St. John Cassian on Dejection and Godly Sorrow

…[W]e must struggle with the demon of dejection who casts the soul into despair. We must drive him from our heart. It was this demon that did not allow Cain to repent after he had killed his brother, or Judas after he had betrayed his Master. The only form of dejection we should cultivate is the sorrow which goes with repentance for sin and is accompanied by hope in God. It was of this form of dejection that the Apostle said: ‘Godly sorrow produces a saving repentance which is not to be repented of’ (2 Cor 7.10). This ‘godly sorrow’ nourishes the soul through the hope engendered by repentance, and it is mingled with joy. That is why it makes us obedient and eager for every good work: accessible, humble, gentle, forbearing and patient in enduring all the suffering or tribulation God may send us. Possession of these qualities shows that a man enjoys the fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, long-suffering, goodness, faith, self-control (Gal 5.22). But from the other kind of dejection we come to know the fruit of the evil spirit: listlessness, impatience, anger, hatred, contentiousness, despair and sluggishness in praying. So we should shun this second form of dejection as we would unchastity, avarice, anger and the rest of the passions. It can be healed by prayer, hope in God, meditation on Holy Scripture, and by living with godly people.

On the Eight Vices, in The Philokalia: The Complete Text, Vol. 1

Mid-Lent: The Cross

Still thinking of the cross, which we do not choose but are called to “take up”. Here is St. Ilyas the Presbyter:

Suffering deliberately embraced cannot free the soul totally from sin unless the soul is also tried in the fire of suffering that comes unchosen. For the soul is like a sword: if it does not go “through fire and water,” (Ps 66.12) that is, through suffering deliberately embraced and suffering that comes unchosen, it cannot but be shattered by the blows of fortune.

“Hail, O Life-giving Tree”

On the 3rd Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross, the cross is solemnly processed to the center of the church during the vigil service, and placed there for the entire week. We venerate it with bows, prostrations, and kisses after each service. Today, during the rite of veneration, as I watched people make prostrations and bow before the cross, I asked myself what it means to venerate the cross—to bow before it, to prostrate before it, to kiss it.

To venerate the cross, I think, is:
–to acknowledge that somehow, in this supreme instrument of torture and terror of Imperial Rome, lies the victory of God over the power of death, the devils and fallen men.
–to remember that Christ chose no other way to save the world except this one.
–to confess that every evil in the world, like the cross, can somehow be transformed into God’s victory.
–to refuse sin and death the last word in my life.
–to confess that, since this was the path my Master chose, I who claim to be his follower must also walk it. (How else am I supposed to walk behind him?)
–to ask Christ to know him in his crucifixion so that I can rise with him in his resurrection.
–to die to the opinions of men and like Paul to say, “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal 6.14).
–to renounce my hope for salvation in economics, politics, medicine.
–to ask for release from the lust for power.
–to believe in God’s unexpectedness.

 

Come, you faithful, let us bow down before the Life-giving Tree on which Christ, the King of glory, stretching out his hands of his own will, has raised us up to our former blessedness of which the enemy deprived us of old through pleasure, making us exiles far from God. Come, you faithful, let us bow down before the Tree, through which we have been granted to crush the heads of invisible enemies.

Come, you people, beholding the most glorious wonder, let us bow down before the power of the Cross: for a tree put forth the fruit of death in Paradise , but Life is the flower of this Tree, in which the sinless Lord was nailed. Receiving incorruption from it, all the nations cry: “You that through the Cross abolished death and set us free: glory to you.”

Hymns for the Veneration of the Cross

Why most Christians are wrong about heaven

I’ve often heard people say, “I’m going to heaven soon, and I won’t need this stupid body there, thank goodness.’ That’s a very damaging distortion, all the more so for being unintentional.

If people think “my physical body doesn’t matter very much,” then who cares what I do with it? And if people think that our world, our cosmos, doesn’t matter much, who cares what we do with that? Much of “traditional” Christianity gives the impression that God has these rather arbitrary rules about how you have to behave, and if you disobey them you go to hell, rather than to heaven. What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping him to renew his creation, and his resurrection was the opening bell. And when he returns to fulfil the plan, you won’t be going up there to him, he’ll be coming down here.

Anglican Bishop Tom Wright of Durham, England

Be sure to read the full text of Bishop Tom’s provocative interview with TIME magazine!

“This was divinely arranged”: St. Augustine on the Difficulty of Scripture

But hasty and careless readers are led astray by many and manifold obscurities and ambiguities, substituting one meaning for another; and in some places they cannot hit upon even a fair interpretation. Some of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in the thickest darkness. And I do not doubt that all this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect, which generally holds in small esteem what is discovered without difficulty.

On Christian Doctrine, II.6