Depicted on the stain glass window that I get to look at every time I stand in front of Holy Altar is an image of Peter walking out to Christ in the middle of the stormy sea. When he took his eyes off Christ for just one moment, he began to sink until Jesus pulled him up from the water.
Archbishop Kyprian (the former archbishop that lived at St. Tikhon’s Monastery when the stain glass that we now have in our Church was installed in the Monastery Church in the 60s) chose this scene particularly for the priests who were serving in the Holy Altar, as a reminder of what happens when we take our eyes off of Christ…when we become distracted during service to Him…when we doubt and lose faith in the difficult moments of our life.
We Sink!
It is about these distractions that I wish to talk about this morning, specifically within the fold of our own parish community. I just did the report for the diocese on regular communing members of our parish family, and the numbers we came up with were 151 adults, and 69 children under the age of 18 with another 6 unborn children yet to come!
What does this mean? It means we have a vibrant parish community! It also means that when we come to offer our praise to God during the Liturgies, there will be more opportunities for the evil one to stir up the distractions in our hearts. With lots of babies and toddlers, comes lots of fussing, noises, and moving around. Like the storms and wind that surrounded Peter on the sea, we too easily begin to focus on what is around us, rather than what is in front of us.
There is a story from the life of St. Porphyrios that can offer some insight and direction for dealing with distractions, especially in the Church. After years of living in solitude and silence, St. Porphyrios, to his joy, was assigned to a small church near a hospital within the city. He was so excited to go in and serve the first Divine Liturgy, but just as he was about to say: “Blessed is the Kingdom…”, a very loud song from the window began to play. It was singing sweet love sons at an incredibly high volume…and the noise boomed throughout the whole chapel. It would have been the equivalent today of someone blaring George Michael and an Alto Saxophone playing Careless Whisper out an open window of the altar.
St. Porphyrios couldn’t concentrate on anything the entire Liturgy. No matter how many times he turned around to say: “Peace be unto all!”, there was absolutely no peace! After the service, St. Porphyrios went outside to see where the noise was coming from, and it so happened that there was a shop next to the window of the church that advertised gramophones and gramophone records. He went to the shop owner and asked politely if it was possible that the records not get played during the hours of Divine Liturgy. The owner of the shop was furious and declined, saying “I’ve got to earn my living! I have rent to pay and children to look after! Mind your own business!”
St. Porphyrios came away from that conversation deeply depressed. He was so disturbed that he considered asking for a reassignment, knowing he would never be able to serve the Liturgy in peace.
“How could I live in there? How could I celebrate the Liturgy? Especially as someone coming from the desert, from complete and utter silence, how could I endure such satanic noise? All the buses from Nikaia, from Peristeri and from Piraeus passed in front of the Church door and you could hear the constant sound of their horns hooting as they went up and down the street. I resolved to leave, but how would I announce it? I returned home dejected, not knowing what to do…”
St. Porphyrios prayed to God for a sign…something to help him to decide whether to stay or go. After three days of fasting and prayer, St. Porphyrios was in the Church when a woman came in with her 12 year old son to light a candle. He had his schoolbooks with him and one of them caught the Saints eye. It was a physics textbook, that St. Porphyrios asked to see. He flipped it open to a page that had been marked which described a special experiment.
“If you throw a small stone into a calm lake, you see the water making ripples over a small area. If you then throw in a larger stone, the ripples become larger and extend over a larger area so that they outflank the first ripples.”
St. Porphyrios took this as a Divine Illumination! Small ripples caused by the outside noise and distractions can be outflanked by prayers of great spiritual intensity that are being said inside the Church.
“And if I celebrate the Liturgy and truly have my mind and my heart on God, who or what can cause any harm?”
What a word…and what an example we are offered about distractions this morning!
To the parents of young ones, we are blessed to be in a good parish family…one that does not worry or complain about the noises of the little ones. Continue to bring them. If they get too loud and inconsolable, take them out, make the sign of the cross on them, tell them that we need to be quiet to go back and kiss icons in the Church, and make that your focus and ministry for the next few years of their life.
To those who are here amid work and worship, who have already raised children in the Church…be a source of encouragement to those with young children! If there comes a moment where we should become distracted, let us remember the Gospel lesson today of what happens when we pay attention to the wind and storms around us. Let us remember that if we truly do have a life that is deeply rooted in prayer, and if our minds and hearts are truly set on the Liturgy itself, then we should have a spiritual intensity within us that overwhelms the nervous ripples of noise and distraction in the Liturgy!
May God Grant us the faith and power necessary to focus solely on Him, not only during the Liturgy, but throughout all of the storms that we sail through in life!