| 145 Albright W.F. Recent Discoveries in Bible Lands//Young " s Analytical Concordance to the Bible. N.Y.: Funk and Wagnalls Co., 20th cd., 1963. P. 6. 148 Albright W. F. From the Stone Age to Christianity. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940. P. 193. 149 Erman А. Life in Ancient Egypt. P. 204. Цит. no: Free J.P. Op. cit. P. 91–92. См. также: Kitchen K. A. Op. cit. P. 156. 152 См.: Lemonick М. D. Secrets of the Lost Tomb//Time. May 25, 1995. P. 38–44. См. также статью «Ο τφος μ τος 50 πργκιπες» (газета «Η ΚΑΘΗΜΕΡΙ ΝΗ». 4. 6. 1995. Σ. 33) и статью «Οι τφοι των υιν Ραμσ Β» 67 δωμτια!» (газета «ΕΣΤΙΑ» 24. 5. 1995). 159 Frec J.P. Commentaries from the Clay Tablets – The Has Shamra Tablets//Sunday School Times. Philadelphia Pa., April 1945; Barton G.A. Archaeology and the Bible. Philadelphia: American Sunday–School Union, 7th ed., 1937. P. 355, tabl. 48–51. 160 Albright W.F. Recent Progress in North–Canaanite Research//Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 70, April, 1938. P. 24. 169 См. фотографию в «Вестминстерском историческом атласе» (Westminster Historical Atlas. L, 1953. P. 23). 170 Thompson J.A. Op. cit. Р. 21, 29, 38. Free J.P. Op. cit. P. 54, 151. Keller W. Ββλος... Σ. 103 104. Breadsted J.H. A History of Egypt. N. Y: Scribner’s, 1912. P. 187. 172 Steele F. The Lipit–Ishtar Law Code//American Journal of Archaeology, April–June. 1947, Vol. LI, 2. P. 158–164. 173 Albright W.F. A Decade of Middle Eastern Archaeology, 1939–1948//Palestine Affairs. Vol. IV, 2, Feb., 1949. P. 24. 175 60 лет назад археологи полагали время жизни Хаммурапи ближе к 2250 г. до Р.Х. Бартон в 1937 г. изменил эту датировку на 2104–2061 гг. до Р.Х. Теперь почти все, кто работает над хронологией Ближнего Востока, датируют время его жизни где–то между 2000 и 1700 гг. до Р.Х., причем больше склоняются к концу этого промежутка времени. Мы следуем новой хронологии, принятой у большинства авторов, среди которых и археолог У. Олбрайт. Подробнее см.: Free J.P. Op. cit. Р. 33, 81. |
| 34 . She is said to have adorned her head, and to have put on a bridal dress, so that one would say that she was going to a bridegroom, not to death. But when the hateful persecutors saw that they had lost the prey of her chastity, they began to seek her mother and sisters. But they, by a spiritual flight, already held the field of chastity, when, as on the one side, persecutors suddenly threatened them, and on the other, escape was shut off by an impetuous river, they said, what do we fear? See the water, what hinders us from being baptized? And this is the baptism whereby sins are forgiven, and kingdoms are sought. This is a baptism after which no one sins. Let the water receive us, which is wont to regenerate. Let the water receive us, which makes virgins. Let the water receive us, which opens heaven, protects the weak, hides death, makes martyrs. We pray Thee, God, Creator of all things, let not the water scatter our bodies, deprived of the breath of life; let not death separate our obsequies, whose lives affection has always conjoined; but let our constancy be one, our death one, and our burial also be one. 35 . Having said these words, and having slightly girded up the bosom of their dress, to veil their modesty without impeding their steps, joining hands as though to lead a dance, they went forward to the middle of the river bed, directing their steps to where the stream was more violent, and the depth more abrupt. No one drew back, no one ceased to go on, no one tried where to place her steps, they were anxious only when they felt the ground, grieved when the water was shallow, and glad when it was deep. One could see the pious mother tightening her grasp, rejoicing in her pledges, afraid of a fall lest even the stream should carry off her daughters from her. “These victims, O Christ,” said she, “do I offer as leaders of chastity, guides on my journey, and companions of my sufferings.” 37 . But who would have cause to wonder that they had such constancy whilst alive, seeing that even when dead they preserved the position of their bodies unmoved? The water did not lay bare their corpses, nor did the rapid course of the river roll them along. Moreover, the holy mother, though without sensation, still maintained her loving grasp, and held the sacred knot which she had tied, and loosed not her hold in death, that she who had paid her debt to religion might die leaving her piety as her heir. For those whom she had joined together with herself for martyrdom, she claimed even to the tomb. |
