The Fiftheenth of August: Church

 

I expect most will not really be interested, but here is more information if you are:   The Dormition of the Theotokos   

 

A True Story

Currently reading this fascinating, sometimes painful, and also inspiring true story of Hanna Zack Miley, rescued from certain death when she was seven years old thanks to the Kindertransport, "an epic rescue effort that would save 10,000 Jewish children from Hitler's Nazi regime by granting them safe passage to England" during World War II.  

 

 

 

A documentary film (I was 8814) has also been produced.  In 2025 it was awarded Best Documentary at the Berlin Indie Film Festival, Best Documentary Feature at the Austin International Film Festival, and Best Biographical Feature Film at the World Film Festival in Cannes.   I have not seen the film yet but plan to watch it online (via this link) after I finish the book.

Far and Wide, Across the Years

Just a small corner on one shelf among all the bookshelves here . . .

An old-fashioned glass pop bottle (you recognize the brand, right?  Even though it's written in Hebrew?) that I brought home with me from my first visit to Israel in 1974.  It was empty for years but I filled it with pancake syrup a couple of decades ago so that the beautiful Hebrew lettering would stand out.

A small oval icon of the Incarnation (Madonna and Child in western terms) that my Orthodox Christian Godmother brought me from a monastery in Greece a few years ago.  

A glass box full of small white moonstones that I gathered along the shore of a lagoon near my home when I was still in high school about 1966.  

Some books waiting to be finished or started, the authors mostly from countries somewhere across the sea:  Serbia, Russia, Mount Athos in Greece . . .  

 It's a well-traveled little corner, spanning the years of my life, while also wandering across several countries far and wide.  My own international wanderings are limited to Israel, Jordan, England, Wales, and France, all so many years ago.  These days I wander around the world only virtually; my traveling days are over.  But I am quite satisfied with that.  

 

The Answer to Our Anxiety . . .

Artist:  Rudolf Ribarz (Austrian 1848-1904)

Sharing this quote from Saint Paisios the Athonite

 The answer to our anxiety is not drugs, alcohol, tranquilizers, or psychiatric treatment.  It will not be cured by Yoga or some new age or eastern meditation practice. The problem is that we have lost God as the center of our lives.  Once we make our love of God the primary focus of our lives and allow His grace to work through us, then no matter what circumstance we encounter in life we will be comforted and embraced in His love.  All anxiety disappears. This is the aim of the Orthodox way of life--to put God first and seek the Holy Spirit.  The anxieties of modern life are only symptoms of our separation from God.

Seashells

A (very) small dish of seashells,

gathered on a beach in Greece a year ago

not by me

but by a dear friend.

 

This little stone heart above is smaller than my thumbnail.

 

 

 Miniature pebbles and stones, and a seashell or two . . .

Lovely little things to delight and enchant.

I'm dreaming of Greece.

I've never been there and may never visit, but who knows?

I would go to see the ancient sites and the churches and monasteries.

Of Rainbows and Peonies

Dear Diary,

It has been a "weather" week here,

a nice change from the usual for late May.

Yesterday a brilliant rainbow fragment touched down

in the valley and hung suspended there in the sky

for about a half hour before it finally faded away.

 Meanwhile, Monday's peonies have faded from

their lovely pink to the palest of pale peachy rose . . .

 Petals have begun falling . . .

 The afternoon light was just right . . .

. . . one last photograph before their final demise.

Peonies certainly do retain their beauty to the very end.

 I've never had a bouquet of them before,

so this has been an especially lovely treat.

 Speaking of light and beauty, I'd like to share these few words . . .

Focus exclusively on God and light,
and never on darkness, temptation and sin.

Endure the trial of yourself and your own faults and sins
peacefully, serenely, because you know that God's mercy
is greater than your brokenness.

When you fall, get up immediately and start over.

Get help when you need it, without fear or shame.

