Category: Authors

Psalm 137 – Ancient Faith – Father Thomas Hopko

Audio Link To Ancient Faith

On the three Sundays before the beginning of Great Lent in the Orthodox Church, at the Matins service, a special psalm is added. It is sung only in the church on these three Sundays in this solemn manner. This psalm is chanted in the church with all the other psalms in the continuous chanting of the psalms during the services, but it is brought forward, it’s highlighted, it’s solemnly chanted on these three Sundays.

It’s done at Matins. Matins on Sunday is always a service celebrating the resurrection of Christ. Every Sunday morning, sometimes late Saturday evening in some churches at a vigil service, the Gospel of the resurrection of Christ from the dead is read. Actually, the resurrection accounts from the four gospels are divided into eleven readings which are read cyclically at the Sunday Matins. Each Sunday you have a different reading about the appearing of the risen Lord after he was crucified.

At this Matins service there are hymns about the resurrection of Christ, there’s a canon about the resurrection of Christ. There’s a great song about the many mercies in the Old Covenant. “For his mercy endures forever” is often sung. There are special verses connected to Psalm 118 about the fact that those who keep the commandments of God cannot die. “Blessed are you, O Lord, teach me your statutes; teach me your commandments, for in them is life.” Christ himself is the only one who kept all the commandments, and therefore could not stay dead, was vindicated by God and raised from the dead.

So you have this marvelous celebration of the resurrection of Christ every Sunday. This is done even during the Great Lenten period. Although Orthodox Christians fast ascetically on Sundays, they still celebrate the Holy Eucharist and celebrate the resurrection of Christ on the Sundays of Great Lent. 

Now, on the three Sundays before Lent begins, this special psalm, 137, is chanted in the most solemn manner. This psalm, 137, is known by its first line: “By the waters of Babylon,” or sometimes translated, “On the waters of Babylon.” That’s how it’s mostly translated in Greek and in Latin. For example, St. John of the Cross, a great Spanish mystic, has a beautiful poem about this psalm, called “Super Flumina—Upon the Waters of Babylon.”

The psalm goes like this:

By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres, for there our captors required of us songs and our tormenters mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion.”

This shows the people of God in exile. They’re not in Judea any more, not in Zion, not in Jerusalem; they’re in Babylon. Babylon in the Bible stands for exile. It’s the Babylonian exile. In the New Testament, this world will be identified with Babylon. Rome, the city of Rome, the pagan Rome, in the book of Revelation, will be identified with Babylon. Babylon is the antithesis of Jerusalem. Babylon is this world as opposed to God’s kingdom. Babylon is the condition of sin and rebellion against God as opposed to the city of peace where God is adored and worshiped and obeyed. You have the tower of Babel in the Bible, the presumption on the part of people that they will build their own city, over and against the city of God.

So Babylon, it can even be identified with the pig pen in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the far country, Jerusalem being the house of the father, or Bethlehem, the house of God; Babylon being that far country, the pig pen, the place of swine, the place of corruption and prodigality, carnality, this age. Sometimes even we speak in America about “the good life,” having “the good life.” Well, in biblical terms, that would be Babylon: simply carnal pleasures, hedonism, opposition to God, self-centeredness. That’s Babylon.

During the weeks before Great Lent begins, the people of God meditate that we are in Babylon. In this world as it is in its fallen, corrupted state is Babylon, opposed to God, opposed to his reign, opposed to his kingdom, opposed to his city. There we are, sitting in Babylon, weeping. We are weeping when we remember Zion. It would be like the prodigal son weeping in the pig pen when he remembered the house of the father. We’re far away from God, and we’re thinking about God, thinking about his city, about his house. We’re remembering it, and therefore we are weeping.

Weeping is an essential element in the Christian life. Jesus said, “Blessed are they, how happy are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.” St. Paul speaks in the letter to the Corinthians about godly grief and ungodly grief. There’s a grief according to God where we weep over our sin, over our exile, over our prodigality. But then there’s an ungodly weeping where we’re simply angry and sad and morose because we’re not getting what we want on our own terms. But there is this godly grief, and the holy Fathers say—even the Liturgy of this time of year in the Church, we have hymns that say, “Those who cannot weep cannot be saved.” There is no salvation without tears.

