Category: Spiritual Life

Purity of Heart

Work on purity of heart

At the beginning of Great Lent, but it ought to be daily practice, is ask ourselves how we are working with certain spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, almsgiving, charitable work, care for self, silence, living virtuously, forgiving wrongs, and the like. Purity of heart is one of those disciplines that we either are untrained in, purposely forget about it, or actively work against it. Like many other things in the spiritual life if we ignore something long enough our center deadens. The point of Great Lent is to reinvigorate our relationship with the Lord and re-train ourselves to be full of life –to thrive– in God’s grace.

What is the quality of your heart? How do you concretely live the grace of freedom? What does purity of heart look like in your life and with those you life and work with on a daily basis?

“Spiritual discipline is above all about purity of heart. We have within ourselves the opportunity, through grace, of purifying our intention, of seeking only a loving response to the love that is already present, that encourages us forward. The heart that is truly free knows what it is free for: to be the lover God has always longed for” (NS).

Theophany in octave

We think in the long-game: the Church has a long tradition of carrying on a significant feast day for eight days following. So there is such a thing the Christmas Octave, Easter Octave, the Dormition Octave, etc. We have the Epiphany octave. If we believe in the primacy of liturgical theology, then experience will demonstrate that the memory found in praying the texts bears a heightened awareness and a keen appreciation leading to spiritual generativity in our life. We can’t settle for the bare minimum of liturgical observance.

Troparion — Tone 1

When You, O Lord were baptized in the Jordan / the worship of the Trinity was made manifest / for the voice of the Father bore witness to You / and called You His beloved Son. / And the Spirit, in the form of a dove, / confirmed the truthfulness of His word. / O Christ, our God, You have revealed Yourself / and have enlightened the world, glory to You!

Kontakion — Tone 4

Today You have shown forth to the world, O Lord, / and the light of Your countenance has been marked on us. / Knowing You, we sing Your praises. / You have come and revealed Yourself, / O unapproachable Light.

Examine yourself

The more I examine myself, the more I see that a life devoted to constructing and organizing, a life which produces positive results and which succeeds, is not my vocation, even though, out of obedience, I could work in this direction and even obtain certain results. What attracts me is a vocation of loss—a life which would give itself freely without any apparent positive result, for the result would be known to God alone; in brief, to lose myself in order to find myself.

Father Lev Gillet (A monk of the Eastern Church)

HOLY DESIRE

“The reason we cannot have this sort of peace in this life is that our desire is not completely satisfied until we reach this union with the divine Being. As long as we are pilgrim travelers in this life we have only desire and hunger: desire to follow the right path, and hunger to reach our final destination. This desire makes us run along the way, the road cemented by Christ crucified. For if we had no longing for God as our destination, we would have no concern for wanting to know the way. I want you, then, to have an ever greater true holy desire to follow this way, the road that will bring you to your destination. . .

Take your lesson from Christ, who in his restlessly yearning hunger and thirst for our salvation cried out from the wood of the most holy cross, ‘I thirst!’ It is as if he were saying: ‘I am more longingly thirsty for your salvation than I can show you through this finite suffering.’ Yes, he is tortured with physical thirst, but that suffering is finite. It is the pain of holy desire, shown us in his thirst for the human race, that is infinite.”

(St. Catherine of Siena)

Seeking the Kingdom?

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1.3), and especially with the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. As baptised and confirmed Christians, we know intimately the depth and scope and challenge of the Eucharistic Mystery, both as Sacrifice and as Sacrament. 

Taking for just a moment the Lord’s parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) in reviewing our lives, let us focus on the third servant. The greatest mistake of the third servant in the parable of the talents is not that he buried his talent. His great failing is that he allowed fear to impede the fruition of his God-given talent. To surrender to fear of risking anything in God’s service is to reject the Lord’s call to live a life fully formed and informed by the eternal Word of God. The Holy Spirit’s gift of “the fear of the Lord” is something else entirely: the true fear of the Lord is the reverent love and willing service offered by those who belong to Christ and who seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness (Matthew 6.33).

Keeping one’s talent safe from risks, that is, secure from question and challenge, is not faithfulness to God. We know from the saints and spiritual masters that true fidelity to Christ does not consist in complacency or in leaving the status quo unchanged. 

Advent is a fitting time to ask ourselves: 

  • Do we harbor an attitude that masks habits of passivity, fear of conflict, paralysis, comfort seeking? 
  • Do we lack trust in the promptings of the Holy Spirit? 
  • What do I need to do, concretely, to enter through the eye of the needle to embrace my vocation as a follower of Christ? 
  • How does the parable of the talents challenge my reality as it is? 
  • What does my Examination of Conscience reveal to me about what would need to change so that I can fully live the gifts of faith, hope and charity?

When we act eucharistically and with openness to the Holy Spirit, we give up the need to control the outcome of our actions, allowing ourselves to enter into the story of the unfolding of God’s Kingdom in his Church, “which he obtained with his own Blood” (Acts 20.28). When Knights and Dames of the Holy Sepulchre act in faith rather than from servile fear, then the Holy Spirit is truly at work in us. This is the spiritual challenge before us this Advent.

The Importance of the Desert to the Inner Life


A recent post by Orthodox Abbot Tryphon on Poustinia is helpful to those who frequently practice silence and have a “hermit day” to keep focus on preferring God above all things. The Abbot writes,


The Russian word, “Poustinia”, means “desert”, and the importance of the poustinia to the inner life can not be dismissed. If we are to hear the voice of God speaking to us, we must listen to His silence.

If we are to learn to hear His voice, we must learn to be silent. Without recollection and silence, the inner life is impossible, and we will not make spiritual progress.

The desert must be a part of our daily living, for without entering into the desert of the heart, nothing can be gained. With the noise of the Internet, and the world of computers, iPods, laptops, and iPhones, the noise of the world threatens our soul like nothing in the previous history of humanity.

The world of cybernetics has its place, but we must not allow it to overwhelm the spiritual dimension of our humanity.

***As a side note and related, Catherine Dougherty popularized the idea of Catholics taking up the practice of Poustinia in her book on the subject.

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware speaks on The Jesus Prayer

The Jesus Prayer

Of all the lectures either in person or recorded offered by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, this interview is gold. Sharing it here because I believe what Ware says is important for the spiritual life.

Spotlight Quote: “What do we mean by ‘silence’? It can be thought of negatively: just a pause between words, an absence of noise. And in that case, it is something negative and empty. But silence can also be understood in a positive way: not just as ceasing to speak, but beginning to listen.”

The interview begins around 7min.

Kallistos Ware – The Jesus Prayer (N173)

 

A good conscience needed for authentic prayer

Conscience demands uncompromising honesty, and that is why it is an integral component of authentic prayer. When we consciously enter the presence of God, it is imperative that we do so as we are, and not with a persona. This means being alert to any sort of self-deception we may bring to prayer, because God desires to meet us as we are. God is not interested in relating with a phantom, a phony, with a persona that has no real existence, which is only trying to cover up what we are afraid to face. To stand before God in our conscience and say, “Here I am” puts us in a position to have a true encounter with the Living God. This is the stuff of transformation. (NS)