O Heavenly Father, were I to imagine what my failings deserve, I would fall into despair. I have frequently disobeyed Your high commands, wasting my life in extravagance and not keeping the four simple rules of living that You have revealed to me through Your Son Jesus. I have not always treated others as I want to be treated. I have judged others and failed to forgive them and have made my love for others conditional. Wherefore I beseech You, Who are alone compassionate, to cleanse me with showers of forgiveness and strengthen me by my fastings and supplications. I beg You, reject me not. As I request Your help, O God, I offer my praise to You, Who I know to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not only now but forever and ever. Amen.
O Almighty God, help me to enter this season of the Great Fast in the spirit of joy, giving myself to spiritual growth by cleansing my soul and body and controlling my passions as I limit my food. Help me to live on the virtues of the Holy Spirit. Help me to persevere in my longing for Jesus, the Christ, so as to be worthy to behold His most solemn Passion and the most holy Passover, rejoicing all the while with spiritual joy. As I request Your help, O God, I offer my praise to You, Who I know to be Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not only now but forever and ever. Amen.
Let us hasten to tame the flesh through fast and abstinence as we approach the battlefield of blameless fasting; let us tearfully pray to the Lord our Savior, and turning completely away from sin let us cry out: “O Christ the King, we have sinned against You: save us as You saved the people of Niniveh and, O Compassionate One, give us a share of Your heavenly Kingdom
O Guide to Wisdom,
O Giver of Understanding,
O Instructor of the Ignorant, and Helper of the Poor,
strengthen and enlighten my heart,
O Master, Give the word to me,
O Word of the Father, that I may not refrain from crying out to You:
“O merciful Lord, have mercy on me, a fallen one.”
Remembering the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise, we begin our forty-day preparation for the Great Day, Easter. We are called during these coming weeks to join with our Church in thinking more intensely about our lives and making an honest assessment of how we are living up to the Gospel exhortation to love our neighbors as ourselves.
This Monday, February 16th, the Church encourages us to make a special effort to begin this time well by observing the Strict Fast. We are called, however, to fast not for the sake of fasting but, rather, to use fasting as a means to dispose ourselves to use these next forty days as a means of truly changing our minds and hearts – to grow as Christians, followers of Jesus. By fasting, we must remember, we do not increase God’s love for us. Fasting can, however, help us to understand how much God loves us. Our Eastern Spiritual Fathers have shared with us a number of ascetic practices which can help us focus our lives. Fasting is such a practice.
I find that our modern world has truly confused the ancient spiritual practices of the Church. So many people seem to have the idea that if they “give things up” or engage in “penance” that they can get God to love them more. This is not the Eastern Church’s understanding. We can never merit God’s love or merit any possible reward we might receive for leading a good life. Any ascetical practices we might do can only help us to open our hearts and minds to find our God who loves us.
It is truly my priestly and brotherly prayer that these next forty days are spiritually beneficial for all who try to seriously observe them. Please know that as we journey through life together that I, your brother, ask God to shower His blessings upon you.
In this article I have been presenting Byzantine theological ideas about the Incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus, the Christ. The question whether the Incarnation would have taken place had there not been a fall, never stood at the center of attention in Byzantium: Byzantine theologians envisaged rather the concrete fact of human mortality: a cosmic tragedy in which God Himself, through the Incarnation, undertook to become personally, or more accurately, say hypostatically involved. The major, and apparently, the only, exception to this general view is given by Maximus the Confessor, for whom the Incarnation and recapitulation of all things in Christ is the true goal or aim of creation; the Incarnation, therefore, was foreseen and foreordained quite independently of man’s tragic misuse of his own freedom. This view fits in exactly with Maximus’ idea of created nature as a dynamic process oriented toward an eschatological goal – Christ the incarnate Logos. As creator, the Logos stands as the beginning of creation and as incarnate. He is also its end when all things will exist not only through Him, but in Him. In order to be in Christ, creation had to be assumed by God, made His own; the Incarnation, therefore is a precondition of the final glorification of man independent of man’s sinfulness and corruption.
There is great sense in this Eastern approach. God’s actions have never been dependent upon man’s actions. God, from all eternity, preordained that He would become a part of His creation and provide the opportunity for people to voluntarily embrace the idea of His great love for them, thus bringing all of His creation into the process of truly being filled with His life. Although His life-force fills all things, there is something to be said when the part of His creation that has free will comes voluntarily to this awareness and freely chooses to live in accord with this awareness.
