24th Sunday After Pentecost (Mt 16:1-8, Eph 2:14-22, Lu 8:41-56). We read in our Epistle lesson this morning that Jesus "has broken down the middle wall of separation" (Eph 2:14). First century Jews hearing this would instantly think of the Tabernacle in the Sinai wilderness with its veil in the middle, understood to be a Garden wall separating the faithful from Eden. For the Holy of Holies in their minds signified Eden. At stake here is an understanding of salvation in its aspect of sanctification, which in turn calls us to understand the purpose of the Temple as it was seen by the spiritual school of Judea, not the Pharisees or the Sadducees. We cannot really understand our own lives of worship, our church buildings, and our salvation until we come to the terms with these elements of our Christian faith.
Michaelmas (Mt 28:16-20, Eph 2:4-10, Lu 8:26-39). The bodiless powers are not so distant. For they are us, and we are them: different states of the same Divine Creation. On Michaelmas, consider what great estate and authority awaits us — not in the distant future but here and now. In our Gospel lesson, we read,
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And He said to them, "I saw Satan fall like lightning
from heaven.
Behold, I give you the authority ..." |
23rd Sunday After Pentecost (Mt 28:16-20, Eph 2:4-10, Lu 8:26-39). This morning's Gospel lesson calls us back to first things: the historical backdrop for the Bible, which is mostly the decline of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and their final descent in the New Testament, which is being composed as the last Two Tribes are dispersed, and the Promised Land is dismantled. In this morning's lesson, Jesus takes His Disciples, through a disruption in the elements, into a lost world, meeting one of the Ten Lost Tribes, Gad. And the Disciples, who have been chosen to govern the Twelve Tribes, are shown what they are up against. The lost Tribe of Gad is not so different from our own land and world. Their challenges eerily resemble our own. In the end, they reject God, Who has visited them from on high and Who has promised them liberation. We depart from the Gadarenes haunted by a basic question. Is this a mirror of our time and place? Are they us?
The "Bosom of Abraham" is mentioned only once in all of Sacred Scripture, not in the Torah, not in the Prophets, but once, in the Holy Gospel According to St. Luke, which is our Gospel lesson this morning. In the Christian tradition we also find it in the writings of Hippolytus, disciple of the Apostolic Father, Polycarp. It is a destination inevitably linked to a path — the path away from the city, signifying the glories of the world. Yes, the parable in St. Luke's Gospel also features a begging leper — among the poor and starving so close to God's heart. But the master theme, our treatment of the diseased and poor, is by way of two men of the city: Abraham, who departed from Ur of the Chaldees and then shunned Sodom and Gomorrah, and a rich man who cultivated city life — two different paths in life and the two kingdoms to which these paths led. Please join us down these pathways as we seek the inner meaning that the Lord Jesus intended for us.
October 23 (Holy Calendar). St. James the Just, Brother of the Lord. We know from his Protoevangelion (treated as Scripture by the Early Church) that the Holy Family truly was holy. James journeyed to Egypt with father, Joseph the Espoused, and his step-mother, the Most Holy Theotokos, raised as a consecrated virgin in the Temple. He was himself consecrated as a Nazarite, as St. John the Forerunner had been, dedicated to God in every aspect of his person and life. On his feast day, we celebrate the One Church, for as the Patriarch of Jerusalem, James set a cornerstone of Five Patriarchates — Jerusalem, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Rome. Following St. Paul's three-year retreat into Arabia and then Damascus following his encounter with the Ascended Christ, he avoided contact with all other humans seeking the household of St. Peter and saw only him and the brother of the Lord. In this, we behold the Apostle to the Nations meeting with (by tradition) the first Bishop of Rome and the Bishop of Jerusalem, bounding the world and the Church. St. James the Just is our Patriarch, therefore — all who continue to honor the Church of Five Patriarchates. Pray for us, O Holy Patriarch, for your example of purity and wisdom and perfect devotion, and your injunctions to service, are our only lifelines in the practice of our faith.
Upon reading our Gospel lesson, a Sister of Hermitage said, "The parables are given so that we NOT understand?! This doesn't seem right!" And here, embracing this truth, we take important steps in our pilgrimage to God. We are invited into a life of discernment — of diligence, of digging and finding and learning and growing. Maturation is long process, but the end of the journey is Heaven. When Jesus says, "The Word of God," what do we think? Surely, it has nothing to do with the Bible. What we call "the Bible" did not exist until the fourth century. And Christians grounding themselves in "the Word"? Bibles that anyone could afford, much less write in, would not appear for nearly two thousand years. There were no Gospels in the year 33 A.D. .... or 43 or 53, not as we understand the term. The word Scripture would have meant the Torah and the Prophets only. And what Jesus means when He says "the Good News" is very different from what is claimed for that phrase in Christian mass media today. Beware the simple parable. It may not be what we think. And the flinty Jesus awaits half-hearted seekers: "that seeing they may not see / and hearing they may not understand." We must be careful where we tread, for God's holy mountain draws near.
