Now, I had no developed idea at the time of what an icon is for, religiously – this was a research trip, I emphasized – but the iconographer assured me that she was asked to write or paint icons for many different reasons, none of which she ever questioned. Obligingly, she had laid out for me a score of art books, each with a page opened to an iconographic image of the saint, and asked me to choose the one I wanted for my icon. All I could see was a swarm of colours and figures until two types of St Demetrius came into view: one, like St George, had him seated on a horse, cape flaring behind him, spearing not a dragon, however, but a man writhing on the ground; and a second type, a three-quarter portrait of a saintly figure with a halo and cross. My eyes stopped at the one robed in the richest, most saturated colour of red I had ever laid my eyes on. It was the 15th century Russian version. “This one, please.”

And so, some weeks later, my icon and I set off, the saint carefully bundled in a soft, blue velvet bag. He went everywhere with me. I propped him up in all the rooms I stayed in, from Paleohora in Crete to Thessalonica in northern Greece; from Cetinje, Montenegro, to Plovdiv, Bulgaria; and points between. In Canada I presented him at a conference on iconography and at a literary reading at a Valentine’s Day Tea. At home he fit on a small easel on a corner of my dresser in front of which I lit a votive candle every day.

As I said, I was doing research.  I interviewed theologians and Orthodox priests, surveyed mosaics and icons in many churches and read about them, and began to absorb why the religious icon (literally, image, from the Greek) is such an important, in fact essential, part of Orthodox Christian worship and liturgy. I had absorbed as much – just by spending my childhood and youthful Sundays  inside an Orthodox church – but I had no idea why. Now I was learning.

In a nutshell – and I quote from the small classic on the subject, Orthodox Iconography, by Constantine Cavarnos – “True icons focus the distracted, dispersed soul of man on spiritual perfection, on the divine.” I (re)learned that, on entering a church or chapel, you light a small candle and place it in a candlestand next to an icon or two, you bow and make the sign of the cross, kiss the icon and say a small prayer. (This is veneration, not worship, and acknowledges the essentially symbolic nature of the image. We Orthodox are not worshipping Wood and Paint.) I learned much about the symbolic elements of St Demetrius’s representation, for example: his beardless face means he died a young man; he carries the spear of his martyrdom; his figure is elongated to emphasize his unworldly aspect; the gold of the halo symbolizes the “eternal uncreated light of God.”

Each new approach to this image, from the modest panels in country churches to the grand mosaics of his Basilica in Thessalonica, not to mention the pomp and circumstance of the many vigils and liturgies I participated in on his feast days, thickened the meaning of that serene and self-knowing face that I gazed at, focusing, I hoped, on the divine.

However, as the sages say: a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In my zeal as a researcher, leaving few stones unturned, I found myself following the paper trail of scholars (archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, Byzantinists and Classicists) who disputed the Church’s version of the life and death of Demetrius – that he had been a notable citizen of Thessalonica who had converted to Christianity and was martyred for it during the last of the Roman persecutions of Christians in 304 and whose tomb is located underneath the Basilica consecrated to him. Instead, another story altogether was proposed as having more correspondence with evidence than the hagiography (writing about saints). According to their evidence, Demetrius was a deacon in the Roman town of Sirmium (in modern Serbia) and was martyred there – beheaded and thrown into the Danube –  from where his cult migrated to Thessalonica, establishing that city as an important pilgrimage and therefore commercial site in Byzantium. (After which, it was implied, the Greeks refused to let go of him.) I narrate all this in my book as a kind of sleuthing, while trying to reconcile the disputatious relationship between “materials that the historian can use” and “those he should leave to poets and artists as their property” and to believers. [Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the Saints]

Ultimately the Demetrius of the icon faded from my view: it lost its talismanic property as the “facts of the matter” overtook the “legend” transcribed by that very image. I put him away in his blue velvet wrap and into a drawer and left him there.

Some years later, while visiting a friend in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, I stepped into its Church of St Demetrius. It had recently been handsomely renovated and my friend, an Orthodox monk, urged me to have a look. Yes, the renovated interior was splendid with icons, marble and chandeliers. Outside, I noticed the entry, down a few steps, to a small art gallery, and I stepped in. The exhibit presented the work of graduating students from Plovdiv’s Academy of Fine Arts – along three walls, a long line of icons. I spent a few minutes in front of each, pleased with myself that I had come a long way in this business of Orthodox saints and now could identify almost all the subjects. And then, there he was: St Demetrius; and I stood transfixed. The iconographer/artist had represented him in the familiar presentation of head and shoulders and chest, wrapped in red, beardless and with a full head of thick brown hair. But his expression! Slightly furrowed brow, deeply-lidded eyes, a gaze turned away from me toward something beyond my ken: I had never elsewhere seen such a fusion of physical beauty with sorrowful resignation.