St. Gregory the Theologian, one great Orthodox saint of [the] fourth century, said there are many things that many different people cannot do. One person, for example, may not be able to help the poor, because he has no money and is poor himself. Another person may not be able to worship God in the Christian community in the Church, because he’s far from a Christian gathering or is ill at home. Another person, he said, may want to offer God a life of purity, but it’s too late; he’s already been corrupted and defiled.

But St. Gregory—and this was said by others: St. Seraphim of Sarov repeated it in the 19th century in Russia—he said there are certain things that everyone can do, no matter what, and two of them are these: Everyone, no matter what, can pray, can remember God. You don’t have to be learned. You don’t have to be healthy. You don’t have to be in a church. You don’t have to have anything, except to be conscious. In fact, some saints say you don’t even have to be conscious, because if you are asleep or comatose, your heart can be awake, remembering God. So one of the things that everyone is called to do is to remember God, never to forget Zion, never to forget Jerusalem.

The other thing is we all can weep. Again, you don’t need to be learned. You don’t need to be rich. You don’t need to be in a church. You don’t need to be healthy. All you need is to be alive, and weeping is possible. St. Gregory said, “Ē dakria pantes,” in Greek: “Tears are for everybody.” St. John Climacus, in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, the book that he wrote—and St. John will be particularly celebrated in Lent; on the fourth Sunday he will be remembered specifically—he said in his book: when the Lord comes in glory to judge us, and we stand before him, or when our life departs from our flesh when we die, we will stand before God, and the Lord will not ask us why we were not theologians. He will not ask us why we were not miracle-workers. He will not ask us why we were not prophets and teachers. He will not ask us why we were not mystics. But he will ask us why we have not ceaselessly wept, why we have not mourned over our sin and the sin of the world, why we have not lamented our exile.

So here we have this psalm, and that’s to remind us of all of this. On the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, and we wept when we remembered God, when we remembered Zion, and on the willows there we hung up our lyres, our harps, for our captors, our enslavers in exile, wanted us to sing. They wanted us to sing mirthful, joyful Babylonian hymns. They wanted us to sing bawdy songs and the kind of stuff you see on television every day. They wanted us to sing, and then they taunted us and said, “Sing us a song of Zion,” in a kind of ridicule.

But then the psalm continues:

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in exile, in an alien country, in a foreign land? How can we sing the songs of Zion in this land of exile?

Then the psalmist cries out:

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither. Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy.

So the exile is singing that Jerusalem has to be above his highest joy, and he cannot ever forget it, and woe to him if he forgets it. Then he even brings a kind of curse upon himself: If I forget it, if I forget you, O God, you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you. Let me not be able to say a word. By the way, in the Scripture, when a person is struck by sin, they are dumb; they cannot open their mouth. They cannot say anything; they cannot use the greatest gift of God, which is the gift of speech. And the right hand is a sign of power, of cleverness, of [ability] to work. So he says if I forget you, let me be able to say nothing, let me be able to do nothing.

Then the psalmist continues:

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Raze it; raze it! Down to its foundation!”

And God did allow those Babylonians to raze Jerusalem to its foundation. The prophet Jeremiah called Nebuchadnezzar the most wicked king who ever lived; he called him “my servant”; “my anointed,” even. “My servant” because, as the prophet Amos said, “ ‘Can God destroy the city, and it is not I who have not done it?’ says the Lord.” The most unbelievable thing in holy Scripture is that the Lord God Almighty razes Jerusalem himself. He razes it to the ground through the Babylonians, whom providentially he sends against it, for the chastisement and the purification and the repentance of his people.

So the exiled person says to God:

Daughter of Babylon, you devastator, you destructive one, blessed, happy shall he be who requites you for what you have done to us.

So the exile says to those who have destroyed his city, the city of God: Blessed is he who will requite you for what you have done. Then the psalm ends with these terrifying words:

Happy shall he be, blessed shall he be, who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock, against the stone.

Now that strophe, that line of the psalm has really scandalized a lot of people. It scandalized a lot of believers, even. In fact, I can tell you, I know some churches where they don’t sing that line. They won’t sing it; they’ll say, “Ah, that’s Old Testamental. We can’t sing that: ‘Blessed is he who smashes your little ones against the rock. Alleluia.’ ” because with the psalm in church, an Alleluia is sung; an Alleluia, a “Praise the Lord” is sung.

