The Second Eve: An Introduction

Fifteen Days, Fifteen Pictures: An Introduction

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ

Tomorrow we start the Fifteen Day Fast, and for the next two weeks this blog is going to do one small thing every morning.

Each day I will take one passage from the Old Testament and show you how the Syriac fathers read it. They found the Mother of God hidden in the strangest places. A bush on fire. A wooden box covered in gold. A ship coming into harbour. Fifteen passages, fifteen mornings, finishing on 15 August with the feast of her falling asleep.

The posts will be short. You can read one before you leave the house.

Why bother with old pictures

Here is the thing our fathers understood that we have mostly forgotten.

When Ephrem looks at the bush that burned on Mount Horeb and did not turn to ash, he is not saying it reminds him of Mary. He is saying something much bigger. Fire lived inside a bush and the bush was still standing. God lived inside a girl from Nazareth and she was still standing. According to Ephrem, that is not two nice ideas that happen to rhyme. It is one God doing one thing, and letting us see it twice, once in a shadow and once in the full light.

The Syriac word for this is rāzā. You already know the word, even if you have not noticed. It is the same word our Church uses for the sacraments, the holy mysteries. A rāzā is something hidden that has been opened up, without ever stopping being a mystery.

So this is not a game of finding clever comparisons. It is the way the Church actually reads the Bible, and it is the way she sings.

One rule I have set myself: in every post, the Old Testament passage comes first and gets read for what it is. A real bush on a real mountain in front of a real frightened man. If we skip past that and go straight to the meaning, the whole thing turns into decoration. The fathers never decorated. They believed those things happened, and that they were already pointing somewhere.

Why the series has this name

There is an image of Ephrem’s that I have never got over.

He says the world has two eyes. The left eye is Eve, and it went blind. Because it went blind the whole world went dark, and people wandered about picking up stones and calling them gods, because they could not see. Then he says: the right eye, bright, is Mary. Through her the Light came and lived among us, and the world could see where it was walking again.

Read that carefully, because Ephrem is not saying what you might expect. He is not saying that Eve was a bad woman and Mary was a good one, so try to be like Mary. He is saying that the world has one way of seeing, and it broke, and in her it works again. And notice what the working eye actually sees. It does not see her. It sees the Light.

That is the pattern of this whole series.

The rule underneath everything

If you take one thing from these fifteen days, take this.

Everything the Church says about the Mother of God is really something she is saying about her Son.

Think about the bush again. Why does anyone remember that bush? Not because it was a good bush. Nobody has ever written a hymn about the shrubbery of Sinai. It is remembered because of the fire that was in it. Take the fire away and there is nothing left to say.

Same with the box in the temple. It was wood covered in gold, and people died for touching it, and not because of the woodwork. It was what was inside.

So every post here will turn, halfway through, from her to him, and it will finish there. If one of them ever fails to make that turn, I have written it badly, and you should tell me.

The fifteen days

• 1 August. Eve, and the knot untied. Genesis 3.
• 2 August. The earth that had never been worked. Genesis 2:7.
• 3 August. A garden, and what grew in it. Song of Songs 4:12.
• 4 August. The ark of the covenant. Exodus 25.
• 5 August. The ship whose cargo is God. Proverbs 31:14.
• 6 August. The bush that burned and was not burnt up. Exodus 3. Feast of the Transfiguration.
• 7 August. The rock struck in the desert. Exodus 17:6.
• 8 August. The tent, and the glory that filled it. Exodus 40.
• 9 August. Aaron’s staff, which flowered in the dark. Numbers 17:8.
• 10 August. The tree that held the ram. Genesis 22:13.
• 11 August. The palace built for the King. Proverbs 9:1.
• 12 August. The chariot that could not hold him. Ezekiel 1.
• 13 August. The gate that stayed shut. Ezekiel 44:2.
• 14 August. The vine, and the cluster of grapes.
• 15 August. Arise, O Lord, into thy rest, thou and the ark of thy strength. Psalm 132:8. Shunoyo.

You will see that the first week is mostly Genesis, the middle is the desert, and the end is the prophets. That is on purpose. The series walks from the beginning of the world to the end of it.

The Feast of the Transfiguration lands on 6 August, right in the middle of our fast, and I have not tried to dodge it. The Transfiguration and the burning bush are the same subject: light that does not destroy what it fills. That post will be the heart of the series.

Where I get things from

At the bottom of every post I will tell you exactly which book I took the quotation from, and the page.

I am doing that for a reason, and I want to be direct about it with you.

There is an enormous amount of material floating around online and in WhatsApp forwards, said to be by Mar Ephrem, which he never wrote. Most of it comes from a later Greek collection that got his name attached to it. It gets copied from one group to the next until everyone assumes it must be true, because they have seen it a hundred times.

Seeing something a hundred times is not the same as it being true. So if I cannot check where a line came from, I will not use it, and if I am unsure I will say so in the post. A shorter post that is true is worth more than a beautiful one that is not.

If you want to read further, everything here comes mainly from Sebastian Brock’s Bride of Light, published by SEERI in Kottayam.

How to use these fifteen days

Read the post, then go and read the passage it is about. The passage is the real thing. The post is just there to get you into it.

A three line version will go to the prayer group each morning for anyone who wants one sentence to carry around during the day.

And do not think of the fast as a fortnight of doing without. We fast because there is a feast at the end of it, and the feast is the point. Ascesis is not a competition and it is not a way of impressing God. It is clearing space.

The Light that lived in her wants to live in us too. That is the whole of it, and fifteen days is not very long to give to it.

See you tomorrow morning.

Your brother in Christ
Jobin