Sometimes good things can be found on Facebook, like the quote below. (I added the icons and Psalm.) We are at the Sunday of the Last Judgment in the Orthodox calendar, and also in the midst of painful current events. We might acknowledge that the traumas and crises and pain are always with us, and being experienced by countless souls. So the exhortation applies at all times:
“It is often thought: what can we do? When the heart is torn with love for some and sympathy for others, what can we do if we are powerless, hopeless, and suppressed?
“We can stand before the Lord in prayer, in the prayer that Elder Silouan spoke about, that praying for the world is shedding blood.
“Not in that easy prayer that we offer out of our comfort, but in a prayer that rushes to heaven from sleepless nights; in a prayer that does not give rest; in a prayer that is born from the horror of compassion; in a prayer that no longer allows us to continue living our insignificant and empty life. That prayer requires us to finally understand that life is deep and that we are spending it racing about something unworthy and also unworthy of ourselves, unworthy of God, unworthy of sorrow and joy, the torment on the Cross and the Glory of Resurrection, which constantly alternate and intertwine on our earth.
“It is not enough to sympathize a little, and it is not enough to say that ‘we cannot do anything.’ If only we would stand in such a prayer, if only such compassion would exclude from our life everything insignificant in the face of the horror of our existence, then we would become people worthy of Christ. And then, perhaps, our prayer would also ascend like a burning and shining flame. Then, maybe, there would be no more inertia, indifference, or hatred that prospers around us because we do not become an obstacle to every evil in our own life.
“In the face of what is going on in front of the Cross, death, and spiritual agony of people, let us renounce the pettiness and insignificance of our life—and then we will be able to do something: by our prayer, by way of our life, and perhaps even by something braver and more creative.
“But let us remember that Christ did not differentiate between people; Christ died for all—because righteous are persecuted and because sinners perish. In His unity with all the people around us, in this dual unity with a righteous and a sinner, let us pray for the salvation of both. For the mercy of God, that the blind may see, and that truth may be established—not judgment, but the truth. This truth will lead us to love, to the triumph of unity, and the victory of God. Amen.”
-Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, excerpt from a 1968 sermon
P.S. 1968 Events:
-Soviet armed forces invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, reinstituting hardline Communist rule.
-The U.S. State Department announced the highest U.S. casualty toll of the Vietnam War, with 543 Americans killed in action and 2,547 wounded. U.S. ground troops killed more than 500 Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam.
-Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.
-Students protest all over the world.
-Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.
-Olympic protests.
Our soul shall wait for the Lord, for He is our helper and our defender.
For our heart shall be glad in Him, and in His holy Name have we hoped.
Let thy mercy, O Lord, be upon us, according as we have hoped in Thee.
-From Psalm 32
When in my last post I shared only two paragraphs from a whole book on prayer, and those two said nothing about prayer, I ought to have given some context! When questions came in, I thought I would open my copy of Beginning to Pray and see what Metropolitan Anthony had said just before or after those puzzling words. But it must be one of those books I have given away; I will have to buy another. But in the meantime, I want to try to make up for a presentation that was confusing by being too truncated.
kingdom of God.‘ So it is inward that we must turn, and not outward – but inward in a very special way. I’m not saying that we must become introspective. I don’t mean that we must go inward in the way one does in psychoanalysis or psychology. It is not a journey into my own inwardness, it is a journey through my own self, in order to emerge from the deepest level of self into the place where He is, the point at which God and I meet.”
perfectly true. You are still not capable of bearing God’s company all the time. Well, say so. God knows that perfectly well, whatever you do about it. Go apart, say for a moment ‘I’ll just have a rest. For a moment I accept to be less saintly.’”
Gladsome Lights 