1052

Owen's recent post on St. David of Wales sent me on a trip down memory lane. It was a bit of a relief, honestly. I'm recovering from a bout with pneumonia (which I spent half the week thinking was flu), so a diversion to a more pleasant time is welcome.

As I've written elsewhere, I was once a novice in a small Eastern Catholic monastery in the Mojave Desert. To attempt to support itself, the monastery opened a bakery 75 miles away in the mountain resort town of Big Bear, California. For the first year of this adventure, a small house was rented in Big Bear and the monks assigned to the bakery (of which I was one) would live in this metochion during the week, baking bread and (in theory) living the same liturgical life they would have in the desert. What nobody realized at the time was that, in a bakery operation that ran 18 to 20 hours a day, the full liturgical life of a byzantine monastery was just not going to fit in. It's not as if you can say to the 50 lbs of dough you just took out of the mixer to just "hold it right there... I'll be back in an hour after Vespers!"

We faced other challenges to our liturgical life, one of which was a paucity of liturgical materials brought on by poverty. The monastery, of course, had the full complement of the St. John of Krondstadt Press Menaion (complete with hilarious mis-translations, absurd renderings into what translators thought was Elizabethan English and strident reminders about copyright laws and the pains of hell that awaited those who violated them on each and every page of this 12 volume set). In the metochion, we were not so fortunate. We had a three ring binder filled with printouts from Fr. Ephraim Lash's fine web-site and that was about it.

Another resource that I'd located on the internet was a free computer program called "Menologion", which had the troparia and kondakia for the whole Byzantine Calendar. This meant that we didn't have to use the generic "Office for a Heiromartyr" or the even more exciting "Office for two or more Heiromartyrs". The only weird thing was that the Menologion computer program, written by some guy in the U.K., included verses for every pre-schism saint in the British Ilse. Though certain of the brethren bridled at trying to mellifluously sing the praises of Kentigern Mungo, whose light apparently shone in Strathclyde like a beacon, I myself never really minded.

We'd, of course, been in stranger liturgical situations at the monastery, such as at the feast of St. Alexis Toth or St. Mark of Ephesus (when I asked the cynical but liturgically expert Br. James why we were celebrating the feast of St. Alexis Toth, he replied that the saint's great virtue was modesty because he'd kept all his other virtues secret). Yet I did find it curious that, at least in the eyes of the authors of Byzantine liturgical verses, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland had once been holy places, filled with holy men and women, until January 1st, 1052 AD at 12:00 AM exactly, when the Holy Spirit, "moving mysteriously it's wonders to perform", suddenly shot across the English Channel on a course straight for Eastern Europe, never to be seen in those parts again.

But things aren't always as simple as what shows up in your Menaion or your missal or whatever book your church gives you. Ask the Coptic Orthodox with a devotion Padre Pio or the followers of some Mexican folk saint. Or, for that matter, the Greek Catholic monks who sang the praises of Alexis Toth, who shone forth from Wilkes-Barre like a beacon of Orthodoxy in America.