| 74 . So, then, I hold thee, my brother, and neither death nor time shall tear thee from me. Tears themselves are sweet, and weeping itself a pleasure, for by these the eagerness of the soul is assuaged, and affection being eased is quieted. For neither can I be without thee, nor ever forget thee, or think of thee without tears. O bitter days, which show that our union is broken! O nights worthy of tears, which have lost for me so good a sharer of my rest, so inseparable a companion! What sufferings would ye cause me, unless the likeness of him present offered itself to me, unless the visions of my soul represented him whom my bodily sight shows me no more! 75 . Now, now, O brother, dearest to my soul, although thou art gone by too early a death, happy at least art thou, who dost not endure these sorrows, and art not compelled to mourn the loss of a brother, separation from whom thou couldst not long endure, but didst quickly return and visit him again. But if then thou didst hasten to banish the weariness of my loneliness, to lighten the sadness of thy brother’s mind, how much more often oughtest thou now to revisit my afflicted soul, and thyself lighten the sorrow which has its origin from thee! 76 . But the exercise of my office now bids me rest awhile, and attention to my priestly duties draws my mind away; but what will happen to my holy sister, who though she moderates her affection by the fear of God, yet again kindles the grief itself of the affection by the zeal of her devotion? Prostrate on the ground, embracing her brother’s tomb, wearied with toilsome walking, sad in spirit, day and night she renews her grief. For though she often breaks off her weeping by speech, she renews it in prayer; and although in her knowledge of her Scriptures she excels those who bring consolation, she makes up for her desire of weeping by the constancy of her prayers, renewing the abundance of her tears then chiefly, when no one can interrupt her. So thou hast that which thou mayest pity, not what thou mayest blame, for to weep in prayer is a sign of virtue. And although that be a common thing with virgins, whose softer sex and more tender affection abound in tears at the sight of the common weakness, even without the feeling of family grief, yet when there is a greater cause for sorrowing, no limit is set to that sorrow. |
| 77 . The means of consolation, then, are wanting since excuses abound. For thou canst not forbid that which thou teachest, especially when she attributes her tears to devotion, not to sorrow, and conceals the course of the common grief for fear of shame. Console her, therefore, thou who canst approach her soul, and penetrate her mind. Let her perceive that thou art present, feel that thou art not departed, that having enjoyed his consolation of whose merit she is assured, she may learn not to grieve heavily for him, who warned her that he was not to be mourned for. 78 . But why should I delay thee, brother, why should I wait that my address should die and as it were be buried with thee? Although the sight and form of thy lifeless body, and its remaining comeliness and figure abiding here, comfort the eyes, I delay no longer, let us go on to the tomb. But first, before the people I utter the last farewell, declare peace to thee, and pay the last kiss. Go before us to that home, common and waiting for all, and certainly now longed for by me beyond others. Prepare a common dwelling for him with whom thou hast dwelt, and as here we have had all things in common, so there, too, let us know no divided rights. 79 . Do not, I pray thee, long put off him who is desirous of thee, expect him who is hastening after thee, help him who is hurrying, and if I seem to thee to delay too long, summon me. For we have not ever been long separated from each other, but thou wast always wont to return. Nor since thou canst not return again, I will go to thee; it is just that I should repay the kindness and take my turn. Never was there much difference in the condition of our life; whether health or sickness, it was common to both, so that if one sickened the other fell ill, and when one began to recover, the other, too, was convalescent. How have we lost our rights? This time, too, we had our sickness in common, how is it that death was not ours in common? 80 . And now to Thee, Almighty God, I commend this guileless soul, to Thee I offer my sacrifice; accept favourably and mercifully the gift of a brother, the offering of a priest. I offer beforehand these first libations of myself. I come to Thee with this pledge, a pledge not of money but of life, cause me not to remain too long a debtor of such an amount. It is not the ordinary interest of a brother’s love, nor the common course of nature, which is increased by such an amount of virtue. I can bear it, if I shall be soon compelled to pay it. |
