Friday, 1/2/15
Today we honor Basil
and Gregory, two saints who helped us understand what the Bible teaches us
about the Trinity and about the Holy Spirit. In their search for a deep
understanding, they had great help from Basil’s brother and sister.
Basil’s brother,
Gregory is remembered as Gregory of Nyssa, the place where he later became
bishop. As boys, Basil and the two Gregorys had studied together both in
Alexandria and Athens.
But, I wanted to
tell you about the older sister of Basil and Gregory. Makrina was her name, and
she had inherited their family land in Cappadocia. It was there that she made away
for the three scholars to live comfortably while pursuing their sacred research.
I don’t know enough
about the matter to bring you verse by verse through the Scriptures, but
beginning with St. John’s telling us that God is love, and using other pertinent Scripture passages; they came
around to describing the eternal inner life of the Trinity as something like a Greek specialty in which
three individuals, while holding hands circle each other in a merry dance. The
Greek name for such a performance is perichoresis.
Incidentally, I had
long been afraid of reading about those heavy endeavors in which Basil and the
Gregorys were involved. But then, I was struck by the similarity between
Makrina’s hospitality and the hospitality offered by Lady Gregory of Coole,
Galway, fifteen hundred years later.
Lady Gregory, as one
of the British nobility in Ireland, had been reared by an Irish nurse. The old
woman filled her imagination with stories from Ireland’s mythical and
historical past.
Then, when Lady
Gregory’s husband died, she opened her estate to W. B. Yates, Sean O’Casey, and
John Millington Synge, urging them on to producing dramas and literature that
have enriched us all. I was delighted, in ambling through Lady Gregory’s garden
at Coole to come on the initials of those great writers carved on the same old
tree.
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