Holy Hierarch John the Wonderworker of Beverley

Bishop Saint John of Beverley

Today happens to be the feast day of our great local saint, Holy Father Alexis (Tovt) of Wilkes-Barre, who led so many of the Rusin people back into the Orthodox fold from his adoptive home here in Minneapolis, and later from Pennsylvania as well. Father Alexis was, of course, a great champion of Orthodoxy as is well-remembered. He was also a great champion of the rights of immigrants and the rights of organised labour generally, and thus it is meet and right and fitting to mark his feast day, the remembrance of a great and good and holy man, with joy. Holy Father Alexis shares his feast day, at least for those of us on the new calendar, with a similarly-minded saint from before the Great Schism: Bishop Saint John of Beverley.

Little is known of John’s early life. Supposedly he was born to hathel parents in the village of Harpham in Yorkshire. He was sent for his education to the Abbey of Saint Augustine in Canterbury, where he was placed under the personal care of the great Greek Archbishop of Canterbury, Saint Theodore of Tarsus, and tutored by the African Saint Hadrian who was then abbot in Saint Augustine’s. Under the care of these two men, John formed the determination to become a monk, and was tonsured in the Benedictine Order. He thereupon joined the Abbey at Whitby under Holy Mother Hilda. Here he spent his time meekly and in a spirit of service, and thus grew in holiness. Such was John’s reputation that when Bishop Saint Eata of Hexham reposed in the Lord, the monk John was chosen – apparently unwillingly – to succeed Holy Eata in his honour as bishop there.

Over the next eighteen years John proved himself to be a kindly and sweet-tempered archpastor for Hexham, gifted by Christ and by his great love for the people with divinely-inspired insight into their troubles and their thoughts. Yet still, the monastic life that he had sought being his first love, he occasionally – and especially during Lent – retired for quiet prayer and study with a handful of close companions into an isolated hermitage surrounded by open woodland and a dyke. Holy Bede says also that he would take with him a pauper or a homeless man, whom he and his monastic companions would wait upon and serve as though he were Christ, during these retreats.

One such poor person Bede recounts. A mute youth often came to the bishop to receive alms, yet his tongue was silent and he was not able to utter a single word. He was hideous to look upon; his head was afflicted with scabs such that only a few ragged tufts of hair were able to grow on his head. The bishop had this youth brought to his hermitage in the first week of Lent, and set aside a house for him in the enclosure. That Sunday Bishop John brought the mute youngster before him and bade him stick out his tongue, upon which the Bishop made the holy sign of the Cross. Then he asked the youth to say some word to him, like ‘ġéa’. The young man answered him thus at once, his tongue being wondrously loosened.

After that, the Bishop taught him to speak the sounds of each of the letters in the English alphabet: ‘A’, ‘Æ’, ‘B’, ‘C’. To these then the Bishop added tutoring in syllables, then full words. Once the young man had mastered these, the Bishop began teaching him full sentences. The Bishop’s monastic companions said of the youngster afterward that whenever he was seen awake he would be saying something with his tongue; as it were like the man whose legs were healed by Apostles Peter and John who upon gaining the use of his legs could not refrain from walking and leaping up even in the Temple. The bishop was most pleased to hear this.

John then commended the skin disease that afflicted the youth’s head to the care of a sæcular leech, or physician. (It must not be imagined that such mediæval ‘leeches’, even in pre-Norman England, were ignorant or superstitious; their remedies were guided by a rigorous empiricism that in some cases holds up even today.) With the Bishop’s prayers and blessing, the leech tended the youth’s head with various remedies. The youth’s scalp healed and he grew a full head of hair; his skin also cleared to reveal a handsome complexion and demeanour. Bishop John, pleased with the boy and the rapid progress he had made, offered to make him a monk and keep him on as a permanent companion in the bishop’s household, but the youth politely declined and returned to sæcular life.

When Saint Wilfrið returned from the exile imposed upon him by Ealdfriþ King of Northumbria, Bishop John gladly relinquished to him the see of Hexham, and upon the death of his fellow-monk at Whitby the Bishop Saint Bosa was appointed to the bishopric of York in his stead. As Bishop John’s disciple (later Abbot) Beorhthun – who was then present – recounted personally to Saint Bede, not long after he had arrived in his new see, Bishop John stopped by the convent of Watton (then called Wetadun), where the abbess Hereburg besought him at once to visit one of the nuns there, her own daughter, who lay dying. The young nun, named Cœnburg, had been bled incompetently, and the wound had festered and grown inflamed. Her arm had swollen so badly that she could not bend it at the elbow, and two man’s hands could not fit around it. She was bedridden and in great pain. The abbess hoped that Bishop John could cure her by his blessing.

Bishop John asked about the circumstances under which Cœnburg had been bled. Upon learning that it had been done essentially during the girl’s menses when her immunity was weak, he rebuked the abbess harshly in the name of Saint Theodore for having bled her daughter untimely, and asked her rather brusquely what she expected of him if the girl was indeed on death’s door. But the abbess was insistent that Bishop John should give her his blessing. Taking Beorhthun with him, Bishop John went in to where Cœnburg lay, said a blessing over her, and left again. Some time later, a lay-servant came in and bade the bishop come back. Cœnburg lay up in her bed, in good health, able to move her arm some, though it was still swollen. She greeted Beorhthun cheerfully, bade him sit and asked the servant to get him a drink. Once Beorhthun had drunk, he asked the nun what had happened, and she described to him how the pain had begun to ebb from her arm at once Bishop John had blessed her. Still, she thought a full recovery would take some time. After Bishop John and Beorhthun had left the convent, they later heard that Cœnburg had healed entirely and gave thanks to Christ for her delivery.

