Undusted Texts

  "How good it is to live with You!  If only the world knew!"--St. Raphael Arnáiz, 4/14/1938 The last entry from St. Rafael Arnáiz's journal ( Dios y mi alma / God and my soul ): "Sunday of the Resurrection, 17th of April, 1938. Today the reverend Father Abbot has given me the cowl and the black scapular.  I would lie if I said that today I have not let myself wear it from vanity.  What a poor man am I! Lord, Lord, have pity and mercy on me.  I am not greater or lesser in your presence, because I would be here or there, seen in one way or another...We men are very infantile and we play like children...We place our illusion in things [that] make the angels laugh.  Lord, give me your holy fear, fill my heart with your love and the rest... Vanitas vanitatum [Vanity of vanities]. Each time I hope less in men...what great mercy of God!  He supplies with growth what they do not give me. I am seeing with greater clarity that whoever place...

"I am the Vine and you are the branches..." All who have been baptized into Christ have been clothed with Christ, and not only clothed: indeed, they have become members of Christ, members of His Body, the Church.  "One cannot have God for his Father without having the Church for his Mother" (St. Cyprian).  "Wherever two or more of you are gathered, there am I in the midst of them."  So we proclaim when we venerate the Cross at the end of Liturgy: "Christ is among us."  "He is and will be."  So He is in the midst of the Church, and so He is in the midst of two or more of the baptized who call upon His name; then we could say that each group of two or more, each Christian community, are a form of mini-Church, a micro-ecclesia, which is united to the remainder of the Church. The union among those in the Church and in the Christian community is the bond of Christ.  It is a true, existing, real union.  "Christian community i...

Icon by the hand of Antonios Fikos "And in his sowing, some fell along the road: and the birds came and ate it...[To] all hearing the word of the kingdom and not understanding, the wicked one comes, and snatches what was sown in his heart: this is the one sowed along the road."--Mt 13:4,19 The sowing of the seed in our hearts is not of our doing: what we have control over is what soil we have prepared.  The sower sows freely, and without His sowing our preparation of the soil is ineffective: "How can one believe without hearing?  And how can one hear without a preacher?"  Therefore we must prepare the soil of our hearts well, not letting it become like a road.  Hear what St. Cyril of Alexandria says: "A wayside is almost always hard and unbroken, because it is trodden down by the feet of all those who pass that way, and seed is never sown there.  No sacred or divine word, therefore, will be able to enter those who have minds that are hard and unyield...

  A mosaic of a Seraph in the Hagia Sophia, Constantinople "Lord, God of the Powers, blessed is the man who hopes upon You."--Ps 83:13 "Holy, Holy, Holy are You, Lord Sabaoth": so we acclaim the Lord during the Triumphant Hymn, the Hymn of the Bodiless Hosts.  But what does that word "Sabaoth" mean?  It means that the Lord is powerful, He is great, and He is worthy to praised by all of creation, not just men. The first section of the Triumphant Hymn itself was revealed to Isaiah the prophet: "I saw the Lord seated on a high and uplifted throne, and full was the house of His glory.  And Seraphim stood surrounding Him...and they cried out another to another and said: 'Holy, Holy, Holy is Lord Sabaoth, full is all the earth of His glory.'"  These are the words as found in the Greek, and yet even the great seventy translators could find no way to express parts of this vision in the Greek tongue: they had to leave the words in the...

  "Lord, teach me to be generous. Teach me to serve you as you deserve, To give and not to count the cost, To fight and not to heed the wounds, To toil and not to seek for rest, To labor and not to ask for reward, Save that of knowing that I am doing Your Will." --St. Ignatius of Loyola, "Prayer for Generosity" During the course of my schooling at a Jesuit school, I became well acquainted with the above prayer by St. Ignatius.  It is a prayer to dedicated to the Lord despite all the difficulties that come our way during this lifetime on earth.  "In the world you will have trouble," informed the Lord, and this is very true.  Christians will always experience friction with the aspects of the world that have not been fully enlightened by the light of Christ.  This is the basic theme of most of the prayer: Lord, teach me to serve You despite the difficulties the world will place on me.  One line has intrigued me, though: "To labor and...

"By faith Rahab the harlot did not perish with the disobedient, receiving the spies with peace."--Heb 11:31 "And in the same way was Rahab the harlot not by works justified, receiving the angels, and by a different way sending them out?"--Jas 2:25 Of the many men and women whose lives we read of in the Old Testament, we account many as models of righteous and early types of Christians.  The Letter to the Hebrews has a long list of them: "By faith a better sacrifice Abel rather than Cain brought to God...," and so it continues through so many figures.  It is easy to see the faith of Abel and Enoch, of Noah and Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob, of Moses and Joshua, of the Judges, of David and Samuel, and so many others.  Yet many, I think, miss the harlot listed among the righteous: Rahab of Jericho. Though we may miss her, the early Church did not.  The author of the Letter to the Hebrews included her among the faithful, and St. James praised her f...

Christ the Vine, showing the Apostles who were first appointed as guardians of the Church "Obedience is always freer and more faithful when it proceeds from love rather than from fear." The Lord did not leave each man to his own will and thoughts: He did not leave us orphans.  In addition to the Spirit that He grants to all, He also gave us the elders of the Church to lead us.  The pope, patriarchs, bishops, and priests are given the task of guiding the Lord's flock, and they will have to render an account for their guidance at the Judgment.  This burden of responsibility is heavy upon them, and heavy too can be our obedience to them, for their directives may not be according to our opinions.  Yet, "that obedience is salvific which is hard: and that which you like and is easy is of little value" (Elder Michael of Valaam). What the elders the Lord has placed over us proclaim, we are to follow, unless it be truly heresy.  This does not mean that the ...

