ONCE IN A while, one comes across a lovely tale of a prince or princess who becomes a Saint by leading a life of goodness involving no martyrdom and little apparent suffering. They don’t give their lives so much as Such a one is St. Melangell, a girl who gave her life to God in devotion and solitary prayer.
Her story is so catching that it features in children’s stories that actually start with “Once upon a time” and in Celtic legend where she shines forth at the center of nature’s love and harmony. As pretty as those stories are, and useful sometimes to teach children lessons, they tend to cast shadows over hard truths about God.
Melangell’s life is as obscure as anyone’s from 7th century Britain might be, but her story has been told enough times that if we subtract the variations, we are left with some details that in their constancy become reliable and form the contours of a life not at all fairy tale like but quite Saint like. One such detail takes the form of a hare, a character central to the story that introduces Melangell to us.
Now, for most of us, the main distinction between a hare and a rabbit is too little to worry about, but in this story it matters quite a lot. Unlike rabbits, hares don’t burrow and therefore have fewer places to hide, which is why this little hare became key to Melangell becoming known to us as St. Melangell, the patron saint of hares and a protectress of living things, including humans.
Melangell’s father, an Irish king, ordered his youngest daughter to marry a nobleman. Of course, she refused. She desired a life devoted to God, so she fled to a wood outside her father’s realm where she hid herself from all human contact while praying among the wild things. There she was discovered one day by a prince from a town called Pengwern Powys in the Tenat Valley of Wales while hunting hares. His dogs had chased a hare into a thicket where, with no place else to hide, it took rather bold refuge among the folds of Melangell’s garments as she prayed. And it is this fact that rescues Melangell’s story from being a mere legend or simple fairy tale. For Melangell was neither aware of the hunter and his dogs or the hare nor did she offer sanctuary to anyone. She herself was hiding. But she had been hiding there alone for fifteen years, praying, and the hare was drawn to the safety of that spot where Melangell and God, together in communion, had redeemed her thicket and made it a place where living things were free from fear and harm.
Despite the Prince’s awe at Melangell’s holiness and love for critters, it was God who gave sanctuary to both Melangell and the hare. In this important detail, we see not a Celtic Goddess who lives among her creatures or a mere lover of nature whose gentleness attracts creatures to herself but a model of what is to be, when through our devotion to God, God extends salvation to the world and all that live in it.
Prince Brochwell responded by giving Melangell his lands and the woods in which she prayed as a perpetual sanctuary to all who sought refuge there, including people whose lives were hunted either by law or injustice, provided they remained and did no harm. She lived for thirty-seven more years as an abbess, and her land remains a dedicated sanctuary to this day and a place of Christian pilgrimage.
❖ IN COMMUNION / issue 64 / Spring 2012
Several texts in Matthew, Mark, and Luke indicate that Jesus was moved by compassion. In every case, Jesus’ compassion leads Him to act or do a good work, a work of mercy. Here are some examples:
Cultivating a Merciful Heart: St. Gregory the Theologian delivered his Oration On the Love of the Poor at a time when leprosy was a major illness. He hammers away at the utterly inhumane neglect and rejection that many Christians of his day showed to lepers. Lepers were often driven from cities, abandoned, denigrated as sub–human, and left to suffer in poverty and terrible pain because many people simply could not stand to be around them and thought they were cursed by God. In our modern societies, people with mental illnesses, serious physical deformities, people with AIDS, prisoners, the poor, immigrants, indigenous people, unborn children and others all too often have been treated like lepers.
Put simply, in manifesting Christ’s love in the world, we grow in likeness to Christ, and, thus, the Trinity for which we were created. This is what it means to be a living icon of God. The icon of the Theotokos of the Sign often graces the apse in many ortho-dox churches. In her purity of heart at the Annunciation, she freely consents to the incarnation of our Lord within her. She bears the Son of God in the flesh. That’s why we call her “Theotokos.” Consider too the wonderful way in which we refer to the martyrs and saints: “our ven-erable and god–bearing (theophoros) fathers and mothers.”
Finally: St. Theodosius the Cenobiarch was well known for his great mercy and compassion to the poor, to those who were ill and dying, and many others. St. Symeon Metaphrastes commended St. Theodosius as “the eyes of the blind, the feet of the lame, the clothes of the naked, the roof of the homeless, the physician of the sick…” And so it can be for each of us—as individuals and as Christian communities— according to the grace and unique gifts we receive from the Holy Spirit; our strengths, weakness, and circumstances; and, above all, our willingness freely to accept and to pass on to others the gift of Christ’s love for us.
