Ladder of Divine Ascent: Rung 28

 

In my blog so far we have had two different articles on prayer, and will probably have many more as the journey continues on the path of salvation and orthodoxy. While I have not reached the safe harbour of heaven just yet I pray and continue to pray that my efforts will not be in vain. As we are reaching the top of the ladder, we can now look on all the previous rungs that we have overcome to reach this height. There is still more to go, but we are nearly there. In the 28^th chapter of the Ladder, St. John discusses prayer and what it means for us as Christians. It is not a typical answer one might receive here in the West, with its protestant base and Catholic majority. But one that everyone needs to hear. This is the ancient philosophy of prayer, the early church’s purest and most devout practice. With it, we will ascend to even higher heights than anyone can imagine. St. John says, “Prayer by reason of its nature is the converse and union of man with God, and by reason of its action upholds the world and brings about reconciliation with God; it is the mother and also the daughter of tears, the propitiation for sins, a bridge over temptations, a wall against afflictions, a crushing of conflicts, work of angels, food of all the spiritual beings, future gladness, boundless activity, the spring of virtues, the source of graces, invisible progress, food of the soul, the enlightening of the mind, an axe for despair, a demonstration of hope, the annulling of sorrow, the wealth of monks, the treasure of solitaries, the reduction of anger, the mirror of progress, the realization of success, a proof of one’s condition, a revelation of the future, a sign of glory. For him who truly prays, prayer is the court, the judgment hall and the tribunal of the Lord before the judgment to come.”

Let’s take that first part, being a bridge over temptations, as well as elaborating on the food of all spiritual beings, and expand our thought process a little more as we gather the gist of what St. John of the Ladder is trying to say. First, we understand that prayer is our communion with God. Not in the same way that partaking of the Eucharist is, but rather our conversation and our uniting of minds with God. I personally am the world’s worst at prayer, I tend to only get up saying the Jesus Prayer and will find myself more often than not ignoring the hours and praying simply the Jesus Prayer throughout the day. However what I have noticed through the practice of prayer is that by doing so I am not as easily overcome by the temptations of the devil as I would when I neglect prayer entirely. I also have noticed my anxiety has decreased and that God fills me like a cup as I pray. I also have been more cautious in my thoughts and actions after I pray than before I pray, mainly because I know that I have just entered the courts of God and have directly met with him face to face. I find myself more eager to spend time with God the more often I pray. In doing so, my relationship with God and Christ grows and warms my heart. It becomes for me a kindling of the all-consuming fire in my life so that I am able to ward off anything that is impure and destructive for my soul. Secondly, as the food of spiritual beings, meaning us as humans, it feeds my soul and nourishes my mind in that I can think clearer and harder on things than without prayer. Discernment comes through prayer and prayer through discernment. In doing so, the prayer of the heart is cultivated and the cold dark abyss of the soul is lit with the fire of God and brings about the repentance of the person praying.

Prayer is affected by how you pray. In doing so, you cultivate different aspects of prayer that are available through God to those who seek him. St. John says, “The attitude of prayer is one and the same for all, but there are many kinds of prayer and many different prayers. Some converse with God as with a friend and master, interceding with praise and petition not for themselves but for others. Some strive for more (spiritual) riches and glory and for confidence in prayer. Others ask for complete deliverance from their adversary. Some beg to receive some kind of rank; others for complete forgiveness of debts. Some ask to be released from prison; others for remission of accusations” We see that St. John says that the attitude of prayer is the same, that being humility. Without humility we do not have prayer but rather endless babel that the Lord will ignore. However as we pray there are many things that we can ask for from God. Using my own experience from prayer, I see that I pray most often for the mercy of God to come upon me. That is all I want. I do not seek earthly things or wealth, or titles or confidence in prayer. I know that all those things God dishes out to those who need it more than I do, and I only want to be an outcast in the house of God. I would rather sit and receive mercy for everything I have ever committed than to be famous or to have power. I want the love of God to permeate me and to give me the strength to carry on in this world, not just for the sake of my salvation, but also that I might spend some time helping cultivate others. Prayer is our way of exacting our feelings into words or sometimes inaudible words so that we can stand before the Almighty God with a clear conscience and pure heart. I do not seek to win crowns or glory, only that Christ will say I was a faithful servant on the day of judgement.

