Category Archives: world events

In the face of what is going on…

prayer, Psalms, quotes, world events, , ,
Kiev Caves icon from 11th century.

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

 

Spinning out of control.

quotes, saints, world events,

“In all nations, storms are gathering; minds are confused. May God save this poor world of ours that is blowing steam like a pressure cooker! Look at those in power! The schemes they come up with! They throw it all into a pressure cooker and leave it, boiling and boiling; the cooker is whistling now! The steam valve is ready to explode!”

“We have not yet realised that the devil has set out to destroy God’s creation and all His creatures. He has put together an alliance to destroy the world… He has become even more vicious now because he knows that he has but a short time. (cf. Revelation 12:12.) He resembles a criminal, who, when surrounded, thinks to himself, ‘There is no way out; they will get me,’ and he starts destroying everything around him. Or, he is like soldiers at war who, having run out of ammunition, draw their bayonets or swords and start slashing away at everything because they have nothing to lose. They say, ‘We are going to die anyway; let’s get as many of the enemy as we can.'”

“Wherever one turns, one thing is clear: things are falling apart! It’s not, for example, that we have a house, and we need to fix a window or something else. No, here it is an entire house that is in shambles — worse yet, the entire village. Things are spinning out of control. Only God can step in and stop it…. The world has an inflamed wound, full of pus, that needs to be opened and treated. But it’s too soon to open it now; evil must first run its course as it did back in Jericho (cf. Joshua 6.), a long time ago.”

-St. Paisios of Mt. Athos, 1924-1994
From With Pain and love for Contemporary Man

The wave is breaking in a deep sea.

quotes, world events, writing, , , , , ,

The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.
-Vladimir Nabokov

On Sunday I taught my first Zoom church school class, on St. Thomas. That was after tuning in, and trying to tune my spirit, to the streamed Divine Liturgy in the morning. In the later afternoon about twenty of us women met on Zoom to chat for an hour and to chose the next book for those of us who read together. Before sundown, I picked peas.

All day my mind was trying to pull me away from that present moment’s demands, but not totally — because it seemed to be doing that which is its natural skill, to weave the latest input from that very moment into the grid of experience and memory. I do not at all like the idea of my mind being like a computer, but the concept of fragmented files occurs to me…

Keeping the contents in a cohesive, organized fashion is a challenging project at my age, when the “files” have mushroomed, and my “processor” is trying to save a hundred bits of data every day to the most logical place. I have an astounding human mind, which sees way more connections between all those thoughts and images and stories than a simple machine could ever do. It is constantly clumping and re-clumping and arranging things, all the while thinking in sentences about its strategies.

This afternoon my godmother came through the gate to my garden, and we visited across the patio for an hour. I shared a smidgen of the last few days, and how it seemed that about five blog posts were churning in a mass in my head, trying to sort themselves out.

Since she went home, I’ve been halfheartedly applying myself to the task, but there is so much I want to write. It seems hard now, during this world pandemic, to sift through all the noise, or turn one’s back on it, in order to hear communications from reliable and helpful sources. And the Source.

In my attempts today, I came upon the idea of making use of my large store of quotes, many of which are thought provoking on many levels and might come to my aid in keeping at my blog and my writing. Even if some days I can’t write one good and pertinent sentence, I might post a quote that helps at least me, and you can make of it what you will.

It may be that my own mind is like an ocean that is too turbulent for me to see anything clearly in the water, but that’s not why I chose the quote above. It brought to mind all the many statistics and news stories, sermons and anecdotes and directives flowing all around us, by which some people I know are trying to figure out, not just how to behave today, but what is The Meaning of it all.