Eyeball to eyeball

It was an uncomfortable moment this morning during the liturgy of the Dormition (the Orthodox equivalent of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin – 13 days late because we use the Julian calendar). Early in the service the deacon has two longish waits in front of the icon of Christ on the iconostasis for the choir to finish the antiphons before coming in with the sequences ‘Again and again, in peace, let us pray to the Lord’.

I stand there face to face to face with the icon of Christ, eyeball to eyeball. I have the whole Syrian situation in the back of my mind. The verse going through my mind is: ‘Vengeance is mine, says the Lord’, that is not Obamas, or Kerry’s or Biden’s. A sense also of the tears of the Mother of God, a concept pretty far from Protestant-dominated US religious sensitivity. The fear, above all, of clumsy intervention, based on an assumption that the world does, or should, operate in our Anglo-Saxon way, that our civilization, with its version of human rights, and its trail of women’s lib, gay lib, etc., is superior to other ones and has the right to play moral policeman. With its attendant damage to the fragile Christian Churches of the Middle East. Mother of God, pray for us.