The concept of 'The Law of Love' is one that has haunted me for the past five years, having its roots in papers and conversations at an Orthodox women’s conference in Istanbul. It went on the agenda for a future conference of OFSJB a couple of years ago, and became our theme for this year's Fellowship Weekend. It acquired a sub-title, 'Living in the Holy Spirit', on the way, as a slight clarification of the subject. The aim was that the weekend should be an exploration - 'devotional', 'meditative', 'hands-on' - of some of the truths of our Faith and the living out of them. This article is compiled from brief notes I made for the talks at Ushaw, and includes some subjects that came up in discussion.

We begin where we begin every act of worship, public or private, with the invocation of the Holy Trinity and the prayer to the Holy Spirit: 'O heavenly King …'. We ask the Holy Spirit to 'come and abide in us', to give us the discernment to live within the canons, prescriptions and practices of the Church in the freedom of the Spirit within Holy Tradition.

Both 'discipline' and 'discipleship' come from the same root: discere, to learn; discipulus, learner, a follower of a great leader or teaching. In our everyday use of these two words, we tend to give them a very different emphasis. 'Discipline' is an external, somewhat negative, exercise, whereas 'discipleship' immediately implies a relationship, a response to someone or something worth following. Relationship brings love with it, and we have to learn to bring this response of love to our concept and practice of discipline. If we do, it will be a lamp lighting our path, and our ascesis will be transformed from an arid duty into an exercise of love.

There is a dichotomy in our everyday life between Law and Love because we live in a fallen world, because we, along with all creation, will die. Yet we, along with all creation, have the memory of being in primal innocence, of the freedom of living in love and accord with God and with all creation as it sprang from His heart. St Paul strives towards this in I Corinthians 13, and St Augustine glimpses this in his wonderful exhortation: 'Love God and do what you like.' Yes; this is possible if our hearts are pure and daring enough. In our day, C.S. Lewis touches on this in two of his books. In The Magician's Nephew, his description of the creation of Narnia shows an innocence and clarity that we can hardly dare to imagine. The greater part of Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) is taken up with an attempt to depict an unfallen world and the struggle of innocence, in the person of the young queen, with the incursion of evil.

In the Old Testament, we see a people, the Israelites, whose growing relationship with the unseen God is more and more defined by its keeping of His laws. Before the giving of the Law under Moses, though, great figures reveal to us what the growth of this relationship will mean in human terms.

Firstly, from among many, Noah. In Genesis 6:18, Noah, having been told to build the Ark to save a remnant from the destruction that God would cause the Flood to wreak because of the violence with which men had filled the earth, is told by God that He will make His covenant with him. After the Flood, God spells this out to Noah (Gen. 9:8-17). It is, at this stage, simply 'a covenant', a relationship.

Later, with Abraham, we learn much more about the relationship and the cost it entails. Abraham is an outstanding figure in the Old Testament. His response to God's commands is instant and uncompromising. Firstly, he is told to uproot (Gen. 12:1-3) and go off into the unknown with God's promise that he will be a great nation and a blessing. He goes, and has a son, Isaac, through whom the promises will be fulfilled. But then God tells him to kill his son and offer him in sacrifice (Gen. 22:1-19). This cuts across all the promises and all the hopes, and the response of Abraham's faith is unimaginable. In view of this, it is scarcely surprising that an incident in Abraham's life, the visit of the three angels in the plains of Mamre, has been seen, in the Church's wisdom, as a revelation - an icon - of God the Holy Trinity. From Moses onwards, the Law easily predominates, but the response of loving relationship shines through the account of God's dealing with Abraham.

With Moses, there comes the formalisation of the Law. The Ten Commandments are given: the blueprint, the summary at the back of the instruction manual. They are the first Law, given to a people that is beginning to come into relationship with God and that needs to learn everything from scratch and in detail. God's covenant with His people is worked out through the endlessly-detailed laws and through the experience of living them in relationship with Him. Moses is the mediator: And the Lord said unto Moses: 'Come up to Me in the mount, and be there; and I will give thee tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which I have written, that thou mayest tell them' (Ex. 24:12), and the Law will be the heritage of the Israelites: 'Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob (preceded by chapters of detailed spelling-out of the Law) and I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be My people' (Lev. 26:12). The Covenant is becoming clearer and clearer: 'Live by My Laws and you will be My people.'

