Not long ago I came across some material on St Kassia (a.k.a. Kassiani) the Hymnographer, which I enjoyed and want to pass along. Here is a short biography from my Saints web site for September 7, on which she is commemorated:
St Kassia (Kassiani) the Hymnographer (9th c.)
She was born in Constantinople to a noble family, and grew to be unusually beautiful and learned — so much so that she was chosen to participate in a 'bride show', at which the Emperor Theophilos was to choose a wife. Struck by Kassia's beauty, the Emperor approached her and said 'Through a woman came forth the baser things,' referring to Eve's transgression. Kassia responded, 'Through a woman came forth the better things', referring to the Incarnation of Christ through His Most Pure Mother. Stung by her reply, the Emperor rejected her and chose Theodora as his wife. Kassia entered monastic life and founded a women's monastery in Constantinople, closely allied with the Stoudion Monastery. Serving as abbess of the monastery, she wrote many liturgical hymns, at least twenty of which are included in the services of the Church. Best-known (or at least most closely associated with her) is the Hymn of Kassiani, sung at Matins on Holy Wednesday. She reposed in peace.
And here is the
Hymn of Kassiani itself (it’s in Tone 8), as translated in Bishop Kallistos’ and Mother Mary’s
Lenten Triodion:
The woman who had fallen into many sins,
perceiving Thy divinity, O Lord,
fulfilled the part of a myrrh-bearer;
and with lamentations she brought sweet-smelling oil of myrrh to Thee
before Thy burial.
‘Woe is me,’ she said, ‘for night surrounds me, dark and moonless,
and stings my lustful passion with the love of sin.
Accept the fountain of my tears,
O Thou who drawest down from the clouds the waters of the sea.
Incline to the groanings of my heart,
O Thou who in Thine ineffable self-emptying hast bowed down the heavens.
I shall kiss Thy most pure feet and wipe them with the hairs of my head,
those feet whose sound Eve heard at dusk in Paradise,
and hid herself for fear.
Who can search out the multitude of my sins and the abyss of Thy judgments,
O Saviour of my soul?
Despise me not, Thine handmaiden,
for Thou has mercy without measure.’
The image is an icon of St Kassia, from a Wikipedia article on her.
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About a week ago we added a new kitten to our household cat collection. It was against our better judgment, but someone had abandoned him in front of the Post Office, so what could we do?
First, of course, we had to name him. When we got our last cat (also a foundling) we looked on the Church calendar for that day and found that it was the commemoration of St Isidore of Chios, so the cat came to be called Izzy.
The new kitten showed up on the feast day of St Demetrios. What kind of a name is ‘Demetrios’ for a cat? Then we remembered that Demetrios becomes Dimitri in Russian, and every Russian name comes with several subtly-different nicknames. Before long our new cat was officially named ‘Mitya’. We also call him ‘Mitka’ and ‘Mitenka’ as the mood strikes us.
There’s been some consideration of animal names in the Orthodox literature. According to Elder Sophrony’s Saint Silouan the Athonite, Saint Silouan did not believe that animals should be named at all. I don't want to discount anything that comes from such a holy source, but I haven't found this view anywhere else and haven't taken it to heart.
Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works devotes an entire chapter to the animals, wild and domesticated, connected with the St Herman of Alaska Monastery. Father Seraphim didn’t feel comfortable giving Saints’ names to animals, but would often use names associated with holy people and places. For example, a favorite dog who appeared on the feast day of St Alexander of Svir ended up being named Svir.
So it seems that we’re at the liberal end of the spectrum of practices and views on Orthodox animal-naming. I take comfort in the Russian folk tradition of naming all roosters ‘Petya’ in memory of St Peter’s denial of Christ as the rooster crowed.
The bizarre image for this post showed up when I Googled ‘Angel Cat’. It was the least tasteless of a collection of cutesy images of kittens with wings, halos and so on. It makes you wonder.
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There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.’ And he divided his property between them. Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in reckless living.
A few reflections on this most-loved parable...
Sin begins as turning away, walking away, from God, to a ‘far country’. Only then do the specific transgressions, summed up here as ‘reckless living’, appear as symptoms of our flight to this far country.
