetry. I look back now and realise the seeds of an Orthodox theology. Notice the references to the Uncreated Energies of God in this poem.
My Lord is like a sunbeam
burning through the rain
Blinking in His beauty
He eases all my pain
Searing away my sins
His Light is a piercing ray
revealing to me His beauty
that prepares me for the Final Day
To look upon this light
is to drive away my fears
When the beam that falls upon my face
the warmth will dry away my tears
Slowly the Sunbeam fades away
but my Lord stays by my side
No longer can I see Him
but His love I can never hide
Whenever I am sad or lonely
I return to that mountain top
There I pray for a Sunbeam
to make the sadness stop
But even when I am happy
my mind returns to that peak
There I remember the sunbeam
the Love of which I speak
Perhaps you have seen that Sunbeam
on a rainswept hill
and know also of that Love
a Love that sustains me still
Then your heat glows from within
lighting up the world around
telling the world about His love
with words that have no sound.
My Lord is like a sunbeam
burning through the rain
Blinking in His beauty
He eases all my pain
Searing away my sins
His Light is a piercing ray
revealing to me His beauty
that prepares me for the Final Day
To look upon this light
is to drive away my fears
When the beam that falls upon my face
the warmth will dry away my tears
Slowly the Sunbeam fades away
but my Lord stays by my side
No longer can I see Him
but His love I can never hide
Whenever I am sad or lonely
I return to that mountain top
There I pray for a Sunbeam
to make the sadness stop
But even when I am happy
my mind returns to that peak
There I remember the sunbeam
the Love of which I speak
Perhaps you have seen that Sunbeam
on a rainswept hill
and know also of that Love
a Love that sustains me still
Then your heat glows from within
lighting up the world around
telling the world about His love
with words that have no sound.
Friday, 15 August 2008
Homily on the Feast of the Dormition
The relationship of the Church to the Mother of God, Mary has been one a great controversy, particularly in the west. To enter into the mystery of the Dormition, we must first explore what the Church Fathers understood about who Mary was? -take Gregory Palamas' Homily on the Dormition as an example.
“If, then, "death of the righteous man is honorable" (cf. Ps. 115:6) and the "memory of the just man is celebrated with songs of praise" (Prov. 10:7). ….
How much more ought we to honor with great praises the memory of the holiest of the saints, she by whom all holiness is afforded to the saints, I mean the Ever-Virgin. Mother of God! Even so we celebrate today her holy dormition or translation to another life, whereby, while being "a little lower than angels" (Ps. 8:6),…..
The King of all "hath desired a mystic beauty" of the Ever-Virgin, as David foretold (Ps. 44:11) and, "He bowed the heavens and came down" (Ps. 17:9) and overshadowed her, or rather, the enhypostatic Power of the Most High dwelt in her. …..
Not through darkness and fire, as with Moses the God-seer, nor through tempest and cloud, as with Elias the prophet, did He manifest His presence, but without mediation, without a veil, the Power of the Most High overshadowed the sublimely chaste and virginal womb, separated by nothing, neither air nor aether nor anything sensible, nor anything supra-sensible: this was not an overshadowing but a complete union…..
But now the Mother of God has her dwelling in Heaven whither she was today translated, for this is meet, Heaven being a suitable place for her. She "stands at the right of the King of all clothed in a vesture wrought with gold and arrayed with divers colors" (cf. Ps. 44:9), as the psalmic prophecy says concerning her…..
The strips of linen and the burial clothes afford the apostles a demonstration of the Theotokos' resurrection from the dead, since they remained alone in the tomb and at the apostles' scrutiny they were found there, even as it had been with the Master. There was no necessity for her body to delay yet a little while in the earth, as was the case with her Son and God, and so it was taken up straightway from the tomb to a super-celestial realm, from whence she flashes forth most brilliant and divine illuminations and graces, irradiating earth's region; thus she is worshipped and marvelled at and hymned by all the faithful ……
Who can describe in words thy divinely resplendent beauty, O Virgin Mother of God? Thoughts and words are inadequate to define thine attributes, since they surpass mind and speech. To the degree that she is closer to God than all those who have drawn nigh unto Him, by so much has the Theotokos been deemed worthy of greater audience.
So, the Fathers held Mary in such great esteem, yet nothing is mentioned of the Dormition in the Bible-silence
The first to break silence about Mary’s death was St. Epiphanius, a heresy–fighting bishop on the isle of Cyprus. Epiphanius was arguing with two camps of Marian heretics—one that denied she was “ever–virgin” and another, a women’s sect known as the Collyridians, who worshipped Mary as a goddess.
