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 (Part III)
The Narrow Way
The Lord said, "...narrow is the way that leads to life, and few there be who find it" (Saint Matthew 7:14).
Metropolitan Laurus, in his lecture, "The Ascetic Podvig of Living in the World," writes the following: "Christianity is an ascetic religion. Christianity is a teaching about the gradual extirpation of the passions, about the means and conditions of the gradual acquisition of virtues. And this Podvig, this struggle comes as we begin to separate ourselves from the world.
So, there it is. As long as we are comfortable with the world, there is little struggle. Try to separate from the world and the battle really begins.
The World
Saint Macarius said that we must fight, and our war is fought on two fronts. One front is within the heart where we fight not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual armies of evil. The second front is in the world where we deal with the material affairs of life. Let's take a moment to examine this battlefield on which the war is fought.
What is this world from which we are to separate? With their usual precision, the Greeks define it for us. The Greek word for world is cosmos and it has two meanings. First, the cosmos is the physical and material world that God created. This physical world is not evil. God proclaimed it as good. This creation even includes our physical bodies, which we sometimes treat with such disdain.
The second meaning of cosmos is the world of sin. Saint John warns us: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world, if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him."
All right, I am not to love this world of sin. But where is it? Saint John points to it: "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world" (I John 2:15-16).
There is a world in my soul, a world of desire, rebellion, self-sufficiency, and pride and it separates me from God. It is my world. I am the god in my world. I created it and I love it and I sustain it. There is another God there also, and He will have no other gods before Him. The Lord said that the Kingdom of God is within us. So, this is where I fight the most profound battles of the heart...
Culture
War in the heart is a mighty battle, but it is not the only arena of conflict. There is another place to fight. The inner world of sin has a greater expression than what resides in my heart or in yours alone. I can join my inner world to yours and collectively, we create what we call culture or society. What is the nature of this warfare?
A desert Holy Father once said that the devil majored in three things: noise, hurry and crowd. If nothing else, the noise has grown louder, the pace of life faster and the crowds larger. Life is filled with stress and demands and worry.
I recently read an article in the journal First Things, written by R.R. Reno, entitled "Fighting the Noonday Devil." The spiritual state of acedia means to be "without care." This sounds pretty good, but what it means is that we don't care about anything. We don't have the energy or drive to pray, we don't care to fast, we don't care to read the Holy Scripture; we don't care to attend the Divine Services of the Church. How many of us have experienced this state?
Reflecting on the sin of acedia, the writer makes the following insightful observation of how a sorrowful state of the spirit had become a cultural value.
Most of us want to be left alone so that we can get on with our lives. Most of us want to be safe. We want to find a cocoon, a spiritually, psychologically, economically, and physically gated community in which to live without danger or disturbance. The carefree life, a life of acedia (without care) is our cultural idea. Pride may be at the root of all evil, but in our day, the trunk, branches, and leaves are characterized by a belief that moral responsibility, spiritual effort and religious discipline are empty burdens, ineffective and archaic demands that cannot lead us forward, inaccessible ideals that, even if we believe in them, are beyond our capacity.
Is this true? Is living a carefree life our highest priority? Our birthright as Americans is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and we will not be denied. The problem is that happiness forever eludes us no matter how much money we have or how many gadgets we hold in our hands. But we continue to strive because we will not give up the idea that happiness means getting ahead, and that means a bigger house, a promotion, a nicer car - maybe two cars, more gadgets, nicer clothes, a secure retirement package, and so on. To gain a carefree life, we enter a world of care. We enter the ranks of the sifted, the overworked, the tired, the anxious, the indebted, and the stressed. Then the priest comes along and adds the demands of the Church, and our knees buckle.
(Next: Worldly Cares)
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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