DORMITION AT THE BURNING BUSH -"Rejoice, fiery throne of the Lord God; Rejoice, the sacred vessel that is filled with manna."
From an Article by Sr. Joanna*
St. Catherine’s visitors typically categorize themselves as ‘pilgrim’ or ‘tourist’. Well-aware that mankind’s deepest longing is for God, monastics recognize the fallacy of such distinctions. All arrive here “hoping to experience the stillness that exists between the soul and God,” His Eminence [retired] Archbishop Damianos of Sinai has said. A hermit monk explains this is equally true whether expressed by exuberant hoots disturbing the night on the steps leading to the Holy Summit, or by anxiously searching for the entrance to the Monastery church in the same black night – hoping to arrive before the service begins, when the angels do.
Much has been made of the Sinai Monastery’s preservation of the precious artifacts of ancient Christianity, and also of the unbroken ages of its peaceful co-existence with neighbors in a non-Christian world.
Less noted is that the Sinai represents the only center of ancient ascetic spirituality open to women – tourist, pilgrim, or monastic [historically]. In a sphere where women have often had to struggle to prove themselves much as in civilian life, female monasticism in Sinai dates from the third century, apparently to the inceptions of the current monastic community itself.
Naturally isolated by remote desert, ascetics seeking stillness never needed to fabricate a barrier to worldly civilization by sealing the Monastery off from visits by families. Of course such a step would never have been contemplated by the guardians of a holy pilgrimage of such literally Biblical proportions. By the time the world resolutely landed on their doorstep with the construction of asphalt roads and tourist infrastructure, Sinai monks had long accustomed themselves to a double burden: combining the rigors of eremitic life with hospitality to those seeking deeper understanding of God.
After all, the Holy Mountain capped by the Peak of the Decalogue – of the Ten Commandments – is the mountain of the knowledge of God. And the Burning Bush, which still thrives in the Monastery courtyard, the path to that knowledge – for it burned with the same fire of divine Wisdom that later shone forth upon all creation from the “Bush of the Holy Virgin.”
Let us ever applaud and praise the Lord God
Who was seen of old on the holy mount in glory,
Who by the fiery bush revealed the great mystery of the
Ever-virgin and undefiled Maiden unto the Prophet Moses.
Aflame but not consumed by the fire of divinity just like the Bush itself, the Holy Virgin is the fiery pillar guiding the faithful through the darkness of this world’s trials. The Israelites were led through the Sinai by fire at night and a cloud by day, and the Holy Virgin spreads the protection of her shelter over the world more broadly than a cloud. Under it, her love gathers together not only the monastics of Sinai, but all the faithful who glorify her Son, the God-man who saves the world from sin as He saved His All-holy Mother from the corruption of death at her Dormition.
Monasteries are not islands adrift on a sea beyond the wave length of stress. Tides break over their shores. They are havens only to the degree that one has learned to take refuge in the will of God – and until then, places of fierce struggle. Against the relentless enemies of one’s own egotism and pride, the invincible weaponry of salvation belongs to the Most Holy Theotokos. One says the Jesus Prayer at all times, for as Sinai’s Geronta Pavlos says, “Prayer is the sun of our souls, without which we cannot live any more than we can survive without the physical sun.”
But in crisis – ask any monastic: The heart that was pierced with a sword at the cross of her Son rushes to help, as Father Pavlos describes, with the reflexive speed of a mother who springs forward to snatch a baby from falling. Power against evil is not lacking to the first person whose human nature was joined to the divine, the Mother of God who was also the first person to see and touch the resurrected Christ (a subtlety of the Gospels elucidated by Saint Gregory Palamas) – and to speak with Him, as she does unto the ages on our behalf. ...
"The heavens were astonished and stood in awe,
and the ends of the earth, Maid, were sore amazed,
for God appeared bodily to mankind as very man.
And behold, your womb has proved to be vaster
and more spacious than heaven's heights.
For this, O Theotokos, the choirs and
assemblies of men and angels
magnify your name."
(Source: The Dormition services’ 13th century Great Supplicatory Canon to the Most Holy Theotokos.)
* From the Article "Dormition at the Burning Bush" by Sr. Joanna, at the FMSM News Blog: https://www.mountsinaimonastery.org/news-blog/dormition2016
