Category: Faith

In the Desert of the Heart By Paul Kingnorth

For see, you were inside, and I was outside, but I sought you there. Unlovely, I rushed without thinking among the things of beauty you made. You were with me, but I was not with you.’

St Augustine of Hippo

Sometimes it is difficult for me to write anything, because all I want to do is to be quiet. I have wanted this for years, and sometimes I achieve it, but it is fleeting. Maybe less fleeting by the year, though. Maybe the pull is growing, and the will and the ability. Growing slowly, like moss on a stone.

‘If anyone wants to learn the will of God’ said the Russian Orthodox priest Father Alexander Men, in one of his Lenten sermons¹, ‘let him seek silence.’ Christians have known this forever. They have fled to deserts and caves, monasteries and sketes. They have taken up residence on the tops of pillars and in the boles of hollow trees. They knew that the voice of God was both still and small² and could only be heard in silence, would only settle in a peaceful heart. 

Silence – or at least, quiet; peace – is the natural environment of the Spirit of God, it seems, and we live in the world which appears purposefully designed to make this a great struggle. The roar of traffic, the planes crossing the skies, the hum of the electric wires, the black rectangles in our pockets which fragment our attention, stimulate our passions and take us anywhere but the place where we stand. Whatever the world is it makes silence, or even quiet, almost an impossibility. That means we cannot hear God. And when we cannot hear God, we are lost.

Most of us will never get the opportunity to live in the bole of a hollow tree, and probably wouldn’t much like it if we did. But it is possible to be distracted by outward appearances. If you live in the middle of a city, a desert or a forest may seem an attractive haven of peace, but of course it is possible to flee to the wilderness and take your restless, neurotic, world-tangled heart with you. Probably it is quite common. Silence, a peaceful heart, the landing strip of the Holy Spirit, is not achieved simply by fleeing external noise, though this certainly helps. Most of the noise comes from within.

Last Sunday was the second Sunday of Lent in the Orthodox Church. Each Lenten Sunday is built around a different theme, usually around one of the Church Fathers or a story from the Gospels, each designed to take us deeper into what is sometimes called the ‘bright sadness’ of the Lenten descent. The second Sunday is dedicated to the memory of St Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century monk who is celebrated in the Orthodox Church for his defence of the spiritual tradition of ‘hesychasm’, which today forms the core of the contemplative spirituality of the Christian East. 

Hesychasm is one of those Greek words often encountered in Christian Orthodoxy which has no direct English translation; it is usually rendered as ‘stillness’. Hesychastic prayer is the pursuit of inner stillness, not for its own sake, but because this is the opening move of the entire purpose of Orthodox Christian spirituality, which is to seek theosis. This is another one of those Greek words, usually translated as ‘union with God.’ Theosis, according to the hesychasts, is achieved in silence, through solitary prayer and living, the aim of which is to offer up a peaceful heart for the Holy Spirit to dwell within. ‘The Holy Spirit is extremely meek,” wrote the Coptic monk Matthew the Poor. ‘He finds no rest in cries and confusion, or in a heart that is cruel, unjust, wrathful, irascible, or proud.’³ Hesychasm seeks to create the conditions for the Spirit to settle in our hearts; something He can only do if our hearts are at peace. 

St Gregory Palamas is celebrated for the intellectual battle he waged in the early 1300s with an Italian Orthodox monk named Barlaam, who had visited Mount Athos, seen the practice of hesychasm at first hand and been scandalised by it. Barlaam, it is said, had been trained in the Western Scholastic tradition, and was horrified by what today he might call the ‘woo’ of Eastern Christian mysticism. He nicknamed the hesychasts omphaloscopoi, our third Greek word of the day, which translates as ‘navel gazers’. Barlaam thought that the hesychasts were deluded and blasphemous; a position I still hear occasionally today from some Protestants. St Gregory took him on, and his defence of hesychasm won the day in the East. In the process, he helped cement its place at the heart of Orthodox spirituality, where it remains today.

The practice most commonly associated with the hesychastic tradition is that of the Jesus Prayer, which all Orthodox Christians – and plenty of non-Orthodox ones for that matter – are familiar with, and which many of us practice daily, either in the boles of trees or in suburban homes before work or after dinner. It is not, of course, necessary to live in a desert or on Mount Athos to pursue inner silence, though again it may help. It is probably not true that it can be found as easily in the midst of a megacity as it can in a forest, at least for most of us: the temptations, and the distractions, are simply greater, which is why people flee in the first place. Still, the principle is clear, and is much enunciated by the Fathers of the Christian Church: the Spirit of God will only settle in a peaceful heart. Outer peace makes it easier to achieve inner peace, but it doesn’t create it. Inner peace is achievable in central London, just as neurotic self-obsession is possible in a desert cave. 

This subject has obsessed me for years: the subject of silence, of stillness. I once wrote a book about the need to pursue it, and the difficulty of pursuing it as a writer. That book, Savage Gods, was a work of neurotic self-obsession if ever there was one, but it worried away at a question that had grown in me for years. It first arose, I think, when I began practicing Chan Buddhism at the age of forty: a practice which turned out to be a gateway drug to Eastern Christianity, just as soon as I was able to ask Christ to open the gate for me. Buddhism, like hesychasm, begins with the search for inner stillness, which it sees as a necessary precursor to understanding the delusions we tend to call ‘reality.’ This is entirely in accordance with Christian teaching, and indeed with modern understandings of human psychology. 

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as well do with our stories in the end. 

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.

Whether we are writers or not, we create these personal fictions we call ‘identities’, and the older we get, the harder it is for that simple, primal stillness which is the precursor to true prayer to break back through. Back when I practiced Buddhism, I remember seeing with crystal clarity, at a level far deeper than the intellect, that if I wanted to progress spiritually I had to stop pumping out all these words. This was not because language itself was inherently bad – it is hardly avoidable – but because of something at once fuzzier and clearer, which even now I find it hard to explain. It was that words were part of the fiction of the world. It was so clear then – and it remains clear now – that spiritual progress, that work of theosis, requires us to drop all of our illusions. To smash through the cement of words and concepts and identities and opinions. To see ourselves naked before God. To make ourselves simple again.

Jesus, in more than one of the Gospels, talks about children, and what they have to teach us. In Luke’s Gospel⁴, when the disciples attempt to shoo away groups of parents who want him to bless their babies, Jesus rounds on them. ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them’, he says, ‘for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’

In Matthew’s Gospel, meanwhile, the disciples are jostling amongst themselves to achieve Jesus’s favour – or perhaps they are just anxious for some clear guidance. ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ they ask Him.⁵ In response, Jesus calls a child over to them. ‘Truly I tell you,’ he says, ‘unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’

The ‘kingdom of heaven’, then, belongs to those who ‘become like little children’. In fact, unless we ‘change’, and learn to ‘receive the kingdom of God like a little child’, we will ‘never enter it.’ Jesus says this twice, and very emphatically. What does it mean?

Simplify, I think. To become childlike means to return again to the state in which God created us. To drop those self-created ‘personalities’. Children do not have strong opinions about the world. They do not – yet – have self-created egos which will trap them. They tend to move through the world wide-eyed, and to accept its magic. To become like a child is also to become like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, a pair of striking images which Jesus uses elsewhere to urge his followers away from complexity and towards simplicity;⁶ away from words and towards experience; away from noise and towards silence. 

I have been struck repeatedly over the years by the fact that some of my favourite Christian saints were ‘uneducated’ people, in the world’s terms. The holiest of them, those who practiced straightforward Christian love with no frills, so often seem to have barely attended school. Some of them could barely read. I don’t think this is a coincidence. 

In his little book Do You Know Yourself?⁷, a collection of talks on Christianity and psychology, the late Fr Symeon Kragiopoulos, a Greek Bishop with a reputation as a ‘profound anatomist of the soul’, anatomises those of us who have what he calls ‘complications’ within: a description which I would guess applies to most modern people, and perhaps most pre-modern ones as well. ‘Someone who has complications within him, who has been blocked internally … can’t live the spiritual life,’ he writes, starkly. 

‘The harm that has happened to humanity,’ he goes on to say, ‘and particularly to contemporary humanity – that is, to us – it’s so great that in our effort to disentangle the complications that exist inside us we tangle them up even more.’ Humans, he says, begin life with ‘this blue sky in their souls, this clear heaven, this purity and holiness.’ In the beginning we are children, as Jesus tells his disciples to be again. But we complicate everything as we grow, with our stories, with our egotistic scrabbling, with all the stuff of life from which there is no escape. We build necessary shells to protect ourselves, and ‘the heaven of [our] souls is clouded and darkened.’ This is what it means to be ‘Fallen.’ 

