Holy New Martyr Lazar the Shepherd of Bulgaria

Saint Lazar of Bulgaria

The twenty-third of April, which is the feast-day of Holy Greatmartyr George in the Orthodox Church, is also the feast of another greatmartyr for Christ from the nation of Bulgaria. Saint Lazar the New Martyr of Bulgaria was not a hierarch, not a monk, not an ascetic, not a priest, not a great prince and not even a soldier. He was a simple layman and a shepherd, one of the common folk of the Bulgarian people. But he is more than the equal of any prince and any soldier, and among the greatest of martyrs, when one considers the bravery he showed under questioning and his refusal to forsake Christ even in the face of the worst tortures.

Lazar [Bg. Лазар] was born in the year 1774 in the municipality of Gabrovo in north-central Bulgaria. His parents were simple but God-fearing folk. However, at a young age he was compelled to leave Bulgaria and went to the town of Soma, in the Ægean region of modern-day Turkey. Here he worked as a manual labourer – a shepherd – in the fields.

While tending the flocks of his master one day, he sat down to rest and fell asleep. While he was sleeping, a Muslim woman passed by on the road, and Lazar’s dog attacked her. Lazar woke up to the dog’s barking, and ran up to save her from the dog – he managed to calm the dog down and save the woman, but her skirts were slightly torn and her person somewhat exposed. This infuriated the woman, who went home and told her husband that a low-class Christian had attacked her and tried to rape her. The woman’s husband, equally piqued, went out himself to confront Lazar – but since he did not know Lazar to look at him, he lay hold of another man and beat him nearly to death. In order to cover up his crime, the husband had his wife’s relatives go before the vâli and have Lazar charged with attempted rape.

Lazar heard of this charge in advance, but he did not flee or go into hiding, knowing that he was innocent of the charge. He appeared in court on the seventh of April, 1802. At once he was charged and thrown into prison. The woman’s relatives, in the meantime, pled to the judge that Lazar must either convert to Islâm or suffer the death penalty for the dishonour he had inflicted upon a pious Muslim woman. They even bribed the judge with 1,000 kuruşlar (silver coins each roughly equal in weight to a Spanish silver dollar) if he could manage to convert Lazar to Islâm.

As such, the judge had Lazar regularly beaten over two weeks in prison, until the twenty-second, to make him more amenable to conversion. While he was in prison Orthodox Christians attempted to visit him, to give him gifts and words of encouragement, but Lazar himself told them to leave because they were putting themselves in danger. The vâli grew more and more angry, because the bribe of 1,000 silver pieces was slipping through his fingers and Lazar was no closer to converting to Islâm despite all of the judge’s threats, tortures and flattery.

The judge then appropriated the flock of forty sheep he looked after, and on the twenty-second of April he ordered that more tortures be applied to the unfortunate Lazar. After his tormenters got drunk, they started burning Lazar’s body with red-hot irons. Then they subjected Lazar to peine forte et dure, placing heavier and heavier stones upon his chest. All the while Lazar refused to forsake Christ, but called upon Saint George the Greatmartyr to help him and grant him strength. The torturers then burned out his tongue; and since he was no longer able to speak they told him to use sign language when he was ready to convert. They also prepared a red-hot band of iron which they placed around his head, causing him excruciating pain.

There was a Greek merchant from Zagora in Thessaly, whose name was John, who also served as a medical doctor and a physician to the judge’s family. He went to the window of the prison and saw Lazar sitting on the floor. Despite having been subjected to the iron band, he was clear-headed and lucid; and despite having his tongue burned out, he was able again by the grace of God to speak clearly. John, who was Orthodox, spoke to Lazar in Turkish – because Lazar being Bulgarian and John Greek, neither knew the other’s mother tongue. John encouraged Lazar to endure to the end. Lazar in turn assured John that he would never convert, but that he feared the torturers would just get tired and stop instead of putting him to death.

Upon learning that Lazar could speak, the judge flew into a rage and summoned the torturers, whom he thought had given him a false report. But seeing for himself the marks of the torture on Lazar’s head and tongue, he was convinced that the torturers had indeed done their jobs. Trying to make Lazar convert one final time, Lazar again rejected all worldly riches and honours that he was promised, and told him: ‘I have one God in three Persons; Whom I worship and adore. I was baptised as an Orthodox Christian, and as an Orthodox Christian I shall die.’ The judge then ordered that he be put to death by hanging.

