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Transforming Psychological States into Spiritual Ones

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christopher-veniaminTransforming Psychological States into Spiritual Ones: Some Practical Advice from the Fathers

Dr. Christopher Veniamin presented the keynote address at the 2013 Parish Life Conference of the Dioceses of New York / Washington and Charleston / Oakland.

How do we live as Christians? Or perhaps a better way of framing the question would be, How do we die every day as disciples of Christ in this broken world of ours?

This presentation aims to give some practical advice on living the commandments of Christ, based on the theology of the Church Fathers, and in particular of St Gregory Palamas, St Silouan the Athonite and Elder Sophrony of Essex.

Dr. Christopher Veniamin is Professor of Patristics at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary and a spiritual son of Elder Sophrony Sakharov, a spiritual giant of the 20th century. He earned his M.A. in Theology from the University of Thessalonica and went on to receive his D.Phil. from Oxford University, under the direction of Metropolitan Kallistos Ware.

Christ has not left us!: Pentecost and the Incarnation

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pentecost
Sunday of Pentecost, June 23, 2013
Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

A recording of this sermon is available via Ancient Faith Radio.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.

On this great day of Pentecost, the fiftieth day following the Lord’s resurrection from the dead, we celebrate and experience once again the descent of the Holy Spirit in the form of fiery tongues upon the Apostles and disciples of Christ. The Lord was born, He grew, He was baptized, He preached, He healed, He suffered, He died, He was buried, He rose from the dead, He ascended into Heaven and sat down at the right hand of the Father, and now He sends to us from on high the Comforter, the great and all-holy Spirit of God, the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the One Who proceeds eternally from the Father.

Just as much as the Father is God and the Son is God, the Holy Spirit, too, is God. He is of one essence with the Father and the Son. He is the Giver of Life. He is the Heavenly King. He is the inspiration of the prophets. He is the One Who led the Apostles into all truth on that day of Pentecost. He is the One sent down upon the bread and the wine to make them into the Body and Blood of Christ. And He is the One Who overshadowed the Virgin Mary, and Jesus Christ was incarnate of Him and of her, and He became man.

Of all these many things we have seen and heard and known of the Holy Spirit, it is this last action that I would like us to focus on especially today, that Christ was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, as attested to in our Creed and as witnessed in the Holy Scriptures. And I also would like us to understand what that has to do with this beautiful day of Pentecost, the day of the mighty wind and of the holy fire.

When we first encounter the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures, it is in the book of Genesis, and He is hovering over the face of the waters, the waters of the formless, void Earth that has not yet been shaped by the Son of God to become this planet of life we now know. We say of course that it was the Son and Word of God by Whom and through Whom and for Whom the creation was made, but the Holy Spirit is there at the beginning, and of course the Father, is as well. And when the Son of God creates man, and man is made according to the image, according to Christ Who is the image of the Father, the breath of life is breathed into man to make him a living soul. That breath, that wind that was breathed into Adam should call to mind the Holy Spirit, for in many ancient languages, including both the Greek and the Hebrew of the Scriptures, wind, breath and spirit are all one word.

And so when many ages after the creation the Holy Spirit is given to the Apostles by Christ, He breathes on them when He says “Receive the Holy Spirit.” And when the day of Pentecost came, the Spirit’s coming was announced with a mighty rushing wind. This is He, the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Truth, the Lord and Giver of Life. And it is He who overshadows the Virgin, and she conceives.

At that moment, mankind is re-created, for the true Firstborn over all creation has become incarnate. The incarnation happens because of the work of the Holy Spirit and the cooperation of the Virgin. If God spoke through man when the Holy Spirit filled the prophets, we now see that God becomes man when the Holy Spirit fills the Virgin.

But what does this have to do with Pentecost? Isn’t the Incarnation the subject of the Annunciation, when the Lord was conceived? Or is it perhaps not the subject of the Lord’s Nativity, the great feast of Christmas? How does the Incarnation have anything to do with Pentecost? Did not the Lord’s incarnate body depart from us ten days ago at the Ascension, and now the Holy Spirit is here in His stead?