But what can that mean? The holy Fathers tell us very clearly. They say this psalm, like all of the psalms, has to be sung and heard in the light of Christ. It is Christ who will destroy all the enemies of God. It is Christ who will himself be crucified out of Jerusalem itself, and in the book of Revelation, the very earthly city of Jerusalem is called Sodom in Egypt, where the Lord was crucified. Tragically, Jerusalem itself, geographically, has become Babylon, according to the Scriptures, because God has been rejected there, and Babylon is the symbol of the rejection of God.

So there is a New Jerusalem, and in the Orthodox Church on the Holy Pascha, on the celebration of the Resurrection of Christ, one of the main hymns will be “Shine, shine, O New Jerusalem,” quoting Isaiah the Prophet. There is a New Jerusalem, a Jerusalem from on high. St. Paul said that Jerusalem is our Mother. It’s the only time “mother” is used in Scripture for anything as a name. The metaphor is there plenty of times, but it says the New Jerusalem from above is our Mother. The kingdom of God is the New Jerusalem, the real Zion.

In order to be with God, to be in the Jerusalem on high, to be in God’s city, in God’s kingdom, Babylon has to be destroyed. God has to be victorious. The very word “gospel, evangelion,” it means the good news of a victory in battle. The word “gospel” doesn’t mean good news in general; it means the good news that our king has destroyed his enemies and ours, and we are now safe and secure. We are now belonging in the protection and the glory of his kingdom.

So Babylon must be destroyed. The enemies must be destroyed. What this psalm tells us, and we find it all through the holy Scripture, [is] that every one of those enemies have to be destroyed. It’s interesting that Moses himself was not allowed to cross into the promised land, across Jordan, because he did not obey God when God said, “Kill all the women and the children. Kill them all, because if you don’t kill them, they will rise up, and they will kill you. This is the allegorical, spiritual interpretation of Scripture. This is what the Scripture is all about. It’s all about God destroying the idols, God destroying the enemies of God, God destroying the destructive ones. It’s all about God being victorious over everything that is not God, that is not divine, that is symbolized in that one word: Babylon.

The holy Fathers say to us that in our spiritual warfare, if we don’t defeat our sins and our passions when they’re small, when they’re infants, when they’re babies, when they’re children, they will grow up and destroy us. You have to kill the sin when it’s little. You have to be faithful in little, and let not the littlest evil live, because if it does, it will grow big and strong, and it will kill you.

So when the psalmist cries out, “How happy is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock,” it means that the enemies of God must be killed when they’re little. Every sin, every evil passion, every crime, every ungodliness, every impiety has to be smashed when it is little.

Then the psalm says it has to be smashed and dashed against the rock. And here the Bible reader, the one who knows the holy Scripture, knows what that rock is. It’s the rock of Christ. It’s the rock that God himself is. How many times in the psalms themselves is God called “my rock”? When the people were saved out of Egypt and needed water from that rock, the Apostle Paul says that rock was Christ.

In his rule for monks, St. Benedict of Nursia, the greatest of monastic fathers in the Western Church, who learned from Cassian and from the Desert Fathers and brought monasticism into Western Europe, he wrote this beautiful rule for monks, and he began the rule with a meditation on Psalm 15, not Psalm 137, but it’s interesting that in that rule he refers to this psalm, Psalm 137, “On the waters of Babylon,” because he said that we are in this Babylonian world, and the monastery should be the New Jerusalem. It should be the city of God. It should be the place where God is adored and glorified. Then he told all of his novices and postulants: When you come into this monastery, when you come to be a servant of Christ and of God, what you must do is smash every enemy against God on the rock. Then he says in his introduction to his rule: the rock is Christ.

The rock is Christ. He is the stone that the builders rejected. He is the cornerstone of the temple of the new city. He is the rock. He is the truth. It’s interesting that in [the] Hebrew language, truth is not an abstract, theoretical agreement of our intellect with reality. The word “truth” comes from the same word as the word “rock.” Truth is what you can depend on, what is real, what doesn’t betray you, which is always faithfully there. God is our rock. Christ is our rock. So blessed are they who smash every Babylonian evil against the rock of Christ.