En route to his place of execution, Lazar endured the mockery of the Muslims who jeered at him for the foolishness of dying for Jesus Christ. And when they arrived at the killing-ground, Lazar willingly placed the halter around his own neck and stood on a basket, before the executioner kicked it out from under him. Thus the holy martyr of God earned the laurels equal to those who died under the early persecutions of the faithful. He entered into the company of the saints where he glorifies eternally the one God in three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which he confessed to the judge on his final day –the Feast of Saint George, the twenty-third of April, 1802.

The relics of Saint Lazar of Bulgaria came to rest at the Monastery of Saint Ignatios on the island of Lesvos in Greece, and also at the Chapel of St Kseniya of Russia in the town of Mandra-Eidyllias in Attica. A Church Service in honour of Saint Lazar was composed by Saint Nikēphoros of Chios. Holy martyr Lazar of Bulgaria, despiser of earthly treasures and willing sufferer for the living God, pray unto Christ for us sinners!

Apolytikion for Saint Lazar of Bulgaria, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr Lazar, O Lord,
Through his sufferings has received an incorruptible crown from You, our God.
For having Your strength, he laid low his adversaries,
And shattered the powerless boldness of demons.
Through his intercessions, save our souls!

Leimonos Monastery of Saint Ignatios, Lesvos, Greece

Stop Line 3 and demand just policing

I took my kids with me to join the Climate Justice Initiative’s protest at the State Capitol building this weekend. I joined my well-known Twin Cities activist friends at the Anti-War Committee, Women Against Military Madness and Veterans for Peace. And we were also joined by AFSCME Council 5, Interfaith Power and Light and the Civilian Police Accountability Commission. It was unfortunately not a very large turnout, but we made our presence known and felt. Why did we attend, though?

Because we need accountability. The climate crisis and the more immediate threat that Line 3 poses to drinking water, animal habitats and tribal lands not only in Minnesota but through the entire Mississippi Basin are bad enough. But they cannot be disentangled easily from a host of other issues. The fact that Twin Cities area police feel they are obligated to defend the corporate profits of a Canadian energy company over the literal lives and livelihoods of Twin Cities residents – particularly those with brown or red or yellow skin – tells us something none too complimentary about their priorities and lack of accountability. The fact that said Canadian energy company feels empowered to cynically mobilise liberal distrust of Russia against environmentalists here at home tells us something about our culture’s messed-up priorities and imperialistic hubris. And the fact that again the indigenous Dakota and Ojibwe peoples are not being heard and that the treaties that give them rights to the land are still being violated by state and federal governments tells us that we are still dealing with entrenched disparities of power that completely override substantive considerations of justice.

I would also say, as a religious conservative – though I understand full well that this may not be a popular position among the people I attended the protest with – that these issues are also tied to life issues. The collapse of time horizons that accompanies the sorts of short-sighted actions like building a tar sands pipeline under the Mississippi headwaters, is related to and indeed is a function of our cultural disrespect of and inconsideration of the future generations: the human children who are as yet unborn. Yes: I consider the unborn to be human, with the right to life. And water is life. I went to that protest because I don’t only want my daughter and my son to have clean fresh water to drink and clean air to breathe, but because I want the children that they will have someday to enjoy the same things. Even if, as Enbridge’s mendacious public relations and advertising campaign threatens, that means less energy for me now, or higher prices at the pump for me now, so be it. I can bear such a deprivation. I dare not presume that they can bear theirs, inflicted by my (and my parents’) generation’s short-sightedness.

So yes. As an Orthodox Christian in the city of St Alexis, I say it aloud: Stop Line 3. Protect our water. Honour our treaties. End Russophobia and the New Cold War. End the wars – full stop. No more stolen sisters. Justice for Jamar, for Philando, for George, for Daunte. End the killings in the womb. All of these things are connected, and we cannot fix a culture of death selectively.

Holy Hierarch Gavril, Archbishop of Chişinău and Hotin

Saint Gavril of Chişinău and Hotin

The thirtieth of March is the feast-day in the Orthodox Church of a great saint of Moldavia under the Russian Empire, Saint Gavril (Bănulescu-Bodoni) of Chişinău. A Romanian clergyman who served the Russian Church during a politically troubled period in the region’s history, Saint Gavril always showed his care and concern for the common people of Bessarabia and the edification and spiritual welfare of the Church and its clergy. Even though – then as now – the political struggle between the old Empire in Constantinople and the new Empire in Moscow raged with him in the middle, Saint Gavril never lost sight of what was important in his life and in the life of the Church. That is – the love of God and the love of his neighbours, whether Romanians or Russians. His life was marked by a self-giving pastoral ministry and missionary work, and he was not afraid to speak out on abuses within the Church, and called for greater autonomy of the Church from the Russian state.

