Becoming A Prayer: The Trisagion

The Trisagion is probably the most frequently said prayer for Orthodox, next to the Jesus prayer. This prayer comes within in the first part of our morning prayers and may even suffice as the entire morning prayer for some. Although we do exchange the Trisagion part of the prayer with other prayers between Lent and Pentecost.      

        Nevertheless, take some time, light some candles and slowly and intentionally say this prayer for a week. It is a prayer of many confessions about ourselves, but mostly about God. As we confess this to God, it will begin to form a better theology and faith within us.

            Morning Prayer

(Before beginning this, take a moment to become internally still and aware that the Presence and Kingdom of God is already around you and in you.)

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen. (Make the sign of the Cross while saying it).[1]

Prayer of the Publican

(Each time you say this make the sign of the cross, bow and touch the floor, unless mobility restricts you, then do what you can).

O God, be merciful to me a sinner.

O God, be merciful to me a sinner.

O God, be merciful to me a sinner.[2]

The Beginning Prayer

O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, for the sake of the prayers of Thy most pure mother, and all the saints, have mercy on us.[3]

Glory to Thee, our God, glory to Thee.

O Heavenly King, Comforter and Spirit of Truth, Who is everywhere present and fills all things, Treasury of good things and Giver of life: Come and dwell in us, and cleanse us of all impurity, and save our souls, O Good One.

The Trisagion

(Each time you say the Trisagion make the sign of the cross, bow and touch the floor).

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal have mercy on us

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal have mercy on us.

Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal have mercy on us

Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirt (Make the sign of the cross) both now and ever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Lord's Prayer

Our Father, Who are in the heavens, hallowed be Your name.

Let Your Kingdom come; Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

Do not let us come into time of trial, but deliver us from evil,

For Yours is the Kingdom and the power and the glory

Of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

---

[1] Put your index, middle and thumb together (Represents the Trinity), and fold your other two fingers down (Represents Christ’s two natures: human/divine). Touch your forehead, abdomen, right shoulder, left shoulder (yes, we cross the opposite of most Roman Catholics, who incidentally used to cross this ancient way).

 

[2] Do not ask for God’s mercy as if you are begging for it to happen. God loves you and is endlessly giving mercy to you already, so say it with the intention of trying to become more aware of it.

 

[3] If you are confused as to why Orthodox and Catholics include prayer from the mother of God and saints, it is not because we worship them. Christian theology believes that because of Christ, death did not get the final say and now their lives are hidden in Christ, but are free to intercede (like any living friend) for us as the “great cloud of witnesses.”

Becoming a Prayer: Saint Moses the Black

Saint Moses the Black was a 4th-century man from Africa with a reputation for violence and roaming the land as a bandit, but after being deeply moved by a group of peaceful desert monks, Moses too wanted to know their faith and dedicated his life to Christ and became a desert monk and martyr. After his conversion he came to be known everywhere for being a man of deep humility and holiness. Moses once turned down a request to serve with a council of judges against a Christian brother, but after much pressure, accepted the request. Moses would later arrive with a basket full of leaking sand on his back (as seen in the icon). They asked why he carried the basket and Moses stated, “I carry behind me my manifold sins where I cannot see them, and I come to judge my brother?” When the other monks heard this, they all forgave their guilty brother.

Saint Moses Prayer:

Almighty God, whose blessed Son dost guide our footsteps into the way of peace: Deliver us from paths of hatred and violence, that we, following the example of thy servant Moses, may serve thee with singleness of heart and attain to the tranquility of the world to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Becoming A Prayer

 

Since entering into the Eastern Orthodox Church years ago my theology has taken a different shape because I have taken a different shape. I am continually being formed by our prayers and the mysterious love and peace of God in my life. If you have never been to a Divine Liturgy, I highly recommend attending one, but what should be known is that it is a prayer service by which we spiritually pilgrimage together before the throne of God where a table has been set to nourish us. We prostrate, venerate, light candles, incense and bring our whole selves as a prayer before God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit). Our prayer is never separate from our theology, but are inseparable and pertinent to uniting us with God and forming us into a community with the character of faithfulness to Christ and to each other. What becomes equally important is that we are people of prayer after we leave as well. Our lives should live in a constant interactive flow between God, ourselves and our world.

            I say all this to say that I want to spend more time in the coming months posting outside of my typical writing. Right now, it seems, the world needs something more edifying and hopeful in a time that has embraced its hate, blame, violence and hopelessness. So, I will be posting more prayers, hymns and poems that are nourishing for the human soul and mind. And I want to begin by offering this prayer:

From “The Prayers of Saint Isaac the Syrian”

As my soul bows to the ground, I offer to you with all my bones and with all my heart the worship that befits you. O glorious God, who dwell in ineffable silence, you have built for my renewal a tabernacle of love on earth where it is your good pleasure to rest, a temple made of flesh and fashioned with the most holy oil of the sanctuary. Then you filled it with your holy presence so that all worship might be fulfilled in it, indicating the worship of the eternal persons of your Trinity, and revealing to the worlds which you had created in your grace an ineffable mystery, a power which cannot be felt or grasped by any part of your creation that has come into being. In wonder at it, angelic beings are submerged in silence, awed at the dark cloud of this eternal mystery and at the flood of glory which issues from within this source of wonder, for it receives worship in the sphere of silence from every intelligence that has been sanctified and made worthy of you. (Prayer 1)