If that is what you think the Spirit is here to do, to take Christ’s place, then you misunderstand this feast and indeed, you may misunderstand what Christianity is all about. The Spirit is here for the same reason He was at the creation, for the same reason that He filled the prophets, for the same reason He overshadowed the Virgin—He is here to bring us the presence of Christ. He is here to bring to us the One Who is Emmanuel—God with us.

When the Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost, the Church as we now know it comes into being (though it is actually eternal, because Christ is a member). A ragtag group of fishermen and other disciples become the Body of Christ. And it is no mere turn of phrase that we use here—“Body of Christ.” We say “Body of Christ” because we should think of His body. We should think of His incarnation. We should think of Him as the Head of the Church, while we are His Body. The Holy Spirit comes for no other reason than to extend the Incarnation.

You see, the presence of Christ is not limited only to His physical body as it walked this Earth and now sits on the Father’s Throne. Christ’s incarnation extended into those Apostles and the other disciples when the day of Pentecost came and the Holy Spirit came upon them. Christ’s incarnation is extended when those 3000 souls are baptized into Christ on that day. Christ’s incarnation is extended into the Body and Blood that will come forth from this holy altar today. Christ’s incarnation is extended in every one of the sacraments. Christ’s incarnation is extended directly into you and into me, because we have put on Christ in baptism and because we eat and drink His flesh and blood.

We are called “Christians,” brothers and sisters, because we are what that word means: “little Christs.” We are the extension of His incarnation because the Holy Spirit has come upon us in our baptism and chrismation and in our life of receiving all the sacraments.

Christ has not left us! He did not go away so that the Spirit could be here “instead” of Him. He sent us the Holy Spirit precisely so that He might become everywhere, so that He might become fullness of Him Who fills all things. Christ in all, and all in Christ. To the extent that we are in Christ, we become Christ by the power of Pentecost, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Christ has not left us! When we receive all the holy mysteries even from the unworthy vessels that are our bishops, priests and deacons, we receive them not from those unworthy men, but from Christ, for in their ordination they have become Christ, and it is by the Holy Spirit that this has happened. The incarnation has extended into them, and through them, by the Spirit, the incarnation extends into us. By the energy and power and operation of the Holy Spirit, we become by grace what Christ Himself is by nature.

Christ has not left us! This is why everything we do here in this holy place matters, why what you do when you leave this place matters, why every moment of every day has the possibility for conveying the awesome presence, power and glory of God into every place. The Holy Spirit has come, and He is extending Christ into us, and we by the Spirit extend Christ into this world.

Christ has not left us! This is the wind and fire of the Spirit, and He is bringing Christ into us with power and with glory. Just imagine for a moment if we truly knew what it means that we are by grace becoming what Christ is by nature—the very presence of God on Earth. We do not become the one and only God—only the Father, Son and Spirit are God. But we may grow to the fullness of the stature of Christ, partakers of the divine nature.

What a wonderful and beautiful and comforting and encouraging Gospel the Holy Spirit preaches to us: Christ has not left us! He gives Christ to us, for Christ sent the Spirit to us for precisely that reason. Though we are sinners, though we are unworthy and have blasphemed God, though we so often ignore Him and put Him last, we who are the Body of Christ have become the extension of the Incarnation of Christ. We can dare to say with the saints that, because of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the Church is nothing less than the whole Christ—Head and Body.

To Him therefore be all glory, honor and worship, with His Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

The Blindness of a Saint

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Sunday of the Blind Man, June 9, 2013
Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

A recording of this sermon is available via Ancient Faith Radio.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Christ is risen!

I am holding in my hand a small pebble of rose-colored marble. This stone has traveled thousands of miles from its native land. It comes from a little island which is only about 3 ½ miles long and a little over a mile wide. The pebble originally rested on the southern beach of the island, which is a little bay covered with pebbles just like this one. The island is one of a long series of islands which run the coast of a much larger island. What makes it unique geographically, however, is that it is the first place traveling north along the coast of Scotland where you can no longer see Ireland.

On the tiny island of Iona is where a holy abbot named Columba landed in the year 563. He was traveling with a small band of monks from Ireland, and he had been sent there in exile, commanded never again to set foot on his beloved native land. Part of his instructions were that he had to sail north from Ireland and could not settle until he could no longer see the island. When Columba and his monks landed on the desolate southern beach of Iona, they scrambled to the top of some high rocks there and strained to see the beautiful green of Ireland. But it was nowhere in sight, and so they knew that their journey was over. But that was not the beginning of that story.