What can help us, then? Christianity we say – if we are Christians, that is – but Fr Symeon is not convinced. ‘I’d dare to say that even Christianity is getting tangled up inside us and is itself getting mixed up,’ he says. Those of us who call ourselves ‘Christians’ do not have the simple, childlike souls we are called to embrace. ‘In the final analysis,’ he says, ‘while a person is Christian, while he believes in the Gospel, while he believes in Jesus Christ, while he confesses and receives communion, he is blocked.’ The blockage comes from the fact that so many of us are influenced more by ‘the spirit of western Christianity, which we perhaps call Christian civilisation, than by the Christianity of the Gospel and the Fathers, by that Christianity that really redeems a human being, that cleanses man and releases him from all those parasites and from all those pitfalls and makes it pure and clean.’

All of which, I suppose, takes us back to where we started: the silence. I have just written 2,500 words of noise to try and get at the matter of silence, and of course have not achieved it, because it is not achieved this way. Lent is a strange journey of deepening: I have learned this very slowly over the years. I am far from being any kind of ascetic, and my Lenten discipline regularly disappoints me, but even so, something seems to happen every year. This year, I have not wanted to say much for weeks. Even when I write, I write about silence. Something is calling me away. I am still not sure where to go, or how.

It took me a long time as a Christian to even begin to understand that much of the work, at least for beginners, is simply in shutting up. There is no point in worrying about whether you are silent or childlike or holy enough, or in trying to make yourself some kind of holy ascetic through force of will. Force of will doesn’t get you that far. You can run off to the forest or the desert if you like: some people are called to that life and some people are not. But we are all called to make a desert of our hearts. The Holy Spirit will alight there, we are told, when it finds a peace to welcome it. 

However, we do it, so much of the work, I think now, is struggling to allow silence a place to grow. When we do that, much of our overcomplicated, worldly nonsense just falls away, even if only for a second. The cement cracks, our stories shatter, and we begin to see how to walk away from ourselves. In the silence, perhaps we discover how to be children again.

Father Symeon should have the last word, I think, because I have written too many already:

‘Spiritual work happens secretly in the heart. Externally, let everything else threaten us. Like the sea: The wind blows, waves rise. But deep down it’s all quiet, peaceful, serene.

This is how a man who trusts in God lives. There might be a wild rage out there, but deep down nothing hinders the soul from having a mystical communion with God, a mystical love for God. Quietly and mystically, in a special way that the heart perceives, the Lord is whispering: “Don’t be afraid. I am here. Keep walking this path. Keep loving me, keep believing in me, keep following me”.

It’s not enough to suffer myriad things in life. When, though, you believe in God and accept all these – whatever it is that happens to you – gladly, for the love of God, God will make a saint out of you.’⁸

1

Fr Men’s Lenten homilies are collected in Awake To Life, published in 1996 by Oakwood Publications, California

2

1 Kings 19:12

3

Quoted from Guidelines For Prayer by Matthew the Poor, St Macarius Press, 2021

4

Luke 18:15

5

Matthew 18:1 – 5

6

Matthew 6:26 – 34

7

Published by Divine Ascent Press, California, in 2010.

8

‘Christians of Comfort.’ https://www.orthodoxpath.org/spiritual-life/christians-of-comfort/

u were inside, and I was outside, but I sought you there. Unlovely, I rushed without thinking among the things of beauty you made. You were with me, but I was not with you.’

St Augustine of Hippo

Sometimes it is difficult for me to write anything, because all I want to do is to be quiet. I have wanted this for years, and sometimes I achieve it, but it is fleeting. Maybe less fleeting by the year, though. Maybe the pull is growing, and the will and the ability. Growing slowly, like moss on a stone.

‘If anyone wants to learn the will of God’ said the Russian Orthodox priest Father Alexander Men, in one of his Lenten sermons¹, ‘let him seek silence.’ Christians have known this forever. They have fled to deserts and caves, monasteries and sketes. They have taken up residence on the tops of pillars and in the boles of hollow trees. They knew that the voice of God was both still and small² and could only be heard in silence, would only settle in a peaceful heart. 

Silence – or at least, quiet; peace – is the natural environment of the Spirit of God, it seems, and we live in the world which appears purposefully designed to make this a great struggle. The roar of traffic, the planes crossing the skies, the hum of the electric wires, the black rectangles in our pockets which fragment our attention, stimulate our passions and take us anywhere but the place where we stand. Whatever the world is it makes silence, or even quiet, almost an impossibility. That means we cannot hear God. And when we cannot hear God, we are lost.

Most of us will never get the opportunity to live in the bole of a hollow tree, and probably wouldn’t much like it if we did. But it is possible to be distracted by outward appearances. If you live in the middle of a city, a desert or a forest may seem an attractive haven of peace, but of course it is possible to flee to the wilderness and take your restless, neurotic, world-tangled heart with you. Probably it is quite common. Silence, a peaceful heart, the landing strip of the Holy Spirit, is not achieved simply by fleeing external noise, though this certainly helps. Most of the noise comes from within.

Last Sunday was the second Sunday of Lent in the Orthodox Church. Each Lenten Sunday is built around a different theme, usually around one of the Church Fathers or a story from the Gospels, each designed to take us deeper into what is sometimes called the ‘bright sadness’ of the Lenten descent. The second Sunday is dedicated to the memory of St Gregory Palamas, the fourteenth-century monk who is celebrated in the Orthodox Church for his defence of the spiritual tradition of ‘hesychasm’, which today forms the core of the contemplative spirituality of the Christian East. 

Hesychasm is one of those Greek words often encountered in Christian Orthodoxy which has no direct English translation; it is usually rendered as ‘stillness’. Hesychastic prayer is the pursuit of inner stillness, not for its own sake, but because this is the opening move of the entire purpose of Orthodox Christian spirituality, which is to seek theosis. This is another one of those Greek words, usually translated as ‘union with God.’ Theosis, according to the hesychasts, is achieved in silence, through solitary prayer and living, the aim of which is to offer up a peaceful heart for the Holy Spirit to dwell within. ‘The Holy Spirit is extremely meek,” wrote the Coptic monk Matthew the Poor. ‘He finds no rest in cries and confusion, or in a heart that is cruel, unjust, wrathful, irascible, or proud.’³ Hesychasm seeks to create the conditions for the Spirit to settle in our hearts; something He can only do if our hearts are at peace. 

St Gregory Palamas is celebrated for the intellectual battle he waged in the early 1300s with an Italian Orthodox monk named Barlaam, who had visited Mount Athos, seen the practice of hesychasm at first hand and been scandalised by it. Barlaam, it is said, had been trained in the Western Scholastic tradition, and was horrified by what today he might call the ‘woo’ of Eastern Christian mysticism. He nicknamed the hesychasts omphaloscopoi, our third Greek word of the day, which translates as ‘navel gazers’. Barlaam thought that the hesychasts were deluded and blasphemous; a position I still hear occasionally today from some Protestants. St Gregory took him on, and his defence of hesychasm won the day in the East. In the process, he helped cement its place at the heart of Orthodox spirituality, where it remains today.

The practice most commonly associated with the hesychastic tradition is that of the Jesus Prayer, which all Orthodox Christians – and plenty of non-Orthodox ones for that matter – are familiar with, and which many of us practice daily, either in the boles of trees or in suburban homes before work or after dinner. It is not, of course, necessary to live in a desert or on Mount Athos to pursue inner silence, though again it may help. It is probably not true that it can be found as easily in the midst of a megacity as it can in a forest, at least for most of us: the temptations, and the distractions, are simply greater, which is why people flee in the first place. Still, the principle is clear, and is much enunciated by the Fathers of the Christian Church: the Spirit of God will only settle in a peaceful heart. Outer peace makes it easier to achieve inner peace, but it doesn’t create it. Inner peace is achievable in central London, just as neurotic self-obsession is possible in a desert cave. 

This subject has obsessed me for years: the subject of silence, of stillness. I once wrote a book about the need to pursue it, and the difficulty of pursuing it as a writer. That book, Savage Gods, was a work of neurotic self-obsession if ever there was one, but it worried away at a question that had grown in me for years. It first arose, I think, when I began practicing Chan Buddhism at the age of forty: a practice which turned out to be a gateway drug to Eastern Christianity, just as soon as I was able to ask Christ to open the gate for me. Buddhism, like hesychasm, begins with the search for inner stillness, which it sees as a necessary precursor to understanding the delusions we tend to call ‘reality.’ This is entirely in accordance with Christian teaching, and indeed with modern understandings of human psychology. 

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as well do with our stories in the end. 

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both.

