The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20160814

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Ladder of Divine AccentStep 24 on John’s Ladder begins a new section, namely emphasis on the Higher Virtues. Thus the first step in this section is Meekness/Simplicity.

St. John introduces this Step by defining what, in his estimation, meekness is: He writes:

Meekness is a mind consistent amid honor or dishonor. Meekness prays quietly and sincerely for a neighbor however trouble-some he may be. Meekness is a rock looking out over the sea of anger which breaks the waves which come crashing on it and stays entirely unmoved. Meekness is the bulwark of patience, the door, indeed the mother of love and the foundation of discernment. It is meekness that earns pardon for our sins, gives confidence to our prayers and makes a place for the Holy Spirit.

You will recall that meekness was also addressed in Step 8. It was related to freedom from anger. Now the Ladder leads us to the higher level of meekness: simplicity, which is the first fruit of an even greater virtue, humility. Meekness is the precursor of all humility. The highest form of meekness is the fruit of obedience and freedom from anger. Thus it is the enemy of anger and the spirit of true leadership, an imitation of Christ and the virtue that makes our hearts receptive to the Holy Spirit.

St. John tells us that meekness works alongside obedience, checks frenzy, curbs anger. It is a minister of joy, an imitation of Christ, the possession of angels, a shackle for demons, a shield against bitterness. The Lord finds rest in the hearts of the meek, while the turbulent spirit is the home of the devil. True meekness calms anxiety and centers us in the love of God.

Meekness is an attribute of human nature and behavior. It has been defined as: righteous, humble, teachable, patient under suffering, long suffering and a willingness to follow gospel teachings. It is one of the essential characteristics and mental attitudes of a true disciple. I shall continue to share additional ideas about this 24th Step.

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20160814

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uspeniyeDuring this coming week, our Church will celebrate one of the six major feasts of our Church that honor the Mother of God. It is her Dormition or her falling asleep. This is the last major feast of the Church Year. This feast celebrates the fact that her body did not know corruption after death but, together with her soul, was taken up into heaven.

The earliest written tradition which speaks of the death of the Mother of God, is found, in the East in the document known as the sermon of St. John the Theologian on the Dormition of Mary. The author is unknown. Some historians believe that this work dates from the end of the second or third century, while others place it at the end of the sixth century.

From the beginning of the sixth century, it was believed that the Church on Mt. Sion is the site of her dormition. It cannot, however, be proved.

Some historians believe that she died in Jerusalem while others claim that she died in Ephesus where St. John was believed to have taken her at the death of Jesus. Even today a house in Ephesus is pointed out as the one where the Mother of God allegedly lived.

The liturgical cult of the Mother of God began with the Council of Ephesus (431), which defined the dogma of her Divine Motherhood.

None of the Fathers of the Church mention her dormition prior to the fourth century. It is not until after the fourth century that, on the basis of tradition, Church writers began to write about the final moments of the life of Mary, the Mother of God. These include Gregory of Tours (+594) in the West and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Modest (+634), who was the first to have a sermon on this event, and St. Andrew of Crete (+712) and St. John Damascene (+749) in the East.

Toward the end of the seventh century, and at the beginning of the eighth century, church writers began to direct their attention not only to Mary’s wonderful dormition, but also to her ascension into heaven body and soul. The most interesting and most substantial testimony on the Dormition is given by John Damascene.

Again, as the Church thought about the events in the Lord’s life, Who truly represent male human beings, they had to observe parallel events in the life of Mary who truly represent female human beings. There are parallel feasts for the Jesus and the Mother of God. Monday, August 15th, is the feast.

Reflections on the Scriptural Readings for this Weekend — 20160807

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deisisThis weekend we bring to completion the 12th week after Pentecost. Our celebration is also enhanced with our celebration of one of the major feasts of Our Lord, His Transfiguration. The message of this feast influenced my understanding of the message given to us in the assigned readings.

Our Epistle, taken from Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, is an exhortation to understand the message he preached. That message was: Christ died … and rose on the third day. In other words, Paul preached that Jesus, whose way of living he was sharing, proved the truth of His message by His resurrection and that the Jesus message should be embraced because of this fact.

Our Gospel reading, on the other hand, speaks to us about the danger of riches. The passage we use is presented as Jesus’ response to this question put to Him: What good must I do to possess everlasting life? Jesus’ response was this: If you seek perfection, go sell your possessions and give to the poor. You will then have treasure in heaven.

