Mother & Protector

We are living at such a time when a priest in cassock and cross is apt to be stopped in the street and asked, "What is your religion?" Some people assume I am Muslim though I have a large cross suspended on my chest, and I hold it up to them. Nonetheless, they ask, "What do you believe?"

"We believe in self-denial and self-sacrifice," I say. "Isn't that the essence of love?" (Oh, they didn't expect that.) I continue, "Christianity is an eternal commitment to love."

"Do you mean a commitment for the rest of your life?" asks the inquirer.

"Yes. You're right. A commitment for the rest of my eternal life. A sacrifice forever." I could say this is the life of every nun and monk, but this is the life of everyone who follows the Master.

Recently, a group from the College of Tropical Agriculture (University of Hawaii) came from Honolulu to work with us in one of our Turmeric fields. After a while they asked, "Don't you ever stop?"

"We start early in the morning and then go all day. Vespers begins at 5 in the evening," I said. Later they asked, "When do you eat?"

I said, "We have one meal after Matins and then a snack after Vespers."

A few days later I happened to be chatting with one of them. "Ya know," she said, "you can't make a living farming."

"You're right," I said. "You can't. But you can make a life." And later, I thought, the main question is God calling us to this life? Isn't that the main question of every moment of every day? What is God calling me to do?

What she really was asking — after seeing us at first hand, so elderly, so frail, using up ourselves, being ground down by endless labors, with no respite in view, having no help, enduring many injuries — what is the point of all this? We certainly make far less than minimum wage. Sr. Mary Martha has pointed out that sometimes we pay from our own savings in order to do this work. And we have no prospect of any deliverance or any windfall ahead. In fact our tools, our equipment, and our bodies constantly wear down and even break down. How did all this begin in the first place?

After fifty-three years of service to the poor — providing medical care in rural China, living with lepers in India, and then relieving suffering in Haiti — the question our superior, Sr. Mary Anne, asks is, "What's next? Lord, what do you have for me today?" I remember a little sign of her desk in Haiti that read, "Lord give me the graces the graces to remember that each person who enters this office is one You have sent to me." The constant test is always, "What is God asking?"

Let me drive a stake in the ground by saying, "God called us to Hawaii." After the apostolate in Haiti concluded after a quarter-century for Sr. Mary Anne and after a decade for Sr. Mary Martha, we did what we had to do to become independent (for surely God was not calling us to degradation and depravity, which had been kept from our eyes in distant and primitive Haiti). But now we were back in the First World, and we could see plainly what was plain for everyone to see.

But where would we go? What would we do? I proposed Hawaii. In Hawaii, we might survive. We could grow food everyday year-round. We could catch fish from the shore. There be no heat bill or air conditioning bill. We would have high-quality medical care without cost. We would not pay income tax (for we only had minimal Social Security). And as a religious community, we would not pay property tax. Now, if we drew these six lines on the globe, where would they converge? I propose they converge nowhere else but on the Big Island of Hawaii. Now, here is practical evidence of God's call: we could survive nowhere else.

A few weeks after we arrived, a complete stranger who lived on Oahu asked if we would live on his "Old Hawaii" farm (est. 1922), contiguous to the Hermitage land. A former supporter during the Haiti years bought us a pickup truck. A nun from Ohio left us her patrimony, which provided enough lumber for our convent. And we acquired a tractor / backhoe from "Uncle Kubota" (our way of saying "zero-down, zero-percent"). The story of how we acquired the land is too long to tell, but the whole of it must be accounted as "miraculous." For example, it was not even subdivided, much less on the market.

Yes, God had certainly called us to Hawaii. But ten years would have to pass before we understood Who was responsible, Who had overseen this call, and Who made all these resources possible for us. For after a decade we had established an eight-acre USDA Certified Organic farm yielding thousands of pounds of produce every year and, more important, we have built a monastery complex of three buildings totaling more 5,000 square feet .... and brought about mostly by two elderly nuns and their elderly, constantly breaking-down chaplain. There is only one word of this: miraculous. ¹

But it would not be until a very holy event in October of 2025, ten years after we arrived, that our Patroness, the One Who was directly responsible for these outsized blessings, would be revealed. We received a text one day. On October 23-25 the Mother of God would visit the Little Flowers Hermitage (Na Pua Li'i). The events surrounding Her arrival were themselves otherworldly. The night before She arrived our farm was invaded by more than a hundred feral pigs — pigs biting each other and squealing, pigs running rampant in every direction, pigs stampeding the place. How in the world could they have gotten in?! Now, we are well familiar with feral pigs. A few do get from time to time through some small breach in the fence they have made. They quietly root the ground and crunch down on old Macadamia Nuts scattered about and eat rotten fruit. But this was completely different: large-scale, restless, frenzied, and (dare I say?) demonic. The only possible reference point for me was Biblical: the Holy Lord's visit to the lost tribe of Gad. Was I beholding a Scriptural warrant? Absolutely so.