From Fr. Thomas Hopko's Fifty-Five Maxims

Elizabeth Goudge, An Undervalued Gift

 

Having just stumbled upon a lovely article entitled 'An Undervalued Gift' about the British author Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984) written by Terrence Handley MacMath for The Church Times in the 18 March 2016 issue.  I had a link here but it doesn't seem to be working anymore, so I have removed it.  The periodical in question is an Anglican weekly newspaper based in London.

A brief quote to whet your appetite:

A review of her work by the poet Muriel Grainger describes her achievement: “She is unique in being a writer of extremely popular romances which are at the same time fundamentally religious. Not that Miss Goudge sets out to ‘put Christianity across’. The love of God; the power of prayer, the reality of the Kingdom of the Spirit — these things are woven into the fabric of her plots with a naturalness and inevitability that come from Miss Goudge’s own convictions and experience, and it is this factor that make them so acceptable and so telling.”

 The author at home in 1935.

And another quote from the article:

Goudge’s autobiography The Joy of the Snow is a self-deprecating assessment of her own life, and shows deep Christian joy and gratitude. But, in a new biography of Goudge by Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow, we learn that, beneath the joy, there was considerable suffering: mental and physical illness, lost love, the burden of caring for her mother. She had been an intensely withdrawn only child, with a stammer, and suffered from muscular-skeletal pain throughout her life. She even experienced a nervous breakdown after an operation in 1937.

Her autobiography published in 1974.

 There is also this thoroughly researched biography

if you are so enamored of her and her work (as am I)

that you want to know as much as possible

about the woman who wrote such lovely books.

Regarding her stories, classified as "romances" 

I'll just add my two bits and declare

they are much, much more than romances!

I've been reading her novels since my mother first began

bringing them home from the library over 50 years ago

and with each reading

I find more beauty and spiritual depth

than the time before.

 Mary Magdalene Church by Matthew Andrew of New Milton, Hampshire

While she spent the last thirty years of her life 

at Rose Cottage in Dog Lane, Peppard Common, Oxfordshire,

Elizabeth's final resting place is beside her parents

at Mary Magdalene Church in New Milton, Hampshire.

I wonder if anyone goes there to leave flowers for her.

I would if I could.

And this is why,
quoting again from the Church Times article:

In a preface for a volume of poetry written by the Sisters of Burnham Abbey, Goudge describes the the Sisters’ vision with deep insight: “Because they see all life and creation irradiated by the love of God, they see in depth; a sunrise means more than itself and pain has purpose. Yet the unity of outlook cannot dim the individuality of each separate poem. When love is the creating power, it seems impossible for two sparrows’ feathers, or even two snowflakes, ever to be the same. The stronger the microscope, the less are they alike. This is the way God likes it.”

From a young age, her words opened up this kind of vision to me.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for sharing your special gift of storytelling

which has run like a golden thread through my own life,

and the lives of many others who have come to

appreciate what you had to give.

Miss Montague

While spending the past two days in pure delight, including more tears than I ever shed before over this story, lost in the pages of Elizabeth Goudge's novel The Dean's Watch, the most recent of many readings of the book, I have become suddenly enamored with the frail and elderly Miss Montague.   Why now?  I met her years ago and have always appreciated her place within this story.   But somehow, this time, the beauty of her character shone out so brightly that the deep in her called to the deep in me; without it being named by the author (this is Elizabeth Goudge's special gift) I know it is nothing less than the dazzling love and light of Christ.

Miss Montague, though frail and elderly when we meet her, is not the least frail or failing in her qualities of faith and love.  We are told her story from her girlhood and we learn how her inner strength and beauty were hard won over many decades of battle with life and self.  

Curious to find out if others out there in the big wide world might share my profound admiration and love for this late-nineteenth-century lady, Miss Montague, I went exploring.   There is no lack of material to be found, and you, too, can find as much or more.   To whet your appetite,  I share a few selections below with links that you can visit if you are feeling particularly adventurous.