Now the message of the feast that we celebrate is this: Personal change or transformation is essential if we desire the fullness of life which can only be achieved when we live in the way God intended humans to live when He created them.

God’s revelation to us through the transfiguration of Jesus is this: His Spirit dwells within us – we are the temples of His Spirit. This event in the Lord’s life, His transfiguration, is meant to bring us insight into this important reality of our humanity.

The Transfiguration reminds us and reveals to us that the purpose of this earthly life is to provide us with the opportunities to really change ourselves in such a way that our thinking and behavior reflects our awareness that God is within us.

When we were born, the potential to become more like God was planted in us. The task of life is to actualize this potential by putting on the mind of Christ – to becoming like Him in our thinking and behavior. God proved the truth of this message by raising His Son from the dead.

One of the things that can help us in this pursuit of personal change is true detachment from the things of this world. When the things of this world are not the main focus of our lives, we can more easily attend to the task of becoming more like Jesus.

What profit is it to you if you gain the whole world but lose your very soul?

Understanding Our Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church — 20160807

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transfigurationThe Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ, one of the twelve major feasts of our Church, is truly the feast that reveals the meaning and purpose of human life, which is, of course, personal transformation. God gave us earthy existence in order to become more like Jesus. The event that this feast celebrates is recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark and Luke).

The observance of this feast goes back to the fourth century. At that time, St. Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine the Great, built a church on Mt. Tabor in honor of the Lord’s Transfiguration. At the end of the eleventh century, the Crusaders found several churches and monasteries on Mt. Tabor. In the thirteenth century, however, the adherents of Islam, came and destroyed them. Cyrill II, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, built a new church over the ruins of the ancient church in 1860. In 1923, a magnificent basilica in honor of the Transfiguration was built.

The feast has been observed in the Eastern Church since the sixth century. It was originally in February. However, since this joyful feast fell during the Great Fast, its celebration was transferred to August 6th. Why this day? The historian Eusebius and St. John Damascene are of the opinion that this event took place forty days before the death of Christ. Thus the Church transferred it to August 6th, which is forty days before the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, celebrated on September 14th.

The custom of blessing the first-fruits in church was prescribed in the Canons of the Holy Apostles at the end of the third century. The Apostolic Constitutions of the fourth century have a prayer for the blessing of first fruits. The local Synod of Carthage (318), offered directions for the blessing of first fruits. The Sixth Ecumenical Council (691) spoke of the blessing of the first-fruits of grapes and wheat. Grapes were blessed because of the wine that is used in the Divine Liturgy.

Although the first custom in the Church was to bless grapes, other very noble traditions emerged. Because of the symbolism involved in blessing fruit, namely that the “seed/seeds” at the center of all fruit represent God’s live within us, we bless any kind of FRUIT on this day. God is the source of our human lives!

The Spirituality of the Christian East — 20160807

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st_john_of_theladderPride can, according to St. John, render salvation impossible, whatever other virtues we may possess. This is why it is so important to acknowledge our pride, to have enough humility to fight it, and to struggle to acquire greater humility. By contrast, the surest way to know that we are full of pride is to think that we are free of it.

Pride, in its purest form, is a rejection of God. It is for this reason that St. John ends his chapter on pride with a section on blasphemy and blasphemous thoughts. Blasphemy is to speak, think, or act in a derogatory way about God or things divine. Thus blasphemy is the outcome of the deepest demonic pride.

Nonetheless, St. John goes on to speak of blasphemous thoughts not only as the fruit of pride, but also as a demonic temptation that even the most righteous can experience.

The only way to fight blasphemous thoughts is to keep on praying and struggling against pride, which is the root of blasphemy. John writes:

Let us refrain from passing judgment or condemnation on our neighbor. If we do, then we will not be terrorized by blasphemous thoughts, since the one produces the other. He who has defeated this vice has banished pride.

We see in St. John’s ideas about pride how all things in our spiritual and psychological lives are connected. Our attitudes of mind truly influence our behavior.

It seems that when we are filled with pride it may be the result of how we were treated as children. If we were depreciated as children – made to feel worthless or unworthy – we may develop a psychological defense mechanism which tries to suave our hurt ego by making us more prideful. Again, if we were given a false sense of who we are and what our talents are, we may become boastful and prideful. Pride is only quelled by an honest recognition of who we are in God’s kingdom and a true acceptance of who we are. Virtue is when we recognize who it is that God created when He created us.
 

