The Most Holy Theotokos, the Unfading Flower

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

Before the Incarnation of God, 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 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 foreshadowings, we were given to know that after our brief earthy existence is not a lesser life, but rather greater: God's eternity, which is life in its fullest possible expression. And the return to Eden was revealed as the point and meaning of all human life.

John the Baptist appeared as the man of Eden, fragrant of the morning of the earth. And he proclaimed, "Μετανοεīτε!" (Metanoeite) "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, "Metanoeite!" 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 the West had embraced the Organon of Aristotle, and all knowledge was reconceived in terms of bifurcations. Indeed, this would become the hallmark of the newly launched Roman Catholic Church in the eleventh century. The Incarnation was also made to conform to this logic by effecting a neat swap — Jesus' life 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 life could one benefit from this marvelous transformation. The impure could not become One with God as the Son and the Father are One (Jn 17:9ff).

That is, salvation (whose root means "to remove obstacles") was not understood as a once-for-all quid pro quo carried out in a house where trades were made (Jn 2:17). Yes, the underlying Greek phrase here is οικον εμφοριον (oikon emphorion), or house of trade. "Business" is not the objection here, but the vain proposition that blood sacrifice could procure the favor of God. Spiritual maturity, fulfilling the Image of God within, the re-forming of the self after the example of Jesus, and, finally, advancing into the Kingdom .... these things are a process. Time and spiritual formation are required for root-and-branch change, by the grace of God.

In like measure, death is not co-equal with life. And Hell is not co-equal with Heaven. Such conclusions were the result of Aristotle's technology, bifuracating 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, and all else is only mutation or subversion of His unique gift. The Fall and loss of Eden was no more nor less than this: abandoning God and God's ways. And Paradise is regained by requiting God's incommunsurable 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 agape).

Since we were children we have prayed to Ever-Virgin Mary many thousands of times to end our exile from Eden 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 His three-year wandering ministry. 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 salvation of the lost and especially those minds and souls 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 any 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 hints of Paradise are fragrant all around us?

Likewise, we dedicate our Farm to her which we seek to cleanse of the toxic world. We are USDA Certified Organic farm since 2016 and proclaim in our trademark,

But all our labors — in prayer and personal purity 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 salvation.

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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