Whether we are writers or not, we create these personal fictions we call ‘identities’, and the older we get, the harder it is for that simple, primal stillness which is the precursor to true prayer to break back through. Back when I practiced Buddhism, I remember seeing with crystal clarity, at a level far deeper than the intellect, that if I wanted to progress spiritually I had to stop pumping out all these words. This was not because language itself was inherently bad – it is hardly avoidable – but because of something at once fuzzier and clearer, which even now I find it hard to explain. It was that words were part of the fiction of the world. It was so clear then – and it remains clear now – that spiritual progress, that work of theosis, requires us to drop all of our illusions. To smash through the cement of words and concepts and identities and opinions. To see ourselves naked before God. To make ourselves simple again.

Jesus, in more than one of the Gospels, talks about children, and what they have to teach us. In Luke’s Gospel⁴, when the disciples attempt to shoo away groups of parents who want him to bless their babies, Jesus rounds on them. ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them’, he says, ‘for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’

In Matthew’s Gospel, meanwhile, the disciples are jostling amongst themselves to achieve Jesus’s favour – or perhaps they are just anxious for some clear guidance. ‘Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?’ they ask Him.⁵ In response, Jesus calls a child over to them. ‘Truly I tell you,’ he says, ‘unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’

The ‘kingdom of heaven’, then, belongs to those who ‘become like little children’. In fact, unless we ‘change’, and learn to ‘receive the kingdom of God like a little child’, we will ‘never enter it.’ Jesus says this twice, and very emphatically. What does it mean?

Simplify, I think. To become childlike means to return again to the state in which God created us. To drop those self-created ‘personalities’. Children do not have strong opinions about the world. They do not – yet – have self-created egos which will trap them. They tend to move through the world wide-eyed, and to accept its magic. To become like a child is also to become like the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, a pair of striking images which Jesus uses elsewhere to urge his followers away from complexity and towards simplicity;⁶ away from words and towards experience; away from noise and towards silence. 

I have been struck repeatedly over the years by the fact that some of my favourite Christian saints were ‘uneducated’ people, in the world’s terms. The holiest of them, those who practiced straightforward Christian love with no frills, so often seem to have barely attended school. Some of them could barely read. I don’t think this is a coincidence. 

In his little book Do You Know Yourself?⁷, a collection of talks on Christianity and psychology, the late Fr Symeon Kragiopoulos, a Greek Bishop with a reputation as a ‘profound anatomist of the soul’, anatomises those of us who have what he calls ‘complications’ within: a description which I would guess applies to most modern people, and perhaps most pre-modern ones as well. ‘Someone who has complications within him, who has been blocked internally … can’t live the spiritual life,’ he writes, starkly. 

‘The harm that has happened to humanity,’ he goes on to say, ‘and particularly to contemporary humanity – that is, to us – it’s so great that in our effort to disentangle the complications that exist inside us we tangle them up even more.’ Humans, he says, begin life with ‘this blue sky in their souls, this clear heaven, this purity and holiness.’ In the beginning we are children, as Jesus tells his disciples to be again. But we complicate everything as we grow, with our stories, with our egotistic scrabbling, with all the stuff of life from which there is no escape. We build necessary shells to protect ourselves, and ‘the heaven of [our] souls is clouded and darkened.’ This is what it means to be ‘Fallen.’ 

What can help us, then? Christianity we say – if we are Christians, that is – but Fr Symeon is not convinced. ‘I’d dare to say that even Christianity is getting tangled up inside us and is itself getting mixed up,’ he says. Those of us who call ourselves ‘Christians’ do not have the simple, childlike souls we are called to embrace. ‘In the final analysis,’ he says, ‘while a person is Christian, while he believes in the Gospel, while he believes in Jesus Christ, while he confesses and receives communion, he is blocked.’ The blockage comes from the fact that so many of us are influenced more by ‘the spirit of western Christianity, which we perhaps call Christian civilisation, than by the Christianity of the Gospel and the Fathers, by that Christianity that really redeems a human being, that cleanses man and releases him from all those parasites and from all those pitfalls and makes it pure and clean.’

All of which, I suppose, takes us back to where we started: the silence. I have just written 2,500 words of noise to try and get at the matter of silence, and of course have not achieved it, because it is not achieved this way. Lent is a strange journey of deepening: I have learned this very slowly over the years. I am far from being any kind of ascetic, and my Lenten discipline regularly disappoints me, but even so, something seems to happen every year. This year, I have not wanted to say much for weeks. Even when I write, I write about silence. Something is calling me away. I am still not sure where to go, or how.

It took me a long time as a Christian to even begin to understand that much of the work, at least for beginners, is simply in shutting up. There is no point in worrying about whether you are silent or childlike or holy enough, or in trying to make yourself some kind of holy ascetic through force of will. Force of will doesn’t get you that far. You can run off to the forest or the desert if you like: some people are called to that life and some people are not. But we are all called to make a desert of our hearts. The Holy Spirit will alight there, we are told, when it finds a peace to welcome it. 

However, we do it, so much of the work, I think now, is struggling to allow silence a place to grow. When we do that, much of our overcomplicated, worldly nonsense just falls away, even if only for a second. The cement cracks, our stories shatter, and we begin to see how to walk away from ourselves. In the silence, perhaps we discover how to be children again.

Father Symeon should have the last word, I think, because I have written too many already:

‘Spiritual work happens secretly in the heart. Externally, let everything else threaten us. Like the sea: The wind blows, waves rise. But deep down it’s all quiet, peaceful, serene.

This is how a man who trusts in God lives. There might be a wild rage out there, but deep down nothing hinders the soul from having a mystical communion with God, a mystical love for God. Quietly and mystically, in a special way that the heart perceives, the Lord is whispering: “Don’t be afraid. I am here. Keep walking this path. Keep loving me, keep believing in me, keep following me”.

It’s not enough to suffer myriad things in life. When, though, you believe in God and accept all these – whatever it is that happens to you – gladly, for the love of God, God will make a saint out of you.’⁸

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1

Fr Men’s Lenten homilies are collected in Awake To Life, published in 1996 by Oakwood Publications, California

2

1 Kings 19:12

3

Quoted from Guidelines For Prayer by Matthew the Poor, St Macarius Press, 2021

4

Luke 18:15

5

Matthew 18:1 – 5

6

Matthew 6:26 – 34

7

Published by Divine Ascent Press, California, in 2010.

8

‘Christians of Comfort.’ https://www.orthodoxpath.org/spiritual-life/christians-of-comfort/

St. Augustine Quotations

In his homily last Sunday, Father Gabe talked about the importance of St. Augustine of Hippo. I thought this compilation of some of his most well known quotes organized into broad topics might be a good way of helping us more deeply connect to this great saint.

Life and Wisdom

“Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity”.

“Patience is the companion of wisdom”.

“It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels”.

“Become what you are not yet.”

“In doing what we ought we deserve no praise, because it is our duty”. 

“Free curiosity is a greater encouragement to learning than frightened compulsion.” (Conf 1,14)

Love and Character

To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek him the greatest adventure; to find him, the greatest human achievement”.

“It matters not as much how much you know, but how much you love.”

“You can judge how much progress you are making by the degree to which you prefer the common good to your own individual interests”.

“Love has hands to help others”.

“Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation”.

“If you are to be filled with what is good, then you must pour out what is evil”.

“The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works”

Humility

“Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”

“Let us, you and I lay aside all arrogance. Let neither of us pretend to have found the truth. Let us seek it as something unknown to both of us. Then we may seek it with love and sincerity, when neither of us has the rashness or presumption to believe that we already possess it.”

“I watch over you by virtue of my office, but I also wish to be watched over by you. I am a pastor for you, under the Pastor. From that position I address you as one who teaches, but with you I am a disciple in the school of the one Master”.

Interiority

“Return to yourself. Withdraw from all the din. Look inside yourself to find a pleasant, private corner in your consciousness…” (Sermon 52,22)

“Always examine yourselves without self-deception, without flattery, without buttering yourselves up. After all, there is nobody inside you before whom you need feel ashamed, or whom you need to impress. There is someone there, but one who is pleased with humility. Let Him test you. And you, too, test yourself.” (Sermon 169.18)

“Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you. For see, you were within and I was without, and I sought you out there. Unlovely, I rushed heedlessly among the lovely things you have made. You were with me, but I was not with you.” (Confessions 10,27,38)

“When teachers have explained, using words, all those subjects which they profess to teach, even the science of virtue and wisdom, then the ones we call pupils consider within themselves whether what they have heard is true. This they do by gazing attentively at that interior truth, so far as they are able. Then it is that they learn, when within themselves they discover that what has been taught is true…” (The Teacher 14.45

“You are closer to me than I am to myself.”