Once again I am called back to writing on the Jesus Prayer. In the West, many will drone on and on without really saying anything. We hear people pray for this thing and that thing and may try to flatter God with lavish titles and wording. In the Orthodox Church we do not and have not tried to do that. For that would be heresy. Rather, we speak direct and plain without the need for flattery and wordy prayers. St. John hearkens that belief when he writes, “If you constantly train your mind never to wander, then it will be near you during meals too. But if it wanders unrestrained, then it will never stay beside you. A great practiser of high and perfect prayer says: ‘I would rather speak five words with my understanding,’  and so on. But such prayer is foreign to infant souls. Therefore, imperfect as we are, we need not only quality but a considerable time for our prayer, because the latter paves the way for the former. For it is said: ‘Giving pure prayer to him who prays resolutely, even though sordidly and laboriously.” The quality and time that we spend with God is more important than the words we use. As I have said, the Jesus prayer has become my lifeline to God, and I use it as often as I can for the things that I have on my heart. In that entire statement that I repeat over and over again, I say everything that I need for the Lord to hear me. I do not need to tell God a story and explain every aspect to Him in my prayer. He already knows. What he is looking for is the humility and humbleness of my soul that will lead me out of the dark and despair into the future joys that I will have sitting at his footstool in Heaven. By simple prayer the heart becomes united with the divine and the powers of heaven come to our aid.

St. John says, “Soiled prayer is one thing, its disappearance is another, robbery another, and defection another. Prayer is soiled when we stand before God and picture to ourselves irrelevant and inopportune thoughts. Prayer is lost when we are captured by useless cares. Prayer is stolen from us when our thoughts wander before we realize it. Prayer is spoilt by any kind of attack or interruption that comes to us at the time of prayer.” Prayer is something that must be pure, we cannot force ourselves to pray and to do things that we have no intention of meaning. There have been many times in my own personal struggle that I have seen myself throwaway prayer for the sake of vainglorious things. I have wasted my time and effort on the cares of this world. That is why I am adamant that I should not ask things for myself rather I should simply pray that God who knows everything will give it to me in the time in which he believes best. Wandering minds and thoughts do us no good, for we must be resolute in our prayer and steadfast in our intent. Otherwise we become like the pagans babbling on for hours with no clear conviction.

I have spoken at length about this particular portion of the Ladder, one that is difficult and very easy to misuse if not calibrated correctly. In doing so, St. John has given us a wealth of treasure that is his writings on the subject. I do not believe that even this particular article will do it justice. Only rather I have seen what I have written for the benefit of my own soul and pray also for the benefit of your own. May God continue to guide us and protect us as we enter into Holy Week and celebrate the Glorious Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Amen.

Ladder of Divine Ascent: Rung 26

 

We have reached the final ascent of the Ladder. Thirty rungs are difficult to overcome, and if I am being totally honest, then I have to admit that I’ve taken a break preparing myself for the final five rungs of the ladder. Rungs 26-30 are some of the more difficult rungs to overcome as we have been battling our way up the ladder and are now being assaulted head on with the full force of the demons. However, if we are to overcome the last rungs, we must prepare ourselves with the Sword of the Spirit, aka our prayer ropes. We must continue on and pray diligently that God will allow us to be perfected in faith and to reach our final destination (not the movie) …heaven. We have now reached discernment, which is a very difficult thing to obtain, and one that I’m afraid the world is seriously lacking in today. In fact, I would assume with all the transgender and gender fluid movements out there today that people have never even attempted discernment. However, we must obtain true knowledge ourselves and in doing so we will progress up the Ladder. In reading the Ladder I came across this quote by St. John that sets the basis for our discussion today. He writes, “Discernment in beginners is true knowledge of themselves; in intermediate souls it is a spiritual sense that faultlessly distinguishes what is truly good from what is of nature and opposed to it; and in the perfect it is the knowledge which they possess by divine illumination, and which can enlighten with its lamp what is dark in others. Or perhaps, generally speaking, discernment is, and is recognized as, the assured understanding of the divine will on all occasions, in every place and in all matters; and it is only found in those who are pure in heart, and in body and in mouth.”