As this relationship develops over the centuries, we see different threads emerging. One of the two extremes is that of ossification, of an external and superficial observance that we see in God's cry from the heart through the Prophet Micah (6:3): 'O My people, what have I done unto thee?', and in the superficial, formalised glimpses we have of the Pharisees and Sadducees in the Gospels. The other is the preparation through the ages of her who was, by her response of loving obedience to the angel's words, to become the mother of God incarnate.

Love between God and His people had been implicit and much developed in the Old Testament, but the Law, easily and for long periods, dominated in the history of the Jews, and Christ brings the new dimension of Love being the Law of life in Him. The Ten Commandments were a blueprint for a people newly come to relationship with God. With the coming of Christ, the emphasis on Law gives way to that on Love. In Deuteronomy, the Great Law had been spelled out: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart ...' (6:5), but the Lord re-iterates it in the context of His own Incarnation. The two Great Commandments (the first, as we have seen, a direct quotation from the Old Testament) are: 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength; this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this: thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself' (Mk 12:30,31). In contrast to the forbiddings of the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes (Mt. 5) give positive teaching: the 'guts' of a way of life; internal, not external. They shine with the promise of blessing, and of joy in the Lord. 'By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples: if ye have love one to another' (Jn 13:35).

The Mother of God gives us two 'words': God-ward and us-ward. In Luke 1:38, she makes her response of loving obedience (a pattern for all our responses) to the angel's word and, through that word, to God: 'Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word'. In John 2:5, at the marriage in Cana, she turns to the servants, and to us, and says: 'Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it'. These two 'words' are the expression of the response of her love, and a basic law for us all to live by.

We have clearly come to an interweaving here: 'A new commandment give I unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye love one another' (Jn 13:34). The Law has become love, and Love has become the law. We see, as clearly as it is possible for us to be shown, the cost of love. We saw the cost to Abraham in the Old Testament, and a glimpse of the cost to God. Here, in the New Testament, it is spelled out: 'God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son…' (John 3:16), 'Greater love hath no man than this…' (Jn 15:13).

Where does 'Law' come into our life in God, in the Church? It has no proper place unless we have come to see it as part of fundamental relationship with God, as one side of the coin of which the other is love. When we plunge into the whole question of living within canons and Canon Law, this vision is vital, or we find ourselves bound and constrained by the negative commands that the Law of Love has superseded, and we may well ask ourselves how we have come to this. We have, with regard to the canons and Canon Law, a transforming touch in the title given by St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain to his commentary on Canon Law: The Rudder (Pidalion): the guiding hand through the external observances (a very different image from that of imposed power.)

It is so easy to see the Law as something external and imposed - and, also, so easy to see this attitude in those in power. But, in nature, we see Law as something intrinsic to the life of the animal, plant or inanimate matter. In the years I spent in Serbia, in monasteries, mostly of peasant nuns, that subsisted very greatly from the working of the land and, especially in the last years, living in very primitive conditions as we restored one of the great ancient monasteries, I was given the chance to live the rhythms of nature more closely than ever before: night and day, the week, the month, the richness of seasonal change. Weather patterns and atmospheric pressure also had a direct effect on our lives, and flood or drought were present and costing realities. It is no surprise that the first great Office of the day, Vespers, plunges quickly into a psalm (103/4) that is a paean of joy in God's creation, from angels (ministers and flames of fire) to men (labouring till evening), living creatures (conies, the leviathan) and the whole of creation; all, by its ordered being, giving a joyful testimony to the Source of all things.