So the psalm has to be sung in its entirety. It can’t leave out that most perfect ending of the psalm. Generally in the Bible, all the enemies that are mentioned in the Bible are the enemies of God. It’s allegorical. It’s spiritual. The king is always Christ. The lord is always Christ God, and God the Father, but the poor, the needy, the lowly, the exiled, the imprisoned are also Christ, when he becomes man and enters into this. And Christ entered our Babylonian exile, in order to take us back to the Father’s house of Jerusalem.

In the Orthodox Church, in this Lenten season and pre-Lenten season, the words of Psalm 137 are put into our mouth. As St. Benedict himself said, “When we go to church, we don’t put our mind where our mouth is. We put our mouth where our mind is.” As St. Anthony, the teacher of Benedict, said, “We glorify God with the words that he has given to us, and only then may we go to our own words, once his word is firmly established in our heart.”

So when we come to church in this penitential season in preparation for penitence, we sing Psalm 137, “By the waters of Babylon.” These words are put into our mouth so that our mind would be in harmony with our mouth. And when we sing this song in the church, what do we know? We know that we are on the waters of Babylon; we are in exile. We are far from Jerusalem and far from God. We are sitting and weeping. Babylon is ridiculing us, wanting us to sing its Babylonian songs. We cannot sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land, but we’ll never forget Jerusalem. Never, above our highest joy. And then we pray that God would destroy the destroyers, that God would be victorious. He would be victorious in Christ, the Victor, the King, the Rock, and that every enemy of God would be dashed against this Rock, and this Rock is Christ.

Pharisee & Publican – Triodion Synaxarion Reading

It was our Holy Fathers’ idea that through the entire Triodion would be commemorated in a concise form all God’s benefits to us from the beginning, using it as a reminder for all of us that we were created by Him, and were exiled from Paradise through the tasting of the fruit, rejecting the commandment that was given to us for our knowledge, and we were cast out through the envy of the arch villain serpent and enemy, who was made to crawl for his arrogance. That we remained cut off from the benefits of Paradise and were led by the devil. That the Son and Word of God, having suffered in His mercy, bowing the heavens, descended and made His abode in the Virgin and became man for our sake, showing us through His life the ascent into the heavens, through humility first of all then fasting and the rejection of evil and through His other deeds. That He suffered and rose from the dead and ascended once more into heaven, and He sent down the Holy Spirit upon His holy disciples and Apostles, who all proclaimed Him to be the Son of God and the most perfect God. And that once more the divine Apostles acted through the grace of the most Holy Spirit and gathered all the saints from the ends of the earth through their preaching, filling the world on high, which was the intention of the Creator from the beginning. 

Now the purpose of the Triodion intended by the Holy Fathers on these three present feasts of the Publican and the Pharisee, the Prodigal Son, and the Second Coming is a kind of preparatory lesson and stimulation to prepare ourselves for the spiritual labors of the Fast, having put aside our usual corrupt habits. 

First of all they present to us the parable of the Publican and the Pharisee, and they call the week following precursory. For those who desire to go off to do military battle, first ascertain the time of the battle from the leaders, so that having cleaned and polished their weapons, and preparing well all their other matters, and having removed all obstacles from their path, they earnestly go forth to their labors, taking the necessary supplies. Often before battle they tell anecdotes and tales and parables to incite their hearts to zeal, driving off idleness, fear, despair and other inadequate feelings. So the divine Fathers herald the coming fast against the armies of demons as a passion which holds fast our souls to cleanse ourselves of the poison accumulated over a long period of time. Not yet possessing those benefits, let us strive to obtain them, and arming ourselves properly, so let us set off to the labors of the Fast. Now the first weapon among the virtues is repentance and humility. And the temptation to attain the greatest humility is pride and arrogance. So they place before us first of all this present trustworthy parable from the Divine Gospel. It encourages us to shun the desire for the pride and arrogance of the Pharisee, and to cultivate the opposite desire of the Publican for humility and repentance. For the greatest and most grievous passion is pride and arrogance, since this is how the Devil fell from the heavens before the morning star and was cast into darkness. Because of this Adam, the father of our race, was driven from Paradise through partaking of the fruit. Through this example the Holy Fathers encourage all not to be proud of their successes, but always to be humble. For the Lord sets Himself against the proud, but He gives grace to the humble. Better a man who has sinned, if he knows that he has sinned and repents, than a man who has not sinned and thinks of himself as righteous. For Christ said, “I say to you that the Publican went down to his house justified rather than the Pharisee.” This parable reveals that no one should exalt himself, even though he has done good deeds, but rather should always be humble and pray from his heart to God, for even if he should fall into the most serious sin, salvation is not far off. Through the prayers of all Thy holy Hymnographers, O Christ our God, have mercy on us. Amen.