The story of Columba’s exile began three years earlier, in the year 560. In that year, he was visiting St. Finnian of Moville at his monastery in Ireland. Finnian, also an abbot, showed Columba a manuscript of the book of Psalms that had been carried to Ireland from the East. Seeing the beauty of its calligraphy and illumination and the precision with which it had been hand-copied, Columba asked to borrow the psalter so that he could study it closely. He was given permission to study it but not to remove it from the monastery which was its home. So Columba brought it into the monastery chapel many nights, often staying up quite late into the morning. Little did Finnian know, however, that Columba wasn’t merely studying the psalter, but was making a copy.

Finnian only discovered later that a copy had been made and became angry. In those days, as in our own, copying books was only something that could be done by permission, and so Finnian demanded that the copy be given to him. Columba refused, and so the case was brought to the high king of Ireland, who ordered Columba to hand over the copy. He again refused and brought the matter to his own father, who was one of the lesser kings of Ireland, the leader of the Clan O’Neill. His father supported him, and a war began between the Irish clans, leading to a battle in the year 561 which cost the lives of thousands.

At seeing the death he had caused, Columba’s heart was torn in two, and he went to his confessor to repent of his sins and ask what he could do in order to atone for them. His confessor told him that he had to go into exile from his beloved native country, traveling up the coast of Scotland and not stopping until he could no longer see Ireland. He was also commanded to convert to Christ at least as many souls as had perished at the battle which he had caused.

Columba obeyed his spiritual father and left for Scotland. When he landed on Iona, he founded a monastery which lasted there for centuries and became a missionary center, leading to the Christianization of the whole of Scotland, largely due to Columba’s travels throughout that country, converting many thousands of Scots. Columba was particularly known for his great courage, as he faced down pagan rulers who were eager to put him to death because the Christ he preached was a threat to their power base in paganism. Despite the danger and because of Columba’s bravery and his repentance, Scotland became a Christian country, producing many saints.

On this Sunday, the sixth Sunday of Pascha, we listen to the Gospel reading in which the Lord Jesus heals a blind man on the Sabbath day, and not just any blind man, but one who was born blind. His eyes hadn’t been damaged by some accident or injury. They had never worked at all.

When Jesus meets this blind man, He tells His disciples that He is Himself “the light of the world,” and that that is His purpose for being in the world. He then works a miracle for this man born blind, spitting on the ground and then anointing the man’s eyes with the clay that resulted. He then sent the blind man to wash in the Pool of Siloam, and then his eyes were opened. He met the Light of the World Who brought light into his world.

In this account, the true blindness is not exhibited by the man born blind, but by those around him who were more concerned with whether Jesus was following their particular interpretation of the rules of the Sabbath. You see, they were spiritually blind even if they weren’t physically blind. And while physical blindness can be fairly easily cured by a brief act from Jesus, those who close their spiritual eyes will not see the Light of the World even if He is standing in front of them.

The story of St. Columba also demonstrates for us a kind of spiritual blindness. There was of course nothing wrong with Columba’s love for the Scriptures, nor is there anything inherently wrong with making copies of them. These are both wonderful, praiseworthy things.

But Columba demonstrated his blindness not by these things but by his insistence that things had to be done his own way. He was not content merely to read the Psalter that belonged to St. Finnian but had to have a copy for himself. He became blinded by his desire. It’s worth noting here that what we desire might be a good and beautiful thing, but if we seek it in the wrong way, then we are doing so in spiritual blindness. We do not see the harm we are causing.

Many of us may seek things that are good but go about it in a spiritually blinded way. Does your profession and desire to provide for your family deprive them of your care and love by your presence? Does your ambition to achieve something good blind you to your need for spending time in prayer both privately and corporately? Does your desire for spiritual knowledge blind you to the needs of those right next to you? Does your desire for relaxation and taking some time off blind you to the urgent needs of those whom God has given you?

