Remembrance of One's Last Day

   The first of the Fathers of the desert, “St. Antony the Great”, says: “We must keep ever in our mind what we should be concentrating on if we in this given day were not to live to its end.” St. John Climacus writes, “Remember your last day and you would never sin.” And again he enjoins us to remember always our death. “St. Isaac the Syrian” said: “Always carry in your heart, man, the remem­brance of your departure from this life.” And all the saints personally always did the same and enjoined on others, who also were eager for salvation, to be attentive to this. And not only the saints but also the wise, secular philosophers agree that the remembrance of one's death is very important for moral perfection. But how can we, who are bound to our passions and so weak, learn to keep this: thought ever present?

   St. Isaac taught: “For perfection and integration the remembrance of our death and judgment is a gift and a supernatural grace from God.” Our inconsistency, our distractions, cause a great impediment. We plainly forget to recall death, judgment, hell, and eternal happiness. We often think of these; sometimes we converse with others about death. But deep within our heart we cannot seem to deepen this thought and remain rooted in its reality. But even with our good will and unceasing efforts, only with God's help and our work and in time can we make progress in this matter.

Christ is Risen! Indeed, He is Risen!

Resurrection Fresco - Holy Trinity Church
Saint John the Baptist Monastery - Douma

Have we received the Holy Spirit?*

   Christ is Risen! It is such a joy to be with you today. Holy Week, the celebration of which we have just completed, is surely the most beautiful time in the entire ecclesiastical year. Who could deny the splendor and magnificence of our feasts?. They are God's own feasts, and make our hearts rejoice in Jesus Christ. Although Holy Week has now come and gone, the hymns of the Passion continue to resound within our ears, mingling with the cries of our heart, which we offer up to the Risen Lord.

   Each of us, to a greater or lesser extent, celebrated those feasts and took something from them. What did we take?. To this question, each of us will have a different answer, because even though the Church is a unity, it is a unity of distinct personalities. It is an assembly of persons, each one of them whole and complete, standing before God, and not an anonymous, undifferentiated mass. Thus it is entirely possible for all of us to be gathered together in church, to be standing next to each other and chanting in unison, but for each of us to get something different out of the experience. And what each of us receives is known only to that person, only to the spirit of the man, which is in him, as well as to God the Spirit, Who searches the depths of our own spirit (cf. 1 Cor 2.10-11).

Christ on Golgotha!.

Saint Nikolai Velimirovitch

   The Gospel on God Among the Criminals…

   Christ on Golgotha! The Saviour on the Cross!. The Righteous One in tor­ment! The Lover of Mankind killed by men! Let him who has a conscience be ashamed! Let him who has a heart weep! Let him who has a mind understand!

   With what can we compare this event - mysterious a infinity, hard as earth and terrible as hell? Of millions of happenings every day throughout the universe, that our eyes can see and our ears hear, with what event can we compare this unmentionable act of wickedness on Golgotha? With a lamb among ravening wolves? Or an innocent child in the jaws of a snake-like king? Or a mother surrounded by insane sons and daughters? Or with a skil­ful man's fall into a machine that he had himself assembled, to be cut to pieces by the machine's wheels? With Abel, whom his brother killed? But then the greater sinner killed the lesser, while here wicked men fall on the sinless. With Joseph, whose brothers sold him in Egypt? But that was a sin against their brother, not against a benefactor, while here the sin is against the Benefactor. With righteous Job, whose flesh Satan turned to corruption and a stench, a meal for worms? But then Satan rose up against God's crea­ture, while here the creature rises up against the Creator. With wondrous David, against whom his son Absalom raised a rebellion? But that was a small punishment for David's great sin, while here the innocent One, the Most Righteous, suffers so terribly!

The Fifth Sunday of Lent Sunday of St Mary of Egypt

   It is not possible to establish with any certainty what part history and what part legend play in the traditions that relate to “St Mary of Egypt”. One may as well simply admit the fact that the Church wished to make her, as we sing during matins: “a pattern of repentance”. She is a symbol of conversion, of contrition, and of austerity. On this last Sunday of Lent, she expresses the last and most urgent call that the Church addresses to us before the sacred days of the Passion and the Resurrection.

   The epistle read at the liturgy (Heb. 9. 11-14) compares the ministry of Christ to that of the High Priest of the Jews. Once, each year, he entered into the Tabernacle, but Christ “entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us”. The High Priest purified and sanctified the faithful by sprinkling them with the blood and ashes of sacrificed animals. “How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?”.

Selected quotes from the Ladder of Divine Ascent

Saint John Climacus

Fresco in the Holy Trinity Church at
Saint John the Baptist Monastery

- It is better to grieve our parents than the Lord. For He has created and saved us, but they have often ruined their loved ones and delivered them up to their doom.
- Repentance is the renewal of baptism. Repentance is a contract with God for a second life.
- A penitent is a buyer of humility.
- Before our fall, the demons say that God is a friend of man; but after the fall, that He is inexorable.
- Some inquire and wonder: “why, when remembrance of death is so beneficial for us, has God hidden from us the knowledge of the hour of death?” – Not knowing that in this way God wonderfully accomplishes our salvation.
- Do not wish to assure everyone in word of your love for them, but rather ask God to show them your love without words.
- The beginning of freedom from anger is silence of the lips when the heart is agitated; the middle is silence of the thoughts when there is a mere disturbance of soul; and the end is an imperturbable calm under the breadth of unclean winds.
- As with the appearance of light, darkness retreats, so at the fragrance of humility, all anger and bitterness vanishes.

From the Cross to the depth of God

   This Sunday, at the end of the Divine Service, we shall have a procession with the Holy Cross placed in the midst of flowers; each believer will get one of these flowers when embracing the Cross. The Cross is surrounded with three candles as if the Holy Trinity is bowing for every believer cleaving to the Cross.

   We, however, reach for meanings and do not stop at the Icon we kiss; we search for deeper understandings, for what lies behind this sacred kiss. And what lies deeper is what the Lord has said in the Bible this Sunday: “Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”, as if He was saying that this is a condition if we want to consider ourselves His disciples, accepting life as it is given, as it comes and be crucified on it. The Cross is cast in our lives or, in other word, our lives are cast on the Cross. Each and every one of us is hindered by this or that person or by his own sin, thus his whole being is scattered. Jesus did not invent the Cross, but He found it in Him, in His Flesh and Blood, in the flesh of a weary humanity. Jesus did not love the Cross and does not request from us to search for suffering, suffering is loathsome, and the Lord wished that this cup pass from Him. Our faith does not call us to suffer, however suffering is in us made by the sin rooted in us.

On Spiritual fatherhood

   What is mainly the importance of “fatherhood”: A “father”, psychologically, is a foundation, a center point, an authority. Our existence is founded on the basis of fatherhood. The whole universe is directed towards a father… towards the Father… the God Father… (The Creed – the first words in Saint Paul’s Epistles – Our Father who art in Heaven).

   The same way we are born physically we are to be born spiritually: Saint Paul says: “for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you” (1 Cor 4: 15)… There is a “life” that is given… An operation, a sort of a creation…  A transition from a life that is “natural”, regular, psychological, superficial, to a life that is “spiritual”, the world of the Holy Spirit, a world that is beyond nature, a deep “inner” life, that is vertical… and this life has been transmitted by succession ever since Christ and His apostles, through this tradition… a living tradition…  A continuity in newness…