Monday, October 8, 2012

Musings on the Holy Fire


             Like many Orthodox, I am fascinated by God’s annual gift to His Church of the Holy Fire, which He kindles faithfully in the Church of the Resurrection (or "the Holy Sepulchre") in Jerusalem every Holy Saturday.  I first heard of the Holy Fire from reading (of all things) H.V. Morton’s famous travelogue of his visits to the Holy Land, his In the Steps of the Master (first published 1934).  It’s fair to say that this English churchman was not impressed. He wrote that he thought it “an extraordinary thing” that “a frenzied ceremony that might have occurred in a grove of Adonis should have taken place at the Tomb of Christ”, wherein “hundreds of simple, but apparently mad, Christians believed that God had sent fire from heaven”.  Morton didn’t believe God did send fire from heaven.  He wrote, “The crowds have been told time and again that the Holy Fire is a piece of symbolism, but nothing will shake their belief that on this day it descends from heaven into the Tomb of Christ.”
            Morton is a wonderful writer, but one should be careful in drawing conclusions from him.  (This is apparent from his biography, In Search of H.V. Morton by Michael Bartholomew.)  Whether or not “the crowds were told time and again that the Holy Fire” was a mere “piece of symbolism”, we probably will never know.  But what we can know is that the Holy Fire is not a mere piece of symbolism, because, unlike in Morton’s day, we now have cell-phone cameras and other gadgets which can film the event live and make the miracle available for viewing on line.  (See, for example, www.monomakhos.com/the-miracle-of-the-holy-fire-in-jerusalem/)
            This site also contains an interview with the Patriarch of Jerusalem who annually received the Holy Fire.  Far from suggesting to the crowds that it was a mere “a piece of symbolism”, he related his own experience of receiving the miraculous Fire.  In his own words, “I find my way through the darkness towards the inner chamber in which I fall on my knees. Here I say certain prayers that have been handed down to us through the centuries and, having said them, I wait. Sometimes I may wait a few minutes, but normally the miracle happens immediately after I have said the prayers. From the core of the very stone on which Jesus lay an indefinable light pours forth. It usually has a blue tint, but the color may change and take many different hues. It cannot be described in human terms. The light rises out of the stone as mist may rise out of a lake — it almost looks as if the stone is covered by a moist cloud, but it is light. This light each year behaves differently. Sometimes it covers just the stone, while other times it gives light to the whole sepulchre, so that people who stand outside the tomb and look into it will see it filled with light. The light does not burn — I have never had my beard burnt in all the sixteen years I have been Patriarch in Jerusalem and have received the Holy Fire. The light is of a different consistency than normal fire that burns in an oil lamp. At a certain point the light rises and forms a column in which the fire is of a different nature, so that I am able to light my candles from it. When I thus have received the flame on my candles, I go out and give the fire first to the Armenian Patriarch and then to the Coptic. Hereafter I give the flame to all people present in the Church.”
            The gift of the Holy Fire goes back a long way.  In the years 1106-1107, the Russian abbot Daniel, wrote of “Miracle of the Holy Light” in his itinerary.  Even Morton acknowledges that “Bernard the monk  mentioned it in his visit to Jerusalem in 870 A.D.”  Why does God send the gift so faithfully?
            As with any question beginning with the word “why”, we can only guess.  But I think it had something to do with the circumstances of the church in those days.  That is, the church in Jerusalem was a church on the cross.   As G.K. Chesterton writes (in his The New Jerusalem), “No man living in the West can form the faintest conception of what it must have been to live in the very heart of the East through the long and seemingly everlasting epoch of Moslem power.  A man in Jerusalem was in the center of the Turkish Empire as a man in Rome was in the centre of the Roman Empire.  The imperial power of Islam stretched away to the sunrise and the sunset; westward to the mountains of Spain and eastward towards the wall of China.  It must have seemed as if the whole earth belonged to Mahomet to those who in this rocky city renewed their hopeless witness to Christ.”  A hopeless witness indeed.  But to know the risen Christ is to know the Hope of the hopeless, and to know that hope always ends joy, that the Cross ends in Resurrection, and that the night ends with the coming dawn.  That, I think, is why God gave the gift of the light to those making their “hopeless witness to Christ” through those long years of darkness. 
            The lasting significance of the Holy Fire is not in the candles that are kindled from it, but in the light that is kindled in our hearts.  God gives the gift of the Holy Fire as the gift of hope, to give us the strength to carry on another year.  Morton may have found the Christians who received the Holy Fire mad.  I would retort that they must have been mad to continue their hopeless witness to Christ our God in the dark heart of the Islamic Empire, lighting candles and saying prayers to the Crucified One whom they could not openly and with impunity confess under the sun. The gift was what kept the mad people sane, the enslaved people faithful.  Chesterton wrote that we Christians had “nothing to set up under the overhanging, overwhelming arches of such a temple of time and eternity, but this brief candle burnt out so quickly before God’s shrine”.  He was right.  The single, guttering, flickering candle of our years is indeed all we have.  And in Jerusalem, every Holy Saturday, they know this candle is lit by the risen Christ Himself.
  