It’s not quite clear why, but in the course of refuting these heretics, Epiphanius took up the question of Mary’s death. He quickly conceded that he could find no reliable teaching on “whether she died or did not die, whether she was buried or was not buried.” He ventured some very cautious lines of inquiry. Among them was a suggestion that “the woman clothed with the sun” in the Bible’s last book (Revelation 12) might be a prophecy of something like Mary’s heavenly assumption.
…………….
By the mid–500s, the August 15 feast had become a universal Church celebration of Mary’s “dormition,” or falling asleep. In the the Acts of John—a fifth–century text from Constantinople that includes material originally written in the second century—recalls that “the mother of us all has departed this life.”
In a Syrian work called On the Divine Names, a mystic known as Pseudo–Dionysius claims that he was on hand, along with the Apostles James and Peter, for “a vision of that mortal body, that source of life, which bore God.”
By the late 5th century, the first full accounts of Mary’s end, or transitus Mariae, begin to emerge. These are the “romances” and “legends” that became the key exhibits in Protestant criticism.
THE STORY
An angel announces to Mary that it’s time for her to die. Miraculously, the apostles appear at her home in Jerusalem, and gather around her dying bed. Jesus comes and takes her soul to heaven, and the apostles lead a procession to lay her body in a tomb at Gethsemane. An angry Jewish mob tries to burn her body, but is repulsed by intervening angels. Three days later Jesus takes Mary’s body to Paradise and reunites her soul with her body. After that, Jesus gives Mary and the apostles a guided tour of heaven and hell. The Apostles are then returned to earth as the story ends, but not before seeing “our Lord Jesus Christ and Mary sitting at the right hand of God.”
Many variations on this basic story have been found, preserved in various languages—Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Slavonic and Latin—all written sometime between the years 400 and 750 A.D.
Together they form a small library of fractured fairytales—with colorful characters, bloated dialogue, dramatic fight scenes, magical appearances, implausible plot twists, strange religious ideas, and fanciful recastings of biblical history.
In the end, though, Mary remains the mother of mystery. Even today, we don’t know what became of her mortal coil. Was she raised up like Enoch (Genesis 5:24) or Elijah (2 King 3:11)? Or did she die—as the ancient faithful and most ancient commentators believed?
The gathering around the bier, the dedication to live and death, and resurrection is an icon of the gathering of the churches-not unity through doctrine or theological rationalism- but rather unity through gathering at the bier of the Tabernacle. Through the Prayers of Mother of God, O Lord forgive our sins of division.
“If, then, "death of the righteous man is honorable" (cf. Ps. 115:6) and the "memory of the just man is celebrated with songs of praise" (Prov. 10:7). ….
How much more ought we to honor with great praises the memory of the holiest of the saints, she by whom all holiness is afforded to the saints, I mean the Ever-Virgin. Mother of God! Even so we celebrate today her holy dormition or translation to another life, whereby, while being "a little lower than angels" (Ps. 8:6),…..
The King of all "hath desired a mystic beauty" of the Ever-Virgin, as David foretold (Ps. 44:11) and, "He bowed the heavens and came down" (Ps. 17:9) and overshadowed her, or rather, the enhypostatic Power of the Most High dwelt in her. …..
Not through darkness and fire, as with Moses the God-seer, nor through tempest and cloud, as with Elias the prophet, did He manifest His presence, but without mediation, without a veil, the Power of the Most High overshadowed the sublimely chaste and virginal womb, separated by nothing, neither air nor aether nor anything sensible, nor anything supra-sensible: this was not an overshadowing but a complete union…..
But now the Mother of God has her dwelling in Heaven whither she was today translated, for this is meet, Heaven being a suitable place for her. She "stands at the right of the King of all clothed in a vesture wrought with gold and arrayed with divers colors" (cf. Ps. 44:9), as the psalmic prophecy says concerning her…..
