Chronicles of the Aeon of the Order of Keepers of the Light: Thy Cross We Venerate

Part One The Abbey of the Exaltation

Once a year, on the day the Order calls the Exaltation, the Wood of Uriel is brought out of the reliquary in the main temple of the abbey — a crossbeam of alloy, blackened by time, on which a Keeper was executed five hundred years ago for refusing to renounce his service to the Light. The Abbot raises the Wood above the ambo and slowly turns it toward the four sides of the temple, and at each turn the community sings "Lord, have mercy" a hundred times.

Novice Nisa stood at her first Exaltation and could not shake off a feeling she considered shameful, yet could not silence.

"Why do we raise an instrument of torture like a banner of victory?" she asked Keeper Agafangel, the eldest in the abbey, after the service. "Uriel wasn't saved by this Wood. He was killed on it. Wouldn't it be more logical to destroy it rather than display it for everyone to venerate?"

Agafangel was in no hurry to answer — he was rarely in a hurry to answer real questions.

"Sit down," he said. "It's a long story, and it isn't about the Wood. It's about what passed through it."

Part Two It Is Finished

"Five hundred years ago, in the time of the Persecutions, the governor of the sector demanded public renunciation of service from every Keeper who was caught," Agafangel began. "Uriel was one of the first to be caught. His judges found in him no real guilt — no treason, no crime — and yet they feared letting him go more than they would have feared a guilty man: he spoke of a power higher than their own, and that frightened them more than any proven offense."

"Like Pilate was frightened by the talk of a Kingdom not of this world," Nisa said quietly, remembering today's reading.

"Exactly so," Agafangel confirmed. "He was bound to this very crossbeam atop a watchtower, in full view of the entire garrison — an execution meant as a lesson to terrify the other Keepers: this is what happens to those who do not renounce. Before he died, Uriel managed to say only two things. The first — to his young disciple Domna, standing below: 'Mstislav will care for you as a disciple. Accept him as your teacher.' He could no longer teach her himself — and in his last minutes he found someone to entrust her to, instead of thinking only of his own pain."

"And the second?"

"'It is finished,'" said Agafangel. "Not 'finished' in the sense of defeat. What ended was not his life, but the work for which he would not renounce. He said it as a man who brings a task to completion, not as a man admitting to ruin."

Nisa was silent, looking at the Wood, still covered until the evening service.

"And what happened afterward?" she finally asked.

"After the garrison guard, wanting to be certain of his death, pierced the crossbeam with a spear where Uriel's heart was, something more than what comes out of any dead body came from the wound," Agafangel said. "A glow came out, unlike anything anyone had ever seen at that outpost — a thin, warm light that lasted until dawn. By morning, the garrison assigned to terrify the Keepers with this execution was itself asking to be relieved of ever taking part in such a thing again. The Persecutions in that sector ended within a year — not out of the governor's mercy, but because even the executioners who had seen that light could no longer pretend they hadn't seen it."

Part Three The Rite of the Exaltation

That evening the main service of the feast began. Agafangel, as abbot of the abbey, raised the Wood of Uriel above the ambo with both hands — the weight of the metal was noticeable even from the back rows — and slowly turned to face east. The choir began to sing "Lord, have mercy," and Nisa joined the whole community in the chant, counting the turns mechanically until she lost count somewhere around the fortieth.

By then the lights in the temple had been dimmed to lamps alone, and the blackened crossbeam raised high in Agafangel's hands suddenly stopped looking to Nisa like an instrument of execution. She saw in it what she had seen on the icons: not an instrument of pain, frozen forever in metal, but a testimony to a man who had passed through that pain without losing himself.

When Agafangel completed the fourth turn and set the Wood on the lectern for veneration, Nisa was among the first to approach.

"Do you still think it should have been destroyed?" Agafangel asked her later, removing his festal vestments.

"No," she said. "But I realized my first question wasn't quite what it seemed even to me. I wasn't really asking about the Wood. I was asking whether something bad that happened to me could ever stop being only bad."

Part Four Not in Spite of, But Through

"We do not teach that suffering is good in itself," Agafangel said, sitting down across from her in the emptied temple. "That would be a lie, and a dangerous one: it would lead people to seek pain for pain's own sake, as though pain automatically sanctified anything. Uriel was crucified by evil men with evil intent. That evil did not become good because faithfulness passed through it. The evil remained evil on their conscience."

"Then what changed?"

"What changed is that evil did not get the last word," Agafangel said. "The persecutors wanted the Wood to become a sign: do not dare to be faithful, this is what awaits you. Instead the Wood became a sign of something else: even here, even like this, faithfulness was not defeated. We do not glorify victory in spite of this wood, but through it, because through it passed the very faithfulness it was meant to break, and did not."

"And what happened to me..." Nisa began, and stopped without finishing.

"The same wood," Agafangel said gently, "the very same as it was in the moment it caused you pain. It won't change after the fact. But it can, with the years, become a place from which a little of that same light flows for someone else — if you, like Uriel, don't let it be the last word about you."

Epilogue We Venerate Thy Cross

The Wood was returned to the reliquary at sunset — until the next Exaltation. Nisa sat a long while in the emptied temple, looking at the lectern where it had just rested.

"Domna accepted Mstislav as her teacher," she said at last. "What became of her afterward?"

"She became a Keeper, trained a dozen more disciples, and lived to a great old age," Agafangel answered. "Her last entries in the abbey's archive end with words she repeated all her life: 'He entrusted me before he tended to himself. That is what he taught me, before he had spoken a single word from the crossbeam.'"

We venerate Thy Cross, O Master, and glorify Thy holy Resurrection.

It is not the instrument that makes faithfulness possible. Faithfulness, carried through the instrument, is what makes the instrument itself worthy of veneration.