So once again let us delve into the heart of St. John in this matter. I will once again state, that he is writing to monks, but there is something to be gleaned from this for all Christians. First, we see that discernment is true knowledge of oneself. This allows a person to accept that they are sinners, in need of the divine grace of God, through prayer and repentance. In our metanoia, we can turn away from those things that are displeasing to God and are harmful to the soul. We also come to the conclusion that God has called us to a higher purpose, one that is fully vested in God and not of this world. The hopes and cares of this world will pass away, but our immortal souls will not. Whether they end up in eternal paradise among the righteous, or eternal torment with the souls of the damned, only God can decide. Our hope and prayer is that by discerning those things that are evil from those that are good, we can live a righteous path and obtain the Holy Spirit with which will dwell in us and guide us on the straight and narrow path. There is often talk among the Orthodox that we are the middle path. We do not turn to the right or to the left, but rather stay our course no matter the circumstances. In doing so we are able to see both sides of an issue and come to the conclusion that God has for us. Today we do not have this, rather we have people being either left or right. In some cases we have ultra-left and ultra-right people who have strayed even farther from the path on which God has set for us. So too in the spiritual world do we see this. The demons will either turn us to the left in a spiritual sense, being fully demonic and evil that we are unable to come to grips with salvation and reject in entirely, or to the right, being full righteous and believing ourselves in no need of salvation from God. The second leads us to a path of self-righteousness and pride that destroys our souls even more so than that of the first. In this pattern that I have laid out, I would suggest that St. John sums it up best. He says, “In all our actions in which we try to please God the demons dig three pits for us. In the first, they endeavour to prevent any good at all from being done. In the second, after their first defeat, they try to secure that it should not be done according to the will of God. But when these rogues fail in this too, then, standing quietly before our soul, they praise us for living a thoroughly godly life. The first is to be opposed by zeal and fear of death, the second by obedience and humiliation, and the third by unceasing self-condemnation. We shall be faced by toil of this kind until the divine fire enters into our sanctuary. And then the force of bad habit will no longer exist in us. Our God is a fire consuming all fever (of lust) and movement (of passion), every inclination rooted in us and all blindness and darkness within and without, both visible and spiritual.”

God being an all-consuming fire is an icon present in Orthodoxy and one that speaks to me more than most. For the righteous this fire consumes us and leads us to righteousness in God and His Church, and for the damned, it is a fire that torments and burns their souls with agony. When we allow the all-consuming fire to sweep us and cleanse us of every stain that we have brought onto ourselves we are able to worship and practice our faith with humility and love. It is like the forest that is burned but not consumed when park rangers and foresters set ablaze the trees and grass that otherwise would suffocate and die under the thick tall weeds that have grown around it. It is like the trees that without this fire could not produce their seeds and would not carry-on living. Without God our lives wither and die and suffer not just the first death, but the second as well. For those who are damned, the fire consumes them and suffocates them like a wildfire set in the summers of places like California and Colorado. God wants to grow us, not harm us. And using discernment, we are able to achieve this. Christ says for us not to place our light under a basket, and when the divine fire enters our sanctuary, we are able to shine brightly on this world and enlighten the even the darkest of places. I am reminded here of St. Nicholas of Japan, who leaving Russia for a foreign country, brought the light of Orthodoxy to Japan, in a time where Japan was and still is a pagan nation. His discernment and life by yielding himself to the divine fire of God led a large portion of the nation to Christ and His Church though he had his trials and tribulations. But the divine grace of God saw him through. So too when we reach a difficult point in our lives must discern the truth from God. In his own timing he will reveal what is to be done for His Kingdom and Glory. St. John writes, “Let no one plead his incapacity to fulfil the commandments of the Gospel, for there are souls who have gone even beyond the commandments. And you will certainly be convinced of what has been said by him who loved his neighbour more than himself and laid down his life for him, although he had not received this commandment from the Lord.”  So if the saints, who normal as they were with their own faults like St. Moses the Black, or the penitent thief, called Rakh in Russian were able to receive the divine grace you can too. The moral of this is that you must allow God to work in your life and present yourself as a willing servant of God. Only then will discernment come and will you be able to climb the ladder even further.