There are many things we may desire, things which in themselves may be laudable, but if we do not keep them in balance and do not look at the bigger picture, we may be stumbling about spiritually blind. Columba did. His blindness led him eventually to provoke a war, and thousands of his countrymen died. Was it worth it? Was it worth it for him to keep that book? Is it worth it when we achieve our hearts’ desires yet neglect those whom we should love? Is it worth it when we attain what we seek yet lose sight of the care of our souls? What does it profit a man, if he should gain the whole world yet lose his soul (Matt. 16:26, Mark 8:36)?

There is hope, however, and Columba finally saw it when he went to his confessor and repented. He had to pay a price for his blindness, and that was exile from his homeland. We who are such a mobile society may not understand this as well, but the loss of his home affected Columba deeply. He could not go back. But even while he suffered this loss, the cure of Columba’s blindness enabled not only him to see the Light of the World, but became the impetus for many thousands upon thousands more to see the Light.

Columba is remembered by the Orthodox Church among its saints, and his feast day is today, June 9th. His great repentance led to a harvest of many souls for the Church of Christ, and the places where he traveled and preached can still be visited today, marked with churches and other artifacts. And even on Iona itself, that little island, though Columba’s monastic community has been gone for many centuries, there still lingers the presence of holiness, the sense that God Himself is huddled down next to the island. I have been there, and I have seen it, and my own heart still aches with longing when I think of that place.

Columba had succumbed to blindness, but God turned his blindness to sight and through him brought sight to many who were spiritually blind, and while he lost Ireland, he became the Enlightener of Scotland, bringing to those people the good news of Jesus Christ and baptizing them into His death and resurrection, giving them the true spiritual light. May he also enlighten us.

To the Lord Jesus Christ, Who is the Light of the World, be all glory, honor and worship, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen. Christ is risen!

Worship in Spirit and Truth

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samaritan-woman

Sunday of the Samaritan Woman, June 2, 2013
Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

A recording of this sermon is available via Ancient Faith Radio.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen. Christ is risen!

There are those outside the Orthodox Church who say that Orthodox worship is empty and meaningless ritual, that it is “dead religion” at its worst. To them, what we do in worship is just “going through the motions,” a sort of dedication to pointless tradition for its own sake. When they look at our vast liturgical tradition, all they see is Pharisaical rules and regulations designed not just to confuse people but to control them, to numb their spirits, to destroy any spark of faith within them.

And there are even some people, perhaps many people, inside the Orthodox Church who have a similar view. It is probably not articulated out loud, but it is spoken by their actions. They do not care too much what the liturgical season is. They do not bother to come to church services aside from liturgy on Sunday morning. They regard discussion of the details of our worship to be annoying and tedious at best, something reserved for ecclesiastical nerds with nothing better to do with their time. It’s nice in some sense that all that complexity is there, but they can’t be bothered with learning it or trying to understand it in any way but the most superficial.

What ties both of these attitudes together is a movement from the churches of the Reformation that began in the 17th century, a movement called Pietism. Without getting too deep into the history of the movement, let us define it simply as the feeling—not so much the teaching, mind you, but the feeling—that the details of doctrine and worship do not really matter. What matters is mostly that you have strong conviction and/or that you are a good moral person. And it is precisely through the lens of Pietism that many people interpret the Gospel reading from this morning, especially the passage on worship. Let’s hear that selection one more time, just to bring it again to our memory:

The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that Thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and Thou sayest that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Listen especially to the words that Christ uses: “the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”

Someone outside the Orthodox Church who looks at what we do as pointless, “dead” religion, then true worship that is “in spirit and truth” will have nothing to do with liturgics. Instead, “true worship” “in spirit and truth” will probably be something made up sometime recently, using exciting, emotional music and a big spectacular show that will leave the congregation feeling charged up at the end. Using ancient rituals is fake, and they leave people feeling dead and perhaps even trapped in a mind-numbing sameness that doesn’t do anything for anyone.

And yet, speaking as someone who used to work in “show business” and used to participate in precisely that religious world, I can tell you that that entertainment-focused approach to worship can be quite as dead, fake and entrapping as they think liturgical ritual must be. There can be enormous pressure to “perform,” to make everything perfect and polished, to stay constantly up to date with whatever cultural trends are on the radio or in the pages of Christianity Today, to be more “relevant” every day. The canon for propriety in that kind of worship is not measured by anything except the demands of a public hungry for innovation and smooth-talking preachers projecting a successful image.

