Keep Silent and Radiate Joy

"You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a swamp that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others. Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgement."

St Seraphim of Sarov, quoted in Jim Forest, Praying with Icons (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2008), 169.

Beauty and the Taste of Orthodoxy

"Beauty" includes all that God has done throughout salvation history, throughout the life of the Church, and in our own lives up to now. "Beauty First" is another way of saying, "Pay attention to theophany." And where do you most readily find theophany? The list is not brief, especially when you multiply the particular instances of nature and good art, as well as liturgy, Holy Scripture, pilgrimage, saints' lives, hymnography, Church art and architecture (indeed, all the ecclesiastical arts, including incense and vestment making), family, friendships, romantic love, and so on. But do we approach these sources as if they were beautiful and fall in love with them? Or have we lost that wonder from our lives?

How do we cultivate this?

This takes experience and training. And one form of training comes from just being immersed in the Tradition. Tradition is a record of prior theophany, of Beauty, and a living Tradition is able to re-present that Beauty to us. As we enter that current and learn to swim in it, we learn what is real Beauty and what is false.

When a child is raised in the Church in a healthy way, what he has above all is an unshakable sense of how Orthodoxy "tastes." He grows up knowing the theological aesthetic of the Church, and this will carry a person most of the way home if he is faithful to it. This is part of what Dostoevsky meant when he said that "Beauty will save the world." He was talking about the saving power to an adult of the memory of attending Presanctified Liturgy as a child.

We start with eros and the willingness to fall in love but also with the readiness to have our eros purified through fasting. When we begin with Beauty, we make Chastity and Unknowing our first allies and friends."

Dr Timothy Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

A Glimpse of the Resonances with Chastity and Fasting

"Now he had come to a part of the wood where great globes of yellow fruit hung from the trees—clustered as toy-balloons are clustered on the back of the balloon-man and about the same size. He picked one of them and turned it over and over. The rind was smooth and firm and seemed impossible to tear open. Then by accident one of his fingers punctured it and went through into coldness. After a moment’s hesitation he put the little aperture to his lips. 

He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified. He could never tell us, when he came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, creamy or piercing. “Not like that” was all he could ever say to such inquiries. 

As he let the empty gourd fall from his hand and was about to pluck a second one, it came into his head that he was now neither hungry nor thirsty. And yet to repeat a pleasure so intense and almost so spiritual seemed an obvious thing to do. His reason, or what we commonly take to be reason in our own world, was all in favour of tasting this miracle again; the childlike innocence of fruit, the labours he had undergone, the uncertainty of the future, all seemed to commend the action. 

Yet something seemed opposed to this “reason.” It is difficult to suppose that this opposition came from desire, for what desire would turn from so much deliciousness? But for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day. As he stood pondering over this and wondering how often in his life on earth he had reiterated pleasures not through desire, but in the teeth of desire and in obedience to a spurious rationalism, he noticed that the light was changing."

+ From CS Lewis' The Space Trilogy, Book 2 Perelandra.

To Always Desire to Know God

 Another ecclesial union, a gathering expressed in the icon is that of mankind and angels...

Every liturgy we celebrate is not just a gathering of humans but also of angels, we sinned against the good angels when we listened to the fallen angels and we therefore need to be reconciled to the good angels for not listening to them. .

According to St Maximus the Confessor, Christ reintroduced us to the good angels when ascending into heaven he passed through all nine ranks of angels and reintroduced us to the angels saying "I forgive them so you must forgive them" .

So one might ask why one needs all this complexity and richness? Is not the Christian life just between me and my God?

We need this communionality, not just of people, but of angels and all this stuff because we're made in God's image and God is a Trinity, God is a community. We are in God's image and likeness as a community rather than as isolated individuals. And this Trinitarian source of everything in this Icon is indicated at the very top of this icon where we see a single source of light seperating into three rays...as an aside but an imporant sort of aside, the heart of this partial hidden sphere at the top is of a dark blue and this symbolizes that God in His essence is entirely uknowable, even in the age to come we will never know God in His essence. He is always the Creator and we are always the creation. However in the outer edges we see white light and this symbolizes God's outgoing grace, His knowability.

I've been married to my wife for about twenty years and I know her but I also don't know her, the day I think I know her, I've lost her. I got to keep reminding myself here's a profound mystery and to get to know her through her energies, but at the heart of my wife made in God's image is a pround mystery.

The more we know this, we'll want to bow down and kiss each other's feet, because before us we have an awesome creature.

So we can say that Christians aren't pantheists, we don't say everything is god, rather we are panentheists, we say "God is in everything"

+ Iconographer Aidan Hart, 'From Genesis to Jerusalem' - Talk on a new icon of creation (talk & panel conversation), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ugxxxz2vAU&t=2094s , fromInstitute for Orthodox Christian Studies Cambridge Youtube ( https://www.youtube.com/@institutefororthodoxchrist517 )

The Liturgical Rearing of Saints

"Raise up Children that God recognizes, not that the world honours. Worldly honour may come and that's wonderful when it does but that's not the job of a parish and the job of a parent is to raise up children and say to God, "Lord they are Yours." And to raise them up in such a way that God will recognize thom in every moment of their life.