Beorhthun also recounted to Saint Bede another occasion on which Bishop John had worked a similar wonder; this time for a þegn named Puch who owned land some two miles off from where Bishop John’s abbey and diocæsan seat lay. It’s unclear from Bede’s narrative whether John had already procured his land at Inderawuda – literally ‘In-Deira-wood’ – for his chief monastery, which would later be called by its modern name of Beverley. His wife had been bedridden forty days with an acute illness. Puch had invited Bishop John to his estate for the purpose of blessing a new parish, but the landowner begged the bishop to stay on a little longer afterward and eat meat with him in his house. Bishop John refused at first, insisting that he must return to his abbey, but Puch began begging with even greater earnest, promising to give alms to the poor if the Bishop would come visit his house and eat with him. Hearing this, Beorhthun joined his entreaties to those of the þegn and together they prevailed upon Bishop John.

In all this time John had not been told of the illness of the þegn’s wife. But the bishop took some of the holy water from the parish consecration he had just performed and bade one of the monks take it in to Puch’s wife for her to drink and to wash herself with. The woman having done this, was cured at once and able to rise from her bed. As was befitting a hostess in Old English heathen custom, but also out of gratitude to him who had healed her, Puch’s wife brought a cup out to the bishop and kept it full of drink as long as he stayed at her husband’s table; in this Beorhthun likened the woman also to Saint Peter’s mother-in-law who showed a similar hospitality to Christ after His having healed her.

Beorhthun also recounts to Saint Bede another miracle at which he was not present, but which he had heard of from those who were. Another þegn by the name of Addi likewise bade Bishop John to his estate for a church-blessing – though he likewise had ulterior motives for the invitation. One of his servants was comatose and near death; indeed, Addi had already prepared the servant’s coffin. Tearfully Addi begged the bishop to bless his servant, for this was a man much beloved by his master. Bishop John went to the unmoving sick man, with the coffin lying beside him and all the household around him weeping, lay a cheerful hand on the man and blessed him with the words, ‘Hurry up and get well!’ Later, as the þegn was entertaining the bishop, the servant sent word out to the hall that he was thirsty. Hearing that the servant was sensible and could speak to ask for drink, the þegn at once gave the bishop a cup of wine to bless, which he did, and had this sent to the servant. The servant came out to the hall, in his right senses, in full mastery of his limbs and clad respectably, and he gratefully greeted the bishop and his master. Addi invited him to dine as one of the company, which he did. Addi’s servant apparently lived to a ripe old age in the same state of health that Bishop John had wondrously restored to him.

Another of Bishop John’s miracles was recounted to Saint Bede by the Abbot Herebald, who was then a young priest-monk attached to Bishop John’s retinue. Father Herebald was fond of horses and of riding, and while travelling in the Bishop’s party they came to an open road well-suited to a race. The lay-brothers asked, and got, permission to ride their horses on the stretch of road, but Bishop John expressly forbade Herebald to join them, however much he begged to do so. Feeling singled-out and slighted, and being as yet a youngster prone to rebellion, Herebald took his horse and joined the race in haughty disregard and directly against the order of his master. Despite Bishop John shouting his dismay after him, Herebald rode his horse at a full gallop and tried to jump a small gully. Herebald fell from his horse, struck his head on a stone that lay in the grass on the other side of the gully, and lay senseless – out of his wits and unable to move, as though dead. His head and his hand, which he had thrown up to protect himself, were both broken. Unable to speak, unable to move and vomiting blood, Herebald was borne back to his bed by the lay-brothers. Bishop John spent the whole of that night in solitary vigil and, as dawn came, he went in to Herebald and said a prayer over him. Herebald awoke and found he had gotten back his speech.

‘Do you know who it is speaking to you?’ asked the bishop.

‘My beloved bishop,’ answered Herebald.

‘Can you live?’

‘I can with the help of your prayers, God willing.’

After giving a short blessing, Bishop John again went away to pray. Herebald was thereafter able to sit up and speak with greater ease; and when Bishop John returned he asked of a sudden whether Herebald had been baptised. Herebald answered that he had, and gave the name of the priest who had dipped him in the waters of life. Bishop John then scowled. ‘That priest! I know him. He is a half-wit who does not know how to instruct or to baptise. I had ordered him, on account of his ignorance, to cease performing baptisms.’ Bishop John then instructed Herebald according to the Liturgy for baptism, breathed upon his face, and lay his hand in blessing upon the broken part of his priest-monk’s skull. He then bade a surgeon come in and bind up his head and his hand. After Bishop John had taken Herebald out and baptised him properly, Herebald was healed in full.

As Bishop of Hexham and as Bishop of York, our holy father John spent a total of thirty-three years before he reposed in the Lord and went to his æternal home in Christ’s kingdom on the seventh of May, 721. When he was no longer able to serve as bishop, he blessed Wilfrið (a different one; Wilfrið the Younger) in the honour of the bishopric at York and retired to his monastery and there lived out the rest of his days in prayer and contemplation. He was buried where he lived, at his monastery at Inderawuda – later Beverley Minster.

Bishop John was recognised as a saint almost at once upon his repose, and many wonders were attributed to his grace and intercession with Christ. William of Malmesbury recounts that he was a particular favourite with cattle farmers, who would bring to his shrine stubborn, wild and violent bulls – which would then leave the churchyard tame as lambs. He was also appealed to by English kings on the eve of battle, and victories were attributed to his intercession with Christ: once by Æðelstán King who asked from him, and got, a total victory in his campaign to subjugate the Scots in 934; and once by King Henry V, who asked for Saint John’s intercession at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, which became a particularly celebrated English victory over the French. Saint John was also particularly beloved by Christian writers as diverse as the scholastic Saint Ealhwine and the mystic Julian of Norwich.

