Christ's robe and the True Cross

Today I went to the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta where the robe that Christ wore at the Crucifixion is buried, accompanied by the mantle of the Prophet Elias and a fragment of the True Cross. This abundance of relics has made it the most venerated site within Georgia and the religious home of the Patriarch.

We were shown around by a vigorous elderly lady, dressed in somber black, who knew no English but had learnt her tour by rote and had it by memory. She had been a history teacher, we discovered, and now supplemented her meager pension by giving tours.

There is an operatic story of the cathedral's reconstruction in the middle ages, symbolized outside, and high up, by a bas-relief of a hand holding an architect's instrument. The said architect was young, arrogant and fatally in love with the same woman admired by the King. Through the machinations of an older, displaced architect, the King had the young architect's right arm severed leading to his death. The Church banished the woman to a convent but she chose suicide instead and the King, remorse filled, abandoned his throne for the woods and his grave! I can see it now, suitable for Donizetti perhaps!

Within the Church was an unusual fresco (re-painted in 17th century) of the Psalms of David (of which the lower part is given below)- of all creation singing its praise and in the middle Christ sits in glory within two circles - an inner one of the Apostles and an outer one of the signs of the zodiac. Every day is marked by the creative activity of God - and Christ transforms fate into destiny. It is very beautiful and joyful.

The surrounding town is having a radical face-lift that rather gives it the character of a film set awaiting actors but no doubt it will settle down with time and ageing into a felt place again.

The wider surroundings were beautiful broken out in spring green and by the roadside people sold baskets of gathered lilac branches in purple, pink and blue hues.

Comments

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog