As I shared, our faith believes that while God provides all that is necessary for human salvation and personal transformation, we must accept and apply these gifts. The mutual cooperation, and the personal relationship that it brings about, is called synergy by Byzantines Christians. Byzantines maintain the operating principle that grace and human endeavor must be functioning concurrently. The one cannot be understood without the other. St. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the three Cappadocian Fathers who have greatly influenced our Church, explained this principle in these words: “When good works and the Spirit’s grace come together at the same time in the same soul, together they are able to fill it with blessed life.” The synergy that results from this cooperative work of God and man, is the source of human salvation. We can only achieve our salvation in cooperation with God. The wonderful aspect of this is that God ALWAYS extends His help since He created us to be the Temples of His Own Spirit. God wants us to achieve salvation which, as St. John tells us, is to know God and Jesus Christ, God’s human manifestation.

This is not to say that Byzantine spirituality is an overly activist spirituality. On the contrary, it takes very seriously the Biblical mandate to “be still and know that I am God.” Byzantine theology admonishes the individual to strive for apathia, or spiritual tranquility. Apathia is marked, to a certain degree, by the absence or unreasoned passion, that is, inordinate appetite for certain things, or obsession. Obsessions include psychological states that we might not think of as passions, such as boredom and, as noted specifically by St. John Climacus, indifference (if you have been following the last article in this Bulletin on the Spirituality of the Christian East, you have already come across this same thought).

I truly believe that this spiritual tranquility is absolutely essential if we are to understand our belief, especially our belief in Jesus as God’s Incarnation and, therefore, the reality that Jesus is fully God and fully Man. This spiritual tranquility opens our hearts and minds to the acceptance of this mystery. It also opens our hearts and minds to the fact that personal salvation is a cooperative effort between God and us. It also opens our hearts and minds to the fact that salvation involves becoming like Jesus.