We at the Hermitage, so fulfilled in our lives as vowed religious, are apt to say, "How wonderful that St. John of Kronstadt was granted both religious life and the consolation of the special friendship of marriage, a virginal marriage." In this setting he progressed, by the grace of God, to the state of life called Saint and Wonderworker. We would say this, but in our journey from the Western Church to Orthodoxy, we have grown to learn that this is a genius of Orthodoxy — each family and home is a religious house, each having icons and incense and tapers. It is rightly taught that you do not bring your personal orisons to Church but offer them in your own sacred devotional space. Every life is a religious life. Our bishops are not corporate executives but holy men. Our priests, many married, lead communities in theosis, the transformation of mind, body, and soul in Christ. St. John of Kronstadt, married yet a monk (we might say), is our exemplar and pastoral leader. Pray for us, St. John and Matuska Elizabeth, for we yearn to join you in your kind of holiness, leaving the madness behind us.
He was so different from the other Evangelists — the Jewish tax collector, Levi; the bright young man so attached to St. Peter, Mark; and the sleeping genius, the Beloved Disciple, John. Luke was passionate and creative — the first icon painter, boldly depicting the Most Holy Mother of God. Read his Gospel, and you will find a manner of presentation more like that of Homer than the (Ur) Holy Gospel According to St. Mark. Consider his depiction of Pentecost vs. the Giving of the Holy Spirit related by St. John. Luke painted on the big canvas, depicting nearly "operatic" stage sets and recording something like "arias" proceeding from the mouths St. Elizabeth, St. Simeon, St. Peter, and the Most Holy Theotokos. Through St. Luke, the Holy Spirit shone through with entirely new artforms .... which would not become current till fifteen more centuries had passed. How rich is our conception of the Early Church through His bold and creative spirit! Pray for us, St. Luke, that we too might be bold, for boldness is so desperately in need today!
Who can say what makes the physical heart quake from spiritual love? Who can say what brings a woman to ignore the laws of personal survival, laying down her life for her children? In matters that lift us far above the gritty world, where is the line separating the physical from the spiritual? Could a scientist .... or an emperor draw it? Where is the boundary? Let us draw near to Heaven through our Holy Icons. St. Luke did not hesitate to make an icon of the Mother of God. Generations of Christians have witnessed their wonderworking powers, dripping with myrrh as dew upon the windows that look on to Heaven. Bow down. Reverence them. Kiss them with a quaking heart. And never doubt that there is mirth Heaven for such as these.
The Son of God sits in the Temple listening to the learned doctors who have loved His Word and devoted their lives to it. He reveals little insights they have missed, whose truth they see instantly. The year is 12 A.D. Where might we go on that day to read of these things? Nowhere. For scrolls could not be repositories for God's secrets. Only the human person might be sacred enough to hold such matter, attested by St. Paul (1 Cor 3:16) and St. Peter (1 Pet 2:5). But the calamity of 70 A.D. — the Temple razed, Jerusalem destroyed, the Jewish people dispersed — changed that calculus. Suddenly, the enterprise of religious life lay in preserving the holy teachings in a series of documents that would be known simply as Talmud. This great rupture of the Jewish lifeworld has made it possible for us to know these secrets and to take our place silently off to one side in the Temple as Jesus had.
October 2, 2020 (Holy Calendar), Synaxis, Protoction of our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary
St. Andrew the Fool-for-Christ (d. 936) feigned madness under the direction of St. Anastasia offering the world's rejection as an ascetic oblation. He would remove his mask of insanity in the company of his spiritual father or his disciple revealing a rock-solid mind and steady spirit. Like his Master, St. Andrew the Fool proved the dog-pack mentality of fallen human nature by being reviled, spitted on, and beaten. Even the beggars to whom he gave his coins despised him. And here is "dog-pack think": the weakest ones exalt and glory over those in whom they detect even greater weakness. In this, St. Andrew the Fool-for-Christ touched an essence of Divinity. He touched the heart of Christ Who, possessing Almighty Power, stripped Himself of Kingly prerogatives in the narrow straits of a helpless beggar nailed to a Cross. And he touched the heart the Most Holy Theotokos, Who emptied herself of worldly honor that She might be reviled and pierced .... yet filling herself with God. A world awaits us — of goodness and purity and right. It begins with taking our place under Her mantle of protection, lifted up before God by her prayers, and guided unfailingly to the shining place whereof this world is but a pale reflection.
