The Most Holy Theotokos, the Unfading Flower

Venerating the Unfading Flower Icon with the Living of the Our Lives

Na Pua Li'i Hermitage, its Church of the Unfading Flower Icon of the Mother of God, and Hermitage Farm together form a refuge — a sanctuary rooted in the ancient Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, which today is called Holy Orthodoxy. We arrived as life-long Roman Catholics living devout lives as vowed religious (Franciscans). But our Church-world, which had been defined in terms of sanctity, faithfulness, and the universal call to holiness, had vanished.

We brought with us many of the categories and beliefs of the Western Church and chief among these that the Son of God had entered history in order to offer Himself as a blood sacrifice to expiate our sins. We soon realized that this principle was basically at odds with the Gospels and therefore at odds with teachings of the ancient Church. Jesus died as a ransom, not as a sacrifice to appease an imagined wrathful Father: "to give His Life as a ransom for many" (Mk 10:25). Nowhere in the Gospels is blood sacrifice mentioned, neither does Jesus offer sacrifice nor participate in the cult of the Temple. Jesus saves us with His Divine Life and then exhorts us and all His human creations to follow Him in this Life. The central teaching of Orthodoxy, therefore, is Theosis. And we do follow Him as we had pledged so many years ago.

The overarching purpose of life is to reclaim the Divine Image set upon on us at our conception, and to form ourselves after the pattern of the God-man, sent to us from the Father to this end. Living in to this truth has become our everything. And as light has opened onto light, we have discovered that this daily journey and endeavor is no labor but rather happiness as one blessing after another alights from Heaven.

We also realized that these irreconcilable opposites — blood sacrifice vs. Theosis — were the occasion for the Great Schism of 1054, which marked the birth of an independent Roman Catholic Church. More basic than this, however, we later learned that these two opposing ideas occasioned the Incarnation of God. For a universal religion of blood sacrifice was spreading over the whole Hebrew lifeworld. We get a glimpse of this through the eyes of God Incarnate in the Parable of the Good Samaritan with its "two ways" — the sacrifice of blood (represented by the priest and the Levite not wishing to become ritually unclean) and the sacrifice of righteous (represented by the Samaritan who pursued virtue).

The intellectual background for our Roman Catholic ideas were Aristotelian. In Classical Antiquity, for example. the concept of the afterlife was gruesome: the "abode of the dead." The ancient Greeks understood this in material terms: as a neighboring kingdom with travelers passing to and fro. Orpheus, for example, visited this grim geography in search of his wife Eurydice. And Hades (for whom this realm was named) seized the maiden Persephone from the among living while she was picking flowers. The Romans, too, understood Hades as being a distant, albeit subterranean, world. They believed that the entrance, known as Avernus, was a crater near Cumae.

With the Incarnation, when Uncreated Light illuminated these crude foreshadowings, we were given to know that death opens on to not lesser life, but rather greater life: to use Jesus phrase, the Kingdom of God, life in its fullest possible expression. And the return to Eden was revealed as the point and meaning of all human life because this equated to retrieving our pristine Divine Image.

John the Baptist appeared as the man of Eden, fragrant of the morning of the earth. And he proclaimed, "Μετανοεīτε!" (Metanoeĩte) "You're going the wrong way! Turn back! Return to Eden!" And the people responded by cleansing themselves with waters ordained for this purpose, giving rise to such a "purity movement" that St. Peter likened it to a second Noah's Flood sweeping over the whole Levant. Jesus, too, proclaimed, "Metanoeĩte!" and revealed a Kingdom of Heaven, whose perfect lineaments recalled Eden. He told Dismas, the good thief, "Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise" (Lu 23:43).

By the time of the European Middle Ages, the entrance to Hell was conceived as "the antipodes" — the other side of the world from Eden. For in the West all knowledge was reconceived in terms of bifurcations with the re-discovery of Aristotle's Organon. Indeed, this would become the hallmark of the newly launched Roman Catholic Church during the eleventh century. The Incarnation was also made to conform to this logic by effecting a neat swap — Jesus' life traded for our salvation.