Saints come in many sizes and varieties, ranging from kings to beggars, surgeons to street sweepers, scholars to the illiterate, the extraordinary to the unnoticed. Some never marry, some are the parents of large families. Some die in bed in their old age, others die early in life at the hands of executioners. There are millions of saints — heaven is crowded — but relatively few of heaven’s population have been formally canonized. The vast majority are rank-and-file saints, an inspiration to those who knew them, but never placed by name on the church calendar.
Press photos taken and interviews completed, at about 4 PM a procession of about two hundred people set out led by a cross bearer. Behind the cross were six bishops: Archbishop Mark (who leads the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in Germany), Metropolitan Valentin of Orenburg (the Russian city where Schmorell was born), Metropolitan Onufriy of Czernowitz in Ukraine, Archbishop Feofan of Berlin, Bishop Michael of Geneva, and Bishop Agapit of Stuttgart. How many priests? I lost count.
Our mission statement is simple and challenging: “Emmaus House, an Orthodox Christian ministry, welcomes all to offer hospitality, healing, and hope in solidarity with the poor and the homeless. We are inspired by the Gospel: in breaking bread together, we recognize the presence of Christ.”
At the same time we were encouraged by these developments and alarmed at how the exclusivity of the gentrification process was destroying the presence of community that had always defined Harlem. On our block, there was no longer any stoop-sitting, a gracious tradition from the south that allows for catching up with and watching out for one’s neighbors. Most of the community gardens had been reclaimed by the city under the ruse that they would be used for low income housing. Signifi-cantly, old timers noted that the new-comers wouldn’t even make eye contact with them when they passed by them on the street. Apartment dwellers and home-owners felt betrayed by their local politicians and were outraged that our local community board was no longer an open forum for all. It all came to a head when 125th street, the heart of the old Harlem, was rezoned for commercial purposes.
The unresolved pains of our childhood, those hidden dark places, easily get triggered in a community setting. We often “act out” from the unresolved wounds of our younger self. My Chinese teacher once told us that “if someone’s behavior bothers you, then it is your problem.” Surely not, I thought, in some cases it is so clearly the fault of the other person. Blaming and judging others is a hedge for us to hide behind, a way to avoid taking full responsibility for our own behavior. He was telling us to take that pivotal moment of discomfort as a challenge to grow. Working through painful moments of conflict with each other is the true challenge of the work of Emmaus House. We are all broken in some way and we need the palpability of a community setting to be forced to engage in this process. Personal growth rarely happens in a vacuum. We must strive to serve others from the place of being a whole, healed human person.
Julia Demaree is the director of Emmaus House. The “ragpicking” philosophy of Abbe Pierre and Fr. David Kirk still define Emmaus today and has helped shape Julia’s longtime fascination with the things that, by societal standards, fall into the “discarded” category as gold nuggets to be transformed into beauty and meaningfulness. If you wish to contact Julia or to make a donation in support of Emmaus house, write her at: juliademaree@gmail.com.
“It is an honor once again to address the Eurasian Economic Summit, which is organized annually by the distinguished Marmara Group and this year is considering various aspects of the relationship between economy and dialogue as well as of development and women’s rights in our world. We have been asked to address how sustainability and economy can be promoted through intercultural and interfaith dialogue.
In 2000, while backpacking in Russia from Moscow to Lake Baikal, Alison Shuman took a boat trip on the Volga and stopped briefly at the city of Kazan, 800 km east of Moscow, where the pop-ulation is nearly half Tatar Muslims and half Russian Orthodox. Twelve years later she returned to Kazan to create a photo-documentary that explores religious identity in post-Soviet Russia and the relationship between Muslims and Orthodox in the city.
Shira Nesher, an Israeli, stands alongside Fakhira Halloun, a Palestinian, as Nesher tells her story about life in a conflict zone to a group of American university stu-dents who are hanging onto her every word. “My family members are Holocaust survivors…as an Israeli, I grew up in an environment of fear and conflict. When I was 18, I enlisted in the Defense Forces, where I eventually became a military tour guide and an educator.”
by Philip P. Kapusta
The newest offering of the a capella choral group Capella Romana, Angelic Light: Music From Eastern Cathedrals, is a com-pilation of pieces from some of their earlier CDs. Fulfilling one of the group=s stated purposes, much of the music in-cluded on this CD is by 20th and 21st century composers. All the selections are liturgical music written for use in the services of the Orthodox Church.