We see the 'suspension' of the laws of nature that we often call miracles, though this apparent suspension is still part of that 'Law of God' that embraces all things. Firstly, Christ's miracles - over nature, over the hearts of men and over death. Then those of His disciples and followers throughout the ages. I'll take St Mary of Egypt specially, because she is so dear to me. Her complete metanoia in the church porch in Jerusalem, her walking across the Jordan, the lion who appeared to dig her grave and, a miracle of humility when she and Abba Zossima lay on the ground, asking each other's blessing. In her, obedience won and she blessed him.

How does this all translate into our daily life in the worship of the Church? There are many canons, prescriptions and practices that govern or guide so many of our actions. I will take three particular areas that are common to all of us: Confession, Communion and fasting, and also look at certain aspects of our behaviour in church.

The Gospel teaching on Confession is clear, to priests and to laity. The clergy are given, by Christ, the power to loose and to bind (Mt. 16:19). This is within the mystery of Christ Himself and the special identification with Himself that He gives to each of His servants in the episcopate and priesthood. It is one of the threads of relationship through which God has bound Himself, in His love, to the living Body of the Church, and is for us, in the practice of sacramental Confession (the sacrament of the joy of reconciliation) one of the great sources of the outpouring of the grace of the Holy Spirit. The question of frequency (as also with Holy Communion) is one to be entered into with our spiritual father, confessor or parish priest, keeping in mind (and heart) that a living relationship, firstly with God but also with the People of God, is the root and heart of the practice. A teaching that I have never forgotten, and which I find contains much of the essence of the situation, is: 'Eat when you are hungry and, if you need a bath before eating, have one.'

I can only approach the whole question of the receiving of Communion with awe and trepidation. It is the heart of our life in the Church, of our life in God. There are many 'frameworks' concerning the frequency with which we receive the Holy Mysteries. In my first years in Serbia, we received Communion once in each Fast. This changed, mainly through influence from the Holy Mountain, and in the last years we received Communion once a fortnight, and every week in fasting periods. After so many years in Serbia of attendance at the Holy Liturgy on days when no layperson whatever received the Sacrament, I have come to find an intrinsic wholeness in the celebration of the Liturgy and the act of Communion, and cannot, at the moment at least, separate them. Our practice may well change over the years, but we can never forget that this act, the act of communion in the Holy Mysteries, is the one ordained by Christ Himself at the Last Supper to be a place of encounter with His life in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Laws - rules – impinge on us, perhaps, most strongly where fasting is concerned. Why do we fast? We use fasting to prepare for something special, with the Feast of the Resurrection as the most special event and the other great seasons of the Church's year in their turn. We use it for purification, both inner and outer. I remember Militsa Zernov referring fairly frequently to fasting as a means of physical clean-out. The Lord Himself reminds us of the link between fasting and prayer, and it becomes an unbearable burden if we divorce the one from the other.

In Bishop Nikolai's Prologue, there is a wonderful incident concerning fasting involving Metropolitan Kalinik and Jeladin Bey: 'In the first half of last century, Jeladin Bey ruled over Ochrid. At that time the Church was governed by Metropolitan Kalinik. Jeladin and Kalinik, although of different faiths, were very good friends, and often visited each other. It happened that Jeladin Bey condemned twenty-five Christians to death by hanging, and the execution was to take place on Great Friday. The Metropolitan, deeply distressed by this event, went to Jeladin and besought him to mitigate the sentence. While they were talking, the hour of the mid-day meal arrived, and the Bey invited the Metropolitan to eat with him. A dish of lamb had been prepared for the meal. The Metropolitan excused himself, as the fast prevented him from remaining to eat, and prepared to leave. The Bey was angered and said to him: "Choose: either you eat with me and free twenty-five people from hanging, or you refrain and they hang." The Metropolitan crossed himself and sat down to lunch, and Jeladin freed the people from the death sentence.' Bishop Nikolai begins this account with the words: 'Fasting is a great thing, but love is greater.'