I wonder again whether my readers truly sense the difference between Eastern theology and Western theology. There truly is a great difference!
Given the fallen state of man, the redemptive death of Christ makes this final restoration possible. But the death of Christ is truly redemptive and life-giving precisely because it is the death of the Son of God in the flesh (i.e., in virtue of the hypostatic union). In the East, the cross is envisaged not so much as the punishment of the just one, which satisfies a transcendent Justice requiring a retribution for man’s sins. One author states: The death of the Cross was effective, not as a death of an Innocent One, but as the death of the Incarnate Lord. I believe that this is truly a very important distinction.
Think about it!
The Great Fast in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church is meant to prepare us for a meaningful celebration of Easter – The Great Day. Although I am sure that my readers already have an idea of how to observe this time, I would repeat some suggestions.
Recommended Minimal Effort
Abstain from meat and dairy products on the first day of the Fast (February 16) and Good Friday (April 3) Abstain from meat on All Fridays of Lent and Holy Saturday (April 4)
In order to enter into the spirit of Lent this is seen as a minimal effort
A Strict Lenten Tradition
Abstain from meat and dairy products all the days of the Fast, even weekends, from February 16 until after Easter services (April 5)
Meat eliminated beginning the day after Meatfare (February 9)
Dairy Products eliminated the day after Cheesefare (February 16)
Modified Strict Lenten Tradition
A modified version of the strict tradition calls for us, in addition to the minimal effort suggested, to abstain from meat on all Wednesdays and Fridays of Lent and all the days of Great and Holy Week and pray more frequently.
What is extremely important is that we voluntarily undertake ascetical practices during this time. Remember, God gave us free will because He wants us to freely love Him. All ascetical practices should be thoughtful and truly reasonable, remembering that it is not the quantity of things that we do but the quality of our efforts. If certain ascetical practices don’t help you to open your heart and mind to a deeper union with God, then you should not engage in them. For example, if someone is sick, they must take that into account; or an aged person’s health might be seriously compromised if they fast or abstain. Again, our approach to religious practice must be intelligent, always remembering that these practices are meant to help us to focus our attention on our spiritual lives and are not things that God needs us to do in order for Him to love us.
My counsel as your spiritual father is to thoughtfully and prayerfully use the time of Lent for spiritual growth. Integrate into your life any activity that you find helps you to focus your attention on your spiritual life and reduces the influence our modern society has on your life. Make God, in a very special way, the center of these next forty days.
The great revelation God has made to the human race is: God IS love. Christianity maintains that Jesus Christ is God’s perfect revelation. Jesus is the fulfiller of that revelation of God’s love as active, immanently present to His children in communion through the self-emptying love unto the death of His only begotten Son. So marked, indeed, has been God’s love for the world that He gave His only begotten Son: everyone who believes in Him is not to perish, but to have eternal life (John 3: 16-17).
Christianity, especially as developed in the West, has, in contrast to how it developed in the East, all too often accentuated the intellectual grasp of truth revealed by God through His Church and failed to see faith in Jesus Christ as a response we are to make to His gift of Himself to us. Understanding with our minds that God is love, as shown by Christ’s dying on the cross for us, we have been exhorted by our spiritual fathers and our teachers to love others in the same sort of selfless way.
We have not heard enough of what the early Church Fathers – theologians who prayed and experienced Scripture – continually taught of the inner spiritual transformation that was experienced in prayer through the power of the Holy Spirit. The middle stage between God’s love for us and our going out in acts of service toward others has been slighted in our teaching and preaching.
Unlike the Eastern Fathers of the Church, it seems like the Church has feared to preach another knowledge, one that is experiential, mystical and unifying of ourselves with God in a community of love – love that differentiates as it unites. Jesus, as the perfect image of the Father’s love for us, became human in order that by His death and resurrection and through His outpouring of the Holy Spirit, we all might come to personally know God!
In the last issue I was addressing the idea that sprang up in the West about Jesus’ death being necessary to atone for the sins of mankind. An idea and attitude which, I’m sure, all of my readers are keenly aware. The view of atonement affirms that Jesus’ death was truly necessary – God required a perfect sacrifice and Jesus was it. I must admit that I was convinced that this was absolutely true during my childhood. The death of Jesus was the most important thing about His life. This is the heart of the most widespread modern and contemporary view and understanding of Christianity’s gospel: Jesus died for our sins, so that we can be forgiven. It is usually accompanied by the promise of a blessed afterlife: if we believe that he died for us, we can go to heaven.
