Annunciation, 39th Year to Heaven, Archangel Gabriel, & Death as Birthday
by Erin Doom
Feast of the Synaxis of the Archangel GabrielAnno Domini 2020, March 26
2. Fr. Maximos Constans
(Athonite monk, St. Maximus the Confessor scholar, and in my opinion, one of the most important living Orthodox theologians) has written about the Annunciation in various places. In his book The Art of Seeing, he boldly asserts: “The Annunciation is the central mystery of the Christian faith and the foundation and justification for the making of icons, for it was through the angel Gabriel’s conversation with Mary that the invisible God ‘became flesh and dwelt among us’ (Jn. 1:14).” Later in the same chapter (“Veil of Flesh, Well of Living Water”: The Paradoxes of the Annunciation), Constas further discusses the relationship between icons and the incarnation:
Byzantine defenders of icons affirmed that Christ’s depictability, that is, his susceptibility to depiction (which they call “circumscription”), was a necessary corollary of his embodiment, a kind of birth, but also a kind of death, for it is the kenosis of a spiritual logos into objective, material form. In assuming the “form of the slave,” the formless, invisible God consents to circumspcription within time and space, to live in a world of shared objectification. To consent to have a body means to be framed by the narrow edges of the manger, confined to the lap of the mother, fixed to the arms of the cross, and figured in a work of art.
[…] In surrendering His body to wounding and His image to depiction in art, God makes visible the nature of His kenotic engagement with the world. God in pain and God in art carry the emphatic assurance of His real presence among us; they are an amplification of that presence, making God more human, and His human form more immediately apprehensible.
3. Constas also reflects on the Annunciation
in the Annual Report of the Friends of Mt. Athos (2012): “Theophanes the Cretan and the Iconography of the Annunciation.” He focuses on two icons of the Annunciation by Theophanes (16th cent.) from the monastery of Stavronikita on Mt. Athos, arguing that “when the symbolism is properly understood, both of these icons identify the conception of Christ with His death on the cross, so that Incarnation and Passion are united on a single seamless continuum.” Read the whole article here.
4. One more note on the Annunciation, or more specifically the date of the Annunciation: March 25. Jeff Reimer, my friend and colleague in the New Moot, celebrates his birthday every year on March 25. And this year his reflections on turning 39 were published by Comment, a journal that focuses on “public theology for the common good.” It is a fantastic essay, one of the very best I’ve read in a while. Seriously. And it couldn’t come at a better time as pandemics tend to provoke reflection on death, for as Reimer notes, birthdays and death are deeply related in the Christian tradition:
In the Latin of Western Christendom the term we would translate as birthday is
dies natalis, literally “day of birth.” It referred, however, not to one’s biological birth but to death, particularly a saint’s entrance into eternal life in heaven, especially upon martyrdom. The day of the child’s physical birth, then, was associated with the saint on whose day he was born, and the naming of the child after the saint provided a model for the child’s life. One’s life at birth was therefore already bound up with death, which was not the end of life, but its true beginning.
Reimer goes on to note the various liturgical associations with the date of March 25: the Annunciation, which falls exactly nine months before December 25, the Crucifixion, and the creation of the world. And he concludes that the
coincidence of all these major days on March 25 makes a certain theological sense, symbolically if not historically. Creation, re-creation, and redemption all occur in a cyclical simultaneity, all three events knit together in time by the pure act of the eternal God. The world is created ex nihilo as the gratuitous overflow of the love of the Triune God; the world is re-created in the Virgin’s womb as an embryo, the God-man Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, the hope of Israel, who in his birth, growth, life, and death recapitulates in himself the drama of humanity itself; and the world is redeemed when the God-man, out of compassionate love for the resplendent, fractious species he has created in his own transcendent image, makes himself the fulcrum of the lever of his own just judgment, both judge and judged, the victim of death and its executioner—all of these things consequent upon the fissiparous mutability of God’s humbler creatures glancing off the keen edge of divine simplicity. All of it occurs on March 25. For my birthday I get the economy of salvation. Happy birthday to me.
That’s just a tiny taste. Reimer also weaves in Dante’s journey to the afterlife and Tolkien’s Ring that was destroyed in Mt. Doom, both of which are associated with March 25, as well as Flannery O’Connor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, George Herbert, and Blaise Pascal, who all “died well” in their 39th year. If there is one thing you read this week, read this essay in its entirety!
5. If you don’t read Reimer’s piece
– shame on you – you should at least read the poem “Death” by George Herbert, which is included in Reimer’s essay. Read it here.
And memorize it! God knows we need to strengthen our memory muscles.
6. Grab your Bible for today’s Scripture readings:
Isaiah 28:14-22, Genesis 10:32-11:9, and Proverbs 13:19-14:6. Click here if you insist on reading them online.
7. Today the liturgical calendar celebrates the Synaxis of the Archangel Gabriel, also not insignificant since today's post provides the first full-length issue of the Daily Synaxis. We know the Archangel Gabriel for his announcement of the incarnation to the Theotokos, but this was only one of at least three other annunciations: the coming fate of the Hebrew people to the Prophet Daniel (cf. Dan. 8:16, 9:21-24), the coming birth of the Theotokos to her mother the Holy Righteous Anna, and the coming birth of St. John the Baptist and Forerunner to his father the priest Zechariah. Here’s a short but wonderful reflection on the Archangel Gabriel
by Rev. Fr. Christopher Stamas; it also explains why today's feast is called a synaxis.
8. Today’s Word from the Fathers, provoked by Reimer’s essay “Good Birth, Good Death: Reflections on My 39th Birthday,”
comes from St. Augustine’s homily On the Birthday of Cyprian, the Martyr:
The birthday of Cyprian, the martyr, is well known throughout all Africa. May the Holy Spirit teach us in this hour what is proper for us to say. For we are about to say something in praise of Cyprian, a most glorious martyr, whose birthday, as you know, we are celebrating today. The Church customarily so uses this term, that is, birthdays, that it calls the most precious deaths of the martyrs their birthdays. […] The actual day of his birth we do not know; and because this is the day on which he died, this is the day on which we celebrate his birthday. The day of his birth, however, we should not celebrate even though we knew it. For on that day he contracted original sin; but on this day he overcame all sin. On that day he came forth from his mother’s womb into this dark world which lures the eyes of the flesh; but on this day from the hidden bosom of nature he went into that light which happily and blessedly enlightens the view of the mind.
Click here to read the entire homily on pp. 37-77
in Robert Tarver Brown’s dissertation, A Study of the Five Sermons of St. Augustine on St. Cyrpian the Martyr, Including Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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