I later learned from Bishop James (of the Monasteries) that this always occurs. To be sure, not always Hawaiian feral pigs! But some otherworldly thing happens the night before the arrival of the Mother of God. Fr. Nectarios, the Guardian of the Mother of God, told me that a holy elder explained to him that upon visiting a monastery, he could see that they were doing very well. They are faithful. For outside the place many demons perched on tree branches. For the goal of demons is to destroy the holy. They don't bother with souls that are already lost.

When the day dawned, the pigs were nowhere to be seen. How did they get out?! The day was clear and sunny, and the air felt wholesome somehow. We opened the Hermitage doors to Her but which doors could be holy enough? No matter. If we were lacking in any way, She took no notice of it but richly poured out Her love on us, her "weeping love," with tears of myrrh. We fetched an analogion on which to place Her icon before our Altar. But first, said Father Nectarios, we must place a good, substantial cloth beneath Her. And the next morning we saw why. This cloth filled with myrrh which poured out from under the glass.

We took note of the timing of Her visit. Our Diocesan cathedral celebrated its patronal feast, also dedicated to the Mother of God, during the same time (the Joy of All Who Sorrow, October 24). And October is the month when the Mother of God chose first to appear in Her aspect of the Hawaiian Myrrh-streaming Iveron Icon (October 6, 2007).

In our little world something remarkable happened" the work ceased. And we refreshed ourselves in the love of the Holy Mother. And I meditated on a fact. She, to Whom the Sisters have been devoted all their lives from little girlhood, She to Whom our community had been dedicated and named from the start, She to Whom we offered so many prayers and daily devotions and daily hymns .... She was now among us. And everything was right in our little world. And I understood. I understood our that labors, which we offered up daily, were actually being offered to Her: our sacrifices, our self-denials, our prayers, all of these are the content of Her Heart. It was She Who saw to it that miracle and miracle should proceed from Her hand. Why were we not called to some great work of which the world's important people might take note? That is not Her way. Her way is to be with the lowly and the unknown.

☦

Today, we celebrate all of this on the great Feast of the Protection of the Mother of God, (called Pokrov in the Russian Church). Yes, She is the Queen of Heaven and Earth. ² But we live our humble lives step-by-step, with our hands full of labors. So first of all, we understand Her to be our Mother, Who really and truly cares for us and prays for us and protects us as any devout and faithful Mother would. Do you know that Her heart aches for Her children? For which mother, truly present to the lives of Her many children, is not filled with cares? And Her Heart is most tender, exquisitely empathetic. as a Heart of true empathy must needs be, for She is Love itself.

About a thousand years ago, on October 1 at four in the morning, St. Andrew the Fool-for-Christ († 936) beheld the dome opening of the Blachernae Church in Constantinople, which was the repository of the Holy Mother's earthly robe, Her veil, and part of Her belt. It opened, he soon realized, at the approach of the Most Holy Theotokos, Ever-Virgin Mary, passing through the night air over him, surrounded by a luminous train of angels and saints. She had come to kneel in this church and to pray. And as She prayed, She wept. She wept. witnessed by St. Andrew and his assistant Epiphanius.

She petitioned Her Son to grant the prayers of the many, faithful Christians the world over who asked for Her Protection. And when She had completed this petition, She walked to the Altar praying and retrieved Her veil and in this visionary mode, miraculously placed Her veil over all the people of the world.

St. Andrew turned to his disciple and asked, "Do you see, brother, the Holy Theotokos, praying for all the world?" Epiphanius answered, "Yes, Holy Father, I see it and am amazed!" ³

Her Mother's love still embraces all Her faithful children. She is in the most secret places of Her many children's hearts. She is privy to their most hidden cares and wishes. Her tears, therefore, must be many. And She intimates the course each one knows he or she must take. Her Example Itself shows them the way, the way of of self-sacrifice and self-denial. Upon our Altar is a little chest of vials of these tears. They are fragrant and unspoiled after a year ..... or of any number of years, for they are Divine. Where do they come from? They arose out of nowhere .... which violates the Laws of Physics. Nothing comes from nowhere! They came from Heaven. They came from Her.

