Ladder of Divine Ascent: Rung 20

 

As St. John often does, he cycles back to a previous topic, only to expand on it further in the next.  As I previously mentioned, sleep will hinder our prayer life if we allow it. Again with all things, being created in the image of God, this means that we too have the power to allow things to happen or not. We choose what we want to do and allow to affect our lives in the sense that if we succumb to the temptation of fatigue, then we have rejected the necessity of prayer. One of the most important aspects of spiritual life is keeping vigil over our souls.  Even now as I am tempted to go to bed and reject finishing this until the morning I know that my thoughts on this matter might not be the same as they are now, fresh on my mind. But here, St. John gets deep, deeper than we’ve gone before. Yes he was writing to monks, but if you replace the word monks with Christians the meaning is still the same. He writes, “Now let us see how we stand before God our King, when we stand at our prayers in the evening, or during the day and night. For some at their evening all-night vigil lift up their hands in prayer as if they were incorporeal and stripped of all care. Others stand at that time singing psalms. Others are more occupied in reading. And some out of weakness courageously resist sleep by working with their hands. Others try to feel the horror of the thought of death, hoping thus to obtain contrition. And of all these, the first and last are in all-night vigil for the love of God; the second do what befits a monk; while the third go the lowest way. Yet God accepts and values the offerings of each according to their intention and power.” Keeping Vigil over the soul means that you are watching it, allowing God to guide you and spending your time worshipping and praising God rather than falling into idleness and sin.

            As we look deeper into the world of keeping vigil, we are looking at the world today and searching for the answers as to how to quench our bodies from falling into to deeper sin and destruction. St. John writes, “Vigil is a quenching of lust, deliverance from dream phantoms, a tearful eye, a softened heart, the guarding of thoughts, the dissolving of food, the subduing of passions, the taming of spirits, the bridling of the tongue, the banishment of phantasies.”  We keep vigil not only to pray and praise God, but also to make sure that we are continually striving towards the openness and the heart filled with the Holy Spirit. Without doing so, we can fall into the trap of the devil and become more like them, rejecting God and filling our lives with pleasure rather than with salvation. Like anything else one wishes to master, vigil takes time and energy and practice. If one believes they are going to be able to keep long vigil on the first time they try, then they are greatly deceived. It takes years of steady practice and growth for people to obtain high levels of vigil and even then only with God’s help. If we wish to seek it solely on our own, then we have lost our salvation without even trying. The demons will rejoice at this because they have seen that their work was not needed to draw one away from God. Furthermore an abundance of sleep does not do the soul good either. As my priest told me once, “You can sleep when you’re dead.” Until then, sleep is simply a hinderance to continuing the fight against Satan and his allies. St. John says, “Long sleep is an unjust comrade; it robs the lazy of half their life, and even more.” We spend half of our lives in sleep and lying down. How much more could we accomplish if we put off the wild slumbers of the enemy and practiced prayer and vigil during this time? How much more could we grow spiritually, singing hymns and praising God? Alas, most people will reject this and call me a fanatic. No, I am not, rather I am someone who cares deeply about God so much, that I would rather sacrifice my own life for the sake of the Kingdom than to lose my salvation in slumber and idleness of sleep. St. John says, “It may happen that continuous meditation on passages of the Psalms is prolonged into the hour of sleep. And it may happen that the demons put these passages into our mind in order to lead us to pride. I would not have mentioned the third case, had not someone forced me to do so. The soul which has spent all day unceasingly engaged with the word of the Lord will love to be occupied with it in sleep too. For this second grace is in a special sense a reward for the first and helps us to avoid falls and phantasies. How much fun and happiness that would bring to our souls to spend even those hours of our nightly slumber with the Lord? But if we do not have the proper heart and mindset, we will be led to pride and our downfall, being puffed up and disobedient towards God. But how often do we dream of things that we have thought about all day? I do that a lot. I tend to think about it continuously all day and suddenly I have a dream that either solves my problem for me, or makes me terrified even more of the situation at hand. So too with God. If we meditate on his words and his commandments all day long, then at night at the hour of our sleep, we will drift into a meditation that will expand our knowledge and foretaste of the divine. But if we are not careful in guarding our souls, the demons will come and hijack those meditations and cause our destruction as I mentioned above. But now is the time to prepare our hearts, our minds for this spiritual struggle. We have ten rungs left after this, the journey is perilous beyond this point. Without the proper guidance, we will not be able to continue. May he who has ears to hear, let him here.

            I leave you with the words of St. John as he ended this rung. He says, “This is the twentieth step. He who has mounted it has received light in his heart.”