Saint Bede’s history is touchingly intimate when it comes to the treatment of the holy man who appointed him as a deacon, and gives us a convincing portrait in words of the man’s personality. Although Bishop John appears a bit reticent and short, even gruff, with those who do not show the proper obedience – after the style of a later Russian starets, one might say – he would not even once withhold his hand from helping even them when they asked it of him. He was indeed a great lover of the poor who took quite earnestly Christ’s entreaty to treat them with the utmost hospitality and solicitude. He was particularly gentle and caring toward women who were sick or suffering. And although he was indeed a wonderworker almost in the classical mode one finds in Russian hagiographies – up to and including his preternatural insights into the thoughts and troubles of others – it is worthy of note that he bore himself humbly. He did not intrude on what he considered the competencies of others in the scientific and medical professions; nor did he consider the miracles and healing he wrought to be a ‘substitute’ for the services of a skilled physician. Holy Father John of Beverley, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Thou hast been given to the faithful, O most sacred John,
As a beauteous tree of holiness,
Bearing all the virtues like most sacred blooms,
Filling all the land with the fragrance of miracles and the sweet fruit of healings.
Wherefore, O namesake of grace,
Entreat Christ God, that He save us who honour thee!

Holy Hierarch Éadberht, Bishop of Lindisfarne

Saint Éadberht of Lindisfarne

On the sixth of May, the Holy Orthodox Church venerates another holy and righteous man of the Old English North, the saintly bishop Éadberht of Lindisfarne [i.e. Edbert], a worthy successor to Saint Cuðberht of the same Holy Isle. His tenure as Bishop of Lindisfarne overlapped somewhat with that of Saint Wilfrið, who served as the interim bishop after Cuðberht’s repose and before Bishop Éadberht was selected. Unlike Wilfrið, Éadberht seemed much more comfortable with the Celtic tradition that was then in favour on the Holy Isle, and he ruled the see with a fairly gentle hand. Saint Bede describes Saint Éadberht thus in his History of the English Church and People:

Subsequently [after Wilfrið left] Éadberht was consecrated, a man who was well known for his knowledge of the Scriptures, his obedience to God’s commandments, and especially for his generosity. For each year, in accordance with the Law, he used to give a tenth of all beasts, grain, fruit and clothing to the poor.

We know nothing about Éadberht’s life prior to his election as bishop. However, once he began his tenure at Lindisfarne he not only continued his ascetic, scholarly and charitable works – including his eremitical withdrawals into a remote cell on the Holy Isle, ‘alone at some distance from the church in a place surrounded by the sea’, twice each year for Lent and for the Nativity Fast – but he also undertook some much-needed projects for the churches on Lindisfarne. In particular, the church that was built by Saint Finan of Lindisfarne had a leaky roof, and so Éadberht renovated that church with a roof lined with lead.

Saint Éadberht also took up the task of translating Holy Father Cuðberht’s relics from their resting place on the Holy Isle into a reliquary at ground level, so that they could be better venerated by the monks. At Éadberht’s insistence, this translation took place on the eleventh anniversary of his burial. The monks dug up Saint Cuðberht, expecting to find little more than dust and weathered bones at his grave. Instead when they uncovered him, they found his body whole and completely incorrupt. Not only was his flesh intact, but even his joints moved freely as though he were merely asleep rather than dead. Even the vestments in which he had been buried were unsoiled, and looked as fresh and white as clouds. The monks were overcome with awe and terror, and when one of them found his tongue he rushed to Saint Éadberht’s Lenten cell to inform the bishop of what they had found, and also brought some of Saint Cuðberht’s vestments with them to show Éadberht and confirm their story.

When they had done so, Éadberht took the garments in his hands and kissed them with love, as though they were still upon Cuðberht’s living body. ‘Clothe the body in new garments, in place of those that you have removed, and place it in the coffin you have prepared,’ he directed them. ‘I have certain knowledge that the grave hallowed by so great and heavenly a miracle will not remain empty for long.’

As he said this he was overcome by emotion, and his deep voice quivered. The brethren, dumbstruck, withdrew themselves and at once obeyed his instructions: clothing Saint Cuðberht’s body with fresh vestments, laying it in the new coffin, and placing him within the sanctuary that he might be venerated by all. It was not long after this that Saint Éadberht was taken with a serious ailment that grew steadily worse, and he departed to his æternal reward on the sixth of May, 698. The brethren who had attended him, remembering what he had said, took up Saint Éadberht’s body and lay it in Saint Cuðberht’s lately-opened grave and in the coffin. There the relics of both saints worked great healing wonders for those among the brethren and also among the laity who suffered various illnesses and afflictions. Saint Éadberht was succeeded by Saint Æþelwold.

In 875, when the Danes attacked Lindisfarne, Saint Cuðberht’s and Saint Éadberht’s relics were both removed by the monks together and were also placed together wherever they went: to Melrose, to Chester-le-Street, to Ripon and at last to Durham. The reliquary was destroyed in the harrowing of the monasteries, but at least some of the relics of Cuðberht survived. Holy Father Éadberht, kind-hearted friend of the poor and witness to the holiness of the saints, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!’

Holy and Righteous Æþelræd of Bardney, King of Mercia, with Holy Passion-Bearer Ósþrýð, Queen of Mercia

Bardney Abbey, Lincoln

The fourth of May is the feast day in the Orthodox Church of Saint Æþelræd, King of Mercia, and his passion-bearing Northumbrian wife, Saint Ósþrýð. Two incredibly devout monarchs of Old England, Æþelræd and Ósþrýð were more renowned for their gifts to the Church than for any great deeds in war or diplomacy – even though their very marriage was meant to smooth over the rough relations between Mercia and Northumbria. Ósþrýð, after all, was the niece of Saint Óswald, and greatly advanced his cultus by her personal devotion and piety. Her wrongful and politically-motivated death was one of the factors that made Æþelræd forsake the world and take the Benedictine cowl.