“Let me know myself that I may know You.” (Soliloquies 2,1,1)

Community

“Honour God in each other.” (Rule 1,8)

“Before all else, beloved, love God and then your neighbour, for these are the chief commandments given to us.” (Rule 1,1)

“God does not demand much of you. He asks back what he gave you, and from him you take what is enough for you. The excesses of the rich are the necessities of the poor. When you possess more than you need, you possess what belongs to others.” (On Psalm 147.12)

“Friendship should not be bounded by narrow limits…. It extends beyond those to whom we owe affection and love, even to enemies, for whom we are commanded to pray. There is no one in the human race to whom we do not owe love, even if not out of mutual love, at least on account of our sharing in a common nature.” (Letter 130.13)

“I admit that when I am wearied by the scandals of the world, I abandon my whole self to the love of friends. I find rest in their love and I can stop worrying, for God is in that person to whom I abandon myself and with whom I feel secure and find rest. Their friendship eases my fear, fear about the incertitude of tomorrow that stems from human fragility…”(Letter 73:10)

‘In an orchestra there are many different instruments. But all are tuned so carefully and played in harmony that the audience only hears one melody. This must be our ideal: to be one orchestra for the Lord.’ (On Psalm 150,8)

Restless Search for Truth

“You have made us for Yourself, O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” (Confessions 1,1)

Truth conquers and “the victory of truth is love.” (Sermon 358,1) 

“Let our searching be such that we can be sure of finding and let our finding be such that we may go on searching.” (The Trinity 9.1,1)

We “understand in order to believe; we believe in order to understand.” (Sermon 43.9)

“Every illness of the soul finds its medicine in the Scriptures.”

“Accordingly, dear reader, whenever you are as certain about something as I am go forward with me; whenever you stick equally fast seek with me; whenever you notice that you have gone wrong come back to me; or that I have, call me back to you.” (The Trinity 1,5,1)

Ongoing Conversion

“It is necessary for a person to let themselves be seized by the Word and change their life.” 

“You can judge how much progress you are making by the degree to which you prefer the common good to your own individual interests.” (Rule 5,2) 

“Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.” 

“When the truth is eagerly sought, finding it produces greater enjoyment. Found, it is sought again with renewed desire.” (The Trinity 15,2,2) 

“As pilgrims on the way, sing in hope, but keep on marching. Are we making progress in good works, in true faith, in right living? 

‘‘Bad time, troubled times’, these people say. Let our lives be good, and the times will be good. We make our times; as we are, so are the times.” (Sermon 80,8) 

Teaching and Education

“Teach that students may become their own teacher. Let us feed our pupils with the right food so that time will come when they will be able to provide their own food.” (Serm.155,3,3)

“The first subject students learn is the teacher. Teachers offer themselves for imitation. This is the essence of what people call teaching.” (De musica 1,6)

“Let our searching be such that we can be sure of finding, and let our finding be such that we may go on searching.” (De Trin.9.1,1)

“Take care of your body as if you were going to live forever; and take care of your soul as if you were going to die tomorrow.”

“Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.”

“God provides the wind, Man must raise the sail.”

“A thing is not necessarily true because badly uttered, nor false because spoken magnificently.”

“God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them.”

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”

“If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don’t like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself.”

“Let us leave a little room for reflection and room too, for silence.”

What Does The Entrance Into The Temple Of The Mother Of God Mean For Us & Our Salvation

By Father Panagiotes Carras

The oikonomia of our salvation began with the very creation of the world. It is not by chance that the fourth Gospel does not commence with a genealogy of our Lord but takes us back to the very beginning.  All things from the beginning to the end, from the alpha to the omega are part of God’soikonomia for our salvation, God’s providential ordering of our salvation. Man was created that he may participate in the Divinity of his Creator by first participat­ing in his own perfection.  We are taught by the Fathers that man was created for perfection. Adam was offered perfection but fell victim to the guile of the serpent.  God’s plan could not be frustrated and the Lord prepared the world for another Adam who would rescue the offspring of the first Adam.

St. Paul tells us that Adam is a type of the future Adam (Romans 5: 14). All Christians are des­cendants of both the first Adam and the last Adam. From the first we inherited death, from the last we inherited life. (1 Corinthians 15: 45-50). It is this Apostolic teaching of the two Adams which was developed by the Fathers and formed the nucleus of the Church’s teaching on the salvation of mankind.

Mankind, which had its beginning in the first Adam, had to be given a new beginning. A new Adam was needed to become the Head of the New Humanity, the Head of the body, the Church, which is His body (Ephesians 1:22-23). However, just as in the creation of the Old Humanity, mankind was given the freedom to choose sonship; similarly in the creation of the New Humanity, mankind was granted the opportunity to choose. The first Adam was from the earth, a man of dust, the second is from Heaven (1 Corinthians 15: 47). The first could choose sin because he was not yet perfect, the second Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ, being God by nature, was totally alien to sin. It is because God’s oikonomia required a member of the human race who was able to prove himself free from every sin that the time had fully come (Galatians 4:4) for God to send forth His Son, since mankind was able to bring forth the All-Holy Virgin.

This is precisely why Theotokos is the key-word of the Christological teaching of the fourth Ecumen­ical Council or as St. John of Damascus says, This name contains the whole mystery of the Oikonomia(On the Orthodox Faith, 3, 12). It is for this reason that the traditional Orthodox icon of the Mother of God is an icon of the Incarnation, the Virgin is always with the Child.

The Church’s teaching of the Theotokos is an ex­tension of what is believed concerning the person of Christ. The Son of God was born of a woman and in this case the Mother is not just a mere physical instrument but an active participant who has found favour with God (Luke 1, 30). The faith of the Church is aptly expressed in the words of Nicholas Cabasilas in his Homily on the Annunciation: The incarnation was not only the work of the Father and of His Power and His Spirit, it was also the work of the will and the faith of the Virgin (On the Annunciation, 4).

It is the teaching of the Church, attested to from the earliest date, that the Virgin Mother of the In­carnate Lord had found favour with God (Luke 1:30) and that she was chosen and ordained to particip­ate in the Mystery of the Incarnation, in the Oikonomia of Salvation. The ancient Church understood the typo­logical relationship between the first Adam and the last Adam, and by extension it was able to see that the first Eve prefigured the second Eve. We find that as early as the Second Century St. Justin and St. Irenaeus had a developed teaching of the Theotokos as the second Eve who through her obedience re­medied the disobedience of the first Eve. And so the knot of Eve’s disobedience received its unloosing through the obedience of Mary; for what Eve, a virgin, bound by unbelief, that, Mary, a Virgin, unloosed by faith (Against Heresies, III, 22, 4.) Mary… by yield­ing obedience, became the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race. (Against Heresies, III, 22, 4). Mary alone cooperating with the economy (Against Heresies, III, 21, 7).

The Church has proclaimed this great Mystery of our salvation not only through the teaching of the Fathers but also through the festal celebration of the acts which worked our salvation, chief of which is the Holy Resurrection of our Lord. On the 21st of Novem­ber the Church celebrates the Feast of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple. It is at this time that the faithful chant Today is the prelude of God’s Good-Will and the heralding of the salvation of mankind. (Dismissal Hymn).

Throughout the whole service the hymns proclaim the exalted place which the Entry has in the history of Salvation. The Entry marks the closing of the Old Covenant, whereas the Annunciation marks the beginn­ing of the New. With the Entry the most Holy Virgin is passing from the Old Covenant to the New, and this transition in the person of the Mother of God shows us how the New Covenant is the fulfillment of the Old.

Like other human beings the Holy Virgin was born under the law of original sin but the sinful heritage of the fall had no mastery over her. She was without sin under the universal sovereignty of sin, pure from every seduction and yet part of a humanity enslaved by the devil. This is the victory which the Feast of the Entry joyfully celebrates. St. Photius praises the Holy Virgin as the great and God-carved ornament of human kind” who ” made her whole soul a holy shrine of meekness… never allowing any of her wares as much as to touch for a moment the brine of evil. (On the Annunciation, 4). This theme con­stantly appears in the hymns of the Feast of the Entry. Thy Miracle, 0 Pure Theotokos, transcends the power of words; for I comprehend that thine is a body transcending description, not receptive to the flow of sin. (Third Magnification of the ninth Ode). Ni­cholas Cabasilas expanded this teaching and dealt with it extensively in his Homily on the Birth of the Theo­tokos where we read: The Virgin remained from the beginning to the end free from every evil because of her vigilant attention, firm will, and magnitude of wisdom. (Chapter 15).

The sinlessness and purity of the Theotokos along with the fact that the Lord was preparing Her to be­come His chamber overshadowed the sanctity of the Old Testament temple. The All-Pure Virgin is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies precisely because she is to become the living temple of God. St. Tarasios in his Homily of the Entry has Saint Anne exclaiming:Re­ceive Zacharias, the pure tabernacle; receive 0 priest, the immaculate chamber of the Word … have her dwell in the temple made by hands, she who has be­come a living temple of the Word (Migne, 98:1489). Zacharias in turn speaks to the Virgin, You are the loosing of the curse of Adam, you are the payment of the debt of Eveand he continues to recall all the types and prophecies of the Old Testament which refer to the Theotokos. (Migne, 98:1492-93).