The icon was for sale. I rushed out to find an ATM to pay with Euros. The gallery attendant took my details and, several weeks later, the Saint arrived at my home in Edmonton. I took him to church to be blessed (without the blessing he would only be a painting) and he stands in the “beautiful corner” – bright, shining worship space – on my bedroom cupboard. Demetrius had borne witness to his Christ, and the iconographer has caught him at the moment of his transition from suffering to perfection. I think he is haunted by some memory yet of the life that had been so fresh and muscular even as it bled out of him.  He does not return my undistracted gaze.

This seemed to signal the end of the Divine Liturgy (Mass) and I thought no more about this moment until August 6, 2017, at my church in Edmonton, St Elia Ukrainian Orthodox Church, when I too shouted “Axios!”

This time I knew what was going on – not an ordinary Liturgy but the Holy Sacrament of Ordination to the Priesthood. St Elia parish had not ordained a new priest in 27 years so this was momentous: our Deacon, who had been assisting our priest at Liturgy for a number of years, was that day going to become a priest

According to Orthodox teaching, the process of ordination begins with the local congregation, which is why the church was full. But only a bishop may ordain (that gesture of “the laying on of hands” familiar in all of Christendom, passing on succession to the priesthood from the first apostles). There is an entire ceremony unto itself in welcoming the Bishop to a church so here is His Grace Bishop Ilarion being greeted in the church vestible by  our still-Deacon Roman with the traditional bread and salt on an embroidered cloth.

I had printed out the English-language version of the service so I could appreciate what I was seeing and hearing. Orthodox Liturgies famously engage all the senses – the puffs of incense, sputter of beeswax candles, glitter of vestments and mitres, the tones of ancient hymns, the taste of blessed bread – and I am always moved spiritually to some degree by the ritual theatricality and pile-up of symbols as the Liturgy unfolds.

Added to these, at Fr Roman’s ordination, were the special gestures that intensified the drama we were witnessing. “…two priests exit and bring the deacon before the bishop, who stands in the Royal Doors [of the icon screen].” “Afterwards, the deacon is brought into the sanctuary and, led by the priests, circles the altar three times while the clergy sing.” “They bring the candidate to the bishop, who makes the sign of the cross three times over his head. The deacon kneels before the altar placing his hands on the altar and his head upon his hands.” “…the bishop places his hand on the head of the deacon and recites the prayer, ‘The Divine Grace.'” “While the Senior Priest intones the Litanies, the bishop reads a prayer with his hand still on the new presbyter’s/priest’s head.”

Finally, we all stood up. Deacon Roman, now Father Roman, emerged, momentarily but visibly stunned, from the altar area to stand before us in his new vestments. “Axios!” Bishop Ilarion proclaimed. “Axios!!!!” we shouted our response. “Worthy he is!” We were, in other words, affirming his worthiness to “stand in innocence  before [God’s] altar, to proclaim the Gospel of [His] kingdom,…to receive the reward of good stewardship.” Axios!

And this, precisely, was what those men of Aegina were shouting all those years ago, before I understood anything.

It was, now, for me, a bittersweet moment. The “sweetness” lay in the deep and sustained emotion/mindfulness I felt and witnessed – especially that of the new priest and his wife and daughter – as we welcomed (into a diminishing number of Ukrainian Orthodox clergy) a new priest, in direct and unbroken succession from Apostolic times, in a ceremony I can only describe as literally Byzantine, when celebrants “were clad in a moving wall of embroidered images.” [The Embodied Icon: Liturgical Vestments and Sacramental Power in Byzantium by Warren T. Woodfin]

But there is a “bitterness” too – or, less harshly, a melancholy – for me in the visible and complete absence of women in this Holy Sacrament. In the photo you can see a Reader, a Subdeacon, two Deacons, three Senior Priests, a Bishop and the new Priest, Fr. Roman. These are all categories of clergy, major and minor, and they are all closed to women, no matter how pious, faithful, charitable or, indeed, educated, we may be.

In the ordinary course of my church life, this does not bother me (much), for I feel absolutely no vocation to the priesthood even if the path were open. But I do know women who serve as our cantors (chanters who lead us in congregational singing) as robustly, fervently and expertly as the male cantors but who will never be “elevated” as the men may hope to be, even to the minor rank of Reader. (Cantors are laypeople, period.) And I know women who do receive a “call” to teach and preach but who must leave their  Catholic or Orthodox Church to do so. It is for them that my heart aches for I have been privy to their pain.