Our Identity in Christ

 

Identity. There’s a lot of discussion in the media today about identity and what people identify as. Where that be pansexual, nonbinary, transgender, or some of the one hundred and twelve different genders I found doing my research. However, we as Orthodox Christians know that there are only two genders for in Genesis it says in 1:27, “He created them male and female, and blessed them and called them Mankind in the day they were created.” While man might have twisted and corrupted the divine plan for mankind, God has never abandoned us. He loves us beyond our wildest understanding. There is always hope for even the worst of sinners. As a lay person, I am the last one who should be talking about the scriptures and interpreting them, but I want to present here that our identity has already been defined for us, and that whether we are male or female, we are united in Christ.

Having been blessed to enter the Orthodox Church in recent years, I have come to have an understanding of Christ and his identity in a unique way that is not present in many places in the world. Christ himself did not come to just save us from the fires of hell, like the fire and brimstone preachers would tell us. No, Christ came to bring man into the fullness of light and life with his incarnation. His incarnation gave to us the uniting of both the divine and mortal and brought us into a place in which St. Athanasius says, “God became man that man might become God.” In that we have the ability to overcome the world just as Christ did. We can create and mold and shape the world as the sub-creators of the world. We are given the Holy Spirit upon our acceptance into the Church, and we use the Holy Spirit to guide our lives and become more like Christ with every passing moment. We can also deny this gift and become more like the demons who rejected God. Our identity is defined first and foremost by how we react and how we have interpreted the incarnation of God. Are we willing to sacrifice our own wills and thoughts for God? The great saints of our time willingly surrendered their lives at the hands of the Soviet persecutors and St. Nektarios when accused of immoral behavior did not try to resist his tormentors but rather accepted it as God’s will and sacrificed his own desire as a bishop to love God more fully.

Secondly our identity is not of this world. If we identify with the spirits of this world, we become more in tune with the world and what they want. In my opening paragraph I discussed the world and how they want to reject the nature of gender and sex in this current age. I see women laying with women, and men with men, and people are okay with it. They claim that their identity cannot be defined by the labels that man has given it, rather they want to be free to do as they please. They want to throw off the yoke of God, which Christ says is “For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” They want the heavy yoke of sin around their neck not knowing that they are plunging themselves deeper and deeper into torment and sin. Our identity is a heavenly one.  We are called to be citizens of paradise, as one of my favorite hymns says. The people of this world, especially those in the west, have lost their faith because they do not practice it. It is better to hide their light under a basket than to stand for something they believe in. The reason we have allowed practices today to begin to warp the minds and hearts not just of the older generation, but the children is because we do not practice the faith. We do not pray, we do not attend services, we simply want to be able to be left alone and do what we want. We cannot be saved alone; we need others to hold us accountable and in doing so we need orthodoxy to bring about a change in our hearts through Jesus Christ.

Thirdly, our identity is defined in how we react to persecution. If we have accepted the first two points, then we understand that Christ is the savior of the world, and that we have a higher calling, a purpose to be of heaven not of earth. Our reaction to persecution is also a defining factor of our identity. I know that I have spoken before on this topic but let me go in detail as to what I mean in relationship identity. Christians since time immemorial have suffered at the hands of those who wish to see the seal of Christ stamped out from the world. Reading through the lives of apostles other night I saw how much the pagans took their anger and their unbelief out on the holy men of God. Trying to eradicate the Church before it could really be established, these pagans would crucify, burn, and torture those who stood for the faith. Today, with the gender identity craze is becoming more and more of threat to traditional and orthodox Christian belief, we have seen the weakest of Christians fall to the wayside and accept this perverse and disgusting teaching as if it came from the mouth of God himself. Instead of holding firm to the apostolic tradition, these so called Christians have rejected even the scriptures themselves. Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Anglicans, and many other faith traditions have placed themselves up as God and have allowed both women priests and homosexual priests within their ranks. They have torn asunder the scriptures and done evil in the sight of God. This is persecution and when the test came to decide whether they were true or false, the fire tested these people as false. While I no doubt there are many who hold firm to Christ in these traditions, the leaders of their respective traditions have turned many astray. Those who hold firm to their identity in Christ will accept persecution with open arms, knowing that Christ himself was subject to persecution and his response was to accept the cross willingly without complaint or argument. Are we so holy that we are better than even Christ himself? The apostles saw and were blessed, blessed more so are those of us who have not seen and yet believed.

While this article took a turn in a different direction that I assume many of you thought it would, it is still good to understand that our identity in Christ is what is most important. I am sure that I will return to this topic many times and expand on my thoughts further in future articles. For now though with the celebration of the Holy Cross tomorrow I am reminded that I must sacrifice myself daily and take up the cross and follow Christ. Wherever that leads me I am willing. For it is not I that lives, but Christ who lives through me.

Amen.