This theological framework is the result of literalizing the metaphorical language of Hebrews and some other passages in the New Testament. It also involves a rationalizing of this language, reducing it to statements in doctrinal formulations.
All of this goes far beyond what the language of Hebrews communicated near the end of the first century. The author is obviously using metaphorical language. He did not think Jesus was literally a high priest; he knew that Jesus was from the tribe of Judah and not Levi. He knew that Jesus never served as the high priest of Jerusalem. He knew that Jesus never entered the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem temple. All of this is a metaphor. It is truly a meaningful metaphor. For Christians, Jesus is the great high priest, even though He was never really the high priest of the Jerusalem temple.
So also the language of Jesus as sacrifice is metaphorical. He was not literally a divine-human sacrifice planned and required by God, so that our sins can be paid for and we can be forgiven. In Hebrews (and in the NT generally when the language of sacrifice is used), what Jesus sacrificed was His life because of His passion for God. To sacrifice is to make a gift of one’s life to God. That is what Jesus did – not because God required it, but because of His passion for God and God’s will.
I’m sure that his will be startling for many. We are so used to hearing that Jesus suffered and died for our sins that we cannot think of His death on the cross in any other way. And yet, true to the Eastern Church’s approach, His death was not for our sins but, rather, to reveal to us that human death is not the end of the life that we have.
I will, because of the Great Fast, temporarily discontinue my thoughts on the Divine Liturgy of John Chrysostom and begin sharing thoughts about the two regular worship services we use during this time, namely the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts and the Liturgy of Basil the Great. Our Church directs us to use these two liturgical services during Lent.
As we know from history, there were, in the early Church, very few and well tested people who could be considered as true Christians. There were not vast numbers of people who belonged to the Jesus movement. There were only small groups of people who met in homes and shared the faith and the Eucharist. There existed, as a result of these small numbers, a real practice of giving Holy Communion to the faithful at the end of the Sunday Eucharist for their daily, individual communion at home. In this way the joyful Eucharist of the Lord’s Day was extended to the entire week. This noble practice was discontinued with the growth of the Church. This practice was discontinued for fear of possible misuse of the Holy Gifts. In the West this led to the appearance of the daily Liturgy and the festal character of the Eucharist ceased. This caused a change, in the West, to the Church’s understanding of the Eucharist.
In the East the initial, eschatological, Kingdom-centered, joyful understanding of the Eucharist was never given up and the Liturgy, even to this day, is not a mere part of the daily cycle. Its celebration is always a feast and always acquires a spiritual connotation of the Lord’s Day. The celebration of the Eucharist, therefore, is incompatible with fasting and is not served on weekdays of the Great Fast. Thus, once the daily Communion at home was discontinued, it was not replaced in the East with the daily celebration of the Eucharist but gave birth to a new form of Communion with the Gifts reserved from the Sunday, festal celebration.
It is likely that the first Presanctified Liturgy was not limited to the Great Fast but was common to all fasting seasons of the Church. As the number of feasts increased, the celebration of the Holy Eucharist became more frequent. This meant therefore, that the Presanctified Liturgy became characteristic of the liturgical feature of the Great Fast. The Presanctified Liturgy is the Eastern Church’s liturgical service of Lent.
In the last issue I shared with you one of the strategies that can be used to discover the road to travel when called to holiness. That strategy was discernment. A second help in the process of discernment is holding up one’s options to the mirror of the Gospel. The Gospel is a trick mirror. It does not reflect what stands before it but what should be. It reflects a person, Jesus Christ. The image we see in the Gospel is that of a man who sought in all things to be in harmony with God. Discernment, therefore, is a decision made with the aid of an image not of our desires but of Jesus. What would Jesus Do and What would He think.
If we are honest, the image of Christ is so brilliant, so overpowering, that it blinds. It has to be refracted, like light through a prism, so that we can look at single facets of Jesus as we make our choices. The compassionate Jesus, the humble servant of all, the forgiving person, the reconciler, the devoted Son of the Father, the Lord crucified out of total love for the Father, are all mirrors into which we look for help in discerning what we are to do.
