FIRST FRUITS OF PRAYER - A FORTY-DAY JOURNEY THROUGH THE CANON OF ST ANDREW by Frederica Matthewes-Green
Ok. I suck at blogging books. Whatever. I read this near the end of February of 2009, at the beginning of Lent as a devotion/meditation to read and pray through during the church season. It’s a book I’ve read multiple times, but one I’ve never blogged before (I don’t think…).
Anyways, the Canon of St Andrew is an incredibly long hymn chanted during Lent in the Orthodox Church–it’s chanted in parts during the course of a couple of evenings, then they bliztkrieg their way through it in one night, with an accompanied reading of the Life of St Mary of Egypt, a looming figure in the world of asceticism and repentant desert dwellers. The hymn itself I think is rather moving, filled with multiple images from the Old Testament of being saved from sin and death and the constant availing of one’s self to the utter mercy and salvation of God.
To those who are unfamiliar with the tropes of wild eyed, bushy bearded and crazy Orthodox monks, this work can come across as very alien, with it’s constant usage of the intercession of the saints and what appears to be whiny emo self-deprecation.
What Matthewes-Green has done is taken this lengthy hymn and divided it up into forty readings with a line-by-line commentary explaining what’s being said, and then at the end of a reading she offers a meditation for your mental perusal about what you just read. Matthewes-Green has a way of making the Orthodox explainable to Western Protestant eyes and ears without comprimising the essentials of Orthodox praxis and theology (and if I’m not mistaken, she was a convert from Protestantism to Orthodoxy).
This book has become an incredibly valuable tool during Lent for me, and it never fails to continue to speak different things to me… which I subsequently forget… but at least Lent comes once a year to try again.