But that was not the way of the Early Fathers. St. Irenaeus (b. 130) described the Son of God as completing Adam's course which had been abandoned in Eden. And St. Athanasius described the conception of Jesus according to the flesh (the Annunciation) as flipping the telos of the human creature from death to life. But, he added, only by remaining fixed upon the life of Jesus as the pattern of one's own life could one benefit from this marvelous transformation. The impure could truly not become One with God in the mysterious sense of the seamless unity shared by the the Father and the Son (Jn 17:9ff).

That is, salvation (whose root word means "to remove obstacles") was not understood as a once-for-all quid pro quo carried out in a house where such trades were made (Jn 2:17). Yes, Jesus' furious anger in the Temple — making a whip of cords and mercilessly beating men — arose from the ridiculous proposition that true intimacy with God might be effected by offering dead animals. For the underlying Greek phrase here is οι̑κον έμφορίον (oȋkon émphoríon), or house of trade. "Business" was not the objection. but rather the vain proposition that blood sacrifice could replace one's own profound transformation as the requirement for uniting with God. Worse — and this cuts close to the reason for His Incarnation — that this blasphemous idea should be taught to the ignorant, mostly illiterate masses enrages God. And let us remember His words on the subject of corrupting the young:

(The Greek meaning for this word offend includes "to lead away from God.") No trial. No mercy. Only furious execution.

Do you see? As we draw near to the core reasons for God's entry into history, the velocities of urgency, candor, and directness rise to a gale force. One-ness with God, the only reason for the Creation, is the only reason for the Incarnation — fulfilling the pristine Image of God within; re-forming the self after the pattern of purity, which is the God-man Jesus; advancing into the Kingdom as God's immaculate sons and daughters.

In like measure, death is not co-equal with life. And Hell is not co-equal with Heaven. Such poisonous fruits were the conclusions born of Aristotle's technology, bifurcating all things into oppositions. The meaning of death is "life without God" (which is really no life at all). And the meaning of Hell is simply the "absence of God." God alone is life. All else is merely mutation or subversion of God's unique and magnificent gift. The Fall and loss of Eden were no more nor less than this: abandoning God and God's ways. Paradise is regained by requiting God's incommensurable love. The master question of the God-man to humankind is, "Who do you say that I Am?" And the master question of the Risen Christ is, "Do you love Me?" (which is the verb form of agápe).

Since we were children, we have prayed to Ever-Virgin Mary many thousands of times that our exile from Eden be ended by showing us Her Son:

She is eternally the Gate through which passed the One Who reopened Eden's gate. One of the our most cherished phrases comes to us from Jesus: the Bosom of Abraham. Like "Kingdom of Heaven," it is a concept unknown before the Advent of God among us. In an early icon, the Most Holy Theotokos is seated in the Bosom of Abrabam — indistinguishable from Eden. She is attended by angels (a category forbidden by the recent invention of Judah-ism, the Persian hybrid religion ). She is flanked by the man of Eden, St. John the Forerunner, and she is joined by the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For the Incarnation will mean redemption of the lost and especially those whose minds and souls have been held captive by the hated regime of the Second Temple.

We yearn and long as a human race to return to the pristine place, the locus amoenus, the untainted and unpolluted place, where no flower can fade nor bloom wither.

The Church exalts the Mother of God in precisely these terms:

Perfect. Pristine. Pure.

We praise and venerate her and humbly dedicate our lives to Her by the grace of Her Son, our Lord, God, and Savior, Jesus Christ. We are the Church of the Unfading Flower Icon of the Mother of God. And where better to lift up our voices to the Unfading Flower than Polynesia, where vestiges of Paradise are fragrant all around us?

Likewise, we have dedicated Hermitage Farm to the Mother of God, laboring to cleanse this little circle of earth of the world's toxins. Since 2016 we have been USDA Certified Organic and proclaim in our trademark:   Purity. Protected earth. Healing foods.

Under Her Mantle, we continue to seek refuge and protection from the chances and changes of this life. Our journeys of theosis are just not possible until we are cleansed of the world's pollutions. Our Master had made this unambiguously clear:

But all our labors — in prayer and sanctification and organic farming — are in vain unless they are offered to Her and through Her to Her Son. Under the shadow of Her wing do we find our wholeness, our sanctity, and our true path to One-ness with God.

We are encouraged by the "old ways" of the Hawaiian culture that have enshrined purity as a way of life, seen in this traditional mele, or song:

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