| 93 . Let us bethink ourselves of the profitableness of right belief. It is profitable to me to know that for my sake Christ bore my infirmities, submitted to the affections of my body, that for me, that is to say, for every man, He was made sin, and a curse, 2107 that for me and in me was He humbled and made subject, that for me He is the Lamb, the Vine, the Rock, 2108 the Servant, the Son of an handmaid, 2109 knowing not the day of judgment, for my sake ignorant of the day and the hour. 2110 94 . For how could He, Who hath made days and times, be ignorant of the day? How could He not know the day, Who hath declared both the season of Judgment to come, and the cause? 2111 A curse, then, He was made not in respect of His Godhead, but of His flesh; for it is written: “Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.” 2112 In and after the flesh, therefore, He hung, and for this cause He, Who bore our curses, became a curse. 2113 He wept that thou, man, mightest not weep long. He endured insult, that thou mightest not grieve over the wrong done to thee. 2114 95 . A glorious remedy–to have consolation of Christ! For He bore these things with surpassing patience for our sakes–and we forsooth cannot bear them with common patience for the glory of His Name! Who may not learn to forgive, when assailed, seeing that Christ, even on the Cross, prayed,–yea, for them that persecuted Him? See you not that those weaknesses, as you please to call them, of Christ’s are your strength? 2115 Why question Him in the matter of remedies for us? His tears wash us, His weeping cleanses us,–and there is strength in this doubt, at least, that if you begin to doubt, you will despair. The greater the insult, the greater is the gratitude due. 96 . Even in the very hour of mockery and insult, acknowledge His Godhead. He hung upon the Cross, and all the elements did Him homage. 2116 The sun withdrew his rays, the daylight vanished, darkness came down and covered the land, the earth trembled; yet He Who hung there trembled not. What was it that these signs betokened, but reverence for the Creator? That He hangs upon the Cross–this, thou Arian, thou regardest; that He gives the kingdom of God–this, thou regardest not. That He tasted of death, thou readest, but that He also invited the robber into paradise, 2117 to this thou givest no heed. Thou dost gaze at the women weeping by the tomb, but not upon the angels keeping watch by it. 2118 What He said, thou readest: what He did, thou dost not read. Thou sayest that the Lord said to the Canaanitish woman: “I am not sent, but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” 2119 thou dost not say that He did what He was besought by her to do. |
| All these days I receive e-mail messages from a girl from Cyprus. Her father died, and every day she writes me just one question: “Why did God do this to me?” And again: “Why didn’t He hear my prayers? Why did He allow all this? I think I’ll lose my mind soon … ” When we begin a sermon at the moment of someone else’s suffering, we are doomed to failure. A suffering person does not need a sermon, does not need a lot of advice and consolations: this can only aggravate the situation. In the moment of suffering, people want only one thing: for someone nearby to sit down and cry with them. A man once asked me: – Father, I go to visit people who have survived grief. What should I tell them? Please tell me the right words. And I answered him: – Do not say anything. Just sit down and let people start talking to you themselves: let them share their grief. It happens that people, being in grief, may say unpleasant things. I can’t say that it’s good, but they have an excuse: they suffer. It happens that people, having experienced grief, lose faith in God, because God, according to their ideas, should arrange everything the way they want, and now their whole life has turned upside down. “I came to the Church, and after three years I lost a loved one. How could this God do this to me?” To be honest, I, like you, do not understand why this happened, either; and together with you I am ready to knock my fists on the door of Christ and turn my tears and pain into a prayer to Him, saying: “Lord, if you can, tell me why! I myself cannot explain this to myself.” Last Saturday, I was at the funeral of a friend of mine. This person helped to paint a temple in the monastery, he had a wonderful wife, good children – in short, he was a wonderful person. He woke up in the morning, drank water, left the house (his wife told him to put on a jacket, it was cold), and when he returned, he lay down and died. His wife did not even have time to understand how this happened. And when I came to the funeral service and saw him in a tomb, I also thought: “Why is there so much suffering in the world? Why was this man destined to die at sixty?” And how to explain why a four-year-old baby is ill with leukemia, and now he lies, suffers, his hair falls out, he cannot eat and cries from pain? How to explain all this to his mother? What will she say? What will this kid say? What shall we all say? |