Saint Æþelræd was one of the Iclingas, son of the infamous Penda of Mercia, born around the year 645. His older brother Wulfhere managed to reëstablish Mercian sovereignty from Northumbria and was named king in 658, when Æþelræd was thirteen years old. In order to secure a peace with Northumbria, he was married to the daughter of Óswiu King, a Christ-loving and generous-hearted girl named Ósþrýð. Wulfhere died of illness in 675, and Æþelræd took the throne.

One of his very first acts as king was to raise an army, march south, invade Kent and raze Rochester to the ground. This may have been a punitive expedition against Hlóðhere of Kent, whose brother Ecgberht had ordered the two sons of Eormenræd of Kent to be murdered, which suggests that he may have been close kin of the two young boys. On the other hand, it may have been an attempt to keep Hlóðhere from threatening Surrey, over which Wulfhere had exercised suzerainty. Whatever the grounds, Hlóðhere was forced to acknowledge Æþelræd as overlord, and Rochester as a see was reduced to penury.

Æþelræd also threatened strife with his neighbours northward, though here Saint Theodore of Tarsos intervened to keep the peace. There was a battle on the Trent between Mercia and Northumbria in which Ósþrýð’s brother Ælfwine was killed. This could have led to further violence between the two neighbouring kingdoms, but Saint Theodore managed to convince Æþelræd to choose the path of wisdom. At Theodore’s urging, Æþelræd made a formal apology to the Northumbrians as well as a payment of weregild for Ælfwine’s life.

Æþelræd King was, in fact, a far better builder than he was a fighter – particularly when it came to churches. He coöperated with Saint Theodore’s plans for a reorganisation of the English Church in Mercia, as the Bishopric of Lichfield was growing altogether too large, ungainly and irregular. He was assuredly influenced in this by his pious wife Ósþrýð, and together the two of them made substantial donations to the foundation of new churches throughout his territory including Long Newnton, Somerford Keynes and Tetbury. Tradition holds that Æþelræd was involved in the foundation of Saint Mary’s Abbey in Abingdon. He certainly founded Bardney Abbey, where he would one day renounce the world and follow Christ in the monastic path, and both he and Ósþrýð would become regular and generous patrons of this Benedictine house of prayer.

Æþelræd had a stormy, up-and-down relationship with Saint Wilfrið, which was the mirror of his relationships with most other English kings. At first the two did not get along at all; the strong personality of Wilfrið combined with Æþelræd’s interest in keeping Northumbria sweet all but assured the exiled bishop would meet with a frosty welcome. The king’s tune changed significantly toward the end of his earthly career. Whether that was because one or both of them had mellowed in temper, or because Æþelræd’s relationship with Northumbria had deteriorated, is unclear. Nonetheless, Æþelræd became a steady supporter of the aging and battle-weary Wilfrið in his attempts to return home from exile and settle in his beloved abbey at Ripon.

In 697, Æþelræd’s wife Ósþrýð was brutally slain by his own þegnas. One hypothesis is that she was killed in vengeance over her sister Ealhflæd’s complicity in Peada’s death. Or it could simply have been the case that Northumbrians like Ósþrýð were simply not that well-liked in Mercia at the time. However, because Ósþrýð was a true and devout supporter of the Church, and because her death was considered unjust and politically-motivated, she has been considered a saint of the pre-Schismatic Church. It would be appropriate, in Orthodox terms, to call her a ‘passion-bearer’: someone who met her death in a Christlike way but who was not killed expressly for her faith. Ósþrýð was buried, apparently at her husband’s insistence, in Bardney Abbey alongside her uncle Saint Óswald, whose cultus she had encouraged throughout her life.

Seven years after his wife’s death, Æþelræd died to the world, gave up his crown to his son Cœnred, and went to live as a simple monk at Bardney. It may well be that Ósþrýð’s death was a determining factor in this decision, in which case his desire to live close by her relics may be seen as a touching gesture of affection. Or it may have been a broader sense of disillusionment with the politics, violence and intrigue of the Mercian court. Be that as it may, even as a monk, he did keep abreast of political affairs; he was apparently the instrument of reconciliation between his son and Saint Wilfrið. He did not likely long outlive his son, who died in 709. He was buried at Bardney and venerated as a local saint alongside his wife. Righteous monarchs Æþelræd and Ósþrýð, just rulers and benefactors of monasteries, pray unto Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

Debunking some hasbara talking points on Palestine

Speaking as an ethnic Jew who converted to Orthodox Christianity largely through the Antiochian Orthodox Church in Pawtucket, a significant part of which belongs to Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian Arabic (along with Armenian and Coptic) immigrant communities, I have grown a lot more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. Having had Palestinian classmates and co-workers in grad school also helped significantly there – so Mazen, if you’re reading this, know that you helped change at least one person’s mind! I also have grown a lot less tolerant of transparently-phoney, cynical and, yes, stupid talking points that are put out by ultraconservative elements of the Israeli government and their backers in the United States. The following does not pretend to be an exhaustive debunking, but instead provides a sampling of answers to common talking points you will find on social media.

There is no letter ‘P’ in Arabic, therefore Palestine is not Arabic.

This particular linguistically-ignorant claim was made on the floor of the Knesset by Anat Barko, and has been adopted by a number of equally-illiterate conservative hasbara groups here in the US on social media. Well, about that. See this letter here: פ? It begins the word Palastiynah פלשתינה which is still used in Hebrew to refer to the gæographical region. It’s called ‘pe’ in manuals of Hebrew grammar, but (still today for most Hebrews) it actually signifies the phoneme /f/. That is to say, many Hebrews today pronounce it similarly to the way Arabs do: Falastiynah (or Arabic Falastîn).