Gavril Bănulescu-Bodoni was born in the year 1746, in the Transylvanian town of Bistrița. His parents were from the town of Câmpulung Moldovenesc in Bukovina. He was twenty-five years of age when, in 1771, he went to study at Kiev Theological Academy, before he travelled for his studies to the Greek island of Patmos, Smyrna, and the Athonite monastery of Vatopaidi. He struck up a close friendship with polymath and ‘teacher of the Greek nation’ Nikēphoros Theotokēs, with whom St Gavril taught together at the Princely Academy of Iași in 1776.

Three years later, Saint Gavril was tonsured a monk in Constantinople, and travelled back to his homeland of Moldavia to serve in the Stratenia Church as a homilist in 1781. He taught philosophy and Greek language at the Slavic Seminary in Poltava in the Russian Empire. In 1784 he transferred to Iași again to serve under Metropolitan Gavriil (Callimachi), then to Huși as a parish priest. Saint Gavril was nominated to serve as the bishop of Romania; however, the Phanariot ruler of Moldavia barred him from consideration. During the ravages of the Russo-Turkish War of 1787-92, both Saint Gavril and the Phanariot prince Alexandru II Mavrocordat of Moldavia were compelled to flee to Russia together with a great many of the Moldovan people. He returned to Poltava and became the rector of the Seminary where he had once taught.

There were a number of administrative changes that were made to the Russian Church under Ekaterina ‘the Great’, among which were the reorganisation of diocæses in the Moldavian territories which came under Russian occupation against the Ottomans. Saint Gavril was appointed to one of these diocæses as Bishop of Cetatea Albă; eventually Saint Gavril was appointed Metropolitan of Moldavia. When the war ended and these territories reverted to the Ottomans, Patriarch of Constantinople Neophytos VII attempted to remove Saint Gavril from his see, and resorted to force. He pleaded with the Ottoman Sultân to arrest Saint Gavril and haul him to Constantinople in June of 1792. Neophytos tried to cajole Saint Gavril with the offer of a bishopric in Greece, but Saint Gavril refused to give up his Russian citizenship (as he would have to have done to accept). It was only after the intercession of the skilful Russian-Tatar statesman and ambassador Prince VP Kochubei with the Ottoman Sultân that Saint Gavril was released from captivity. As we can unfortunately see from this sorry episode of Constantinopolitan persecution of a brother-bishop, the scandalous rivalry between the two sees has a long and ugly history.

Saint Gavril returned to Russia after his release from Ottoman imprisonment, held several bishoprics including in Crimea and Kiev, and joined the Holy Synod of Petrograd. He administered the anointment of the sick to the Tsarina on her deathbed.

The foregoing litany of appointments and elevations might give one the impression that Saint Gavril was a political climber within the Church, but his subsequent career shows that this was not the case. He did care deeply for his flock, and in general did not fear to tread on political toes within the Tsarist bureaucracy when the right of Christ’s Church was at stake. After a period of illness and temporary retirement in Odessa, Saint Gavril was appointed primate in the new Exarchate of Bessarabia, which was created out of the occupation of Bessarabia in 1806 and the Treaty of Bucharest between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1812. During this time – particularly from 1808 on – Bishop Saint Gavril took immediate action to: reduce the interference of the Tsarist bureaucracy in the life of the Church; safeguard the people of Bessarabia against abuses and predations by the warring military forces in the region – including the Russian military; and weed out the priests who were mere functionaries and hangers-on of the state bureaucracy in preference to those genuinely committed to serving the spiritual and earthly needs of the Moldavian people. For this period of activity in his career, Saint Gavril is particularly beloved by modern Moldovans both as a committed religious guide and mentor, and as an activist-bishop for a kind of popular justice.

In 1813 he petitioned Tsar Aleksandr I for an ukaz for the creation of a new eparchy encompassing Bessarabia and parts of what are now the southern Ukraine and Crimea. This ukaz was granted, and the new Archbishopric of Chişinău and Hotin was allowed to organise itself in accordance with local customs. Saint Gavril, together with the local boyars, managed to leverage this ukaz in order to establish an autonomous region – in which both the local Moldovan dialect of Romanian and Russian were used by the state. During this same year, Saint Gavril founded a Romanian-language printing press, and in 1817 he oversaw the foundations for the Nativity of Christ Metropolitan Cathedral in Chişinău as well as the Soborul Cathedral. He oversaw a Romanian translation of the New Testament in 1817, followed by one of the whole Bible in 1819 in Petrograd. The hard-working bishop reposed in the Lord in 1821, and was interred with honour in the Church of the Dormition at Mănăstirea Căpriana near Chişinău.