We have only scratched the surface of discernment here, in that it comes from God to those who are pure of heart and willing to accept the cross. Times will be difficult, and times will come when you will need to discern things whether they are demonic or from the Lord. We have seen this in the charismatic movement which was led astray by the speaking in tongues. We see this today in the transgender movement and all forms of the LGTBQ+. However the true Christian will seek the will of God and only what he wants for us. There will be no turning away from the faith for those who persevere. May God bless you and keep you forever.

Amen.

Ladder of Divine Ascent: Rung 25

We have reached Rung 25, which has been a struggle for me. You are reading these as they were written and finished, but I must admit as I was writing these it took me some time to finish the final six rungs. The first twenty-four have been relatively difficult to produce a solid article for, as I have been feeling more tired and restless the more, I write. Whether that be as my friend Yianni says, “Snitches get stitches” or simply me struggling by my own feebleness and passions I cannot say. However, I can rest assured that I have not reached humility and that I have not destroyed the passions. I have not become dispassionate and am to judge things clearly and effectively without putting my own biases into the matter. St. John in the 25th rung becomes even more serious as we near the end of the journey. We have climbed so far and can look back on everything that we have overcome, but still though without overcoming the last six rungs, we have yet to complete our journey. The 25th rung is destroying the passions.

St. John writes, “Let all who are led by the Spirit of God enter with us into this spiritual and wise gathering, holding in their spiritual hands the God-inscribed tablets of knowledge. We have met, we have investigated, and we have probed the meaning of this precious inscription. And one said: ‘It means constant oblivion of one’s achievements.’ Another: ‘It is the acknowledgement of oneself as the last of all and the greatest sinner of all.’ And another: ‘The mind’s recognition of one’s weakness and impotence.’ Another again: ‘In fits of rage it means to forestall one’s neighbour and be first to stop the quarrel.’ And again another: ‘Recognition of divine grace and divine mercy.’ And again another: ‘The feeling of a contrite soul, and the renunciation of one’s own will.’ But when I had listened to all this and had attentively and soberly considered it, I found that I had not been able to comprehend the blessed sense of that virtue from what had been said. Therefore, last of all, having gathered what fell from the lips of those learned and blessed fathers as a dog gathers the crumbs that fall from the table, I too gave my definition of it and said: ‘Humility is a nameless grace in the soul, its name known only to those who have learned it by experience. It is unspeakable wealth, a name and gift from God, for it is said: Learn not from an angel, not from man, and not from a book, but from Me, that is, from Me indwelling, from My illumination and action in you, for I am meek and humble in heart and in thought and in spirit, and your souls shall find rest from conflicts and relief from arguments.” We must learn from the fathers of the church. In the west, learning and speaking about the Church fathers will get you a lot of looks. In fact many will question why I quote more of the Church fathers than scripture. While scripture is certainly a factor in how we live our lives, we also know that scripture is to be lived. Those who have came before us have lived the scriptures with their whole hearts and their writings can be very valuable. Here St. John explains that seeking humility he went to the different opinions on humility and divine grace. In it we see that St. John finally sees that humility and the power to overcome our obstacles in life are to allow the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. You can read the scriptures and as many books as you want, but without the experience and indwelling of the Holy Spirit, overcoming the passions will not be achieved. We must rest within Christ. Only then can we achieve that which is to destroy the passions.