October 1, 2020 (Holy Calendar), Protection of our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary
St. Andrew the Fool would be granted the Divine vision of the Most Holy Theotokos, the Ever-Virgin Mary, surrounded by ranks of angels and saints kneeling before the Altar in the Church of Blachernae (Constantinople), where her first-class relics — her robe, part of her belt, and her all-important mantle — had been transferred from Palestine half-a-millennium earlier. "Today the Virgin stands in the midst of the Church, and with choirs of Saints she invisibly prays to God for us." She asks Her Son to accept the prayers of those petitioning for Her protection. And beneath her mantle are the faithful souls who seek her Motherly embrace. Meantime, Constantinople was surrounded by enemy troops (by some accounts, Muslims; by other accounts, pagans from Kievan Rus'). Her prayers protected the city that day, and they will protect us today, for we too are surrounded by dark armies — deceivers, accusers, and destroyers (cf. devil ← diabolos ← "who throws across"). Seek her prayers. Seek her protection. Seek to live under her mantle in this dangerous and uncertain world, where a roaring lion seeks someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8).
He has set His Image upon each of us and has inscribed a unique plan upon every soul. It may lie dormant for a time. Then it "goes off." It springs to life. It begins beating within us like a living heart. It has been wakened by His call. Our God is a calling God. He calls to us in the night. He writes messages to us upon the walls of our daily experience. He summons us to follow Him. What other life can there be? For does not every alternative amount to a living death?
September 23, 2020 (Holy Calendar), Conception of St. John the Forerunner
Conception of St. John the Forerunner (September 23, Holy Calendar). Conceived in the winter of a woman called barren, whose father was disappointment and bitterness. Beyond their lives, the world contracted as the autumnal equinox signaled the death of summer. But a new summer solstice still lay ahead reaching its height at his nativity, who pointed forward to the winter solistice and the Nativity of the True Light on the darkest of all nights. Never forget: we live in the midst of a vast artwork Whose Creator "painted" the heavens and the earth whose intricately interwoven meanings inescapably point back to Himself and thence to us, whom He mysteriously loves so well.
As we complete the eight days set aside to reflect on the Life-giving Cross, we ponder what sort of friendship God has offered us by this Sign — up-ending expectations, permitting the Temple to fall into rubble, abolishing ritual sacrifice. He has swept blood and death aside and has named us His sons and daughters. We are to be the Temple, saith the Lord. What should worship be following this Eighth Day of Creation? What should our sacred space look like? He has offered us His friendship. "Love one another!" is His command. And He has called us His family. The early Church responded by Breaking Bread according to His word. The veil between Heaven and earth has been lifted. And we meet with angels and archangels and all the company of Heaven. Here are our friends. This is our family.
During the Church's latter history, the Holy Cross has become seen as a place of butchery. Christian homilies and hymns are preoccupied with our being soaked in the Blood of the Lamb. But this deathly and passive understanding of Christian life and worship would have been alien to the Apostles, to the first Christians, and to their spiritual descendants for the next thousand years. By contrast, the Cross was seen as the place of transformation par excellence continuous with the Incarnation of God, Who at His earthly Conception, flipped the telos (or blueprint) of our lifeworld from death to life. At His Transfiguration He appeared among the deathless ones, Elijah and Moses. Please join the Hermitage as we Exalt the Life-giving Cross and honor God's invitation to be His friends.
From the conception of a never-fading Virgin, from a birth immaculate as our own, a certain fragrance is detected. It is a familiar scent. We know it from the deepest recesses of our racial memory. Her birth has roused its long slumbering within us. It is the fragrance of the morning of the earth, of the utter east, of the pristine shore which will be warmed by the first life-giving beams of the new Sun. The world, long dead, begins to stir with expectancy. For in her birth a sign is given from above. Within her is renewed the hope of first Creation and the desire of the everlasting hills.
This week God calls us away from our routines and toils to remember our vocation, our literary vocation. "By the breath of His mouth He made the made the starry host" (Ps 33) and then wove a Sacred Story in which we are all characters, all arising from His pen yet free to act and move and say what we will. Mysteriously, the Advent of God is (among other imperative and holy things) about unlocking this Narrative, layer upon layer. Heed His call, for this is our vocation -- yours and ours and everyones. For to participate in this Story is to participate in God.
What does perfection look like in God's eyes? What is the perfect life on earth as Heaven sees it? It has nothing to do with our individual accomplishments. It cannot be expressed by Olympic gold or trophies or university degrees. In fact, it has nothing to do with our worldly attainments, but rather a negation of what our culture proposes to be excellent.
13th Sunday After Pentecost (1 Cor 16:13:24, Mt 21:33-42). The story of the Holy Scriptures reads as a history of gardens, a succession of vineyards, for the vineyard signifies the good life with God Who is goodness. Conversely, wild life creeping into the garden, ruining the vineyard, represents the loss of Divine harmony on earth. Let us open this chronicle of gardens and read of the story of our ancestors and of our own lives.