O mystery exalted beyond every word and beyond silence, who became human in order to renew us by means of your voluntary union with the flesh, reveal to me the path by which I may be raised up to your mysteries, traveling along a course that is clear and tranquil, free from the illusions of this world. Gather my mind into the silence of prayer, so that wandering thoughts may be silenced within me during that luminous converse of supplication and mystery-filled wonder. (Prayer 7)

A More Christlike Word Review

In this book Brad Jersak attempts to unconfuse the common misconceptions about what the Bible is and who Jesus is, and he does it well. It opens with Brad’s own journey of the shifting understanding of scripture in his life as it became harder for him to hold to the recent Protestant inventions of Biblical infallibility and inerrancy. I say recent because neither early Christians nor the Judaic traditions have ever claimed this about scripture. In fact, Jewish tradition seems more aware and embracing of its discrepancies and contradictions than possibly anyone else.

Nevertheless, his main point becomes that for Christians there is an infallible Word of God that the New Testament writers point to, but his name is Jesus. From this point Brad puts the Bible back into its context as a liturgical text shared and interpreted by its community, especially in terms of how it points to God. Brad shows how the whole of scripture according to the early Christian traditions was seen as an unfolding drama of redemption. Yet, it itself is being told through the messiness and brokenness of human lives and it constantly reflects that.

What changes is when Christ claimed that all of scripture always testified about himself, which is what Brad calls the Emmaus Way of reading the Bible. He convincingly argues that Christians are not being disingenuous when reinterpreting the whole text through Jesus. Just as every Judaic interpretation comes from one of many rabbinic schools of tradition, so Christianity comes from its own rabbinic Jesus-tradition. This tradition reveals Jesus as the plot twist that makes us have to rethink and reinterpret everything that came before it.

So, if you have ever found yourself disturbed and confused over the Bible’s many tensions, good. You were paying attention. This book will be a helpful resource for reorienting you toward what to do with that trouble. In essence, it is okay for the Bible to be a text in travail because it is a saga that is going somewhere. But, as Brad contends, it is one that points toward the unpredictability and incomprehensibility of an infinitely merciful, redemptive and Christlike God.

 

(I received this book for free from Speakeasy in exchange for an honest review.)

Invisible Cities

Given that I write a lot of book reviews these days, I feel the need to state that this is Not a review of Invisible Cities. It is, nonetheless, personal lit-crit or a commentary on interesting themes that I noticed in the story. It may seem odd for a theology blog to engage this particular story, but I assure you it fits well with many of my past themes. 

This book, however, is what I consider to be an important work of literary art. I believe genuine art must be flexible enough to never be pinned down by one person’s interpretations, so my hope is to not discourage further engagement with the story, but rather the opposite.

As a brief synopsis, Invisible Cities is set in a fictional time and place with real historical characters: Genghis Kahn holding captive the renowned explorer Marco Polo with plans of executing him. Yet there is a catch to Polo’s captivity in that so long as Polo can keep Kahn fascinated with telling him detailed stories about all these cities that Kahn has conquered, though never bothered to visit, then Kahn will never get around to killing him. Thus, Polo tries to endlessly keep the stories going. Though Kahn is never quite sure whether he is being told the truth or not, it works. Khan is captivated by his descriptive stories of exploration.

At face value this entire book can look like a wonderful use of language moving interchangeably between poetry and prose with lots of ingenious word plays, and it definitely is, but it is also more.

There is a moment late in the book where Polo is traversing the countryside pastures, set between the cities, and Polo stops to exclaim that the pastures all look the same. But a shepherd nearby condemns Polo’s blindness to its wonderful differences. This pointedly sets juxtapose what Polo had been pointing out to Kahn about the cities. So, what I see is a possible counternarrative being brewed by Calvino calling forth sight to what the world has become blind to.

To borrow from another book to help make this point, in Wendell Berry’s Jayber Crow, the character Jayber is reflecting on his own invisible hometown and says, “Thousands of leaders of our state, nation, entire administrations, corporate board meetings, university sessions, synods and councils of the church have come and gone without hearing the name Port Williams. And how many such invisible, nameless, powerless little places are there in this world? All the world, as a matter of fact, is a mosaic of little places invisible to the powers that be. And in the eyes of the powers that be all of these invisible places do not add up to a visible place. They add up to words and numbers.” (p.139).

For me, this sums up what Calvino is at least indirectly pointing toward with Kahn's faulty understanding of place. To what degree he might have actually been saying this I cannot say. But if nothing else, Invisible Cities does seem to be a long meditation on difference; specifically difference among those who refuse to ever discover it. Those who cannot see it, power being especially guilty of this, mark all its conquests as being contained by a one-dimensional sameness to be enumerated among its own possessions. It is colonization and colonization is the work of control by creating sameness, but it does so with the consequences of eradicating beauty, choking life and robbing the world of its meaning. 

