My beloved spiritual children in Christ Our Only True God and Our Only True Savior,
CHRIST IS IN OUR MIDST! HE WAS, IS, AND EVER SHALL BE. Ο ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΕΝ ΤΩ ΜΕΣΩ ΗΜΩΝ! ΚΑΙ ΗΝ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΙ ΚΑΙ ΕΣΤΑΙ.
LIVING THE TRADITIONAL ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN LIFE
What is Orthodoxy?
Almost every Orthodox spiritual writer has emphasized that true Orthodoxy is a matter of the heart. Without warmth of heart towards God and neighbor, there can be no true faith. Father Seraphim Rose wrote:
Orthodoxy is not merely a ritual, or belief, or a pattern of behavior, or anything else that a man may possess, thinking that he is thereby a Christian, and be spiritually dead; it is rather an elementals reality of power which transforms a man and give him strength to live in the most difficult and tormenting conditions, and prepares him to depart with peace into eternal life.
This elemental reality of power of which Father Seraphim speaks is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, that living and eternal flame of love within the regenerated heart. It is the seal and the promise of our baptism waiting to be fully realized in our lives. Walking in the Spirit is Orthodoxy in its most fundamental reality. Saint Seraphim of Sarov told us that the only true purpose, the only real goal of any Orthodox life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.
Traditional Orthodox Christian life is also a life of suffering love, and this is most difficult for North Americans to accept. Even though we are familiar with suffering, we do all that we can to avoid it. Yet, the Lord said that if we were to follow Him, we had to take up our cross. The cross cannot be embraced without suffering. A non-suffering Orthodox Christian is a contradiction of terms. A non-suffering Orthodox Christian is on the road to hell.
Internals and externals
Whenever you discuss a question like "what is Orthodoxy?", someone will raise the issue of Orthodox external. Many proclaim that since Christ came to set them free, they will not be entangled with manmade rules about things like attending the Divine Liturgy, fasting, prescribed prayers, and so on. Why do we need all of this incense and icons and other external things?
To understand the relationship of internal faith and external rites, one must turn and listen carefully to Saint Thephan the Recluse:
"People concern themselves with Christian upbringing, but leave it incomplete. They neglect the most essential and most difficult side of the Christian life and dwell on what is easiest - the visible and external. This imperfect and misdirected upbringing produces people who observe with the utmost correctness all the formal outward rules for devout conduct, but who pay little or no attention to the inward movements of the heart, and to true improvement of the inner spiritual life. They are strangers to mortal sin, but they do not heed the play of thoughts in the heart. Accordingly, they sometimes pass judgments, give way to boastfulness or pride, sometimes get angry (as if this feeling were justified by the rightness of the cause), and are sometimes distracted by beauty and pleasure, sometimes even offering others in fits or irritation. Sometimes they are too lazy to pray, or lose themselves in useless thoughts while in prayer. They are not upset about doing these things, but regard them without any significance. They've been to church, or prayed at home according to the established rule, they carry out their usual business, and so they are quite content and at peace. But they have little concern for what is happening in the heart. In the meantime, it may be forging evil, thereby taking away the whole value of the correct and pious life."
Let us now take the case of one who has been failing somewhat short in the work of salvation. He or she becomes aware of this incompleteness and sees the incorrectness of their way of life, and the instability of his or her efforts. And so they turn from outward to inward piety. They're lead either by reading books about spiritual life or by talking with those who know what the essence of Christian life is, by dissatisfaction of their own efforts by a certain intuition that something is lacking and that all is not going as it should be. Despite all of his correctness, he has no inner peace. He lacks what was promised true Christians - peace and joy in the Holy Spirit...He comes to understand that the essence of the Christian life consists in establishing himself with the mind in the heart before God in the Lord Jesus Christ by the Grace of the Holy Spirit. In this way, he is enabled to control all inward movements and all outward actions so as to transform everything in himself whether great or small into the service of God and the Trinity, consciously and freely offering himself wholly to God.
"...establishing himself with the mind in the heart before God in the Lord Jesus Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit." Surely, this is what we all want. Is Saint Theophan saying that the disciplines of a pious life are of no value? Anyone who has read his work knows that this is not the case. How else can we establish the mind in the heart without them? But there is three possibilities concerning the discipline of piety: a) no piety, at all, b) pious practice but without heart, and c) pious practice which establishes the mind in the heart before God in the Lord Jesus Christ by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The first option is atheism; the second is pharisaic. Certainly, the last option is what authentic, traditional Orthodoxy is all about.
(To be continued)
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"Glory Be To GOD For All Things!"--Saint John Chrysostom
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With sincere agape in His Holy Diakonia,
The sinner and unworthy servant of God
+Father George