Beth Taylor at Glasgow Art Club

I spent lunch-time yesterday at the Glasgow Art Club attending a really superb concert organized by Westbourne Music. The soloist was the Glaswegian mezzo Beth Taylor, and she was performing a programme of songs by female composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There was a lot to like in the programme, including three songs by Clara Schumann (which left me thinking that Brahms had learned a lot from her), five songs by Alma Mahler, plus pieces by Lili and Nadia Boulanger, Ethel Smyth, Hedwige Chrétien, Germaine Tailleferre, and Augusta Holmès. I think my favourites were the pieces by Tailleferre, Holmès, and Nadia Boulanger.

All the music was very strong, but what made the concert stand out for me was Beth’s performance. She throws herself into the music with absolute confidence and communicates it as much by her gestures and expressions as by her amazing voice.

Prayer ropes and neurodivergence

The traditional Orthodox prayer rope is a loop of coarse black wool woven into knots (often 33 or 100) and closed with a cruciform tassel. It is most commonly used to count the number of times you have recited the Jesus Prayer (or similar alternative).

However, for some neurodivergent people those knots can become instruments of torture. If you are hypersensitive to textures, counting off those knots can feel like rubbing your fingers along a sheet of sandpaper. In addition to finding the sensation of the knots very uncomfortable, I find that it masks my awareness of the distinction between one knot and the next. So counting with a traditional wool prayer rope is virtually impossible.

Fortunately, I have found a Russian Orthodox alternative – the lestovka. Instead of wool knots, it consists of strips of leather wound round a core (usually small pieces twig wrapped in scrolls with the Jesus Prayer) to form ‘rungs’. The smooth leather rungs give a very different (much more pleasant) tactile experience and are not so tightly packed as the knots, making it much easier to use for counting. It occurs to me that, in addition to its use for prayer, the lestovka is an easily pocketable and discreet stimming aid.

The lestovka has come to be associated with the Russian Old Believers and Eastern Catholics. But their use was once much more widespread in Russian Orthodoxy (see e.g. some icons of St Sergius of Radonezh or St Seraphim of Sarov) and they are once more becoming more popular.

They can be found (sometimes at ridiculously high prices) on sites like Etsy. I got my fairly simply 50-rung lestovka from the Convent of St Elisabeth the New Martyr, Minsk.

Misunderstanding autism

I wish I could celebrate the fact that earlier this year the Ukrainian Orthodox Church published a molieben for autistic children. Unfortunately the language of those prayers reveals an appalling ignorance of autism on the part of their author(s). Some examples:

Moleben for Children Suffering from the Affliction of Autism . . .

. . . these suffering children . . .

. . . the innocent suffering children . . . afflicted with the illness of autism . . .

. . . who innocently suffer from the illness of autism

Let’s be clear. Autism is not an illness. It is a family of neurodevelopmental differences which means that the brains of autistic people are wired rather differently than those of the majority of the population. What autistic people need is not healing but acceptance of such differences as make the majority uncomfortable. And perhaps the Orthodox Church should take a fresh look at the men and women it venerates as fools-for-Christ in light of the diagnostic criteria for autism.

The Overlapping Skills and Strengths of Neurodiversity by Nancy Doyle,
based on work by Mary Colley

Environmentalist, heal thyself!

I’m in the middle of editing the papers from last year’s ORIC Conference, and I came across a striking line in one of them: ‘By healing yourself, you heal the entirety of nature.’ My first, kneejerk reaction was to think that this was dangerously quietistic. Taken out of context, might one not read it as suggesting we can address the environmental crisis merely by attending to our own spiritual state? An extreme (and radically spiritualized) version of ‘Think globally, act locally’?

But in an Orthodox context it doesn’t mean that at all. If, as Orthodoxy believes, we are called to be the priests of creation, then this is a reminder that no effort to heal the environment is complete (or even achievable) without at the same time walking the path of self-healing, i.e. of theosis.

And so, I was led back to St Gregory of Sinai’s insistence that the perfect hesychast ‘sees the entire creation luminous’.

Schism in the Anglican Communion

On 16 October, GAFCON (the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans) announced that it is severing ties with the rest of the Anglican Communion. Their communique is unequivocal that this is schism: ‘We cannot continue to have communion with those who advocate the revisionist agenda, which has abandoned the inerrant word of God as the final authority and overturned Resolution I.10, of the 1998 Lambeth Conference.’ As far as they are concerned, they are now the Anglican Communion and will henceforth be known as ‘the Global Anglican Communion’.

