Encompass us beneath the precious veil of your protection

Chicago has always been an interesting place for me in terms of my reading in urban studies, and I suppose when I say that I’m coming to Chicago at an interesting time, most people would expect for me to talk about Black Lives Matter and all of the attendant issues wrapped up with that movement – race, class, capital, policing, gentrification, queerness, bodies. I happen to care a lot about black lives and all (and more!) of these attendant issues, and I will post on that in the future not only because what Cornel West calls the ‘black prophetic tradition’ has been integral to my intellectual formation, but also because having arrived in this city, all I feel like I can say is – it feels really complicated here.

Though there are indeed some very intriguing connections between Black Lives Matter and Eastern Christianities (as well as some awkward disjunctures), it would be dishonest for me to say that that is what I was thinking about when I was en route to Chicago – that is to say, I have thought about it, but it wasn’t what I was thinking about on the plane.

As most in the Byzantine world know (at least on the side that’s in communion with Rome), the Chicago Eparchy – the Saint Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy which stretches from Hawai’i to Michigan – has experienced a loss. Two days ago, as I was preparing to leave Vancouver, I received word via my various social media feeds that Bishop Richard (Seminack) had reposed. The news quickly spread across Byzantine internet – indeed, so fast that my spiritual father in Richmond quipped that neophytes should not be hearing about the repose of eparchs before the presbyters.

Because I came into the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church through that little Eastern Catholic mission in Richmond (where much of our attention is focused on what Byzantine Christianity has to say to Asian Canadians), the truth is that I did not know Bishop Richard, and as I come to Chicago, I have a feeling that I’m just going to soak like a sponge in the richness of the various Eastern Catholic Churches from across the spectrum that are establishments in their own right in the Windy City.

But for some odd reason, his repose still seemed to affect me at a deeper level as I was getting ready to go. Maybe my old Anglican angstyness about bishops is showing, but one of the primary (and therefore odd) reasons that I stumbled into the Eastern Catholic Church was because I came to disagree on what bishops were for in the mess of the Anglican Communion. I suppose that bishops are also sometimes seen as sovereigns in the Latin Church too, and for me, this is somewhat of a hairy notion because I came – especially while reading St Ignatius of Antioch (especially the letters to the Ephesians and Smyrneans) – to see bishops as persons. Of course, St Ignatius’s injunctions to submit to the bishop in everything does give off a sense of episcopal power, but this authority, at least as I came to understand it, is because the people gather around the bishop as he celebrates the Eucharist, making Jesus Christ present, and where Jesus Christ is, St Ignatius says, there is the Catholic Church. The power of the bishop is therefore anything but ideological; it is, as Metropolitan John of Pergamon puts it, diaconal.

As the news came out that Bishop Richard had reposed – complete with a letter from Patriarch Sviatoslav himself – I found myself drawn into prayer for his soul, even though I did not know him and am very new to the eparchy that he shepherded. My priest in Richmond likes to emphasize that when we say eternal memory, we’re not asking to remember the reposed forever, but that like the thief asked the Lord on the cross, we are asking that Bishop Richard be remembered by the Lord in his kingdom. Lord, may Bishop Richard’s memory be eternal!

But this also spells changes for the Chicago Eparchy, ones into which I am likely entering. As I pondered the Gospel and the Protection of the Theotokos, I wondered about this as well. Knowing that the eparchy is named for St Nicholas, it reminds me of another story, one that – like the Gospel reading – involves being overwhelmed to the point of drowning, literally.

My priest in Richmond once related to us a story once told by St Philaret, Metropolitan of New York, of the icon of St Nicholas of Myra in northern China, in the province of Harbin, where the Russian Orthodox have had quite a presence (in fact, St Philaret lived in Harbin for over forty years). Everyone, even those who were not Byzantine, knew about St Nicholas because his icon was (of all places) in the train station. One day, a man was drowning – he had fallen through some thin ice – and he cried out, ‘Old Man from the Train Station, save me!’ And there he was, very suddenly, on the river bank, and he ran to the train station and fell in gratitude before the icon of St Nicholas, soaked but saved.

Our father among the saints, the hierarch Nicholas, pray to God for us! Encompass us beneath the precious veil of your protection, Most Holy Theotokos! Lord, save us!

In fact, the weird thing about calling for salvation from the waters, even to the point of edging on a mix-up between Wednesday’s Gospel and St Peter walking on the water, is that all of these watery scenarios remind me of a topography that is completely different: the desert.