"What good thing shall I do that I might have eternal life?" A simple sentence. The reply from the Lord Jesus is also simple. But it may not be what we think we want for ourselves. The good and the true are always simple. Simplicity is one of the properties of God. It is Hellish life, by its nature a complex of deceit and delusion, that is complicated. And wholesale efforts to redefine God's good and simple world? These are a wilderness of mazes, replete with narratives that have no end or real direction. We need not go far to see examples. For we live in a world of deceit and delusion. Withal, God's simple and good life abides, unchanged and unchanging. "Taste and see that the Lord is good!" (Ps 34:8).
At no stage or moment of life can we say, "There! This is what I am about!" For the state of our soul is a mystery known only to God. It is at the end of life when the great revelation we have awaited is disclosed: "Who am I? What was my life really about?" Even with the Mother of God, whose faithfulness lay in her sinless life, a conclusion could not yet be drawn. Only at the end of life are we past every temptation and every occasion for sin. That she was faithful to the end is part of the bedrock of our Christian faith. What then do we call her end? For crossing that line is understood to be the outcome of sin, the disease which sin introduces into our soul. St. John of Damascus called it "the Deathless Death."
When the Ruler of All begins a brief parable introducing "a certain king," we hear irony. When He promises to describe the "Kingdom of Heaven," a phrase that has never been heard before, we listen in rapt silence. And when this marvelous Kingdom seems to be invisibly present where we already are, we realize that we cannot be sure of anything and that our measures and weights and boundaries have failed. But this certain King will take care of that, for he "wishes to settle accounts."
Who then Is This? A child of the poor? The Only-begotten Son of God and Eternal Word of Creation? A destitute vagabond and despised criminal? The King of kings and Lord of lords? Is this not the carpenter's son? Is this not the well-pleasing Son of God the Father? It pleased Him to be all things, "for all things have come of Thee, O Lord." Who might say that they have uncovered God's "true identity" when His Being far surpasses our poor instruments to comprehend Him? Let us press our foreheads to the ground before His Majesty and with St. Peter say, "It is good that we might be here."
What is the meaning of life? If we express it in material terms, we see that our lives are spiritually empty. If we define it only in spiritual terms, we are aware of endless impracticalities. In fact, the spiritual world is interwoven into the material world as a Person of God is interwoven into the Son of man. We are left with a divine command, therefore: to discern spiritual significance in a material world, which will be our liberation from mortal life and the demons who haunt it.
Jesus goes to a high mountain having sent the Apostles out into the world on their own. Is this not a kind of "dress rehearsal" for the Ascension? As we might expect, they are jittery having no real direction. And here we see a haunting image of our own world — drifting and, without really knowing it, sinking into oblivion. Yet, our little story this morning concludes with a single sentence, which opens before us the Kingdom of God! It may appear at any time, in any place, if only we have eyes of faith to see it. Please join the Hermitage in our weekly meditation, "Come!"
The Lord's stepbrother, St. James, the Bishop of the first patriarchate Jerusalem, singled out Elijah's nature, which is no different from yours or mine. Yet this human body entered Heaven. Let us meditate on this, for this is a key that unlocks the deepest meaning of our own lives. We must trek nearly two miles above sea level, standing near to the Son of God and His Disciples, meeting with Moses and Elijah, and hearing the Most Holy voice of Father God, to venture further into this mystery touching the dignity of our bodies, a dignity worthy of this company and of Heaven itself.
July 17, 2020 (Holy Calendar), Feast of St. Marina of Antioch (b. 289)
On the Altar this morning, our icon of St. Marina, a patroness of chastity. We call to mind the 7th-c. Father, St. Isaac of Syria, who wrote that the two fiercest struggles of the Christian journey are protecting one's chastity and resisting the feeling of abandonment and its follow-on of cynicism and depression. We see the connection between these two: casual sex always means abandonment (which the soul unfailingly feels), and cynicism sets the stage for more casual sex as the heart seeks meaning where there is none. We at the Hermitage ask, "Which do you want? Sex without love or love without sex? Protect us, Blessed Marina, Great Martyr, who chose genuine love over all the world had to offer.
What more trenchantly speaks Heaven's goodness into the world than a truly shining life? It was the vocation of St. Gabriel the Archangel to announce the conception of three most shining lives into human history. In this, he stands amongst the dust of this world speaking clarity. He stands at the gate welcoming simple souls who long to see the real, the true, the shining.
"He returned to His city," says St. Matthew in passing. Remarkable! His city! Let us meditate on this marvelous place where the gates and courts of God were established on the earth for a brief time. We will learn much about Him, and we will recall much about ourselves .... as He would have us to be.
The night is far spent, and the Church faces grave divisions. At such a time we look for patron saints, great saints who can intercede for us. For (certainly in the history of the U.S.) there has never been a more urgent hour than the present one. Where can we find the pass through these high mountains? Where is the narrow way avoiding heresy and perversion on one side and disunity and rancor on the other? Ss Peter and Paul found this path. They too were plunged into the intense furnace of opposing theologies, of murderous, demonizing dissension, of wrack and ruin to one's cause and to one's person. Yet, by the grace of God, they forged a Church. Pray for us Ss Peter and Paul, for you know us, and you understand our times.
