Food for thought...

Beguiling and deceptive is the life of the world, fruitless its labor, perilous its delight, poor its riches, delusive its honors, inconstant, insignificant; and woe to those who hope in its seeming goods: because of this many die without repentance. Blessed and most blessed are those who depart from the world and its desires.

Elder Nazarius

Forgive your humble rambling servant, but I thought that particularly the people of the US who are suffering the approach of TAX DAY (EEK!) might find solace and some measure of comfort in the Blessed Elder's words.

I was party to a spontaneous joke a long time ago. It said: "Money can't buy you happiness, my son; (pause for effect) but you can rent it!" Of course the truth is money can't buy, rent, borrow, or give happiness to anyone. Happiness, the fleeting outward emoting of approval, always eventually dissipates either into numbness or melancholy. This is because what most people consider to be happiness is not so; it is the expending of a pleasurable emotion.

True Happiness is the physical incarnation of spiritual Joy that is only experienced by a person who has humbly submitted the entirety of his/her life to the Most Holy Trinity. In such a person there is strength and peace, joy and hope, all springing from the fountain of Faith. Accepting God's generous invitation to Holy Love and Divine Light can result in a lifetime of experiencing the vicissitudes of this life with equanimity because the challenges and disappointments of life are not able to defeat the Spirit within us. Instead of depending on the passing things of life, we cherish and are embraced by Life Himself.

It is thus that even when we read a Church Father, or prayer, or listen to a Troparion or Canon that emphasizes our sinfulness and unworthiness, our desperate need for repentance and the cliff's edge of damnation at which we all stumble, we rather can discover joy than sink into despair. Joy, because we correctly understand these spiritual words as carried on in the context of a Divine Dialogue of Eternal Love.

The level of our "fear of the Lord" is precisely related to our realization that I really don't deserve the Grace and Mercy our Lord lavishes on me. This produces ever more prayerful moments of praise, repentance, adoration and thanksgiving. The tears of repentance are tears of joy, the tears of a parent who thought his/her child were dead and suddenly finds it alive. These are the tears of a child who knowing his culpability, recognizing his responsibility, and expecting the punishment that is meet, discovers that his turn of heart has produced forgiveness and with it brought thankfulness.

This is why the great Fathers of the Church always speak of contrition accompanied by tears. It is not the emotional collapse of the defeated; it is the spiritual triumph of the humbled repentant prodigal accepted back by the Loving Father.

Thanks be to God for the undeserved Gift of His Salvation so freely offered to us. May we all repent so completely that our eyes stream with tears of thankfulness. As we find ourselves healed of sin let us rejoice in the ability granted us to grow in His Divine Image and Likeness.

Let that be our goal, yours and mine, and the toils and trials of this life will account nothing in comparison to the security of Love we will possess in Christ.

May it be God's will that I achieve that ascetic goal and so keep clean my baptismal garment. Pray for me. I am praying for each of you my appreciated, dear and beloved readers.

Thanks be to God!

Sacrifices, Priorities and What the New Year Offers

Today is the first Sunday of the new Liturgical (Church) year. As we noted last week, the Church year begins on September first. With September the first two of a series of Holy Feasts begins to unfold. The first of these is the Nativity of the Theotokos (The “Birthgiver of God”) the Virgin Mary. The spiritual significance of this feast becomes apparent as the year progresses and we come to realize the great role the Virgin makes in our salvation. Next week we will celebrate the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, the anniversary of St Helena, the mother of St Constantine, finding the True Cross in the fourth century.

Together, these Feasts (two of the Twelve Great Feasts that along with Pascha are our holiest annual celebrations) remind us that our Faith is not tied to fables of a never-never-land. The Truths of Christianity are solidly grounded in the rock surface of real history. The Holy Trinity does not inhabit a make believe era cut off from reality, He reveals Himself in the sweat and blood of human life.

This should immediately alert us to the fact that Christ can be active in our lives today. I say can be because we actually have a say so in our own salvation. Because God is Love, it is against His Nature (so to speak) that He would impose Himself on us. To be real, love must be freely given and freely received. Therefore, God offers us His saving Love, but it is up to us whether we will accept it or not. And just as we must prioritize our lives for any earthly thing we truly want, we must also make choices and decisions about how to live if we are to accept God’s love and the salvation that comes with it.

