Category: Will

Surrender Ourselves To God’s Grace – Archimandrite Aimilianos

In our class Sunday we discussed distractions and how difficult it can be to remain focused during these longer, more intense services we experience during Lent. I thought this article was full of wisdom and pragmatic guidance that might be useful to us as we approach the mid-point of the Fast which occurs next Wednesday. The focus of the article is on the Divine Liturgy. It’s an excerpt from the outstanding book ’The Way of the Spirit’ by Archimandrite Aimilianos. It’s a useful next step as we get in touch with our sense of exile that he described in this earlier article . It’s also a good followup to the article we read about ’finding our true selves in Christ’.

Chapter 2 – On The State That Jesus Confers

My beloved children, how marvelous was today’s Gospel lesson! It’s one we’ve heard many times and experience continuously, especially during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy. As we journey through the desert of life, it is only natural that our thirst should draw us to the Liturgy, because the Divine Liturgy is a sumptuous table set in the open air, such as that which the Lord has spread before us today.

What did we hear in the Gospel? Jesus gathered the people together. Why? Because the Apostles told Him they have nothing to eat (cf. Mk 6.36; Mt 14.15). Thousands of people, who had come from every town to see Jesus (Mk 6.33), would have gone hungry, and so the Lord had them sit down in groups on the ground (Mk 6.40), in order to satisfy their souls. They had gone forth into the wilderness to see Jesus, and He gathered them all together (cf. Mk 6.35; Mt 14.15).

The Divine Liturgy, my beloved, is precisely this going forth; it is a movement from one place to another, which we enact continuously. It is also a sitting down in the open in order to eat. It is, first of all, a kind of exodus. But from where? The people mentioned in the Gospel went forth from their towns and villages (Mk 6.33; Mt 14.13), but we come forth from ourselves, as well as from the places in which we live. We leave one kind of place, and come to another, which is different from the one we left. And who among us, upon entering a church, does not sense that there is something special here? Who does not know that to come here means to leave all else behind? And this can be seen by the fact that, if an inappropriate thought enters our mind while we’re here, we immediately want to dismiss it. And even if we’re unable to, we recognize it as something foreign, something that has intruded into the space of our soul, something that has slipped past our guard and entered into us.

We enter the church, then, when we go forth from ourselves in power, in substance, and in truth, leaving behind all our sins, our inclinations, and our aspirations. To enter the church means to leave outside all those things that make up our life in the world. That which exists is God (cf. Ex 3.14), but that which is ours, and which alone belongs to us, is our sin, our self will, and our desire. Apart from God, the self is something non-existent, even though it is, and remains, the creation of His hands, the breath of His first blessing (cf. Gen 2.7).

When we enter the church, we leave behind, not simply the things we see, but even the things for which we hope, because the latter in particular occupy a central place in our lives. Even though the things we hope for are not currently in our hands, we live as if they already were, feeling them intensely, as if we could run our fingers through them, lay hold of them, and possess them. In general, the intensity of our feelings about such things assumes the character of an actual experience, and we must leave that behind, along with all that we see. 2

And what we “see” is everything we encounter in the course of the day: things seen by the eyes of the body as well as those of the soul—which are much more perceptive. The things we “see” are all the things we experience, which stir us up, unsettle us, occupy our minds, give us pleasure, and lift our spirits. When our eyes fall upon them, they elevate us, but only to a place within the visible world: never beyond it.

In leaving behind everything we see, we come forth from that which constitutes our place of exile. This is the new exodus undertaken by the children of God every time they assemble and unite themselves to Christ in the sacred space of the church.

Having left everything behind, where do we find ourselves? In the open air, as befits people close to God (Wis 16.9; cf. Lk 21.31). 3

Why do I say in the open air? Because, looking around the church, we feel that we’re standing in heaven, and heaven cannot be considered a closed space. 4 And this is why Christ chose the desert as a place for prayer: precisely because its endless expanses and tremendous openness symbolize heaven itself. The desert, moreover, stands in contrast to the world: it contains no worldly pleasure, it gives you no earthly delight, and it offers you no fleshly repose. Heaven is something like that.

