Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church Newsletter September, 2013 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS 238. Father, the prayers for a woman on the day after giving birth refer to uncleanness. That’s upsetting to new mothers. Another person asked: Why do we still have those Churching prayers? Those concepts are from the Stone Age! We shouldn’t do that any more! 234. I know that the Canons say that menstruating women should not come to Church or be communed. Is this Canon still in force in our modern world? Because of the high regard the Orthodox Christian Church has for the miracle of birth and of motherhood, it offers the same rite of purification to women who give birth today as was given to the Mother of God when she gave birth to Christ our Savior. Historically, in our Church tradition, on the day after the birth of a child, the priest comes to the mother and offers prayers of thanksgiving for her health and speedy recovery, and offers a blessing for the health of the child and for its protection from evil and a prayer asking for forgiveness for the mother and everyone in the household who has touched her. In the Old Testament Law, touching blood (or any bodily effluvia – that is anything which flows out of our bodies) would cause anyone to be rendered impure. We don’t have a good word for this idea of ritual impurity. We’ll discuss it below, in depth. On the eighth day after birth, children are customarily brought to Church by their godparents for naming and for baptism. In the contemporary Church in North America, in order to accommodate the wishes of parents to be present at the rites for the newborn, the baptism is often held on the fortieth day after giving birth. On the fortieth day the mother comes to Church to be purified with prayer and for absolution of her sins and to be re-admitted to Holy Communion with our Lord and His Church. The newborn child is then brought into the Church to be Churched, or offered to the Lord. This rite follows the New Testament example of the Virgin and our Lord Himself and their obedience to the Old Testament Law. Saint Luke gives an exact account (2:22-40) of our Lord’s being brought to the temple and His being recognized as the Messiah by Saint Symeon. The Greek text of Saint Luke’s Gospel says “when the days of their purification were accomplished” and not ‘her’ purification. This reminds us that the newborn child was also considered ‘unclean’ or ‘impure’ until it was baptized and brought into the temple and presented to God. The Lord who created the universe also submitted to His own Law, out of love, obedience and respect for His Father. In the Old Testament times, these prayers at the time of Churching the child and its mother were accompanied by an offering. In Old Testament times, exhaustive lists of what you should give when you ask for a blessing are written – the offering you make with your request – a ram, a sheep, a lamb, a dove. You remember the offering the Virgin Mother of God was to make when she presented Our Lord in the Temple. She was “to bring to the priest at the entrance to the tent of meeting a year-old lamb for a burnt offering and two young pigeons or two doves for a sin offering. But if she cannot afford a lamb, she is to bring two doves or two young pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. In this way the priest would make atonement for her, and she would be clean.” [Leviticus 12. 6-8] She and Joseph were poor and they could offer only the two birds. Of course, God didn’t eat these offerings and sacrifices, but they were there for the use of the priests and Levites (Old Testament deacons) and their families. According to Scripture, if a man is worthy of doing the work, he’s worthy to be paid for it. The Apostle Timothy quotes Old Testament Law when he cites Deuteronomy (25:4) and writes: “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer is worthy of his wages.” (I Tim: 5:18). 3 Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church Newsletter September, 2013 On February 2nd of every year, we solemnly celebrate the 40th day after Christ’s birth, on the feast we call the Meeting or Presentation of the Lord in the Temple. Despite the fact that in the celebration of the feast the theme of the Meeting of the Lord with Symeon in the temple is preponderate over the theme of the purification of the Virgin, this feast is considered to be a great feast of the Mother of God. Until recently, the Western Church called this feast the Purification of the Virgin Mary. In the scripture readings for the Vigil of the feast, we hear the Old Testament reading (composite from Exodus 12, Leviticus 12 and Numbers 8) of the prescription that every firstborn male child be consecrated to God because of the Lord’s having delivered Israel from Egypt by slaying all the firstborn sons of Egypt, and for that reason all males shall be circumcised on the eighth day, and after an additional thirty three days of purification, the mother shall bring into the temple a lamb or two turtledoves and two pigeons, shall be purified and made clean from sin. And the offering will redeem the firstborn son. And we hear the reading from the Prophecy of Isaiah (6:1-12), which tells how the angel brought a live coal to the mouth of the prophet to purify his lips so that he might preach the Word of God to the people who would ignore it and be brought to ruin. And those who remain faithful would be greatly multiplied, which parallels the prophecy of the Righteous Symeon (Luke 2.34). We hear, in the hymnography of the feast, how Saint Joseph brought the offering of doves and pigeons for the purification of the Virgin who had not known man, yet gave birth to the Son of God, and how the Creator of the World was brought as a child into the temple on the fortieth day in order to fulfill His own Law. Held in the arms of the Righteous Symeon, who prophesied (Luke 2.35) that the sword which would pierce the Lord’s side would also pierce the heart of the Virgin, this prophecy was fulfilled when the Ever-Virgin Mother saw her Son die on the Cross (John 19.35). In her extraordinary example of humility, the Mother of God submitted herself to all the ordinances of the Law, though she had given birth to the Creator of the Law, in order to show discipline and respect. The Mother of God, who is the Ark, the Temple which contained God, and who in childbirth unites earth and heaven, comes to the temple to be purified so that she may again worship freely there. The Virgin Mary, descendant of the great King David, can only afford to offer two birds for the sacrifice. The price of redemption of her Son, five shekels (Numbers 18:15-16), is paid in the five wounds by which He redeems all of mankind. The Virgin Mother did not feel the pains of childbirth, according to the ancient texts, but she feels the pain like a sword piercing her heart as she watches the spear pierce the side of her crucified Son. In response to the Pure and Spotless Virgin’s exemplary obedience to the Law by coming to the temple to be purified, Orthodox Christian women today also come to be purified through the prayers and absolution of the priest. And as the Virgin came to the Temple to be readmitted to its worship by presenting her Son as an offering to God, ‘redeemed’ or bought back by the sacrificial offering made by Saint Joseph, women today come to be re-admitted to full sacramental Communion with our Lord in the Church, bringing their children to be ‘presented,’ ‘offered up’ and consecrated to God, redeemed by the sacrificial offering made by our Lord, who offered Himself up, once, on behalf of all and for all. In the Churching, although the priest prays to God to cleanse and forgive her, the woman is not being absolved as if giving birth in itself is considered to be a sin. The prayers do ask that the woman be absolved of impurity or uncleanness, but this word should not be understood to mean defilement, dirtiness or sinfulness as a result of having given birth. Remember that abstaining from weekly Holy Communion is a sin, even more so is an abstention of forty days. The Churching does convey the forgiveness of the Church, so there is no need for the mother to come to confession (unless she has other sins she wishes to confess). 4 Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church Newsletter September, 2013 In order to understand why something as holy and wonderful as the event of a mother’s giving birth to a new life can be considered ‘unclean’ and in need of purification, we must look carefully at the close connection between the Old Testament ideas of the holy and of the clean and the ‘unclean’. If we study the concept of ‘uncleanness’ in the Old Testament, we find that contact with three things cause ‘impurity’: 1) contact with physical uncleanness (such as dead and decaying flesh, bodily evacuations and secretions, diseases, and certain animals), 2) contact with, or commission of, moral or ethical uncleanness, and 3) contact with ritual ‘uncleanness’.