Holy Tears

What is most remarkable in the Gospel accounts of the Myrrh-bearing Women? It is so plain that it is commonly overlooked. Nearly all of them have the same name, which is also the name of the Lord's Mother: Μαρία / María. And, of course, there is yet another Mary, Mary of Bethany, who had chosen "the one thing that is needful," had "chosen that good part" (Lu 10:42). And, Jesus adds, "it shall not be taken from her." What is that good part, that one thing that is necessary, the without-which-there-is-nothing? It is single-minded faithfulness — the decision to turn your back on the "many things" (Lu 10:41), which is the world, and make a whole-hearted decision for God: the love and devotion of heart and soul and mind and strength, which God requires. This is far more than a possession. It is your life, your all, your identity. Surely, it cannot be taken from you. This is the "treasure in Heaven that does not fail, where no thief approaches nor moth destroys" (Lu 12:33). Imperishable, living, the good part .... it is the Divine part in each of us.

The Myrrh-bearing Women possess the same name, and that name will be first and forever most blessed: "..... henceforth all generations will call me blessed!" (Lu 1:48). Its manifest meaning is faithfulness that cannot fail — in the face of danger, bearing unspeakable sorrows, under threat of maiming and murder. It is laid out for all to see and does not flinch.

For when the Test of Humankind comes, with the Creator of All being crucified, all those chosen to be His Disciples flee before this awesome and terrible enormity .... all flee except the Marys (and, by one account, a boy, who would be a son to one Mary).

In a whole world and age now gone, the famous Anglo-Catholic Bishop, Keith Ackerman, told me that he would not ordain a man who did not have this single-minded faithfulness and devotion, who saw everything through a theological lens. He envisioned the same, much-smaller priesthood and must-smaller church that Pope Benedict XVI would later describe as the "Catacombs Church," to which the vast Roman Catholic Church must return. It "will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning," Pope Benedict wrote. For without single-minded faithfulness, without the striving for holiness, there can be no Church — only a vacant mockery of the Church, where Sacraments (or Mysteries) are sought in vain. Only emptiness.

I write this having returned from the Church of the Iveron Icon of the Mother of God in Kailua, Hawaii. It is known by its colloquial name: "Church of the Streaming Iveron Icon." That is, Myrrh unaccountably streams from under the glass and must be collected reverently in vials. I rejoice to say that we have these vials of Myrrh on our Altar. I say unaccountably, but that is the world's point of views with all things seen through a scientific lens. Empirically, the Mother of God, Who is mysteriously united to this Mysterious Icon, sheds Tears of Myrrh. I myself can attest to this observable fact: I say, empirically. But science cannot account for it, for it violates a basic law of science: Nothing can come from nowhere and without a cause. Yet it does.

The priests who are blessed to be the stewards of this holy Icon of the Mother of God, Father Nectarios (the custodian) and Father Octavian (his assistant), have told me that they have discerned a pattern while traveling with Her: She weeps Myrrh most copiously in the places that are most desolate of God, where faithfulness has been generally abandoned. In one trip, She wept such tears of myrrh that Fr. Octavian had to enfold his cassocks around Her that the holy Tears not be trampled underfoot.

When I visited, I encountered such an overwhelming Presence of Holiness radiating from this manifestation of Heaven among us that it was palpable. The beautifully humble Father Nectarios apologized for the inadequacies of his church. I said, "Father, the holiness of this place is overwhelming. Who does not feel it?"

On this evening, a visitation of the holy Bishop James and a crush of sincere people seeking nearness to the holy amplified the Heavenly atmosphere. You see, all of these hearts were open, all of them yearning to unite with holiness. There was nothing to impede the expansiveness of this experience. It rained down blessing from Heaven.

Have you ever found yourself in prayer among hard-bitten skeptics. Holiness shuts down. You feel yourself struggling. Oxygen is sparse. But pray among the saints. And your lungs will open. And you will be carried along on a wave of grace.

I prayed before the Holy Mother. It takes the breath away to think of it: standing so near to Her physical Manifestation. And I asked Her for healing of soul and body. Right then, I experienced a "clarifying" of my chronically fogbound brain (for decades weighed down by chains of cognitive handicap). I did not experience a complete healing, for I perceive I am where God wants me to be. But Her touch? Yes, I felt Her goodly touch.

I experienced a brilliant example of what ROCOR's founder Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky called "Co-suffering Love" — our Lord and God and Savior's "Co-suffering experience of our infirmities" (The Moral Idea of the Dogma of Redemption), which began at His Conception. For to be One with God means (in that incommensurable intimacy) is a Divine sharing in our human condition and state, Whose Power is redemption.

We prize our self-hoods, what we call our identities. We yearn to tell "our stories" .... to explain ourselves. But they are the legacy of our fallen nature, Met. Antony writes, "but we must struggle against this." We must abandon our individual journeys in order to enter the unity of all journeys.