Secondly St. John writes, “Painstaking repentance, mourning cleansed of all impurity, and holy humility in beginners, are as different and distinct from each other as yeast and flour from bread. By open repentance the soul is broken and refined; it is brought to a certain unity, I will even say a commingling with God, by means of the water of genuine sorrow. Then, kindled by the fire of the Lord, blessed humility becomes bread and is made firm without the leaven of pride. Therefore when this holy three-fold cord or, rather, heavenly rainbow, unites into one power and activity, it acquires its own effects and properties. And whatever you name as a sign of one of them, is a token also of another. And so I shall try to prove what I have just said by a brief demonstration” Here I will take my liberty and use the bread as my example as well, but try to further explain it more precise terms. When one makes prosphora, the person goes into it with prayer and repentance. This is the first step in that we must make a true repentance. So too when a baker makes bread, they prepare themselves by gathering the ingredients. We have been gathering the ingredients by climbing the ladder and learning how to control ourselves with the different areas of our lives that hinder our relationship with God. We must repent and begin with a clean heart. We must make sure that our flour is pure and white before we begin. Secondly, we add the yeast, which the Holy Spirit. For most of us this at birth, when we are entered into infant baptism. For someone like me, this occurred in 2017 when I entered the Church through Chrismation. I received the gift of the Holy Spirit and partook of Holy Communion for the first time. The Holy Spirit entered my body and began to make the bread rise and grow towards spiritual maturity. From there, the bread needs time to rise. You put in a warm, dark place. You let it rise and proof as you wait. So too, as a Christian through prayer and the divine services the bread of our lives is put in a warm place to grow and mature. Over time it gets bigger and bigger until the devil comes along and punches us back down, deflating our spirits and weakening us. But God is allowing us this time to grow once again. You might have let your bread rise several times before it is ready for the oven. Once it is ready for the oven, God allows us to enter the heat of the battle, the oven. From there we enter the fray, and we begin to be heated. This is the most crucial stage. If we have been strong in our faith and are pure of heart, the oven will heat us, but with the Love of Christ. We will turn out perfect and will enter heaven. If not, the fires of the world will burn us, and we get scorched. Some of us will be burnt, but not too burnt and will still be good enough to serve at the Divine Liturgy. Others however will crumble and break and be inedible. Even still the worst of us will be burnt and blackened and not worthy of the Kingdom of Heaven and will be cast out from heaven and into the fires of Gehenna. Though we might take lumps along the way it is the calling of all of us to be perfected in love by God. To let our bread rise and become the very chamber of the Holy Spirit and the Body of Christ. I pray that during Lent this season we have grown and become more like Christ.

St. John also says, “Humility is a divine shelter to prevent us from seeing our achievements. Humility is an abyss of self-abasement, inaccessible to any thief. Humility is a strong tower against the face of the enemy.1 The enemy shall not prevail against him, nor shall the son, or rather, the thought of iniquity do him evil: and he will cut off his enemies from his face and will conquer them that hate him” Humility is like the grand castles we see dotting the landscapes of Europe. Built strong and fortified they are difficult to overcome even in the best of weather. So too, when we enter into the Church we begin building our own castle, we must build it with the strongest of materials, the stones that the ladder is built on. When we build the castle, we know the devil will try to assault it. If we have used the information from the Ladder and the scriptures, we are able to combat the devil with every available tool that we have in our arsenal. Some will be better equipped at this, but this comes with experience. The only way in which one truly achieves the grace of God is living. We are not called to be isolationists and remove ourselves from all things, only to detach ourselves from the value that we find in this life. We must practice our faith for it to grow.

Amen.