As against this, I remember, when I was living at Gradac in the early Nineties, a friend, Ljubinka, coming to help us prepare for a feast. She had leukemia and, although it had been in remission, it had flared up again and she knew she had not much time left in this world. The Feast of the Holy Cross was approaching. It was a very special feast for the monastery and the village below it, and we asked a blessing to fast and receive Communion on the Feast. The rest of us were given the blessing, but she was told that, as she had fasted and received Communion the previous week, she was too ill to fast so much, and could not therefore receive Communion. I was strongly tempted to have the above passage from Bishop Nikolai read at the evening meal.

Christ's teaching about fasting is very clear: 'When ye fast, be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance, for they disfigure their faces that they may appear unto men to fast…. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint thine head, and wash thy face, that thou appear not unto men to fast, but unto thy Father who is in secret...' (Mt. 6:16). We must not inflict our fasting on others. I have many times heard the comment: 'I'm sorry, I can't eat this; I'm fasting.' In those circumstances, we have already had a choice. If it is during the Fasts, should we be there, in company, at all? If the call of love sends us there, surely it sends us to find some other way of fasting at that moment, and not fly in the face of Christ's teaching, proclaiming our fasting to all around us. One of the monasteries I was in was the parish church for a small hamlet, and we all knew one another in the area. One small boy was a terror to his parents and sisters. When he came to Communion, though, I only ever heard the priest ask him if he had fasted from this or that food; never if he had stopped hitting his sisters! There are so many ways of fasting.

One area that affects women most especially is the practice of the blood-taboo within our worshipping life. There are many who suffer from a rigid, pharisaical interpretation of the rules about blood and participation in the life of the Church. Who among us women knows herself able to approach rules about not receiving Communion, not entering the sanctuary, not venerating icons, when we are menstruating, with the same inner freedom and joy with which we embrace the rule about fasting before Communion? Whatever insights the Church may have about this question, I hope with all my heart that it will be far from the mindless assumption of uncleanness that I have so often met both among the clergy and my fellow-nuns. Christ's healing of the deformed woman in the synagogue on the Sabbath (Lk 13:10-17) gives us the priorities here: liberating from bondage and letting the woman 'walk tall'.

Many of the rules governing our behaviour in church can remain as rules externally applied, but patterns can emerge that illumine them and help us to know and remember God's constant presence with us.

In my years at Gradac, we were in a place where the monastery has been derelict for three hundred years and the parish had not long been restored. The people had become unaccustomed to entering the church, and many of the younger generation had never been into it or any other. I remember the visit of the Chief of Police from Rashka. He himself was a believer, and was at home in church, but his driver was petrified. He stood in the entrance and said to me: 'I haven't a clue what to do. Where do I start?' I explained that we treat the church building very much as any other, in that we greet the Householder as we go in, explaining the particular way we greet Him in church by crossing ourselves and kissing the icon in the centre. This meant that we talked about the Sign of the Cross, about icons and about the way the space in the church was set out: the Altar, the icon screen (that was not, at that time anything other than a bare stone structure), the nave etc. This experience was repeated in many different ways for all of us who did 'church duty', and was such a strong means of contact with the local people and of basic teaching of the Faith.

Another practice, that is not universally practised even in the Russian Church, is the relationship between kissing icons and hands and the receiving of Holy Communion. I was taught this when I came into the Church, and have found it a very strong reminder of Christ's coming and abiding through the Sacrament. We are used to venerating the icon before going up to Communion, but this practice came about because it is, if we are receiving Communion, our last opportunity to do so. We stop this veneration when the Holy Gifts are brought out from the Altar, as we do not venerate the lesser (the icon) in the presence of the greater (Christ Himself in the Sacrament). When we have received Communion, we do not kiss the icon before we leave the church, or the priest's (or bishop's) hand at the blessing, because we have Christ Himself within us, and we do not ask Him, in us, to venerate that which is lesser than Him. Even here, though, the Law of Love needs to prevail. At Zhicha, where this practice was almost unknown, the bishop would stand just inside the west door and bless everyone on the way out - and it would have been totally unacceptable not to have kissed his hand. I found a quick apology to Christ within helped the remembering of His presence even more!

