6th Lenten Email

Below is the text of my 6th Lenten Email. I think I explained what these are in a prvious post but I am not sure. Every Lent and Advent I send out a series of emails to my non-Orthodox friends which, I hope, explain what I am doing and why. Most of them just think I am weird for trying to observe such a strict regimen, set down in a calendar that most regard as rank legalism. So, I try to show them what Lent and Advent are really about. I'm not sure I succeed, but I still try. Anyway, below is the email I sent this morning.

----


I don't know if you read the Washington Times or not, but if you read it last month perhaps you read the series titled "Killing Eve". It was horrific. Here is an excerpt:

"Kavita Srivastava, a local lawyer and general secretary for the human rights organization People's Union for Civil Liberties, said it's no surprise so many doctors in Jaipur are guilty [of aborting female babies].

"The status of women is already low here because of the feudal Rajput culture," she said, referring to the former ruling caste. "There are traditions in Rajasthan of women committing johar which is mass suicide or sati where a widow throws herself onto her husband's funeral pyre. A woman's entire identity was subsumed by her husband. If he died, so must she."
Women who committed sati would have temples built in their honor, she added, and palaces in Rajasthan commonly have a wall displaying the last hand prints women left before they died. . . . In Rajasthan's violent desert culture, baby girls were drowned in boiling milk or abandoned in a sand dune. Whole villages went decades without female children."

But before we begin condemning Oriental societies we should remember that women in the west were treated little better. Demosthenes mentioned the state of women in his own classical European society: "We have whores for our pleasure, concubines for daily physical use, wives to bring up legitimate children and to be faithful stewards in household matters." And archaeologists have uncovered Roman brothels where the drains were full of skeletons of strangled babies. Even childbirth, given for the salvation of women (I Tim. 2:15) had been turned into an opportunity to commit evil and negate the good thing God had planned for women.

Every year, during Lent when we mourn for our sins we also remember when God decided to lift the head of a woman. On Sunday, March 25, exactly nine months before Christmas, is the Feast of the Annunciation. On this day God elevated a woman so high that the Orthodox rightly bless her as "More honorable than the Cherubim, and more glorious beyond compare than the Seraphim" for she held in her body One greater than the universe. When she said to Archangel Gabriel "Let it be according to thy word" she became the temple and throne of God. She became the mother of God. And in becoming his mother she became the mother of the Church. (Warning! Logic follows. If she is Jesus' mother, and the Church is his body, it follows that she is the mother of the Church.)

But she is not the temple, throne, and mother of God for her own benefit. What kind of mother only cares about herself? She wants for us what God wants, which is the best possible thing. She wants us to be temples of God, too. We can follow her as she follows Christ. Just as she said, "Let it be according to thy will" we can say "Thy will be done". In its essence, this is the goal of Lent and all of Christian life; training our weak and misshapen wills to align with Gods will.

One person who achieved that goal was St. Mary of Egypt. Without going into too much detail, the Orthodox have 5 different cycles of readings, hymns, music, commemorations, feasts, and fasts that do not line up the same way twice very often. I've been told we only do the same exact service twice every 400 years. This year, the Feast of the Annunciation and the Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt fall on the same day. But unlike the Mother of God, St. Mary of Egypt was the farthest thing from a virgin. She was a prostitute. But hers was not the kind of cold-hearted money-obsessed behavior one normally associates with prostitutes. Rather, she was a pathetic creature who, if she were on earth today, would be thought of as a sex addict. But one day she appealed to Mary the Mother of God for help, and her prayer was answered. She disappeared into the Jordanian desert where she remained for many years living a life of repentance. When she was next seen she had been transformed. She had become a temple of God. (If you want to read her whole but rather short story you can