Both the Hebrew letter pe פ and the Arabic letter fâ ف not only carry the same phonetic value (ooh, look, see that ‘p’ in ‘phonetic’ carrying the /f/ phoneme? whoops, there it is again!), but they actually historically descend from the same letter in the original Phœnician (sorry, Punic – I guess those damn Phœnicians didn’t exist either since the Romans couldn’t pronounce their name right) writing system: Pe or Fe. It’s the same damn letter. Heck, it actually even looks similar in both ‘child’ writing systems of Hebrew and Arabic. Etymologically-speaking, the two words Palastiynah and Falastîn are exact cognates with each other. We’ll get to some further linguistic and etymological fallacies a little bit later, though.

The Palestinian people did not exist before 1967 (or 1948, or 1918).

The infamous Golda Meir quote from 1969 sadly still has a life of its own among the American and Israeli right-wing today, and you’ll even hear it expressed among Democrats. Unfortunately, these people even get Golda Meir wrong, because her point was not that Palestinians did not exist, but that Palestinians did not have an independent country of their own prior to 1948, being subject either to Ottoman rule as a part of the province of Syria, or to British rule as a part of the Palestinian mandate. What Ms Meir is actually saying is still rather morally grotesque – she was deliberately trying to exculpate violent land thefts and expropriations by European Ashkenazim of Arabs’ land by pointing to prior imperial rule over said Arabs – but to take from her quote the idea that the Palestinians didn’t actually exist as a people prior to the creation of the State of Israel is a double distortion of historical fact.

In truth, Palestinian identity – though this is somewhat controversial – can be traced back to the failed revolt against Ibrahim Pasha’s rule in 1834, which brought the rural fallâhîn and Bedouin tribesmen of the Levantine countryside together with urban burghers in al-Quds, Nâblus, al-Khalîl and Safad. The Arabs in Palestine rebelled against Ibrahim Pasha for two reasons: on the one hand, they sought to avoid conscription, taxation and forced labour for the army; and second, they objected to the policies of cultural and religious assimilation that were being promoted by Ibrahim Pasha. The rebellion therefore involved a broad swathe of Levantine society – both nomadic Bedouins and settled fallâhîn, both rural and urban Arabs, both Christians and Muslims.

Even though the rebellion was brutally crushed and the events of 1834 generally forgotten, the revolt did inspire the inhabitants of Palestine to begin thinking of themselves as having a shared local identity that was not just Ottoman, not just Arab and not just associated with their millet. In this case, then, the Palestinians were very little different than the peoples of the Balkans, who likewise formed these groups of local interest which only later blossomed into nationalist sentiment. That sentiment formed, it cannot be stressed enough, among people who were already living there.

The term Syria Palæstina was invented by the Romans as a symbol of Judæan subjugation.

Uh, no. The history of the gæographical term Palæstina (or, more correctly, Παλαιστίνῃ) dates back to Herodotus in the fifth century BC, who used it in his Histories to refer to the district of Syria then locally called ‘Canaan’. In this, because he was using primarily Ægyptian source material, he was borrowing the Ægyptian place-name for the region, which was Pelešet. Both of these facts are correctly accounted for in the Jewish virtual library. There is a seed of truth to this claim in that the Romans did merge Judæa with the surrounding territory in Syria, and they did rename the whole region Syria Palæstina in order to humiliate the Jews and quell further revolts. But the hasbara claim that the Romans invented the term ‘Palestine’ for that purpose is cynically ahistorical and misleading.

There were no Arabs living in the Holy Land in the 19^th century.

You’ll usually see various travelogue accounts used to bolster this claim, including that of Samuel Clemens, who claimed the Holy Land was ‘desolate and unlovely’, and ‘untenanted by any living creature’. Chalk that up for one more literary grudge I have against that guy, along with his summary dismissals of Walter Scott, Jane Austen and Alfred Russel Wallace. But what you won’t see in these carefully-curated hasbara versions of the Western travelogues are the reasons there was such poverty and desolation in the Holy Land – the fact that a rebellion had been put down there only about twenty years prior, and the reprisals had killed off twenty percent of the population. It’s like claiming that Europe was an uninhabited barren wasteland after the Thirty Years’ War, or after World War Two – which, in fact, many parts of it were. In 1800, the population of the Holy Land was 275,000 people, mostly Muslim. By 1881, the population of the Holy Land had grown again to around 500,000 people, of whom 87% were Muslim, 9% were Christian and 5% were Jews. Most of these indigenous Jews – the Mizrahim – had never left Palestine for millennia and were as much victims of displacement by the influx of Ashkenazim after 1948 as their Christian and Muslim neighbours. Palestine was hardly terra incognita prior to 1947.

The Bible is the Zionists’ deed to the land of Israel.

If I may directly quote the words of my Hebrew teacher, Dr Paul Tarazi:

The necessity for discussing the way the Bible looks at God’s alleged promise to secure out of Canaan an eternal deeded property to the Jews of all ages need not be justified. The bloodshed and misery caused by such a misreading of the Bible and carried out throughout the twentieth century into ours is, in itself, horrific. Linking it, directly or indirectly, to God’s Word and thus His will is, to say the least, blasphemous.

The covenantal understanding of God’s promise to Abraham and his progeny – among whom, it must be said, are the Arabs and the other Semitic peoples – in fact precludes any reading of the Bible as a ‘deed’ to the land. The only true deeded proprietor, the only true melek מלך in the Hebrew Scriptures, is God; the others – that’s us, by the way; Jews, Muslims and Christians! – are merely His tenants, merely His guests. Only the later, pernicious influence of modernist nineteenth-century nationalist ideology would attach to the Scriptural phrase ‘land of Israel’ or ’ereṣ Yisra’el ארץ ישראל, a fee-simple property claim by an entire national group. The Bible specifically enjoins peoples – but in particular God’s people – to practise hospitality and mutual aid to people who do not have even that level of claim upon property. ‘For you were strangers in Ægypt’ is not merely a polite reminder to the people of Moses; it is in fact a soteriological and eschatological claim, in fact: that if you do not treat strangers hospitably, then you are still in Ægypt and you are still a stranger to God. Again, Dr Paul Tarazi:

Throughout the Bible, God’s law summons its hearers to love and care for anyone in need living on His earth. It even asks them to behold God’s face, that is, His presence, in that of their presumed enemy, as Jacob was taught in his encounter with God and Esau. This divine commandment is pushed to its ultimate meaning in Jesus’ teaching about love, which is magisterially summed up in the words of John: ‘He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.’