In the Minea of St. Dimitry of Rostov we read, Thus with the honor and glory not only of men, but also of angels, the most Immaculate Maiden was led into the temple of the Lord. And it was meet: for if the ark of the Old Testament, bearing manna in itself, which served only as a prototype of the Most Holy Virgin, was carried into the temple with great honor, with the assembling of all Israel, then with how much greater honor, with the assembling of angels and men, had to take place the entry into the temple of that same living ark, which had manna — Christ — in it, the Most Blessed Virgin, fore-ordained to be the Mother of God.

The Feast of the Entry celebrates the sanctity of the All-Holy Virgin and glorifies the Lord who placed her in the inaccessible Holies like some treasure of God’s, to be used in due time (even as came to pass) for the enrichment of, and as an ornament transcend­ing, as well as common to, all the world.(St. Gregory Palamas, Homily on the Entry, IX).

Teachings From the Service of the Feast

In the Orthodox Church services we participate in the saving events of the Oikonomia of Salvation. This is why, during these services we hear the word Today quite often. This is why in the first Sticheron of the  Lord I have Cried  begins, Come let us faithful dance for joy on this day. The second Sticheron begins with In the temple of the Law today is the living temple.  During Vespers, Matins and the Divine Liturgy we enter into the Mystery of the Entry of the Theotokos. When we enter into the Mystery we are not simple witnesses as the maidens who accompanied theTheotokos but rather participants in the eternal mystery.  

The first two Old Testament readings of Vespers speak of the Divine establishment of the Tabernacle and the Temple (Exodus 40:1-5, 9-10, 34-35 and IIIKings 8:1, 3-4, 6-7, 9, 10-11). The third reading, taken from the Prophecy to Prophet Ezekiel ( Ezekiel 43:27-44:4) speaks of the Theotokos as the living Temple of God.  

During the Divine Liturgy, in the reading of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Hebrews (9:1-7), we are taught that all things which were done in the Temple of the Old Testament were a Prophecy of what would be fulfilled by our Saviour. In the Gospel of Saint Luke (10:38-42, 11:27-28), which is read at every Feast of the Mother of God, we hear: Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. We are reminded to glorify our Lord and bless His mother, who brought us our salvation.

Icon of the Feast

The Orthodox teaching on the The Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple as the heralding of the salvation of mankind is seen in the Icon of the Feast. The central theme of the icon is the Holy of Holies (1) in the Temple which is about to receive a blessing far superior to any of its former blessings. The priest Zacharias, the father of St. John the Baptist, receives Panagia at the gates of the Temple (3) and in this way prophesies that the Virgin Mary is the New Ark of the Covenant. Saints Joachim and Anna (4), accompanied by virgins of Jerusalem, carrying torches in procession, bring Panagia as a well-pleasing sacrifice. The Theotokos is brought to the gates and ascends to the Holy of Holies where she is cared for by angels (2). Notice that the young virgins do not have their heads covered but that the Theotokos has her head covered. Also the garments of the Mother of God resemble those of Saint Anna and not of the young virgins. The Theotokos, although a child, is already a perfected woman that has reached full spiritual maturity.  She who in body is but three years old, and yet in the spirit is full of years (Ode three of the Second Canon).

Temple Of The Foolish Rich Man – Homily by Father Phillip LeMasters

Have you ever thought about the similarities and differences between barns and temples? Usually when we think of barns, we think simply of places to house farm animals or to store crops.  We normally do not think of them as having much spiritual significance. The rich man in today’s gospel lesson thought of his barns only in terms of his business, which was so successful that he looked forward simply to relaxing, eating, drinking, and enjoying himself.  Unfortunately, he did so to the point of making his possessions an idol.  He was rich in things of the world, but poor towards God.  He was ultimately a fool, for he based his life on what was temporary and lost his own soul.  His barn became a temple only to himself. 

We live in a culture that constantly tempts us to follow this man’s bad example. More so than any previous generation, we are bombarded with advertising and other messages telling us that the good life is found in what we can buy. Whether it is cell phones, clothing, cars, houses, entertainment, food, or medicines, the message is the same: Happiness comes from buying the latest new product. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, this message is particularly strong. We do not have to become Scrooges, however. It is one thing to give reasonable gifts to our loved ones in celebration of the Savior’s birth, but it is quite another to turn this holy time of year into an idolatrous orgy of materialism that obscures the very reason for the season.

We are not really near Christmas yet, as Advent just began on November 15. Today, as we continue to celebrate the ForeFeast of the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple, we are reminded of the importance of preparing to receive Christ at His birth. Instead of looking for fulfillment in barns and the money they produce, we should follow her into the temple. Sts. Joachim and Anna took their young daughter to the temple in Jerusalem, where she grew up in prayer and purity in preparation to become the living temple of God when she consented to the message of the Archangel Gabriel to become the mother of the God-Man Jesus Christ. The Theotokos was not prepared for her uniquely glorious role by a life focused on making as much money as possible, acquiring the most fashionable and expensive products, or simply pleasing herself. No, she became unbelievably rich toward God by focusing on the one thing needful, by a life focused on hearing the word of God and keeping it.

In ways appropriate to our own life circumstances, God calls each of us to do the same thing. And before we start making excuses, we need to recognize that what St. Paul wrote to the Ephesians applies to us also: “[Y]ou are no longer strangers and sojourners, but…fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the cornerstone, in Whom the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in Whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.” In other words, to be a Christian is to be a temple, for the Holy Spirit dwells in us both personally and collectively. The only way to become a better temple is to follow the example of the Theotokos in deliberate, intentional practices that make us rich toward God, that open ourselves to the healing and transformation of our souls that Christ has brought to the world. We must participate personally in His holiness if we want to welcome Him anew into our lives at Christmas.

The rich fool became wealthy by investing himself entirely in his business to the neglect of everything else. In contrast, the Theotokos invested herself so fully in the Lord that she was able to fulfill the most exalted, blessed, and difficult calling of all time as the Virgin Mother of the Savior. In order for us to follow her example by becoming better temples of Christ, we also have to invest ourselves in holiness. The hard truth is that holiness does not happen by accident, especially in a culture that worships at the altar of pleasure, power, and possessions. So much in our world shapes us every day a bit more like the rich fool in our gospel lesson, regardless of how much or how little money we have. Many of us are addicted to electronic screens on phones, computers, and televisions. What we see and hear through virtually all forms of entertainment encourages us to think and act as though our horizons extend no further than a barn. In other words, the measure of our lives becomes what we possess, what we can buy, and whatever pleasure or distraction we can find on our own terms with food, drink, sex, or anything else. We think of ourselves as isolated individuals free to seek happiness however it suits us. No wonder that there is so much divorce, abortion, sexual immorality, and disregard for the poor, sick, and aged in our society. Investing our lives in these ways is a form of idolatry, of offering ourselves to false gods that can neither save nor satisfy us. The barn of the rich fool was also a temple, a pagan temple in which he basically worshiped himself. If we are not careful, we will become just like him by laying up treasures for ourselves according to the dominant standards of our culture and shut ourselves out of the new life that Christ has brought to the world.

We cannot control the larger trends of our society, but we can control what we do each day. During this Nativity Fast, no matter the circumstances of our lives, we can all take steps to live more faithfully as members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ as the cornerstone. In other words, we can intentionally reject corrupting influences and live in ways that serve our calling to become better living temples of the Lord. Yes, we can stop obsessing about our barns and enter into the temple of the one true God.

The first step is to set aside time for prayer. If we do not pray every day, we should not be surprised that it is hard to pray in Church or that we find only frustration in trying to resist temptation or to know God’s peace in our lives.  We also need to read the Bible.  If we fill our minds with everything but the Holy Scriptures and the lives of the Saints, we should not be surprised that worry, fear, and unholy thoughts dominate us.  Fasting is also crucial.  If we do not fast or otherwise practice self-denial, we should not be surprised when self-centered desires for pleasure routinely get the better of us and make us their slaves.  We should also share with the poor.  If we do not give generously of our time and resources to others in need, we should not be surprised when selfishness alienates us from God, our neighbors, and even our loved ones. This is also a time for humble confession and repentance.   If we refuse to acknowledge and turn from our  sins, we should not be surprised when we are overcome by guilt and fall into despair about leading a faithful life.  No, the Theotokos did not wander into the temple by accident and we will not follow her into a life of holiness unless we intentionally reorient ourselves toward Him.