It might be easy when you're in church and you and the children are being anointed during an Orthodox service or when you're saying prayers together, but there are times when parents and parishes have to struggle to raise up children that God would say to them "I know you".

There's also the opposite side of that...children have to know the voice of their mother, the Church. They have to know the voice of the Church and the only way that children know that voice is by time spent with their mother. Only by time, again and again and again, so that they get used to the mother's voice, our mother the Church. She's a good mother because she always calls us, she's always calling her children to her to come and to be with and spond time and receive the blessings of God that are there and awaiting them.

These blessings are unique, they're many, they're special, they're often individual but they can also be corporate but in order for child to know it's mother's voice it has to be close to her. The child has to be embraced by her, fed by her, held by her, guided by her, sometimes chastised by her, but always loved and cared for by her...and that's the Church.

And as a parish and as a people and as parents that's where our children belong, that's where they find out who they are, that's where they know who they are. It's so essential to spend time with our most holy mother the Church.

I would not trade anything for these kinds of beautiful moments in the Church because they are the seeds that grow the right fruit. It takes a while for us but those seeds grow into the right fruit, properly watered and properly tended to, properly cared for, properly embraced by our mother the Church."

Spoken by a humble Priest, father and servant of the Orthodox Church, September 2024

One can only die a Christian

"Man cannot live a Christian. He can only die a daily death...

Christ is perfect God and perfect man-perfect man in the sense of ultimate perfection, of real, genuine man. Only he, the all-perfect man, drained to the depths all the fullness of human experience, while those who follow after him, led by his commandment and his Spirit, only approach this fullness, without arriving at its totality, at least in the confines of this earthly life.

In writing of the fullness of universal human experience I feel convinced that it is obtainable in all circumstances, so that in this respect monasticism is not an exception to the rule. Each of us is given the same commandment - in other words, none of us is belittled in the sight of God, God has a like measure of regard for each of us. Each of us is provided with the same sum- if I may put it that way - sufficient to acquire the ultimate perfection attainable by man, the price of which is one and the same for all - to be utterly unsparing of self. Being completely unsparing of oneself does not mean just "bestowing all one's goods to feed the poor, or giving one's body to be burned, " but forsaking all that one has in the sphere of one's created being in its separateness from God, in selfish individualism and opposition to one's fellow man.

This is only fully to be attained in death, and so to live as a Christian in effect is impossible - one can only die a Christian."

+ St Sophrony of Essex, "The Staretz' Demise" in St Silouan the Athonite, (Yonkers, NY: SVS Press, 2021) p. 215-217

A Memory That Saves

"You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation."

+ Alyosha in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov

Hope of the Resurrection

"...the very accomplishment of a liturgical celebration of the mystery of the resurrection floods the light of hope into our hearts, which produces generosity. It is the person who does not hope, and is tethered to temporality, who concludes he might as well eat, drink, and be merry if this really is all there is. If we are really only flickering bits of consciousness that will be snuffed out tomorrow, we might as well focus on the little pleasure we can squeeze out of today. (How simple life must be for a hedonist!) 

But hope in the resurrection allows us to take the proper measure of our brief time in this world, and this does not make us neglect our neighbor, it stirs up greater generosity. We have seen this in the lives of many mystics. The saint with a soul soaring upward into heaven does not forget the world; to the contrary, he or she is in the most radically free position to transform it. 

Chesterton said his first attractions to Christianity came when he realized that Christians were the only ones to preach the paradox that one must be “enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it.” 

Hope allows us to love the world radically, without practical calculation or cost analysis. Hope gives courage. Hope gives fortitude. Hope lets us love recklessly."

+ Dr David Fagerberg, "Liturgical Mysticism", Steubenville : Emmaus Academic, 2019. 122.

Beyond Articulation

"The divine essence is beyond articulation; the words of Scripture point beyond themselves and reveal the absurdity of any fundamentalism. To insist on "literal truth" in theology is to make a fool of oneself, whether one articulates theism or atheism. In doing so we "know not what we do," because any articulation taken literally is at best a reduction of ultimate truth to what a finite intellect can grasp; it is an idol."

Fr David Starr

Seminary: Pointing Towards Beauty

"Remember what a significant part of the means for this holy enterprise was given by foreigners. We must show them the beauty of Orthodoxy. May this church be a place of brotherly intercommunion and the rapprochement of all Christians … Here prayer shall be unceasing, not only for all Russian peoples labouring and heavy-laden, and scattered abroad in the sorrow of exile, but for the peace of the whole world, for the welfare of God’s holy churches, and for the union of them all." 

+ Metropolitan Evlogii, At the Consecration of Institut Saint-Serge in Paris, France, July 18th, 1924. (Lowrie 1954, S. Sergius in Paris: the Orthodox Theological Institute, p. 11.)

"For peace in the whole world, for the stability of the holy churches of God, and for the unity of all, let us pray to the Lord." 

+ From The Great Litany, The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom