Healing down through the layers.

quotes,

“People today are complicated, multi-faceted, confused, and in one wayMaximos fresco SS or another, their souls are layered: layer upon layer of blindness, layer upon layer of callousness, layer upon layer of pride. For this reason they are never healed once and for all.

“As soon as you take a humble attitude, though, Grace intervenes and works a miracle: you are freed. But the work does not end here. This Grace, this light, this healing that comes, proceeds also to the next layer further down. And here the sin is more unyielding, is more strongly rooted, the resistance is uncompromising.

“If you say, ‘May it be blessed, My God. I will look even deeper and I will acknowledge my stubbornness and my sin, and will humble myself,’ then another miracle takes place. And in some incomprehensible way, the second and the third, the fourth and the fifth layers of the soul are put right. But some people will not accept this. They remain at the superficial layers, and spend their life like this and are never healed.”

— Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos, author of Do you Know Yourself?

Anything less is a bondage.

church, quotes, reality, , ,

Fr. Stephen asks rhetorically, “Can You Forgive Someone Else’s Enemies?” with a look at the words and actions of Jesus in the Gospels, and reflecting on the story of The Brothers Karamazov. He writes:

Forgiving is “loosing.” Refusing to forgive is “binding.” The imagery of loosing and binding helps move the imagination away from a legal construction. When we sin, or even when we are involved in sin, we become bound. There is a binding that occurs because we ourselves were the cause of the sin. There is a binding that occurs because we ourselves were the victim of a sin. Thchrist forgiving resurrection 2ere is a binding that occurs because we simply witness the sin. There is even a form of binding that occurs to the whole of humanity because of the diminishment of even one of its members. If everyone were somehow only responsible for their own actions the world would be quite different. As it is, the action of one involves the binding of all. Adam’s sin has left us bound ever since. We are not being held legally responsible for Adam’s action. We are existentially and ontologically bound by Adam’s sin.

These truths are hard to grasp, even for the intellect, and Fr. Stephen helps me quite a bit at that level. But to live in the reality of our freedom, to acquire and absorb and give this kind of liberating love — it’s something impossible, were it not for the fact and the power of the Resurrection. Lent is a good time to pray about this, yes?

I’m looking forward to seeing all of my children at once this weekend, and the thought of them and their tender, breakable and forgiving hearts gives me great comfort; they are a testimony to the kindness of God. And His kindness certainly pertains to the article I was referencing, the whole of which you can read here.

lilies

my garden,

P1120610When I was young, the only lilies I knew were the ones our Sunday school teacher Mrs. Montgomery would bring into the church at Easter. I thought they must be what people meant when they talked about “Easter Lilies.” Eventually I learned that they were not.

True Easter Lilies still are not very familiar to me, or even appealing. It’s calla lilies that I have known and loved all these years, and that reward me year after year as a gardener, too, for very little investment. I always feel privileged to gather a few elegant blooms into a vase to display in the house. Sometimes they are blooming at such a time that we parishioners can fill the church with them for Palm Sunday, but more often than not, the show is over by then. I might call them my Lenten Lilies.P1120617lilies crp

Lift High the Cross

church, feasts, music,

This morning I wasn’t able to attend Liturgy, but as it was the Sunday of the Veneration of the Holy Cross, I was singing the Troparion hymn of the feast to myself as I went about opening the blinds and other movements of greeting the day. (“Oh, God, save Thy people, and bless thine inheritance….”) Gradually, without my fully noticing for a while, the melody of my humming changed to this hymn, which our family learned relatively recently and which has become a favorite of mine. I suppose it’s slightly more appropriate for another Sunday focusing on the Cross, that one in September when we consider The Elevation of the Life-Giving Cross. But it came to me today, so here it is, for your uplifting, too.

Lift High the Cross