If you read George Antonius’s book The Arab awakening, you will realise how keenly Arab observers understood the religious issues, and also how hard that ideal was to put into practice for everyone involved. The imperialist European peoples are implicated as well – particularly the French, the Germans and the British – who did not exercise hospitality to the Jewish strangers in their own midst, but instead murdered them. And then, in seeking to expiate their sins without cost to themselves, they transplanted them into a land and a patrimony which was not theirs in the first place to give. As long as we living in the West do not come to understand our own fault in this, our own rôle in creating this misery (both ideologically and at the base level of political interests), the tragedy will continue to play out and the suffering of the Palestinian and Jewish peoples affected will not end.

Holy Hierarch Brieg, Bishop and Abbot of Saint-Brieuc

Saint Brieg of Saint-Brieuc

The first of May in the Orthodox Church is also the feast day of Saint Brieg, the patron of Saint-Brieuc in Brittany. A Welshman of Ceredigion, Saint Brieg played an active role in the fifth- and sixth-century Christianisation of the Bretons. Like his contemporaries Tudwal, Corentin and Malo, he founded a monastery in Brittany which served as a beacon of education and sanctity in the northwestern peninsula of Gaul.

Brieg [also Briog, Breock, Brieuc or Briomaglus] was born to a noble couple, Cerp and Eldrudd, who lived in Ceredigion. His name was actually originally Briafael; however, after an angel appeared to his mother Eldrudd and persuaded her otherwise, he went by his pet-name of Brieg. His parents sent him abroad into Gaul when he was only nine years old, in the company of Saints Illtud and Padrig. There he learned the Gospels and the ways of Christ from Saint Germain of Auxerre, who consecrated him as a priest when he was old enough. However, Brieg took a desire to return to his native Wales, to Ceredigion.

Saint Brieg set up a hermitage, later a monastery, at the site of Llandyfriog in western Wales. From here he began preaching the Gospel to the local people. He spent some time here before he was visited by an angel and told to undertake a seaward journey to Rome. He boarded a ship with 168 other souls on board, and set sail. On their way, they were attacked by a sea monster, which was warded off by the power of Brieg’s prayers. They landed in Cornwall, where Saint Brieg set about again founding churches and teaching and healing and giving among the local populace. In Cornwall, Brieg’s sojourn is remembered by the toponym of St Breock, where the saint is said to have landed. It is said that he converted the heathen king Cynan Meriadog, the brother of Saint Elen of the Ways.

From Cornwall Saint Brieg made his way into Armorica, landing in Finistère and making his way northeast toward Tréguier along the River Jaudy. Here Saint Brieg founded the monastery which was later given to his kinsman, also from Wales: Saint Tudwal. Saint Brieg did this on account of a plague that was ravaging his native Wales: he desired to return to help the sick, and left in charge the man he felt best fit to take the responsibilities of being an abbot.

Saint Brieg was not long, however, in returning to the Breton coast. Having left Tréguier in Saint Tudwal’s care, he took eighty-four companions and journeyed to the mouth of the river Gouët, which fell under the lordship of his kinsman Riwal Mawr. At first, it seems, Riwal was none too pleased with having to deal with a band of monks foraging on his own doorstep, territory-wise; however, upon learning that Brieg was his kinsman he ran to embrace him instead. He welcomed Brieg as a royal guest and treated his monks with every hospitality, and even gave up his own manor for the monks to use – though it took some political finagling for the monks’ claims to be recognised by the Franks. The site of this monastery is now the Cathédrale de Saint-Etienne in the village that now bears Brieg’s name.

It’s known that Saint Brieg reposed in the Lord on the first of May, but the foregoing hagiography is rather chronologically confused, and it would be difficult from that alone to pinpoint when exactly he lived. He certainly wouldn’t have lived at the same time as Cynan Meriadog, a Romano-British chieftain under Magnus Maximus who held sway in the 300s. It seems to be the consensus of Breton and French religious scholars and historians that Saint Brieg lived during the sixth century, which would make him more the contemporary of Tudwal than it would make him the contemporary of Saint Germanus. Holy hermit and abbot Brieg, pray unto Christ our God for us sinners!

O holy Brieg, Enlightener of the lands of Wales and France:
With miracles thou didst preach Christ in thy life,
And in death thy fragrance proclaimed thy glory.
Pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved.

Cathédrale de Saint-Etienne, Saint-Brieuc, France

Holy Hierarch Asaph of Tegeingl, Bishop and Abbot of Llanelwy

St Asaph Cathedral, Llanelwy, Wales

One of the great saints of Wales, today in the Orthodox Church we commemorate Sant Asaph, a sixth-century monk and later bishop at the monastery of Saint Cyndeyrn at Elwy. Asaph was one of Cyndeyrn’s closest and most devout disciples, and he took the crozier from him after he returned to the north country.

Asaph [or Asa] was the grandson of Saint Pabo the ‘Pillar of Britain’ of Yr Hen Ogledd by his son Sawyl Ben Uchel. He was therefore, by this connexion, a first cousin of two other great holy men of Wales: Saint Deiniol (ap Dunawd Fawr map Pabo) and Saint Tysilio (mab Brochwel Ysgrithrog, by his wife Arddun Ben Asgell ferch Pabo). Asaph being Cumbrian by blood, it seems natural that he would gravitate to a monastery run by another saint from the British Old North.