None of us will do that perfectly, but we must all take the steps we are capable of taking in order to turn our barns into temples. Remember that the infant Christ was born in a barn, which by virtue of His presence became a temple. The same will be true of our distracted, broken lives when—with the fear of God and faith and love—we open ourselves to the One Who comes to save us at Christmas. The Theotokos prepared to receive the Savior by attending to the one thing needful, to hearing and keeping His word. In the world as we know it, that takes deliberate effort, but it remains the only way to be rich toward God. And that is why Christ is born at Christmas, to bring us into His blessed, holy, and divine life which is more marvelous than anything we can possibly imagine. As the Lord said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

The Victory of the Cross – By Father Dumitru Staniloae

This is Part I of an extract from a short booklet of the same title. As we prepare ourselves for Holy Week, I suspect you will agree with me that his presentation of the Cross is both clear and compelling. It helps us to understand our suffering and His suffering in the Light of the Cross. This Light can focus us on our love of the Giver not on his gift. 

In this way, the Cross is constant in elevating us to what is eternal and transcendent in the Triune God where our true faith, hope and love lie.

Our Lord and Savior’s words become so much clearer in the light of this powerful presentation of the Cross by this 20th century Romanian Theologian so highly regarded:

If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me

Luke 9:23

The Cross Imprinted on the Gift 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.

We can see many meanings in this cross imprinted on the gift of the world which God gives to us. St Maximus the Confessor said that ‘all the realities which we perceive with the senses demand the cross’; and ‘all the realities which we understand with our mind have need of the tomb’. To these words of St Maximus we can add this: that in our fallen condition we feel the dissolution of the present world and of our own existence as a pain, a suffering; feel it as a sorrow because we have bound the affections which form part of our very being to the image of this world which is passing away. This attachment to the things of this world is felt particularly strongly by those who do not believe that there is any further transformation of this world after the life which we now know. 

The Christian, however, carries this cross of the world and of his own existence not only more easily but with a certain joy, for he knows that after this cross there follows an imperishable life. With this faith he sees the world as crucified and dead to him, and he and all his tendencies as crucified and dead to the present world. This does not mean that he is not active in this world, and that he does not exercise his responsibility towards it; but he works in order to develop in the present state of the world, destined as it is to dissolution and death, the germs, the seeds of its future resurrection. He longs that this world, and his own existence in it, may be crucified as Christ was crucified; that is to say he wishes voluntarily to undergo the suffering of the cross with the hope of resurrection into a higher world, an imperishable world, a resurrection which is truly with and in Christ. 

The Christian does not see the transitory nature of the structures of this world and of his own existence as leading towards a crucifixion without hope, or as moving towards a definitive, final death. He see this situation and he lives it, anticipating the crucifixion at its end with hope, the hope of a higher and unchanging life. 

However, it is not only the Christian who lives his own life and that of the world in anticipation of their crucifixion, lives them as nailed to the cross of the passing away of their present form; everyone inevitably does so. For everyone knows that those we love will die, and this certainty introduces a sorrow into the joy of our communion with them. Everyone knows that the material goods which one accumulates are transitory, and this knowledge casts a shadow on the pleasure one has in them. In this sense, the world and our own existence in it are a cross which we shall carry until the end of our earthly life. Never can man rejoice wholly in the gifts, the good things, and in the persons of this world. We feel the transitory nature of this world as a continual cross. But Christians can live this cross with the hope of the resurrection, and thus with joy, while those who have no faith must live this experience with increasing sadness, with the feeling that existence is without meaning, and with a certain despair which they cannot altogether alleviate.

The Cross in Relationships

Our responsibility towards those who are near to us forms the weight of a particularly heavy and painful cross on account of the fragility of their life which is exposed to a multitude of ills, a multitude of difficulties which arise from the conditions of this world in its present state. Parents suffer intensely and very frequently because of the ills and difficulties of their children; they fear for their life, for their failure, for their sufferings. Therefore the life of parents becomes a life of continual concern, and the cross of the children is their cross. Our cross becomes heavier with the weight of the cross of those with whom we come in contact, for we share responsibility for the life of our children, our relatives, our friends, and even of all men with whom, in one way and another, we are in touch. We bear responsibility for all that can threaten the life of those for whom we have care, and we have the obligation, so far as we can, of smoothing their difficulties and helping their lives. Thus we can reveal and strengthen our love for them and their love for us; thus we can develop the seeds of a future life in strengthening our and their spiritual existence. In this responsibility towards our neighbour we live more intensely our responsibility towards God. Christ has shown this meaning of his cross, he who had pity on those who were suffering, and wept for those who were dead. 

A second sense of the cross in relationships is this: the fallen world is often lived and felt as a cross to be carried until death through the fact that people sometimes act towards us in a hostile way, even though we have done them no wrong. They suspect us of having evil intentions towards them. They think of us as obstacles in the path of their life. Often they become our enemies even on account of the noble and high convictions to which we remain faithful. Our attachment to these convictions brings their evil designs into the light and their bad intentions to view even though we do not intend this. And this happens all the more because by the beliefs which we hold, and which we cannot renounce, we show our responsibility towards them, since we seek the security of their physical and material life and the true development of their spiritual being. This is a responsibility which we reveal in our words, our writings and our actions which become, as it were, an exhortation to them. 

We also feel as a heavy cross the erring ways of our children, of our brethren, and of many of our neighbours and contemporaries. We carry their incomprehension of our good intentions and of our good works as a cross. Almost every one of our efforts to spread goodness is accompanied by suffering and by a cross which we carry on account of the incomprehension of others. To wish to avoid this suffering, this cross, would mean in general to renounce the struggle and the effort to do what is good.

Thus without the cross there can be no true growth and no true strengthening of the spiritual life. To avoid the weight of this cross is to avoid our responsibility towards our brethren and our neighbours before God. Only by the cross can we remain in submission to God and in true love towards our neighbours. We cannot purify or develop our own spiritual life nor that of others, nor that of the world in general, by seeking to avoid the cross. Consequently, we do not discover either the depth or the greatness of the potential forces and powers of this world as a gift of God if we try to live without the cross. The way of the cross is the only way which leads us upwards, the only way which carries creation towards the true heights for which it was made. This is the signification which we understand of the cross of Christ.

Humble Repentance or Paralyzing Guilt – Homily Fifth Sunday of Lent

By Father Philip LeMasters

            Whenever we experience guilt and shame because of something we have done wrong, we need to ask ourselves a question.  Do we feel that way because we are sorrowful that we have disobeyed God or because we cannot stand being less than perfect in our own eyes or those of others?  The first kind of humiliation is spiritually beneficial and may lead to repentance, but the second kind is simply a form of pride that easily paralyzes us in obsessive despair. At this point in our lives, most of us probably experience some mixture of these two types of shame.  As we grow closer to Christ, the first must increase and the second must decrease.

When we wonder if there is hope for the healing of our souls in this way, we should remember St. Mary of Egypt. She stands as a brilliant icon of how to repent from even the most shameful sins. Mary experienced a healthy form of guilt when her eyes were opened to how depraved she had become through her life of addiction to perverse sexual pleasure.  Through the intercessions and guidance of the Theotokos, she venerated the Holy Cross at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and received Communion on her way to decades of ascetical struggle in the desert. When the monk Zosima stumbled upon her almost 50 years later, he was amazed at her holiness.  He saw this holy woman walk on water and rise up off the ground in prayer, but like all the saints she knew only her own sins and perpetual need for the Lord’s mercy.

Perhaps what makes St. Mary of Egypt’s story such a beautiful icon of true repentance is that she was genuinely humble before God.  She was not sorrowful for her sin out of a sense of wounded pride, obsessive self-centered guilt, or fear of what others thought of her.  Instead, she said earnestly to the Theotokos “Be my faithful witness before your Son that I will never again defile my body by the impurity of fornication, but as soon as I have seen the Tree of the Cross I will renounce the world and its temptations and will go wherever you will lead me.”  And she did precisely that, abandoning all that she had known for the long and difficult journey that led to the healing of her soul.  Her focus was completely on doing whatever it took to reorient her life toward God, to purify her desires so that she would find true fulfillment in Him.

Today the Orthodox Church calls us all to follow her example of repentance, regardless of the details of how we have sinned in thought, word, and deed. By commemorating a notorious sex addict who became a great saint, we proclaim that no sin is so shameful that we cannot repent of it.  An honest look at our lives, as we should all take during Lent, dredges up shame and regret in various forms.  St. Mary of Egypt reminds us to accept humbly the truth about our failings as we confess our sins, call for the Lord’s mercy, and do what is necessary to find healing.  Her example reminds us not to be paralyzed by prideful obsessions that block us from being freed from slavery to our passions.  Even her depraved way of life did not exclude St. Mary of Egypt from acquiring remarkable holiness.  If she did not let a perverse form of pride deter her from finding salvation, then no one should be ashamed to kneel before Christ in humility. The Savior did not reject her and He will not reject us when we come to Him as she did.

