Apostles Fast Meditation

In order to be able to see anything, the eye needs light. In order to see truths about God, ourselves, the world, we require light of another kind. The “enlightenment” of our minds depends on God. As the 20th-century monastic elder Sophrony tells us, “To apprehend sin in oneself is a spiritual act, impossible without grace, without the drawing near to us of divine Light. …”

Divine Light and the insight that it brings is a matter of gift; it is grace. My access to it doesn’t depend entirely on me. I can’t will it into existence. For that matter, I can’t save myself, I can’t have faith purely out of my own intellectual acumen. I can’t become virtuous purely out of my own willpower; I can’t come to a right understanding of myself and my sinfulness on my own. God grants these gifts.

I have to seek divine Light, and cooperate with it. I have to earnestly desire it. I have to pray about it and pray for it.

—Dr. Peter Bouteneff, How to Be a Sinner

Apostles Fast Meditation - Holy Apostle Jude, the brother of the Lord

Source: legacyicons.com

How, if He is not risen but is dead, does He stop and drive out and cast down those false gods said by the unbelievers to be alive and the demons they worship? For where Christ and His faith are named, there all idolatry is purged away, every deceit of demons refuted and no demon endures the name but fleeing, only hearing it, disappears. This is not the work of one dead, but of one alive, and especially of God. …

For if it is true that one dead can effect nothing, but the Savior effects such great things every day—drawing to piety, persuading to virtue, teaching about immortality, leading to a desire for heavenly things, revealing the knowledge of the Father, inspiring power against death, showing Himself to each.

—St. Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation

Apostles Fast Meditation

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God is indivisible in Himself. When He comes, He comes wholly, as He is in His eternal Being. We do not contain Him. He reveals Himself to us at the “point” where we knock: “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you” (Lk. 11:9). He speaks in brief dicta but life is not long enough to uncover their full content.

Reverently we sense His Fatherhood, His clemency. We see that He hungers to communicate to us His eternal life; to have us attain the perfection of His Son, who is the equal mold of the Father. Incomprehensible is His design for us. From “nothing” He creates gods like Himself. And our whole being bows before Him—not in dread before the stern Master but in humble love for the Father.

—St. Sophrony, On Prayer: Reflections of a Modern Saint

Midweek Morning Meditation

Source: wikipedia.org

"The sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room." - Blaise Pascal Recently, we chanted an Akathist Hymn to "Jesus - Light to Those in Darkness." It was written by Fr. Lawrence Farley. There is a great deal of theological/spiritual reflection found in any given Akathist Hymn, but this passage from Ikos Six caught my attention: The joy of Paschal processions around the House of God remains a distant memory, O Lord, and my soul is in despair ... Pascha was really not that long ago, actually as recent as April 12. However, the question remains as posed in Ikos Six: Is it already a "distant memory?" The point is surely not being made that we will or should maintain that "paschal exaltation" that many of the faithful have experienced - if only for a moment or two - on the "night brighter than the day." We know that that will pass. But does the whole paschal mystery, the vision of life sustained by the remarkable and saving events of the divine oikonimia - Incarnation, Redemptive Death, Resurrection and Ascension of the Lord - recede into a well-worn religious compartment of our mind that is far less real than the events of our daily life that impinge upon us in a relentless and almost merciless urgency? What happens so quickly with the "joy of the Paschal procession?"  Yet, even if does quickly recede, the Ikos seems far too dramatic in its claim that our "soul is in despair..." We have developed great tools of adaptation to our environment to avoid something so calamitous as a "soul in despair." And one of those tools is simply a capacity and a desire to be constantly distracted. One event (Pascha?) - no matter how significant - is replaced by another event before the first event is fully absorbed, or so it seems. An unexpressed question is often: What's next? I would like to bring up the whole issue of how distraction relieves us of any such deeper and mindful reflection. To do so, I am turning to a book that I am currently reading, a kind of intellectual biography of the great French mathematician and religious philosopher, Blaise Pascal, author of the well-known Pensees. The author  of his biography - Graham Tomlin - clearly an "expert" on Pascal, even entitled Ch. 11, "Distracting Ourselves to Death." As a seventeenth century philosopher, a time that what we call the "modern world" was coming into existence, Pascal had a great deal of insight into the "human condition," and he already knew how we avoid the deeper dimensions of life through the enticements of distraction. Graham Tomlin, who subtitled his book "The Man Who Made the Modern World," begins with an opening paragraph that updates Pascal's thoughts on distraction by giving the topic a contemporary ring: "We live in an age of distraction. The gadgets in our pockets offer us ceaseless entertainment and instant gratification. At any moment when the slightest shadow of boredom flits across our minds, or when we feel slightly awkward in public, we can whip out our phones, trawl through social media posts, watch an endless stream of videos featuring all kinds of trivia or catch up on events that may be happening anywhere around the world. Even when we might decide to put aside our phones, there is the TV, radio, the internet, podcasts, a constant stream of messages and news about sport, politics or culture to fill every silent moment and to make sure that we are never left to the devices and desires or our hearts." (p. 245) Ah, our iPhones! They may just be best described by the terms St. John Klimakos used to capture our relationship to our own human body: friend and enemy. Or, is that "frenemy?" So, we are caught up in this need to be distracted, but the short term effect of being entertained has its own steep price to pay. As Pascal himself writes:  "The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads us imperceptibly to destruction. Diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death." Perhaps a bit "heavy" for an early morning meditation. Yet, if Pascal's thoughts have the ring of truth to them; if, indeed, we are "distracting ourselves to death," then maybe our "soul is in despair," without our even knowing it!  We will close with a well-known statement of Pascal's that can redirect us away to some extent from the distractions that have such a hold on our minds, hearts and souls: "The immortality of the soul is something of such importance to us, affecting us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter." Certainly, as the Lord said: There is one thing needful!

Apostles Fast Meditation

 A healthy approach to yourself as sinner depends upon knowing something of God’s mercy. Without faith and trust in God—as merciful and loving beyond measure—our self-condemnation would be impossible to bear. It would be self-destructive. And there is no clearer portrait of God than the crucified Christ, who has voluntarily surrendered everything for us. The cross—the limitless self-giving, voluntary co-suffering that it represents, the extent of love and mercy that it conveys—reveals to us what it is to be God.

—Dr. Peter Bouteneff, How to Be a Sinner