By Abbot Tryphon, April 12, 2020
Let us use this pandemic as the time to rediscover the beauty of our faith
This COVID-19 pandemic has afforded me the time to sit in silence, enjoying the beauty of the surrounding forest, like nothing I’ve experienced in years. The forest is so quiet, now that I don’t hear traffic sounds off in the distance, and airlines flying overhead, and the return of our bird population has afforded much joy for we monks, listening to their singing in the forest trees.
Our environment is so quiet, in fact, that wildlife has appeared like never before. We’re even hearing packs of coyotes back in the depths of the forest, just west of the monastery grounds, something we’ve not heard in the over thirty-two years since moving the monastery to Vashon Island.
Although I miss drinking coffee on the veranda of the trapeza with visitors, and the communal meals following our celebrations of the Divine Liturgy on Sundays and feast days, I’ve also noticed that just sitting in my monastic cell, with the lampadas burning before my personal icons, has been the occasion for breathing in the beauty that has always been there, but sometimes not seen because of my normally busy schedule tending to the needs of pilgrims. Our monastic temple seems even more beautiful, now that I am not tending to the usual business of my days.
This pandemic has brought back my attention to that which originally drew me to Orthodoxy in the very beginning. My very first encounter with the magnificence of her churches and the grandeur of her divine services, is now boldly confronting, once again. Having grown up amid the natural beauty of Northern Idaho, with mountains and lakes that continually took my breath away, I’m now experiencing, anew, the same wonder and amazement when entering our church for services, or walking on our forest trails.
Orthodoxy and beauty are inseparable because God and beauty are inseparable. The beauty of a sunset is a reflection of our Creator, just as the interior of a temple reflects our experience with this Creator God. We humans were formed as physical beings, placed in a material world and invited to commune with our Creator. The majesty and beauty of the created world inspires us to an awareness of God’s presence.
A bouquet of flowers placed in our icon corner has an internal effect on us. Created in God’s image, we in turn become creators. The beauty that comes from the artist’s brush or the poet’s voice, is an act of a creator. Taking our creative instincts into the realm of the spiritual unites us with God and connects us to the eternal. This is why an artist or a poet can experience the eternal when creating something of beauty.
God is the Creator of heaven and earth and is present through His creative energies. The material world, being good, is an important means through which God expresses Himself. It is through God’s created beauty that we are drawn into a relationship that is meant to be eternal and through which Divine Revelation can transform our nature. Then creation is completed and the created is united to the Creator.
With all the fear most of us are experiencing as we collectively look toward an uncertain future, this can actually be for us a precious time, for it allows us to look at the beauty that we so often do not see. Even if we are locked in quarantine, and separated from our fellow parishioners, or our family and friends, we can gaze with wonder at our personal icons, and know that our Lord loves us, and that His saints are interceding before the Throne for us.
We must remember that this period of trail and separation will pass, and our world will be restored to the beauty God intended, if we let it. The preoccupation with the material world that has been filled with consumption of goods, and the acquisition of perishable things, can be beautifully replaced with that which is truly important, and of an eternal value for we Christians, if we let it. Then, even if belatedly, we will once again shout out together, Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen! And this time, we will feel it in the depths of our hearts and souls.
With love in Christ
Abbot Tryphon
~Abbot Tryphon, The Morning Offering, https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/morningoffering/2020/04/rediscovering-the-beauty-of-orthodoxy/
***