Saint Gavril was glorified by the Orthodox Church in Moldova in a ceremony at Mănăstirea Căpriana on the fourth of September, 2016. This was due in no small part to the efforts of His Holiness Patriarch Kirill, who received a letter of thanks for his efforts in this glorification, as well as that of Saint Agafia Maranciuc whose feast we celebrate in June, from Moldovan President Igor Dodon. Holy hierarch Gavril of Chişinău, friend of the downtrodden and defender of the rights of Orthodoxy, pray unto Christ our God this day that our souls may be saved!

Nativity of Christ Metropolitan Cathedral, Chişinău, Moldova

Holy Righteous Prince Boyan-Enravota, Protomartyr of Bulgaria

Saint Boyan-Enravota of the Bulghars

As well as being the Sunday of Saint Gregory Palamas this year, the twenty-eighth of March is also the feast-day of Saint Enravota, the first Bulgarian martyr for the Orthodox Christian faith. He is also called Saint Boyan, an epithet derived from the Slavic word for ‘warrior’. Saint Enravota is known for being a friend to the captives and merciful to his enemies, though these are not traits one normally thinks to look for in a Turkic chieftain. His conversion to Christianity and his prescient, Divinely-inspired prophecy of Orthodoxy’s spread in Bulgaria led to his martyrdom at the hands of his own family.

Saint Enravota, or Boyan (Bg. Енравота or Боян) was born probably in the early 800s. He belonged to the ruling family of the Old Bulghars, the Dulo clan, which claimed descent from Attila the Hun. The khaghan Asparukh of the Dulo clan, who had originally hailed from the banks of the Volga, migrated south and west along the Black Sea coast, and founded the first Bulgarian state in Thrace in the year 681. This state had a Turkic-speaking, Tengri-worshipping Bulghar ruling class – kin to modern-day Chuvash, Bashkir and Tatar peoples – and a commoner class comprised mostly of Slavs and Thracians, who had for the most part not yet begun the process of Christianisation. It is noteworthy that Saint Enravota is one of the Orthodox saints who is regularly portrayed in traditional iconography, as in the icon above, with Asian features.

Enravota was the eldest son of the Bulghar khaghan Omurtag the Builder, and the grandson of the great khaghan Krum the Fearsome (known for his immense territorial expansions; his strict-but-fair law code which had, for its time, generous welfare provisions for state assistance to beggars; and – oh, yes – fashioning drinking vessels out of the skulls of his fallen enemies). Enravota was of a considerably different temperament than his father and grandfather, which may be one reason why he was passed over for consideration as Omurtag’s heir in preference to his youngest brother Malamir.

The Bulghars were at this point in time constantly at war with the Eastern Roman Empire. This was the old nomadic style of chronic warfare which took the form of harassing one’s neighbours, stealing their chattel and occasionally carrying off captives. During Omurtag’s time this was the norm – the Bulghars would stage raids for cattle and slaves into Byzantine-held territories. One of the captives that was taken by the Bulghars in such a raid was a Christian bishop named Kinamon. When it was learned that Bishop Kinamon was literate and knowledgeable, Omurtag hired him as a tutor for his children – however, Kinamon began teaching them not only reading and writing and the seven liberal arts, but also began to teach them the præcepts of the Christian religion and encourage in them the Christian virtues. Kinamon also refused to take part in the pagan ceremonies of the Bulghar state. Omurtag, under pressure from his boyars and enraged at this corruption and ‘softening’ of his children, had Kinamon seized, tortured and thrown into a dark pit, where he remained as a prisoner for many years.

Malamir had not listened with particular attention to Bishop Kinamon. The elder brother, Enravota, had, and among the first requests he made of Malamir when he became khaghan was to release Kinamon from captivity. This request was granted, and Kinamon was released to Enravota as a slave. But Enravota listened further to Kinamon as he taught him about Christ and the good news of mankind’s salvation and reconciliation to God. Ultimately, Enravota chose to accept baptism and become Christian himself. He was filled with a love of prayer and fasting, and his younger brother took notice.

