Vouchsafe us, O Lord…

“Vouchsafe us, O Lord, to live this day without sin.” We pray thus in the morning. But only the gentle presence of the Divine Spirit within us affords us the possibility of continuing sober in spirit….  If our prayers are to lead to results like those of which our Fathers and teachers spoke so rapturously, it is essential that we follow their teaching. The first condition is belief in Christ. The second, to acknowledge ourselves as sinners. This perception can reach such depths that one feels oneself worse than all other men; and this is obvious to us not because of our outer behavior but because we see how distanced we are from God…. The more we humble ourselves in painful repentance, the more rapidly our prayer reaches God. When, though, we lose humility, no ascetic striving will help us. The action in us of pride, criticism of our brethren, self-exalting and hostility towards our neighbor, thrusts us away from the Lord.

~Elder Sophrony of Essex: On Prayer

In daily life…

Rembrandt’s St Anastasius of Sinai

In daily life it is important that we remain constantly attentive to the indications God gives us about what we should do and the way we should do it. Even so we will not be able to free ourselves completely from bad thoughts; no one can, not even the most perfect. Perfection, however great, does not prevent man from being bothered by thoughts. But simply because of experience in spiritual life, what shook us deeply before becomes easier to overcome. In the desert, Christ opposed the temptations of the devil by immediate rejection, even giving theological basis for His answers. It is a lesson for us. Each time we have a bad thought, we should reject it immediately, and refuse to enter into converse with it. But this practice can only be assimilated by long ascetic effort, and by the action of grace in us. What does it mean to work out our salvation? It means that among all the things that we see in cosmic existence, we choose what is pleasing to God and separate ourselves from what goes against God. Then, little by little, we see our life changing. But be patient. God can, of course, visit us and in an instant open our eyes to eternity. But usually it is a labor of several years.

~Fr. Sophrony of Essex

for the Creator… there can be no enemy…

The Staretz would say that for Christ there are no enemies — there are those who accept “the words of eternal life,” there are those who reject and even crucify; but for the Creator of every living thing, there can be no enemy. So it should be for the Christian, too, who “in pity for all must strive for the salvation of all.”

Wherein, then, lies the force of the commandment, “Love your enemies“? Why did the Lord say that those who keep His commandments would know from very experience whence the doctrine?

. . . . God is love, in superabundance embracing all creatures. By allowing man to actually know this love the Holy Spirit reveals to him the path of fullness of being. To say “enemy” implies rejection. By such rejection a man falls from the plenitude of God. . . .”The whole paradise of Saints lives by the Holy Spirit, and from the Holy Spirit nothing in creation is hid,” writes the Staretz. “God is love and in the Saints the Holy Spirit is love. Dwelling in the Holy Spirit, the saints behold love and embrace it, too, in their love.”

. . . .[It] is possible to judge whether a given state of contemplation was a reality or an illusion only after the soul had returned to consciousness of the world; for then, as the Staretz pointed out, if there were no love for enemies and so for all creatures, it would be a true indication that the supposed contemplation had not been a real communion with God.

– The Monk of Mount Athos  by Archimandrite Sophrony

We must pray for all…

A hermit declared with evident satisfaction that “God will punish all atheists. They will burn in everlasting fire.”

Obviously upset, the Staretz [St Silouan] said: “Tell me, supposing you went to paradise, and there you looked down and saw someone burning in hell fire, would you feel happy?”

“It can’t be helped. It would be their own fault,” said the hermit.

The Staretz [St Silouan] answered him in a sorrowful countenance: “Love could not bear that,” he said. “We must pray for all.”

* This excerpt was taken from the book:

The Monk of Mount Athos by Elder Sophrony Sakharov

hat tip: Mystagogy

There are two kinds of hunger…

William Bouguereau -Thirst (La Soif) 1886

Prefer the apparent inaction of inner silence to feeding the hungry?  There are two kinds of hunger – physical and spiritual… Behold the days come, saith the Lord God that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.  In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for thirst.

~Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov

hat tip: Church Fathers Wisdom (Dynamis)

astounded by the inconceivable vision…

St Basil the Blessed at Prayer: Part 3 of the Triptych “Holy Rus” (Sergei Kirillov, 1994)

It is impossible to detect the actual process of our inner growth.  I think this may be because our spirit thirsts for ‘those things which cannot be shaken’ (Heb. 12:27) – that are not subject to progression.  A life of profound prayer is a combination of our natural upsurges towards the eternal Being and the eternal Being’s descent to us.  When the One true God reveals Himself to us we are introduced into the sphere of His Being and undergo a radical alteration in our whole self not to be defined in ordinary language.  We are too circumscribed to contain the gift completely.  Nevertheless, our heart experiences an indescribable harmony of love, and the mind falls silent astounded by the inconceivable vision.  

Blessed Sophrony Sakharov

“Spiritual Life,” On Prayer, Rosemary Edmonds (tr), Stavropegic Monastery of Saint John the Baptist, Essex, England, p. 81.

They hunger for truth…

Ilya Repin's Barge Haulers Wading (1872)

O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God:

We beseech and implore Thee,

Cast us not away from Thy presence,

and being not wroth with all of our ungodliness

Appear unto us, O Light o the world,

to reveal unto us the mystery of the ways of Thy salvation,

that we may become sons and daughters of Thy Light.