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of Our Faith — 20160807

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capadociosI have been sharing the thoughts of St. Gregory of Nazianzen about our Triune God. He says, “I cannot grasp the greatness of that one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light”. Our thought must be, he says, “in continuous motion, pursuing now the one, now the three, and returning again to the unity”. For Gregory our thoughts about God must swing ceaselessly between the “two poles of the antinomy, in order to attain to the contemplation of the sovereign repose of this threefold monad”. What he is saying is that while we think about the Three, Distinct Persons that are God, we must always also think about the fact that they are of ONE SUBSTANCE, equal and undivided. This, of course, is the mystery that faces us as Christians. There is no possible way that our human minds can accurately conceive of God. St. Gregory says, “How can this mystery be grasped save by the aid of an idea – be it that of movement or of development – which is inadmissible?

The Christian Godhead does not dwell within bounds, nor does it spread itself indefinitely. The one would be without honor, the other would be contrary to order. The one would be wholly Judaic, the other Hellenistic and polytheistic. One gains a glimpse of the mystery of the number, three; the deity is neither one nor many. Its perfection goes beyond the multiplicity of which duality is the root. God is Trinity. This fact can be deduced from no principle nor explained by any sufficient reason, for there are neither principles nor causes anterior to the Trinity.

It has only been the Christian religion that has conceived of God as Three-In-One. There are many people in the world who cannot accept our understanding of God. Our understanding of God as Three-In-One comes from our understanding that Jesus is God and Man. Once people accepted the fact that God become a human person in the man Jesus, they had to begin thinking about God in a different way. The Godhead had to be preserved. God is not just a super-human. He is beyond humanity. And yet He became man. Because this is beyond human comprehension, we be-lieve that God’s Spirit has led us to think about God as Trinity. This idea of God being Triune, connects us to God in a very intimate way.

CALLED TO HOLINESS — 20160807

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This article, as I look back over the last several weeks, is really just a stream-of-consciousness about what I have termed our call to holiness. As I reviewed the last several weeks, it is evident that I think the call to holiness is a call to truly understand and to accept life as God created it and intended it to be lived. It is a call to humbly curb our desire to have life as we want it to be and to accept life as we find it to be. This means, I guess, giving up the idea that life would be much better if it was exactly as we want it to be. It means giving up our natural tendency to be anxious about life and how it will turn out. We can never predict what will happen in life. It reminds me that the real challenge of life is not to allow life’s uncertainties to make us anxious.

As I share this I have become aware that it has taken me a considerable length of time and a number of real challenges to come to this conclusion. I’m not sure but maybe age has had a mellowing effect on me. I do know, however, that the serious health challenge I faced has truly changed my way of thinking. It allowed me, I think, to really realize that life is short and to spend time being anxious about it only robs you of the joy of living it.

The call to holiness is God’s call to all of us to appreciate not only the life that He shares with us but also the opportunities He continuously gives us to come to a deeper union with Him. As we come to a deeper union we begin to realize – to know and feel – how much God loves us and that His love is unconditional.

The reality is, however, that we can’t come to this realization without work – without leaning to meet the challenges of life in a “Jesus-like” way. We know how He meet the challenges of His life. When we decide that we want to meet life’s challenges as He did, then life begins to change – we begin to change.

The interesting thing is that when we embrace personal change, life becomes much more wonderful.

The Divine Liturgy and Our Worship of God — 20160807

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Holy Eucharist IconAfter the first priestly prayer of the Anaphora, all present are called upon to sing the Seraphim’s song, namely the Holy, Holy, Holy. The first line is the hymn is found in Isaiah 6:3 and also Revelation 4:8. In Isaiah we read that he saw the Lord and the Temple was filled with his glory. Then Isaiah says this: Hovering about him were mighty, six-winged seraphs …. In a great antiphonal chorus they sang, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is filled with his glory.”

The apostle John writes in Revelations something which truly appears to have been taken directly from Isaiah: Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty – the one who was, and is, and is to come.

The second part of this prayer is what the crowd cried to Jesus at his triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mt 21:9), which is modeled after Psalm 118:25 and, of course, Isaiah. It was tradition that all Hebrews memorized certain portions of the Old Testament. Psalm 118 reads:

O Lord, please help us. Save us. Give us success. Blessed is the one who is coming, the one sent by the Lord. We bless you from the Temple.

In this hymn we use a Hebrew word Hosanna. It is derived from the words yasha, which means “save,” and na, which is an expression of entreaty or request and can be translated in a variety of ways. The Hebrew terms yasha and na were combined (O, save!) to became the word hosanna.