Ladder of Divine Ascent: Rung 23

 

As I have said many times, St. John of the Ladder tends to bring about the last chapter in the Ladder with continuation into the next chapter. While there is a possibility that you could have combined these two chapters into a single step, separating vainglory and pride as two separate rungs of the Ladder allows for a more thorough approach to life and to give the reader an opportunity to prepare themselves for future assaults of the devil as well as the rest of the rungs that we have yet to climb. If we have made it this far up the Ladder as few have, then the view below will begin to give us a picture of the stench and the destruction that we have left for the glory and rewards of heaven that we are approaching. Yes, yes, things are going to be harder here from the top. The more we have climbed the harder the fall from here, but it is not all lost. We can pick ourselves up and we can get back on the Ladder, we just might have to go through a few extra rungs by returning to the place from where we fell.  With that said, we need to explain the heart of the matter of this particular issue and rung on the Ladder. Yes we discussed vainglory in the previous post, but this is all about pride. St. John says, “Pride is denial of God, an invention of the devil, the despising of men, the mother of condemnation, the offspring of praise, a sign of sterility, flight from divine assistance, the precursor of madness, the herald of falls, a foothold for satanic possession, source of anger, door of hypocrisy, the support of demons, the guardian of sins, the patron of unsympathy, the rejection of compassion, a bitter inquisitor, an inhuman judge, an opponent of God, a root of blasphemy”  He also says, “The beginning of pride is the consummation of vainglory; the middle is the humiliation of our neighbour, the shameless parade of our labours, complacency in the heart, hatred of exposure; and the end is denial of God’s help, the extolling of one’s own exertions, fiendish character.”  St. John also says, “It is shameful to be proud of the adornments of others, but utter madness to fancy one deserves God’s gifts. Be exalted only by such merits7 as you had before your birth. But what you got after your birth, as also birth itself, God gave you. Only those virtues which you have obtained without the cooperation of the mind belong to you, because your mind was given you by God. Only such victories as you have won without the co-operation of the body have been accomplished by your efforts, because the body is not yours but a work of God.” Lets go ahead and discuss these two thoughts

First, we have to understand that pride is the denial of God. Satan and his legions of angels that fell with him denied that God was the ruler of all and thus they fell from Heaven and were cast out. Thus when we are full of pride, we are cast down into the pits of hell and our souls are tormented by the pains we have heaped on ourselves. Nothing we have comes from our own merits, and thus we must understand that is by the grace of God that we achieve all things. When God allows us to suffer for our benefit, then we must do so with humility. When we curse and drag God’s name through the mud, we only heap more pride on ourselves and continually condemn our immortality to hell. When we repent, we repent not just for ourselves but for every generation and every person in the world. When we fall, the whole world falls. If the world could fall through one man, what makes you certain that the world doesn’t fall again every time you sin? Your pride is what makes you blind. It is what keeps others from accepting the truth of Orthodoxy. It was has weighed the world down for all these millennia and yet, we continue to stand here, day after day and build our pride up because we do not wish to see the benefit of humility. With humility comes grace, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the forgiveness of our sins. Without cooperation with God and without fostering the virtues within yourself how do you expect to serve God with a full and pure heart? You just can’t, it is impossible. Therefore shed off your old yoke, the yoke of pride, and turn around your shameless parade of labours into fruitful productive labours and live a shame free life.

Was not expecting such a direct attack again on myself and my heart. The pride that wells up inside of me is immense sometimes and it is hard to control. I have been trying my best to rid myself of all forms of pride and I have not yet succeeded. I pray that through your prayers dear brothers and sisters, that I might overcome this struggle. I cannot seem to do so on my own and ask the Lord to help me.

Amen.