"Go! Be it done unto you as you have believed!" Two divine commands that restate a fact of our human nature. That is, we can only find what we are looking for. The thoughts of our hearts play a controlling role in the "reality" we assemble and the narratives we propose to explain reality. Nowhere is this principle more important than in our spiritual journey. To use St. John's phrase, we must be like Him to see Him as He really is (1 Jn 3:2). The centurion of our Gospel lesson today lives under, and wields, authority. He has no problem seeing the One Who has authority over Heaven and earth (Mt 28:18). He knows a Supreme Commander when he sees One. But do we? What narratives do we propose? What reality do we see? Will we see Him as He is? If not, then we can have no part in His Kingdom.
As Jesus makes plain, the choice between the Kingdom of God and worldly life is basic. It touches everything. Compromise or blending is not possible. We share today our voyage from the world and how it led us through (seemingly) the most far-flung routes. In God's wisdom and power, we arrived where we had begun and received what was ours from the start.
People may assume that we former Roman Catholics have found refuge in the Russian Orthodox Church. After all, church refugees and would-be refugees now cover the U.S. landscape. But we do not see our Church home in this light. We have not retreated from the Church, but the opposite — we have gone to her heart, which is Catholic and an indomitable adversary to secular culture. This last is the great cause of our time: a menacing secular culture that seeks to obliterate all vestiges of belief in God and God's morality. On whom can we depend to stand up to this fierce onslaught of chaos and violence? This is the vocation of the Russian Orthodox Church, tried in the furnace of Soviet oppression. She has been prepared by God for the present moment. And we are humbled to stand with her.
What is a saint? Yes, St. Paul writes that all believers are saints (Rom 1:7, et al.). But that begs the question concerning the nature of faithful life. What is the faithfulness of a saint, then? At the Hermitage we look to the Community of the Most Holy Theotokos and of the Beloved Disciple to understand Christian life.
We seek God yet find ourselves standing always in a swirl of holy mysteries, which we shall never order, much less categorize. It is our life's work, therefore, to receive each clue as precious and to search out the hidden roads from thing to thing, which God has set out for us: Pesach-to-Pascha, Shavuot-to-Pentecost, rivers of blood to rivers of living water. On this day, we have much to meditate upon.
What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom? In our post-scientific-revolution society, we expect some kind of convergence between these two things .... which is to say that our understanding of "truth" is gravely flawed. Today we celebrate the minute pains and momentous sacrifices that have preserved the changeless faith which the Son of God has bequeathed to us. It is also a story about and for our civilization and our times. We cannot claim to be Christian until we come to terms with this story.
Our longest and most comprehensive Gospel is Luke-Acts beginning with the prophecy of the birth of St. John the Forerunner and concluding with St. Paul's entrance into Rome. But shouldn't this be a three-volume set? Are not the Gospels about the promised unlocking of the Scriptures? And is not the Book of Acts a depiction of life lived according to these revealed principles? Where is the missing, most valuable, middle volume in which the Lord takes His disciples into a kind of wilderness for forty days and teaches them plainly and directly? It has never been revealed. Yet, we receive valuable clues at the point of Jesus' Ascension into Heaven. Let us consider them carefully, for our own "life lived" will depend on these divine principles.
This year and today is our Covid-19 Gospel lesson, for it restores our perspective: which end is up, what is right, and Who is Who. He is our Creator. We are His creatures. He alone is life. All else beside Him is death. We depend entirely upon Him for everything: for every cell of our bodies and every atom of the beautiful earth are His gift to us — an incommensurable gift that no one else and nothing else can give even in the tiniest measure.
Sunday of the Samaritan Woman (Acts 11:19-30, Jn 4:5-42). Today is set before us the ideal of God-with-us. St. John's Gospel begins with the grave words, "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not" but then progresses to an encounter with God at Jacob's Well culminating in a whole town declaring, "We believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world." Here is a story of spiritual seeking and longing .... and then of finding and rejoicing. Here is what we have lived for, what we have longed for, and what we today receive: God, plainly revealed, and salvation.
People ask why .... are even affronted that ... Jesus should say to the paralytic man at the Bethesda pool, "See that you sin no more lest something worse should befall you." What is this sin? We do not know much about the paralytic man, but certainly we can say that everyone who comes to this pool is an idolator — a most serious affront to God. For the pool is an Asclepion — a colonnaded temple surrounding a pool. These were found throughout the Roman Empire, where invalids worshipped the god Asclepius hoping to be healed. It is a dark, dog-eat-dog world intended to display the anti-world to Heaven's Kingdom. Yet, in our Epistle lesson, Acts 9:32ff, we are presented with the corrective: the Christian community of love. This morning we contemplate the basics: the elemental world forever or the Kingdom of God. The earliest name for Christianity was "The Way," and most surely it is about the Crossroads. Which way will we go? The choice is always before us.
