"How good it is to be here"

Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), from The Book of Mystical Chapters: Meditations on the Soul's Ascent from the Desert Fathers and Other Early Christian Contemplatives, translated by John Anthony McGuckin:

As soon as your mind has experienced
what the scripture says:
"How gracious is the Lord,"
it will be so touched with that delight
that it will no longer want to leave the place of the heart.
It will echo the words of the apostle Peter:
"How good it is to be here."

Online source. (Symeon was a Byzantine Christian monk, theologian and hymn-writer whose life and writings were the subjeect of one of Pope Benedict's general audiences on patristic and mediaeval theology and spirituality.)

Loving God in the depths of the heart

In his treatise On Spiritual Perfection Diadochus of Photiké (c.400-before 486) writes:

Anyone who loves God in the depths of his heart has already been loved by God.

In fact, the measure of a man’s love for God depends upon how deeply aware he is of God’s love for him.

When this awareness is keen it makes whoever possesses it long to be enlightened by the divine light, and this longing is so intense that it seems to penetrate his very bones.

He loses all consciousness of himself and is entirely transformed by the love of God.

Such a man lives in this life and at the same time does not live in it, for although he still inhabits his body, he is constantly leaving it in spirit because of the love that draws him toward God.

Once the love of God has released him from self-love, the flame of divine love never ceases to burn in his heart and he remains united to God by an irresistible longing.

Fuller text here.

Failure and glory

Alice von Hildebrand (from an article originally published in Homiletic and Pastoral Review and available on Ignatius Insight) on success, failure, and the glorification of God:

Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it very convincingly: "God does not ask us to be successful; He asks us to be faithful."

Moreover, for man's fallen nature, success is fraught with danger. It flatters our pride; it tends to make us arrogant and to view ourselves as superior to other men, to nourish our hubris....

Success is a heavy fare to digest. Only the saints can handle it because they keep repeating in their heart:..."Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to Thy name give glory".

They know that he alone is the victor and that they are useless servants.

Supernaturally speaking, it should make no difference whatever whether I or another succeed in the work we perform in God's vineyard.

The only concern of the supernaturally motivated person is that God is glorified.

If we accept a defeat with humility, we can glorify God more and better than if we had succeeded and fall prey to pride.

The workers in God's vineyard should always remember that God does not need us. He deigns to use us.

Liturgy of the heart

Fr Jean Corbon OP on liturgy and theosis (divinization) in an extract (on the Ignatius Insight website) from his book The Wellspring of Worship (Ignatius Press, 2005):

If we consent in prayer to be flooded by the river of life, our entire being will be transformed;

we will become trees of life and be increasingly able to produce the fruit of the Spirit: we will love with the very Love that is our God.

It is necessary at every moment to insist on this radical consent, this decision of the heart by which our will submits unconditionally to the energy of the Holy Spirit;

otherwise we shall remain subject to the illusion created by mere knowledge of God and talk about him and shall in fact remain apart from him in brokenness and death.

On the other hand, if we do constantly renew this offering of our sinful hearts, let us not imagine that our New Covenant with Jesus will be a personal encounter pure and simple.

The communion into which the Spirit leads us is not limited to a face-to-face encounter between the person of Christ and our own person or to an external conformity of our wills with his.

The lived liturgy does indeed begin with this "moral" union, but it goes much further.

The Holy Spirit is an anointing, and he seeks to transform all that we are into Christ: body, soul, spirit, heart, flesh, relations with others and the world.

If love is to become our life, it is not enough for it to touch the core of our person; it must also impregnate our entire nature.

To this transformative power of the river of life that permeates the entire being (person and nature), the undivided tradition of the Churches gives an astonishing name that sums up the mystery of the lived liturgy: theosis or divinization.

Through baptism and the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit we have become "sharers of the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4).

In the liturgy of the heart, the wellspring of this divinization streams out as the Holy Spirit, and our individual persons converge in a single origin.

But how is this mysterious synergy to infuse our entire nature from its smallest recesses to its most obvious behaviors?

This process is the drama of divinization in which the mystery of the lived liturgy is brought to completion in each Christian.

When prayer appears to be unanswered

Joseph the Hesychast (an Orthodox monk on Mount Athos in the first half of the 20th Century), says the following about the need for patience and endurance when our prayers appear, on the surface of things, to be unanswered:

God always helps. He always comes in time, but patience is necessary. He hears us immediately when we cry out to Him, but not in accordance with our own way of thinking.

You think that your voice did not immediately reach the saints, our Panagia [the All-Holy Virgin Mary], and Christ.

On the contrary, even before you cried out, the saints rushed to your aid, knowing that you would call upon them and seek their God-given protection.

However, since you do not see beyond what is apparent and do not know how God governs the world, you want your request to be fulfilled like lightning. But this is not how things are.

The Lord wants patience. He wants you to show your faith. You cannot just pray like a parrot.

It is necessary also to work towards whatever one prays for, and then to learn to wait.

[...] Now you become angry and fainthearted and grieved, thinking that the heavenly Father is slow in answering.

But I tell you that this will also happen as you desire—it will definitely happen—but first it takes prayer with all your soul, and then you must wait.

And when you have forgotten your request and have ceased asking for it, it will come to you as a reward for your patience and endurance.

When you reach the verge of despair while praying and seeking, then the fulfillment of your request is near.

Christ wants to heal some hidden passion within you, and this is why He delays in granting your request.

If you obtain it sooner, when you demand it, your passion remains uncured within you.