In today’s gospel text, James and John related to Christ in a very different way, for they wanted the best positions of power when He came into His Kingdom.  The Lord challenged their prideful delusions by reminding the disciples that humility, not self-exalation, is the way to life eternal.  He said “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.”  How shocking that today we celebrate honest, humble repentance from a woman with a truly scandalous past while some of the men closest to Christ in His earthly ministry think only of getting worldly power for themselves.

Perhaps the key difference is that St. Mary of Egypt got over obsession with herself.  Instead of assuming that she was “damaged goods” for whom there was no hope, she humbly died to self by taking up her cross.  Indeed, her repentance began in the context of venerating the Holy Cross at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.  The rest of her journey required profound faith, sacrifice, and courage. To undo with God’s help the harm that she had done to herself through years of debauchery must have been incredibly difficult.  But sustained by the Lord’s mercy and the intercessions of the Theotokos, that is precisely what she did over the remaining decades of her life.

Today, so near the end of Lent and only a week from Palm Sunday, we see that this is the path we must take also.  In order to follow it, we must not be paralyzed in prideful shame about anything we have said, thought, done, or otherwise experienced or participated in at any point in our lives.  Instead, we must have the brutal honesty and deep humility of St. Mary of Egypt, a woman with a revolting past who became a shining beacon of holiness.  That is how she found healing for her soul and it is how we will find healing for ours also. The good news of this season is that the Lord makes such blessedness possible for us all through His Cross, His descent into Hades, and His glorious resurrection on the third day.  But in order to participate in the great mystery of His salvation, we too must get over our pride, accept His mercy, and actually repent.  If St. Mary of Egypt could do that with her personal history, we can too.

Great Lent And The Mystery of the Cross & Resurrection – Short Reflection

By Archimandrite Zacharias from his book ’At The Doors of Holy Lent’

Great Lent is a taste of death in the Name of God, for the sake of our reconciliation with Him, for the sake of His commandment. The little death that that beast, our ego, endures through fasting, through voluntarily bearing shame in the mystery of confession, by shedding streams of wretched tears for our dire poverty and inability to render mighty love unto the Lord; this death places us on the path of Him Who said: ‘I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore.’(Rev 1:17-18). This begets in the heart the faith that, ‘If we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him: Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over Him.’ (Rom 6:8-9). Then on the night of the Resurrection, we sing with boldness the hymn: ‘Yesterday, O Christ, I was buried with Thee and today I rise again with Thy rising. Yesterday I was crucified with Thee: do Thou Thyself glorify me, O Saviour, in thy kingdom.’ Our minor taste of death leavens in the heart and, upon hearing the good news of the Resurrection of Christ, it becomes an explosion of joy, initiating us into the mystery of His descent into hell and ascension above the Heavens.

The Church is preoccupied with only one matter: the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. Saint Paul was consumed by the desire to set forth before his disciples the image of Jesus Christ, ‘and Him crucified’ (1 Cor 2:2). In other words, his concern was to impart to them the knowledge of the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ, knowing that whosoever walks the way of the Cross will also enter into the presence of the Risen Lord. The Church institutes as a commandment that we should go through this period with spiritual tension for the renewal of our life. She travails to see her children assimilated through obedience into the mystery of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ.

Putting All of the Fifth Week of Lent Together – Father Thomas Hopko

At the end of the fifth week of Great Lent, and very particularly on the fifth Sunday, the Orthodox Church has all of its members and faithful Christians contemplating a very beloved and well-known person in Christian history for ancient Christians, and that is a woman named Mary of Egypt. On the matins of the Thursday of the fifth week, there is a penitential canon of St. Andrew of Crete that is read. That particular service, which is a long type of penitential vigil, is often called in Orthodox popular piety “the vigil of Mary of Egypt.” It’s kind of an identification with Mary. In Slavonic, it’s called Marii bodrstvovaniye, the standing with Mary in penance before God. Indeed, in that canon, with all the penitential verses, there are verses that ask Mary of Egypt to intercede for us, to pray for us, as part of the penitential canon. St. Andrew of Crete, the author, is also asked, but particularly Mary of Egypt.

On this Sunday, it’s again kind of a paradox in Orthodox worship, because the focus is now all on Christ. You have that great celebration of the Theotokos with the Akathist on Saturday, and then you enter into the Lord’s Day, and you hear the gospel about Christ going up to Jerusalem and entering into his glory through his suffering. Then even on that Sunday also in the epistle reading, we’ll hear again about how Christ enters into the holy of holies in heaven, not of creation, the sanctuary of God, securing for us an eternal redemption, and that he’s led to offer his blood on the cross through the eternal Holy Spirit where he offers himself without blemish to God and we are encouraged to purify our consciences from dead works in order to serve the living God.

So we are focusing on Christ, but then, with that, you have this whole Sunday when on the one hand you have these marvelous hymns about the resurrection and the victory of Christ on that Sunday, and then you hear even more about this Mary of Egypt. And it’s a kind of a juxtaposition. It’s almost as if the Holy Spirit and God Almighty wants us to keep these two things together. As we focus on Christ and his victory and go up with him to Jerusalem, then we know that this is for everyone and that it is for the worst of sinners. Nobody is excluded, and you can never forget that when you think of Mary of Egypt.

Who was this Mary? It’s interesting that on that Thursday matins with that canon the entire Life of Mary of Egypt is read in church.

…Orthodox Christians in this ancient tradition are called to contemplate that Mary, to remember her. And what’s the point? What’s the point? Oh, there are probably so many, and maybe the points are different for every single person who hears that story, but there’s two points that are for sure. One is that, no matter how sinful we are, the Lord God Almighty forgives us. The other point is that repentance is not just an emotion. It’s not just some kind of magical act. When we repent, we have to purge out of ourselves all of the garbage and filth and slime that’s in us. We have to go through a purgation process before we can be illumined and deified. All that is evil in us has to go: it’s got to be scrubbed away; it’s got to be cut out by the word of God that’s a two-edged sword that cuts the bones and marrows, the sinews, as it says in [the] letter to the Hebrews, the heart of people.

Penance is a work. It is a work. It’s made possible by faith and grace, but it is the result of faith and grace. We know God, we believe in him, we accept his grace, and then that grace purifies us, but it’s not automatic. I can’t resist saying—maybe I shouldn’t on the radio—about how one of my friends would say, “We believe in God the Father, Creator of heaven and earth; and the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ; and the Holy Spirit. We don’t believe in the Magician, the Mechanic, and the Fairy Godmother.” God is not a fairy godmother. He’s not a magician. He’s not a mechanic. There has to be a synergia between us and God. We have to accept that grace that cleanses us, that heals us, that power, and it’s got to happen, and it takes time. It takes time, it takes effort, it takes perseverance to the end. How often Jesus said, “Those who persevere to the end will be saved.” He says, “In hypomone, in patient endurance you will win your life,” and that repentance is a process; it’s not a momentary act.

Yes, Mary had her conversion experience. Yes, she knew the grace and the love of God at that moment, at that Holy Sepulcher. Yes, she knew that she was saved when she was allowed to enter and to venerate the tomb of Christ and receive the precious gifts of his broken body and spilled blood for the forgiveness of her sins, for the healing of her soul and her body and her passions and emotions and for the attaining of everlasting life. Yeah, that moment took place, and there are many such moments often in people’s lives. But then there is the result of that moment: the ongoing life in conformity to that moment. That’s what we see also in Mary of Egypt.

When I was the dean of St. Vladimir’s and the pastor of the chapel, and of course I was there for 30-some years, I always loved that fifth week of Lent. We had a practice at the seminary chapel that was, for me, at least, incredibly significant and marvelous. This is what it was: We would have those penitential services: the Presanctified on Wednesday with all those prostrations and those 24 additional penitential hymns—“O Lord, before I perish utterly, before I perish to the end, do thou save me, O Lord.” We would sing that canon of Andrew with Mary and keep that vigil on that Thursday. Honestly, we cut it down a bit. We were not monks and monastics there; we had our schedule to live, but we did it. We did it, yes. And then we sang the entire Akathist Hymn the next day, with all that marvelous celebration and veneration of the Theotokos with everything we could possibly think of put into our mouth to celebration the incarnation of the Son of God through her.

And when we sang that Akathist Hymn, we had a quite large icon of the Theotokos, Mother of God, with the Child, and we had it set in the middle of the church, and it was surrounded by flowers. It was decorated by beautiful flowers, and we would stand in front of that icon of the Theotokos, Mary, Mother of God. The deacons would be incensing and the whole church would be singing this marvelous Akathistos Hymn with all those wonderful words. Then we would celebration the Incarnation and Mary on that Saturday in the morning.