In his Gospel. Mark illustrates how this mirroring is a help in the process of discernment. Jesus and the Apostles were returning to home base in Capernaum. Hey were strung out along the road in groups of two or three. Those in the rear, out of earshot of Jesus, were arguing about which of them was the most important. They were all putting forth good reasons for their importance.
Each could bring up unique attributes he had – ways of acting, decisions he had made – that would guarantee that he would be first in God’s realm. When Jesus asked what they had been discussing, they were silent, because they suddenly realized that being important was not high on Jesus’ list of priorities. In fact, it wasn’t on His list at all. Then Jesus gave them a norm: Whoever wishes to rank first must remain the last one of all and the servant of all. Perhaps the Apostles had not been conscious of their real motives for wanting to be first. Perhaps all the reasons they had advanced to bolster their claim to priority sounded praiseworthy. But they certainly had missed the point of Jesus’ life; they had to go back and reflect on their patterns of thinking and acting. Ask yourself: What attitude of Jesus is most difficult for you? What keeps you from turning to the Gospels for help?
ЗАКЛИК УКРАЇНСЬКИХ КАТОЛИЦЬКИХ ЄПИСКОПІВ В СПОЛУЧЕНИХ ШТАТАХ АМЕРИКИ ДО ПОСТІЙНОЇ МОЛИТВИ ТА ПОСТУ ЗА УКРАЇНУ
Всі єпископи Української Греко-Католицької Церкви в Україні разом з Патріархом Святославом Шевчуком просять своїх вірних більше постити та постійно молитись за ці потреби, наприклад за Президента та провідників України, за навернення агресора, за українську армію і всі що захищають цивільного населення, за душі загиблих і за єдність незалежної України. Долучаймося з ними у спільній молитві і пості!
Ми, українські католицькі єпископи в Сполучених Штатах Америки у цьому зверненні до вас закликаємо все наше духовенство, монашество та вірних щоденно молитися за Україну, присвятити свій дорогоційний час у тишині у роздумах та молитві за ті намірення, за які просять єпископи в Україні. Користаймо нагоду аби збільшити час на роздумування й молитву за Україну, за особливі вищезгадані прошення. Коли молите Бога про мир та єдність, думайте про страшні страждання народу. Моліться до Матері Божої за її заступництвом, та разом з її Сином, Ісусом Христом, і її материнською опікою захищати Україну. Нехай цей піст стане нагодою нам прилучитися з нашими страждаючими братами і сестрами на Україні. Пожертвуйте більше часу молитися про наших страждаючих братів і сестер!
Крім того, ми просимо, щоб все наше духовенство та вірні, після кожної Божественної літургії та усіх богослужень промовляли Молитву за мир в Україні. Будьмо наполегливі й продовжуймо молитися, постити та роздумувати поки в Україні не настане мир та єдність. Дякуємо вам за сподівану вірну й молитовну участь! Нехаи вас Бог благословить!
+Високопреосвященний Стефан Сорока
Митрополит Української Католицької Церкви у США
Архиєпископ Філадельфійський для Укpаїнців
+Преосвященний Річард Семінак
Єпископ Чіказької єпархії святого Миколая
+Преосвященний Павло Хомницький, ЧСВВ
Єпископ Стемфордської єпархії
+Преосвященний Богдан Данило
Єпископ Пармської єпархії святого Йосафата
+Преосвященний Іван Бура
Єпископ-Помічник Філадельфійський
лютий, 2015 р.
Молитва за спокій в Україні
Отче Небесний, Твій Син учив нас:
“Блаженні миротворці,
бо вони синами Божими назвуться”.
У цей час ми гаряче молимося, щоб Твій Дух Святий
надихав людей в Україні ставати миротворцями.
Щоб вони шукали примирення і діалогу,
та припинилися гостра конфронтація та убивства.
Щоб на цій багатостраждальній землі
запанував мир в народі,
відродилися людські права, принципи демократїі
та релігійної свободи.
Боже, Отче наш, молимо Тебе:
заспокой страждання, зціли поранених
і прийми душі полеглих у Твоєму Царстві Небесному.
Пресвята Мати Божа, накрий своїм
благословенним та захисним покровом всю Україну.
Нехай життя буде для створення Твого Миру
в Україні і світі.
Амінь.