We live in a world of noise. We are surrounded by noise created, projected by others. We make and project our own noise. Years ago, when the Walkman was the iPod of the moment, I had an anthropology professor who talked about wanting to do a study on the effect of the Walkman. He wondered out loud if the increasingly pervasive presence of earphones would have an effect on how people related to one another. Our Christian tradition is all about relating – relating to God, and relating to one another as icons of God. We are surrounded by noise, and we envelop ourselves with noise of our own choosing. What does it say about our individual willingness to participate in communion with one another?

Music, and by this I mean generally other peoples’ music, has become an invasive wall of noise here in the UK. It falls into two categories. The first is public music, the second is pseudo-private music. It is rare to go into a shop, cafe or restaurant and not be bombarded with loud music. This is public music is intended to suggest a mood, or an atmosphere in the establishment. When done well it really does accomplish the task, and can be mildly enjoyable. Often it is not done well, and simply becomes another layer of unpleasant noise. Pseudo-private music is the noise generated by individuals wearing (or not wearing) ear phones. Their music is meant to be private, but often is blasting at a level that allows everyone in the same train carriage to sing along. And it is this phenomenon that attracts my attention. Pseudo-private music is a statement by the user to everyone else. “I’m in my own world,” it says, “stay away, you do not exist here!”

When Moses met God on Sinai he passed through tremor, cloud, and smoke, and spoke to God as “one man speaks to another”. Elijah stood at the entrance of a cave and waited to experience the true presence of God. Wind, crushing rocks, earthquake, fire, none of these elemental phenomena was God. But when he heard the quiet whisper, Elijah knew he was in the real presence of God. Both of these are manifestations of God – that is, they are “theophanies”. In each an individual penetrated the barriers between God and man, in order to relate to God “as one man speaks to another”. The feast of Theophany is different. It is a celebration not just of the manifestation of the Trinity, but also of the elimination of barriers between God and Man. Not just for particular individuals, but for all baptised people.

The noise we make, and surround ourselves with; the noise we create to get attention, or even to deflect attention away from ourselves is a cloak, a barrier. The noise is not me, it is not who I am. What constitutes “me” is hidden underneath the layers of noise. Just as what constitutes you is hidden, underneath your layers of noise. Or more often – behind the ear phones. As practising Christians however, we are challenged by the example of God – to do away with the barriers, to be prepared to relate with openness to “the other” who, like us, is an icon of the Incarnate Logos. If we are to speak of communion with one another, and with God, then we must do so understanding that it means dropping our cloak of safety, allowing others to see the real person while we actively penetrate their barriers and speak to them as one man speaks to another: as friends of God.

On my recent North Sea excursion to Norway and the Orkneys I often enjoyed standing on the outer decks looking out to sea. It struck me that the ocean is, or could be viewed as “the desert” in the same way that third and fourth century ascetics went out into the desert to master the art of transcendence.

And yet, to my knowledge at least, there is nothing like the Philokalia of the Sea.

The idea of the desert was one of relying not on the social network of other humans, but on God alone (and I dare say the gifts and talents God provides for self-sufficiancy). On the Ocean – on a small ship, or as some have done in the past few years – on your own in a tiny, fragile sailing vessel – you are very literally on your own, and I dare say very reliant on the Divine for company.

The awe inspiring sense of isolation at sea is I think comparable to that of the classic image of “The Desert” – but I wonder are there other places where humans go that can fit this idea? The city perhaps? Afterall London, where I live is a place where it is very easy to be very alone, very isolated, by choice, and by accident. I can see how this very man made “desert” could be a place of spiritual growth and renewal in the same spirit as that of the early ascetics.

I have a soft spot for “Marian Art” largely because I have a fascination with the Theotokos. My last year of my bachelor’s degree focussed on early imagery of Mary, and that interest followed through to my PhD research. So this reflection by Judith Dupre was a rather fun read – oh and the rather striking images included were well worth the pause to consider.

The Independent yesterday, had an interesting article about the plight of Eastern Christians in the Middle East. You might be aware of a synod recently held in the Vatican to discuss the fact that Christian communities in the Middle East are being actively persecuted, and marginlised to the point that many are fleeing their homelands.