And then, on Saturday evening when we would come for the vespers and the matins and the Divine Liturgy of the fifth Sunday of Lent, in that same frame of flowers, on that same stand, the same analoy, in the middle of our same church, would be another icon: an icon of another Mary. Because we would remove the icon of the Theotokos and Child, and in that very same frame of flowers, on that very same stand, in the middle of our very same chapel, we would see Mary of Egypt. What a contrast that was! What an amazing thing it was, that on Saturday we’re glorifying and venerating the incarnation of the Son of God through the All-pure Virgin, of whom is more holy? The most holiest of mere human beings, Christ’s mother, Mary, holding in her arms the Holy One of God, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, the Messiah of Israel, the Savior of the world. Holiness! Holiness like you cannot imagine! was in that icon in those flowers and in those songs.

And then in the same building, on the same stand, in the same flowers—was Mary of Egypt. And our icon showed her emaciated, sun-burnt, her hair frizzly white, and her face totally beautiful, and even similar to the face of the Theotokos in the iconography. Totally beautiful. And we knew that a nymphomaniac, sexually addicted harlot and even-worse-than-a-harlot human enters the same radiance and the same glory as the Mother of Christ and of all believers. Like Mary, she herself became more honorable than cherubim, more glorious than seraphim, because in Christ everyone who’s saved has that particular glory. We all are enthroned with Christ over all the angels—the twelve apostles sit on twelve thrones, judging the angels, it says in Scripture. We really are deified and enter into the glory of God. That is why Christ was born of a Virgin, and that’s why we venerate his mother so magnificently.

But on this day we know that the worst, the lowliest, the filthiest, the most addicted, the most impassioned, the most possessed, by faith and grace through that same Christ, by the intercessions of his mother and all the saints, can enter into that same glory. And Mary of Egypt tells us that. She shows us that. And then she begins herself to intercede for us poor sinners. Maybe some of us listening are sex-addicted ourselves and nymphos and whatever, controlled and on computers, looking at porno and whatever—but there’s hope for us. There’s hope for us. Mary of Egypt proves there’s hope for us.

But it’s not magic, it’s not mechanical; God is not a fairy godmother. There must be faith, grace accepted and lived out, and that purgation that leads to illumination that leads to glorification, leads to deification—can be ours. If it can be Mary of Egypt’s, then it can be ours. And how wonderful it was to go to church on Saturday of the fifth week and stand in front of that flower-decorated icon of the Theotokos and Child, and to come back again that same night and the next day and to see, in that same place, Mary of Egypt.

St. Symeon the New Theologian – His Lessons on Humility & Joyful Sorrow

This 11th century saint shed many tears in his life, and wrote much about the ’not of this world’ paradox of joyous tears. Below are a few of his quotes on humility and joyful sorrow. A common theme to many of these quotes is his experience of his own spiritual poverty in his journey to the wealth of what lies beyond in the mercy and grace of our Triune God. As Father Thomas Hopko would remind us “genuine humility means to see reality as it actually is in God”. You may also find this talk from our own Archbishop Alexander about the life of St. Symeon very interesting as he raises an awareness of his unique contributions to our faith.

“When the faithful man, who always pays strict attention to the commandments of God, performs all that the divine commandments enjoin and directs his mind toward their sublimity, that is, to a conduct and purity that are above reproach, he will discover his own limitations. He will find that he is weak and lacks the power to attain to the height of the commandments, indeed that he is very poor, that is, unworthy to receive God and give Him thanks and glory, since he has as yet failed to attain any good of his own. One who thus reasons with himself in the perception of his soul will indeed mourn with that sorrow which is truly most blessed, which will receive comfort and make the soul meek (cf. Matt. 5:5).”

He also writes:

“Let us long with all our soul for the things God commands us to embrace, spiritual poverty, which is humility; constant mourning by night and by day, from which there wells forth the joy of the soul and the hourly consolation for those who love God. By this means all who strive in truth succeed in attaining meekness. Those who hunger and thirst for righteousness and seek it at all times will obtain the kingdom of God, which ‘surpasses all human understanding’ (Phil. 4:7). Further, one becomes merciful, pure in heart, full of peace, a peacemaker, courageous in the face of trials (cf. Matt. 5:3-11). All this is the result of mourning day by day. It is also brought to pass that we will hate evil; it kindles in the soul that divine zeal which does not allow it to be ever at ease or to incline to evil deeds with evil men, but fills it with courage and strength to endure to the end against adversities.”

Elsewhere he writes: 

“The first effect of mourning in God is humility; but later it brings unspeakable joy and gladness. And around humility in God grows the hope of salvation. For the more a man feels with his whole soul that he is the most sinful of men, the more strongly hope and humility grow and blossom in his heart, and fill him with the conviction that, through humility, he will surely gain salvation.”

He also writes:

“Mourning has a twofold action: like water tears extinguish all the fire of the passions and wash the soul clean of their foulness; and, again, through the presence of the Holy Spirit, it is like fire bringing life, warming and inflaming the heart, and inciting it to love and desire God.”

Elsewhere he again writes:

“Where there is humility there is also the enlightenment of the Spirit. And where there is the enlightenment of the Spirit there is also the outpouring of the light of God, there is God in the wisdom and knowledge of His mysteries. Where these mysteries are to be found, there is the kingdom of heaven and the experience of the kingdom and the hidden treasures of the knowledge of God, which include the manifestation of the poverty of spirit. Where poverty of spirit is perceived, there also is the sorrow that is full of joy. There are the ever-flowing tears that purify the soul that love these things and cause it to be completely filled with light.”

Also:

“O tears, which flow from divine enlightenment and open heaven itself and assure me of divine consolation! Again and many times over I utter the same words out of delight and longing. Where there is abundance of tears, brethren, accompanied by true knowledge, there also shines the divine light. Where the light shines, there also all good gifts are bestowed and the seal of the Holy Spirit, from whom spring all the fruits of life, is implanted in the heart. Here also the fruit of gentleness is borne for Christ, as well as ‘peace, mercy, compassion, kindness, goodness, faith and self-control’ (Gal. 5:22-23). It is the source of the virtue of loving one’s enemies and praying for them (Matt. 5:44), of rejoicing in trials, of glorying in tribulations (Rom. 5:3), of looking on the faults of others as if they are one’s own and lamenting them, and of laying down one’s life for the brethren with eagerness even unto death.”

4th Sunday of Lent – ‘Lord I Believe; Help My Unbelief’ Adult Education Class

This week we celebrated the mid-point of the Lenten fast. We’ve had the Cross out in the church and heard words that encourage us to enjoin ourselves to the Cross as the not of this world ’refuge of all men’.

The Cross is the haven of the storm-tossed, the guide and support of those that go astray, the glory of Christ, the power of the apostles and the prophets, the strength of God’s athletes, the refuge of all men. We see it set before us in this time of fasting and we venerate it.

Heal my brokenness, O King of all, crucified upon the Cross in thy surpassing love. Thy hands and feet were pierced with nails, Thy side was wounded with the spear, and Thou wast given vinegar and gall to drink, who art the joy of all men, their sweetness, glory and eternal redemption.

The Fast that brings us blessings has now reached its midmost point: it has helped us to receive God’s grace in the days that are past, and it will bring us further benefit in the days still to come. For by continuing in what is right we attain yet greater gifts. We therefore cry to Christ, the Giver of all good: O Thou who for our sakes hast fasted and endured the Cross, make us worthy to share uncondemned in Thy divine Passover. May we spend our lives in peace and rightly glorify Thee with the Father and the Spirit.

Triodion Matins/Vespers Wednesday/Friday 4th Week

This Sunday we venerate St. John Climacus and his great work ’The Ladder of Divine Ascent’. In our Vigil we’ll sing these powerful words that unite him to the Cross and as a guide for our own Lenten journeys.

O holy father John, through faith thou hast lifted up thy mind on wings to God; hating the restless confusion of this world, thou has taken up thy Cross; and following Him who sees all things, though has subjected thy rebellious body to His guidance through ascetic discipline, by the power of the Holy Spirit

O holy father John, truly hast though ever carried on thy lips the praises of the Lord, and with great wisdom has thou studied the words of Holy Scripture that teach us how to practice the ascetic life. So hast thou gained the riches of grace, and thou has become blessed, overthrowing all the purposes of the ungodly.

Triodion Vespers 4th Sunday of Lent

During this week’s class time, I’d like us to focus on the Gospel reading (Mark 9: 17-31) for today and the humility and honesty of the appeal ’Lord I believe, help my unbelief’. I’d also like us to do a deep dive into the Prayer of St. Ephraim and what lessons it has for us as we now enter the second half of our Lenten journey.

I’ll print the following articles for our class Sunday:

During the week, I posted some additional articles that you may find relevant and useful as we prepare for class: