May We Learn To Do Small Things With Great Love — And Keep Doing Them
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(OPINION) A few days ago, I found a breathtaking photo essay by The Associated Press about Father Spyridon Denaxas, an Orthodox monk who since 1971 has prayed and ministered at the gleaming white Panagia Hozoviotissa Monastery, which is built into the face of a cliff on the island of Amorgos in the Aegean Sea.
The monastery has stood there for more than 1,000 years, but today, Spyridon, another monk and a 35-year-old assistant are the only ones left. Spyridon is in his 70s.
The article’s text, by Giovanna Dell’Orto, and photographs, by Petros Giannakouris, provide a moving testament to Spyridon’s joy and lifelong faithfulness. He continues to offer divine liturgy and other ministrations to a handful of pilgrims who climb the cliff from the village below for services. He welcomes sightseers from far-flung regions. He offers his visitors cold water, sweets and shots of homemade honey-flavored raki liqueur.
While Spyridon was away for a recent medical emergency, a swarm of earthquakes hit the area, Dell’Orto writes. All the monk could think about was making his way back to Amorgos to support the residents.
“I wanted to be here with my community, feel their emotions, because I’m responsible. God put me here to care for them,” he told The Associated Press.
The islanders — even its atheists — regard Spyridon with true affection, Dell’Orto says. To them he’s a living icon.
The Panagia Hozoviotissa Monastery is a Greek Orthodox monastery on the island of Amorgos in Greece. (Public domain image)
In a seemingly dissimilar but actually related vein, my wife, Liz, and I attended the funeral this week of a relative of hers who passed away at 91.
The funeral was held in a small Baptist church in an isolated community in what’s got to be one of Kentucky’s more rural counties. It was about as far out in the country as you can get in the Commonwealth, and reminded me of my dad’s comment about a church where he’d preached: “It’s not at the jumping off place, but you can see it from there.”
The church building mirrored the ones I grew up in. The pews, the pulpit, the attendance tote boards on the wall all immediately catapulted me back 60 years. I wasn’t taking notes, but if memory serves me, the Sunday school tote board said the enrollment was 25 and the previous Sunday’s attendance had been 15. I realized with a pang I was witnessing a Christian subculture that I treasure fading into oblivion as farming communities die out one by one, just like the people who once populated them.
Then the pastor stepped behind the pulpit — and delivered possibly the most moving, funny, and concise eulogy I’ve ever heard. Believe me when I say it was great, because I’ve heard, and preached, a trainload of funeral sermons. They’re hard to do well, without falling into bromides and pablum.
The preacher talked about the departed in a way you can only do if you’ve lived, worshipped and wrestled alongside him for decades. He talked about his talents and his exasperating quirks and his generosity and his demons — all with equal grace and, it felt to me, love.
He told how the old man had become a churchgoer in his latter years, how he’d made up his mind to quit drinking and then had actually done it, something the preacher called a miracle. I imagine it was, for that comment drew loud amens from the congregants, all those other folks who knew the deceased well themselves.
After the service, the preacher told Liz that in addition to being the church’s pastor, he was a farmer in the community. He turned out to be in his 70s, like Spyridon.
As Liz and I drove back home, I was struck by how similar the monk and this Baptist preacher seemed, although they live on opposite sides of the planet, speak different languages and belong to vastly different traditions.
They’re both holy men who’ve stayed faithful to their calling even as the world went off and left them, or maybe never much recognized them to begin with.
Mulling it over later, I realized, “That’s what I want to be.” I want to be that guy who stays faithful to his calling no matter what the rest of the world does. That was a quiet breakthrough for me, because I’d been considering retiring from my own small church. Now I know I want to remain faithful for as long as my health holds and my parishioners will have me.
Maybe that’s what the kingdom of God is largely made up of: obscure men and women like Spyridon, the Baptist preacher and me, planted here and there in every nook and cranny of God’s creation, nearly invisible, offering up a liturgy or a cup of water or a gracious memorial wherever it’s needed on a given day by some weary soul.
“In this life we cannot do great things,” Mother Teresa said. “We can only do small things with great love.”
Amen.
Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.