What is important is that people feel good, that they have an emotional experience, but because what is popular in entertainment can go out of style so quickly, and because churches will never be able to keep up with the frenetic pace of the Top 40, the glitter gets dull and the music gets campy and the architecture goes out of style. And what do you have? Dead religion. It used to feel good, but it’s just not that cool any more. And so such churches, despite all their apparent outward success, have an enormous turnover rate for their members, who eventually leave, looking for something else that will feed their desire for what’s missing.

But someone inside the Orthodox Church, while not actually rejecting liturgical worship, may nevertheless not really care much about it, either. If he comes only to Sunday liturgy while neglecting Vespers and Matins, he may notice that not much changes from week to week. He may notice that the choir eventually cycles through only a certain repertoire of pieces. He may notice that the priest is preaching on the same passage from Scripture he did last year at this time. He may notice all the services listed in the schedule but think to himself, “That’s just for religious fanatics” or “I don’t have time for that.” But what he really means is “That’s boring, and I don’t care.”

And he certainly looks around and notices that hardly anyone else around him seems to care much about such things, either. That one time he came to Saturday Vespers or Sunday Matins, he made up half the congregation. So it must be okay. And surely God does not care about such details. Those are all man-made, anyway, stuff for clergy and crazy converts to bother over. And there it is in the Bible today: worship God in spirit and in truth. Doesn’t that mean that, as long as you’re a good person, as long as you really believe, that the rest just doesn’t matter? What matters is the “spirit,” right? Isn’t that the “truth”?

One of the problems of Pietism is that it forgets anything about history and why it matters. It is understandable that someone might read this encounter of the Lord Jesus with the Samaritan Woman, see Him speaking about worship in spirit and truth, and thereby conclude either that one should reject liturgy entirely or that even if one doesn’t reject it, that its details don’t really matter. But such an interpretation just doesn’t hold up in the light of history, and it certainly doesn’t hold up in the light of what has been experienced in liturgical worship by the people we know really made it to Heaven—the saints.

So what does history actually show us about this, and why should we care? First, we should remember that the New Testament as we now know it does not appear in a list we would recognize as our twenty-seven books until the year 367. That’s more than 300 years after Jesus rose from the dead before we might be able to point to something fully recognizable to today’s Christians as “the Bible.”

So what does the historical context of the formation of the Bible actually show us about how Christians worshiped? That is, when the Christians of the first three centuries of Christianity knowingly included the language of worshiping “in spirit and truth” in their Bible, what did they understand it to mean?

After centuries of Jewish liturgical worship that had been directly instituted by God Himself, the first Christians did not immediately drop everything, pull out their guitars and drum sets, and start worshiping God by putting on a big theatrical spectacle while imitating first century pop songs.

But neither did the Apostles go around preaching to the first Christians that all that Scripture and liturgical tradition they had been raised with and were in the process of transforming along Christian lines was now going to be handled by liturgigeek experts and that no one else need bother with knowledge or participation in worship that was anything more than minimal.

Neither is true. What happened is that much of Jewish liturgical tradition was retained and then initially augmented with specifically Christian elements, such as the Eucharist. It all became more specifically Christian especially after the Christians were expelled from the Jewish synagogues. Over time, the liturgical tradition gradually unfolded to what we have today. Even in the 21st century, it still retains the essential shape that it had in the first century, with no radical revisions. And it was always assumed that the vast content of the liturgical life was there both to teach and to shape the Christian as he participated both rationally and bodily. That is what the actual data on worship from the first few centuries of Church life shows.

Doctrine matters. Liturgy matters. And both make a big impact on the authenticity and even the very existence of the Christian spiritual life. If you don’t pay attention to those things as much as you are actually able, you’re not only not doing it right, you might not be doing it at all. So how does this work? And why?

Liturgical worship was instituted by God first for the Jews and then continued and expanded for Christians because it corresponds directly to how human beings are made. If we really want to get close to God and become like Him, then this is how you do it. You may not need to understand every single detail of how it works, but if you only barely understand it or barely participate in it and don’t even care about the details, it will not have much impact on you, and you will remain essentially dead in your sins.