2018 Homily Zaccheus Sunday – Holy Cross Monastery Abbot Seraphim

Today, as we stand at the threshold of Great Lent, the Holy Church gives to us in the Gospel story of Zaccheus an icon of the Lenten journey which lies ahead. It is precisely an icon, because everything happens as it were in a flash, in one single image passing before our eyes. We hear nothing of Zaccheus’ past, and after these few short verses he never again appears on the pages of the New Testament. In fact, it is only in St. Luke’s Gospel that we hear of him at all. Yet for all its brevity, this Gospel passage contains within itself the entire narrative of salvation.

Zaccheus was the chief among the publicans. The publicans, the tax collectors of the Roman Empire, were considered to be the lowest of the low by the Jewish people. This was not only because they had betrayed their own people, becoming officials of the hated Roman occupation. It was not only because they enriched themselves by preying upon the poor, the weak, and the defenseless, openly committing thievery and extortion among their own neighbors and kinsmen. No, they were considered to be abominations above all because in order to become officials of the Roman Empire, they were required to voluntarily make pagan vows and to offer pagan sacrifice. In exchange for the fleeting riches of this life, they had willingly betrayed their God, their people, and their own souls.

Here is vividly shown the ineffable compassion of our Savior. Even before Zaccheus showed any sign of repentance, the Lord not only did not disdain him, but was even willing to voluntarily take upon Himself this greatest of shames before the people of Israel by eating and lodging in Zaccheus’ house. Truly, the Lord gives nobody up as lost, not even those who have deliberately and knowingly betrayed God and cut themselves off from their divine inheritance as “the seed of Abraham, and heirs according to the promise.” Such is the hope and the power of repentance, which the Church places before our eyes on this last Sunday before the Lenten Triodion is opened and the “Season of Repentance” begins.

And truly, all of us … have betrayed and continue to betray our ineffable and divine calling, choosing to turn away towards the riches of this present life, whatever the form they may take in each of our sinful hearts. As Abba Dorotheos warns us monastics: “We think that having left the world and come to a monastery, we have left everything worldly; but here also, for the sake of meaningless things, we are filled with worldly attachments.” We have crucified ourselves to the world, and yet we have not crucified the world to ourselves. We monastics, far more than those living in the world, are without excuse in our love for the fleeting things of this life, yet all of us alike fall many, many times each day.

This is tragic, and yet we will never pass out of the reach of our own failings so long as we are on this earth. In the words of the Apostle James, all of us stumble in many things. Each of these stumblings has idolatry at its heart; in every fall, we sacrifice a bit of our souls which rightly belongs to God. And yet, though seeing more clearly than we do our deep impurity and ingratitude, the Lord does not reject us as we have rejected Him. He yet comes to us, and even now He is coming to us in the Holy Gifts about to be consecrated, coming to lodge with us in the unworthy and neglected house of our soul.

Seeing this, we must all like Zaccheus hasten to come down and prepare a place for the Lord. As the Holy Fathers teach us, to “come down” is to humble ourselves, which is the absolutely necessary prerequisite to any work of virtue. Had Zaccheus not come down and humbled himself, then doubtless he would have been filled with vainglory and smug self-satisfaction at such a great deed as his giving away of all his goods to the poor and to those he had wronged – and he would have thereby lost Christ, who “resisteth the proud but giveth grace to the humble.”

These works of virtue, however, are still quite necessary, especially – as Zaccheus practiced – those virtues which oppose the passions that run strongest in ourselves. It is a spiritual law that if we are not progressing in virtue then we are falling back into sin, and consequently falling away from the presence of the Lord. Yet at the beginning of this Lenten journey, it is essential to firmly remind ourselves that all virtue, all asceticism, and all piety will serve only for our condemnation if they are not accompanied by a sincere striving for humility.