Malamir demanded that his brother renounce Christianity at once and return to the pagan worship of the Bulghars, but Enravota steadfastly refused. Malamir then ordered – taking upon himself the sin of Cain – that his elder brother be killed. The eleventh-century chronicler Saint Teofilakt of Ohrid gives us a record of the prophetic speech he gave to his brother Malamir before the sentence was carried out:

This faith, which I now die for, will spread and increase across the whole Bulgarian land, although you may wish to oppress it with my death. In any case, the Sign of Christ will establish itself and churches of God will be built everywhere and pure priests will serve the pure God and will deliver ‘sacrifice of praise and confession’ to the life-giving Trinity. Idols, and priests as well, and their ungodly temples, will crumble and will turn into nothing, as if they had not existed. Besides, you alone, after many years, will cast away your ungodly soul without receiving anything in reward for your cruelty.

Saint Enravota was then put to death by the sword, and he joined the ranks of the holy martyrs. This happened in the year 833. It was not long before his prophecies began to be fulfilled, for the mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius was about to begin among the Slavic peoples of Europe. As for Malamir, he died some years later, childless and heirless. The khaghanate passed to his and Enravota’s nephew by the middle brother Zvinitsa, named Presiyan. Presiyan’s son, Saint Boris, would be the one who invited the two remaining of the Seven Saints into Bulgaria – Saint Kliment and Saint Naum. And, just as Saint Enravota predicted, from their efforts the Sign of Christ did establish itself in Bulgaria, churches were built everywhere, and priests were lifted up from among the Bulgarian people to serve and praise God in gladness and singleness of heart. Holy protomartyr Enravota, bearer of God’s Good News to the Bulghar people, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion to Saint Boyan-Enravota of Bulgaria, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr Boyan, O Lord,
Through his suffering has received an incorruptible crown from You, our God.
For having Your strength, he laid low his adversaries,
And shattered the powerless boldness of demons.
Through his intercessions, save our souls!

Holy Greatmartyr Georgi the Elder of Sofia

Saint Georgi of Sofia

Today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate a great Bulgarian martyr of the Ottoman yoke, Saint Georgi the Elder of Sofia. In fact, he lived at the time when the Turks had only recently established themselves on the European continent, and he was among the first victims of their fanaticism. Under Ottoman rule, in fact, he served in their army, but he bravely refused to brook insults against Our Lord from the officers, which was the reason for his execution.

Saint Georgi was born in Sofia, probably around the year 1407. We have little knowledge of his parentage, but we know that they were Bulgarians and that they loved him and gave him a good education. His hagiography describes Georgi as a handsome, powerfully-built young man who was also literate. He lived at a time when, as mentioned above, the Turkish enemy was advancing into European Thrace, and the few remaining holdouts of the old Eastern Roman Empire – which in its hubris had descended into petty political bickering, backstabbing and even apostasy from the Orthodox faith – were under significant political pressure from the Ottomans. Georgi may have belonged to one of these minor statelets before they were conquered by the Turks; however afterwards it appears he joined the Ottoman Army without having adopted Islâm.

He was in Adrianopolis, which was renamed Edirne by the Turks, in his armour and military insignia in order to have his bow repaired by a local craftsman in service to the army, who was also a Turk. As the craftsman while working on his weapon, some nearby Turkish soldiers began to blaspheme against Christ. And Saint Georgi, hearing this, could not refrain from saying back to them:

The Lord Jesus Christ, our God, is great and unique and His wisdom is unparalleled. Yours, whom you call a prophet, can’t even be counted among the dogs. Who is like the Lord Jesus Christ our God, Who dwells in the heights and watches over the humble? One alone is Holy, One is the Lord, One is worshipped, Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father, amen. What God is as great as our God? He is the sole Creator; all other things are created!

The Turks then flew into a rage, and beat Georgi mercilessly about the face, and then they tried without success to strangle him and then bind him with his own bowstring. However, Georgi being as large and powerful as he was, they could not restrain him, and he continued to confess Christ in His Lordship. The Muslims at last succeeded in binding his hands behind his back, and marched him to the local governor, the vâli. The vâli asked the young soldier if it was true that he had spoken as he had. Georgi owned every one of his words, repeated them, and added still more. The governor ordered him to be tortured on a rack and beaten, and then sent to another official of higher rank.

This official then asked him: ‘Is what I have heard true, you accursed man?’

Georgi answered back: ‘Shall I hide the truth now? What I have said, I have said. Yes, you tyrant – I have spoken everything that you have heard.’

The Turkish official then ordered him to retract his speech, forsake Christ and confess Muhammad as the prophet – promising him honour and gifts if he did so. But Georgi refused, continuing to confess one Lord Jesus Christ, as God and Creator, Who reigns eternally. Then the official handed Georgi over to the mob, which beat him, struck him, spat upon him, and then had him thrown into prison, where he continued to be mocked and tortured.

