Month: September 2017

September 5

Nothing so much as love brings together those who have been sundered and produces in them an effective union of will and purpose. Love is distinguished by the beauty of recognizing the equal value of all men. Love is born in a man when his soul’s powers–that is, his intelligence, incensive power and desire–are concentrated and unified around the divine. Those who by grace have come to recognize the equal value of all men in God’s sight and who engrave His beauty on their memory, possess an ineradicable longing for divine love, for such love is always imprinting this beauty on their intellect.

~St Maximos the Confessor

The Shepherd of Swallows

They swirl and they spin,

darting this way and that.

They are hard to follow—

and hard to catch.

 

Like swallows, they

are lively and ever-moving,

and rarely seem to sleep;

and even in our sleep,

they keep moving.

 

Our thoughts—

are never still;

our minds

in motion—

perpetual.

 

We need a shepherd,

and a guide.

 

With words like trained falcons,

the prayers of the church disrupt

our swallow’s erratic motions—

and flying in formation,

they bring our thoughts

into line.

 

How do you catch a swallow

and put it in a cage?

 

Very difficult…

 

But fly alongside—

as they swirl,

be their guide.

 

With prayers,

they will follow

by your side—

 

and find safe

landing.

 

~FS

September 4

The Lord hews out cisterns in the desert, that is to say, in the world and in human nature. He excavates the hearts of those who are worthy, clears them of their material sordidness and arrogance, and makes them deep and wide in order to receive the divine rains of wisdom and knowledge. He does this so that they may water Christ’s flocks, those who need moral instruction because of the immaturity of their souls.

~St Maximos the Confessor

September 3

Everyone, then, who through self-restraint does away with sensual pleasure, which is intricate, convoluted and intertwined in many ways with every sensible object, makes the crooked straight. And he who with patience withstands and defeats the harsh implacable bouts of suffering turns the rough places into smooth ways. Thus, when a person has well and truly struggled, has defeated sensual pleasure with desire for virtue, has overcome pain with love for spiritual knowledge, and through both virtue and knowledge has bravely persevered to the end of the divine contest, he will see, according to Scripture, ‘the salvation of God’: and this will be his reward for virtue and for the efforts he has made to attain it (Isaiah 40:4-5).

~St Maximos the Confessor

September 1

When through self-control you have straightened the crooked paths of the passions in which you deliberately indulged–that is to say, the impulses of sensual pleasure–and when, by enduring patiently the harsh and painful afflictions produced by trials and temptations suffered against your will, you have made the rough ways smooth and even, then you may expect to see God’s salvation, for you will have become pure in heart. In this state of purity, through the virtues and through holy contemplation, you will at the end of your contest behold God, in accordance with Christ’s words: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God’ (Matthew 5:8). And because of the sufferings you have endured for the sake of virtue you will receive the gift of dispassion. To those who possess this gift there is nothing which reveals God more fully.

~St Maximos the Confessor

August 31

So long as you do not pursue virtue or study Holy Scripture for the sake of glory, or as a cloak for greed (1 Thessalonians 2:5), or from love of flattery and popularity, or for self-display, but do and say and think for the sake of God, then you are walking with spiritual knowledge in the way of truth. If, however, you have in some respects ‘prepared the way for the Lord’, yet have not ‘made His paths straight’, He will not come to dwell within you (Isaiah 40:3 and Mark 1:3).

~St Maximos the Confessor