Yet even more than all of this, there is one aspect of today’s Gospel story which we must learn without fail in order to properly begin our Lenten struggle. What happened to Zaccheus which wrought such a great change in his soul? What was it that not only brought about sincere repentance for his former deeds, that not only filled his heart with longing for a better way of life than that of treachery and ill-gotten gain, but which also inspired him to imagine that such a great change was even possible for such a one as he? Certainly not the hatred, scorn and derision of the righteous ones of his day. In short, what turned him away from all the false glamor, ease and pleasure of this life toward the Kingdom of Heaven, and what made him believe that even one who had fallen so far as he had any hope of entering therein?

The answer is quite simple: he caught a glimpse of Christ. We do not know what was happening in his heart up until that time, but we do know that when he saw Christ, everything changed. His life was instantly and forever transformed. Though he was not touched by the healing hands of the Savior, though he was still separated from the Lord by the crowd of his own sins and passions, yet one glimpse which he caught from the top of a sycamore tree was enough to renew and recreate his heart.

And though all of us standing here have betrayed our God like Zaccheus, yet all of us have also, at least once in our lives, in a brief and fleeting instant, beheld His saving face. Some of us may be given the grace to perceive His presence often. For some of us, that moment may never come again on this earth. But it is enough. It is enough, as long as all the rest of our life is a striving (even if through constant failure) to remember that Holy Face, and to purify – as far as we are able – the house of our heart, in the knowledge that He is coming again at the end of the ages to abide there forever. This was the real meaning of Zaccheus’ asceticism, of his total renunciation of all his former life. It was this that led him to his holy death as a martyr. And so it must be for us also, during this Lenten season and during all the season of our life on this earth. All the righteousness and all the asceticism in the world will avail us nothing if at its heart there is anything other than the all-merciful, all-compassionate, and all-forgiving Face of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ, to Whom be honor and dominion, together with His Father Who is without beginning and His all-holy and good and life-creating Spirit, now and ever, and unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Prayer & the Pandemic – OCA’s Bishop Alexis

God remains our refuge, our peace, and our source of courage. Within this trial, this threat to so much that we hold so very dear, there is a call that is given and a promise that beckons. But to hear that call and see the fulfilment of that promise, we need to approach our Savior as His faithful children have always approached Him, not with self-righteous indignation or self-pitying despondency, but with humble, patient hope.

The call is to prayer of the heart. The promise is the purifying and illumining grace of the Holy Spirit. In the emphasis on more frequent communion over the past forty years, we might be tempted to neglect the necessary ongoing moment-to-moment inner communion with Christ by prayer, that talking with Him and walking with Him that characterized most of the lives of the Apostles before and after the institution of the Mystical Supper. Many of our greatest saints were deprived of Holy Communion for periods of time that for us would be unbearable to contemplate, but that for them were periods of continued growth from glory to glory, because they were never without Holy Communion with Christ through prayer. Prayer is not easy; it requires concentration, dedication, and love, but through the gates of prayer, we can touch Christ, Christ can touch us, and we can be healed. It is imperative for us all to learn to serve Liturgy at the Altar of the heart and the time is now at hand. 

During this crisis of the corona virus, we are given the opportunity to become men and women of deep prayer. We are given the occasion to “enter into our closet, and when we have shut the door, pray to our Father which is in secret” (Matthew 6:6), offering Him our repentance, our gratitude, and our love. We can come to understand that “prayer is a safe fortress, a sheltered harbor, a protector of the virtues, a destroyer of passions. It brings vigor to the soul, purifies the mind, gives rest to those who suffer, consoles those who mourn. Prayer is converse with God, contemplation of the invisible, the angelic mode of life, a stimulus towards the divine, the assurance of things longed for, ‘making real the things for which we hope’” (Theodore, the Great Ascetic, Century 1:61).  As Saint Sophrony of Essex puts it, “prayer is infinite creation, far superior to any form of art or science. Through prayer we enter into communion with Him that was before all worlds…Prayer is delight for the Spirit.” (On Prayer, 9).

The Elder Aimlianos whose love for the Divine Liturgy was incomparable once said, “It is pointless to go to Church, unnecessary to attend Liturgy, and useless to commune, when I am not constantly praying” (The Church at Prayer, 14).  A spiritual life of private prayer is not a monastic prerogative, but the common inheritance of all the faithful. The saintly elder further notes, “The harm that befalls us if we do not know how to pray is incalculable. Incalculable? It is the only harm from which we suffer. There is no catastrophe that can compare to it. If all the stars and all the planets were to collide with one another, and the universe to shatter into smithereens, the damage would be far less than that which befalls us if we don’t know how to pray”  (The Church at Prayer, 10). The threat of the virus perhaps can open our eyes to the threat of not knowing how to pray to God in our heart. The threat of the virus may turn into a blessing that can enliven our spiritual life.