These vials contain a manifestation of the Most Holy Mother of God, Herself. And when I hold them and try to explain them in my dim way to a doubting worldling, I understand Her tears. How great is the Divine Love that is poured out on Her children, on God's sons and daughters?! How great the cares?! How many are the countless saints who receive mortal prayers in moments of desperation?! And yet how many of us in our carefree hours pay any mind to any of them ..... even God?

But I suppose this is a kind of proof that God is our Father and that He has provided a Mother Who prays and cares for us. For are not these the unmistakable traits and marks of children: receiving unending and unmerited love of their mother and father and never pay it any mind?

We see God's love everywhere. "YHWH Yireh". God provides. I can tell you as a former Mainer, that when the hard, brown, dead earth, which has been brown and dead for half-a-year, that when it thaws bountifully spring forth every kind edible plant and wildflower and fruits beyond numbering? Who did this?! we realize that we have been set in a garden of His planting and tending. God's love is particular in His Providence. That's what we call Him. And the Most Holy Mother's love in particular is Her protects. For that is Her Nature.

This morning when I was carrying out the Proskomedia, among the prayers we read, "Under the shadow of His wings." I have only seen such wings manifested as a mother hen, the chicks beneath her wing and the chicken hawk directly above. Isn't this the image Jesus chooses:

A young girl named Adele Brise was taken to America in 1855 at the age of nineteen. Imagine yourself to be a girl of nineteen torn away from her friends and torn away from the gentle Sisters of Providence of the Immaculate Conception, who had guided and formed her, in her hometown of Champion, Belgium. Do you know what champion means in French? It means, "defender, protector."

Along with many other Belgians, they would settle on the Door Peninsula, north of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Soon after arriving, she suffered an accident having to do with lime. And she was blinded in one eye, and side of her face was disfigured, which isolated her all the more. She took solace in her devotion to the Mother of God. She would get up before dawn walking to Mass ten miles to the closest church in northern Wisconsin weather. It was there, on the path through the woods where bears and wildcats roamed, that the Blessed Mother appeared to her. She appeared several times. And she gave Adele her vocation. Adele must school children in prayers and devotions of the faith: making the sign of the cross, knowing when to bow, when to genuflect and so on. Her father built a chapel on the spot and later a schoolhouse. Simply people. We mark out our religious landscape without ado. This would be the only appearance of the Mother of God in United States to receive approval by the Vatican. Only one.

In 1871 the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history engulfed the Door Peninsula. Thousands of lives were lost and tens of thousands of horses, cattle, and other livestock. One million acres burned. There was nowhere to escape! But the people shared an intuition: that the fire would not come near to Adele, it would not come near her little compound with a little white fence around it. The fire surely would not go there. And farmers and their families, some bringing their horses, ran to Adele and the sisters. They all crowded into the buildings. And everything was reduced to scorched earth except the compound. The fire stopped at the perimeter of her little compound called Champion. Descendant of those who saw it still tell the story: the fire roaring to the skies yet it would not touch the fence surrounding her few acres.

Here in Hawaii, only three years ago, a wildfire in Lahaina, Maui became the deadliest fire in Hawaii's history and the deadliest fire in the U.S. over the past century. But one building was not touched. Sr. Mary Anne and I had visited this building twelve years ago. When we walked in Sister said, "This place is holy." And indeed you could feel the deep reverence of the choir and the prayers.

The fire burned furiously all around this church, but the Church of Maria Lanakila (The Virgin Mary Who Prevails) was not touched. Pictures after the fire were remarkable: nothing but scorched ground, nothing but burnt ruin. Yet one magnificent church where the Most Holy Theotokos is revered, where She protects the people inside, where She pours out Her love, where She pours out Her tears. No, the fire dare not come near.

Let us today, on this day when we set aside a feast to celebrate Our Lady of Protection, lift up our prayers and praise and gratitude to the Most Holy Mother of God. She is Present only a few feet from where I stand in the aspect of Her tears and Present in Her true Form everywhere. And tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that, let us ever be mindful of Her Holy Love, Her Ever-Presence, and Her Protection. The Sisters rely on that protection every day and have for many decades. You can, too.

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