Catechumens: I’ve spoken to you occasionally concerning the need for prayer at all times and in all activities, whether preparing supper or traveling or preparing for any work. This tradition is visible in the many prayers for such occasions in the prayer books for laymen, in the Russian Book of Needs, and in the various priestly blessings for everything from traveling to blessing a house. As an example, I have referred to the pieties of the Celts, Orthodox before the centurions came to convert or martyr them by the sword. Whether from pious customs of the Russians, the Serbs, the Greeks, or those of any pious people, we stand to learn much that can transform the inner man by transforming his outward veneration.
These devotions should never be lightly dismissed as merely ‘ethnic’ or conservative (a political notion) or ‘peasant’ practices, though indeed we can learn likewise from many pious ethnics, conservatives, and peasants, even in all our assumed Western education and cultured refinement. If we cannot, then how shall we learn from a Tax Collector, a Fisherman, a Samaritan, indeed a Carpenter and a Jew?
Nor must we allow ourselves to accord a totality to our own local attitudes or national culture here in the West, falling into the very pitfall we might presume upon our brethren of other lands, among whom are countless Saints and churches as flowers of diverse spiritual meadows. If we have assumed that ours is a more or less generic environment, that may be more from a poverty of piety than from a particularly Western brand of it, and we would be arrogant in the extreme if we casually shunned the habits those who planted and led us as spiritual parents — who do, it must be observed, hail from other places and also other times. If I flee from pieties because they smack of particular nationalities, then I have truly fallen prey to the heresy of phyletism.
The question is never whether piety is presumably “Russian” or “Serbian” or what have you, but whether or not I give the fullest possible expression of reverence, of veneration, of worship, and what I can learn in humility from others. Any time I adopt for myself a rule, or am assigned one by my spiritual director, it will have originated in the practice of actual persons, who have a history, an ethnicity, a nationality. Piety which is disconnected from the human race on the one hand and individual human persons on the other, which is merely a theoretical contemplation, cannot be Orthodox piety. If we cannot say “following the tradition of the holy fathers…” on the one hand, or “as I have learned from those who led me” on the other, then we must question whether the object of piety is indeed the personal God-man, Jesus Christ, who entered history as a very specific person, the Seed of David. If we must invent a national piety from scratch, we will be far from Christ.
I’m suggesting we ask ourselves, of the venerable pieties of all Orthodox, sanctified by the practice of Saints, what we may learn and how we may find a home for them in our lives. In what form can we integrate their wisdom as praxis? Look on the ancient prayers in this letter without fear that they are from a ‘foreign’ culture, but ask what men of all cultures may teach us concerning our common journey, our one reason for being, our universal and shared goal, if we have understood anything of the faith – I mean our union with God. In all things, it has been my impression that all the fathers, all the saints, and all of orthodoxy has but one teaching and one purpose, our union with God. We know no other point or end of our knowledge. For this we strive to overcome the passions and to see God.
In particular, we find in the Celts a constant prayer. In one sense, not one particular prayer but a constant praying in and for all matters, even the mundane. In another sense, it is always one particular prayer, in that the Holy Trinity, and Christ in particular is that prayer. Christ beside me. Christ before me. Christ behind me. Christ within me. Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ to the right of me. Christ to the left of me. Christ in my lying, my sitting, my rising. Christ in heart of all who know me. Christ on tongue of all who meet me. Christ in eye of all who see me. Christ in ear of all who hear me (Breastplate of St. Patrick).
Prayer at Smooring The Fire
I smoor (smother) the fire this night
Be God’s compassing about ourselves,
Who keeps watch this night? The bright and gentle Mary of the ringlets. Whole be house and herd,
— “Little Book of Celtic Prayer ” by A Duncan. |
Prayer at the Guarding of Flocks May Mary the mild keep the sheep, May Oran keep the kine (cattle), May the Spirit of peace preserve the flocks,
— Carmina Gaedalica |
— Catechetical Letter 1/25/2005
“The LORD bless thee and keep thee. The LORD make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee. The LORD lift up the light of his countenance upon thee and grant thee peace” (Numbers 6).