The temptation before us is to deafen our ears to this call to active, arduous prayer to approach God and instead to prefer more passive, easier ways for God to approach us. Now is not the time to try to devise any means to avoid this prayer in private, but it is the time to heed the call to prayer in our heart to the God of our heart. There is a rich, inner world beckoning to us, a world where God is all in God. Let’s take the gift of this time to enter into that world.  And if we do so, when we come together for the Divine Liturgy with a yearning magnified by distance apart, that Liturgy will be more radiant and more angelic than anything we have known before. Through a deep life of inner prayer, we will indeed learn how to set aside all earthly cares, that we may receive the King of all.

Pre-Lent – OCA Faith Series – Volume II Worship – The Church Year

The paschal season of the Church is preceded by the season of Great Lent, which is itself preceded by its own liturgical preparation. The first sign of the approach of Great Lent comes five Sundays before its beginning. On this Sunday the Gospel reading is about Zacchaeus the tax-collector. It tells how Christ brought salvation to the sinful man and how his life was greatly changed simply because he “sought to see who Jesus was” (Lk 19.3). The desire and effort to see Jesus begins the entire movement through lent towards Easter. It is the first movement of salvation.

The following Sunday is that of the Publican and the Pharisee. The focus here is on the two men who went to the Temple to pray—one a pharisee who was a very decent and righteous man of religion, the other a publican who was a truly sinful tax-collector who was cheating the people. The first, although genuinely righteous, boasted before God and was condemned, according to Christ. The second, although genuinely sinful, begged for mercy, received it, and was justified by God (Lk 18.9). The meditation here is that we have neither the religious piety of the pharisee nor the repentance of the publican by which alone we can be saved. We are called to see ourselves as we really are in the light of Christ’s teaching, and to beg for mercy.

The next Sunday in the preparation for Great Lent is the Sunday of the Prodigal Son. Hearing the parable of Christ about God’s loving forgiveness, we are called to “come to ourselves” as did the prodigal son, to see ourselves as being “in a far country” far from the Father’s house, and to make the movement of return to God. We are given every assurance by the Master that the Father will receive us with joy and gladness. We must only “arise and go,” confessing our selfinflicted and sinful separation from that “home” where we truly belong (Lk 15.11–24).

The next Sunday is called Meatfare Sunday since it is officially the last day before Easter for eating meat. It commemorates Christ’s parable of the Last Judgment (Mt 25.31–46). We are reminded this day that it is not enough for us to see Jesus, to see ourselves as we are, and to come home to God as his prodigal sons. We must also be his sons by following Christ, his only-begotten divine Son, and by seeing Christ in every man and by serving Christ through them. Our salvation and final judgment will depend upon our deeds, not merely on our intentions or even on the mercies of God devoid of our own personal cooperation and obedience.

. . . for I was hungry and you gave Me food, I was thirsty and you gave Me drink, I was a stranger and you took Me in, I was naked and you clothed Me, I was sick and in prison and you visited Me. For truly I say to you, if you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to Me (Mt 25).

We are saved not merely by prayer and fasting, not by “religious exercises” alone. We are saved by serving Christ through his people, the goal toward which all piety and prayer is ultimately directed.

Finally, on the eve of Great Lent, the day called Cheesefare Sunday and Forgiveness Sunday, we sing of Adam’s exile from paradise. We identify ourselves with Adam, lamenting our loss of the beauty, dignity and delight of our original creation, mourning our corruption in sin. We also hear on this day the Lord’s teaching about fasting and forgiveness, and we enter the season of the fast forgiving one another so that God will forgive us.

If you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses (Mt 6.14–18).