The tragedy is that most of these Christians are Easterners – and that when they come to Western Europe or the US they face a loss of identity, because many Western Christians do not acknowledge, or understand that these folks are in fact real Christians. A point often driven home in media reporting in here in the UK about the history and development of Christian art, ideas, and praxis.

Last week my office was re-decorated. It was about time too. I’d never changed the colour of the walls which as you can see were a nausiating “Crayola Sunshine Yellow”. Preparing for the arrival of the decorator I had to empty the room in which I spend so much of my time. The bird had to come out, my books, my table, cushions, laptop – everything. At the end I paused to reflect on the emptiness of my room in the morning sun.

We often think of emptiness as a negative space – a lack, an absence of something important. It was interesting, even energising however, to take a moment and enjoy the moment of emptiness not as a “lack” of something but as “potential”, a joyful leap into the unknown.

Six months ago my garden stopped. Or so it seemed. Leaves turned brown and dropped off. Flowers vanished. Vines ceased producing fruit, withered, and crumbled. Newts, butterflies, moths, dragonflies; even the neighbour’s cat – disappeared. For five months or so I stood on the patio looking out over a brown, crumpled, lifeless trapezoid (our garden is not quite rectangular).

It was empty.

It was spent.

I sometimes wondered if this vine, or that fruit tree would ever spring back to life – would it survive the “down time”.

The “visual” of my garden in that down time, was deceptive, for underneath the surface things were happening. Trees were resting, and preparing for the spring. Newts were hibernating (at least I think they hybernate), eggs were maturing, the ground was renewing its richness. Things were happening in the quiet of “down time” that were not immediately apparent.

Here we are some six months later and the fruit trees have blossomed, and are covered in little fruits and leaves. Lettuce, beans, and melons are sprouting reaching ever higher preparing to put on their annual show. Newts have returned to the pond in droves, and are in full mating show. The fish have lifted themselves from the bottom, shaken off their winder slumber and are zipping around demanding food and looking to mate in a few weeks time. Bamboo shoots are popping up left and right, mint is spreading, bay is flowering, irises have produced long stalks with promising buds. The active life has returned to the garden.

And so it is with one’s spiritual life. We go through periods of intense activity, engagement, interest. Then something throws a switch and shuts it all down – or so we think. We become emotionally detached, even a bit depressed, wondering, “where did it all go?” But it comes back.

Perhaps the trick is to learn to cultivate a less enthusiastic, more consistent “sense” of spirituality, so that the “garden” produces year round and not just in the few months of spring and summer. A skill which I think is much more difficult than it appears – on the surface at least.

This is interesting no only for its comedic value – you just had to laugh. But also for the side thoughts that emerge while reading the story. A man in Liverpool has been found guilty of “causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress”, sentenced to 100 hours of community service, and given an ASBO forbidding him to carry religiously offensive material in public.

He left pornographic material, and cartoons of Christian and Muslim religious figures in the prayer room at Liverpool airport in an effort to convert people to atheism.

Okaaay . . . .

If you’re done gasping (or in my case giggling hysterically) lets play with this one for a moment. Does this judement now mean that I can change the sign on my front door from: “No Evangelists”; to “Evangelists Will Be Prosecuted”?

This man’s actions are curious in another – more serious way – in that it moves to pose questions about identifying belief in the first place. In a very real sense his choice of pornography was . . . . wisely chosen. A significant number of Christians, at least, place a strong emphasis on the relationship between sex, and God. Is this all our tradition can speak to? Of course not – but it is very much a part of the popular reception of what Christianity is all about.

Why? Because too many Christians at least, link their faith in God, their “belief” with sex, and sexuality, thereby narrowing the range of areas of life where they might readily percieve “blessings seen and unseen”.

The Irish politician Feargal Quinn has written in the Irish Times (27 March) that the EU must set a fixed date for Pascha. His argument runs that the movable date is inconvenient to parents and schools organising vacations, and time off. That it negatively affects the tourist industry, and causes inefficiency in other businesses attempting to market their Easter related products. The current system, asserts the Senator, is considered by many to be a hassle and needs to be fixed. The EU he points out is great at unifying and systematising things – so why not the date of Easter? Afterall, it would, he believes, be enormously popular since we all find the movable date of Easter so irritating.