Asaph was given to Abbot Cyndeyrn at a young age, presumably by his parents. One miracle from his very early days is given in the Vita of Cyndeyrn. It was customary for Cyndeyrn, as with many other British and Gælic saints (like Dewi Sant, Saint Pedrog, Saint Cóemgen and Saint Neot, to name a few) to perform the ascetic discipline of reciting the Psalms while submerged to his neck in ice-cold water. On one occasion when he was severely chilled after having performed this austerity upon himself, he sent the six-year-old Asaph to fetch him a burning brand to warm him. Instead of a brand, Asaph fetched some embers and hid them in the breast of his cotte. Not only was Asaph not harmed by this, nor his clothes, but the warmth of his faith had brought the cinders out of his clothes bright and glowing. From this episode Abbot Cyndeyrn understood that this child was extraordinarily close to God. This wonder is very similar to one performed by the Breton Saint Malo of Aleth.

The abbey founded by Saint Cyndeyrn at Elwy – now the town of Llanelwy or St Asaph in Wales – was originally built from wood and served as a bishop’s seat as well as a monastic community. The tradition holds that Saint Cyndeyrn’s monastery housed 965 monks. The three hundred of these who were strong and hale in body and suited for outdoor work, were sent to labour in the fields. Another three hundred who were weaker in body, or who were better disposed for fine motor work, laboured in the barns or in the monastery buildings, cleaning or cooking, writing or transcribing as suited their talents. The remaining three hundred sixty-five monks, being cleverest and having the best memories and speaking voices, were assigned – one to a day – to singing in the choir, reading from the Epistles or the lives of the saints at Liturgy and mealtimes, and assisting Cyndeyrn at the altar. Saint Asaph was one of these last, and the dearest disciple to the abbot.

Saint Asaph reached the age of maturity, took the tonsure and later became a priestmonk. He set out from Llanelwy and lived for some while as a hermit in Tegeingl. A number of wonders accompanied Asaph wherever he went. We can tell this from the various toponyms associated with Asaph. There is Ffynnon Asa: Saint Asaph’s holy well in Cwm, the second largest in Wales. Its waters have healed people of rheumatism and mental disorders. There is also Pant Asa, ‘Asaph’s Hollow’, near Treffynnon. There is Onen Asa, ‘Asaph’s Ash’. And also Llanasa, ‘Asaph’s Church’, which may have been the site of his hermitage. All these places are located in Tegeingl, or Flintshire.

After Saint Cyndeyrn declared his intention to depart back to Cumbria, Sant Asaph returned to Llanelwy. He received his friend and abbot’s blessing, and became the second abbot and bishop of the town. He blessed the first cathedral in Tegeingl, which today too is dedicated to Saint Asaph. Asaph served as an exemplary bishop and was much beloved by the folk of Tegeingl, so much so that he was locally venerated as a saint after his repose. He lived to an old age and reposed peacefully in the Lord on the first of May, probably sometime around 598. Holy abbot and bishop Asaph, light of Christ’s Gospel in Tegeingl, pray to Him Who loves mankind on behalf of us sinners!

Holy and Right-Believing Berhte, Queen of Kent; and the 79 Monastic Martyrs of Sînâ’ and at-Tûr

Saint Berhte of Kent

A very happy Bright Wednesday and International Workers’ Day to one and all! It is also the feast day for two great and saintly women of the Orthodox Church: formally for Saint Queen Tamara the Great of Georgia, and informally for Saint Queen Berhte of Kent (also Perchta in her own tongue, or Bertha in the modern spelling).

Berhte was born, probably around 560, to a woman of uncertain background named Ingoberg, and King Charibert I of the Franks. According to the historian Saint Gregory of Tours, her parents’ marriage was not a particularly happy one, on account of King Charibert’s rather abusive and adulterous habits:

Moreover king Charibert married Ingoberga, by whom he had a daughter who afterwards married a husband in Kent and was taken there. At that time Ingoberga had in her service two daughters of a certain poor man, of whom the first was called Marcovefa, who wore the robe of a nun, and the other was Merofled. The king was very much in love with them. They were, as I have said, the daughters of a worker in wool. Ingoberga was jealous that they were loved by the king and secretly gave the father work to do, thinking that when the king saw this he would dislike his daughters. While he was working she called the king. He expected to see something strange, but only saw this man at a distance weaving the king's wool. Upon this he was angry and left Ingoberga and married Merofled. He also had another, a daughter of a shepherd, named Theodogild, by whom he is said to have had a son who when he came from the womb was carried at once to the grave.

In the midst of this unhappy family situation, when she was about fourteen or fifteen years old, Berhte was given in an arranged marriage by her parents to a heathen prince of Kent named Æþelberht, howbeit with the understanding that she would retain her Christian faith and also be allowed the company of Bishop Léodheard (or Létard) in England, to counsel her and to administer the Gifts to her. As Saint Bede relates:

For [Æþelberht] had already heard of the Christian religion, having a Christian wife of the Frankish royal house named Berhte, whom he had received from her parents on condition that she should have freedom to hold and practise her faith unhindered with Bishop Léodheard whom they had sent as her chaplain.

Her new heathen husband gave his Queen Berhte and Bishop Léodheard thereafter the old Roman Church of Saint Martin for their personal religious devotions. We know that she had two children with Æþelberht King: Saint Æþelburg, the wife of the saintly Éadwine King of Northumbria; and Éadbald, himself later King of Kent and a latecomer to the faith, of whom something has been mentioned before on this blog in connection with Saints Laurence and Mellitus of Canterbury. According to Bede, she also had significant sway over Æþelberht’s decision in 597 to welcome to English shores Saint Augustine of Canterbury, who then began the process of bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the English people. Queen Berhte herself indeed showed great hospitality to Augustine and his party of monks, giving them her own chapel for their housing and use in preaching.