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Lent and the Shaping Of Desire – Public Orthodoxy by John Monaco

Christianity is a religion of desire. At first glance, this statement may seem counterintuitive and contradictory. After all, Christians are told to deny themselves, to take up their cross and follow Christ (Mt 16:24). Several prayers, especially in the Divine Liturgy, also seem to downplay desire. In the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, prior to the reading of the Holy Gospel, the priest prays for the revering of the Lord’s commandments so that, “having trampled down all carnal desires,” the Christian may do that which is pleasing to God. Similarly, the the prayer during the Cherubic Hymn, the priest prays that “No one bound by carnal desires and pleasures is worthy to approach, draw near, or minister to You, the King of Glory.” Church history is filled with numerous examples of ascetics and saints who renounced their desires, whether that includes St. Benedict throwing himself into the thorn bush to chasten his sexual desire, or Eudocia the Samaritan (whom the Orthodox Church commemorated on Forgiveness Sunday) who abandoned her earthly riches and physical beauty to the disdain of her former lovers. Countless entries within the Church’s illustrious hagiography follow a similar trajectory: a person with worldly fame and material pleasures experiences a conversion, and then sells her belongings, and embraces a life of poverty and self-denial. It would then seem that “desire” has an awfully negative place within Christian discourse. In other words, if you desire something, it is probably bad and sinful, and the way to holiness is thus avoiding what we desire and instead pursue those things we do not like.

In theory, one could pursue the Christian life this way. In fact, many have. Assuming desire is evil (particularly bodily desire), one trods the path of famous historical figures: Mani, whose ideas produced the dualistic philosophy of Manichaeism which tormented Augustine of Hippo; Marcion, the Gnostic heretic who repudiated the idea that Christ could have assumed human flesh; Severus, who led an extreme sect of ascetics (the Encratites) and believed marriage, as well as women, were inherently sinful. Orthodox Christian theologians were quick to denounce these figures among others, as such ideas were seen as dangerous and heretical. In affirming the goodness of creation, Orthodox Christianity rejects any notion that matter is evil or that, in order to achieve union with God, one must renounce one’s humanity. At the same time, Orthodoxy is hardly a religion of comfort: the fasting rules (which, of course, can be modified and determined by one’s spiritual father) and extolling of the ascetical life dismisses any idea that Orthodoxy places no demands on its adherents.

Christianity is a religion of desire, precisely because it is concerned with a God who desires to save the human race and who loves mankind. Christians are those who desire to respond to God’s free invitation to love and serve Him here on earth and worship Him forever in eternity. A desire-less Christian is an oxymoron; our intellects are oriented to seek truth and the knowledge of God, and our wills are directed towards loving that which is good and making good use of temporal goods for the sake of loving the Eternal Good. The Christian is the one who desires to follow Christ and orders her desires to pursue those things which lead her closer to Him.

However, as we all know, we do not desire things in a vacuum. Here on earth, human desire is always staged within the context of a fallen world. Our passions move us to desire things outside of their proper place. Desiring sex is good, but the desire to view pornography is not, as it is the selfish inversion and objectification of the sexual act. Desiring to support one’s family and have daily sustenance is good, but the ravenous desire for wealth is not, as it seduces a person to seek pleasure solely earthly things at the expense of finding joy in God. Desiring justice for victims of assault is good, but the desire for revenge is not, as it prevents us from loving our enemies.

Lent is the perfect opportunity for Christians to examine and train their desires—not to eschew them. What is the purpose of asceticism, if not for being the exercise by which we shape our desires to be pure and ordered to their proper ends? Food is good, but an inordinate love for food can result in health problems as well as social ones. Can our time of fasting from meat and dairy help us examine the way in which those popular industries contribute to environmental degradation? Games, movies, and other forms of entertainment are good, but an obsession with the virtual can distract us from the real— including those who are right in front of us. Can our time of fasting from unnecessary purchases and Netflix-binging help us be better stewards of our God-given time, money, and energy? As Philip Kariatlis wrote, “Fasting finds its true meaning when the outward abstinence of food is connected with the inward struggle to intensify our longing for God through the dynamic of purity and repentance.” Renunciation is not an end in itself, but only as a means of ongoing union with God.

Fasting, prayer, and almsgiving are activities by which our desires are purified, our wills healed, our intellects open to the glory of divine truth. Far from being a distraction to Christian life, desire is the very vehicle by which we move closer or farther from Christ. Returning to the liturgy, the lex orandi by which Christians are to base their lives, we come across an anonymous prayer to be recited following the reception of Holy Communion. In this prayer, we see the end (that is, the telos) of our desire: “For You are, indeed, the true object of our desire and the inexpressible gladness of those who love You, O Christ our God, and all creation praises You unto the ages. Amen.”

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