| Although I have always believed in Christ since I was born into a Greek Orthodox family and raised by devout parents, it is particularly in this war situation that I felt my life on earth is meaningless and seeking a life with Christ is what God calls upon us to do. I thought that my life on earth can end at any moment and besides the fancy house, the expensive jewelry, the luxury car what treasures do I really have that are everlasting? The violence in our area was so intense and the checkpoints so many that I also lost my job as an educator with the Latin Patriarchate Schools and contributed to the 60% unemployment rate of Palestine. As a professional person I felt into a deep depression not being employed and furthermore I felt even more depressed since my husband could not leave or did not want to leave and return to Boston. In my small mind I grew up thinking that the family is the mom, dad and the kids but in Palestine the family is also the grandparents and all the aunts and the uncles. My husband could not escape to freedom while leaving his family behind. I really had to struggle to be an obedient wife and to wake up to a man every morning that I began to think of as my enemy but in front of God had taken vows to honor and to respect. I was frustrated that the extended family was more important than me. I am sure now this is the reason that Palestine has being emptied out of its Christian population since 1948 with the creation of Israel because when one person relocates outside the country, they actually just take everyone else with them meaning the whole extended family or clan. I find it so very sad that when I frequently venerate Christ’s Holy Tomb the most precious and sacred spot for Christianity where Christ’s Holy Resurrection took place and the miracle of the Holy Fire continues to take place every year on Holy Saturday that the Israeli tour guide will say to pilgrims: “I cannot go in there with you but I will wait right here” -so its kind of showing the holy places like a place of a museum where we are in deep need to keep our Christian community here and have people worshiping the Lord in churches throughout the Holy Land not just empty shrines. I don’t object to an ecumenical presence in Jerusalem and sharing the land with everyone but I promote specifically that Palestinian Christian people should have their basic human right to stay where they were born and their parents were born instead of being squeezed out by the Zionist policies of making a 100% Jewish homeland for Jews only. |
| Augustine deputed his two companions to exercise the gift of healing, and they proceeded to lift him up, the one applying the hand of power to the upper part of his body, the other implanting strength in his knees and ankle-bones. The cure is described as more painful than the malady. While it was in progress (for it was not instantaneous) the poor man, as we read, cried out lustily for mercy. At length his body, which had been a mass of disease and deformity, assumed its natural shape, and the three wonderful benefactors disappeared in the direction of their several tombs. Meanwhile, the sacristan and keepers of the church, who had been aroused from their sleep by cries of distress proceeding from the sanctuary, had repaired to the spot, where to their astonishment they found the poor man, whose hapless condition they had commiserated the day before, in the full possession of health and activity. He related to them the circumstances of his visit to Canterbury, and learned that the three shrines from which they had appeared to issue, and among which his eyes had afterwards lost them, were those of St. Augustine and his two companions, St. Laurence and St. Mellitus. These, then, were the strangers on right and left. «A great number of the miraculous narratives of which St. Augustine of Canterbury is the subject have their scene on the wide ocean... Among those a foremost place is given by Goscelin to the wonderful preservation of King Canute from perils on the sea, on his return from his great pilgrimage to Rome [in 1031]. A terrible storm is said to have overtaken him when he was just within sight of the English shore. He betook himself to St. Augustine, whose favour he had experienced throughout his travels, and vowed large gifts to his shrine. Soon after, the storm ceased, and the vessel got safe to shore. «A somewhat similar intervention was vouchsafed in the case of Egelvius, Abbot of Ethelingey, who had also been to Rome to pay his devotions at the tomb of the Apostles. |