4 comments:

  1. October 10th 2012

    Hello Father Lawrence,

    Lit by Christ Himself? Or lit by dissolved white phosphorus! The timing of your post is interesting. Yesterday I was very tempted to return to the Orthodox Church; after it was community; a social gathering rich in tradition, glorious in beauty and with high ideals, such as love one another. All good things, surely, but then I read your post. Chaldean magicians could accomplish the same “miracle” in the fifth century! No community, no matter how beautiful, is worth the sacrifice of the truth. How can you not acknowledge the blatant fraud that this miracle is? I am disappointed, but sadly, no longer surprised. I shall not be returning to the Church, however much I once loved it, because truth is worth the sacrifice.

    Sincerely yours,

    Solomon Slazenger

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear Solomon: I am at a loss as to how you might know with such certainty that a phenomenon reported since 870 A.D. is the result of the continued and hidden use of dissolved white phosphorus, or how successive patriarchs since then could keep such a conspiracy going without someone 'blowing the gaff'. But surely the truth claims and legitimacy of Orthodoxy or of any religious community do not stand or fall with such things. One should not choose the Orthodox Church because it is a social gathering rich in tradition, or because it is glorious in beauty, or because of its high ideals. One should choose Orthodoxy because the witness of history compels one to do so.

    ReplyDelete
  3. October 10th 2012

    Dear Father Lawrence,

    I would like, if you permit, to make just one reply. And in this I would like to address three things: The first is the history. You ask how it could have gone on this long without someone “blowing the gaff”. I direct you to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon (published 1776-1789), the diaries of Orthodox Bishop Porphyrius (Uspensky) (1804-1885) (as quoted by Russian Orthodox researcher Nikolay Uspensky and Dr. Aleksandr Musin of Sorbonne) or the modern Russian skeptic Igor Dobrokhotov. Therein lies my point, “the gaff” is blown and has been for sometime.

    But my second point is philosophical. You mention “surely the truth claims and legitimacy of Orthodoxy or of any religious community do not stand or fall with such things… choose Orthodoxy because the witness of history compels one to do so.” This is a common complaint among the Christian churches (Protestant and Orthodox), ‘ignore this deliberate fraud, or well-meaning scam or misunderstood natural phenomena – it doesn’t matter, only the truth of Christ, as witnessed to by the history of the Church matters.’ When the history of the Church includes such things as frauds, scams and errors on what grounds would I trust it to be a witness to history? What I trust is Reason, which has given us the repeatable experiment, the abolishment of Smallpox and many other benefits (and horrors, if I’m to be completely honest) of our modern age.

    Finally, a personal curiosity: if these things don’t matter (miracles in the modern age and so forth), then why does the Church mention them at all? If they matter – then stand by them. If they don’t matter – then don’t defend them.

    Sincerely yours,

    Solomon Slazenger

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dear Solomon: Thank you again for your comments. Gibbon and company notwithstanding, I still maintain that the eye-witness testimony and experience of so many contemporary people cannot be discounted so easily. Your second point, however, I think brings us to the heart of the issue. I believe that it is unreasonable to expect that an institution which has existed for some two millenia on many continents will never contain within it anyone pushing frauds or scams. To reject the Church because it sometimes contained unscrupulous men would be a bit like discounting medical science in North America because there have existed along side it a number of 'quacks'. The existence of occasional frauds (and I still do not admit the Holy Fire to be one) does nothing to refute the basic soundness of the institution in which they occur. Reason is wonderful, but one must distinguish between the use of reason by historians and its use by scientists in a lab. It is reasonable to accept the historicity of (say) the Holocaust, and contrary to reason to deny it. But reason cannot confirm the historicity of events by repeatable experiments, and to expect it to do so is to muddle the distinct disciplines of history and science. I believe the historicity of the Resurrection of Christ (and therefore the claims of Orthodoxy) not because it is repeatable in a lab, but because I find the historical evidence for it compelling. I am quite happy to defend the modern miracles in which I believe (and there are other miracles than the Holy Fire), but I do not base my faith on them. My faith is based on the historical evidence for the Resurrection. Anyway, thank you again for writing.

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.