Praying Correctly

“Let us pray neither for show nor against our enemies, and let us not be arrogant to think that we can teach Him [God] the method of assistance. . . .  Did you tell Him your injury?  Did you tell Him everything you suffered?  Do not tell Him these and how to help you, because He realizes exactly your best interest.  However, there are many who, in prayer, recite thousands of verses, saying: ‘Lord, grant me physical health, double all my possessions, repel my enemy from me.’  This is completely absurd.

We must dismiss all these things and pray and supplicate only as did the publican, who repeatedly said: ‘God be merciful unto me a sinner.’ Afterwards, He knows how to help you.  For He says, ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.‘  Therefore, in this way, my brethren, let us pursue wisdom with toil and humility, beating our breasts like the publican, and we will succeed in getting whatever we ask for; but when we pray filled with anger and wrath, we are hated by God and are found to be an abomination before Him.

Let us crush our thought, humble our souls, and pray for ourselves as well as for those who have hurt us.  For when you want to persuade the Judge to help your soul and take your part, never pit Him against the one who grieved you.  For such is the character of the Judge, that, above all, He sanctions and grants the requests of those who pray for their enemies, who do not bear malice, who do not rise up against their enemies.  As long as they remain unrepentant, however, God fights them all the more.”  (St John Chrysostom, ON REPENTANCE AND ALMSGIVING, pp 52-53)

A Prayer attributed to St. Philaret, Metropolitan of Moscow, is written in the spirit of St John Chrysostom’s comments on prayer above:

My Lord, I know not what I should ask of You.  You alone know my true needs.  You love me more than I am able to love.  O Father, grant to me, Your servant, all which I cannot ask.  For a cross I dare not ask, nor for consolation;  I dare only to stand in Your presence.  My heart is open to You.  You see my needs of which I am unaware.

Behold and lift me up!  In Your presence I stand, awed and silenced by Your will and Your judgments, into which my mind cannot penetrate.  To You I offer myself as a sacrifice.  I have no other desire than to fulfill Your will.  Teach me how to pray.  Pray Yourself within me.  Amen.

God and Mammon

 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.  (Matthew 6:24)

St Silouan the Athonite writes:

“The truly repentant man readily bears every affliction – hunger and nakedness, cold and heat, sickness and poverty, humiliation and exile, injustice and slander; for his soul is turned with longing towards God, and he has no care for earthly things but prays to God with a pure mind.  But the man who is attached to worldly goods and riches can never have a mind pure in God, since in the depths of his soul he is constantly preoccupied with his possessions; and if he does not repent whole-heartedly, and mourn at having grieved God, he will die bearing the burden of this passions, without having come to know the Lord.”   (ST SILOUAN THE ATHONITE,  p 349)

The World as a Passageway to the Kingdom

The Elder Aimilianos writes:

“In general, the Fathers were concerned about the Kingdom of heaven, and in a certain manner theologized based on their personal, spiritual revelations and eschatological experiences.  That is, they saw the world as a figure, a prelude, a passageway to the kingdom of God.  This is why they always endeavored to raise the human person from earth to heaven.

The Church Fathers saw the Old Testament as a foreshadowing of the New.   The events of the Old Testament and even the words of the text were seen as both revealing Christ and hiding Christ.  The saints of the Old Testament saw Christ, but only at a distance or in shadow or in a prefiguring.  Only when the Word became flesh in Christ was the reality revealed.  According to the Elder Aimilianos, life now on earth is similarly a prelude to the reality of the Kingdom.  We must live this life on earth, yet it remains only the passageway to the reality for which we hope and desire.  As such, this world is viewed as temporary or transitional, or the path upon which we must trod to reach our destination.  The things of this world for the Fathers are to be viewed in this perspective – their import is not eternal or permanent but is passing away.  This spirituality caused the Fathers to see this world as of secondary importance to our eternal lives.  Thus through the centuries, the Orthodox spiritual writers did not focus very much on studying the world, but rather were far more interested in the world to come which they believed was the only true reality.  Or, as Galileo puts it, “The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go.”  This was indeed the interest of the Fathers.

The Elder continues:

The Fathers did not focus their theology on matters pertaining to this world.  This is why they did not produce a theology of marriage.  They certainly taught marriage, and taught things about marriage, but always with an emphasis on raising the human mind from marriage itself to what marriage represents and symbolizes.  St Paul does the same thing when he says that ‘marriage is a a great mystery concerning Christ and the Church.'”  (THE MYSTICAL MARRIAGE: Spiritual Life According to St Maximos the Confessor, p 120)

Thus for the Fathers, as the Elder notes, even marriage for them was not about living on earth, but a way to experience salvation, to experience a way to the Kingdom of God.  The Fathers didn’t produce a theology of marriage because they were not very interested in the physical life in the material world.  They were focused on raising people from this world to heaven.   Marriage was not an absolute for them for it really only belonged to the fallen world and they weren’t trying to figure our how to better enjoy this world.  Though Orthodox concerned about the culture wars proclaim Orthodoxy has a clear idea of marriage, Elder Aimilianos says, “not so.”   There still are plenty of things for the Church to discuss today.

The Canaanite Woman Cries Out and Is Heard

And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and cried, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon.” But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly. (Matthew 15:21-28)

Elder Epiphanius says: “The Canaanite woman cries out and is heard [Mt 15.22]; the woman with an issue of blood keeps silent and is blessed [Mt 9:20].  The Pharisee calls out and is condemned; the publican doe not even open his mouth and he is heard” (Lk 18:10-14)”  (GIVE ME A WORD, p 96)

Sin is a Crime Against Love

“Sin is always a crime against the Father’s love.  Sin occurs when we distance ourselves from God and incline towards the passions.” (St Sophrony, WE SHALL SEE HIM AS HE IS, p 20)

Against you, you alone, have I sinned,
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you are justified in your sentence
and blameless when you pass judgment.