In that respect, it’s very much like being healed by a doctor. You need to listen closely to what he tells you about how the cure is going to work and what you need to do. If you don’t, then you’re probably not going to be healed. And you certainly had better not go about making up your own cures. You’re not the doctor.

The Orthodox Church’s liturgical life is worship in spirit and truth. It is in this worship that we truly receive the Holy Spirit. It is in this worship that we not only learn the truth but actually participate in the truth. In this worship, the wisdom of the ages is packed in tightly. In this worship, the whole of the Church’s theology is not only taught but actually experienced. In this worship, God reaches out to touch us and we receive that touch and are healed.

Anyone who thinks that all that is just going through the motions has never really dived in deep to know it for himself. And anyone who thinks that some minimal knowledge and participation is enough is skipping the great banquet just to munch on a few appetizers available near the door. He will go away hungry.

Worship is what we were made for, brothers and sisters. When Christ tells the Samaritan Woman that the time is coming when all true worshipers would worship His Father in spirit and truth, He is referring not only to the geographic explosion of worship that is about to happen in His time—that the mystical sacrifice will not only be on the Samaritans’ mountain or in the Temple in Jerusalem, but in every place—but He is also telling us that a powerful, overwhelming, holistic, and world-transfiguring form of worship is about to be inaugurated, a form of worship that enfolds every part of what it means to be human—the mind, the body, the soul—everything!

How could anyone want to stand on the outside looking in? How could anyone be content with merely an occasional “observance” that doesn’t take up too much time so as to be inconvenient? How could anyone who truly experiences this think of it as “dead religion”? This is not meaningless ritual—this is the most meaningful action that can happen in human life. This is our encounter with the God before the ages. This is the awesome moment when we not only see God but touch Him and taste Him. This is worship in spirit and truth.

To our Lord Jesus Christ therefore be all glory, honor and worship, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen. Christ is risen!

The Springtime of Repentance

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Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt, April 21, 2013
Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick

A recording of this sermon is available via Ancient Faith Radio.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God. Amen.

Today we remember a woman who walked out into the desert and repented there for more than forty years. On this fifth Sunday of the Great Fast, the Church celebrates St. Mary of Egypt.

Born in the mid-4th century, Mary was a woman dedicated to pleasure. She is sometimes called a prostitute, but that term is not really accurate, because she would not take money in exchange for her wantonness. She was offered it many times, but she would usually refuse it, and sustained herself primarily by begging. And so she lived this way, constantly seeking out new men to engage in fornication. Being beautiful, she was desired by many, and so she lived an “active” lifestyle. She began this way of life when she was twelve years old, having run away from home to the city of Alexandria.

After seventeen years of what became a more and more tortured way of life, she decided to make a pilgrimage to the city of Jerusalem for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross in September. But she did not go to celebrate the feast. She was instead hoping to find crowds of pilgrims with whom she could satiate her lust, her constant, overwhelming desire. She paid for her travel by prostitution, and when she arrived in Jerusalem, she continued in her manner of life, having found new people to lead into her desperation for physical satisfaction.

She eventually was led to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which includes Golgotha, the place of the crucifixion, within its walls, the holiest place to celebrate the feast of Christ’s Cross. But as she began to enter the doors of that blessed church, she was suddenly stopped by an unseen force. The crowds around her entered, but it was almost as if a great hand was holding her back.

At that moment, something began which the world tells us is really not possible. At that moment, something began which for the world is not in any way desirable. Mary began to repent. And she walked beyond the Jordan River and kept repenting for more than forty years.

When we hear this word repentance, it is likely that we do not hear it as anything positive. It may stir up feelings about guilt. It may sound like judgmentalism or condemnation. It may conjure images in our brains of overbearing, bombastic preachers hurling down sermons on hellfire and brimstone like lightning bolts from angry gods. So why do we talk about repentance so often in the Orthodox Church?

Well, it should probably first be said that there are many so-called churches that have stopped talking about repentance or have tried to massage it out of their message because it is unappealing to their customers—or, I mean, their congregants. And certainly one does not hear about repentance in the public square much any more. It is long since any president declared a day of national fasting and prayer as Abraham Lincoln did in 1863. I daresay there are some things done by those in the public square that need some repentance.