It follows, then, that no one can live in the desert if he’s still seeking to satisfy his own desires, if he is still anxious to realize his own hopes. You ask God to satisfy your desires, and, when He doesn’t, you think He’s turning a deaf ear. You ask God to realize your hopes, and to your dismay they remain elusive. You ask God to deepen your religious feelings, only to discover that He keeps Himself at a distance. Why? Because in reality those things are only about you, and not God, and thus they constitute the closed space in which you are confined; they are the place out of which God wants to lead you. Now, however, we find ourselves in the open air like that crowd of thousands, people close to God, close to the Lord. As for me, I’m blind, but I’m here too. I’m paralyzed, but nevertheless I’m here. I have no wings, I’m confined to the earth, but I’m here too, close to God.

What does it mean to be close to God? Think for a moment: can you be close to an icon and not be moved to venerate it? Can you be close to a fire and not be warmed? Can you be close to the light and not be illumined? Of course not. How, then, can you be close to God and not become godlike? How can you stretch out on God’s open spaces and not be raised up to the heights of His grandeur?

It follows, then, that after our exit from the world, we find ourselves close to God. We do not, however, find ourselves before the face of God (cf. Ex 33.11). Why? Because, for the most part, the eyes of our soul and body (which are both earthly) do not see God: they only seek Him. In the darkness broken by the brazen lamps, we seek Him, but we do not see Him. And that is the tragedy of human existence: we see everything except that which truly exists. All creation, which had a beginning and which will come to an end, falls under our gaze, which means we see things that, in reality, have no independent existence. 5 The tragic figure of man does not see that which alone truly exists: the One Who Is (cf. Ex 3.14), and Who is always with us.

That is what it means to be close to God. And when we enter into the open spaces of the church, we immediately experience a particular feeling, a feeling which confirms for us that here, in this place, our Helper is at hand. He is invisible, but you feel Him, as if He were rushing toward you, as if you could hear the sound of His breathing. He is your Helper, the One Who can deliver you, Who can redeem you, Who alone can satisfy your insatiable soul, which is forever being gnawed by hunger. You are close to God, and God is invisibly present. But, you may ask, where is He? Who can see Him?

If you wish to see God, my beloved children, there’s only one thing to do: go to church filled with longing to see His face, filled with divine and heavenly desire to be able, somehow, to feel the presence of your Helper and Defender. When you do this, your soul will experience an initially strange feeling: it is God touching your heart. And what will the heart do in response? Will it laugh and rejoice? No. It will be filled with a blessed, godly grief, and begin to weep and lament. In the presence of the Lord, you’ll feel your heart—which is like a useless sack—filling to the brim with the sense of its own emptiness and thereby overflowing with tears. And these tears will be its secret cry, saying:

“Where are You, Lord? Have mercy on me.” “Where are You, Lord?” That is the heart’s first cry. But it immediately realizes that it’s not able to see God, and that, if it did, it would lose its life (cf. Ex 33.20). Correcting its mistake, it continues: “Grant me Your mercy, You are my mercy, Yours is mercy, I am Yours, and You alone can have mercy upon me; You alone can bring me up from the pit of tribulation, from the depths of Your absence and my absence—Your absence from me, and mine from Your own spiritual life.”

When the soul begins to cry—and it cries to God, my beloved, very easily indeed, because God, in a sense, is the soul’s only surviving relative, and what could be more natural than that it should seek Him, and that it should cry when it realizes that it cannot see Him? When you allow your soul to cry, when you reject everything that cuts off the flow of your tears, then you’ll have a feeling of much greater intimacy with God. You’ll understand that now someone else governs your life. You’ll sense that now someone else has grasped the tiller, someone else has taken hold of the wheel (indeed of your own hands) and is now directly guiding you Himself. You become someone guided by the grace of God.

We are guided by God’s grace, to which you can surrender yourself in all confidence. Indeed, it is impossible for you to do the slightest thing without it. Consider the glory of the stars, the magnificence of the heavens, and the wonders of the earth: none of these can give you anything at all. The only thing that can fashion a new heart within you (cf. Ezek 11.19), rendering the old one utterly useless, is the power of God’s grace.

The Annunciation & Our Conciliar Salvation

By Father Stephen Freeman

I consider it both a strange mystery and a settled matter of the faith that God prefers not to do things alone. Repeatedly, He acts in a manner that involves the actions of others when, it would seem, He could have acted alone.

Why would God reveal His Word to the world through the agency of men? Why would He bother to use writing? Why not simply communicate directly with people? Why speak to Moses in a burning bush? Why did the Incarnation involve Mary? Could He not have simply become man, whole, complete, adult, in a single moment?