The Islâmic scholars then came before the official to protest his leniency against Georgi, whom they deemed a blasphemer. When Georgi was called again before the court, he appeared radiant and happy, as though he were about to be presented with high honours. The official had been content to follow the letter of the law, to have him horsewhipped and then released. But the mob demanded that Georgi be put to death by burning at the stake, and the Turkish official feared them, and so he handed Georgi over to the mob and to the pyre that they had already prepared. Georgi approached this fire bravely, knowing that although the enemy could burn his body they could not touch his soul.

Several Turks tried to impede his progress to the pyre and entreated him to recant his Christianity, but Georgi would not listen to them. Two Turkish soldiers struck him in the heart with a sword as he ascended the pyre. As the blaze was lit and he knelt upon the pyre to pray, another soldier ran him through with a spear, disembowelling him. In this way Saint Georgi of Sofia met his martyrdom and joined the ranks of the saints. The Muslims employed various means of preventing the Christians from finding his body. They threw animals on the pyre with him, added fuel to the fire and left it burning from the afternoon until the following morning so that everything was burnt to ashes, and then scattered the ashes away.

However, for several days after this, the Lord saw fit to honour His martyr in a perceptible way. A pillar of fire appeared over the spot where Saint Georgi had been executed, such that everyone living in Edirne could see it. Sometimes it appeared as the light from a gentle candle; at other times it appeared as a small flame; and at other times it appeared as a great star falling from the sky, but remaining in place for hours over that hallowed spot. In 1880 the Ottoman Sultân Abdülhamid II gave permission for the Bulgarians to build a church in Edirne in honour of the martyr. In this day as well let us remember Saint Georgi, and pray for his intercession for those who continue to suffer persecution and martyrdom for the Orthodox faith. Holy martyr Georgi of Sofia, bold confessor of Christ, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Apolytikion to Saint Georgi of Sofia, Tone 3:

Your holy martyr Georgi, O Lord,
Through his suffering has received an incorruptible crown from You, our God.
For having Your strength, he laid low his adversaries,
And shattered the powerless boldness of demons.
Through his intercessions, save our souls!

Church of Saint Georgi the Greatmartyr, Edirne, Turkey

Iconography and the Asian face

Saint Ia the Teacher

Today is the Sunday of Orthodoxy, the day on which we commemorate the vindication of the veneration of icons in the Byzantine Empire, but I find that I’m still trying to process what happened in Atlanta this past week. An intensely-religious young man suffering from sexual frustrations and loneliness took out his rage and self-loathing on the bodies of women, with six of the eight known victims being Asian-American women. How can we deal with this?

If we are honest, we must acknowledge the several dimensions of this case. It is simply not enough to write off this case as a mere example of individual misogyny and sexual frustration. That is a partial truth at best. Several conservative commentators have tried to do so already, including Rod Dreher (who is never short of excuses when it comes to explaining away American culture’s lowkey mistreatment of Asian Americans). If the Asian women involved were ‘just’ prostitutes, and their killer was ‘just’ a deranged sex pervert whose problems can be dismissed as individual psychosis, it becomes that much easier to dismiss them and anyone who might find broader grounds for concern. On the Sunday of Orthodoxy, though, we must beware of dismissing the full humanity of any person, or need for a full rather than a partial justice, and we must bear in mind the sort of table fellowship that Christ Himself kept.

There is in my icon corner, an icon of the Chinese saints of the Boxer Rebellion. I keep this icon – a reminder to my children that there is holiness in faces that look like theirs – in a place of special prominence, next to icons of the Maccabee martyrs, and next to an icon of Saint Niketas the Goth – which serve as reminders to me that there is a holiness in faces that look like mine. There is a reason for this placement. The light of Christ shines through ‘yellow’ Asian faces, just as much as it shines through ‘white’ European faces; just as much as it shines through ‘black’ African and Melanesian faces; just as much as it shines through ‘brown’ South Asian and Middle Eastern faces; just as much as it shines through the ‘red’ faces of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The icons of the saints show us that Christ is fully present, that the full nature of transfigured humanity is entirely present in every single person, regardless of their sex, their class, what job they have, where their ancestors came from or what colour skin they have. Iconography demolishes racial difference by placing it beneath the universal-personal Reality of Christ. Saint Ia the Teacher appears to us as she truly is in her icon.