The word hosanna was used as part of the Jewish temple liturgy on the feast of Tabernacles. The priests carried willow branches and cried Hosanna while processing around the altar of burnt offering. (this truly sounds like something we would do). Over time, the crowd gathered to worship, picked it up and it became a cry of joy. The seventh day of Tabernacles even came to be called “Hosanna Day.”

We see this used when the crowd greeted Jesus as He entered the city of Jerusalem. It is recorded that they waved palm branches and joyfully cried out: Hosanna! By this time, the term may have lost some of its original meaning and may have been mostly an acclamation of joy and petition (as it is now during the Divine Liturgy). At this point in the Liturgy we eagerly welcome into our midst, Christ our true Savior.

Gaining a Deeper Understanding of the New Testament — 20160807

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4Ev-MariaLaachI have been presenting, basically, the history of thought on “inspiration” and the Bible. In the Middle Ages, theological reflection on the human factor was limited to following the lines of earlier thought on the subject. So much real emphasis was laid on the divine origin of the sacred book that little or no real attention was given to the activity of the human factor, except to reject with the earlier tradition any notion similar to the mantic theory of inspiration. It seems that the Church has always steered away from the idea that God has dictated the Bible word-for-word to scribes. Henry of Ghent, to be sure, denied that the human writers of Scripture could be described as mere organs or channels through which the words of divine knowledge came to mankind; rather, the writers should be thought of as true, but secondary, authors of the books of Scripture.

Yet this insight was never developed or given its due place in a theory of inspiration until the 19th century and especially the 20th century. Linguistic studies of the Bible and of cognate literatures and languages; increased knowledge of the general cultural background in which the Bible developed; recognition of the literary borrowings in parts of the Bible; and the detection of a number of editions of many books has shown that biblical literature has a genuine human history and that human minds have shaped the biblical books. The human personalities who worked on them apparently did everything that other human writers would have done in composing literature in any culture.

Hence, in contemporary Catholic thought great stress is placed on the Bible as truly the word of God expressed in words that are truly the product of human minds, as though two artists composed the books of Scripture: God and man.

Thus, a recent writer speaks of two incarnations: in one incarnation, the Word of God became enfleshed in human nature; in the other, the word of God became enfleshed in the language of men. Because the word of God has become enfleshed in the words and languages of human beings of different cultures and civilizations, any study of the Bible will always necessarily include investigation of the human conditions that shaped the thought and language patterns of the human authors of the Scriptures. This position is not held by all Christians.

Acquiring the Mind of Christ — 20160807

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christ_iconAs I suggested in the last issue, the petition in the Our Father that asks that we not be led into temptation, is a prayer that we be liberated from the deceit and vanity of our minds and hearts, from the carnal lusts that dwell in our bodies. It is a prayer that God Himself would be man’s shelter and refuge (cf. Ps 91).

This brings us to the very last petition of the Our Father – deliver us from evil. This last petition is also included in Jesus’ prayer: “I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one” which is found in John’s Gospel (Chapter 17 of John’s Gospel). It touches each of us personally, but it is always “we” who pray, in communion with the whole Church, for the deliverance of the whole human family. The Lord’s Prayer continually opens us to the range of God’s economy of salvation. Our interdependence in the drama of sin and death is turned into solidarity in the Body of Christ, the “communion of saints.”

In this petition, evil is not an abstraction, but refers to a person, Satan, the Evil One, the angel who opposes God. The devil is the one who “throws himself across” God’s plan and his work of salvation accomplished in Christ. “A murderer from the beginning, … a liar and the father of lies,” Satan is “the deceiver of the whole world.” Through him sin and death entered the world and by his definitive defeat all creation will be “freed from the corruption of sin and death.” Now “we know that anyone born of God does not sin, but He who was born of God keeps him, and the evil one does not touch him. We know that we are of God, and the whole world is in the power of the evil one.”

Deliver us, Lord, we beseech you, from every evil and grant us peace in our day, so that aided by your mercy we might be ever free from sin and protected from all anxiety, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

The Our Father is truly the ultimate prayer of all humans since it is the prayer of our brother Jesus Who has invited us to join Him in worshipping the Father. Together with Jesus we address God as our ABBA – loving Father – and petition Him to help us come to a true understanding of the meaning and purpose of life and keep us focused on the task of life: becoming like Jesus, our Father’s revelation to us about how to be the human He created us to be.