In celebration of the Feast of the Three Hierarchs Sunday—the patrons of the Seminary chapel—the community of St. Vladimir's Seminary gathered together for Divine Liturgy and the 39th Annual Father Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture.
His Beatitude, Metropolitan Tikhon presided over Divine Liturgy Sunday morning at Three Hierarchs Chapel. His Beatitude offered beautiful remarks for the occasion, drawing on metaphors of song and instruments:
And, indeed, throughout the service to the Three Hierarchs, these great teachers of the Church are compared to instruments: to panpipes or flutes, to lyres or harps .... The three saints we celebrate today contribute different, but harmonious, sounds to the music of theology. And this image of theology, and of Christian life, as harmonious music is an image of perennial—and indeed, eternal—significance. The service of the three saints teaches us that we Christians, across space and time, have no higher purpose than to contribute our harmonious notes to the great music of God. The Christian who desires to imitate these three great saints must allow himself to be played by the Spirit as a supple, obedient instrument, in harmony with all the music of past ages, and in harmony with his fellow-faithful in his own time. God is able to raise up stones as sons of Abraham, but instead He has chosen each of us to make a humble but irreplicable contribution to His great music.
On Sunday evening the Seminary community gathered again, this time in the Metropolitan Philip Auditorium for the Father Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture. Another five hundred people from around the country and abroad signed up to watch the lecture online. This year's lecture was delivered by The Rev. Dr. Khaled Anatolios, the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.
"The significance of this event is for me deeply personal," Fr Khaled began in the introduction to his lecture. "Though I never met Fr. Alexander Schmemann in person, his writings have had so great an impact on me over the years as to warrant my counting him as both a theological mentor and even, I would say, a spiritual father."
Father Khaled, a scholar of the early Church, went on to speak to “Salvation as Liturgy: Alexander Schmemann’s Liturgical Theology and the Renewal of the Joy of Salvation.” During his talk, as Fr. Khaled discussed the idea of "doxological contrition" and the correlation between joy and repentance as found in the theological vision of Schmemann.
"If we accept Fr. Schmemann's witness to the indispensability of Christian joy, then we have to recognize that the psalmist's prayer, 'Restore to me the joy of your salvation [ps. 50:12a LXX],' has already been fully answered in Christ our Savior," explained Fr. Khaled. "To confess Christ as savior is to partake of the joy of His resurrection and to disseminate that joy. But this is not a matter of superficial emotionality, but rather an effort of constant conversion. Christian joy is a repentance whose starting point and ending point is always the glory of the risen Christ."
The 39th Schmemann Lecture concluded with words of sincere gratitude to Fr. Khaled from Seminary President The Very Rev. Dr. Chad Hatfield, who thanked Fr. Khaled for his "remarkable" and profound message to everyone listening.
A replay of the 39th Annual Father Alexander Schmemann Memorial Lecture is available to watch on the Seminary's YouTube channel.