To be a Myrrh-bearer to Jesus is to be in attendance to a great King that no one else perceives. It is to honor the God and King that no one else honors. He is the highest of Kings and greatest of Lords. And beside Him death, even Hell, cringes in horror. Today, we honor those who honored. We revere those who revered. We humble ourselves imitating those who were humble. For He is our Lord and our King, and beside Him all else is nothing at all. Bear myrrh for Him. Go to the sanctuaries throughout the world and worship Him boldly, courageously, and faithfully. Anoint the holy spaces within you to "make Him room." And on the holy days, bow your heads at church, for He reigns. He reigns today. And He reigns unto the ages of ages. Do not wait in passivity, but crown Him with many crowns. He is the Lamb upon His throne.
Belief in God is the natural state of man and woman. It is encoded within us at birth. It is the world and an act of the perverted will that undermines the beautiful soul emplanted within us at conception. But divorce from God is a fearful act of withdrawal and a diminishing of our full stature. It is upon this foundation of fear and doubt that Jesus chooses to establish His Church. The Church gathers us as living souls. We participate in the Holy Spirit there receiving baptism and renewed baptism (reconciliation). This is His plan. This is His will. And from here He can once more speak into our childlike hearts, to which belongs the Kingdom of Heaven.
Christos anesti! Christos voskrese!
Christ is risen from the dead,
trampling down death with death,
and on those in the tombs bestowing life!
The Homily of St. John Chrysostom,
Archbishop of Constantinople, on Great & Holy Pascha.
I have heard the question many times: "How could God have made a world like this one .... if there is a God?" But "Christ did not come to explain human suffering or to eliminate it. Rather, He came to fill human suffering with His Presence" (Archpriest Gheorghe Calciu). And this world that He cannot change? This is the world that we have made. At every step, we might have chosen another — a good world. But we did not. Yet, He chooses to be with us. In this, He must suffer. Here is Great & Holy Friday. Forever enshrined — God's Son upon a Cross because He chose. He chose for us.
He rides into the Royal City, into the Vineyard, to the Wedding Banquet. He is the Son, the Heir, the Bridegroom. All has been made ready for the Marriage of Heaven to earth. In this, the two greatest questions set before each human life are enunciated: "Who do you say that I AM?" (Mk 8:29) and "Do you love Me?" (Jn 21:15). Here is the final crossroads — for them and for each of us. Which will it be? As in any marriage proposal, there there can be no third way: either "Yea" or "Nay." And as in marriage, consent must be all-encompassing, life-changing, and sacrificial. Every hour of every day: sacrificial. Here is the love your life. But will you claim it?
In the chaos of our bad decisions, of our many compulsions, in the busy-ness of our egos and the noise of the world, we had lost our way. We had forgot our identity. Our lives had become wandering mazes lost. Then God in His love looked to the free choice of His Son and the consent of a peasant girl to set before us our own true identities: the ideal of a man and the ideal of a woman. In these faces we might recognize our own truest selves, and following them we might find our way out of darkness into light, where God dwells. Here is safety. Here is protection against the ravages of the world. Here is life.
May I share truths about our God? The world is God's implacable enemy. He desires each of us to turn away from it and home to Him. Our life here is brief, but His is forever. For Him death is not a tragedy but a holy passage into joy. Now He has called each of us into a wilderness to be alone with Him. This space from which we may not veer is our quarantine area. This time He has carved out that we may ignore the demands of worldly life. At death, it is too late to begin spiritual preparation. In His love, He has ordained a NOW. Go to Him, for He is waiting.
Which ladder is it that brings you to your own starting place and original intention? "The Ladder of Ascent" of St. John Klimatikos (translated "Scala Paradisi") reminds us of a related word, "Scale," where we "weigh in the balance." As we ascend through Lent toward the Kingdom of Heaven, our burden is lightened, our bodies are diminished, and our souls are magnified. Do you remember the lightness of being you once knew? Our minds are "renewed," St. Paul says (Rom 12:2), not invented. Our Lenten pilgrimage is an inner journey to our own spiritual beginnings.
On March 6, 326 in Jerusalem a burst of divine light set before us a revelation for the ages: the Precious Nails and Life-Creating Cross of Our Savior emerging from beneath the temple of Venus. Is this not the great crossroads of nearly every human life? Is it not the story of humankind? Here is the crossroads between "eros," the lust of the flesh for the world, and "agape," the self-sacrificing love of even our God. One path leads down a path of darkness-unto-blindness & prison while the other leads to the light-that-is-life & freedom. Here in this season of plague, look upon a canvas painted by our God. He has displayed it in His love and hope that we all be guided safely home.