Such questions could be multiplied ad infinitum. But at every turn, what we know of God involves others as well. We may rightly conclude that such a means of acting pleases Him.

This Friday is the Feast of the Annunciation when the Church celebrates the Incarnation of Christ at word of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. An Orthodox hymn on the feast says:

The manner of His emptying cannot be known;
the manner of His conception is beyond speech.
An Angel ministers at the miracle; a virginal womb receives the Son;
the Holy Spirit is sent down; the Father on high is well pleased,
and according to their common counsel, a reconciliation is brought to pass
in which and through which we are saved.

“According to their common counsel” is a rich phrase describing this conciliar action of God.

At the same time that this conciliar mode of action seems obvious to Orthodoxy, it is frequently denied or diminished by others. There is a fear in some Christian quarters that were we to admit that God shared His action with any other, our salvation would be a matter of our own works and not the sovereign act of God. It is feared that a conciliar mode of action shares the glory of God with mere mortals.

It is true. This understanding shares the glory of God with mere mortals. But, interestingly, St. Paul says that man is the “image and glory of God” (1 Cor. 11:7). Apparently, we were brought into existence in order to have such a share.

The failure to understand this and the effort to re-invent the Christian story with diminished roles for angels and saints, or Christians themselves, comes very close to setting forth a different gospel altogether.

The Word became flesh of the Virgin Mary. The flesh of the Virgin is also the flesh that is nailed to the Cross (when her soul was itself mysteriously pierced). The flesh which we eat in the Eucharist is also the flesh of the Virgin – for there is no flesh of God that is not the flesh of the Virgin.

And it does no good to protest that the Word merely “took flesh” of the Virgin. For Adam cried out concerning Eve, “This is truly bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” And St. Paul noted concerning the wife of a man that a man should love her, “For no one ever yet hated his own flesh.”

I puzzle at how Christians who understand that it is wrong for a woman to say, “It’s my body and I can do with it what I want,” when she is carrying a child, can at the same time treat the Mother of God as though she had merely lent her womb to God for a period of time.

God’s conciliar action in our salvation is so thoroughly established that it involves our will, our soul, our flesh and bones. He includes bread and wine in our salvation so that the fruit of this garden might become the fruit of life. Everything around you is for your salvation and has its share.

This is not only true in the Incarnation, but continues to be true for every saving effort in our lives. We cannot save ourselves, of course, for that, too, would be denying the conciliar action of God.

There is a saying among the fathers, “If anyone falls, he falls alone, but no one can be saved alone.” But I think we cannot even say that we fall alone – for the one who falls is equally bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. Christ does not distance Himself from the one who falls, but unites Himself with him so completely that He endures the consequence of our fall, entering death and hell to bring us back alive.

The Church is nothing other than the conciliar salvation of God, bone of His bone and flesh of His flesh – His body. We are being saved together whether we will admit it or not. Those who study and quote the Bible are themselves handling documents that were written, copied and preserved by others. It is a conciliar document.

The Orthodox way of life urges us to embrace the fullness of our conciliar being. In sacraments and saints in worship and wonder we live within the cloud of witnesses and share the common struggle.

For this reason let us unite our song with Gabriel’s,
crying aloud to the Virgin:
“Rejoice, O Lady full of grace, the Lord is with you!
From you is our salvation, Christ our God,
Who, by assuming our nature, has led us back to Himself.
Humbly pray to Him for the salvation of our souls!”

3rd Sunday Of Lent Veneration of the Cross

By Father Sergius Bulgakov; extracted from ‘Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions For the Church Year’

There are two worlds for the Christian and two lives in them: one of these lives belongs to this world of sorrow and suffering, while the other is lived in a hidden manner in the Kingdom of God, in the joyful city of heaven. All of the events, both of the Gospel and of the Church, which are celebrated at different times of the Church Year are not only remembered but are also accomplished in us, insofar as our souls touch this heavenly world. These events become for us a higher reality, a source of unceasing celebration, of perfect joy.

The bliss of divine love is the sacrificial bliss of the Cross, and its power is a sacrificial power. If the world is created by love, it is created by no other power than the power of the Cross. God who is love creates it by taking up the Cross in order to reveal His love for the creature. The Almighty Creator leaves room in the world for the creature’s freedom, thus as it were humbling Himself, limiting His almightiness, emptying Himself for the benefit of the creature.