I have spoken about greeting the Householder in church. In the last few years in Serbia, when we had a great deal of contact with the villagers during the building period, I had the chance to experience many of the Christian household practices that had survived the years of Communism. Archimandrite Julijan, who led the building work and remained as spiritual father of the monastery, would take me with him when he went to bless the houses with Holy Water, visited the sick or called in at a Slava. As he went into the house, he said: 'God bless this house and all who live in it', then salute the icon (in the hall or the living room) and bless the family. The saluting of the icon was not just part of his priestly presence, but a greeting we could all use in one another's houses.

Somewhere at the heart of our home, we have a 'Corner of Beauty', a gathering of icons in one place with a lit lamp in front of them. It is here that we will almost certainly concentrate our formal prayers, alone or as a family. If this is not in our bedroom, a lamp in front of one or two icons near the bed is a great comfort and assurance of God's presence.

As Orthodox Christians, we are committed to evening and morning prayer in whatever form we can compass. There are now several translations in addition to the Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayer, that was the only one for decades. This observance gives our day a structure of prayer, and we could add the daily commemorations: Monday, the Holy Angels; Tuesday, St John the Baptist, etc. Each week begins with Sunday and leads on to the next Sunday. If we are preparing to receive Holy Communion on a Sunday or Feast, the days before are coloured by our beginning to use the special prayers, culminating in the evening before and the very precious time on the morning itself, between waking and arriving in church.

Before I came into the Church, I had, as many who come more and more to love Orthodoxy and all it enshrines, begun tentatively to use the Jesus Prayer. Reading all I could about it, two things struck me very especially: its being a tested path to the constant remembrance of God and the need to use it with simplicity. On a first visit to Zhicha in 1971, the spiritual father of the monastery, Fr Dositej, talked with me about its use, and gave me a 'first structure' as a foundation: fifty each of the Jesus Prayer itself, to the Mother of God and to my guardian angel. A rosary is useful, to release the mind from concentrating on counting, and the prayer can be used anywhere - within a time of formal prayer, when travelling (waiting at bus-stops!) or walking in the country.

I have spoken of the icon of the Holy Trinity, 'the Hospitality of Abraham', and want now to return to it in terms of the function of each Person of the Holy Trinity - the 'law' of each Person's role. So much is said today about equality: the equality of men and women, equality of opportunity and so forth. But when we turn to the Holy Trinity, the source of all relationship, we catch a glimpse of the fullness of being and function of each Person, that is unique and in the uniqueness of which we have a share. 'Equality', especially when used to mean 'sameness', has no place here. We are, rather, brought to the edge of that mystery of personhood that springs from God Himself.

In the course of many years' work on translations of the lives of the saints, I have been greatly struck by those who have 'stepped outside the framework', the norm, in their living-out of the love of God. Firstly, St Vitalis, from Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich's Prologue (22 April 22; Part II, p. 87): 'In the time of Patriarch John the Merciful, a young monk appeared, who, as soon as he arrived, compiled a list of all the prostitutes in Alexandria. His way of asceticism was exceptional and singular. During the day he hired himself out for the heaviest work, and at night he went into the brothels, gave the money he had earned to some prostitute and shut himself in her room with her for the whole night. As soon as he had shut the door, Vitalis begged the woman to lie down and sleep, while he spent the entire night in a corner of the room in prayer to God for that sinner. So he kept the sinner from sinning even for one night. The second night he would go to another, the third to another, and so on in order till he had gone through them all, then he went back to the one with whom he had started. By his counsel, many of these sinners left their foul calling; some married, some went into monasteries and others began some honest work for payment. All these women were forbidden by Vitalis to say why he came to them. As a result, he became a scandal to the whole of Alexandria. People reviled him in the streets, spat on him and buffeted him. But he bore it all patiently, revealing his good works to the Lord but concealing them from men. When he died, all became known about him. There began to be many miraculous healings over his grave; people came from far and wide, bringing their sick to it. Spat on by men, he was and is glorified by the all-seeing God.'