First lets deal with the most obvious issue. As part of Quinn’s argument he attacks the Orthodox for, as he says, being the ones preventing the adoption of the WCC proposed unified date of Easter (never mind the fact that it would still be a moveable feast!). If the EU were to undertake the project, it is unlikely that the rest of the world will follow suit. Think about this for a minute, we need only look at developments in the Anglican communion over the past ten years to see that Nigeria and her sister churches would see this as yet another decadent, heterodox intrusion by the liberal homosexuals in Brussels. Now – we have three, no, four dates of Easter. I can imagine any number of churches in the US that would follow suit.

There’s another problem here too and that is – if the EU, a secular authority is to set the calculations for one religious festival, then for the sake of consistency, and fairness – it must set them all. So, what do you think of the new European wide Pascha-Ramada-Pesach? It would be efficient – Muslims, Christians and Jews would celebrate their major feast on the same day, making it easier for the tourism industry, soccer mom, and oh, of course lets not forget the all important businessman trying to make a living by hawking tawdry holiday crap at a time convenient for him.

Yeah, there’s a reason why it’s a religious festival and not a secular one. Our calendar is messy – true. But it’s got character, and history, and it makes the liturgical year have a sense of organic rhythm that it would most surely lose if we started pegging our movable feasts down – not for reasons of discernment, and good praxis but for “convenience”.

I’m all for a unified date of Pascha – it is, interestingly enough, the only festival that that ancient canons specifically state must be celebrated by the whole church on the same day. Other feasts have regional variations even now. But, it also took over 300 years to arrive at the decision for a unified date of Easter.

My own community, until recently, struggled with the problem of the two Pascha’s for over a decade – because we had both Eastern and Western rite communities and missions. Every year we would raise the spectre of debating the date, and every year we had to set it aside because neither side was happy to abandon its “traditional” date – and it must be said for some very interesting, and very well thought out reasons.

I raise this point not only to place this firmly within an OC/IC context, but to make the point that it is not a theological, or even a traditional reason that we should be concerned about a unified date of Pascha – but an ekklesiological one: that on this one day the whole Christian world confess “with one heart and one mind” our trust in the risen Christ, and to celebrate together our liberation from the fear of the dark places through which we must sometimes walk alone. Every year in our community as Great Lent arrived the old divisions between the two sides of the community emerged, and one side tried to push forward its own date. Every year we were reminded of how fragile a union we shared, and how, dis-unified in some respects we truly were as a “community”. Pascha is about our union with Christ, as much as it ought to be about our reaffermation to be in union with one another as community – locally, within our individual parishes and synods. If we can do that – then I’d venture to guess that we could learn to become a stronger “community” across the OC/IC movement.

I’ve been waiting for this for some time now – I heard about it when it first started – and have remembered and forgotten about it off and on for two years since. But here it is – finally – the web site of the Codex Sinaiticus.

What!? Youd don’t know what it is? Ach Mein Lieber Gott! It’s only the oldest complete manuscript of the NT (fourth century)! Oh and its very pretty too.

So sit back, rev up your browser, and enjoy a piece of Christian history online! Oh, and if you like this – I can point you to some other really nifty papyriology/manuscript sites of similar vein.

This is the door full of love,

and within it is love.

Enter, sinner, pray [much] for love from your Lord,

full of love.

For centuries pilgrims (Pagan and Christian) have left their mark on shrines and holy places – grafitti is just one method. Today we think of it as a marring, a desecration – but to many, such as the author of the above inscription, it was an act of devotion.

This inscription is found just inside the entrance to the church of St. Antony in the Monastary of St. Antony in Egypt. It is the only known Syriac grafitti and very much reflects the style of Syriac spirituality.

It caught my eye – and made me take a moment and reflect on the cause of our relationship with Christ, and through him, one another.

If you’d like to read more of the grafitti at St. Antony’s, as well as the wall paintings, history, and conservation of the monastary, check out the book “Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea (ISBN 0300092245).