The son got to this far country using his inheritance from his father. We use God's own good gifts — our bodies, our intelligence, our wills, given to us for communion with Him — to turn away from Him and wound ourselves with sins.
The divine wealth that once Thou gavest me I have sinfully wasted. I have departed far from Thee and lived as the Prodigal, O compassionate Father. Accept me also now as I return.
— Matins canon, Ode One, Sunday of the Prodigal Son.
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Let's take stock, shall we?
I can't claim to understand the state of the economy, but then, as we've learned recently, the people we trusted to run the economy for us don't know much either: it turns out that the world financial system, or at least the American corner of it, has been in the hands of greedy fools.
We were told there was a ‘Subprime Mortgage Crisis’. How could a few poor people losing their houses affect you and me? Quite a bit, as it turns out. There were a whole lot of these loans, and they’re all going bad. Also, it turns out that the Prime mortgages, the kind we have, weren’t so prime after all. All the big boys shared the risk like so many junkies sharing needles — which was supposed to dilute the bad loans so that they would magically become good loans. Instead, it ensured that the infection spread through the whole financial system. Now some huge banks are collapsing or being nationalized (yes, they don't use the word ‘nationalize’ because Americans don’t like it, but there it is.)
Now we’re told that a giant insurance company, AIG, is teetering, and that if it goes a worldwide meltdown of the money system is more or less guaranteed. So the government will probably have to come in and somehow prop it up with federal money.
One problem with this is that the federal money is, essentially, imaginary. The national government is living so far beyond its means that it borrowed the entire cost of the Iraq war, charging it to the great National Credit Card. The idea is that — as with our maxed-out personal credit cards — as long as we keep making that monthly minimum payment to China or wherever, everything will be fine. For further ranting on this topic, see an earlier post, ‘I Got Debts that No Honest Man Can Pay’.
(While we're on the subject of credit cards, some analysts think that the next collapse will be in the credit card industry, as borrowers start defaulting on their cards. That will be interesting, won't it? Imagine the effect on your daily life when Visa and Mastercard file for bankruptcy.)
Fortunately our own deposits at our local bank are guaranteed by FDIC, right? A recent article notes, in passing, that the fund protecting your deposits and mine is worth about 50 billion dollars — to ‘insure’ about a trillion dollars in deposits. That comes out to, let’s see, five cents backing up every depositor dollar. If even five percent of deposits are lost due to bank failures, there's no money left to cover the rest. Do you still feel safe?
Of course while all this is going on, climate change continues to accelerate and the oil sustaining industrial society continues to run out. But those are topics for another day.
We’ve already heard some advice on all this, perhaps the only really useful advice, from a reliable source: Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
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Do you spend too much time online? I thought so. Otherwise why would you be reading this?
Recently I was talking (somewhat pridefully) about our family's long-standing avoidance of TV, and was reminded of how the Internet, useful as it is, can easily become the same kind of Devourer of Time that TV is in so many people's lives.
For a long time I've spoken vaguely about how I ought to spend less time online, but hadn't really mustered either a resolve or a plan. Finally I'm trying something:
I found a little countdown timer program that sits on the OS X dashboard. (Click here to go to the site where I got it.) Currently, at the start of my ‘online day’ I set the timer to two hours and start it. While I'm online, the timer is running.
One discovery is that it's not hard to burn through two hours doing this and that, all of it apparently useful, on the web. Who knows — I may decide to increase my time ration if the two hours really seems not to be working out. And I stop the timer when I'm just typing a body of text, as I am at this moment. Too lenient? We’ll see.
But I'm already noticing that I consider more carefully whether I'm going online to do something definite, or just to ‘see what’s on’, as they say in TV-land. So for now, I'm happy with the system.
The image is of the 3-2-1 Countdown Timer as it appears on the dashboard. Apparently the user is about to time a soft-boiled egg. This little program is only available for the Mac; if you labor in the Windows environment, I'm sure a little Googling will lead you to a comparable product.
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Not long ago I came across some material on St Kassia (a.k.a. Kassiani) the Hymnographer, which I enjoyed and want to pass along. Here is a short biography from my Saints web site for September 7, on which she is commemorated:
