Category Archives: quotes

It was legislated in Paradise.

Lent, quotes, ,

“Do you think that I posit the antiquity of fasting on the basis of the law? Indeed, fasting is older than the law. …Fasting is as old as humanity: it was legislated in paradise. It was the first command that Adam received: You shall not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You shall not eat legislates fasting and self-control. …It is because we did not fast that we were banished from paradise. So let us fast that we may return to it.”

-St. Basil the Great, “First Homily on Fasting,” On Feasting and Fasting.

Prisoners in a thousand ways.

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Metropolitan Anthony Bloom:

I remember something my grandmother told me when I was a child. She was talking to me about the Greek war of independence against Turkey…and she told the case of a soldier who, after the battle, in the dark night, called his lieutenant and cried: ‘Lieutenant, Lieutenant, I have taken a prisoner!’ — ‘Bring him here,’ answered the lieutenant.– ‘I can’t, he is holding me so tight,’ replied the soldier.

This seems absurd…and yet I have the impression that very often it is the situation in which we find ourselves with respect to the world when we who are prisoners of this world in a thousand ways — not so much outwardly as inwardly — think that we can transform it….

From God and Man

Death is a change, but not an end.

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AT UNIVERSITY

Puritans reckoned the cadavers
in Anatomy were drunks off the street;
idealists said they were benefactors
who had willed their bodies to science,
but the averted manila-colored
people on the tables had pinned-back
graves excavated in them
around which they lay scattered in the end
as if exhumed from themselves.

-Les Murray

This month marks ten years since my husband’s departing from his earthly life, which leads me to meditate again on this topic. And today is one of the Memorial Saturdays we Orthodox have during Lent:

“Saturday is the day which the Church has set aside for the commemoration of faithful Orthodox Christians departed this life in the hope of resurrection to eternal life. Since the Divine Liturgy cannot be served on weekdays during Great Lent, the second, third, and fourth Saturdays of the Fast are appointed as Soul Saturdays when the departed are remembered at Liturgy.” (OCA)

Les Murray’s poem recognizes something about human beings that our modern consciousness rarely grasps: the unity that exists between soul and body, and the brutality of violating the physical aspect of a fellow human.

Father John Whiteford writes that sometimes,

“…you will hear people say that the deceased is not in the coffin but with Christ, for example. However, if a person dies in Christ, their souls will be with Christ, but until the general resurrection, their body remains a part of them that will one day be reunited with their souls (though their body will be transformed) — and as such, the soul apart from the body is not the whole person (2 Corinthians 5:1-5). 

If you are interested to know more about the Orthodox perspective on end-of-life issues, you might check out the Ancient Faith podcast “A Christian Ending” from Deacon Mark Barna, who has also co-authored a book by that title. Episodes of the podcast include: “Understanding Death,” “Cremation,” and “Preparing the Body for Burial,” and about a dozen more.

My late husband’s casket in our house.

In the wholeness of Orthodox vision and practice, “…death is a change, but not an end. That which we see, the body, remains important and worthy of honor. A funeral, the service of remembrance, is a sacramental gathering in the presence of God. The body is honored, even venerated. The life of remembrance, eternal remembrance, begins.”

-Father Stephen Freeman, “A Secular Death”

What springs from unity.

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St. Gregory Nazianzus (or Nazianzen), also known as St. Gregory the Theologian, is one of the Three Holy Hierarchs of the Orthodox Church, along with St. Basil the Great and St. John Chrysostom; and one of The Cappadocian Fathers, along with St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Basil the Great (of Caesarea). He has been called The Trinitarian Theologian, and you can read a snippet of such theology below. I was intrigued by his also being called The Minstrel of the Holy Trinity, evidently because of his poetic style, and spiritual poetry. I will be looking more into that.

“The opinions about deity that hold pride of place are in number: atheism, polytheism and monotheism. With the first two the children of Greece amused themselves. Let the game go on! Atheism with its lack of a governing principle involves disorder. Polytheism with a plurality of such principles, involves faction and hence the absence of a governing principle, and this involves disorder again. Both lead to an identical result — lack of order, which, in turn, leads to disintegration.

“Monotheism, with its single governing principle, is what we value — not monotheism defined as the sovereignty of a single person (after all, self-discordant unity can become a plurality) but the single rule produced by equality of nature, harmony of will, identity of action and the convergence towards their source of what springs from unity — none of which is possible in the case of created nature.

“The result is that though there is numerical distinction, there is no division, there is no division of the substance. For this reason, a one eternally changes into a two and stops at three — meaning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. In a serene, non-temporal, incorporeal way the Father is parent of the ‘offspring’.”

―St. Gregory of Nazianzus, d. 390, The Five Theological Orations

I’ve been plugging away at reading The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, in which Vladimir Lossky gives a history of Christian understanding of God as He has revealed Himself, in which story St. Gregory’s doctrine plays a major role. It’s a stretch for my untrained mind to follow the thoughts of these venerable fathers of antiquity, who who were not only extraordinary scholars, but holy men: St. Gregory often emphasizes that even to begin to think well about God it is most necessary to have a repentant heart. So I will close with his exhortation to those who might think more highly of their theologizing than they ought (from Oration 20), which I find heartening right now:

“If you trust me, then — and I am no rash theologian! — grasp what you can, and pray to grasp the rest. Love what already abides within you, and let the rest await you in the treasury above. Approach it by the way you live: what is pure can only be acquired through purification… Keep the commandments, make your way forward through observing the precepts: for the practical life is the launching-pad for contemplation. Start with the body, but find joy in working for your soul.

“… the most perfect of all things that exist is the knowledge of God. Let us, then, hold on to what we have and acquire what we can, as long as we live on earth; and let us store our treasure there in heaven, so that we may possess this reward of our labor: the full illumination of the holy Trinity—what it is, its qualities and its greatness, if I may put it this way—shining in Christ himself, our Lord, to whom be glory and power for the ages of ages. Amen.”