Spiritual Food for Thought
St. Cosmas of Aetolia
The Martyrs earned paradise with their blood; the Monastics, with their ascetic life. Now we, my brethren, who beget children, how shall we earn paradise? With hospitality, by relieving the poor, the blind, the lame, as Joachim (the father of the Theotokos ) did…. Almsgiving, love, and fasting sanctify man, enrich him in both soul and body, and bring him to a good end; the body and the soul become holy.
St. Theophanes the Recluse
On the feast day of the Entrance into the Temple of the Most-holy Theotokos, I find it timely to give you instruction in prayer – the main work of the temple. A temple is a place of prayer and arena of prayer’s development. For us, entry into the temple is entry into a prayerful spirit. The Lord has the kindness to call our hearts His temple, where we enter mentally and stand before Him, ascending to Him like the fragrant smoke of incense. We are going to study how to attain this state.
Gathering in the temple, you pray, of course. And in praying here, you surely ought not abandon prayer at home. Therefore, it would be extraneous to speak to you about our duty to pray, when you already pray. But I do not think that it is extraneous in any way to give you two or three rules about how to pray, if not in the way of teaching, then simply as a reminder. The work of prayer is the first work in Christian life. If in everyday affairs the saying: “live and learn” is true, then so much more it applies to prayer, which never stops and which has no limit.
Let me recall a wise custom of the ancient Holy Fathers: when greeting each other, they did not ask about health or anything else, but rather about prayer, saying “How is your prayer?” The activity of prayer was considered by them to a be a sign of the spiritual life, and they called it the breath of the spirit. If the body has breath, it lives; if breathing stops, life comes to an end. So it is with the spirit. If there is prayer, the soul lives; without prayer, there is no spiritual life.
However, not every act of prayer is prayer. Standing at home before your icons, or here in church, and venerating them is not yet prayer, but the “equipment” of prayer. Reading prayers either by heart or from a book, or hearing someone else read them is not yet prayer, but only a tool or method for obtaining and awakening prayer. Prayer itself is the piercing of our hearts by pious feelings towards God, one after another – feelings of humility, submission, gratitude, doxology, forgiveness, heart-felt prostration, brokenness, conformity to the will of God, etc. All of our effort should be directed so that during our prayers, these feelings and feelings like them should fill our souls, so that the heart would not be empty when the lips are reading the prayers, or when the ears hear and the body bows in prostrations, but that there would be some qualitative feeling, some striving toward God. When these feelings are present, our praying is prayer, and when they are absent, it is not yet prayer.
It seems that nothing should be simpler and more natural for us than prayer and our hearts’ striving for God. But in fact it is not always like this for everyone. One must awaken and strengthen a prayerful spirit in oneself, that is one must bring up a prayerful spirit. The first means to this is to read or to hear prayers said. Pray as you should, and you will certainly awaken and strengthen the ascent of your heart to God and you will come into a spirit of prayer. Continue reading ‘St. Theophanes the Recluse On Prayer’
St. Silvanus the Athonite
Everyday experience shows that even people who in their inner depths accept Christ’s commandment to love one’s enemies do not put it into practice. Why? First of all, because without grace we cannot love our enemies. But if, realizing that this love was naturally beyond them, they asked God to help them with His grace they would certainly receive this gift.
Excerpt taken from the book: St. Silouan the Athonite- By: Archimandrite Sophrony
Fr. John Moses
The study of the works of St. Theophan the Recluse is always a challenge, but the study of his book, The Path to Salvation , has been a true blessing. I am sorry for those of you who were not able to attend our class. Do read the book and take time to study it and digest well the truths that it contains.
St. Theophan says that when we are baptized, God places a seed of His Grace within us. There have been a few rare souls in whom this seed immediately blossomed into the fruit of holiness and a Christ-like life.
Rare, indeed.
While this holiness was possible for all of us at our baptism, for most of us some part of our nature remains unconverted or unchanged. St. Paul calls this unconverted part of our nature “the flesh” In several of his writings he talks about “fleshly” or “carnal” Christians.
Having both the seed of Grace and a carnal nature means that spiritually speaking we are schizophrenic. We live between two inner realities – the Spirit and the flesh. St. Paul tells us that the flesh wars continually against the Spirit.
So, in the face of this schizophrenic spiritual reality, St. Theophan asks the question, “How do we live a God-pleasing life?”
Wait a moment. This question may make us think that we have to do something for God to love us. No, not at all. The Scriptures and the Fathers are clear about this. God loves us now, just as we are. As St. Paul points out, even while we were sinners and His enemies, God sent Christ to die for us. St. John writes, “God so loved the world that He gave His Only Begotten Son…” God is unchanging eternal Love and not some angry Father that we must appease by our good behavior.
Yet certainly, God does not want to see us laboring under the slavery of sin. In Exodus, God tells Moses that He had heard the cries of the people under the whips of their taskmasters. He would send a deliverer to free them. Continue reading ‘Just Say No- By: Fr. John Moses’
Fr. John Behr
While Christ has already died, we are to consider ourselves as dead to sin and alive to God: “Do not yield your members to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but yeild yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments of righteousness” (Rom 6.13). Yet we are still under death, and so, while our death to sin in baptism is spoken of as an event in the past, our life with Christ is still in the future: if we have died with Christ, through baptism, we shall also live with him.