Today is more than a saint day, for it signifies a great boundary defining Catholic faith and worship. Is human reason to be trusted as the faculty that will lead us to God, or do we trust the human spirit, the soul? This debate between logic and prayer is represented by Barlaam and St. Gregory Palamas respectively. It is also the story of the Western Church, overheated by dialectical philosophy, departing from an ancient Church founded by the Lord Jesus to perceive through its spirit and to pray from its soul.
Today we celebrate the Seventh Ecumenical Council, which ended the persecution of Christians venerating icons. Why will you, even now, rarely find icons in a Western Catholic Church (Roman or Anglo-Catholic) and almost never find a statue in an Orthodox Church? This is not simply a matter of taste, yet neither is it governed by ecclesiastical laws. It is all the more amazing, therefore, that is should be so. Reflecting on this basic fact will lead us to understand essential differences between the Western Church and Orthodoxy and the life of faith, therefore, for one-and-a-half billion Christians in the world.
From at least the 2nd century to the present, a surprising number of the faithful have believed that Jesus sweeps everyone into Heaven on account of His famous compassion. "But what of the content of our lives?! What of the state of our souls?!" we may ask. But the reply is steadfast century after century: "It does not matter, for God is merciful!" What a pity that so many lives, eternal lives, should be thrown away because of this dangerous heresy. The Lord Jesus Himself tells us plainly, "Of My Own I can do nothing for you. As I see, I will judge." Yes, His personal feelings may move Him to pity in the private spaces of a grieving Heart. But this grief will not alter His Judgment. Yet, at the end of the day, it will be ourselves who act as judge. For all our lives, we have been the masters of our thoughts and choices, the "decider" of the content of our personal histories and the corresponding state of our souls. Jesus will see and then act based entirely on this: what is, not what might have been.
Continuing in the five Sundays of Pre-Lent, we enter our third: Prodigal Son Sunday. That this story is dear to the Lord's heart is clear, for it recasts last week's parable of the remorseful Publican and proud Pharisee in a new setting. The Publican who chose for worldly life now repents with his eyes downcast, on his knees, with his face (in a sense) pressed to Father God's tunic. The Pharisee looks upon him with contempt, not knowing the powerful transformation within that has carried him to God's bosom. This week the Publican is cast as a Prodigal Son who chooses for the world but then arrives to the same brokenhearted state and thence to contrition and grace. The Pharisee is cast as the older brother. These parables reveal the sinews and nerves of spiritual growth, of our own advancement to Heaven, and to our own transformation — intimacy with and likeness to God. The parable reveals our own stages of spiritual development, culminating in our becoming the Father. Then, we apply the Father's mind and heart in understanding the Younger Son.
Two young men stood at a crossroads. One chose the enticements of worldly life and prestige. The other chose religious life. But they both ended up at same destination, the world — upward mobility and vanities. Being a religious myself, I am more mindful of the Pharisee than the Publican. I know the story of the man who chose religious life but ended up becoming a slave to worldly culture. Is this not the story of our great religious communions? Where does one send a family to form their children in church without fearing some kind of unwholesome indoctrination? Has the toxic culture won? Well, it is certainly a pitched battle.
What timezone is Heaven in? It is always now. Heaven is an eternal now. Eden was an eternal now. Jesus says we must go back to the hearts we had as children to enter this marvelous and unending now. Wasn't that the essence of a Saturday afternoon when we were nine or ten? A now that had no boundaries? This is the nature of salvation and the goal of our journey to God — to live in His godly now without fear, without fretting, without plans or designs. Dependent on Him. Now. Forever.
"Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" Towering words, life-commanding words. Yet, I wonder if we are able to hear them as they were intended to be heard. The problem begins with the translation, repent, which Tertullian, the "Father of Western Theology" rejected. The word Jesus used, metanoia, does not mean, "Do penance!" Let us go back to the very day when He spoke these all-important words and listen closely to what was actually said: "Metanoiete! Simply go back!"
Do we understand the Forerunner as the "man from Eden," fragrant as the morning of the earth in his purity? Do we grasp the ancient significance of water — chaotic, dangerous, and symbolic of the powers of darkness and destruction? The entrance of John the Baptist onto the scene was shocking in its scale and potency. The whole Levant was swept up in its power. For in his person were contained the greatest forces and supreme words in our of our story: the void, creation, Eden, salvation. Consider this story once more but with the eyes and ears of the ancient world.
The second greatest feast of Orthodoxy, after Great Pascha, observes "God in man made manifest." Here is the kernel of our lives and of our faith. For as the Fathers plainly saw, God has been our essential nature but lost to us in the darkness of our minds. Only by God sending His Son, a man in Whom God is abundantly manifest ... unto true Godhood, might we discover our own birthright to Heaven. Here is the identity crisis for the ages — royalty roaming the earth in the brutishness of our animal nature. Salvation? Why it has always been ours .... if only we would embrace God uniting our divine nature with His. The path to this embrace is as ancient as our faith: purgation (ridding ourselves of all that is unworthy within us), illumination (having been cleansed, letting divine light fill our lives), and union (having reclaimed our birthright, joining the Father in His empyreal kingdom). Today we venerate the Great Manifestation. Let us give thanks for this, our Heavenly re-birth.