"We worthily exalt the all-praiseworthy Peter and Paul, the defender of the rock of the Church, and the net of the world."--Sessional Hymn I, Matins of the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul Glory to Jesus Christ!  The fast has ended, and the feast begun: we now celebrate the all-glorious Prime Apostles, Peter and Paul.  We can see this feast as the final feast in continuation of Pentecost, which in turn continues Pascha, and thus the Great Fast, and thus Theophany, and thus even Nativity.  For we can see a progression in time in many of our great feasts, beginning with the Nativity.  We celebrate Christ's birth, and then His Baptism and the manifestation of the Trinity to the world, the great Theophany.  Not long thereafter, we walk the way of the Cross during the Fast, remembering in part Christ's temptation in the desert falling His Baptism, and in part those days when He approached His death.  At the end of the Fast, we remember His glorious entranc...

St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite "For not for us is the battle against blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the worldrulers of the darkness of this age, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places."--Eph 6:12 There has always been need for the faithful to do battle.  I do not mean physical battle, which God only commanded for a time, but spiritual battle.  Even in the Garden, Adam was called to fight against the serpent and failed, as one tradition views it.  So Satan and his demons have since then been lurking on the earth, "prowling like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour."  Yet God has not abandoned us to the maw of the dragon: He gives us the grace to defeat the wicked one.  Christ trampled death by death, and He also trampled Satan and his power.  He Who cast out demons while on earth continues to cast them out when we call upon Him.  In the spiritual life, then, we are alwa...

Moses Elects the Council of Seventy Elders (1737) by Jacob de Wit (1695-1754) "And spoke the Lord to Moses: 'Gather to me seventy men from the presbyters of Israel, whom you know, that they are presbyters of the people and scribes of them.'"--Num 11:16 Those God chooses to lead His people are never alone in their task.  The Lord does not wish it to be so.  Instead, the Lord calls others to support them in their ministry.  Take the example of Moses.  Not only did he have his brother Aaron at his right hand, but he had elders, presbyters (as the Greek has it), who assisted him.  At the exhortation of his father-in-law, Jethro, he called righteous men from the tribes of Israel to be rulers over the people and to assist him in judging.  These were not his only assistance, though, for the Lord ordered Moses to bring seventy presbyters of Israel to be before Him on the holy mountain.  These are the ones who "were seen in the place of God and ate ...

    The Root of Jesse, or, Christ's Family Tree "For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God."--Rom 8:14 The Holy Spirit that indwells in us is the Spirit of sonship by which God adopts us, by which He makes us members of His family.  If we are all sons of God, then we are all brothers and sisters of each other.  Whether we are Jew or Gentile by blood, by grace we have all become the brethren of the Jews.  For those not of direct bloodline to the Jews are a wild olive tree, and yet they have been grafted on to the cultivated olive tree, the tree of the Israelites.  So all who receive the Spirit are joined to the olive tree the Lord has cultivated since the Garden: all become of one family. = If we are all of the same family, then our family history is shared as well.  The Scriptures are a family history, a history of the family chosen and cultivated by God.  The history of the Old Testament is the history of the Jews by ra...

  Holy Prophet Aaron the High Priest "Then the Lord said to Aaron, 'And behold, I have given you whatever is kept of the offerings made to me, all the consecrated things of the people of Israel; I have given them to you as a portion, and to your sons as a perpetual due."--Num 18:8 Out of the twelve tribes of the Israel, the descendants of the sons of Jacob, the Lord chose one to be His own.  For He said, "The Levites shall be mine: I am the Lord" (Num 3:44).  Levi was not among the msot beloved sons of Israel, for of him and his brother Simeon his father said, "Weapons of violence are their swords.  O my soul, come not into their council; O my spirit, be not joined to their company; for in their anger they slay men...I will divide them in Jacob and scatter them in Israel" (Gen 49:5-7).  Yet despite the violent nature of Levi, his descendants were not always so.  While Moses may have been a man of anger at times, Aaron was the servant of God ...

  "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths."--Prov 3:5-6 Sadly, men are not omniscient as God is.  He is the only One Who not only knows the past perfectly, the present in its fullness, and the future in all of its unexpected turns.  Our history is quite partial, our knowledge of now is incredibly limited, and our predictions from the future are sometimes little more than a shot in the dark.  We can never know what will happen even today, a lesson that I experienced firsthand with one of my family members this past fall.  On Monday she was fine, in Tuesday she was hospitalized, and by Friday she had fallen asleep.  I cannot know when I will cease drawing breath: these could be my final words.  Of course, we can make "educated guesses," using what knowledge we have to make reasonable predictions.  Thus, my health is good right now, so...

  Metropolitan Tryphon (1861-1934) "Oh, how many ideas and works had perished in that building--a whole lost culture?  Oh, soot, soot, from the Lubyanka chimneys!"--Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn In one of his most famous works, The Gulag Archipelago , the Russian author and Nobel Laureate in Literature Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn laments all the great works of human thought and culture that were destroyed by Soviet authorities.  The interrogators would burn many of the papers they found on the persons of their prisoners.   That was the fate of the Solzhenitsyn's own War Diary .  He mentions other such destructions: one man had formulated an alphabet and vocabulary for the Yeniseian languages, and with his work's annihilation came the removal of an entire nationality's written language for decades.  Another man was a great engineer, and his papers were taken from his wife and eradicated as well.  Solzhenitsyn's lament over the destruction of so much cultu...