If you wait, you obtain your request and the cure of the passion.

And then you rejoice exceedingly and give warm thanks to God Who arranges all things in wisdom and does everything for our benefit.

So then, there is no point in losing heart, getting upset, complaining. You must close your mouth.

Let no one perceive that you are disturbed. Don't fume with anger, as if to work it out of your system, but rather be calm. Burn the devil through patience and forbearance.

From Monastic Wisdom: The Letters of Elder Joseph the Hesychast (Florence, AZ: St. Anthony's Greek Orthodox Monastery, 1998), and online here at Orthodox Christian Information Center.

"The prism of passion"

I came across the following at The Crescat (it's taken from Vox Nova's 10 Suggestions For a Better Catholic Blogosphere in 2011):

If you frequently find yourself losing your cool in discussions at certain blogs, stop commenting on them.

If you try that and don’t succeed, stop going to certain blogs altogether.

It is the sin of pride that convinces us that we must engage certain people in order to show them the truth.

The fact is that people who can’t engage each other productively force one another away from the truth, not towards it.

The Holy Spirit has more instruments than just you.

I don't know the origion of the following quotation on the subject of Dispassion (I discovered it serendipitously on an Orthodox blog called Tales of the Wild Babushka), but it makes a similar point in a more specifically theological way:

The absence of passion when either seeing or thinking of things is the absence of egoism.

The dispassionate person no longer sees and thinks of things through the prism of passion which wants to be satisfied with them;

in reference to himself, things no longer seem to be gravitating around him, but they appear as having their own purpose independent of his egotism.

Other people appear to him as human beings who are purposes in themselves, who need help from him….

The dispassionate person knows that he influences his neighbors more by his quietness, as a sign of his deep cleansing from passions.

He works for salvation of others, with the unwavering confidence in the plan which God has for every soul….

Dispassion leads us into the inner most part of the mind, to the heart, where God is found and the winds of passion aren’t whistling and blowing, but where the peaceful and conquering breezes of love are stirring.

Feast of the Theophany

From Vespers for the Feast of the Theophany (Eastern Catholic):

When the Forerunner saw the One who is our enlightenment,
the One who has brought light to all, coming to be baptized,
his heart rejoiced and his hand trembled.
He pointed Him out to the people and said:
This is the Savior of Israel who delivered us from corruption.
O Christ our God, O Sinless One, glory to You!

O our Saviour, the armies of angels trembled
when they saw You baptized by your servant,
and the Holy Spirit bearing witness and descending,
and when they heard the voice of the Father speaking from heaven:
This One upon whom the Forerunner lays his hands
is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.
O Christ our God, glory to You!

When the Jordan River received You, O Fountainhead,
the Comforter descended in the form of a dove.
Now behold the marvel:
the One who bowed the heavens bows his head to the Forerunner,
and the one made of clay cries out to his Maker:
"Why do You command me to perform what is beyond my power?
It is I who need to be baptized by You!"
O Christ our God, O Sinless One, glory to You!

H/T Ignatius Insight.

Émile Mersch - adoptive sonship

Fr. Émile Mersch (1890-1940) on adoptive sonship and divinization:

The Word is united to us in order to unite us to Him and to transform us into what He is, that is, to make us sons of God, not by nature, like Him, but by grace; to stamp us with His form and character of Son.

Thus through One, He has taken up His abode in us all. ...

This is the great Christian truth: the Son was made man that in Him and through Him, men might be adopted as sons.

By our participation in the only-begotten Son we become adopted sons, truly and "physically."

This shows clearly that He is the Son in the full sense of the term, that is, by nature.

[...] As the Fathers repeat so often, we become by grace what Christ is by nature.

Christ is the Son by nature, and He is God because He is the Son.

The grace we receive ought to make us sons, that is, adopted sons, who are divinized because we are adopted.

Our divinization comes from our adoption, and our adoption is no less sublime than our divinization; the excellence of both is derived from that of the sonship of God the Son.

[...] He has made us His own beloved children by sanctifying us in His well-beloved Son.

Émile Mersch: The Theology of the Mystical Body (B. Herder Book Co., 1952; originally published in French c. 1940), pp. 347-8, 372, 374; quoted here by Carl E. Olson.

Cyril on the Baptism in the Jordan

In today's Office of Readings (on those regions where Epiphany was celebrated last Sunday), St Cyril of Alexandria gets right to the heart of things in a passage from his majestic commentary on St John's Gospel:

Christ, as the first fruits of our restored nature, was the first to receive the Spirit.

John the Baptist bore witness to this when he said: “I saw the Spirit coming down from heaven, and it rested on him”.

Christ “received the Spirit” in so far as he was man, and in so far as man could receive the Spirit.

[...] The Father says of Christ, who was God, begotten of him before the ages, that he has been “begotten today”, for the Father is to accept us in Christ as his adopted children.

The whole of our nature is present in Christ, in so far as he is man.

So the Father can be said to give the Spirit again to the Son, though the Son possesses the Spirit as his own, in order that we may receive the Spirit in Christ.

[…] The only-begotten Son received the Spirit, but not for his own advantage, for the Spirit in his, and is given in him and through him, as we have already said.

He receives it to renew our nature in its entirety and to make it whole again, for in becoming man he took our entire nature to himself.

[...] Christ did not receive the Spirit for himself, but rather for us in him.

For it is also through Christ that all gifts come down to us.

Fuller text here on my other blog.