Billy Graham, I was surprised to discover, evidently reads Elizabeth Goudge, for he mentions Miss Montague in his book The Secret of Happiness.

I also found Miss Montague described quite lovingly in a 2004 newsletter from St. Ignatious Orthodox Church here.   Indeed, Miss Montague's approach seems to fall quite in line with what little I understand of the Eastern Orthodox way of things.  And since that has now become the Way upon which I very willingly go, I am doubly encouraged in it.

Some of you already know the blogger Lanier and will not be at all surprised to read what she has to say about The Dean's Watch.

So what, you may be asking, is it about Miss Montague that draws me so?  She achieved the rare beauty of a life fully surrendered to God.  How many of us even know what that really means?  In my own life the struggle continues, and it has taken me 60 years to even begin to appreciate the depths of meaning behind those words "fully surrendered to God" and the small glimpses I've been graced with have only made me desire this all the more.

Elizabeth Goudge must have walked a similar path, for listen to how knowingly she writes about Miss Montague . . .

  So she took a vow to love. Millions before her had taken the same simple vow but she was different from the majority because she kept her vow, kept it even after she had discovered the cost of simplicity. Until now she had only read her Bible as a pious exercise, but now she read it as an engineer reads a blueprint and a traveler a map, unemotionally because she was not emotional, but with a profound concentration because her life depended on it. Bit by bit over a period of years that seemed to her long, she began to get all her scaffolding into place. She saw that all her powers, even those which had seemed to mitigate against love, such as her shrewdness which had always been quick to see the faults of others, her ambition and self-will, could by a change of direction be bound over in service to the one overmastering purpose. She saw that she must turn from herself, and began to see something of the discipline that that entailed, and found too as she struggled that no one and nothing by themselves seemed to have the power to entirely hold her when she turned to them. 

It was then that the central figure of the Gospels, a historical figure whom she deeply revered and sought to imitate, began at rare intervals to flash out at her like live lightning from their pages, frightening her, turning the grave blueprint into a dazzle of reflected fire. Gradually she learned to see that her fear was not of the lightning itself but what it showed her of the nature of love, for it dazzled behind the stark horror of Calvary. At this point, where so many vowed lovers faint and fail, Mary Montague went doggedly on over another period of years that seemed if possible longer and harder than the former period. At some point along the way, she did not know where because the change came so slowly and gradually, she realized that He had got her and got everything. His love held and illumined every human being for whom she was concerned, and whom she served with the profound compassion which was their need and right, behind the Cathedral, the city, every flower and leaf and creature, giving it reality and beauty. She could not take her eyes from the incredible glory of His love. As far as it was possible for a human being in this world she had turned from herself.  She could say, "I have been turned," and did not know how very few can speak these words with truth.

Here is truth.  Here is love,  Here is deep and abiding joy that is centered only in God, the source and fountainhead of everything.  Here is glorious servanthood of the creature to the Creator.

To which, my prayer has been and remains

I have gone astray like a lost sheep; 

seek Your servant, 

for I have not forgotten Your commandments.  

Psalm 119:176

Robed with joy....

Anyone else out there follow the Psalms reading schedule in the Book of Common Prayer?  I have found it to be a marvelous exercise reading through all 150 Psalms each month.  Some days I stumble through half asleep; other times I'm struck with wonder at the inspiration and wisdom there.

This morning, for instance....

...reading in Psalm 65, 

I came to verses 11-13....

You crown the year with Your goodness.

Your ways overflow with plenty.

 The wilderness pastures overflow,

 and the hills are robed with joy.

The pastures are clothed with flocks,

and the valleys covered with grain.

They shout in triumph;

indeed, they sing.

When surrounded with the Autumn beauty this weekend,

I saw the joy,

and I heard the singing....

...and my heart was full of joy and song too...

Why else do you think He designed all that color and magnificence?

He is ablaze in beauty!