 

Ladder of Divine Ascent Rung 22

 

If the 21^st Rung was where I fell off, knowing my heart and my mind, then there is no way that I have achieved victory over the last of these. Throwing off the yoke of the devil was never easy. It was always going to be a difficult decision and task set before us. Do we flee from that which appears easily and luxurious, to something that appears tiresome and poverty-stricken? Or do we go with the poverty-stricken appearance that is truly luxurious? The question and decision laid before us, is whether we are willing to sacrifice our pride for the sake of our immortal souls. Recently as I have stated, there have been issues with me and my cowardly outlook on life. I have fled from the danger God placed me in, to a place of even more suffering and pain that I could even imagine. But that is what happens when you reject God’s love. The pride that you endure makes you suffer, both physically and spiritually and I have experienced both as of late. St. John says, “With regard to its form, vainglory is a change of nature, a perversion of character, a note of blame. And with regard to its quality, it is a dissipation of labours, a waste of sweat, a betrayal of treasure, a child of unbelief, the precursor of pride, shipwreck in harbour, an ant on the threshing-floor which, though small, has designs upon all one’s labour and fruit. The ant waits for the gathering of the wheat, and vainglory for the gathering of the riches of virtue; for the one loves to steal and the other to squander.” He also says, “The sun shines on alike, and vainglory beams on all activities. For instance, I am vainglorious when I fast, and when I relax the fast in order to be unnoticed I am again vainglorious over my prudence. When well-dressed I am quite overcome by vainglory, and when I put on poor clothes I am vainglorious again. When I talk I am defeated, and when I am silent I am again defeated by it. However I throw this prickly-pear, a spike stands upright.”

So what does it meant to be vainglorious? Well in the above statements its pretty clear. We are a waste of sweat, a betrayal of treasure. We have gathered riches only for them to be stolen from us by our own pride. We are like the man who spends all his hours accumulating wealth and pleasures, only for that very night for his soul to be demanded from him by God. Prayer, fasting, love of your neighbor is good, yes, but in reality, it is not good if you do not have the light of Christ illuminating your heart. Without Christ, everything that we do is for nothing. We could give away everything, we could fast, we could pray and if we don’t have Christ then we are still without. The protestants pray, but they do not have Christ. The Catholics pray, and they too do not have Christ. The Muslims pray and they do not have Christ. Only in Orthodoxy is Christ to be found. We know where the Holy Spirit is, we cannot say where he is not. For the Holy Spirit works throughout the world, but especially through the Church and we know he is in the Church. We pray that by our struggles as we continue up the ladder that we will rid ourselves of pride. If being a coward was one of the steps to ridding ourselves of pride then we must acquire the bravery of heart to proclaim the gospel without fear or condemnation and to dare call God Father. We must pray: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.” Without which we cannot over come pride. We will continually swim in the cares and destruction of life, without so much as gaining ground. We have to stand firm in the faith. Neither going to the left or to the right. We must remain on the straight and narrow path, the path that leads us to salvation. St. John says, “There is a glory that comes from the Lord, for He says: Those who glorify Me, I will glorify. And there is a glory that dogs us through diabolic intrigue, for it is said: Woe, when all men shall speak well of you. You may be sure that it is the first kind of glory when you regard it as harmful and avoid it in every possible way, and hide your manner of life wherever you go. But the other you will know when you do something, however trifling, hoping that you will be observed by men.”

Oh how much sweeter is it to receive the glory from God than to receive it from men? It is the sweetest of sweet the fragrance of life. The very beginning of the transformation of our corruptibility into incorruption. Let us pray that God through the prayers that we offer to him will accept them and that God will protect us from all sort of pride and destruction. I know that God is on the side of all those who love Him and I pray that I will love Him above all else, sacrificing my own will for the sake of the Kingdom of God. I leave you with this advice from St. John. He says, “When we invite glory, or when it comes to us from others uninvited, or when out of vainglory we decide upon a certain course of action, we should remember our mourning and should think of the holy fear with which we stood before God in solitary prayer; and in this way we shall certainly put shameless vainglory out of countenance—if we are really concerned to attain true prayer. If this is insufficient, then let us briefly recollect our death. And if this is also ineffective, at least let us fear the shame that follows honour. For he who exalts himself will be humbled1 not only there, but certainly here as well”

Amen.