Based on the membership figures given in Wikipedia, this suggests that Anglicanism has now split into two communions of roughly equal size. The bulk of GAFCON’s strength lies in the Global South though, if I remember correctly, several dioceses in the predominantly white parts of the world are affiliated to it.

Locally, I will be interested to see what will happen at the parish level. For example, here in Glasgow, St Silas’s website is clear that it adheres to the Jerusalem Statement, which is the foundational document of GAFCON. Will parishes like it follow their conscience and GAFCON or will they find some form of words that allows them to remain part of their current dioceses?

Personally, I am very disappointed to see the emergence of yet another church. If the leaders of this nascent Global Anglican Communion really want to make a positive contribution to the future of global Christianity, they should seriously consider entering into dialogue with Orthodoxy with a view to restoring communion between them and us.

In praise of monochrome

I find that I am now taking most (if not all) of my photographs with a view to processing them as black and white. In fact, I have been taking more and more of my photos with my Fujifilm X70 precisely because I can see the world in monochrome through its touchscreen. So, I thought I’d jot down some of my reasons for this preference:

• Colour can be distracting. By removing the colour, I am forcing the viewer to focus on the shape, line, texture, and overall composition.
• It simplifies my task as a photographer. By working in black and white, I no longer have to consider the appropriate juxtaposition and balance of colours in my images.
• I think it gives my images a sense of timelessness.
• Processing it in monochrome (particularly with Nik Silver Efex) gives me more control over the mood of the image. It allows me more easily to put my interpretation on it. In the words of Elliott Erwitt, ‘Color is descriptive, black and white is interpretive.’
• It forces me to look at the world differently. So, I see things I would miss if I concentrated on the colours of a scene.

By the way, I have recently uploaded a new tranche of black and white photos to my Flickr account.

All Creation Luminous

Having Perplexity AI prepare an Orthodox critique of my PhD thesis provided me with food for thought while I contemplated the not inconsiderable task of revising the thesis from an Orthodox perspective. So far, the fruit of that contemplation had amounted to the following chapter outline:

Introduction: Our Compromised Environment – an introductory examination of the environmental crisis and its nature as a spiritual problem.

1. Creation and the Patristic Mindset – an exploration of how Orthodox theological methodology applies to the doctrine of creation (including the Orthodox view of Scripture; Georges Florovsky’s call to “acquire the patristic mind”; the emergence of  Orthodox theology from liturgical experience; and the role of apophaticism in Orthodox theology).

2. The Triune Creator – the grounding of environmental theology in the Orthodox doctrine of the Trinity (the Cappadocian vision; perichoresis and relational ontology; creation and the divine energies; creation as a triune act).

3. The Word Through Whom All Things Were Made – an exploration of patristic cosmic Christology (the Logos, the logoi, and creation; the Incarnation and the material creation; the cosmic Christ; recapitulation and the restoration of the cosmos).

4. The Lord, the Giver of Life – outlining the pneumatological foundations of environmental theology (the Spirit as Life-Giver; the Spirit in Orthodox liturgical theology; deification and cosmic transformation; eschatological pneumatology).

5. Priests of Creation – replacing an anthropology focused on dominion/ stewardship with Orthodox priestly anthropology (the image and likeness of God; the priestly vocation; Adam and the cosmic temple; deification and ecological responsibility).

6. The Eucharistic Vision of Creation – examination of John Zizioulas’s suggestion that creation is eucharistic and its implications for environmental theology (creation as divine gift; the eucharistic offering of creation; the implications for our worship; the Eucharist and environmental ethics).

7. Nature in Orthodox Worship and Spirituality (the sanctification of time; the blessing of creation; iconographic ecology; ascetic environmentalism).

8. All Things Made New – examining the eschatological destiny of creation (Orthodox affirmation of matter and bodily resurrection; the cosmic dimension of salvation; the transfiguration of the cosmos; the kingdom of God and ecological hope).

9. Towards an Orthodox Environmental Ethics (ascetic principles and sustainable living; the Church as ecological community;  the global challenge of the crisis and Orthodox witness; political responses to the crisis and Orthodox action).

At the moment, one major element is still missing. Somewhere I have to work in a chapter on human sinfulness and the notion of ecological sin. I feel it should go fairly early in the text, but I’m not sure how to do that without anticipating material that I want to develop later on.

And the title of this revised study of environmental theology? At the moment, I am calling it All Creation Luminous: An Orthodox Vision of the Natural World. According to St Gregory of Sinai, the perfect hesychast ‘sees the entire creation luminous as in a kind of mirror’.