We all know that certain earthly goals require us to spend time, money and sweat if we are to achieve them. “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and it took effort and determination to put the first stone on top of another to get things started. Growing in the image and likeness of God requires no less of us. Keeping the fasts and taking the time for Holy Day celebrations; giving to the Church of our time, our talents and earthly resources are but minor sacrifices in comparison to the spiritual rewards we can achieve in Christ, both here now and tomorrow.

Our Lord sacrificed Himself on the Cross for us, and is it not a little thing for us to make the small sacrifices of effort, prayerful focus, offering of our time, or giving a few dollars for Him? And the best part? The abundant life our Lord wishes to give us now in this world is but a foretaste of the fullness of eternal life He is offering on the Day of Resurrection in exchange for our commitment to Him today!

Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through Faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on Faith; that I may know Him and the power of his Resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like Him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Brethren, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. (Phil. 3.8-14)

Thanks be to God!

A Daughter's Perspective - Life Update

This morning, my daughter emailed me the text of an essay she had written as a class assignment. She didn't mention the specific instructions for the essay, but I concluded it must have focused on struggles in the student's life in some way.

I like to believe that I've always had a close and open relationship with my child. To say that I consider her very intelligent and insightful is not just a parental boast, I've consider the issue very objectively over the years (that is, with as much objectivity as a parent is capable of incorporating into such deliberations). Yet, I have been truly moved by her essay. She presents a side of herself that I honestly did not think she was mature enough to have, much less embrace.

While I would candidly offer that she could give a second draft of the essay expanding on a couple of things that I know she is hinting at but not clearly stating, I am honestly astounded at her reflection. I present it below with one spelling error corrected and the poetry at the end formated in verse form (she had formatted it as prose at the end of a paragraph -- I can't help myself, old teaching habits!) .

To anyone suffering grief, I hope it proves as inspiring as I have found it to be.

English 4
19 August 2009

In My Life, I’ve Loved Them All

“In my life, I’ve loved them all,” were a few words from the Beatles’ song “In My Life”. In my life, there have been many hardships that I’ve gone through. People very close to me have died of diseases which had no cures. These two people and events have helped me become the person I am today: my grandfather and Alzheimer’s disease, and my mother and Brain Cancer.

My grandfather had Alzheimer’s disease which he lived with for a few years. During the summer, I would help my grandmother by staying home and keeping my grandpa calm and making him lunch or taking my grandma to the store. There were times when my grandfather would get into extremely bad moods and he would get violent. He would curse at some of the people in the house and he almost hit my mom. Luckily, she was able to calm him down and he would be quiet for a time and fall asleep. Honestly, it drove me crazy, but in the end it taught me to be patient with people because sometimes they don’t know what they are doing. It also taught me self-control. Every now and then, he would shout at me for not letting him outside because my parents told me not to let him. I had to control myself not to shout back, but to ask him calmly to go back into the living room and sit down. He died in 2007.

The second hardship I’ve had to overcome was when my mother was diagnosed with Brain Cancer in 2008. When my father told me, I was in tears. When I looked over at her I saw that she had an optimistic look on her face. It shocked me. How could she be so happy when she had a level four brain tumor? It baffled me, but a little while later, I realized that she was scared but she was just happy to be alive at that moment. At first, she seemed to act normally. Well, at least after the emergency surgery she had only a day or so after discovering the disease. My mother would walk and talk like she always did. But then her one tumor turned into four, then 5 or 6. She had another surgery, and then was taken home for her final days. During this time, I learned that life is the shortest thing we have. A person has to learn that life is so important that it should not be wasted. She lived with the disease for eight months, only eight short months. I learned how hard it is to take care of another person, because that is what I had to do for a while. I do not know how people with seven children do it. My mother taught me, through her disease, to look for the goodness in other people and to look at the silver lining instead of the dark cloud.

I have learned a lot through these hardships. By looking for the good things in life, my attitude has gone from unhappiness to joy. I love going to school now because of all of the new possible events that can make my day and life better. I used to try to make someone happy every now and again, but now I try to make my friends laugh more and I try to teach them that life can be very rewarding when looked at in an optimistic point of view. My grandfather and my mother were good people with good morals. They taught me how to behave, right from wrong and so many other lessons in life.

A quote once again from the Beatles’ song “In My Life”:

“And these memories lose their meaning,
when I think of love as something new,
though I know I’ll never lose affection,
for people and things that went before,
I know I’ll often stop and think about them,
in my life I love you more.”