Excerpt taken from the book- The Mystery of Christ: By Fr. John Behr
St. Isaac the Syrian
By: Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev
Already in his lifetime Isaac was respected and venerated as a spiritual teacher. After his death his glory increased as his writings spread. Joseph Hazzaya, who lived in the eighth century, called him ‘famous among the saints’. Another Syrian writer calls him ‘the master and teacher of all monks and the haven of salvation for the whole world’.
By the eleventh century, due to the Greek translation of his writings, Isaac became widely known in the Greek-speaking East: in the famous anthology of ascetical texts, the Evergetinon, the passages from ‘abba Isaac the Syrian’ stand on the same footing as those from the classics of early Byzantine spirituality. This is how a modest ‘Nestorian’ Bishop from a remote province of Persia became a Holy Father of the Orthodox Church of Chalcedonian orientation – a rather exceptional phenomenon in the history of Eastern Christianity.
St Isaac has exerted a considerable influence on Russian spirituality. His ascetical homilies, translated into Slavonic in the XIVth century, made a deep impression on St Nil of Sora, one of the most important monastic writers of the XVIth century. In the XIXth century major theologians, such as Philaret of Moscow and Theophane the Recluse, as well as famous secular writers, such as I.Kireyevsky and F.Dostoyevsky, were among his admirers. Dostoyevsky was deeply influenced by Isaac’s homilies and used some of them as a source material for ‘the writings of Elder Zosima’ in ‘The Brothers Karamazoff’. Continue reading ‘The influence of St. Isaac the Syrian and his significance for today’
Metropolitan Anthony Bloom of Sourozh
We are called to be children of God…yet no man can attain any of this through his own efforts. Neither by our own efforts or by our own desire can we become a part of the body of Christ…nor can we become partakers of the divine nature simply by our own efforts…The way in which any of this can be realized are through the sacraments of the Church [in Her Liturgical Life].
The sacraments are the actions of God within the Church in which God grants us His grace by means of this material world. It is in the sacraments [such as baptism, confession and communion] that brings us the grace which we cannot acquire by any other means,…She brings grace to us as a gift through the material substance of this world, the water of baptism, the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist, and the myrrh of Chrismation…the world even though it is enslaved to corruption is itself pure and without sin. And God takes this world, the matter of this material creation, and unites it in an incomprehensible way with Himself, and this material world brings to us the grace which we are unable to raise ourselves up to.
(Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, The Mystery of Faith, 166.)
In the Incarnation, God assumed human life in its fullness, and the discovery of the divine presence involved the body, as well as the soul. Since God Himself had suffered in His assumed human body, the human forms and bodies of His witnesses had to be seen as sharing in the glory of His resurrection.
Excerpt taken from the book: Imperial Unity & Christian Divisions
Fathers of the seven Ecumenical Councils
During the time of the Ecumenical Councils many pious Bishops were recognized as great teachers and defenders of the faith and were glorified by the Church as saints. St. Nicholas, Archbishop of Myra in Lycia, was known for his zeal, wisdom, humbleness and charity. He assisted the poor, quickly protected unjustly condemned or any one suffering from abuses of the rulers of those days. His noblest act, the conviction of Arius at the first Ecumenical Council, brought him an eternal glory and was marked by special acknowledgment of the fathers of the Council. He died December 6, 343 A. D. When Saratzins were threatening the city of Myra, his relics were removed to Italy, where they repose to the present time in the city of Bari.
St. Athanasius, the great, of Alexandria, belongs to the school of Apologetics of the Church. When a deacon on the First Ecumenical Council, St. Athanasius was superior in his defense of the true faith against Arius’ heresy and as Archbishop of Alexandria during 46 years, proved to be steadfast pillar of the Church. He was accused by the heretics then in all kinds of crimes, including treason, was exiled five times from Alexandria and only the last six years of his life he spent in the Cathedral city, arduously working for the peace and glory of the Church. He wrote many apologetics on behalf of the Church and died peacefully in 373 A. D., being 75 years old, and was given by the Church the title of “The Great.”
In the fourth century a most trying time for the Church, lived and worked the other three Ecumenical hierarch and teachers- Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom. Continue reading ‘Great Fathers and Ecumenical Teachers of the Church’
St. Nicholas Cabasilas
The essential act in the celebration of the holy mysteries in the transformation of the elements into the Divine Body and Blood; its aim is the sanctification of the faithful, who through these mysteries receive the remission of their sins and the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven.
As a preparation for, and contribution to, this act and this purpose we have prayers, psalms, and readings from Holy Scripture; in short, all the sacred acts and forms which are said and done before and after the consecration of the elements. While it is true that God freely gives us all holy things and that we bring him nothing, but that they are absolute graces, he does nevertheless necessarily require that we should be fit to receive and preserve them; and he would not permit those who were not so disposed to be thus sanctified. It is in this way that he admits us to Baptism and Christmation; in this way that he received us at the divine banquet and allows us to participate at the solemn table. Christ, in his parable of the sower, has illustrated this way that God has of dealing with us. “A sower went forth,” he says, “to sow”- not to plough the earth but to sow: thus showing that the work of preparation must be done by us.
Therefore, since in order to obtain the effects of the divine mysteries we must approach them in a state of grace and properly prepared, it was necessary that these preparations should find a place in order of the sacred rite: and, in fact, they are found there. There, indeed, we see what the prayers and psalms, as well as the sacred actions and forms which the liturgy contains, can achieve in us. They purify us and make us able fittingly to receive and to preserve holiness, and to remain possessed of it.
Excerpt taken from the book: A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy -By Nicholas Cabasilas