| Having in 1764 lost all its lands with the male serfs alone numbering more than 3 thousand, the monastery faced serious economic problems. “The churches of the monastery are rather poor,” noted a traveler who visited the monastery in 1850. The monastery received a small income from the mineral water well opened at its wall in 1765. In the middle of the 19 th century, a clinic was built there where patients could take cold and warm mineral water baths for payment. Today St. Cornelius’s Monastery is a sorry sight. First, as early as in the 1920s, the cathedral was ruined, and then Communist barbarians destroyed the wall, the brethren’s cells, the belfry, the smaller churches, and the administrative buildings. Only the refectory with the adjoining cellarer’s and abbot’s chambers has miraculously remained. Valuable objects of art collected by the monastery over the course of centuries disappeared. Only some of them are now kept in the Vologda museum: four icons of the festal tier (16 th century), epitaphion (symbolic burial Shroud of the Lord) dating from 1594, and other articles of church art. The Nurma flows as slowly as it did five centuries ago between banks overgrown with sedge and willows. In autumn, old monastery birches growing in two uneven rows along the path leading up the slope shed their small, yellow leaves into its quiet waters. Ploughed fields lie around. The dense forest that used to give St. Cornelius the longed-for silence is no more. But the land keeps the memory of the saintly man who used to walk its paths, built his first church here, suffered hunger and privations, pleading with the Lord to send peace to Holy Russia. The ancient monastery arouses mixed feelings. The stern grandeur of the thick refectory walls that lived through the Time of Troubles and the reign of the first Romanovs capture one’s imagination. But today’s view ruins all historical pictures created by it. How senselessly and cruelly we do away with our history! How indifferent we are to the shrines, venerated by many generations of our predecessors! It was not long ago that local residents could show St. Cornelius’s tomb in the tall weeds that grow in the place where the cathedral used to rise. Today it can be found no more… |
| In this spirit, in this context, St. Andrew is given rein to speak to us. But, ironically, this is not what he seems to wish, and it is certainly not the way his hymn works. It doesn " t speak to us at all—it aims to speak for us, or perhaps even that is slightly inaccurate—its deepest aim is to draw us into its spirit, so that its words become our own words . Just as the prayers contained in the prayer book are meant to teach us the way a heart should cry to God in daily prayer, to instruct us in the kind of words that our own hearts should issue forth, so the Great Canon speaks within us as we ought to speak. It gives us, as if on a kind of loan, the words that would emerge from within each of our hearts, if only we would take seriously what repentance really means, but which we so often do not find brimming from our lips, deadened to the spiritual reality by our laxity, and our worldliness, and our distraction. Thus, the Church seems to say: the Great Canon is written and read in the first person, not simply for St. Andrew, but for all of us. “ Where shall I begin to lament? ” we sing. “ I am the one who by my thoughts fell among robbers. ” “ I am the coin with the Royal image which was lost of old. ” “ The alabaster jar of my tears, O Savior, I pour out on Thy head as perfume. ” I want to dwell on this first-person reality for just a moment, since as all of us clergy, and all attentive laity know, that this is a regular feature of our Divine Services. Though, yes, we do often speak historically of the past, in our hymns very regularly, we find our liturgical experience is set into the first person. I see the crucifixion of Christ and what " s more I see it today. I behold the empty tomb. I witness the resurrection. And thus, in the Great Canon, I sing to my soul, through the word spoken by the priest; St. Andrew’s own words. And while this is always a powerful element in our prayer, it is perhaps nowhere moreso than in this hymn, for it is precisely this that gives the Great Canon that tangible sense of potency that I mentioned at the outset, because I am given to sense, if only for a few minutes of my attentive participation, something that I long for, something that my heart and soul deeply crave. Though I may not live a life of worthy repentance, nevertheless, something with in me longs to, cries out to, and by being drawn into this hymn of experience, for a moment I am given to taste firsthand of the glories of that repentant life that I so often neglect on my own. |
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