This is the opposite of how the broader society treats Asian faces. This is the opposite of the way Dreher, and Hughes, and others, expect us white men to treat women with Asian faces. Dreher even quotes, with tacit approval, a reader on his blog who literally defends the ‘mysterious and magical’ racial archetype of the Asian ‘exotic seductress’ – an archetype which is created and reinforced by the demands of the market in prostitution and pornography – even as that same reader recognises and decries the fact that it’s all a calculated act, for show.

There is a reason why Fr Seraphim Rose referred to pornography as ‘the devil’s iconography’, and why Plato’s Socrates made connexions between prostitution and the sorts of crowd-pleasing acts that demagogues in the public square do. Even though skin is shown, and touched, what is felt and beheld is not the real person. The aspects of the real person that are there, are falsified even in being shown, because they are marketed as the instruments of another’s lust – another’s desire to dominate. Pornography does the exact opposite of what iconography does: it occludes the real person being portrayed. Our society’s exoticised, eroticised, submissive ‘yellow-fever’ portrayal of Asian women is a hindrance to seeing them as they truly are.

What Dreher and Hughes deliberately refuse to understand, and refuse to understand because of the New Cold War and culture-war angle that is part of their own marketing strategy, is that pornography does have an inescapably racist dimension. This is precisely because it appeals to a disordered desire to dominate, and racial power disparities are marketable. The same logic holds true for prostitution: backdoor brothels are businesses, and they simply would not sell Asian bodies to frustrated men if there were not a marketable power disparity there. These things do the opposite of iconography and the opposite of relic veneration, in that they take pieces – body parts, aspects of identity – of real women, and turn them into an illusion of actual connexion: a sham, a façade, a facsimile of love. They turn the meeting of body with body into an occasion of idolatry, the worship of the self. The men who visit prostitutes – or who look at porn – do so because it gives them an illusory sense of power over women. The same logic holds true of men (whether white or otherwise) who frequent prostitutes or pornographic images of women of another race: that illusory sense of power over someone of another race is part of the ‘product’.

Fr Seraphim Rose spoke wisely. Iconography and relic-veneration do destroy these illusions: precisely because being one in Christ destroys these power differences between Greek and Jew, slave and free, man and woman. At church, I take care to venerate an icon of Saint Mary of Ægypt. She was, for much of her life, a prostitute – and a particularly shameless and indiscreet one at that. She is venerated because she repented, but her repentance consumed the entire latter half of her life. Here’s the thing: when I venerate this particular (brown-skinned, half-naked, Middle Eastern) woman, I am acknowledging before her and before Christ my own powerlessness, my own weakness, and I am not given back any illusion of power or any sense of entitlement to satisfaction, sexual or otherwise. (She is the saint. I am not.) The meeting of my lips and hands with her image is not the occasion for lust or for idolatry. It is the occasion for healing, however slow and however arduous (just as it was for her), from both.

Trying to process the Atlanta shootings

It’s been my experience that Clean Week always seems to hit hard with bad news, at least in recent years. Tuesday’s news of the shootings of eight workers in massage parlours in Atlanta kind of struck home hard for me and my family. We haven’t discussed it that much, but it’s been on my mind a lot. Firstly, there is much here to grieve over, much here to pray over. In particular I pray for the affected communities in Atlanta, for the victims and their families, and for the Asian American and Pacific Islander folks in the United States who feel the grief and insecurity of this massacre most keenly.

But it is only natural, as part of that grieving process, to ask ‘why’ and to seek to understand how this could have happened. This case should raise for us Americans several troubling questions surrounding the modern relationship between the sexes. We should be intensely scrutinising how particularly American Protestantism has attempted to address that relationship, and how fraught it has become in recent years. We should be looking closely at the historical ways in which white American (and British and French too, to be fair) men have ideologically colonised the (female, or feminine) Asian body, and how the association of Asian-ness with a certain kind of femininity has fed into sexist myths. And following from this we should be carefully examining the current-day power struggles and ideological struggles between Western and East Asian countries that continue to prop up both the related ‘yellow fever’ construct and the ‘yellow peril’ construct. I’ve already encountered people commenting on this story, already trying to dismiss the killer as ‘mentally ill’ and pointing out his sexual hang-ups to preclude any discussion on how race relations, œconomic exploitation or foreign policy might have had some bearing on his motives or on the vulnerability of the victims. This is remarkably depressing, because there is much that needs to be said along each and every one of these dimensions.