My melancholy consists in reflecting ruefully on the steadfastness with which Orthodox theologians refute the case for female ordination even into the Diaconate (an argument that has been simmering since the 1960s). I am a great admirer of the late Orthodox scholar and priest, Rt. Rev. Dr. Alexander Schmemann – he is a beautiful writer, passionate, exigent and devout – and so I turned to something he had written, “On Women’s Ordination,” where I hoped to read a statement that would cheer me up. http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles6/SchmemannOrdination.php

He admits that the Orthodox Church has never faced this question: “It is for us totally extrinsic,” meaning he finds no basis, no terms of reference to female ordination “in our Tradition, in the very experience of the Church”, and therefore is simply not prepared for it. He then references, consolingly I think, the famous passage from the Letter of Paul to the Galatians, in which Paul reminds us baptized Christians that among us, at least, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female.” A radical democracy of the spirit, then, in the very earliest Christian communities?

I shall have a lot more to say about this as I go along (and about St Paul, for whom I have a lot of time) but let me end this post by saying that truly it has been a joy to participate in the Divine Liturgy [“the work we do together”] with Fr Roman, who gets more quietly priestly by the week. Axios!

Fast forward a decade and I was busy travelling around most of Slavic Europe, including Ukraine, in search of the history, politics and culture that explained my generation of ’68 under Communism. I had already written a book about the Sixties in Canada and now was eager to find out how my counterparts in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and, sort of, in Ukraine experienced their 1960s. The book that resulted, Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe (1993), my first real achievement of creative nonfiction, records the rather bruising reality check I experienced as a Western feminist and New Leftist. But the journey had taken me beyond social and political realities. I realized that, since my sojourn in Two Hills, I had been excavating successive layers of personal identity and now, far from having come to bedrock in the history of Eastern Europe, I had laid bare an unsuspected deeper layer, Byzantium.

In retrospect, I can see how it crept up. As mentioned in an earlier post, I had frequently sought peace and quiet of mind and spirit in Orthodox churches and monasteries as I moved around. But these were not yet “Byzantium” to me but simply sites of cultural familiarity. Then I picked up on the jokey contrasts made by local wits between the cultures of espresso vs Turkish coffee, wine vs vodka, Austro-Hungarian vs Ottoman Turkish streetscapes, Latin vs Cyrillic alphabets, right-bank vs left-bank Danube, and the barely-disguised desire of speakers to be associated with the “European” side of the equations. Most dramatically, in Warsaw, after interviewing a young historian of modern Polish history, I walked with him along the city walls above the Vistula River, and followed his gaze as he pointed eastward, across the river to the Praga district, and to the prominent silhouette of a Russian Orthodox church, and exclaimed, “There is Asia!”

I was stunned. “Wait a minute,” I wanted to protest. “My relatives live over there, way east, and they’re not Asians,” but I caught myself on the defensive: what was this anxiety that he and I shared not to be excluded from “Europe”? More to the point, why did an Orthodox church lie outside Europe in this historian’s mind?

In 1988 I was in Kyiv, capital of the fast-receding Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, during the commemorations of the 1000th anniversary of the Christianization – or Baptism – of Kyiv and the land of Rus’ in 988. Christianity was brought to what would become the Ukrainian people not from Rome but from Constantinople. It is an oft-told tale, of how emissaries of Prince Volodymyr of Rus’, still a pagan, had ventured into the great church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople, stood under its immense dome and wondered whether they had been transported to Heaven. Their report convinced Volodymyr to establish Byzantine Christianity on his lands and it was this Baptism that we were celebrating in Kyiv with all the pomp and circumstance as could be mustered by clergy and politicos not to mention the faithful masses. It took me another decade to get started but I knew that I had to write a book about Byzantium, the matrix, the Mother Lode, the progenitrix of the spiritual and popular culture of the Ukrainians, including those emigrants 900 years later who built those onion-domed churches on the Canadian prairie and parkland.

But Byzantium is huge. A thousand years of imperial history: the Second Rome, after the fall of that other one, that endured until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. Immensely wealthy and powerful at its zenith, missionary to the southern and eastern Slavs, repository of Hellenic arts and sciences, interlocutor with neighbouring Islam, “The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor,” as W. B. Yeats had it – what would be my subject?

I tell that story in Prodigal Daughter, how I stumbled on the iconographic representation of St Demetrius of Thessalonica, Great Martyr and Myrrh-streamer, martyred in 304 AD in the northern Greek city of Thessalonica, in the last of the Roman persecutions of Christians. He returned in the sixth century to defend his beloved city by performing miracles that saved it from marauding Slavic tribes. Perhaps the even greater miracle was that these same Slavs would in their turn come to venerate him as one of their own, a saint of Byzantine Christianity safeguarded for them in the Orthodox Church. I knew I had my subject: I would follow Demetrius around the Byzantine world and tell the tale of my people and his.