God seeks in the creature a friend, another self, with whom He can share the bliss of love, to whom He can impart the divine life, and in His boundless love for the creature He does not stop at sacrifice, but sacrifices Himself for the sake of the creature. The boundlessness of the divine sacrifice for the sake of the world and its salvation passes all understanding.

The Son humbles Himself to become man, taking upon Him the form of a servant and becoming obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross. The Father does not spare His beloved, His only-begotten Son, but gives Him to be crucified; the Holy Spirit accepts descent into the fallen and hardened world and rests upon the Anointed, Christ dwells in His Mother, and sanctifies the Church. It is the sacrifice not of the Son alone, but of the consubstantial and indivisible Trinity as a whole. The Son alone was incarnate and suffered on the Cross, but in Him was manifested the sacrificial love of the Holy Trinity–of the Father who sends Him, and of the Holy Spirit who rests upon Him and upon His sorrowing Mother.

A Christian lives in God, and, in so far as he enters into the love of Christ, shares both in the burden and in the sweetness of His Cross. To worship the Cross and to glory in it is for him not an external commandment, but an inner behest: ‘Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his Cross, and follow Me.’

We can only worship the Cross to the extent to which we share in it. He who is afraid of the Cross and in his inmost heart rejects it worships it falsely and deceives his own conscience.

The original Adam, when he was still in sinless ignorance of good and evil, was given to know the sweetness of the cross through obedience to God’s commandment forbidding him to eat the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil grew in Eden (Gen. 2:9). That was the Edenic sign of the tree of the cross: in renouncing his own will, in doing the will of the Heavenly Father, man was crucified on the tree; and it became for him the tree of life, full of eternal bliss. But because of the whispered wiles of the sly and malicious serpent our progenitors rejected the cross; they descended from the cross, which meant that they had become willful and disobedient. And the tree became deadly for them, giving knowledge of good and evil and leading to their expulsion from Eden.

But this tree of the cross from which the original Adam descended, it was this tree of the cross that the New Adam, the Lord, the Son of Man, the Only Begotten Son of God, ascended. He ascended the cross in order to draw all men unto Himself (John 12:32), for there is no path to the Eden of sweetness except the path of the cross. And the ancient serpent, speaking to the Crucified One with the lips of His disciples, tried to tempt Him: Come down from the cross! But the new temptation was rejected, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil once again became the tree of life, a life-bearing garden; and those eating its fruits partake of immortality.

And in every man, for as long as life is given to him, there lives the seed of the old Adam. Every man hears in himself the serpent’s incessant whisper, which is echoed by man’s natural infirmity and weakness: Come down from the cross. Do not suffer. The world is hostile to the cross, is made furious by the word of the cross. Love for the world is hatred for the cross. But love for God is also love for the Lord’s cross.

The cross shines in the sinful darkness of our heart, illumining it and at the same time exposing it. Our sinful, self-loving nature fears it and resists it. Why deceive ourselves? The natural man is afraid of the Cross. And yet we must overcome this fear; we must bring forth the tree of the Cross in our hearts, lift it up, and worship it.

Sweet are Thy wounds in my heart, O sweetest Jesus, and no sweetness is greater for my heart than their sweetness!

Glorifying What Is Not Of This World – The Kingdom Of God Through The Divine Sign Of The Cross In Our Hearts

By Father Sergius Bulgakov ; extracted from the book ‘Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions For the Church Year’

The power of God triumphs by means of itself, not by means of the power of this world. For the world, there is no power of God. The world does not see and does not know the power of God: it laughs at the power of God. But Christians know that the sign of God is powerlessness in the world — the Infant in the manger.

And there is no need to gild the manger, for a gilded manger is no longer Christ’s manger. There is no need for earthly defense, for such defense is superfluous for the Infant Christ. There is no need for earthly magnificence, for it is rejected by the King of Glory, the Infant in the manger.

But there is a need for the authentic revelation of the God of Love. There is a need for the image of all-forgiving meekness, praying for His enemies and tormenters. There is a need for the image of the way of the cross to Christ’s Kingdom, to defeat evil by the triumphant self-evidence of good. There is a need for the image of freedom from the world.

And powerless, we are powerful. In the kingdom of this world we desire to serve the Kingdom of God; we believe in, call, and await this Kingdom. For we have come to know the sign of the Infant in the manger.

Power in powerlessness, Triumph in humiliation. And let our heart be our manger, in which we bear the divine sign, the sign of the cross.