“…There is suffering on all sides. The air resounds with the groaning of the oppressed. Millions upon millions of unhappy people struggle, if only for a while to escape death treading on their heels. Day after day we hear tell of starvation, violence, slaughter. The nightmare has no end. Others may strain to find a way out of the darkness of their spiritual ignorance: they hunger for Truth. But when this Truth, apparently so sought after, so longed for, appears in all its divine perfection, though ‘the spirit indeed is willing… the flesh is weak’ (Matt. 26:41), and they close their hearts to the power of immortality. Spurning Him Who said, ‘I am the truth’ (John 14:6), they join the persecutors – and, as Tertullian said, ‘the best way of finding favor with the persecutors of truth is to dilute and corrupt it’ (Apologeticus 46).”

 

from the book: His Life is Mine by Archimandrite Sophrony

Genuine Christian Dispostion…

Mikhail Nesterov's Evening on the Volga Loneliness (1932)

Man is indeed an enigma. The tragedy of our age and (more particularly, perhaps) the wholesale withdrawal from the Church and from Christ compel us to approach the problem boldly. St Paul wrote to the Corinthians:

‘Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world… but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory… God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God… Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God’ (I Cor. 2:6 et seq.).

This is normal Christian understanding, without which we cannot ‘walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called (cf Eph. 4:1). But, it may be objected, could not such temerity lead to pride? To counteract any tendency to conceit we have only to remember Christ’s warning: ‘And thou Capernaum, which are exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell’ (Matt. 11:23).

For a clearer picture of the Christian journey, let us adopt the method resorted to by the fathers of the Church, and draw an analogy.

When we see a centuries old tree with its branches reaching to the clouds, we know that its roots, deep in the earth, must be powerful enough to support the whole. If the roots did not go down into the bowels of the earth – perhaps as far down as the tree is high – and if they were not as strong and widespread as the part we see, they could not feed the tree. They could not support it – a slight wind and the tree would fall. We can observe something similar in the spiritual life of man. If, like the apostles, we recognize the greatness of our calling in Christ – that is, of our election in Him before the creation of the world to ‘receive the adoption of sons’ (Gal. 4:5), it makes us humble, not proud. This lowering, this humbling of ourselves is essential if we would preserve a genuinely Christian disposition. It is expressed in a constant awareness of our nothingness, as radical and all-round self-condemnation. And the deeper one goes in self-condemnation, the higher God raises one.

‘Until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force… He that hath ears to hear, let him hear’ (Matt 11:12,15).

from the book: His Life is Mine by Archimandrite Sophrony

heavenly love on the earthly plane…

I am reading His Life is Mine by Archimandrite Sophrony, and I am sure that I will finish it and restart it again. Such is the nature of reading and praying to understand the depths of such thought.

From the beginning this book has touched me profoundly…

from Chapter 2, The Enigma of I AM:

The Gospel says, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life’ (John 3:16). The Holy Spirit introduces us into the realm of Divine love, and we not only live this love but begin to understand that if God, the First and the Last, were mono-Hypostatic (that is, one Person), then He would not be love. Moses, who interpreted the revelation I AM as meaning a single hypostasis, gave his people the Law. But ‘grace and truth came by Jesus Christ’ (John 1:17). The Trinity is the God of love: ‘The love of the Father which crucifies; the love of the son which is crucified; the love of the Holy Spirit which is victorious’ (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow). Jesus knowing ‘that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end‘ (John 13:1). This is our God. And there is none other save Him. The man who by the gift of the Holy spirit has experienced the breath of His love knows with his whole being that such love is peculiar to the Triune Godhead revealed to us as the perfect mode of Absolute Being. The mono-Hypostatic God of the Old Testament and the (long after the New Testament) (God) of the Koran does not know love.

To love is to live for and in the beloved whose life becomes our life. Love leads to singleness of being. Thus it is within the Trinity. ‘The Father loveth the Son’ (John 3:35). He lives in the Son and in the Holy Spirit. The Son ‘abides in the love of the Father’ (John 15:10) and in the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit we know as love all-perfect. The Holy Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and lives in Him and abides in the Son. This love makes the sum total of Divine Being a single eternal Act. After the pattern of this unity mankind must also become one man. (‘I and my Father are one’ (John 10:30). ‘That they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us’ (John 17:21).

Christ’s commandment is the projection of heavenly love on the earthly plane. Realized in its true content, it makes the life of mankind similar to the life of the Triune God. The dawn of an understanding of this mystery comes with prayer for the whole world as for oneself. In this prayer one lives the consubstantiality of the human race. It is vital to proceed from abstract notions to existential – that is, ontological categories.

Within the life of the Trinity each Hypostasis is the Bearer of all the plenitude of Divine Being, and therefore dynamically equal to the Trinity as a whole. To achieve the fulness of god-man is to become dynamically equal to humanity in the aggregate. Herein lies the true meaning of the second commandment, which is, indeed, ‘like unto the first’ (Matthew 22:39).

I have had simple explanations, platitudes really, of how One alone cannot love, etc. Father Sophrony, who sometimes is so deep that I find myself rereading things multiple times, made this one simpler for me. The part that touched me: is, “To love is to live for and in the beloved whose life becomes our life. Love leads to singleness of being” and “The dawn of an understanding of this mystery comes with prayer for the whole world as for oneself. In this prayer one lives the consubstantiality of the human race.”

Perhaps it was the platitudes so oft repeated that allowed a more developed explanation to sink in? Whatever the grace, I am thankful to God for it and to Father Sophrony for writing it in the first place. What a treasure.

In Christ,

handmaid Leah