The other source by which we know something of Queen Berhte’s life is a letter she received from Pope Saint Gregory the Dialogist in 601, who of course took a deep and intense personal interest in the successes of the mission to England. In this letter, Pope Gregory commends Queen Berhte’s personal faith and welcomes joyfully the news of her help and hospitality to Augustine and to the monks Laurence and Peter who were with him. He compares her, flatteringly, to Saint Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine. (This may be one of the several sources of the later pious tradition that holds Saint Helena herself to have been a Briton.)

However, he does – gently and with most careful diplomatic language – reprove her for being a Christian wedded to a heathen and not having brought her husband to the faith earlier. His reasoning is that her formidable intelligence, book-learning and zealous faith ought to have overwhelmed her husband into accepting Christ long before Augustine arrived. He thereupon encourages her to make up for this slowness by being all the more zealous in converting her husband’s people, and assures her that the fame of her zeal in spreading the Christian faith is known even by the Emperor in Constantinople. Again, this is a highly diplomatic letter. Also, this epistle suggests some noteworthy parallels here in the personal lives of mother and daughter. Like Berhte, her daughter Æþelburg was married young, partially at her family’s behest, to a foreign heathen king. Also like Berhte, she was apparently a bit too slow in getting him to convert for Rome’s liking. (And Pope Boniface is notably less diplomatic in his letter to her, as he accuses Æþelburg of essentially letting her physical attraction to her husband get the better of her.) Both women, however, did exert influence upon their husbands to get them to convert; and both were notably successful.

The date of Saint Berhte’s death is unclear; it is not given by Bede or by any other proximate work of history. It does, however, seem to have been sometime between 604, where she is associated with the founding of Saint Augustine’s Abbey, and her husband Æþelberht’s death in 616, whom Holy Bede believed she predeceased. The Catholic Encyclopædia gives her death date as c. 612, which is probably as good a guess as any.

Since the actual date of her repose seems unfortunately lost to historical record, it is unclear how Queen Berhte became associated with 1 May as her festival. The fact may simply be that May Day was the date of her repose; that the Church’s traditional memory is better and more trustworthy than sæcular record-keeping; and that Henry VIII’s destructive rampage destroyed records about her life that might have proven it to modern eyes. Though I have to wonder also if there isn’t a connexion between her veneration – as the first Christian queen of England, and a beautiful one at that – and the præ-Christian folk custom of appointing a young and beautiful maiden as ‘May Queen’ to open and lead the festivities of the heathen rites to Freya, which fell around the first of May. Let it be borne in mind that it was Pope Gregory’s own explicit approach and directive to Saint Mellitus, not to ban and curse such festivities, but instead to bless them and redirect their energies toward Christian themes instead of idolatrous ones; and this approach met with a great deal of success among the English people.

Nonetheless, regardless of the reasoning, I do feel that it is meet and right after the Paschal feast, when the women were the ones who went out from the tomb of Christ to spread the word of His Holy Resurrection, to remember a good and great woman who bore the exact same news to the people of a chilly island in northern Europe five and a half centuries later. Holy and righteous Berhte, queen, mother and forerunner of the faith in England, pray to Christ our God that our souls may be saved!

~~~

I note also, that Bright Wednesday is, as per the custom of the Russian Orthodox Church, one of the commemorations of the 79 Ægyptian monastic fathers who were killed by brigands, 40 at Sînâ’ and 39 at [EDIT: at-Tûr], in the year 312: including the saints named in the Liturgy as Ashi‘yâ’, Sâbâ, Mûsâ the Teacher, Mûsâ the Disciple, Irmiyâ’, Bûlus, ’Âdam, Sarjûn, Dumna, Baruqlus, ’Ibatiyyâs, Ishâq, Maqâr, Marqus, Bilsamin, Yûsâbiyyûs and ’Iliyâs. These monastics, as we discover from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, had much in common with the fallâhîn of the countryside that surrounded them, and indeed aspired to the virtues that they associated with the peasant lifestyle. They ate only dates and drank only water; and they held long vigils on Saturday to prepare for the Liturgy on the following day; many of them were wonderworkers in life. Today, indeed, Sînâ’, the holy place is still home to monks who make a living working with their hands, after much the same manner as the ascetics of old, and who (thankfully) enjoy a notably closer and more friendly relationship with their Bedouin neighbours now than they did in the 300s.

As for Rafah, the situation there is quite sad. It is divided, today, between a portion in Ægypt, and a portion in Gaza, where the Israeli and Ægyptian governments have erected between them a barbed-wire fence that runs straight through the city. The barrier at the border is causing great suffering and health problems for the Palestinians of Gaza, it creates complications between Palestine and Ægypt, and indeed people are still dying there from violence inflicted upon them by the Israeli armed forces. The border crossing is closed for May Day. So, my fellow Orthodox Christians – for the sake of the saints who shone forth in glory in that city and whom we in the churches of the Slavic tradition remember on this Bright Wednesday, please do remember to say a prayer for suffering Gaza, and to ask God to remember the Palestinian people in His kingdom.

EDIT: The Orthodox Church in America claims that the first city where the Sinaitic monastic martyrs were slain was not Rafah (Raphia), but rather at-Tûr (Raithu), and after a bit further research I am now inclined to believe that the OCA is correct. There was indeed a contemporary Orthodox monastic community in Rafah which is now abandoned, but the desert-monastic communities of the Peninsula, including Saint Catherine’s, were mostly clustered in the Sinaitic southwest, along the as-Suways. My apologies for the error. However, it could hardly be inappropriate still to ask the Sinaitic monks’ intercessions for their poor brethren to the north.

The Monastic Martyrs of Sinai and Palestine