And so I went back to church. For purely research purposes, you understand – to immerse myself in the world of St Demetrius’s legacy as lived by Ukrainian Orthodox Christians of Canada. I started in Saskatoon (where I was writer-in-residence for a year) in Holy Trinity Cathedral, I bought my first Bible, the Orthodox Study Bible Revised King James Version, I memorized whole swatches of Liturgy, belted out the ancient hymns…and began to write my book. The book was published in 2010 and I’m still in church.

I have an enduring childhood memory of being taken by my father to the Edmonton Exhibition grounds – merry-go-round, ferris wheel, cotton candy – while my mother stood chopping and frying mounds of onions at the food booth operated by the Ukrainian Women’s Association of Canada, Edmonton branch. (This may have been for the hotdogs, perogies/pyrohy being still far too ethnic for public offering.) It’s what women who went to church did – and cooked for weddings and funerals and served tea at Spring Teas – and so I found myself, a few months after becoming a paid-up member of St Elias Ukrainian Orthodox church in Edmonton, welcomed into the January monthly fellowship luncheon team, handed an apron, a knife and a mound of veggies to slice.

The luncheon teams are made up entirely of women, although occasionally a spouse will help with clean-up, and the team captain is responsible for the menu. Unlike the weeks of Lent when the captain has to be particularly creative to go beyond the inevitable humus and tuna fish sandwiches, January is not a fasting period, and our captain is creative with all kinds of meats and cheeses and salads, and team members contribute an astonishing variety of baking. Meanwhile, the Divine Liturgy is proceeding upstairs and we teamsters are given time out to join the line-up of parishioners receiving Communion near the end of the service.

Those staying for lunch drift down and help themselves to beverages but no food until the priest and deacon have joined us and said a prayer and blessing. They are the first at the buffet table and we lunch ladies wait until everyone is eating dessert before we fill our own plates. We do not eat with our guests but are called out by name and given a round of applause before we begin the clean up.

Do I chaff at such retro custom?

Even as I donned that first apron, I felt I was simply taking up the responsibility handed down to me by my mother and her generation: as they had served, so now would I. If this meant food preparation, I was happy to do it, hopelessly gendered as I am (it’s men, for instance, who set up the security system and priced snowblowers). Secondly, it would be churlish to refuse, given that I am now part of a community. And this relates to the fact that I am also an oblate of a Benedictine community, St Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, SK (more about that in another post), and have committed to living as best I can according to the Rule of Benedict which is deeply concerned with hospitality, as in Chapter 53: The Reception of Guests. “Once a guest has been announced, the superior and the brothers are to meet him with all the courtesy of love.”

Benedictines also live according to precepts of humility. Chapter 7: Humility. “Brothers, Divine Scripture calls to us saying Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted.” This has been a new challenge for me, this bid for a change of heart after a lifetime of taking pride in achievements and honours, burnished with a thick shellac of intellectual and emotional defiance as a feminist. I have surrounded myself with people just like me – middle-class, educated, of progressive political bent, well-travelled and usually unchurched – but most of my fellow parishioners at St Elia’s would not recognize themselves in that profile.

When I first sat on the Church Council (and I’m still there), I set myself the discipline of actually listening to the others instead of automatically thinking that I had the best ideas. (“Listen” is the first word in the Rule of Benedict.) Besides, being quiet and listening to people with decades more experience in managing the church was a humbling education: what did I know about when the carpets need to be cleaned, the altar cloths replaced and the pussy willows gathered and bundled for Easter? about which charities to support? How to help a bereaved family? Whether the Honour Guard of the Women’s Association can assemble outside the church at a funeral home? (Yes, it can.) And on and on, not to mention the long memories of feuds and hurts and disappointmentsamong people who know each other all too well. I was the newbie.

But it’s been quite a while since my fellow parishioners made a fuss that the author of “All of Baba’s Children” had joined their parish. I’m just part of the family now, and I accept that, as family, I did not choose these people individually, they came as a group with the territory, and we may not always get along or even have much to do with each other but no one can say we’re not related.

I am now also on the July and October luncheon fellowship teams. I did not volunteer, I was summoned: as we lose women to disability, relocation or death, the ranks thin and those who remain have to step up and fill the gaps. So, two Sundays ago it was my turn again. I was gathering up dirty plates and cutlery from a table when the woman seated there said, “You’re a writer, you shouldn’t be wiping tables.” I was genuinely taken aback: what did that have to do with it?