To the first, the fact that there was a self-acknowledged motive of sexual entitlement and ‘sex addiction’ on the part of the killer, and the fact that the killer was a fundamentalist Baptist, are both worth commenting on. To a certain extent, the same commentary that I made in the blog post ‘Misogyny and the flight from feeling’ also applies here. Our culture places a ridiculously unhealthy emphasis on sex. American culture having abandoned healthy traditional rites-of-passage, fraternal and communal forms of male bonding, and ideals of physical fitness and activity in their own right as expressions of masculinity, American manhood is now primarily expressed in the unhealthy terms of capitalist wealth acquisition, risk-seeking behaviours and sexual conquest. Although women have not been desocialised to the same degree by the culture, there is also an unhealthy burden placed on women to make themselves sexually-appealing and -available; contradictorily to remain chaste and ‘pure’; but at the same time also responsible in toto for the consequences of frustrated male libido, including any violence perpetrated against them. The killer in this case seems to have been motivated by the same frustrations, and foisted the responsibility for his own sexual hang-ups onto the women who ‘tempted’ him.

It’s also worth exploring the relationship of how these ‘temptations’ are configured, to the expressions of chiliastic American fundamentalism and the incredible, intolerable psychic burdens that it places on its members as individuals as a result of its apocalypse-oriented legalistic and Calvinistic theology. The Southern Baptist Church of which the killer was a member has, of course, repudiated all of his actions and made a public statement renouncing all forms of misogyny and racism. We may take that statement, for what it’s worth, as sincere and well-meaning. But we also need to be examining the content of the misguided and hæretical theology that this church and its pastor have preached, which absolutely had an effect on the actions the killer chose to take. It is worth asking what sorts of beliefs made him think that murdering masseuses would ‘help’ and ‘protect’ other men, and preserve them from ‘temptation’; and if a belief that the end of time and the threat of hell was imminent might not have accentuated and lent an urgency to these beliefs.

Likewise with the idea that Asian women’s bodies are in some way ‘fair game’ for white Western men – a power dynamic that undergirds an entire marketing and business model of Asian-themed American erotica. That goes all the way back to the days of British and French colonialism in Asia. Among George Orwell’s œuvre (knowledge of which among Americans seems to stop with his anti-Soviet screeds Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm), his book Burmese Days actually manages to be an insightful view into the way that even well-meaning British colonisers used their military power and carefully stage-managed social prestige to sexually dominate and use local women (and then toss them aside). This pattern also held true with the French in colonised Southeast Asia, the Dutch in Indonesia, and the American military in the Philippines, Vietnam, Korea (still ongoing), Guam (still ongoing) and Okinawa (still ongoing). The entire stereotype of Asian women as ‘exotic’, hyper-feminine, submissive sex dolls, which figures into the marketing of pornography and prostitution involving Asian women, stems from this long legacy of colonial violence and rape by Britain, France, the Netherlands and America.

The ‘yellow fever’ problem and its associated stereotypes among Western men, are thus inextricable from even the present-day configurations (and associated myths) of military power and capitalist exploitation in the Pacific. The mirror image of this, of course, is the demonisation of Asian masculinity in the ‘yellow peril’ stereotype. It’s an old story, but the ‘yellow peril’ mythology has extended in the modern time into the international scene, where it has metastasised into a shadowplay of anti-Russia and anti-China narratives, meant specifically to distract the American people from the gross political mismanagement and œconomic rapine happening at home. But to begin with, the stereotype of the fecund, inscrutable, untrustworthy and ultimately disloyal and seditious Asian man has its roots in the deliberate capitalist exploitation of Chinese wage slavery on the railroad construction projects in America in the latter 1800s. To prevent Chinese workers and ‘native’ white American workers from banding together or unionising, California railroad bosses actively promoted anti-Chinese racism as a way to divide the workers and depress wages. Which leads us full circle back to the beginning consideration: the deconstruction and hyper-individualisation of masculinity in America by capitalist modernity, and the sole remaining outlets for masculine self-expression being wealth acquisition, consumerist excess, violence and sexual domination.

What is clear to me is that in the murders of these eight Atlantans – six of whom were AAPI women – the entire American culture needs to grapple with itself. Standing in the dock are the emptying of American masculinity of all values except violence and material gain and sexual domination; the pervasiveness of evil doctrines of penal substitutionary atonement and chiliastic proclamations of a divine judgement in wrath and wilful damnation; and the ongoing American imperialist warmongering in East Asia and the Pacific that initially led to, and reinforces, these racial stereotypes of Asian women. Not just one man, and not just one confession, but America as a nation must repent of its sins before God and humankind.