How liberating! I've shared that when I arrived to Haiti, a great burden rolled off of my back. The world suffers. And I have left the great lie, I have left the bubble of the First World. And now my attention and my thoughts were not of myself but were completely caught up in all of their sufferings. I don't mark myself as special by any means. What I am relating is the human experience of this, and I am sure this is what Sr. Mary Martha and Sr. Mary Anne felt. Sr. Mary Anne told me once that her greatest joy was being assigned to a leper colony in India, where she could live with them, embrace them, and be part of their suffering. Her foremost prayer is that she would never be asked to leave. This is where she would die and be buried.

Met. Antony cites St. Luke:

St. Basil comments on this unity saying that the monks in his care had victory over self-love, which is the insistence on self-hood and individual identity:

Victory over self-love and its ground of being, which is individual identity, which we often characterize as "my needs."

You know about "my needs." It's the basis for abandoning your children or abandoning your husband or abandoning your wife. It is the justification we hold up for even offenses against Heaven. It is a devilishly amorphous category indeed. But the Marias had no room in their hearts for such devilishness. They shared one thought, which is faithfulness to the Beloved. Of their own lives and futures and places in society they take no account. Of their safety they take no account. I suppose the Temple police characterized them as insolent, for they could not be intimidated, seeking always to be near to Jesus. Their every thought is Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, if only expressing their loyalty to His corpse, expressed with myrrh. They bear myrrh — where the world's brokenness and Divine grace are distilled in a holy essence.

The Greek word has a Semitic root: murra, which suggests "bitterness" etymologically. Do not we see a deep connection between the proper noun María and the noun múrra. For the Marias have departed from their individual, earthly lives as they have entered the mystery of a common identity in Christ — bearing myrrh and submerging their individualities in one one, fragrant name. They have become united with Christ's co-suffering love, which is the deep meaning of the Cross.

Do you know the shallow meaning of Cross. It is a talisman that grants salvation, "instant karma."

Embracing this deep Cross, we become truly Christian. Uniting with us, Jesus inevitably suffers. He cannot but uniting with us. It is from here, in our repentance (which is the polar opposite from insistence on "our needs") where we commence our journey of Theosis. Our eyes are opened. We are filled with regret. And we take our first steps forward with the Co-suffering Christ. And we begin to apprehend what Divine grace means.

Met. Antony wrote the famous essay which I have cited to refute the theology of the atoning Cross — the idea that our redemption could be effected through the blood sacrifice of Jesus. The Cross, though, is our invitation to a vast sorrow and mourning that so many, many people are lost, alienated from their God, the only possibility of Life. We are being readied to understand the sorrowful tears of the Mother of God, Who weeps for us, Who weeps over our futile search for identity, arising from our brokenness and fragmentation. In our brokenness we are alone. We are isolated. We become absorbed in ourselves.

It is a false promise, this freedom to go out and "find oneself." It is the classic devil's bargain, in which you trade away everything that is precious and holy in order to receive in return .... thin tissues of nothing. Look around you and see how desperate this futile search has become — from the self-help books of the 1960s to pilgrimages to India to Zen institutes in California to psychedelic drugs and finally to trillions of dollars spent for psychoanalysis and therapy, which always center on individuality and perceived needs. The costs for this quest are staggering including abandoning marriages and children, of ruined careers, and in many cases loss of sanity .... and certainly widespread depression. Today, the "identity problem" has reached such extremes that would have been unthinkable even during the anything-goes 1960s that we now behold a culture in crisis.

Despite NPR reporting (August 29, 2019), along with other legacy media outlets, that here is no sexual orientation gene, people continue to live as if so-called "gayness" were a real thing. They continue to insist that people "are born this way." Be careful. When you enter the slippery game of identity, you find yourself among phantoms. And now the next generation seeks to alter themselves surgically and chemically all in search of a "truer identity," only to become trapped in this irreversible decision and horror. Does one caught in this snare not hear the ridiculing laughter of demons?

But be sure of this, here on earth there no true identity to be found. After all this time, inductive reasoning should have made this obvious — with so much being sacrificed and no results being obtained. But this would not been surprising to the Cappadocian Father, St. Gregory of Nyssa. He wrote, we are visible images of the Visible Image of the Invisible God. And because God is inscrutable, we are inscrutable.

I say we shall never find stable identity on the earth. But that is not quite true, for our only stable and dependable identity is Jesus Christ .... and Him crucified (1 Cor 2:2). Only in uniting with Him in His Co-suffering love does identity begin and continual spiritual growth. Like the monks in St. Basil's care, we must move beyond self-love and become imitators of Christ until we take no account of our individual selves, until we stop enumerating our illusory "needs," and wake up, noticing only the real needs of those around us — feeding them, clothing them, sheltering them against the cold — and shed tears like those of the Mother of God, bitter tears, fragrant of the Kingdom of Heaven.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.