How do you hear Heaven? How do you hear Heaven's most urgent warnings or instructions? To be sure, Heaven's urgings are not rare but rather constant and true and always gracing us like life-giving mists. When we were children, we could see the world with immediacy and clarity. The edge of each leaf so sharp, the fragrance of the woods so keen. Each us us was born with these clear faculties planted within us as surely as our birthright to Heaven. God speaks to this purity within us still, just as He spoke to the heart of a sixteen-year-old girl and to an eighty-year-old carpenter. But if our eyes and ears be dull from gazing too much on the world, then turn to Heaven anyway, for nothing shall be impossible for God. And His mercies are everlasting.
The question is old as His birth: But if this is God, where is His might? In an ancient world where kings were called "Potentates" and Caesar's power was celebrated with the word "god," we Christians have "folly" (1 Cor 1:22ff). Do we believe the Lord of Hosts could not visit His Almighty Power upon us? Have we forgotten the Day of the Lord and the vast (and shameful) disjunction between the standards of Heaven and our own? God's Son, the Heir, His Own Self, lived among us in His weakness and vulnerability because His relationship with us depends upon our love. In His wisdom, He came to us, Who made Heaven and Earth, in frailty that our hearts might speak to Him in care and devotion and in the language which is His alone: love, real and abiding love.
Abraham, a prince of the Chaldees, Moses, a prince of Egypt, living princely life before God's appearance to Moses in the Wilderness of Midian, were called (along with many others) to be a kingdom, not through royal genealogy but through belief and faithfulness. Yes, Moses descended from Abraham through Isaac and Jacob. But what is that since all people on earth have descended from Noah, another patriarch of the nation of belief? We see that this royal "house" is the House of Love — God's offer of a kind of divine sonship through adoption. This morning we read a genealogy in the first verse of St. Mathew's Gospel that does not lead to Jesus, "not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man" (as St. John would say on this subject), "but of God." It is of God. And God — Who is outside of time, where sequence and family descent have no meaning or scope, Who is Spirit, which does not depend upon white or red corpuscles or plasma for genealogy — has envisioned a different kind of kingdom. It is a nation based upon our love of Him and His love for us through mutual adoption — including Joseph's adoption of the infant Jesus. It is a nation whose blood and sinews are love. By worldly standards, Jesus holds but a tenuous claim on the modest honor of being of the House of David. Yet, we who believe hold the royal honor of being of the House of God by that same principle: adoption.
Today, the Orthodox Church honors the Patriarchs: Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jacob ... Is this a "birthday of the Church"? Well, no. Does it venerate the founders of the faith? Not exactly. It is a commemoration of those to whom God offered friendship, which was then fully requited. Noah endured derision and rejection. Abraham and Moses lived princely lives, which they foreswore embracing the wilderness instead. Friendship with God signifies intimacy, learning God's thoughts and ways and, in like measure, a turning away from the world and its false enchantments, which falls beneath godliness. A great king prepared a banquet and invited many. As in all banquets, it was a sign of friendship with God. Its delicacies included eternal life, peace of mind, the reclaiming of one's birthright in purity & goodness. But all declined, for they were wholly absorbed in worldly pleasures. Reject God? Is this not remarkable! No, not if we look out the window and see that this is our norm today. Indeed, "what we list" (whose noun-form is "lust") is commonly the cause for declining all that God offers. Who are the Patriarchs, then? They are those who set aside their lives, lives of privilege and luxury, in order to be available for real friendship with God. For friendship with God begins with relinquishing our lusts in order to make room for His ways and His mind and the spirit of goodness. We cannot have both.
How do we discover God's expectations for us as individuals? Often this sacred process, which we call theosis, is a journey through suffering and struggle and finally in being laid bare. After all, the world does not belong to God in the mystery of His self-depreciating gift of freedom to humans and angels. The world, time and again, turns out to be the implacable enemy of God (as the NT and our own experience reveal). To live godly lives, we must swim against the current, must carve against the grain. We must strip ourselves of the world's debris, which otherwise would cling to us. But the end result will be purity and goodness and right. It was this process, striving for purity, that made possible the conception of the Most Pure Theotokos.
Who does not notice that we in the U.S. (and in much of the English-speaking world) are now living a double life? Have developed a split personality, to the grief of our souls? The human spirit longs for integrity, where every inner thought and impulse fit together harmoniously in a state of peace. But our culture, with breathtaking speed, has forced us into a life where we are constantly pulled in two directions. We have our former culture and life, where from late October until late December we remembered who we truly were, where we were going, and what mattered most. Now we have the same timeframe but all the former significance has been lost, replaced by a version that has stood our beloved, age-old customs on their head.