(Psalms 51:4)

Neighbors

But the lawyer, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”   (Luke 10:29)

Jesus asked: Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed mercy on him.” And Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”  (Luke 10:36-37)

“Neighbors, as Jesus knew. Can be a not insignificant challenge to anyone’s Christianity.”  (Niall Williams. THIS IS HAPPINESS. P 92)

Little Things Add Up

“For if, as they used to say, we do not despise little things and think they are of no consequence to us, we shall not fall into great and grievous things.  I am always telling you that bad habits are formed in the soul by these very small things – when we say, ‘What does this or that matter,’ – and it is the first step to despising great things.  … ‘What does it matter if I find out what this brother is saying or what that guest is doing?’ the mind begins to forget about its own sins and to talk idly about his neighbor, speaking evil against him, despising him, and from this he falls into the very thing that he condemns.

Because we become careless about our own faults and do not lament our own death (as the Fathers put it), we lose the power to correct ourselves and we are always at work on our neighbor.  Nothing angers God so much or strips a man so bare or carries him so effectively to his ruin as calumniating, condemning, or despising his neighbor.”  (St Dorotheos of Gaza, DISCOURSES AND SAYINGS, pp 131-132)

Anointed to Be Kings and Priests

“All the faithful are truly anointed priests and kings in the spiritual renewal brought about through baptism, just as priests and kings were anointed figuratively in former times. For those anointings were prefigurations of the truth of our anointing: prefigurations in relation not merely to some of us but to all of us. For our kingship and priesthood is not of the same form or character as theirs, even though the symbolic actions are the same. Nor does our anointing recognize any distinction in nature, grace or calling, in such a way that those anointed essentially differ one from the other: we have but one and the same calling, faith and ritual. The true significance of this is that he who is anointed is pure, dispassionate and wholly consecrated to God now and for ever.”   (St Gregory of  Sinai, THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle 42025-42032)

For St Gregory (d. 1346), all Christians who have been chrismated are anointed to be both priests and kings.  In Christ, both male and female are each anointed to share in the same kingship and priesthood.  God has now given in baptism to all His people the anointing that previously was bestowed only on a few elect.    See also my post A Kingdom of Priests and Kings

We Will Not Be Punished Because We Have Sinned, But Because We Didn’t Repent

“I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” (Luke 15:10)

In THE PHILOKALIA, one of the quoted authors is known as St Theognostos.  Modern scholars say this saint remains unknown to us.  Even the dates he wrote are unknown –  In THE PHILOKALIA he is said to be from the 3rd Century yet he quotes St. John of Damascus (7th Century) so must have written in the 8th Century or later.  Some scholars think he lived in the 14th Century.  Regardless of his identity, his writings remain in the collection of honored saints of the Church.

“We will not be punished or condemned in the age to be because we have sinned, since we were given a mutable and unstable nature. But we will be punished if, after sinning, we did not repent and turn from our evil ways to the Lord; for we have been given the power to repent, as well as the time in which to do so. Only through repentance shall we receive God’s mercy, and not its opposite, His passionate anger. Not that God is angry with us; He is angry with evil. Indeed, the divine is beyond passion and vengefulness, though we speak of it as reflecting, like a mirror, our actions and dispositions, giving to each of us whatever we deserve.”   (Kindle Loc 23502-14)

Theognostos seems to acknowledge that our “mutable and unstable” human nature means we are going to sin at times.  Sinning is not the problem.  The real issue is God is loving, merciful, forgiving and patient and God awaits our repentance in order to embrace us back into His fold.  When we don’t repent and don’t seek our way back to God, then we reject God’s love for us.  We show disregard and disrespect for God and God’s plan for us.  God awaits our return and we despise God’s love, moving further away from our Creator, the Source of Life.  For Theognostos, however, none of this is about God’s anger or vengefulness for those terms really are nothing more than our reflecting back on God how we humans feel towards those who offend us.  We treat God as if God is some giant human being with no better moral sense than we have.  When we do this we totally ignore the revelation in Scripture that God is love.  Instead of our imitating God, we reduce God to being nothing more than one of us.

See also my post Seeing Salvation.

Remembering Sin as the Path to Humility

Generally, when it comes to the New Year, we like to forget the bad things that happened in the past year and look forward to positive things in the New.  Or sometimes people take this time of year to remember the best of the previous year.  Orthodox spiritual writers, however, think there is good reason to remember past sins – not to feed shame and self-loathing, but to help us repent.  Repentance means change – to move in a new direction.  Remembering our past sins, reminds us not to be so quick to judge others in their sins and failures.  Rather, remembering our past failures can help us sustain a healthy humility in our selves as well as patience, empathy and mercy for others as we see them wrestle with their own sins and temptations.  We can learn how to bear with one another as well as how to bear one another’s burdens (Romans 15:1; Galatians 6:2).  New Year’s resolutions can include remembering our past sins so that we don’t repeat them but rather learn from them so that we will be the better person from now on.

But, my brethren, let us not forget our offences, even if we wrongly think that they have been forgiven through repentance; let us always remember our sinful acts and never cease to mourn over them, so that we may acquire humility as our constant companion, and thus escape the snares of self-esteem and pride.   (St Theodoros the Great Ascetic, The Philokalia, Kindle Loc. 11216-24)