The strips of linen and the burial clothes afford the apostles a demonstration of the Theotokos' resurrection from the dead, since they remained alone in the tomb and at the apostles' scrutiny they were found there, even as it had been with the Master. There was no necessity for her body to delay yet a little while in the earth, as was the case with her Son and God, and so it was taken up straightway from the tomb to a super-celestial realm, from whence she flashes forth most brilliant and divine illuminations and graces, irradiating earth's region; thus she is worshipped and marvelled at and hymned by all the faithful ……
Who can describe in words thy divinely resplendent beauty, O Virgin Mother of God? Thoughts and words are inadequate to define thine attributes, since they surpass mind and speech. To the degree that she is closer to God than all those who have drawn nigh unto Him, by so much has the Theotokos been deemed worthy of greater audience.
So, the Fathers held Mary in such great esteem, yet nothing is mentioned of the Dormition in the Bible-silence
The first to break silence about Mary’s death was St. Epiphanius, a heresy–fighting bishop on the isle of Cyprus. Epiphanius was arguing with two camps of Marian heretics—one that denied she was “ever–virgin” and another, a women’s sect known as the Collyridians, who worshipped Mary as a goddess.
It’s not quite clear why, but in the course of refuting these heretics, Epiphanius took up the question of Mary’s death. He quickly conceded that he could find no reliable teaching on “whether she died or did not die, whether she was buried or was not buried.” He ventured some very cautious lines of inquiry. Among them was a suggestion that “the woman clothed with the sun” in the Bible’s last book (Revelation 12) might be a prophecy of something like Mary’s heavenly assumption.
…………….
By the mid–500s, the August 15 feast had become a universal Church celebration of Mary’s “dormition,” or falling asleep. In the the Acts of John—a fifth–century text from Constantinople that includes material originally written in the second century—recalls that “the mother of us all has departed this life.”
In a Syrian work called On the Divine Names, a mystic known as Pseudo–Dionysius claims that he was on hand, along with the Apostles James and Peter, for “a vision of that mortal body, that source of life, which bore God.”
By the late 5th century, the first full accounts of Mary’s end, or transitus Mariae, begin to emerge. These are the “romances” and “legends” that became the key exhibits in Protestant criticism.
THE STORY
An angel announces to Mary that it’s time for her to die. Miraculously, the apostles appear at her home in Jerusalem, and gather around her dying bed. Jesus comes and takes her soul to heaven, and the apostles lead a procession to lay her body in a tomb at Gethsemane. An angry Jewish mob tries to burn her body, but is repulsed by intervening angels. Three days later Jesus takes Mary’s body to Paradise and reunites her soul with her body. After that, Jesus gives Mary and the apostles a guided tour of heaven and hell. The Apostles are then returned to earth as the story ends, but not before seeing “our Lord Jesus Christ and Mary sitting at the right hand of God.”
Many variations on this basic story have been found, preserved in various languages—Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Slavonic and Latin—all written sometime between the years 400 and 750 A.D.
Together they form a small library of fractured fairytales—with colorful characters, bloated dialogue, dramatic fight scenes, magical appearances, implausible plot twists, strange religious ideas, and fanciful recastings of biblical history.
In the end, though, Mary remains the mother of mystery. Even today, we don’t know what became of her mortal coil. Was she raised up like Enoch (Genesis 5:24) or Elijah (2 King 3:11)? Or did she die—as the ancient faithful and most ancient commentators believed?
The gathering around the bier, the dedication to live and death, and resurrection is an icon of the gathering of the churches-not unity through doctrine or theological rationalism- but rather unity through gathering at the bier of the Tabernacle. Through the Prayers of Mother of God, O Lord forgive our sins of division.
Sunday, 10 August 2008
Welcome
Welcome to the Orthodox Northampton blog. You may know that my family and I have recently moved from Aberdeenshire, in Scotland, to Northampton, in the southern East Midlands of England. I am now attached to the parish of the Annunciation in Oxford, with my bishop, Basil of Amphipolis. I live in Northampton, however, and I have recently met with Fr Florin, a Romanian priest and his growing congregation. We are also blessed with a Greek congregation in Northampton, and a Serbian priest. This blog, I pray, will be a collaborative effort of developing an Orthodox Christian presence in Northampton- the home to the largest population of Eastern Europeans outside Westminster, London.
I hope that this blog will continue in the same vein as its predecessor St Drostans - a mixture of occasional comment and news about Orthodoxy in the UK, and especially in the town of Northampton.
Mother of God, pray for us sinners...
Fr Timothy Curtis
I hope that this blog will continue in the same vein as its predecessor St Drostans - a mixture of occasional comment and news about Orthodoxy in the UK, and especially in the town of Northampton.
Mother of God, pray for us sinners...
Fr Timothy Curtis
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