Then, Sts Abraham and Maria: (Prologue, 29 October; Part IV, pp. 125-6; Fr Justin Popovich, Lives, Vol. 10, pp. 618-629): Abraham would not rest until he had found his niece Maria, who, after growing up with a desire for virginity, fell into fornication with a monk and, believing herself to be lost, became a prostitute. He found her and, pretending to be a customer, went into her room and revealed himself as her uncle, finally bringing her to repentance and the knowledge of forgiveness.

In the twentieth century, we have Mother Maria Skobtsova, not formally in the Calendar of Saints, but bearing the marks. A Russian aristocrat and intellectual, she married twice and had three children, and then, in Paris in the early 1930s, was called by her bishop, Metropolitan Evlogiy, to be a nun 'in the world', to live for the succour and salvation of others. She worked with Russian girl students, with the poor and needy who found a refuge in her house, and then, during the war, with Jews in danger of arrest by the Nazis. For this last activity, she was denounced, arrested and sent to Ravensbrück. She died there, and there is a very strong probability that she took the place of another prisoner who had been condemned to the gas chamber. If this is what happened, it would be consistent with, and the culmination of, a life spent in the loving, sacrificial service of others.

These examples are, as I have said, of saints who have dared to put the law of love above all others, to be unconventional for the love of God. God alone knows, though, how greatly they were upheld by the prayers of those who, in withdrawal and silence, prayed for them and for those with whom they were engaged, and wrestled with the devil for the souls of those who had fallen away.

We have looked a little together at the relationship between Law and Love. Love leads us to embrace the constraints of living and working in relationship. This is apparently a lessening of freedom, but leads to responses of sensitivity and generosity; the expression of a loving service that is truly freedom in God.

We were back in Durham for this year's conference, housed more conveniently and comfortably this time in Ushaw's purpose-built conference centre. All the same, some of us lost our sense of direction as we sought for our next venue around the cathedral-sized cloister. The college is a fine example of the architecture of nineteenth-century triumphalism, set in splendid countryside. Over the quadrangle looms the large church and numerous outbuildings, including a small gasometer, are gently decaying around the perimeter. Pevsner told us that the roomy and highly decorated chapel of St Joseph, where we held our services, was built for the servants.

In response to suggestions made at last year's AGM, the programme was designed to give more space for thought and the interchange of ideas, both formally and informally. Mother Maria led us on to consider the relationship of love and law in the Old and New Testaments, in the development of the Church and in our lives today, showing how these principles are often the complements of one another. A particularly fruitful discussion, with a rich feedback session, followed her prompts to think of the Ten Commandments as positive, rather than a series of 'Thou shalt nots.' We were encouraged to ask questions and given help in developing our thoughts. In the final plenary session Bishop Kallistos joined Mother Maria in answering our free-ranging questions.

A highlight of the weekend was our visit to Durham Cathedral to sing a moleben at the shrine of St Cuthbert, behind the high altar, and then at the tomb of St Bede. A few people visited the shrine, to light a candle and pause for a moment. Led by Bishop Kallistos and Father Kyril, we held our service. The acoustics were kind, we gained confidence in singing and felt that we had shared in the continuity between the Church of Cuthbert and Bede and Orthodoxy in Britain today. Other visitors, perhaps tourists rather than pilgrims, came into the chapel, surprised that there was 'something going on'; some of them stayed.

The conference formally finished with the Fellowship's AGM on Sunday afternoon. Some of the members were able to stay the night and go on pilgrimage to Lindisfarne the next day.

We missed several members whom we had been looking forward to seeing but who were not well enough to join us. However, being up north meant that we were joined by new friends; we hope that they will be with us next year.

Patricia Owen

Rosemary CARTER is a musician by training, and often leads the choir at Fellowship conferences.

Paul GROVES is a poet, and lecturer in Creative Writing, who regularly writes and broadcasts, and who has won several awards for his poetry. His fourth volume, Wowsers, has recently been published.

Mother MARIA is a nun of the Russian Orthodox Church. She attends the Cathedral in Ennismore Gardens, and is a member of the Fellowship Committee.