Yet in the process of this book, Calvino may just be recovering the language that undoes such spells of contentment to this. 

Samaritan Cookbook Review

I once unwittingly wondered why people still bought cookbooks when most recipes were available online. My aunt responded by saying that a good cookbook should be just as much a cultural experience as it is about preparing food because they belong together. To only get a recipe does not contribute to that. From that moment on I had the utmost respect and love for a cookbook that was also capable of drawing its reader into the experience of the people and place it is from.

For most of human history food and its preparation has been a thing of community that belongs to its land and knows it familiarly. Until the dawn of industrialized agriculture, commercial grocery, fast-food and tv-dinners (the real war on family and culture), everyone gathered to take part in growing food, food preparation, eating and even the lost art of conversation which all contributed to the fullness of its social dimension.

My point in opening a book review like this is that the “Samaritan Cookbook” captures this. The Samaritans have long been a people who remained close to their food, land and each other. Most people only know them from the Biblical instance when Jesus responds to the question of “Who is my neighbor?” with the parable of the “Good Samaritan.” To call them “good” was actually scandalizing to its original hearers as the Samaritans at that time were the hated/ostracized remnants out of the northern kingdom of Israel.

However, as this cookbook shows the Samaritans never ceased to be in that place nor did their Jewish way of life ever come to an end: religiously, culturally or dietarily. That they never left the land is very significant toward the heritage of these recipes as their hand has a long history in Middle Eastern cuisine. These recipes have been collected and handed down over many generations, but this is the first time that this specific collection has been translated into English.

As I have been making my way through these recipes, I have noticed familiar Mediterranean flavors, but I am finding a unique fluidity and simplicity in their ingredients and preparation that does not always exist in other cookbooks from these regions. Yet, their simple combinations never lack for taste or nourishment and to me this simplicity tells of their way of life and community. So, I recommend Samaritan Cookbook: A Culinary Odyssey from the Ancient Israelites to the Modern Mediterranean as a learning experience about the Samaritan people through their stories and food.

(I received this book for free from Speakeasy in exchange for an honest review.)

The Mystery of Suffering and the Meaning of God: A Review

(Disclosure: I received this book for free from Speakeasy in exchange for my honest review.)

The Mystery of Suffering and the Meaning of God was written by retired Rabbi Anson Hugh Laytner as an autobiographical sketch and reflection on his life and theology. The book begins with one of the most fascinating interpretations of Job I have ever read in which Job becomes a text that deconstructs and dispels the theodicies of its day.

This creates the launching point for Anson to tell about a long series of tragedies that profoundly marred his life and devastated him in a Job like way, though the wisdom of his wife and friends that pop up in his stories and foot notes are thankfully far more helpful than Job’s. Nevertheless, these tragedies undid much of what he could believe about God and led to his deconstruction of theodicies and reconstruction of how he perceived God, evil, life, loss and hope. He could no longer justify a world where God is a micromanager that allows, as he says, fatalism to replace faith and acquiescence replace acceptance. I would describe this wrestling and new reframing as something of a semiotic shift in his life.

So, if (like me) you go into this book thinking you are going to get a historically faithful rabbinic interpretation on suffering, think again, because that it is precisely what he is protesting against, though towards the end it does show up in his reworking. I will say, however, that it is faithful to the Jewish tradition that follows the path of wisdom over and against offering tidy answers to what is really this mystery of life that we have a choiceless residence in.   

Subsequent to this, what I found most interesting is without stating it as such Anson moves towards an apophatic view of God in which the affirmations about God must be exchanged for the negations of God because the uncreated Creator ultimately is incomprehensible. Making our affirmations about God the central way of “knowing” God, as he more or less shows, leads to an arrogant synthesis between what is knowable and unknowable and even seems to hinder our spiritual growth.

However, some of my cons about this book, of course, come from my own Christian tradition. While the Christian perspective is given voice both positively and negatively (for good reason), it is not really faithful to the Christian view of suffering pre-reformation and fundamentalism. Look no further than how Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor interpret Christ’s suffering, human suffering and death to see the drastic difference, though present Christianity may be more to blame for this than Anson. Yet, the thin understanding of this theology may also stem from his move toward finding hope in something of a Unitarian ideology, which is not to say that religions and cultures have nothing to learn from each other, but in my experience when we attempt to reconcile the differing views of God from one religion to the next as all holding the rightness of our picking and choosing about God, it invariably ends up with mistakes of a farsighted nature about what each religion is really saying.

With that said, I never felt he was being shallow or flighty in his working through any of this. In fact the level of honesty and humility with which he writes about his pain, skepticisms and frustrations on to the final chapters that give way to his very inclusive hopefulness makes him a refreshing a voice. More to the point, love, for him, is the highest moral truth and the foundation of our interconnectedness that forms out of a chaotic universe; it is the one place Anson says he experiences God’s presence the most.  To conclude, his reflection has a way of making his audience of any faith, or none, struggle right along with him, but the insightfulness that emerges from it, I should think, will not make this book a waste of anyone’s time.