In our Nativity Fast preparation, we will be using a lot of materials from a 20th century Romanian saint recently canonized … St. Dumitru Staniloae.
Let’s begin by examining an Orthodox perspective on the condition of our hearts.
What Is The Condition Of My Heart?
And the heart itself is but a small vessel, yet there also are dragons and there are lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. And there are rough and uneven roads; there are precipices. But there is also God, also the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the Apostles, the treasures of grace—there are all things
St Macarius ‘50 Spiritual Homilies and Great Letter’ (Homily 43)
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained
Alexander Solzhenitsyn ‘The Gulag Archipelago’
What Is God’s Purpose For For Us?
St. Dumitru has a very useful way of helping us understand God’s purpose for us? He says:
The fathers emphasized the goodness of God as the motive behind creation … God created all things in order that they might share in his Love, that is, full communion with God … the Good, as scripture testifies, produced everything and is the ultimately perfect Cause… God created the world for the sake of humanity, that the world be led towards the purpose of full communion with Him … only humans in a conscious way can rejoice more and more in the love of God and become God’s partners … The world serves this movement of raising ourselves to our ultimate meaning of achieving our fullness in communion with the personal God. All things impose on us a responsibility before God and before the world itself, and it is by the exercise of this responsibility that we increase in our communion with God and with our fellow human beings.
The Experience of God – Vol 2: The World: Creation & Deification (p.17-18) By Dumitru Staniloae
Can Thirst For The Infinite Be Satisfied By The Finite ?
The human being has a spiritual basis and therefore a tendency toward the infinite which also is manifested in the passions, but in these passions the tendency is turned from the authentic infinite which is of a spiritual order, toward the world, which only gives the illusion of the infinite. Man without being himself infinite, not only is fit, but is also thirsty for the infinite and precisely for this reason is also capable of, and longs for, God, the true and only infinite (homo capaz divini – man capable of the divine). He has a capacity and thirst for the infinite not in the sense that he is in a state to win it, to absorb it in his nature – because then human nature itself would become infinite – but in the sense that he can and must be nourished spiritually from the infinite, and infinitely. He seeks and is able to live in a continued communication with it, in a sharing with it. But man didn’t want to be satisfied with sharing in the infinite, or he believed that he is such a center, he let himself be tricked by his nature’s thirst for the infinite.
So, the human being, instead of being satisfied to remain in communication with the true infinite, and to progress in it, wanted to become himself the infinite. He tried to absorb in himself or to subordinate to himself everything that lent itself to this relation of subordination: dead objects, finite things. Instead of quenching his thirst for the infinite, he sought to gather everything around himself, as around a center. But because man isn’t a true center in himself, this nature of his took revenge; it made him in reality run after things, even enslaving him to them. So passion, as a tireless chase after the world, instead of being an expression of the central sovereignty of our nature, is rather a force which carries us along against our will; it’s a sign of the fall of our nature into an accentuated state of passivity. Our nature, whether it wants to or not, still has to express its tendency for a center outside of itself. By the passions, this center was moved from God to the world. Thus the passions are the product of a tortuous impulse of our nature, or of a nature which has lots its simplicity and tendency to move straight ahead.
The spirit of man has no exact limits and is capable of being filled with the infinite and thirsts to receive it; yet instead of looking for the relationship with the infinite Spirit, it seeks to fill itself with the finite and passing objects. So it is left with nothing and its thirst is never quenched.
…By their irrationality, by their deceptive character, by turning man away from his true goal, the passions keep man in the darkness of ignorance. By the struggle against the passions, the human being escapes ignorance; he returns to the true infinity of God, as a goal of his life and as a liberation of his spirit from the slavery of the world and from the tyranny which the passions represent. This is the meaning of dispassion.
Orthodox Spirituality – The Essence Of The Passions p.77 -79 By Dimitri Staniloae
Are We Attached To The Gifts Of God Or The Gift Giver ?
We are going to use a small booklet written by St. Dumitru for a lot of our initial class work as we prepare ourselves for Christ’s birth. The booklet is entitled ‘The Victory Of The Cross’. Let’s begin with a short Gospel verse:
If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me
Luke 9:23
It’s pretty universal for us to think about gifts as we enter this time of year. St. Dumitru gives us a very different perspective on this relationship between His purpose for us … full communion with God .. and the cross of the reality we experience in the gifts of the world.
The world is a gift of God, but the destiny of this gift is to unite us with God, who has given it. The intention of the gift is that in itself it should be continually transcended. When we receive a gift from somebody we should look primarily towards the person who has given it and not keep our eyes fixed on the gift. But often those who receive a gift become so attached to the gift that they forget who has given it to them. But God demands an unconditional love from us, for God is infinitely greater than any gifts given to us; just as at the human level the person who gives us something is incomparably more important than what is given, and should be loved for himself or herself, not only on account of the gift. In this way every gift requires a certain cross, and this cross is meant to show us that they are not the last and final reality. This cross consists in an alteration in the gift, and sometimes even in its entire loss.
Victory Of The Cross p.1
You can find this booklet in more of its entirety in the following links:
Part 2 – The Cross and God’s Revelation of Its Meaning
Why What Is Natural Doesn’t Seem Natural
St John’s Adult Education 