I think there are probably two reasons why repentance is unfashionable. The first is that, as we said earlier, most people have a harsh and painful image of what it means to repent. It is demeaning. It is hard. It is annoying. The second reason is just that we like sin—another word that doesn’t get used too much in public any more.

But since we are Orthodox Christians, we recognize that we need to repent. And since the public proclamation of the Gospel has always begun with the exhortation “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand,” first in the mouth of John the Baptist and then from his cousin the Lord Jesus Christ, we should ask what repentance really is. And then we should ask why we should not flee from repentance but should actually want it. And this will tell us how someone like St. Mary of Egypt could keep repenting for so very long.

The word for “repentance” in Greek is metanoia, and it consists of two different Greek words—meta and nous, with the latter word being changed by the compound. Meta can mean many things, but here it means “change” or “turning.” And the nous is the innermost sense of human beings, the faculty with which we apprehend divine, mystical reality. It is the “heart” or the “eye of the soul.” So metanoia—repentance—is the turning of the eye of the soul, the changing of the heart. It is to direct our innermost gaze away from what is sinful, what separates us from God’s life, and toward what is good, what connects us with the life of our Maker.

That is the etymological and theological description of what repentance means. But for us to understand repentance, I think we may need some illustrative imagery. The place where Mary of Egypt went to engage in her repentance was the desert beyond the Jordan River. There it is said that she watered the place with her tears, the tears she shed over her many years of evil and self-destruction.

And that is what sin does. It is not just a transgression against some cosmic law. It is self-destruction and nothing less. Sometimes the destruction is sudden and devastating, but other times it is the slow dehydration that turns what is fertile into the barrenness of the desert. That is what happened to much of the Middle East, by the way—so much of it was fertile, but through gradual overuse and misuse of the land, it became desert. So it is with human persons. What is beautiful and fertile and full of possibility becomes, over time, bit by bit, dry and thirsty.

Yet repentance is possible. When a soul repents, the rain begins to fall. Sometimes the rain may bounce off the hard ground because it is so unused to receiving it, and so it may seem to do nothing or even to hurt. But over time, the rain begins to soak the land. And where there may at first be mud and erosion, there eventually comes to be fertility and growth.

Repentance is the springtime of the soul, and is it any wonder that we are now in this Lenten season of repentance, right now, at springtime? Even the very word Lent itself actually means “springtime.” We pour repentance into our souls by shedding those things that weigh us down, those useless burdens of sin that look and feel so good but actually are deeply dangerous to us. And when that repentance comes pouring in, all the many virtues of our souls, like flowers in a garden, begin to awaken, to bud and to bloom. They have been sleeping during the long winter of sin, but now they can grow.

To repent is not to feel guilty. Guilt may encourage us to repent, but it doesn’t always. Guilt is just the pain at recognizing the desert that our souls have become. But pain isn’t repentance. To repent is to turn, to change, to come back to life. We have to see that we have a desert in our souls, and sometimes it takes the upheaval of disaster, depression, divorce, drugs or death to see it. But it doesn’t have to take that. Seeing the desert within may also be inspired by contact with true beauty. Seeing the beauty of Eden, the beauty of Paradise, in the love of our Lord, we realize that we live in the desert. And we want Eden.

And so we repent. We turn back to Eden. We turn to the divine life of Christ, the life of the Holy Trinity granted in communion with the Son of God. This is what it means to repent! It means that we who are dead can be made alive, that we who are dry and thirsty may become fertile and full, that we who are addicted might be set free.

And that is how Mary of Egypt could live in that desert for decades. She was not out there moping around feeling guilty. She was watering her garden. She was tending to the flowers of virtue in her soul. She was walking with God in Eden, just as Adam and Eve had once done. She who had been a desert in the midst of fertility became a walking Paradise in the midst of the desert.

Has this Great Lent been the springtime of your soul? Even if it has not yet been, it still may be. There always is hope. There always is mercy. There always is possibility. Let us repent with joy, brothers and sisters, and so pour the grace of God like long-awaited rain into the desert of our souls.

To our life-giving God, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, be all glory, honor and worship, now and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.

St. Paul Antiochian Orthodox Church

Planting the Seeds of Orthodoxy,
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