Holy Fire

Let's separate it so that, you know, this goes through this corridor, that goes through that corridor." We're thinking ahead, and it gets played against us.

Uh, you have the Holy Fire ceremony where you have the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

You have thousands of people who want to come into a relatively small church and light fire.

And they're holding a candle, small candle, a very large candle with a very large fire on it.

A Greek had that morning received a kick, whilst attempting to tickle it with a switch.

He promised to procure seats for us in the Latin gallery of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in order to witness the distribution of the Holy Fire on the Saturday preceding the Greek Easter.

It is the only place of safety, he said, for you know that on one occasion more than four hundred people were killed at that time in a riot with the Turkish soldiery.

But you do not really mean to go to Hebron by way of An-Es-Shems? Yes, we do, said Agnes.

One part of the chapel, which is twenty-six feet long by eighteen feet broad, contains the tomb; the other is called the Chapel of the Angel.

The two are connected by a low passage, which only admits one person at a time.

In the wall of the outer chapel is a small round hole, from which they say the Holy Fire will be distributed." "Yes," said Agnes, "I saw the hole.

But I sincerely trust the Sepulchre is not genuine, for I should not like to think our Saviour's grave is so much desecrated.

a transcendent legacy built not on stone or iron, but on the quiet, irreversible power of a shared language.

Holy Fire and Hushed Hymns of Greece Stepping inside a local parish later that afternoon, a heavy, sweet scent of incense enveloped me, accompanied by the flicker of candlelight against golden panels and the resonant echoes of ancient hymns.

I had moved out of the ancient data migration and deep into the modern hardware of the Greek Orthodox Church.

The tradition traces its lineage straight back to the early apostles and the Eastern Roman world.

On Good Friday, neighborhoods in Athens and villages across the islands host candlelight processions, carrying a flower-covered beer called the Epitafios that symbolizes the tomb of Christ.

The mood abruptly shifts on Holy Saturday night.

Crowds gather at churches in the dark until midnight, when the Holy Fire, a flame flown in annually from Jerusalem with near-state ceremony, is passed quickly from candle to candle.

The priest chants, Christos Anesti, Christ is risen, and the solemn silence explodes into joyous cheers, fireworks, and ringing bells.

He names Mehron.

He names the holy fire ceremony at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Israeli police have to manage both the crush risk and the long-running territorial feuds between the church sects.

and then the part he actually cares about.

Right.

Right.

And it's why the recommendations out of that analysis were about density monitoring and crowd flow, not about more ambulances.

Let's talk about the Holy Fire, because that's a different shape of problem entirely.

It is.

So while there are many claims about vindicatory miracles in Protestant denominations, when you dig deeper into the claims, you see they are nowhere near as well established as distinctly Catholic miracles.

This also includes allegedly vindicatory Orthodox miracles like the Holy Fire, which my colleague Jimmy Akin has ably explained in his video that I'll link in the description below.

There are also other miracles to consider that affirm theology that is incompatible with many contemporary forms of Protestantism, even if it doesn't directly prove Catholicism, like venerating icons in the East or seeking the intercession of the saints.

So we're still left with the problem of discerning, what is the meaning behind all these events? Response number three, Catholic miracles aren't special because lots of non-Christian religions have vindicatory miracle claims.

They're both the same blood type, AB, 140 points of congruency.

And then we take all that and we tie it back into this phenomenon that's been going on for essentially... 1,700 years in Jerusalem at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Holy Fire.

And we delve into that.

So it's amazing how we in the West have never heard of the Holy Fire.

And yet the Greek Orthodox and others have been celebrating and watching this, including Muslims, for centuries.

So it's all coming out.