Why I am allowed to be alive

This is the Column of Christ's Flagellation, the post of His scourging, the customary place of criminals who suffered for their sins against society, not usually the place of suffering for society's sins, but One Day is was done that way.

This is the Column, dark today, of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, born of the Ever Virgin Mary and of the Holy Spirit, Who did miracles wondrous fair, and fished for mankind, and turned stone into bread, and bread into Eucharist.

This is the Column I saw, and peered into, near the Throne. Only a King such as He would take a Column such as this, with anamnetic iconic force linked across millennia to remind us all that only this King would take a Whipping Post, painted crimson That Day, and make it royal, though ebony for the ages.

This is the Column I saw and kissed one day, last week, like all days, and knew it was My Column once, and should have been my crimson, were it not for a Son One Day who took me past, with you, through the resolution of Time. At this place in Istanbul, above and beyond to the veil of her, who prays for the City still, as she did for her Son Who stood before this Column of His Flagellation, and our Salvation.

From a guide to the Ecumenical Patriarchate, by Fr. John Chryssavgis: Located in the southeast corner of the nave (of the Patriarchal Church of St. George), this column is one of the most treasured and ancient relics of the Church of St. George. It is a portion of the column where our Lord was bound and whipped by Roman soldiers during His Passion and before His Crucifixion. Two other portions of this column are preserved in Jerusalem and in Rome. It is said to have been brought to Constantinople by St. Helen, the mother of Emperor Constantine, after she visited the Holy Land.

Comments

[ochlophobist]

I have much appreciated your travel thoughts in these past few posts. It seems that we Orthodox are tempted in two directions with regard to the EP, to stress how unimportant the see is, or to rhetorically gather behind it in a kind of tired clownish militant fashion that, these days, sounds a bit too much like the drone of a Eugène Ionesco play. But aside from all that one finds the New Rome doing what Orthodox seem to always end up doing - suffer. Sometimes I wonder if the singular witness of our Church to the contemporary world is that we are superbly unsuccessful. And in the midst of their unsuccesses I find so many of my Orthodox brethren saying, as Fr. Schmemann did while cancer ate him away, "Lord, it is good to be here."